by John Boyd
“Has she? Did she mention to you that she’s been in constant communication with her space vehicle since she left it, that she’s probably getting directives from that source?”
The question felt like a fist slamming into Breedlove’s stomach, and there was no way he could conceal his shock and consternation. “No, sir.”
“X-rays revealed an implant in her skull above her left ear with filaments from the bug leading to her tympanic membrane. Our experts have determined that it’s a minutely transistorized ultra-high-frequency radio receiver, but she refuses to answer any questions regarding the device.”
“Kyra never mentioned it to me.”
It was a painful admission for Breedlove to voice, and Harper nodded tactfully. “Come with me to my office, and I’ll show you the evidence.”
When they entered the admiral’s suite on the eighth floor, a Wave lieutenant at a desk near the entrance to the admiral’s private office stood up as the admiral approached. Breedlove could hear her heels click as she snapped to attention and extended three telephone slips for Harper to take.
“Belay those calls,” Harper snapped. “Call this number and get Attorney Cohen here without delay. Then bring me the file on our visitor.”
Click, the Wave reached for the telephone. Click-click, she was dialing. As the admiral held open his private door for Breedlove to enter, he commented proudly, “I run a taut ship. Everything’s done by the numbers.”
The admiral’s private office featured a window opening onto a view of the harbor. Height-shortened freighters lay at the docks below. The Bremerton ferry had left its Seattle slip and was scrawling its wake across the sound. Waving a hand toward the view, the admiral said, “This is the closest I’ve been to the ocean in two years, and I get homesick for the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song.”
“What was your last command at sea, Admiral?”
“A guided-missile cruiser… Be seated, Breedlove. By showing you Kyra’s X-ray negatives, I’m paying out the slack on the security lines, but I’m doing it because I like the cut of your jib and I think you’re tacking against the wind with our fair visitor, the Navy’s code name for Kyra. Incidentally, our astronomers determined that her sun lay in the general direction of the Pleiades. A classified program, such as Project Fair Visitor, is compartmentalized. Each operative functions on a ‘need to know’ basis. Security clearances run from 1-A to 3-B, and your classification is 3-B—you know the fair visitor is on the planet, and that’s all you need to know, but as an eyewitness to her arrival you are yourself classified information.”
With a half-smile Harper raised his hand. “Ranger Thomas Breedlove, I hereby classify you a top-secret document. You’re on file for all qualified personnel who wish to share your information.”
“How will I know who’s qualified?”
“Your contact will tell you, and you’ll be meeting him shortly.”
“Who is coordinating the project?” Breedlove asked, thinking more in terms of government bureaus than of individuals.
“Only the chief coordinator knows that, because he’s the only person who needs to know.”
Two sharp raps came on the door and the Wave lieutenant entered, bringing a red manila folder. As if on parade she paced across the room, came to a heel-clicking halt before Harper’s desk, laid the folder before him, about-faced, and paraded out of the office. The bulk of the folder amazed Breedlove. Yesterday he had left Kyra without a driver’s license, and today her dossier was already as thick as a small town’s telephone book.
Harper drew an X-ray negative from the file and handed it to Breedlove. “Here’s the item she won’t talk about.”
Looking at Kyra’s skull, the seat of her wit and wisdom, revealed in such dull shades of gray struck him as almost obscene. Showing brightly on the film, slightly above and behind the ear orifice, were the implanted metal object and its trailing filaments.
“Proof of perfidy,” Harper said, and his tone sounded gloating.
“Not at all,” Breedlove snapped. “Maybe the device is classified 1-A under Kanabian security regulations, and we have no clearance.”
Harper’s face went cold, and he snapped the folder shut. “Let’s go to the ready room, Breedlove.”
Down the hall from the admiral’s office, the ready room was designed to resemble the pilots’ briefing room on an aircraft carrier. Leather upholstered chairs were anchored to the deck. The walls were painted gray, and at one end of the room stood a lectern on a dais before a blackboard. Three men were already seated on the front row of chairs. Each man had brought a tape recorder, and there was a mike on the lectern with a recorder.
Harper introduced the three early arrivals to Breedlove. The gray-haired man with the unlit pipe in his mouth nearest the window was Dr. Hargrove, an anthropologist. Next to him, black-bearded, young, and muscular, sat Dr. Teach, sociologist. Finally came Dr. Upton, short, rotund, a blond fuzz of close-cropped hair on his ball-like head. Upton wore thick glasses that magnified his pale blue eyes until they appeared huge and protuberant. He was an entomologist. Breedlove wondered what an entomologist was doing here, but apparently the Navy was covering all bases with Project Fair Visitor.
“These gentlemen, and others who will be arriving, interrogated Kyra this morning, briefly since her time is limited, and they’re seeking substantiation of their interviews and additional information from your account of your relationship with Kyra.”
Three other scientists entered as Harper spoke, but he ignored them. “You commence the lecture promptly at 1400. Latecomers will be required to play back the log tape. Tomorrow morning’s debriefing will commence at 0900. Please report five minutes early, Ranger Breedlove, to test the recording equipment.”
The admiral had issued an order, and Breedlove nodded, feeling suddenly optimistic. He had been given a chance to enter a plea for kindness and generosity toward Kyra and her people before an influential group of civilians, and if he could convey to these scientists a fraction of his own regard for Kyra, they might thwart any military solution of the threat her presence hypothetically posed to earth.
“Gentlemen,” the admiral addressed a group, now swollen to eight men, “the smoking lamp is out, I repeat, out!”
He nodded to Breedlove and stepped back to stand behind the speaker. Hargrove laid down his pipe. It was exactly 1400 by the chronometer on the bulkhead. Admiral Harper ran a taut ship.
Breedlove began at the beginning, opening his talk with the report of the nude campers in Jones Meadow and of his setting out to investigate. He knew he was speaking for history, and he wanted all the facts in order and as accurate as his memory could make them. As a storyteller, he realized he was being somewhat pedestrian, and his listeners did appear to be fidgety until he told of Kyra drifting out of the mists. Now they were leaning forward, as rapt as children attending a favorite fairy tale, and he knew what had generated the intensity of their interest: Kyra. Her presence lay over them all as invisible but as obvious as the scent of perfume.
With twelve men present, Breedlove figured he had his full audience of the men who had interviewed Kyra before noon today, but there was no interruption from his listeners until he mentioned Kyra’s claim that her dress was made of hydrogen plasma. The remark brought a disdainful snort from someone in the back row, and the snort brought an extemporaneous rebuttal from a physicist from the University of Oregon who rose to his feet and began to rattle off the mathematic formulae for interlocking nuclei of stripped hydrogen atoms. Breedlove had lost the floor until the admiral stepped to the lectern, gaveled for silence, and barked, “Gentlemen, postpone all disputation until after the debriefing.”
Breedlove continued, growing more and more aware of the blue eyes of Upton, who was asking no questions at all but listening so intently his ears seemed to be cupping forward. Those blue, floating orbs, magnified and detached by the thick lenses, grew hypnotic and disturbing. Breedlove talked on, trying to keep his gaze from drifting back to Upton, and
he was losing his peculiar battle with the entomologist when the thirteenth man stalked into the room.
The man entered to no welcoming nods or hand waves from colleagues who recognized him. With a pacing stride he walked down the side aisle to the rear of the room and stood looking over the group with cold, expressionless eyes. He was tall, whipcord lean, dressed in black with a long deacon’s coat and a vest. His face was long, square-jawed, with an Indian’s high cheekbones and hooked nose. For a moment he stood, his gray eyes moving over the group from an immobile face, his legs spread slightly in a gunfighter’s stance. The black suit, the long, impassive face, and, above all, the cold and deadly eyes brought a menace into the room.
The stranger was out of his habitat in Seattle, Breedlove sensed. He should have been stalking down the street of a west Texas town, his thumbs hooked into a gunbelt, advancing toward some ultimate shoot-out. Finally, jackknifing his legs, he settled into a chair, pulled a cigar from a coat pocket, a kitchen match from his vest, and struck the match with his thumbnail. He lifted the light to his cigar.
From behind Breedlove Admiral Harper called, “The smoking lamp is out, Mr. Slade.”
“Up yours, Harper,” Slade answered, loud and clear. “The smoking lamp is lit.”
“Gentlemen, the smoking lamp is lit,” the admiral said. “Doctor Hargrove, would you open the window, please.”
A pleasant murmur ran through the room as the scientists reached for cigarettes or tobacco pouches, and suddenly Breedlove, though a nonsmoker, found himself liking the mysterious and malevolent Mr. Slade. Even Dr. Upton became animated, asking a question about the interior of the space vehicle Breedlove had been describing.
“Did the hatch covers opening onto the spiral ramp differ in size?”
“They seemed to me to be out of line, or staggered,” Breedlove answered carefully, “but the appearance might have been caused by their different sizes.”
Upton was scribbling notes now, and the compelling eyes were lowered, but he raised them shortly to inquire, “Did you notice if the jams and jellies in the C rations were particularly favored by the Kanabians?”
“Yes, they were.”
Moving on to a description of the twilight ceremony, he tried to convey the home longing and the sadness of exile he had felt in the singing of the group, but he refrained from mentioning the peculiar vision he had experienced during the session. There was the matter of his credibility, and these men were mostly interested in objective facts.
“This singing,” Upton said, “was it performed with a vibrating sound from deep within their throats?”
“Yes. It was similar to a cat’s purr, but louder and more rhythmical.”
“Or like the drone of swarming bees!” It was not a question from Upton but an exclamation, voiced with a sense of discovery.
Breedlove felt it was an accurate metaphor and said so. At this point Dr. Teach asked Upton a question in a low voice, and Upton almost screeched, “Socially functional structural differentiation.” Teach laughed with a scorn that brought a buzz of low-voice argumentation from Upton until Harper intervened to permit Breedlove to resume his account.
He related an edited version of his dinner conversation with Kyra in Seattle and gave a sanitized account of their good-night kiss.
“While you were kissing,” the man called Slade asked, “did she make any sexual advances?”
From his question the black-garbed poseur would be a psychiatrist, Breedlove assumed.
“None whatsoever.”
“Ranger, would you recognize a sexual advance if you saw one?”
It was an outright jibe not worth an answer, and Breedlove could not have given one over the laughter. He was beginning to lose confidence in these men, not in their expertise but in their wisdom and maturity. Yet for Kyra’s sake he finished his talk with a plea.
“Gentlemen, Kyra and her small band of exiles come in peace and wish to leave in peace. To me it’s obvious that the risks we incur from granting her request for a small amount of uranium is less than the risk we incur by denying her, yet I have already heard arguments to the contrary. This is a moment of grave crisis for Kyra Lavaslatta. For humanity it is the ultimate crisis. If we fail these pilgrims we will have destroyed ourselves so completely it will matter no longer whether she stays to eliminate a lesser breed or is herself exterminated, for by our acts we would have abandoned those qualities which distinguish us from brutes and forfeited forever the Biblical status which once put us only a little lower than the angels.”
To his surprise, a smattering of applause greeted his words, and his opinion of the group rose slightly. It mounted another notch when Upton stood to address the group in a shrill but certain voice: “I don’t know where the rest of you stand, but I can say, before I feed the data to the computer, let’s give the female anything she wants and get her off the planet, fast.”
Clutching his note pad and tape recorder to his chest, Upton scurried from the room.
Someone in a back row called, “Teach, did Upton give you any idea what he’s up to?”
“He’s invading my turf with some fuzzy idea about the social organization of the Kanabians,” Teach answered. “He thinks the study of insects qualifies him as a sociologist.”
“There’s no social organization there,” someone volunteered. “It’s an anarchic matriarchy.”
“Not anarchic,” Hargrove demurred. “Highly stratified but not anarchic. Her state withered away, and her people have achieved the ultimate synthesis of law and order.”
“Kannerer, how long before her profile emerges?”
“Maybe a week,” a swarthy man answered. “Her Gestalt’s a humdinger.”
“That’ll be drawing heavily on her limited time.”
“Can’t be helped. She’s mid-Victorian about sex, so we have to approach those areas by indirection.”
Breedlove was eager for them to pursue this subject further, but Harper tapped his shoulder. “Breedlove, I’d like for you to meet your contact, Richard Turpin, a gifted member of the intelligence community… Gentlemen, please do not discuss this subject across departmental lines. The debriefing is over.”
With the babble of voices continuing unabated behind him, Breedlove turned to shake hands with a blond, blue-eyed man of about thirty who had the high cheekbones and slab jaws of an Oklahoman. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Turpin.”
“Call me Dick, Tom. We’ll be seeing lots of each other.” The trace of a drawl supported Breedlove’s estimate of Turpin’s origins.
“Dick Turpin,” Breedlove commented. “A famous name in the annals of crime.”
“Glad you’ve heard of me. I’m not Mr. Hoover, but I’ve solved my share of crimes.”
“Then you’re with the FBI.”
“Was,” Turpin corrected. “I’m now with the Special Security Squad.”
“Excuse me, Breedlove.” Harper tapped his shoulder again. “Attorney Cohen’s waiting to see you in the passageway, and he’s getting impatient.”
“Show him in.”
“He’s not cleared for the ready room… Gentlemen, the debriefing is over, repeat, over.”
“Excuse me, Dick,” Breedlove said, “I’ve got to see my lawyer.”
“You can’t be excused, Tom. We’ll see your lawyer.”
Not wishing to see his relationship with his contact begin on a note of acrimony, Breedlove said, “Then come along, Dick.”
They walked into a corridor filled with people, mostly women, who awaited the men inside. Glancing over the people, Breedlove could not see Cohen, but Turpin called, “Hi ya, Abe! Here’s your client.”
A tall, well-tailored man with an attaché case moved toward them with the straight-line precision of a Manhattanite. The hand he extended to Breedlove was cordial, but his voice was exasperated. “My office relayed your call to me. I had to cancel a hearing to get here, then Harper keeps me cooling my heels for ten minutes. Glad to meet you, Ranger Breedlove. I’m Abe Cohen.”
Chapter Eight
“You’re not the Abe Cohen who gave me your card this morning.”
“Nevertheless, I’m Abe Cohen.”
“What did the other Abe Cohen look like?” Turpin asked.
“About sixty, with drooping jowls, receding gray hair, and large brown eyes.”
“This is a matter for Ben Slade,” Turpin said. “Excuse me.”
He turned and went back into the ready room.
“What’s going on here, Ranger?” Cohen asked.
“It’s top secret. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to you without Turpin listening in.”
“Nonsense. The lawyer-client relationship antedates security regulations by a few hundred years. From what Peterson tells me, you’ve some sort of jurisdictional problem with a woman you’re trying to palm off as exotic fauna. It sounds less like a legal problem than a psychiatric problem.”
“It’s real. Kyra Lavaslatta, a girl from another planet, landed a spaceship in the Selkirk Area. I brought her to Seattle to get radioactive uranium enough to power her liftoff.”
“The uranium would be handled by the AEC. If she’s an emissary and her papers are in order, she’s under the jurisdiction of the State Department. If her papers aren’t in order, she’s a matter for Immigration.”
“We know that, Mr. Cohen, but we were hoping—”
“Hoping I’d find a loophole! It follows.”
“That’s not all. The military wants me to pinpoint the location of the spaceship, possibly to destroy it, and I don’t want to tell them.”
“If you’re not under oath you don’t have to tell them anything, and if all this is so hush-hush they won’t subpoena you. A subpoena would take a court order. But if she has no fuel for a liftoff, why is the military concerned?”
“They’re afraid she might lift off and return and attack the planet with eight other women and a boy.”
“Preposterous, but typical,” Cohen snapped. “There’s a peculiar angle to this case: the penalty for illegal entry is expulsion from the country, which is precisely what the alien wishes, and the expelling country must provide the means of transportation, which in this case is uranium. Illegal aliens do have some rights, you know.”
