by Matt
"You don't understand—," began Shane, and checked himself. Of course, Peter did not understand, but explaining to him would take too much time and trouble, even if it could be done successfully. Moreover, the other man was right about a word said right away after the demonstration.
Not only that, Shane thought, the fact that he only had time for a word or two with the visitors now would give him a chance to dodge any awkward questions; and he would have the hours between then and tonight's scheduled meeting to consider how such questions should be answered.
"All right," he said. "But I've got to be at the Government Unit an hour from now."
"You will," said Peter. "The place I told them all to meet is close by here."
It was, indeed, close. It was barely more than a couple of minutes more before the car pulled up before a block of flats and two minutes after that Shane was in the sitting room of a small flat belonging to one of Peter's contacts, a young couple who might or might not be Resistance members themselves.
There was a knock at the door five minutes later and Shane prudently moved out of sight, into the flat's one bedroom, where he waited with his only company, the couple's year-old baby. In a few minutes, Peter joined him.
"Guess who was first in?" said Peter. "Georges Marrotta. You remember the man who spoke to you in Basque when we picked you up in Milan?"
Shane nodded. He had a clear mental picture of the thick-bodied man in the leather jacket, with the short, black hair and the pipe in the teeth of his round, hard face.
By the time another ten minutes had gone by, the flat had been entered eight more times and Shane was beginning to grow restless.
"What time is it?" he asked Peter.
"One-forty pm," answered Peter.
"Aren't they all here yet? I've got to get going," Shane said.
"We're still missing two," answered Peter. But Shane had made up his mind.
"I can't wait any longer. The new Aalaag Officer of the Day'll be coming on duty in thirty minutes. He might have some reason to want to see me. Those who aren't here now are just going to have to catch up with me this evening."
He pulled the edges of the cowl on his cloak close together before his face.
"Let's go in," he said. "You said Maria's one of the ones already there?"
"Yes."
"Good," said Shane. "Let's go."
They went into the sitting room, which, being of a size with the flat it belonged to, was overcrowded with the twelve people now in it, now that Shane and Peter had arrived. Windows had been opened on the cold December afternoon to counteract the stifling heat caused by so many bodies crowded into so small a space.
Shane found himself wedged into one corner of the room, so that he could face all of them at once. His audience was perched on everything from sofa backs to cushions on the floor.
Peter began by introducing to him everyone there but Maria. Out of the sudden spate of names, only a few managed to stick in Shane's mind. Anna ten Drinke would have stood out in any crowd. She was a short, large-boned, powerful woman of about fifty with a square face and an uncompromising attitude. Wilhelm Herner was a slim, gentlemanly looking individual in no less than his sixties, neatly suited and neck-tied. The only other woman—from Madrid—looked no older than Maria; and a late arrival from Warsaw looked like a boy in his teens, with a stiff brush of black hair and a smiling face.
"I'm sorry," Shane said to them, turning his head from right to left so that he could look at them all in turn through the narrow vertical opening of his closed hood. "But any real talk will have to wait for our scheduled meeting tonight. Peter can tell you after I'm gone—if he hasn't yet—what I told the people here in London. Meanwhile, to give you the essentials briefly, I know the Aalaag better than any other human you're going to find—for reasons that, for safety's sake, like everything else about me, I can't tell you. I invented the Pilgrim symbol, and it's to be a rallying symbol for those ready to act in opposition to the aliens. I'll be coming to your cities— Peter, again, will tell you how I make contact when I do that. If you want to work with me, help me to do the same sort of thing you saw me do today, then fine. If not, I'll work without you. If you're with me, you'll start immediately to form a tight, international organization, and recruit people to it who're ready to act against the Aalaag."
He paused.
"Now," he said, "I've got to leave in a minute or two. Quickly and briefly, any questions?"
Their faces were not the faces of the Londoners Peter had introduced him to originally. These were, for the most part, harder, older faces, more used to command. They would possibly also be more intelligent than Peter's people, as a group, Shane thought.
"I saw you come partway down from the clock tower, but then you disappeared," said a gray-haired man with a young face, but a thickened body. He was sitting with two others on the room's only couch. He spoke in North American English with a midwestern accent that was almost faultless, but Shane's linguist's ear guessed him to be a native speaker of North African French. "I saw you again on the ground. You walked right past the Aalaag, who didn't stop you. How did you get up to the clockface without anyone seeing you? I was there a good fifteen minutes before noon, watching, and if you climbed that tower you must have done it somehow from the inside."
"The answer," said Shane, "is— I'm sorry, but again that's something I'm not going to tell you. You can like it, or not. My survival depends on not telling much about myself. Go on."
"Did you deliberately wait until the Aalaag"—he pronounced the alien name very well, thought Shane, for someone not of Lyt Ann's special corps—"was there to do what you did, because you wanted him to see you? Or perhaps did you wait so that we could see him seeing you?"
"The latter," said Shane. "As I say, I'm going to be repeating that sort of performance in some of your cities. The purpose is to show that the Pilgrim can do things right under the Aalaag's noses and still not be caught. The Pilgrim's to be a symbol of freedom, as I said."
"In that case—"
"Just a moment," said Shane. "Let me add something to that. You'll notice that when tomorrow's newspapers come out, none of them will mention the incident. That'll be because what I painted on the clock was the Pilgrim symbol, and the newspapers are sensitive to anything that might offend our masters or make them look bad. But I'm willing to bet that the news of what I did has spread through half of greater London by this time tomorrow, by word of mouth. I'll also bet that the mark on the clockface won't last two days—and that no one will be seen removing it. Which means that it'll have been removed by the Aalaag, as soon as they learn about it—which they will in due time from someone like an Interior Guard or some member of the London police. But by that time too many people will have seen it to hush up the fact it was there, and put there by the Pilgrim."
"Now we ask the obvious question," said Anna ten Drinke. Her English was heavily accented. "Perhaps you are a spy for the Aalaag—that was why you were allowed to do what you did and not be stopped by the alien on guard at the Houses of Parliament."
"I'm not," said Shane. "But that's something you're going to have to gamble on, because there's no way I can convince you I'm not without giving away information that would mean I'd end up being caught by the Aalaag; which, aside from the fact I've no intention of letting it happen, would be self-defeating to all our prospects. But I'll give you one question to ask yourselves whenever that particular doubt comes up in your minds—and I've got a hunch it's going to be coming up again and again—and that's whether anything I do or anything about me could be so valuable to the Aalaag that it'd outweigh the cost to them of fostering a legend of a human who could do what he wants in spite of all their power—and get away with it every time."
"Why do you want us to build a worldwide organization ready to take action?" said Wilhelm Herner.
"Isn't that what you've always wanted to do anyway? Now, I'm giving you a reason. As the Pilgrim, I can be the focal point for such an undercover force
; and I'm also going to be able to get you information about what the Aalaag are going to do, often even before your local Aalaag knows it. Basically, you're to start the resistance of the world's whole human population—so that if eventually the day comes to rise against the Aalaag, and you give the word to rise, everyone could, at once—or so close to everyone that those who'll hold back'll be too small in number to make a difference."
"That's all?" asked Georges Marrotta heavily. He had sat smoking his pipe in silence up until now.
"Secondly," went on Shane, ignoring him, "I want you to foster the legend of the Pilgrim and the hopes of humans everywhere so that the organization you're going to build will have some hope and faith going for it."
"And just how are we going to rise against the Aalaag when the time comes?" Marrotta took his pipe out of his mouth.
"Peter will tell you what I told the London people," said Shane. "I told them you can't fight the Aalaag and win. Repeat—you can't possibly fight the Aalaag in conventional terms and win. But given things the way I want to set them up, we might be able to make them fight against themselves. In brief, it may be possible to make them decide to leave our world and go look elsewhere for servants."
No one in the room said anything to that; but skepticism was like the smoke cloud from Marrotta's pipe, in the air over them all.
"Third," said Shane, "I want you to use these ordinary people you recruit and others to make this new idea of the Aalaag's for improving production work. Peter's told you what I originally told him and the people he introduced me to here in London—that the so-called Governor Project that's being tried out here is a pilot project. If it works, they'll be trying it all over the world. There'll be an organization like it set up in each one of your cities; and these have got to seem to work. Unfortunately, that means they actually will have to work. Production of materials the Aalaag want for their own use has got to increase."
There was something like a universal, quiet groan of negation about the room.
"You want us to push people to actually increase production?" Anna ten Drinke demanded. "Even if we could get to the ones concerned—and they're ordinary people not working for the Resistance—how do we get them to increase what they're producing now?"
"Very simply," said Shane. "Part of the fall-short in production is simply caused by nothing more than individual foot-dragging on the part of those doing the producing. There's nothing organized about it. It's simply a case of the farmer, the mechanic, or whoever, saying to himself or herself—'why should I sweat myself for those bastards?' Just get them wherever possible to stop the foot-dragging—stop even only part of it—and what the Aalaag'll see will be a statistical improvement for which the Governor Units will get the credit."
He looked around the room at all of them.
"Think of the advantages in just that, for a moment," he said. "Once their production goes up because of what you did, you can get in touch with the humans they've got the Units staffed with, and break the news that the only reason they're getting the improvement is because of Resistance help. Which means that from then on they work with you unless they want the statistics to go back to looking bad. Don't you see the power this can give you?"
Desoules shook his head.
"It sounds like a pipe dream," he said.
"Not a pipe dream," said Shane. "A possibility. A good possibility; and all I'm asking you to do at this moment is consider it. Think about it until you see me tonight and we'll talk more about it then. Meanwhile, I've got to get going. Peter, will you take me where I need to go?"
Shane got up from where he was sitting and started toward the front door of the apartment.
"Let him go," said Georges Marrotta. He had the pipe back in his mouth. "I don't think we need him. I don't think we want him."
"That's up to you," said Shane, still on his way out. "Peter? Maria?"
Outside the front door, in the small corridor that led to the stairs, Shane noticed that Maria was looking at him oddly. But he had no time now to ask her why.
"Is the car ready?" he asked Peter.
"Yes. We can go right away," said Peter, beginning to lead off.
"I think I'll stay here and listen to how they react in there," Maria said to Shane. "Unless you need me to come with you for some reason?"
"No," said Shane. "I'll see you back at our suite in an hour. I'll just be showing up there long enough so that I can sign out normally, as if I'd never been gone."
"I'll be there," she said.
Shane went.
He arrived back at the Unit at a lucky moment. One of the Interior Guard officers—a captain—was just exiting his car as Shane turned into the courtyard. Invisible, Shane followed him closely, slipping into the building just behind him when he opened the front door and going past him as he stopped at the desk with the duty corporal behind it, to sign in. Shane hurried up the stairs, almost blundered into the Lieutenant Governor as the other turned into the top of the stairs and started a descent, then made it the rest of the way back to his office door.
No one was visible in the corridor. He opened the door, stepped in with a sigh of relief and closed the door behind him. He stripped off his robe, hid it in his attache case, and sat down at his desk. It was not until then that he noticed the hard copy of a message, left in the center of his papers, on top of everything where he could not miss seeing it when he came in. Some Aalaag had evidently tried to get in contact with him and been frustrated.
The print was the boldface print of the Message Room's automatic translator. The breath that Shane had held unthinkingly on seeing, this evidence that someone had come and found him missing during his absence went out of him with a gush. It was unlikely that the human having the delivery duty in the Message Room today had wasted time searching for another mere human. For one of the Aalaag he or she would of course have combed the building from top to bottom. If Shane did not get the message in time to react properly to it, that was his look-out, not the messenger's.
Shane read the message itself, which was brief.
"Beast Shane Evert. You will report to the First Captain without delay."
It was signed by Molg Ema, who gave his title as Adjutant for the Day to Lyt Ahn.
Shane's responses were almost automatic. That message was a command that would override any other Aalaag command or order—not that any of the officers left behind by Laa Ehon were likely to give him counterorders. But it did require instant response. He must leave for the House of Weapons immediately.
Only, before that, he must make sure the tools he had taken from the arms locker were back in place, and to do that safely, he must first make sure that the three Aalaag officers still in the building were occupied elsewhere, so that he would not be caught entering or leaving the locker.
He decided to risk using the privacy tool. It would be good only for deceiving any other humans he should meet—an Aalaag, given light enough to notice the apparent distortion of air—would immediately know what was going on. The devices, both of them, were still in the pockets of his jacket. He put on his robe once more, on the faint chance that, if caught by one of the Aalaag, he could yet talk himself out of trouble that would arise. If he was discovered with such a device—he could gamble, for example, on the fact that the Aalaag would not check, and make the claim that Lyt Ahn had authorized his carrying it for protection from other humans who might be inimical to a servant of the Aalaag. His robe on, he checked the corridor once more, found it empty, and slipped out of the door to check the various places where the three officers might be found.
He found them in the first place he checked. The officer on duty was at his desk, with the other two in conference with him. Shane got a good look into the office as a message was carried in by a bucktoothed young messenger who was very probably the same one who had delivered the one to Shane's own desk. Now Shane slipped away, still invisible, made his way as silently as possible down to the arms locker, opened it and replaced the two items he had ta
ken.
He made a silent prayer that no Aalaag should ever check the items for evidence they had been handled by a human. Shane had no positive knowledge that the Aalaag could find such evidence on items handled hours or even days before, but he had learned to think of nothing as impossible where the Aalaag were concerned. He went back out again. Visible now whether he might have wanted to be or not, he went back up the stairs to the main floor, saw no one, ascended to his office —and a moment later came out, banging the door behind him like an individual in a hurry, and clattered down one flight of stairs to the duty officer's office.
He rapped on the door, waited for the human voice to tell him to enter, then spoke in English to the Interior Guard lieutenant on desk duty there, as protocol required—as if the three Aalaag officers were not in the room.
"Please inform the duty officer," Shane said, "that I have just received a message from my master the First Captain ordering me back to his presence."
He showed the message to the human and was about to turn and go when the duty officer spoke in Aalaag. Clearly, he was one of the few aliens to recognize a word or two in a human tongue.
"Hold! That beast there that just came in. What is this about a message?"
