It took no avoidable chances. It picked its prey and came boiling up into space beside it—or among it, if it was a small convoy—and did its work. It didn't bother with prisoners, so the work was soon done. In an hour everything was over. The dead hulks with their dead crews and dead passengers went drifting away for Zamm to find. The king-shark was gone again.
Disgusted, Zamm gave up trying to outguess it. She went off instead and bought herself a freighter.
The one she selected was an expensive, handsome ship, and she loaded it up with a fortune. She wanted no gilded hook for the king-shark; she'd feed it solid gold! There were a dozen fortunes lying around her globe, in salvaged cash and whatnot from previous jobs. She'd use it up as she needed it or else drop it off at Jeltad the next time she went back. Nobody kept accounts on that sort of stuff.
Her freighter was all ready to start.
"Now I need a nice pirate!" mused Zamm.
She went out and caught herself one. It had an eighteen-man crew, and that was just right for the freighter. She checked over their memories first, looking for the one thing she wanted. It wasn't there. A lot of other things were, but it had been a long time since that kind of investigation made her feel particularly sick.
"Anyone lives through it, I'll let him go!" she promised, cold-eyed. She would, and they knew it. They were small fry; let somebody else grab them up if they wanted them badly enough!
At a good, fast, nervous pace, the freighter and its crew crossed what was currently the most promising section of the king-shark's area—Zamm's black globe sliding and shifting and dancing about its bait at the farthest possible range that would still permit it to pounce.
By and by, the freighter came back on another route and passed through the area again. It was nearing the end of the fourth pass when the king-shark surfaced into space beside it and struck. In that instant, the freighter's crew died; and Zamm pounced.
It wasn't just contact range; it was contact. Alloy hide to alloy hide, Zamm's round black leech clung to the king-shark's flank, their protective screens fused into a single useless mass about them. It didn't matter at what point the leech started to bite; there weren't any weak ones. Nor were there any strong enough to stop its cutter-beam at a four-foot range.
It was only a question of whether they could bring up something in eighty seconds that would blast out the leech's guts as the wall between them vanished.
They couldn't, it seemed. Zamm and her goblin crew of robots went into the king-shark in a glittering wave.
"Just mess up their gravs!" said Zamm. "They don't carry prisoners. There'll be some in suits, but we'll handle them."
* * *
In messed-up rows, the robots laid out the living and the nearly dead about the king-shark's passages and rooms.
"From Cushgar!" said Zamm surprised. "They're prowling a long way from home!"
She knew them by their looks. The ancestors of the king-shark's one hundred and fourteen crewmen had also once breathed the air of Terra. They had gone off elsewhere and mutated variously then; and, like the Daya-Bals, the strongest surviving mutant strains eventually had blended and grown again to be a new race.
Not a handsome one, by Zamm's standards! Short and squat and hairy, and enormously muscled. The spines of their neck and back vertebrae stuck out through their skins in horny spikes, like the ridge on a turtle's shell. But she'd seen worse-looking in the human line; and she wasn't judging a beauty contest.
A robot stalked briskly along the rows like a hunting wasp, pausing to plunge a fine needle into the neck of each of the people from Cushgar, just beneath the fourth vertebral spike. Zamm and a robot that had loafed till now picked out the ones that seemed damaged worst, settled down beside each in turn and began their questioning.
Some time passed—four, five hours—finally six. Then Zamm and her robots came back to her ship. The leech sealed its egress port, unclamped and took off. The king-shark's huge, dark hulk went drifting along through space. There was no one alive on it now. Fifteen minutes later, a light suddenly flared from it, and it vanished.
Zamm sat white-faced and silent at her desk for a much longer time than that.
"The dolls," she said finally, aloud.
"Yes?" said the big robot-voice.
"Destroy them," said Zamm. She reached out and switched on the telepath transmitter. "And get me a line through to Jeltad. The Co-ordinator—"
There was no reply, and no sound came from within the ship. She lit up some star-globes and began calculating from them. The calculations didn't take long. Then she sat still again for a while, staring into the luminous green, slowly swirling haze that filled the transmitter screen.
A shape and a face began forming in it at last; and a voice pronounced her name questioningly.
* * *
"They're in Cushgar!" said Zamm, the words running out in a brittle, tinkling rush. "I know the planet and the place. I saw them the way it saw them—the boy's getting pretty big. It's a gray house at a sort of big hospital. Seventeen years they've been working there! Seventeen years, working for them!" Her face was grisly with hate.
The Co-ordinator waited till the words had all run out. He looked rather sick.
"You can't go there alone!" he said.
"How else!" Zamm said surprised. "Who'd be going with me there? But I've got to take the ship. I wanted to tell you."
The Co-ordinator shook his head.
"You bought that ship with your second mission! But you can't go there alone, Zamm. You'll be passing near enough to Jeltad on your way there, anyway. Stop in, and we'll think of something!"
"You can't help me," Zamm told him bluntly. "You can't mission anybody into Cushgar. You lost every Agent you ever sent there. You try a Fleet squadron, and it's war. Thousand Nations would jump you the day after!"
"There's always another way," the Co-ordinator said. He paused a moment, looking for that other way. "You stay near your transmitter anyhow! I'll call you as soon as we can arrange some reasonable method—"
"No," said Zamm. "I can't take any more calls either—I just got off a long run. I'm hitting Deep Rest now till we make the first hostile contact. I've only got one try, and I've got to give it everything. There's no other way," she added, "and there aren't any reasonable methods. I thought it all out. But thanks for the ship!"
* * *
The Co-ordinator located the man called Snoops over a headquarters' communicator and spoke to him briefly.
Snoops swore softly.
"She's got other friends who would want to be told," the Co-ordinator concluded. "I'm leaving that to you."
"You would," said Snoops. "You going to be in your office? I might need some authority!"
"You don't need authority," the Co-ordinator said, "and I just started on a fishing trip. I've had a vacation coming these last eight years—I'm going to take it."
Snoops scowled unpleasantly at the dead communicator. He had no official position in the department. He had a long suite of offices and a laboratory, however. His business was to know everything about everybody, as he usually did.
He scratched his bearded chin and gave the communicator's tabs a few vindictive punches. It clicked back questioningly.
"Want a location check on forty-two thousand and a couple of hundred names!" Snoops said. "Get busy!"
The communicator groaned.
Snoops ignored it. He was stabbing at a telepath transmitter.
"Hi, Ferd!" he said presently.
"Almighty sakes, Snoops," said Ferdinand the Finger. "Don't unload anything new on me now! I'm right in the middle—"
"Zamm's found out about her kin," said Snoops. "They're in Cushgar! She's gone after them."
Zone Agent Ferdinand swore. His lean, nervous fingers worked at the knot of a huge scarlet butterfly cravat. He was a race tout at the moment—a remarkably good one.
"Where'd she contact from?" he inquired.
Snoops told him.
"That's right on my doorst
ep," said Ferdinand.
"So I called you first," Snoops said. "But you can't contact her. She's traveling Deep Rest."
"Is, huh? What's Bent say?" asked Ferdinand.
"Bent isn't talking—he went fishing. Hold on there!" Snoops added hastily. "I wasn't done!"
"Thanks a lot for calling, Snoops," Ferdinand said with his hand on the transmitter switch. "But I'm right in the middle—"
"You're in the middle of the Agent-list of that cluster," Snoops informed him. "I just unloaded it on you!"
"That'll take me hours!" Ferdinand howled. "You can't—"
"Just parcel it out," Snoops said coldly. "You're the executive type, aren't you? You can do it while you're traveling. I'm busy!"
He cut off Ferdinand the Finger.
"How you coming?" he asked the communicator.
"That's going to be over eighteen thousand to locate!" the communicator grumbled.
"Locate 'em," said Snoops. He was punching the transmitter again. When you want to get in touch with even just the key-group of the Third Department's forty-two thousand and some Zone Agents, you had to keep on punching!
"Hi, Senator!"
* * *
If anyone was amusing himself that week by collecting reports of extraordinary events, with the emphasis on mysterious disappearances, he ran into a richer harvest than usual.
It caused a quite exceptional stir, of course, when Senator Thartwith excused himself in the middle of a press interview, stepped into the next office to take an urgent personal call, and failed to reappear. For the senator was a prominent public figure—the Leader of the Opposition in the Thousand Nations. He had closed the door behind him; but his celebrated sonorous voice was heard raised in apparent expostulation for about a minute thereafter. Then all became still.
Half an hour passed before an investigation was risked. It disclosed, by and by, that the senator had quite vanished!
He stayed vanished for a remarkable length of time. In a welter of dark suspicions, the Thousand Nations edged close to civil war.
Of only planetary interest, though far more spectacular, was the sudden ascension of the Goddess Loppos of Amuth in her chariot drawn by two mystical beasts, just as the conclusion of the Annual Temple Ceremony of Amuth began. A few moments before the event, the Goddess was noted to frown, and her lips appeared to move in a series of brisk, celestial imprecations. Then the chariot shot upwards; and a terrible flash of light was observed in the sky a short while later. Amuth bestrewed its head with ashes and mourned for a month until Loppos reappeared.
Mostly, however, these freakish occurrences involved personalities of no importance and so caused no more than a splash of local disturbance. As when Grandma Wannattel quietly unhitched the rhinocerine pony from her patent-medicine trailer and gave the huge but patient animal to little Grimp to tend— "Until I come back." Nothing would have been made of that incident at all—police and people were always bothering poor Grandma Wannattel and making her move on—if Grimp had not glanced back, just as he got home with the pony, and observed Grandma's big trailer soaring quietly over a hillside and on into the sunset. Little Grimp caught it good for that whopper!
In fact, remarkable as the reports might have seemed to a student of such matters, the visible flow of history was at all affected by only one of them. That was the unfortunate case of Dreem, dread Tyrant of the twenty-two Heebelant Systems:
" . . . and me all set to be assassinated by the Freedom Party three nights from now!" roared Dreem. "Take two years to needle the chicken-livered bunch up to it again!"
"Suit yourself, chum!" murmured the transmitter above his bed.
"That I will," the despot grumbled, groping about for his slippers. "You just bet your life I will!"
* * *
"We should be coming within instrument-detection of the van of the ghost fleet almost immediately!" the adjutant of the Metag of Cushgar reported.
"Don't use that term again!" the potentate said coldly. "It's had a very bad effect on morale. If I find it in another official communication, there'll be a few heads lifted from their neck-spines. Call them 'the invaders.' "
The adjutant muttered apologies.
"How many invaders are now estimated in that first group?" the Metag inquired.
"Just a few thousand, sir," the adjutant said. "The reports, of course, remain very—vague! The main body seems to be still about twelve light-years behind. The latest reports indicate approximately thirty thousand there."
The Metag grunted. "We should be just able to intercept that main bunch with the Glant then!" he said. "If they keep to their course, that is. It's high time to end this farce!"
"They don't appear to have swerved from their course to avoid interception yet," the adjutant ventured.
"They haven't met the Glant yet, either!" the Metag returned, grinning.
He was looking forward to that meeting. His flagship, Glant, the spindle-shaped giant-monitor of Cushgar, had blown more than one entire attacking fleet out of space during its eighty years of operation. Its outer defenses weren't to be breached by any known weapon; and its weapons could hash up a planetary system with no particular effort. The Glant was invincible.
It was just a trifle slow, though. And these ghost ships, these ridiculous invaders, were moving at an almost incredible pace! He wouldn't be able to get the Glant positioned in time to stop the van.
The Metag scowled. If only the reports had been more specific—and less mysteriously terminated! Three times, in the past five days, border fleets had announced they had detected the van of the ghosts and were prepared to intercept. Each time that had been the last announcement received from the fleet in question. Of course, communications could become temporarily disrupted, in just that instantaneous, wholesale fashion, by perfectly natural disturbances—but three times!
A slightly chilled breeze tickled the Metag's back-spines for a moment. There was no nonsense about the Metag; but just the same, his conscience—like that of Cushgar generally—was riddled enough to be conducive to occasional superstitious chills.
"There they are, sir!" the adjutant announced suddenly, in an excited quaver.
The Metag stared unbelievingly.
* * *
It was as bad as the worst of the reports. It was worse! Secure behind the Glant's defenses, the sight of a few thousand hostile cruisers wouldn't have caused him a qualm—
But this!
There were a few small war vessels among them—none over six hundred feet long. But, so far as one could tell from their seared, beam-blasted exteriors, most of them had been freighters of every possible size, type and description. There was a sprinkling of dainty, badly slashed yachts and other personal space craft. No wonder they'd been mistaken for the murdered cold hulks of the centuries, swept along in a current of awful new life—!
But the worst of it was that, mixed up with that stream, was stuff which simply didn't belong in space—it should have been gliding sedately over the surface of some planetary sea! Some, by Old Webolt, had wings!
And that one, there!
"It's a house!" the Metag howled, in horrified recognition. "A thundering, Old-Webolt-damned HOUSE!"
House and all, the battered ghost-horde came flashing up at a pace that couldn't have been matched by Cushgar's newest destroyers. Ponderously and enormously, the Glant raced forward in what was, even now, an obviously futile attempt to meet them.
The adjutant was gabbling at his side.
"Sir, we may just be able to reach their flank with the grapnels before they're past!"
"Get them out!" the Metag roared. "Full range! Get them out! We've got to stop one of them—find out! It's a masquerade—"
They didn't quite make it. Near the end of the van, a torpedo-shaped, blackened thing seemed to be touched for a moment by a grapnel beam's tip. It was whirled about in a monstrous semicircle, then darted off at a tangent and shot away after the others. They vanished in the direction of Cushgar's heart-cluster.
<
br /> "That was a mistake!" breathed the Metag. "It'll be telling them about us. If the main body deflects its course, we'll never . . . no, wait! There's one more coming—stop it! NOW!"
A slender, three-hundred-foot space yacht flashed headlong into a cluster of the Glant's grapnels and freezers and stopped dead.
"And now!" The Metag passed a broad tongue over his trembling lips. "Now we'll find out! Bring them in!"
Grapnels and tractors began to maneuver the little yacht in carefully through the intricate maze of passages between the Glant's overlapping first, second, and third defense zones. There was nothing wrong with this ghost's looks; it gleamed blue and silver and unblemished in the lights glaring upon it from a hundred different directions. It might have taken off ten minutes before on its maiden flight.
The Great Squid of space had caught itself a shining minnow.
"Sir," the adjutant said uneasily, "mightn't it be better to beam it first?"
The Metag stared at him.
"And kill whoever's inside before we've talked to them?" he inquired carefully. "Have you gone mad? Does that look like a battleship to you—or do you think they are ghosts? It's the wildest good luck we caught them. If it hadn't come straight at us, as if it wanted to be caught—"
He paused a moment, scowling out through the screens at the yacht which now hung in a bundle of guide beams just above the Glant's yawning intake-port. The minnow was about to be swallowed.
"As if it wanted to be caught?" he repeated doubtfully.
It was the last doubt he had.
The little yacht moved.
It moved out of the grapnels and tractors and freezers as if there weren't any! It slid over the monitor's spindle length inside its defenses like a horrible caress. Behind it, the Glant's multiple walls folded back in a white-hot, thick-lipped wound. The Glant split down its length like a giant clam, opened out and spilled its flaming, exploding guts into space.
The little yacht darted on, unblemished, to resume its outrider position on the ghost-van's flank.
Zone Agent Pagadan of Lar-Sancaya really earned herself a chunk of immortal glory that day! But, unfortunately, no trace of the Glant was ever discovered again. And so no one would believe her, though she swore to the truth on a stack of Lar-Sancaya's holiest writings and on seven different lie detectors. Everyone knew what Pagadan could do to a lie detector, and as for the other—
Agent of Vega and Other Stories Page 20
