The Silent Invaders

by Robert Silverberg

  The finger fell elsewhere. He got through Health with nothing more than a rudimentary checkup. At the last desk his passport was stamped with a re-entry visa, and the clerk said, “You haven’t been on Earth for a long time, have you, Major?”

  “Not in ten years. Hope things haven’t changed too much.”

  “The women are still the same, anyway,” the clerk said with what was meant to be a sly leer. He shuffled Harris’ papers together, stuck them back in the portfolio, and handed them to him. “Everything’s in order, Major. Go straight ahead and out the door to your left. And lots of luck on Earth.”

  Harris thanked him and moved along, gripping one suitcase in each hand. A month ago, at the beginning of his journey, the suitcases had seemed heavy to him. But that had been back on Darruu; here on Earth they weighed only two-thirds as much. He carried them jauntily.

  Soon it will be spring on Darruu, he thought. The red-leaved jasaar trees would blossom and their sweet perfume would fill the air.

  With an angry inner scowl he blanked out the thought. Such needless self-torment was stupid. He was no Darruui. He was Major Abner Harris, late of Cincinnati, here on Earth for eight months of vacation.

  He knew his orders. He was to establish residence, avoid detection, and in the second week of his stay make contact with the chief Darruui agent on Earth. Further instructions would come from him.

  TWO

  It took twenty minutes by helitaxi to reach the metropolitan area from the spaceport. Blithely handling the Terran currency as though he had been using it all his life, Harris paid the driver, tipped him precisely fifteen percent, and got out. He had asked for and he had been taken to a hotel in the heart of the city—the Spaceways Hotel. There was one of them in every major spaceport city in the galaxy; the space-liners operated the chain under a jointly-owned corporation for the benefit of travelers who had no place to stay on the planet of their destination.

  He signed in and was given a room on the 58th floor. The Earther on duty at the desk checked out his papers and, as he handed Harris the registry plaque, said, “You don’t mind heights, do you, Major?”

  “Not at all.”

  A boy scooped up his bags. On Darruu, it would be a humiliation to carry another person’s bags. But this was not Darruu, Harris reminded himself once again, and when he reached his room he gave the boy who had carried his bags a demi-unit piece, received grateful thanks, and was left in solitude.

  He locked the door. For the first time since leaving Darruu he was really alone. Thumbing open his suitcases, he dextrously performed the series of complex stress-pressures that gave access to the hidden areas of the grips; miraculously, the suitcases expanded to nearly twice their former volume as he unsealed them. There was nothing like packing your belongings in a tesseract if you really wanted to keep the customs men away from your property.

  Busily, he unpacked.

  The first thing to emerge was a small device which fit neatly and virtually invisibly to the inside of the room door. It was a jammer for spybeams. It insured a good measure of privacy.

  A disruptor-pistol came next. Harris slipped it into his tunic-pocket after checking the charge.

  Several books; a flask of Darruui wine; a photograph of his birth-tree. Bringing these things had not increased the risks he ran, since if any of them had been discovered it would only have been after much more seriously incriminating information had come to light.

  The subspace communicator, for example. Or the narrow-beam amplifier he would use in making known his presence here to the other members of the secret Darruui cadre established on Earth.

  Harris finished unpacking, restored his suitcases to their three-dimensional state, and took a tiny scalpel from the toolkit he had unpacked. Quickly stripping off his trousers, he laid bare the desensitized area in the fleshy part of his thigh, stared for a moment at the network of fine silver threads underlying the flesh, and, with three careful twists of the scalpel’s edge, altered the thermostatic control in his body.

  He shivered a moment as his metabolism rolled with the adjustment; then, gradually, he began to feel warm. Closing the wound, he applied nuplast; moments later, it had healed. He dressed again.

  He surveyed his room. Twenty feet square, with a bed, a desk, a closet, a dresser. There was a small airconditioning grid mounted in the ceiling. The usual plates provided a steady greenish electroluminescent glow. There was an oval window, beneath which was a set of polarizing controls. There was a molecular bath and washstand. It was neither the shabbiest nor the most elegant room he had ever stayed in. It wasn’t bad for twenty units a week, he told himself, trying to think the way an Earthman might.

  The room-calendar told him it was half past three in the afternoon, 22 May 2562. He was not supposed to make contact with Central for ten days or more. Closing his eyes, he pictured the Terran calendar and computed that that would mean the first week of June. Until then he was simply acting the part of a Terran on vacation.

  The surgeon had made certain minor alterations in his metabolism to give him a taste for Terran food and drink and to make it possible for him to digest the carbohydrates which the Terrans were so damnedly fond of consuming. They had prepared him well for playing the part of Major Abner Harris. And he had been equipped with fifty thousand units of Terran money, which was enough to last him quite a while.

  Carefully he adjusted the device on the door to keep intruders out while he was gone. Anyone entering the room surreptitiously now would get a nasty jolt of energy, not enough to kill but enough to annoy. Harris checked his wallet, made sure he had his money with him, and pushed the door-opener.

  It slid back and he stepped through, into the hallway. At that moment someone walking rapidly down the hall collided with him, spinning him around. He felt a soft body pressed against his.

  A woman!

  The immediate reaction that boiled up in him was one of anger, but he blocked the impulse to strike her before it rose. On Darruu, a woman who dared to jostle a Servant of the Spirit could expect a sound whipping.

  But this was not Darruu.

  And he remembered a phrase from his indoctrination: it will help to create a sexual relationship for yourself on Earth, by way of camouflage.

  The surgeons had changed his metabolism in that respect, too, making him capable of feeling sexual desires for Terran feelings. The camouflage theory held that no one would expect a disguised alien being to engage in romantic affairs with Terrans; it would serve as an effective bit of sidetracking.

  “Excuse me!” said Harris and the female Terran in the same instant.

  His training reminded him that simultaneous outbursts by two people were cause for laughter on Earth. He laughed. So did she.

  Then she said, “I guess I just didn’t see you. I was hurrying along the corridor and I wasn’t looking.”

  “The fault was all mine,” Harris insisted. Terran males are obstinately chivalrous, he had been instructed. “I opened my eyes and just charged out blind. I’m awfully sorry.”

  He looked at her. She was tall, nearly his height, with soft, lustrous yellow hair and clear pink skin. She wore a black body-tight sheath that left her shoulders and the upper hemispheres of her breasts uncovered. Harris found her attractive.

  Wonderingly he thought, Now I really know the surgeons have changed me. She has hair on her scalp, and enormous bulging breasts, and yet I can feel desire for such a creature!

  She said, “It’s my fault and it’s your fault both. That’s the way most collisions are caused. Let’s not argue about it.” She threw him a dazzling smile. “My name is Beth Baldwin.”

  “Major Abner Harris.”

  “Major?”

  “Interstellar Development Corps.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Just arrived on Earth?”

  He nodded. “I’m here on vacation. My last stint was Alpheratz IV.” He grinned and said, “You know, it’s silly to stand out here in the hall discussing things. I was on my way down below to
get something to eat. How about joining me?”

  She looked doubtful for a moment, but only for a moment. Then she brightened.

  “I’m game,” she said.

  They took the gravshaft down and ate in the hotel’s third-level restaurant, which was an automated affair with individual conveyor-belts bringing food to each table. Part of his hypnotic training had been intended to see him safely through social situations such as this, and so he ordered a dinner for two, complete with wine, without a hitch.

  She did not seem shy. She told him that she was employed on Rigel XII, and had come to Earth on a business trip. She had arrived only the day before. She was twenty-nine, she said, unmarried, a native-born Earther like himself. She had been living in the Rigel system for the past four years, she finished.

  “And now tell me about you,” she said, reaching for the wine decanter.

  Harris shrugged diffidently. “There isn’t very much to tell, I’m afraid. I’m a fairly stodgy career man in the IDC, age forty-two, and this is the first day I’ve spent on Earth in ten years.”

  “It must feel strange.”

  “It does.”

  “How much vacation do you have?”

  He tapped his fingertips together. “Six to eight months. I can have more if I really want it. When do you go back to Rigel?”

  She smiled strangely at him. “I may not go back at all. Depends on whether I can find what I’m looking for on Earth.”

  “And what, pray tell, are you looking for?”

  She chuckled lightly. “That’s my business,” she said with finality.

  “Sorry.”

  “Never mind the apologies. Let’s have some more wine.”

  After Harris had settled up the not inconsiderable matter of the bill, they left the hotel and went outside to stroll a while. The streets were crowded; a clock atop a distant building told Harris that the time was shortly after seven in the evening.

  He felt warm, now that he had adjusted his temperature controls. The unfamiliar foods and wines in his stomach gave him an oddly queasy feeling, though he had enjoyed the meal.

  The girl slipped her hand through his looped arm and squeezed the inside of his elbow in an affectionate way. Harris smiled at her.

  He said, “I was afraid it was going to be a terribly lonely vacation.”

  “Me too. You can be tremendously alone on a planet that has twenty billion people living on it.”

  “Especially if you’re a stranger on your own world,” he said glibly. “Having been away for ten years.”

  They walked on. In the middle of the street a troupe of acrobats was performing, using nullgrav devices to add to their abilities. Harris chuckled and tossed them a coin, and a bronzed girl saluted to him from the top of a human pyramid.

  Night was falling. Harris considered the incongruity of walking arm-in-arm with an Earthgirl, with his belly full of Earth foods, and enjoying it.

  Darruu seemed impossibly distant now. It lay eleven hundred light-years from Earth; its star was visible from here only as part of a mass of blurred dots of light, without individuality.

  But yet he knew that it was there. And he missed it.

  “You’re worrying about something,” the girl at his side said.

  “It’s an old failing of mine.”

  He was thinking: I was born a Servant of the Spirit, and so I was chosen to go to Earth. I may never return to Darruu again.

  As the sky darkened they strolled on, over a delicate golden bridge airily spanning a river whose dark depths twinkled with myriad points of light. Together they stared down at the water, and at the stars reflected in it. She moved closer to him, and her warmth against his body was strangely pleasing to him.

  Eleven hundred light-years from home.

  Why am I here?

  He knew the answer, of course. Titanic conflict was shaping in the universe. The Predictors held that the cataclysm was no more than two hundred years away. Darruu would stand against its ancient adversary Medlin, and all the worlds of the universe would be ranged on one side or on the other.

  He was here as an ambassador. Earth was a mighty force in the galaxy—so mighty that it would resent the role it was scheduled to play, that of pawn between Darruu and Medlin. Darruu wanted, needed Terran support in the conflict to come. Obtaining it would be a delicate problem in the art of engineering consent.

  A cadre of disguised Darruui, planted on Earth, gradually manipulating public opinion toward the Darruu camp and away from Medlin—that was the plan, and Major Abner Harris, born Aar Khülom, was one of its agents.

  They walked through the city until the hour had grown very late, and then turned back toward the hotel. Harris was thoroughly confident now that he had established the sort of relationship with the girl that was likely to shield him from all suspicion of his true origin.

  He said, “What do we do now?”

  “Suppose we buy a bottle of something and have a party in your room?” she suggested readily.

  “My room’s a frightful mess,” Harris said, thinking of the many things in there that he would not want her to see. “How about yours?”

  “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”

  They stopped at an autobar and he fed demi-unit pieces into a gleaming machine until the chime sounded and a fully wrapped bottle slid out of the receiving tray. Harris tucked it under his arm, made a mock-courteous bow to the girl, and they continued on their way to the hotel.

  The signal came just as they entered the lobby.

  It reached Harris in the form of a sudden twinge in the abdomen; that was where the amplifier had been embedded. He felt it as three quick impulses, rasp, rasp, rasp, followed after a brief pause by a repeat.

  The signal had only one meaning: There is an emergency. Get in touch with your contact-man at once. Emergency!

  Her hand tightened on his arm. “Are you all right? You look so pale!”

  In a tense voice he said, “Maybe we’d better postpone our little party a few minutes, Beth. I’m—not quite well.”

  “Oh! Is there any way I can help?”

  He shook his head. “It’s something I picked up on Alpheratz,” he said huskily. Turning, he handed her the packaged liquor bottle and said, “It’ll just take me a few minutes to get myself settled down. Suppose you go to your room and wait for me there.”

  “But if you’re sick I ought to…”

  “No. Beth, I have to take care of this myself, without anyone else watching. Is that okay with you?”

  “Okay,” she said doubtfully.

  “Thanks. Be with you just as soon as I can.”

  They rode the gravshaft together to the 58th floor of the hotel and went their separate ways, she to her room, he to his. The signal in his abdomen was repeating itself steadily now with quiet urgency: rasp rasp rasp. Rasp rasp rasp. Rasp rasp rasp.

  He neutralized the force-field on the door with a quick energy impulse and opened the door. Stepping inside quickly, he activated the spybeam jammer again. Beads of cold sweat were starting to form on his skin.

  Rasp rasp rasp. Rasp rasp rasp.

  He opened the closet, took out the tiny narrow-beam amplifier that he had hidden there, and tuned it to the frequency of the emergency signal. Immediately the rasping within him ceased as the narrow-beam amplifier covered the wavelength.

  Long moments passed. The amplifier picked up a voice speaking in the code devised for use among Darruui agents alone.

  “Identify yourself.”

  Harris identified himself according to the regular procedure. He went on to say, “I arrived on Earth today. My instructions were not to report to you for about two weeks.”

  “I know all that,” was the impatient reply. “There’s an emergency situation.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “We’ve discovered there are Medlin agents on Earth. Normal procedures will have to be altered. I want you to meet me at once.”

  He gave an address. Harris memorized it and rep
eated it. The contact was broken.

  Meet me at once. The orders had to be interpreted literally. At once meant right now, not tomorrow afternoon at Harris’ convenience. His tryst with the yellow-haired Earthgirl would just have to wait.

  He picked up the housephone and asked for her room. A moment later he heard her voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Beth, this is Abner Harris.”

  “Are you all right? Is everything under control? I’m waiting for you.”

  Hesitantly he said, “I’m fine now. But… Beth, I don’t know how to say this—will you believe me when I tell you that a friend of mine just phoned, and wants me to meet him right away, downtown?”

  “Now? But it’s after eleven!”

  “I know. He’s a strange sort. Keeps odd hours. I’ve got to go.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any friends on Earth, Major Harris. You said you were lonely.” Her voice was sharp with the edgy sarcasm of disappointment.

  “He’s not really a friend,” Harris said uncomfortably. “He’s a business associate. From IDC.”

  “Well, I’m not accustomed to having men stand me up. But I guess I don’t have any choice, do I?”

  “Good girl. Make it a date for breakfast in the morning instead?”

  “It’s a lousy substitute, but it’ll have to do. What time?”

  “Oh, nine.”

  “All right,” she said. “See you at nine, Major Harris.”

  THREE

  He stopped in the hotel lobby and poked his nose into the concierge’s booth. The concierge, a bony-faced, hawk-nosed man whose veiled eyes glittered with the knowledge accumulated in a hundred years of hoteliering, smiled subserviently at him.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to know how to get to 11543 Narvon Boulevard, the quickest way.”

  A grin creased the leathery face. “The Major is interested in the night-life, is he? Have you made a reservation? The Naron Boulevard clubs usually have few empty seats.”

  “I’m meeting a friend there,” Harris said. “I assume he’s taken care of the arrangements. Is it possible to walk there?”