Way of the Pilgrim

by Matt

  Although the interior physical layout was different, the resemblance to the London Unit was striking. Again, the humans had offices on the lowest floors, the Aalaag had theirs on the upper ones. An elevator existed for Aalaag alone to use. Shane had no doubt that the arms locker would be down in the basement—either that which the building had originally possessed, or extra space created by the Aalaag.

  But once more there was the ritual of the first evening, when he had dinner with the new Milan District Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, and the colonel commanding the Interior Guard. Since these were all Italian rather than English, the meal was more of a social event and the three wore their personal ambitions more gracefully.

  Nonetheless, it was an occasion on which Shane ended by parrying questions about himself, the Governor plan generally, and the exact amount of cooperation the other three might expect from him during his future official visits of inspection, if any.

  He returned to the hotel a little more drunk than he had intended to become, very much more tired, and unaccountably depressed. It did not help his mood that Maria was not in the room when he got there and a note on the writing table in the parlor of the suite told him she had gone to see a woman friend of long standing and would be back before an unreasonably late hour. He kicked off his shoes, lay down on the bed they had occupied earlier—somehow it seemed more friendly than the unused one—and found himself falling asleep.

  He had intended to stay awake until Maria returned. He was far from easy in his mind about the security of his hidden identity with her being out by herself. But the exhaustion that claimed him was powerful. Wearily he got up, undressed, got back into bed and fell immediately, deeply asleep.

  18

  "... There wasn't any danger," Maria told him the following morning as he was dressing to go to the Governor Unit and she was still in bed. "Pia's not in the Resistance, but she knows I am. She also knows enough not to ask questions. She's an old friend of my mother's—in fact, the last few months before she died, my mother lived in Pia's house and Pia took care of her. But she thinks I've been gone the past few months in Bologna on Resistance business, that's all." "Still..." said Shane doubtfully.

  "Listen to me!" Maria sat up in bed. "I wanted to find out how Georges really felt about you—she knows him, too, and most of the others. It's all right. He does hate you, but he won't betray you; it's not that kind of hate. She also told me other things you should know. Do you realize that what you did in London is known all over Milan, all over Italy, already? I mean, by everybody, not just those in the Resistance?"

  He must have looked skeptical, because she nodded vigorously.

  "Yes!" she said. "It is! I don't think you realize the way the Pilgrim symbol was reaching and changing people, even before you marked it on that clock in London. And since then— to have a real, live Pilgrim—anyway, Pia'd heard of it already from at least a dozen people who didn't realize she'd already been told. And there're Pilgrim drawings everywhere—more out of sight than they used to be, but a lot more than just the ones those of us in the Resistance had put up. Everybody's using the mark now, your little drawing of a figure in a cloak with a staff; and all sorts of people are starting to wear the cloak. Do you know what the story they're telling now has you doing at the clock in London?"

  "What?" he asked, sliding his arms into his jacket.

  "According to the way it's told now, you first walked up to the alien—"

  "The Aalaag," he corrected automatically. "Practice saying it in Aalaag every chance you get until you've got the pronunciation down automatically; and remember, it isn't the Aalaag who're alien—we're the aliens. Learn to think in their language the way they think in it."

  "Yes, yes, the Al—the Aa—" This time she got the opening sound correct. "—laag on duty at the clock, guarding it. You walked up to him first and he started to point his weapon, the one like a spear with knobs—"

  "Long arm," he said in Aalaag.

  "Long... long arm," she repeated in Aalaag with difficulty. "He started to point it at you and you raised your hand and he froze in place. He stayed frozen while you walked to the tower, disappeared, appeared in midair by the face of the clock, marked it, and floated to the ground. You walked away, and as you walked away, the Aalaag started to come out of his frozen state, but you held up your hand again and he backed away from you and let you go."

  "Good God!" said Shane.

  Maria looked at him shrewdly.

  "You're not pleased. I think it's wonderful."

  "But... the idiots!" said Shane. "If they start believing an Aalaag can be paralyzed or backed off with just a wave of the hand, some nut among them wearing a pilgrim robe in imitation of me's just liable to try it and be cut down for it!"

  "But the important thing is they believe that somewhere there is someone dressed like a pilgrim who can get away with it," said Maria. "Wasn't that the whole point of your doing it? All this time they've wanted someone to believe in who can snap his fingers at the Aalaag—" This time she said it correctly in the alien tongue. "And they've found it. In you. That's what counts. Not whether someone or other gets himself killed trying to imitate you."

  Shane stared at her. Her practicality shocked him—and at the same time he was astonished that he, of all people, could be shocked, considering his actions and his secret plans.

  "I've got to go," he said.

  He was fully dressed now. She was out of bed almost immediately; she held him and kissed him hard. "Be careful," she said.

  "I'm not going anyplace dangerous, or planning to do anything risky," he answered, although dealing with the Aalaag was always risky. "What's there to be careful for?"

  "Be careful anyway," she said. "Be careful even of the traffic. The traffic is terrible here, nowadays."

  "All right," he said. "I'll be careful."

  They kissed again, and he left.

  Colonel Arturo Leone, the Unit's Interior Guard commanding officer, was the only one of the three top human administrators who was in his office when Shane arrived. Shane sent word through the Interior Guard Officer of the Day that he would like to see the colonel if the other had time to talk at the moment. He was invited into Leone's interior office, which was smaller than the offices of the three Aalaag assigned to the Unit but somehow—it was hard to say how— less spartan.

  They had talked at dinner all the evening before, in Italian; but here in his office, Leone spoke in almost accentless English. He saw Shane settled in a comfortable chair facing Leone's desk, and given the chance to decline coffee or anything else to drink, before asking him his business.

  "I've got to talk at some length with each of our Aalaag superiors here," answered Shane in Italian, "and it'd be best if I could catch each of them in his or her off-hours, preferably at a time when whoever it is isn't busy at something personal —you understand what I mean."

  Leone nodded. Most Interior Guard were aware of the limited but serious recreations of the Aalaag—the aliens' home-world picture viewing and their incomprehensible game-playing.

  "I understand," he said. "You show your experience with the Aalaag, Mr. Evert."

  Shane rejected the implied flattery almost sharply.

  "You know as well as I do," he said, "human servants who don't learn Aalaag ways don't last."

  Some of Leone's business-hours punctiliousness relaxed. He switched to speaking in Italian himself.

  "You're very right," he said. "Well, then, let's see. Ahm Or Ayla's on duty right now, but she's due to come off in a couple of hours and a few minutes. Then Cono Ra takes the main daytime shift until approximately two thousand hours, then Sem Arail relieves Cono Ra. The trouble is we haven't been together with these particular Aalaag, any of us in the Guard unit, here, long enough to learn much about their off-duty habits...."

  He and Shane discussed the matter and finally settled on the fact that the most promising time for Shane to try to find the three Aalaag least annoyed with the necessity of talking to him wou
ld be an hour or so before each was due to go on duty. Normally, the aliens neither gamed nor picture-viewed in the time immediately before their duty times. Leone apologized for the absence of the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, who had been called to a meeting with Laa Ehon, and then took Shane around the other human-used rooms of the building to meet each of the junior staff, whom he had not had a chance to meet the day before. Finally, with something of a flourish, the colonel installed Shane in the office Shane would have to himself for the duration of this visit and, presumably, on future ones.

  Shane settled in, pretending to immerse himself in copies of the documents dealing with the activities of this Government Unit so far. Actually, he began the compilation of a record of where everyone, human as well as Aalaag, were at all times during the twenty-four hours.

  He had had time to realize how much he had trusted to chance on his visit to the arms locker of the Government Unit in London, without knowing more about the movements of the human staff, as well as the Aalaag. There was no telling whether the Aalaag had taken any particular notice of the incident of a figure wearing pilgrim robes who had marked the face of Big Ben in London.

  That they must know of it, through the Interior Guard, and the ordinary British police forces, if not otherwise, in spite of the fact that no newspaper would make more than the most noncommittal mention of it, was certain. That they could reconstruct exactly what he had done if they became suspicious, he believed utterly. But with some justice, he could still hope that the incident would be buried among hundreds of other episodes of defacement of property, which was what most pilgrim markings were classed as, according to Aalaag ideas of propriety. In which case, it would merely be left to their human servants to handle.

  Furthermore, if that had happened, he could reasonably hope that those human servants—even those in the police and the Interior Guard—would tend to discount as imaginative exaggerations the more unusual elements in the popular account of his ascent to and descent from the clockface. The Aalaag Guard on duty there, who had seemed to notice him only on his way down or after he was already on the ground, had probably seen nothing—to an Aalaag—out of the ordinary about it, or he would have stopped Shane then and there.

  Therefore, those Aalaag concerned with such human criminal acts were not likely to guess that some of their own tools had been used, let alone make the further mental leap to the unthinkable possibility that some of those tools might have been stolen from an arms locker. It should simply not occur to them that a human could have gained entrance to an arms locker and made use of some of their own tools.

  With any reasonable luck, then, there should be no special watch kept on arms lockers in the new Government Units— yet. This time, and perhaps the next one or two times, he could borrow from such storage places with relative safety.

  But he must still guard against the accident of either an Aalaag or a human catching him in or near a locker.

  It was three full days, accordingly, before he had the movements of the alien and human personnel of the Unit charted to his satisfaction. In the process he had talked to all three of the assigned Aalaag and found them typical alien junior officers, none of them unusually clever or perceptive. There were two periods in the normal twenty-four hours, he found, when all three could be counted on to be occupied and safely out of the vicinity of the locker. One of these was midmorning, the other was just as the human staff was about to end office work for the day. The later time was obviously preferable for his purposes, when many of the humans in the building would be moving around its corridors and stairs in their normal course of activity.

  When he remembered how unplanned and unthinking his raid on the locker in London had been, a coldness seemed to touch the back of his neck.

  On the evening of that third day he returned to the hotel room to find Peter there with Maria.

  He had unlocked the door of the parlor of their hotel suite with his room card and let himself in without thinking. He halted abruptly and at the sight of him Peter got hastily to his feet, followed by Maria, who came on to kiss him. The sudden movement on both Peter's and Maria's parts would have had an almost comic guiltiness to it, he thought, if it had not been so clearly the product of great excitement in both of them.

  "Peter!" Shane said, smiling.

  "Yes," said Peter. "I just got in here about twenty minutes ago. Maria said you'd be coming at any minute."

  "And he's got wonderful things to tell you!" Maria shepherded him over to a seat on the couch on which Peter had also been sitting, before a long coffee table holding a tray with Scotch whisky, soda, ice, glasses, and wooden stirring rods, clearly ordered up from room service. Peter had a half-full drink before him.

  "Well, that's good," he said, looking at Peter. "What is it?"

  "Well, I—look here, why don't you have something first—," said Peter, reaching for the tray.

  "No. No!" said Shane, and then realized he was speaking too sharply. He made his voice more reasonable. "Thanks just the same, but when you live with the Aalaag, alcohol's too risky most of the time. I've lost my taste for it. Just tell me what this news is."

  "Ah. Well." Peter picked up his own glass and sat back against the cushions of the couch, still smiling at him. "You've no idea what that clock-marking trick of yours started in London—started everywhere, I'd say."

  "I've been telling him how people had been reacting here," said Maria. "He doesn't realize how they're reacting—everyone who's human."

  "Oh, the general populace," said Peter, with a small wave of the glass. "That's true enough. The Pilgrim symbol was already having a large impact before you marked Big Ben. But the great thing about your trick there is that it triggered off something even we in the Resistance hadn't more than suspected. Something beyond our wildest dreams—so to speak."

  "What are you talking about?" said Shane.

  "Well, it's a bit of a story, as I've been telling Maria," said Peter, settling himself even more comfortably against the back of the couch. "You see, in the Resistance, we always suspected—knew, actually, though we'd no proof, of course— that there were other anti-Aalaag groups around that believed in keeping to themselves. Each military force in every country, of course, had at least one. The old Intelligence outfits almost automatically either housed an antialien group, or went completely over into being undercover anti-Aalaag organizations... and so on. None of these people would contact us, naturally, since they thought of us as a bunch of rank amateurs and wanted to keep their own existence secret in any case."

  He paused to drink and then refill his glass. Shane and Maria sat in silence watching what was obviously a staged wait.

  "So," he went on, "since they wouldn't contact us and since they none of them found anything they could do except collect data on the aliens and talk plans for some sort of possible action if this happened, or if that turned out to be true, etc.... we had no real way of knowing they were there. Oh, the police everywhere also had their own antialien groups, even some of the large corporations did—and of course there were free-lance paramilitary groups of the sort that tried to get at the aliens in the first few months after the conquest and found that not only couldn't they touch even a single alien, let alone kill one, just showing themselves on the horizon got them wiped out—"

  "Get to the point," said Shane.

  "Sorry," said Peter. "I'm afraid I'm enjoying it too much, being the bearer of glad tidings. The point is, there were all these groups lying low and now they've come out and acknowledged their existence; not only to each other, to us! They had to come to us, because we're the only ones who'd had any contact with you!"

  Peter broke into laughter. The whisky he had drunk was not enough to make him boisterous, but it was undeniably enough to take some of the normal restraints off him.

  "And guess what we learned, as they all began to report in?" he said.

  "All right, what?" said Shane.

  "That they wouldn't talk to us, their own compatriots, all
this time, but every group, cell and organization of them had been in close contact almost from the beginning with their opposite numbers in other countries. That is, the Intelligence Resistance group in London knew the French Intelligence gang headquartered in Paris. The Royal Air Force group knew all the other groups in air forces in other nations. To a great extent Intelligence groups in the military knew those in civilian Intelligence and the police.... And so on—all over the world."

  "All right," said Shane, "so the numbers of seriously involved Resistance fighters against the Aalaag have turned out to be a lot larger than anyone thought. That makes no difference to me. I've still got to do what I've got to do."

  "No, no! Don't you see?" Peter sat up so abruptly that the liquid in his glass came perilously close to slopping out on the couch cover.