Part 4

But that was all he had gotten from the alien's pockets. It was a curiously ordinary and unexciting mess of nothing, there was no trace here of anything not human. But it did give him one thing: his destination.

And whoever had put him on the train knew that too.

The first porter he found let slip, luckily, that his name had been given as Mr. Pringle. Where they got that one, or how they got him on the train, Web was never to know. And yessir, why sutinly, sir, said the porter, looking at him oddly, as he had every right to look, this here now train sho' does stop at Chicago.

When he left the train at Chicago it was after midnight.

Dammit, he said to himself bitterly, I got to do everything at night.

He had planned to dodge around the station a bit before leaving, but there was no crowd. The place was wide and bare, stony, with a few night travelers dozing on benches. None of them he could see had sharp noses.

But now he was not sure whether they were after him or not, because--

--who in God's name had put him on the train?

He brooded for a while in a small coffee shop, but it got more and more complicated. Since the aliens had not killed him, and in fact obviously meant for him to go to Chicago and look up this man Bosco, there was no way to understand the bombing of the pod, or the empty trucks, or anything. Were there two kinds of aliens, the good guys and the bad guys? That was possible. His mind opened up. If you accept the presence of one alien, you might just as well accept dozens.

And that was quite a thought. As a matter of fact, how many aliens were there, really? The whole darn world could be shot through with aliens, skinny ones, fat ones, straight ones, bent ones, maybe all the odd-looking people he knew were aliens. Maybe even, maybe Dundon was an alien.

He looked around furtively. In a coffee shop, late at night and not a very clean coffee shop, it is remarkable how thoroughly inhuman people can look.

He left the shop.

Well, he had no way of knowing what was up, who was good or who was bad. But a lot of men had died, and until he knew why, and who did it, and how, and could protect himself, he was going to trust nobody. He was not going to walk deserted streets in the middle of the night looking for Bosco. He hailed a cab for the Statler Hotel. To his relief, he found that there was a Statler in Chicago.

He was given a room for which he could not possibly pay if he stayed here for any length of time, and he thought once more of Dundon.

He would have to call Dundon. He would explain the last few hours as some kind of amnesia, during which he had gotten out of the drugstore safely, bought some new clothes, read the alien's card, and boarded a train for Chicago, all without knowing it.

Although that was the most logical explanation, there was an odd feeling in his mind and he did not believe it. But he decided to tell Dundon that anyway.

It was while he was making the call that the Faktors found him again.

VI

Toward morning reality began to close in upon Ivy with a cold, numbing flow. She sat examining the things around her, the wall, the table, the ceiling. As the morning came on a soft rose crept into the sky. She went to the plastic window and stood watching the dawn.

This thing was going to happen.

The impossibility was fading now as the sun rose and the huts across the way stepped out of darkness. That old, that horrible thing, that dry, wrinkled thing....

She was too much afraid, and revolted, to cry. What followed now was an animal fear, an animal desperation, and for the first time she felt an urgent, vital energy gathering within her. She had to get out, she had to get away. This thing was unbelievable and could not happen at all, not ever, because she would not let it happen. She moved back from the window and began to pace her cage.

And the anger was replaced by a dissolving helplessness. She had no plan. She searched, thought desperately, pleaded with herself, but she had no plan. When they came all she could do would be fight, which would not be enough, and the thing would happen.

Eventually, because carrying this load in her mind was much too great, she tried at last to accept it. If she could just endure. She would have to shut off her mind, like a radio is shut off, and live inside herself, in silence.

She knew that would not work either.

By mid-morning it became obvious that the man was in no hurry, or was busy. He did not come after breakfast, and she waited out the morning. She was just beginning to begin to hope when two of the older men, the guards, came into the hut.

It was evidently a formal thing, this breeding. They took her clothes, gave her a single, pale yellow garment which reached not quite to her knees. She put it on. The two old men were dressed differently today, in soft pastel robes which were flowing and ridiculous around their spindly legs. She gathered that today there would be a celebration.

One of the old men gave her the needle as she stood dressing, before she had a chance to struggle. She was lain for the last time upon the floor, to wait for the evening.

And then, to her great amazement, a calm possession took over her. All the school girl fear and disgust and revulsion fell away for a moment, and she examined the situation critically.

What the hell, she said to herself, startled but at the same time pleased at the feel of strength in her.

What was this after all? This was sex, really, so what? It was going to happen? Well, let it happen. It happened to other women, and it had not killed them. Now it was going to happen to her, and she would certainly live through it, and since none of it was her fault, there was merely a physical thing that took place, like in the old days when girls were married against their will, so she guessed she could bear it.

She was shocked at herself. But she felt her sanity, which had slowly begun to slip away, return with a rush. Her youth did not return with it. She would have preferred to have her initiation take place in some other manner, certainly, with someone more suitable, and she knew that afterwards she might regret it all very much.

But she had a whole afternoon to pass lying flat on her back and thinking, and she passed the afternoon in growing up quickly, as countless women had done before her, helpless and alone, captured in wax by barbarian soldiers.

* * * * *

"I said this is Hilton, by God! Me. Web. Lieutenant Hilton!"

It was a little while, understandably, before Dundon got hold of the idea of the aliens. And then--also with great understanding--Web decided not to tell him the full story. Not over the phone. In person it would be bad enough, but over the phone it was too great an effort, and anyway, he was not really sure that he was himself. He told Dundon where he was.

"Chicago? Chicago? Chica--"

"That's right, chief. Chicago. You got it. I'm in the Statler Hotel. Incidentally, I need quite a buck to pay my way out. And if you will come here right away I will tell you what's up."

Dundon was still asking him about Chicago.

"At the Statler," Web insisted, "under my own name. Bring money. And bring an escort. Watch out for old men with sharp noses. What? We've been invaded. Yes, by little old men with sharp--look, chief, never mind, come out here and I'll tell you the whole thing."

With that he hung up.

At the thought of how Dundon must look, he grew cheerful for the first time since the whole business had begun. For a risingly happy moment he began to feel for once like his old gay carefree self.

I am going to wait, he said happily to himself, until the whole damn army gets here.

I am not going to move a foot. I will sleep and eat until the cows come home, I will load up on scotch and I will lock my door, because, by heck, I deserve it.

Because he had had little experience with hotel rooms, especially rooms of such a lavish nature, he did not think of room service. He strode through the door gaily whistling, and was halfway to the elevator when the orange flash cut him down.

* * * * *

Kunklin and Prule joined to rake in twelve more Faktors, and to dissolve Web once again.

"This is quite hard on the boy, really," Prule observed reproachfully.

Kunklin was unmoved. "He doesn't feel a thing. He will never know about it."

Prule agreed, but he was a sensitive man, and he sighed. And then he said:

"They found him with remarkable celerity, don't you think?"

"Tracing a Galactic--an unequipped Galactic--is not difficult. The wave length, of course."

"Yes, but they had no idea he was coming to this place."

"They certainly did. They expected him at the center of operations--which this town must obviously be--sooner or later. When their men did not return from the desert, or the town, they must have grown apprehensive."

"Well, anyway, we don't need this poor fellow anymore. Why don't we let him go, and mop up ourselves."

Kunklin grinned righteously.

"I'm a great believer in letting these people help themselves," he said. "It seems more sporting that way. He's doing fine so far. I think we ought to leave him in just to see how far he can go. Really, he does deserve to be in at the end."

"I suppose. But you know, we almost didn't finish that last recording in time."

It was a sobering thought.

"We'll have to follow him more closely," Kunklin said, beginning the work of assembly. "But after all, we're very near the end. I expect we will be going home--"

He broke off in mid-sentence as a tall, unusually symmetrical young woman walked leggily around the corner of the hall. Kunklin was invisible behind the warp shield, but although she could not see him he could clearly see her, and his eyebrows rose happily.

"Um," he began, "it begins to come home to me now why this planet is so well-visited. First this Earthman's father, then the Faktors--"

Prule cut him off. Kunklin was a first rate repairman, but he was also a first rate lecher, a trait he had carried to several harrowing extremes on other humanoid worlds, to Prule's almost Quakerian sorrow. Prule soberly pressed him back to work, to the messy job of assembling Web Hilton from the molecular recording.

And when Kunklin's head was down and busy, Prule's eyes quickly followed the pneumatic young lady as she walked down the carpeted hall.

* * * * *

And now Web was walking down a street in the black night, walking slowly, without purpose or direction or intelligence. He was aware of walking for quite some while, numbly, vacantly, as if he was rising from a long dark tunnel, before he reached the end and came suddenly alive.

He stopped in the center of the sidewalk.

It had happened again.

Bewildered, he looked around him. There was nothing about the street, about the long low rows of squat black houses, which was familiar. He had no reason of his own to come here; he was not even sure he was still in Chicago.

He put his hand to his forehead and rubbed his eyes. A feeling of great emptiness, of being utterly alone in an impossible world, swept through him. This time his memory went as far as the call to Dundon, no farther. He had begun to walk from the room, and it was as if he had walked off a cliff into nothing, into a cloud, and he had emerged from the other side still walking, only now he was walking on an unknown street. What happened in between was not in his mind. After a moment he did not try to remember, because there was not even an association. In that area his mind was totally empty.

He gathered himself quickly. There was a great drive inside him which all the years up to now had not really touched, but now he was beginning to feel himself move. He was confused. He was alone. But he was also becoming deeply angry. He was going to find out what had happened, was happening, and he would do it if it meant searching to the end of his life.

He walked quickly to the nearest corner.

The street he was on was Wingate Street.

Which was, he recalled instantly, the address of Albert Bosco.

So he had been directed here. The blank in his mind was not amnesia. Someone had guided his movements to Wingate Street, had picked him up out of the hotel like you pick up a toy train that has gone off the track.

His anger rose.

He would follow that trail, all right, and when he reached the end--

He began to look for the Doctor's house.

It was a high, narrow building near the end of the block. There was no light in any of the windows.

He strode up to the front door without hesitation, forcefully punched the bell.

Lights came on upstairs. Something came clumping down the hall toward the door, opened it.

Bosco was an old, old man in a shining bathrobe. In the light of the hall his alien nose was keen and obvious.

"Emergency," said Web quickly, "are you the Doctor?" He stepped inside the door before the old man, startled, could answer. He stood poised upon a thick carpet, listening for sounds from other parts of the house. The house was silent.

"I am Doctor Bosco," the old man said weakly, nervously, "what is it you want? Who sent you to me?"

"I need your help," Web said. He thought: this one doesn't know me. "Can you come?"

"But ... but ... but ... I do not leave this house. I am not ... I cannot go out. You will have to find someone else." He reached past Web to open the door again. Web decided to make his move.

* * * * *

The arm reached by him. He closed his hand upon the wrist.

The alien froze, stared with enormous horror straight up into his eyes. The wrist in Web's grip was remarkably gaunt and brittle. With a quick downward motion he could break it, and both of them knew it.

The old man started to back away, moaned once with a bubbling hum, and collapsed.

Web bent down to look at the man. He wasn't dead, but he was out cold. Scared damn near to death. Web was amused, grinned once very swiftly. If this was a sample, these aliens weren't much.

He picked up the old man, light and wispy as a bundle of leaves, and carried him under one arm into the big living room which opened off of the hall. He thought better of turning on a light, slumped the old man on a couch and sat down beside him.

A street bulb outside the house threw a white soft glow of light into the room. That was enough to see by for his purposes. He moved over on the couch to a position from which he could see the door. And then, in darkness, he waited.

It was several minutes before the old man moved. Web had time to think, to form a plan. The first thing that moved in Web's mind was a wonder of why in heck the old man should have fainted, and then it occurred to him that this thing here was alien, truly alien, and probably had a science so far beyond ours as to be impossible to comprehend. He would undoubtedly be long-lived. Web thought; could just as well be immortal.

But anyway, no matter what else he was, it was pretty sure that he lived a long while, and death, any death, was a rare thing among his people. Hence the unusual, to an Earthman, fear of dying. It figured. Humans fear dying all right. But a lot of them face it every day as part of their jobs, because life on Earth must be something like a jungle compared to the germ-free, war-free, super-sanitary world of the future. Death to a man like this would be quite a fearful thing.

And so the collapse.

And a weapon for Web.

He smiled in the darkness, cruelly, as the alien stirred. He would find out from this man whatever he wanted to know.

Awake at last, with Web above him like a huge black mountain, the old man nearly fainted again. But he managed to recover slowly, in a state of really pitiful terror. He had known from the beginning that Web was not a Galactic--a Galactic would never have approached in person. The thought helped him to survive. But even then this Earthman was a barbarian, an unaccountable man with no scruples against killing, and Web was perfectly right about the fear of death. The alien talked.

For a while he babbled, but then it began to make sense.

He told about the coming extinction of his race, and the plan for interbreeding which would save it. He had been on Earth, he said, for several years, choosing specimens for test purposes. The tests had proved positive and the first step of selection was almost completed. He had been stationed as a real doctor with a real practice, so that he would have the opportunity of giving preliminary physical examinations and passing on the names of potentially acceptable candidates. And there were many doctors like him spread all over the world. Since the United States was by far the Earth's healthiest country of any size, most of the selecting had been done right here.

"But what did you do with the men in the satellite?" Web asked, doing his best to follow but fast losing ground.

"How did you know--?" And then the alien almost collapsed again. He had heard, undoubtedly, of the one man that had escaped from the satellite. But that had been a Galactic--

"Why did you do that, kill all those men, and how?"

Web shook him, the alien yelped feebly, then babbled it out.

"The satellite was in a very dangerous position. It could see all our intercontinental travel, the ships we have going and coming daily. It would undoubtedly warn the planet of what it saw. But we could not simply destroy it. Blame for that might conceivably be placed on your enemies, and you are such unstable peop--that is--we--there was no need for a general war. We could not risk that, being ourselves just as vulnerable to atomic attack as any life. So we--removed the men on the satellite."

"How, dammit, how?"

When he swore the alien jumped.

"Through devices which you--if you do not already know, you cannot be--oh--yes--I will tell, I will tell--" The old man searched desperately for an explanation. "Your body has--every body is held together by electric forces. By million upon millions of tiny electric currents. The atoms of any body are kept in position by a--by an attraction between them. Now, if that attraction is nullified, the atoms will drift apart, disperse. The atoms will no longer exist in any form. That was what happened to the men in the satellite. They were--turned off."

Web sat perfectly still for a long moment. Then he said swiftly, viciously:

"But why didn't it get me?"

The alien writhed on the couch.

"Your blood must be different. We thought you were a Galactic. Your body chemistry is unusual, your--your charge is different."

Once again Web sat in silence, trying to follow that. Galactic and different blood. But he wrenched his mind away. The sun would be up soon and he would have to be out of here quickly. He would need to know where their main base was. Then it was the army's turn. Although what could the army do?

He got the location out of the old man. It was surprisingly near to Chicago.

And the time of the first take-off, the first shipment, would be that night.

He rose to leave. Then he turned back to the old man.

He debated it for a moment, but saw nothing else possible. The old man knew who he was and where he was going, and what he knew. He could not leave the old man to warn the others. The old man knew that too, looked up at him and saved him the trouble.

He died just before Web's great hands reached him.

VII

Within the next hour he had a gun, taken from an amiable but unfortunate young cop who had the courtesy to stop and give him a match on a dark back street. He was sincerely sorry for that, knowing what would happen to the cop, but he was also acutely aware that he needed the gun a hell of a lot more than the cop did, even if this was Chicago.

Later on, when the sun was up, he reconsidered. It occurred to him that where he was going noise would be no virtue, not if he was going in alone. So he bought himself a knife--Bowie, with a double edged tip. Anyway, he had been schooled in knives in jump school, and he knew how to use one even better than a wild .45. The thing to do now was get within reach.

A cab took him to the bus terminal. It was a beautiful morning, brisk and clear and cold, and on the way he picked up three Faktors.

At discreet intervals, they followed him into the terminal. He did not notice them. They ringed him at a distance, following a set plan of destruction, prepared to close in. Since there had been no time for another recording, Kunklin and Prule had no choice. The three Faktors died at once, in their tracks, in separate parts of the waiting room.

It was a short while before the slumping men were noticed and the uproar began. By that time Web was outside boarding a bus, and he went on his way knowing nothing at all of the Faktors, nor of the unfortunate incident that immediately befell the Galactics.

He rode the bus for two hours. As he got nearer and nearer to his destination his resolve began to slip away. He was utterly alone, and these enemies were alien. What in heck could he accomplish?

The bus pulled into a town called Alford just before noon. He stepped down into the quiet street. There were no aliens around, none that he could tell. He decided that there was probably no sense in waiting for the dark. He did not know his way and the layout would be important, so he decided to go up into the hills right away.

It was a long walk. He stayed with the road for about two miles, then cut off abruptly into the woods. The ground became steeper, he began to climb.

He had not gone forty feet before he tripped the first alarm.

* * * * *

The catastrophe, which neither Kunklin nor Prule had anticipated, occurred as the result of a power failure.

Continued operation of the machine known as the "bender," together with the enormous power drain of the anti-gravity webs they used to float back and forth, had sapped the power of their suits down below danger level. The one last burst which destroyed the three Faktors reduced that power completely.

Both Kunklin and Prule became immediately visible.

They caused quite a stir.

Dressed as they were in white, satin-like suits, with glass bowl helmets on their heads and a large back pack sprouting antennae in all directions, they were an instantaneous focus of interest in the bus terminal.

They were greatly annoyed, and also somewhat embarrassed.

"Galactic obscenity," said Kunklin, as a crowd gathered, "I thought you recharged the suits."

"I thought you did," muttered Prule anxiously. "But let's get out of here. Which way is the ship?"

They began to walk forward toward the door and the curious, grinning crowd parted.

"It's way down this wide street. Oh fine!" Kunklin swore gloomily, attempting at the same time to keep his face impassive. Fortunately, Earthmen were humanoid. If they were not, of course, the Galactics would never have allowed this to happen. And if experience on other planets of this culture level was any judge, these people here would think the Galactics and the suits were some kind of stunt. But though this accident had happened quite often to other Galactic agents, it had never happened to them, and they were apprehensive. They eyed the crowd warily as they walked.

Grinning, giggling, pointing, the crowd eyed them back, and followed.

Out into the street they went, two tall, undeniably weird-looking men unable to keep their embarrassment from their faces. One wide-eyed little boy ran up to Prule, grabbed at his sleeve with taffy-smeared fingers. He chirped loudly to his parents to "looka the space men." The mother came up, politely disengaged his fingers, gave a smiling, unintelligible apology to Prule. Prule nodded as graciously as he could, tried to walk faster.

"Listen," Prule groaned, "the power is too low to work the translator. Suppose we're stopped? We can't talk to them."

"Here comes one in a uniform," said Kunklin, beginning to perspire.

"Police?"

"Yes."

"I suggest we run."