Part 1

Moon Of Treason

by EMMETT McDOWELL

Branded an outlaw by the ISP, hated and feared as a mutant, Clyde Vickers stalked his quarry in impotent rage. His kind, it seemed, was always wanted for the dirty work....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Clyde Vickers shuffled awkwardly down the gangplank. After two years on Jupiter he felt buoyant as a toy balloon in the mild gravity of Earth's satellite. Every step he expected to go sailing over the heads of the other passengers--up, up into the vast booming reaches of Luna City's airlock.

The line jammed, came to a fuming stop. Vickers found himself wedged between a woman who had boarded the liner at Mars and a bearded Plutonian explorer. He craned his neck, peering over their heads to see what had caused the bottleneck.

An officer of the ISP, in a blue uniform, was standing at the foot of the gangplank, examining passports. Vickers cursed under his breath.

"Damn them," he thought, "damn them."

Behind him, the black spaceliner made sudden pistol-like reports as it expanded in the warm air. It had brought some of the cold of outer space along with it, and hoar frost stood out on its sides a foot thick. It was rapidly exhausting the heat in the airlock. Vickers shivered as the cold struck through his ill-fitting gray suit.

"Papers," the ISP man said and held out his hand.

With a start Vickers realized that he had reached the end of the gangplank. The ISP man took one look at Vickers' little green book and his face hardened.

"Parolee!" he said.

There were whispers from the crowd. A little boy said: "What's he done, momma? What's he done?"

"Hush!" she bade him.

Vickers gave no sign that he'd heard.

"Two-time loser, eh?" the ISP man went on and ran his eyes over Vickers. He saw a tall man with huge shoulders, the muscle bulging the cheap gray cloth--muscle that could be acquired only in the killing gravity of Jupiter's penal mines. Then he saw Vickers' eyes, and he looked startled.

Vickers had his nictitating lids lowered; his eyes seemed almost normal. Almost but not quite!

"What the devil!" the ISP man wet his lips. "Vickers! By God, I should have recognized the name. Vickers, eh?" He seemed about to say more, then changed his mind. "Move along. You're holding up the line."

"My passport."

"Pick it up at the parole board. If you don't report there in twenty-four hours, you'll be picked up yourself and shipped back to Jupiter. You're a two-time loser, Vickers; you can't afford to get into trouble again."

Vickers regarded him with open dislike, then turned on his heel, started across the spaceport at a cautious shuffle.

Freedom!

He couldn't leave the moon. He had to accept whatever work the parole board secured for him--more than likely some stinking job deep in the moon pits. He must report for a check-up and a psycho-therapeutic treatment every four weeks. He couldn't marry or hold property or change jobs.

And if he fell from grace again, it meant sterilization and a life sentence on Jupiter.

Freedom. What the hell had he to look forward to?

* * * * *

All his life Vickers had been lonely. His parents, horrified at having produced a monstrosity, had placed him in a home and washed their hands of him.

Not that Vickers' abnormality was disfiguring or particularly noticeable even--you had to look closely at his eyes to recognize the nictitating lids--but he was a freak, a mutant, and the sight of him had been a constant reminder of their shame.

At the home, Vickers' playmates had quickly discovered his queerness and had taunted him about it with the cruelty of children. His attempts at friendship were met with rebuffs. He might have been able to adjust but he was never allowed to forget that he was different.

Later when the peculiar power of his eyes became known, he was feared a little, resented and cordially hated. Vickers was forced in on himself. He built a shell, a hard flippant armor against the senseless antagonism he met everywhere.

In spite of hysterical predictions and a flood of stories in the science-fiction magazines, the Atomic Age had not ushered in a wave of mutants--at least not radical mutants. Vickers was practically unique.

And alone.

Nevertheless Vickers experienced an odd tingling excitement as he emerged from the lock into Luna City. Beneath his thick layers of protective indifference, he was eager as a boy, friendly, sensitive. A starved gregariousness looked out of his eyes in unguarded moments.

He stood with his back to the wall of an export firm, breathing deeply of the warm, artificially earth-scented air. Through the soles of his feet he could feel the pavement vibrating faintly, as deep inside the bowels of the moon, the mechanical mining worms gnawed out the ore, chewed it, digested it, spat it out as metal ingots.

The voice of the city rolled over him, deafened him. His eyes were bewildered at the crowds jamming the pavement. His pulse leaped. He was like a blind man who has just had his sight restored.

Someone said: "Hello, Vickers," and struck him on the shoulder. "Glad to see you out."

Vickers brought his eyes down. He stared at the man who had addressed him. The look of exaltation slowly faded from his face to be replaced by a puzzled frown.

"I don't know you."

"Oh, come now, surely you recognize me." The man was as big as Vickers, exactly, and the same build. He was clad in a shabby gray suit. There was something tantalizingly familiar about him. Vickers wrinkled his forehead in concentration.

"I must remember that," said the man, and wrinkled his forehead exactly like Vickers.

They were standing in a doorway out of the stream of pedestrians. Suddenly Vickers' mouth fell open. He stared at the man in startled disbelief.

It was himself!

The resemblance was too perfect. The same close-cropped black hair and Jupiter-enlarged muscles. The same short, straight nose, wide, thin-lipped mouth, square jaw. Even the same transparent inner lids lowered over pale gray eyes. It was like looking into a mirror.

Vickers felt his mouth go dry.

"Who are you?" he demanded harshly.

"You recognize me? Good."

The man grinned, began to edge away.

Vickers lunged for him. But the fellow eluded his grasp, slipped into the stream of traffic like an eel. He was rapidly being swallowed up by the crowd. Vickers ploughed after him.

There was something afoot--something dangerous to himself, he felt. He was determined not to lose sight of his double and opened his nictitating lids....

Instantly, the scene about the busy spaceport changed. It took on a vaporous unreality like an x-ray photograph. The people, the buildings, even the pavement underfoot became tenuous as smoke. He could see right through them.

It always frightened Vickers a little to use his full vision, taking him a second to adjust. Then he located his double about ten steps ahead.

He could make out the misty outlines of elevators in the man's flashing heels. So that was how he'd given himself the necessary height. Pads filled out his frame reproducing Vickers' Jupiter-trained muscles. The nictitating lids had been cleverly simulated by contact lenses.

But why?

Why should anyone go to all that trouble to disguise himself exactly like Vickers--even to the ill-fitting gray suit? There was something sinister about the whole affair.

Just then Vickers tripped, lost his precarious balance and fell sprawling.

He scrambled to his feet in time to see the stranger leap into an air taxi.

"Look at his eyes!" a woman cried out at his elbow. "Look at his eyes!"

* * * * *

Vickers hastily lowered his inner lids, cursing under his breath. There wasn't another cab in sight. He'd better clear out before he was the focal point of a riot. Normal humans weren't fond of mutants.

Already a crowd was collecting. Vickers heard angry mutterings. He forced his way through the press bull-like. Suddenly he found his path blocked by two determined-looking men.

"Hold on," said the man on the outside and put his hand on Vickers' chest. He was blond with cold, pale blue eyes. "What's your hurry?"

Vickers started to thrust them aside when he felt the second man jam a gun into his ribs.

"Vickers, aren't you?" asked the blond man.

"What of it?"

"Come along." He jerked his chin toward an air taxi. "Don't make a fuss."

"Where?"

"Headquarters." The man produced an ISP card. "We tried to catch you at the ship, but you'd left."

Vickers hesitated. Despite the pistol in his ribs, he thought he could take the two plainclothesmen. It would be a futile move, though. The ISP would throw out the net for him, and this time he would be sent back to Jupiter for life.

He sighed, "All right," and climbed into the cab.

He wondered if there could be any connection between the incident outside the spaceport and this visit to ISP headquarters, but he knew it would be useless to ask. He stared silently out the cab window at the polyglot crowd, drawn from three worlds.

The moon was international. It was governed by a board of seven delegates, one each from the seven great nations of Earth. They were known simply as "The Seven" with headquarters in the moon-tower near the center of Luna City. The ISP offices were located there too as well as all government bureaus.

All at once Vickers realized that the cab was headed in the wrong direction.

"Where are we going?" he demanded, jarred out of his stoical calm.

The ISP agents had taken seats one on each side of him. He could feel their guns prodding his ribs, sleek automatics with built-in silencers. Wicked things that could tear half his guts out.

"Shut up," the blond man said.

Vickers lapsed into silence again. He was more bewildered and angry than alarmed. Try as he would, he couldn't guess who'd want him badly enough to snatch him.

There had been no rivals in Vickers' line of work. Samuels and Rebkia, his partners, had both been killed in the ISP trap two years ago. There was no one left who had any interest in him. Unless--

He said suddenly: "You're not ISP agents."

"That's right."

"What's the idea then?"

"You ask too many questions," said the blond man.

"An' that's a fact," the other agreed.

Vickers' mouth set. He still thought he could take the two gunmen, but his curiosity had the best of him. He sank back in the cushions and waited.

The cab had gone about three kilometers when it pulled up at the curb.

"All right, Vickers," the blond man said; "here's where you get your answers."

He crawled out, straightened. The cab had stopped before a door of opaque blue plastic. Above it in letters of electric blue light was the inscription:

INTERNATIONAL SPY RING INCORPORATED Secrets Bought and Sold

Vickers stared at it in disbelief. There was just the plain blank door squeezed between a theatre on the right and a travel agency with posters of the Martian deserts in its windows on the left. The blue door was hard to focus on--like a slightly blurred picture. He opened his nictitating lids.

To his utter bewilderment, he found himself looking through the door into the theatre lobby. The blue door didn't lead anywhere. It wasn't even a door, he realized, but an illusion!

* * * * *

Vickers had been examined many times. "The peculiarity of your vision," one eminent psycho-biologist had told him, "lies in your ability to see matter as it actually is. Tenuous unmaterial energy. There's more space between the nucleus of an atom and its electrons in proportion than between the sun and its planets. It's like looking at the stars"--and he had waved his hand at the sky--"you can see them but they don't obstruct your vision."

It was a strange world that Vickers could see with the nictitating lids raised--a fairy-like insubstantial world, beautiful and shocking. A glass world without secrets.

But his eyes never lied to him. And the door didn't exist in fact. There was only a blank theatre wall where he had seen it.

Then the blond man stepped forward and went through the motions of opening the door.

"Inside," he said and walked through and vanished!

Vickers knew he had vanished, because he could still see the misty outlines of the wall where the door should have been and the interior of the theatre. He felt his stomach go hollow. "In you go," the other man said and nudged him with the pistol.

Vickers allowed his nictitating lids to close.

At once he could see the door again, standing open, and a reception room beyond. The blond man was just inside motioning for him to enter.

Vickers drew a deep breath and stepped across the threshold.

There was a moment of abysmal darkness, a giddy sensation, then Vickers found himself standing in the reception room, ankle deep in carpet. He felt unaccountably heavier--not as much as he would weigh on Earth but more than he should weigh on the moon.

A girl was approaching him. She said: "Go right in, Mr. Vickers," indicating a door across the room; "they're waiting for you."

"Who's waiting for me?"

"Mr. Thorpe. The president of International Spy Ring, Inc. Right in here, sir."

The utterly absurd title of the company struck him anew. The seven great nations would no more permit such a business to exist than they would sit supinely by and allow an armed invasion.

In the first place they all maintained their own very efficient espionage and counter espionage systems. They couldn't afford to let one nation grow more powerful than the rest. At any costs they had to preserve the status quo.

He didn't voice his doubts, but followed the receptionist into a large, spartanly furnished office. There were no windows, the room being lit by soft yellow light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The top of a huge desk of purely functional design was littered with gadgets, and behind it sat a bald, pink-faced man, wearing a pleasant expression.

There was one other person in the room--a girl--and she was crying softly.

"Mr. Thorpe," the receptionist said, "Mr. Vickers to see you," and withdrew.

The girl turned her back quickly to Vickers so that he couldn't see her face, but he could watch her hands worrying the material of her dress.

It was an expensive dress, Vickers recognized, an exclusive Venusian creation of green gossamer that was very nearly transparent even to his normal vision. He was a little shocked and looked away.

The man called Thorpe beamed at him. "Glad to see you, Vickers," he said and made it sound genuine. "Won't you sit down?"

Vickers let himself sink into a chair across from the girl. He couldn't keep from studying her. Her brown hair was done in a sort of halo effect and she wore wedge type sandals that must have added three inches to her height and made her feet look tiny.

Thorpe cleared his throat.

"We had a good reason for bringing you here," he said; "I hope it didn't inconvenience you too much."

"Get to the point," said Vickers.

Thorpe looked startled.

"Vickers, we can use a man with your unique talents. In fact, there's a job that no one but you--"

"Sorry."

Vickers was on his feet, starting for the door to the reception room.

"Don't be hasty," Thorpe said in an agitated voice. "I really can't let you go until you hear me out."

* * * * *

Vickers caught the veiled threat in his words, swung around. Thorpe's finger was resting on a button. The girl had begun to sniff audibly.

"All right," said Vickers, "but make it short. I have to register at the Parole Board office before the expiration of twenty-four hours."

"No hurry," Thorpe said, waving him back to his chair. "You met your double on the street. He's gone to the board to register in your place. He'll also fill any job they see fit to assign you. So you see, Vickers, you're quite free. You're even supplied with a perfect alibi."

Vickers did see. He saw a number of things, none of which reassured him. He said: "Fingerprints?"

"They'll check. He's wearing tips with your prints. So will his height and weight. He's a fine actor, Vickers, one of the best."

"How did you get my prints? My record is in the ISP secret file, but--"

"But that's our business. Secrets, Vickers. Any secrets. State secrets, scientific secrets." He chuckled. "We make no secret about it."

Vickers looked skeptical.

"Do you mean to tell me that you could steal the plans, say, of the USSE's new space drive?"

Thorpe rubbed his hands together, his grin broadening.

"We sold them the plans. In fact, we sold those same plans to the Black Republic, the Arab Federation, China and New Spain as well. The only reason we didn't sell them to the United States is because they happened to be the ones who had developed them."

He paused to let his words sink in. "That may seem unethical, but it's our policy. In our small way, we feel that we help to preserve the status quo."

"Rubbish!" said Vickers. "If you'd done that, they would have sent the lot of you off to Jupiter."

"They try." Thorpe looked at his watch. "In fact, Vickers, we have information that the ISP plans to raid us in exactly twenty-three minutes."

Vickers stiffened. "Is that straight?"

"Quite. But don't alarm yourself. They'll never get past the blue door."

Far from being soothing, Thorpe's reassurance had just the opposite effect on Vickers. For the first time, he began to doubt that he could get through that blue door himself. There was something so damned complacent about the man behind the desk--

In sudden alarm, Vickers opened his nictitating lids, flicked a quick glance around.

The room was quite real, but there was no sign of Luna City nor of the moon's desolate surface. He sucked in his breath.

The office seemed to be part of a large windowless structure. He could see, through the walls, a restless ochre sea outside and a red pebble beach. Strange, sinuous vegetation cloaked the shore.

"Where are we?" he blurted out. "How did I get here?"

"I'm sorry," said Thorpe, "but that's one secret that isn't for sale."

Vickers closed the nictitating lids and the office recovered its solidity.

"What's your proposition?"

Thorpe gave him a shrewd look. "This is Tani Fralick," he introduced the girl. "I'm sure you've heard of her father. He's the physicist...."

* * * * *

Vickers sat bolt upright. Fralick was probably the most renowned man on Earth, Mars or Venus. He certainly was the Systems greatest physicist. Fralick was head of the United States' Bureau of Research. It was practically treason for his daughter to be in the offices of such an organization as "International Spy Ring, Inc."

Thorpe said: "Tani's father has been abducted by the Arab Federation."

The girl gave a muffled sob, buried her face in her hands.

Vickers yelled: "What!" Then in a lower voice, "But there's been nothing on the newscasts."

"Of course not. The U.S. is hushing it up. They don't want it broadcast that their top experimental physicist has been stolen. They don't even know who has him or where he is. Tani has asked us to get her father back."

"Where is he?"

Thorpe didn't look so cherubic as he drummed on the desk top.

"Here. Luna City. He's being held in the embassy of the Arab Federation."

Vickers said: "Why don't you turn your information over to the U.S.?"

"It's not as simple as that. The Arabs would kill him before they'd give him up."

Vickers shrugged. "If the U.S. with all its resources can't release him, I don't see how you expect me to do it."

"You can, though. In fact you're the only one who can. The question is, will you?"

"No!" said Vickers flatly; "I won't."

"But--"

"No buts about it. With my record, it would be poison for me, if my name ever became associated with anything like International Spy Ring, Inc. I'm through, Thorpe, I've quit. I can't afford to be sent back to Jupiter."

Tani Fralick suddenly burst into a flood of tears. Vickers clenched his fist. At that instant a bell began to ring insistently.

"The raid," Thorpe said. "What say we watch it? Anyway, Vickers, you can't leave 'til it's over."

Vickers grunted, sank deeper into his chair. Tani's soft child-like crying was getting under his skin, but he steeled himself against it.

Thorpe pressed a button on his desk, and a huge televisor screen on the wall behind him glowed into life. The multiple noises of Luna City rolled into the office shattering their isolation. The tri-dimensional effect was so real, that it was as if the wall itself had been removed and they were peering directly into the street outside the blue door. Vickers could read its idiotic sign.

INTERNATIONAL SPY RING INCORPORATED Secrets Bought and Sold

All at once he frowned as he discovered the silent men converging on the entrance. They were dressed in civilian clothes, threading their way unobtrusively through the press. ISP men, Vickers recognized, with a thrill of alarm.

One of them reached the portal, put out his hand for the knob.

The blue door vanished.

It simply went out like a light, leaving the ISP man staring stupidly at the blank wall of the theatre.

Thorpe snapped off the televisor. Vickers could see that he was chuckling.

"The fun's over," he said. "But they'll be nosing around there for a week. There's really no door there, you know."

"Yes, I know. But I'll be damned if I understand."

"You will," Thorpe said cryptically. Then he switched on the inter-office com. "Miss Stevens, see that this memo is circulated throughout the organization. 'Due to a police raid, the new offices of International Spy Ring, Inc., are located at B624-1/2 Water Street, Level Three'."

* * * * *

He clicked it off, stared at Vickers coldly. All the friendliness was gone.

"Suppose we quit fencing. We know your history, Vickers. You used to claim that you could arrange the escape of any prisoner, no matter where he was being held--for a price. You made monkeys out of the ISP for a while. How many men have you broken out of the Jupiter Penal Mines and readjustment camps?"

"I don't know," said Vickers. "It was a good racket while it lasted."

"But you couldn't finagle your own escape, could you?"

"It's easier to work from the outside," Vickers rejoined laconically.

Thorpe said in a nasty voice: "That's just the point I'd like to make. Either you help us release Fralick, or we'll frame you and turn you over to the ISP."

Vickers' eyes narrowed. He leaned suddenly across the desk, hit Thorpe on the chin with his balled fist!

There was a "crack!" as Thorpe's jaw bone snapped. He was bowled over backward to lie in an unconscious heap against the wall.

Tani screamed. She tried to reach the desk, but Vickers grabbed her off her feet, thrust her under his arm.

"Put me down! Put me down," she cried furiously, kicking, squirming. Vickers paid no more attention to her frantic wriggling than he would have to a kitten. His inner lids were raised and he was staring with a strange fixity at the alien world visible through the walls.

"What are you going to do?" Tani gasped. "Are you crazy? You can't walk out of here. The blue door isn't operating. Besides, even if you did get away the Ring would have you framed."

"I'm not going back to Luna City," Vickers said tersely. "I'm going outside."

"Outside!"

"Yes." He started for the reception room. "I don't know where we are. Another world, another dimension, it's all the same. I'll be free of the ISP. I'll find a way out if I have to break through the walls."

"But you can't!" she wailed. "The atmosphere outside it! It--it's chlorine!"

Vickers felt as if someone had kicked him in the belly. He set Tani on her feet.

"How do _you_ know?"