by Matt
He thought he caught a hint of admiration in the officer's steady gaze. But then, if the other ever thought of walking the Milan streets alone, it would be in his regular uniform, which he was never permitted to discard. Someone like this officer would never be able to imagine the freedom of Shane in going about, ostensibly as one of them, among the ordinary humans of the city—nor could he imagine how necessary these few moments of illusory freedom were to Shane.
"Very well," said the officer. "The one who will carry you is Am Mehon. The Masters' desk at the air terminal will direct you to the ship when you get there."
"Thank you," said Shane.
"You are entirely welcome."
They had both picked up, inevitably, Shane thought bitterly, the very courtesies and intonations of their owners
He went out through the heavy, right-hand door of the pair that made up the entrance, and down the steps. There were no taxis in sight—of course. No human without need to be there would hang around the alien Headquarters. He turned up the same street he had followed to find the square.
He walked a block away from the Headquarters and chose a corner to wait on. Some little time went by and no taxi passed. He was beginning to think of walking farther from the Aalaag stronghold when a taxi finally passed him, cruising slowly. He hailed it, and it pulled over to the curb.
"To the airport," he said to the driver, looking at the thin, overcoated man behind the wheel as his fingers automatically opened the cab door. He stepped inside—and tripped over something on the floor as he got in.
The door slammed, the cab took off with a rush. He found himself held, pinioned by two men who had risen from crouching positions on the floor of the cab's back seat. He felt something sharp against his throat.
He looked down and saw a so-called glass knife, actually a dagger made by a sliver of glass held between two bound-together halves of a wooden dagger. The glass formed the cutting edge and could be—as this one had been—sandpapered to razorlike sharpness.
"Lie still!" growled one of the men in Italian.
Shane lay still. He smelled the rank, old stink of dirty clothing from both of the two who held him. The taxi whirled him away through unknown streets to an unguessable destination.
They rode for at least twenty minutes, though how much of this was necessary distance to reach their goal and how much was to mislead Shane in any attempt to estimate the length of the trip was impossible to guess. At length the taxi turned, bumped over some very uneven pavement, and passed under the shadow of an arch. Then it stopped, and the two men hustled Shane out of the vehicle.
He had just a glimpse of a dark and not too clean courtyard surrounded by buildings, before he was pushed up two steps, through a door and into a long, narrow corridor thick with cooking odors.
Shane was herded along, more numb than frightened. Inside him there was a feeling of something like fatalistic acceptance. He had lived for two and a half years with the thought that someday ordinary humans would identify him as one of those who worked for the aliens; and when they did, they would then use him as an object for the bitter fear and hatred they all felt for their conquerors, but dared not show directly. In his imagination, he had lived through this scene many times. It was nonetheless hideous now for finally having become real, but it was a situation on which his emotions had worn themselves out. At the end, it was almost a relief to have the days of his masquerade over, to be discovered for what he really was.
The two men stopped suddenly. Shane was shoved through a door on his right, into a room glaringly lit by a single powerful light bulb. The contrast with the shadowed courtyard outside, and the even dimmer hallway, made the sudden light blinding for a second. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that he was standing in front of a round table and that the room was large and high-ceilinged, with old, grimy paint on the walls and a single tall window which, however, had a blackout blind drawn tightly down over it. The cord from the light bulb ran not into the ceiling, but across the face of it, past a capped gas outlet, and down the farther wall and to a bicycle generator. A young man with long black hair sat on the bicycle part of the generator, and whenever the light from the ceiling bulb began to fade, he would pump energetically on his pedals until it brightened again and held its brightness.
There were several other men standing around the room, and two more at the table with the only woman to be seen. She was, he recognized, the prisoner he had seen in the screen. Her eyes met his now with the look of a complete stranger, and even in his numbness he felt strange that he should recognize her with such strong emotional identification and she should not know him at all.
"Where's that clothing store owner?" said one of the men at the table with her, speaking to the room at large in a northern Italian underlaid with London English. He was young—as young in appearance as Shane himself; but, unlike Shane, spare and athletic-looking with a straight nose, strong square jaw, thin mouth and blond hair cut very short.
"Outside, in the supply room," said a voice, speaking the same northern Italian, but without accent.
"Get him in here, then!" said the man with the short hair. The other man beside him at the table said nothing. He was round-bodied and hard-fat, in his forties, wearing a worn leather jacket. In his mouth was stuck a short-stemmed pipe. His face was round. He looked entirely Italian.
The door opened and closed behind Shane. A minute later it opened and closed again, and a blindfolded man Shane recognized as the proprietor of the store where he had bought the reversible cloak was brought forward and turned around to face Shane. His blindfold was jerked off.
"Well?" demanded the short-haired young man.
The shopkeeper blinked under the unshaded electric light. His eyes focused on Shane, then slid away.
"What is it you want, signore?" he asked. His voice was almost a whisper in the stark room.
"Didn't anyone tell you? Him!" said the short-haired man impatiently. "Look at him. Do you recognize him? Where did you see him last?"
The store proprietor licked his lips and raised his eyes.
"Earlier today, signore," he said. "He came into my shop and bought a reversible cloak."
"This cloak?" The short-haired individual made a gesture. One of the men standing in the back of the room came forward to shove a bundled mass of cloth into the hands of the proprietor, who slowly unfolded it and looked at it.
"This is mine," he said, still faintly. "Yes. This was the one he bought."
"All right, you can go then. Keep the cloak. You two— don't forget to blindfold him." The short-haired man turned his attention to the young man slouching on the bicycle seat of the electric generator. "How about it, Carlo? Is he the one you followed?"
Carlo nodded. He had a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. Through his numbness, Shane watched Carlo with fascination, for the toothpick seemed to give him a rakish, infallible look.
"He left the Square of San Marco and went straight back to the alien HQ," Carlo said. "As fast as possible."
"That's it, then," said the short-haired man. He looked at Shane. "Well, do you want to tell us now what the Aalaag had you up to? Or do we have to wait while Carlo works you over a bit?"
Suddenly, Shane was weary to the point of sickness— weary of the whole matter of human subjects and alien overlords. Unexpected fury boiled up in him.
"You damn fool!" he shouted at the short-haired man. "I was saving her!"
And he pointed at the woman, who stared back at him, her gaze frowning and intent.
"You idiots!" Shane spat. "You stupid morons with your Resistance games! Don't you know what they'd have done to her? Don't you know where you'd all be, right now, if I hadn't given them a reason to think it was someone else? How long do you think she could keep from telling them all about you? I'll tell you, because I've seen it—forty minutes is the average!"
They all looked at the woman.
"He's lying," she said in a thin voice. "They didn't offer to do a thing to me. They just ma
de me wait awhile and then turned me loose for lack of evidence."
"They turned you loose because I gave them enough reason to doubt you were the one who made the mark!" The fury was carrying Shane away like a dark, inexorable tide. "They let you go because you're young and healthy and they don't waste valuable beasts without reason. Lack of evidence! Do you still think you're dealing with humans?"
"All right," said the short-haired man. His voice was hard and flat. "This is all very pretty, but suppose you tell us where you learned our mark."
"Learned it?" Shane laughed, a laugh that was close to a sob of long-throttled rage. "You clown! I invented it. Me— myself! I carved it on a brick wall in Aalborg, half a year ago, for the first time. Learn about it! How did you learn about it? How did the Aalaag learn about it? By seeing it marked up in places, of course!"
There was a moment of silence in the room after Shane's voice ceased to ring out.
"He's crazy, then," said the hard-fat man with the pipe.
"Crazy!" echoed Shane, and laughed again.
"Wait a minute," said the woman. She came around and faced him. "Who are you? What do you do with the Aalaag?"
"I'm a translator, a courier," said Shane. "I'm owned by Lyt Ahn, the First Captain of the Aalaag—me and about thirty men and women like me."
"Maria—," began the short-haired man.
"Wait, Peter." She held up her hand briefly and went on without taking her eyes off Shane. "All right. You tell us what happened."
"I was delivering special communications to Laa Ehon— you know your local Commander, I suppose—"
"We know Laa Ehon," said Peter harshly. "Keep talking." "I had special communications to deliver. I looked through a viewing screen showing the room you were in and saw you—" He was looking at Maria. "I knew what they'd do to you. Laa Ehon was talking to one of his officers about you. All that had been spotted was some human wearing a blue robe. There was just a chance that if they had another report of a human in a blue robe making that mark it would make them doubtful enough so they wouldn't want to waste a healthy young beast like you. So I ducked out and tried giving them that other report. It worked."
"Why did you do it?" She was looking penetratingly at him.
"Just a minute, Maria," said Peter. "Let me ask a few questions. What's your name, you?" "Shane Evert."
"And you said you heard Laa Ehon talking to one of his officers. How did you happen to be there?"
"I was waiting to deliver my communications."
"And Laa Ehon just discussed it all in front of you—that's what you're trying to tell us?"
"They don't see us, or hear us, unless they want us," said Shane bitterly. "We're furniture—pets."
"So you say," said Peter. "What language did Laa Ehon speak in?"
"Aalaag, of course."
"And you understood him so well that you could tell there was a chance to make them think that the human they wanted was someone else than Maria?"
"I told you." A dull weariness was again beginning to take Shane over as the fury died. "I'm a translator. I'm one of Lyt Ahn's special group of human translators."
"No human can really speak or understand the Aalaag tongue," said the man with the pipe, in Basque.
"Most can't," answered Shane, also in Basque. The weariness was beginning to numb him so that he was hardly aware of changing languages. "I tell you I'm one of a very special group belonging to Lyt Ahn."
"What was that? What did you say, Georges—and what did he say?" Peter was looking from one to the other.
"He speaks Basque," said Georges, staring at Shane.
"How well?"
"Good..." Georges made an effort. "He speaks... very good Basque."
Peter turned on Shane.
"How many languages do you speak?" he asked.
"How many?" Shane said dully. "I don't know. Eighty or ninety, maybe, I speak... well. A lot of others, I speak a few words of."
"And you speak Aalaag just like one of them?" Shane laughed.
"No," he said. "I speak it well—for a human."
"Also, you travel all over the world as a courier—" Peter turned to Maria and Georges. "Are you listening?" Maria ignored him.
"Why did you do it? Why did you try to rescue me?" She held him with her eyes. There was a new silence.
"Yowaragh," he said dully.
"What?"
"It's their word for it," he said. "The Aalaag word for when a beast suddenly goes crazy and fights back against one of them. It was like that first time in Aalborg, when I snapped and put the Pilgrim mark on the wall under the man they'd thrown on the hooks."
"You don't really expect us to believe you were the one who invented the symbol of resistance to the aliens?"
"You can go to hell," Shane told him in English.
"What did you say?" said Peter quickly, in Italian.
"You know what I said," Shane told him savagely, still in English, and in the exact accent of the London area in which the other had grown up. "I don't care whether you believe me or not. Just give up trying to pretend you can speak Italian."
A small dark flush came to Peter's cheeks and for a second his eyes glinted. Shane had read him clearly. He was one of those who could learn to speak another language just well enough to delude himself that he was accentless—but he did not speak it like a native. Shane had touched one of his vulnerabilities.
But then Peter laughed, and both flush and glint were gone.
"Caught me, by God! You caught me!" he said in English. "That's really very good! Magnificent!"
And you'll never forgive me for it, thought Shane, watching him.
"Look now, tell me—" Peter seized one of the straight-backed chairs and pushed it forward. "Sit down and let's talk. Tell me, you must have some sort of credentials that let you pass freely through any inspection or check by the ordinary sort of Aalaag?"
"What I carry," said Shane, suddenly wary, "are my credentials. Communications from the First Captain of Earth will pass a courier anywhere."
"Of course!" said Peter. "Now sit down—"
He urged Shane to the chair; Shane, suddenly conscious of the weariness of his legs, dropped into it. He felt something being put into his hands and, looking, saw that it was a glass tumbler one-third full of a light brown liquid. He put it to his lips and smelled brandy—not very good brandy. For some reason, this reassured him. If they had been planning to drug him, he thought, they surely would have put the drug in something better than this.
The burn of the liquor on his tongue woke him from that state of mind in which he had been caught ever since he had stepped into the taxi and found himself kidnapped. He recognized suddenly that he had now moved away from the threat involved in his original capture. These people had been thinking of him originally only as one of the human jackals of the Aalaag. Now they seemed to have become aware of his abilities and advantages; and clearly Peter, at least, was thinking of somehow putting these to use in their Resistance movement.
But the situation was still tricky and could go either way. All that was necessary was for him to slip, and by word or action imply that he might still be a danger to them; and then their determination to destroy him could return, redoubled in urgency.
For the moment the important thing was that Peter, who seemed to be the dominant of their group, appeared to be determined to make use of him. On his part, Shane was finding, now that his first recklessness of despair was over, that he wanted to live. But he did not want to be used. Much more clearly than these people around him, he knew how hopeless their dream of successful resistance to the Aalaag was, and how certain and ugly the end toward which they were headed, if they continued.
Let them dig their own graves if they wanted, he thought savagely. All he wanted was to get safely out of here and in the future to stay clear of such people. Too late, now that he had answered their questions, he realized how much leverage against himself he had given them, in telling them his true name and the nature of his work w
ith the Aalaag. Above all, he thought now, he must keep the secret of Lyt Ahn's key. They would sell their souls for something that would unlock most alien doors—doors to warehouses, to armories, to communication and transportation equipment. And the use of the key by them would be a certain route to his association with them being discovered by the Aalaag. He had been making himself far too attractive to them, thought Shane grimly. It was time to take the glamor off.
"I've got thirty minutes, no more," he said, "to get to the airport and meet the Aalaag officer who's flying me back to Lyt Ahn's Headquarters. If I'm not there on time, it won't matter how many languages I can speak."
There was silence in the room. He could see them looking at each other—in particular, Peter, Georges, and Maria consulting each other with their gazes.
"Get the car," said Maria in Italian, when Peter still hesitated. "Get him there on time."
Peter jerked suddenly into movement, as if Maria's words had wakened him from a dream so powerful it had held him prisoner. He turned on Carlo.
