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Title: Cosmic Saboteur

Author: Frank M. Robinson

Illustrator: W. E. Terry

Release date: October 14, 2021 [eBook #66540]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COSMIC SABOTEUR ***

               They told him he hated Earth, beating him
          until he nearly died--for he must be convinced!...
             It was all part of his indoctrination as a--

                            Cosmic Saboteur

                         By Frank M. Robinson

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
                             February 1955
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


They jumped him when he was walking past an alley, a couple of blocks
from the stockyards on Chicago's brawling South Side.

He had gotten off the "El" two stops down because it was a damn fine
Spring morning and he liked to walk through the Polish section and
watch the city wake up. He was 17 years old and he hadn't grown cynical
with the world yet. He liked the clean, fresh smell of the early
morning and he got a kick out of the sleepy-eyed housewives in their
ratty bathrobes, banging open the front door to bring in the milk and
the morning paper.

He'd pick up the live-stock reports, he thought, hop an "El" back
uptown and maybe he'd be at Amalgamated News Service only a couple of
minutes late. And if they didn't like it, they knew what they could do
about it. His kid brother ran copy at the News and he said they could
use another boy down there.

"_Stan_," Larry had said, "_you're wasting your time at AMS. You won't
get as much dough at the News but you'll learn something._"

Which was something to consider because Larry was one bright cookie and
someday he was really going to be somebody....

It was early morning and nobody had started to work yet--the streets
were deserted. There was a chill in the air and he stopped by an open
alley to light a weed and take the clamminess out of his lungs.

And then he got it.

A handful of knuckles right in the mouth, splintering his teeth and
splitting his lip so he sprayed blood like somebody had squeezed a
sponge. It was hard to get a good look because the shock had filled his
eyes with tears. But there were three of them and they were grown men
and the biggest he had seen outside of a television wrestling match.

He screamed "_Help!_" just once before a hand as big as a typewriter
buried itself wrist deep in his stomach. He doubled up and went limp,
gasping for breath. One of the men caught him by the jacket collar and
pulled him further into the alley, to the back of a restaurant where
there was a small mountain of empty boxes and garbage cans full of
orange peels and eggshells and stale doughnuts.

Nobody said a word.

He was still fighting for his breath and feeling sick when they
stood him up against the refuse pile and started going over him
scientifically, cutting his face and hitting him in the kidneys. He
tried to blink away the blood that kept streaming into his eyes, to
get a good look at them. But they kept working on his face until all
the world was a bloody haze and it was hard to even make out light and
shadow....

He lashed out once and heard a satisfying grunt and then somebody hit
his wrists with a slat of wood, deadening the nerves so he couldn't
close his hands. He tried to scream but he had no wind left and he
realized dimly it wouldn't have done much good. The streets were
deserted and it was the type of neighborhood where nobody went to
anybody else's rescue--least of all, early in the morning.

A fist caught him flush on the side of the jaw and he staggered over
against the garbage cans and fell to the bricks, his face half buried
in the stinking garbage. He played dead dog for a moment, catching his
breath, then scrambled to his knees, clawing handfuls of rotting orange
peels and decayed bones to throw at the three silent men in front of
him.

"_You'll never get away with this! The cops_...."

The toe of a shoe caught him in the groin and he collapsed again. He
didn't even recognize the thin screaming that sounded in his ears as
his own.

       *       *       *       *       *

A voice from a million miles away said: "_We're not supposed to kill
him!_" and he guessed that the men were from out of town because it was
an accent that he had never heard before. Then two of them were holding
him up, twisting his arms behind him, while the third stuffed garbage
in his mouth, choking him so his screams died away to a dull, muffled
sob.

They let him go for a minute and he tried to run away. They laughed
and tripped him before he had taken three steps. Then they jerked
him to his feet and started hitting him again, working him over
professionally, chopping at him with fists covered by thin, leather
gloves that cut his face and ripped his shirt and jacket.

When he finally slipped limply to the pavement, they let him lay there,
kicking him in the thighs and the buttocks. His cap was a dozen feet
away, the remnants of his jacket not too far from that. His pants were
ripped and his shirt was in shreds, the strips waving like bloody
banners in the slight, morning breeze.

One of the three said "_I guess it's time to go._" Stan could hear
running feet and then there was a long silence. He couldn't tell if it
was a minute or half an hour later when footsteps again sounded across
the bricks and somebody knelt by his side.

"You're hurt, son! Let me help you...."

The voice was soft and full of compassion, like a minister's might be.
The man helped him to his feet and Stan lurched to the street and sat
down on the curbstone. He tried to wipe away the blood with a tattered
shirt sleeve but it still seemed to be running down his cheeks. Then he
realized that he was crying.

"Try this."

He felt something pressed into his hands and wiped at his face with the
handkerchief.

"T-thanks."

"Who were they, son?"

"I don't know. I was just walking past the alley and they ... jumped
me. I don't know why. Honest to God, Mister, I don't know why!"

He felt close to crying again and shut up for a moment to try and
control the convulsive heaving of his chest. Then he looked up at the
man standing next to him.

Black shoes, brand new. Neatly pressed gabardines. Tall and somewhat
thin. Wearing a light, black topcoat like you might imagine a priest
would wear. A tan hat, also brand new. Middle twenties, with the face
of a saint. The face of a man you knew you could trust.

"What's your name, son?"

"Stan. Stanley Martin." He was still close to sobbing and the name came
out with too many syllables.

The man pondered for a moment and Stan thought he looked a little like
a high-school principal trying to guess how bright a student might be.

"We'll have to fix you up, Stan. Then we'll have to take you home." He
helped Stan to his feet and guided him over to a black car a few yards
down the street.

Far away, there was the wail of a siren.

"The cops," Stan said, hanging back. "I gotta tell the cops."

"There'll be time enough for that later," the man said smoothly. There
was the faintest suggestion of haste in his voice.

"I oughtta wait," Stan mumbled, but the man pushed him gently into the
car and Stan didn't argue. He lay down on the back seat, resting his
throbbing head against the cushions and the side of the car. It was
a big car, he thought vaguely. Like a rich man's sedan, with a glass
partition between the driver and the passengers.

He heard a hissing sound from somewhere and the world started to gray
out. And then he suddenly wondered how he could be taken home if the
man didn't know where he lived....

Just before he blacked out altogether, a voice said:

"_I'm your friend, Stan. Say it to yourself and say it over and over.
I'm your friend. I saved your life._"

"You're my friend," Stan repeated dully, his mind slipping slowly into
a pool of throbbing blackness. "You saved my life...."

The last thing he saw was a quick glimpse of the city streets, the
slowly rotting houses, and the bright splashes of green in the front
lawns and the cottonwood trees.




                              CHAPTER II


His muscles were aching and sore and he felt sick to his stomach.

His eyes wouldn't focus at first and he stayed flat on his mattress
and stared at the hazy outlines of the room. It was a funny kind of
hospital. Nobody had bandaged his cuts--they were still caked with
blood--and he still had on the same torn clothes that smelled of sweat
and dirt.

_Where had the man taken him?_

He shook his head, trying to make out the details of the room, and his
vision cleared a little.

The room didn't even come close to a hospital. It was more like a
jail. There was the cot that he was sitting on and the washbasin and
the flush bowl and the barred door at the entrance. Nothing else. No
windows, no desk, no calendar, nothing. Just a small cell of gray,
featureless metal.

He stood up, holding on to the cot for support, and touched the bars
wonderingly. He hadn't done anything wrong, he thought. Not a damn
thing!

"_Guard! Guard!_"

He'd get a lawyer! Larry had connections and maybe....

There were footsteps outside the cell door and a moment later it swung
open. The man who opened it wasn't a guard--at least he didn't dress
like one, Stan thought. Just a man in a blue suit. Smiling and urbane
and what the ad writers would call dapper.

Except for his eyes. The same kind of cold eyes that an executioner
might have. Eyes that had watched people die--slowly.

Stan shivered.

Death. In a blue serge suit.

"I was wondering when you were going to wake up," the man said
pleasantly. He held out his hand. "My name's Fred Tanner. You...."

Stan didn't take the hand. "I want to know what's coming off here!
Where's the joker who brought me here? Where's...."

"Somebody else can tell you all you want to know," the man said easily.
"Just follow me."

Stan didn't move.

"You coming?"

It wasn't a question, it was a statement. Tanner stood there, his head
half cocked, watching Stan curiously, like somebody might watch an ant
or a bird. Stan started to say something but the words died in his
throat. Tanner was no weakling. He had thick wrists and a bull neck and
a feeling of power that he wore like a suit of clothes.

He was the type, Stan thought coldly, who could break you in two if he
wanted.

He shrugged and followed Tanner down the corridor for a hundred feet
and then into a room about the size of his own cell. There was an oval
shaped desk in one corner and a tubular chair by it, both of the same
metal as the walls and the floor. The whole assembly looked like it had
been punched out of one sheet.

The man behind the desk looked like an ex-football player ten years
later, Stan thought. A husky man, just starting to go to fat, with
thick lips and thinning hair.

Tanner pushed Stan forward. "Here's the boy, Mr. Malcolm."

Stan wet his lips. "I ... I'd like to know what this is all about, sir."

"Fred," the man behind the desk said in a bored voice. "He lacks
manners."

Tanner casually lashed out with the flat of his hand and caught Stan
on the side of the head--hard. Stan staggered against the wall and
half-slid to the floor. He could feel the tears start again.

"Hey! What's the...."

"Again, Fred."

Stan crumpled to the floor, shook his head, and struggled back to his
feet. He was dazed but he knew enough not to say anything.

"What's your name?"

"Stanley Martin. I told...."

"Fred."

The blow rocked him but he managed to keep his feet. His legs felt like
water.

"How many of your family are living, Martin?"

"Just my mother." He licked his cracked lips. "And my brother. That's
all."

"You've lived in Chicago all your life?"

"Yes ... yes, sir."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Malcolm finally put down the reports he had been reading and looked
up at him. If Tanner's eyes had been cold, Stan thought, then Mr.
Malcolm's eyes were frozen.

"You don't like Chicago, do you?"

"I ... I guess I like it well enough."

"No, you don't," Mr. Malcolm said smoothly. "You told the other copy
boys you hated the city and as soon as you could, you were going to
leave it."

Stan gaped. "How did you know?"

"We know a lot of things." Mr. Malcolm leaned casually back in his
chair, inspecting Stan like he would a butterfly on a pin. "We know
that you hate your mother. And your brother."

"Where do you get that stuff?" Stan bleated, his voice rising. "What
are you trying to prove?"

"Fred. Again."

Tanner had to help Stan up.

"I'm going to be sick," Stan said faintly.

The man behind the desk ignored him. "Your mother used to take a strap
to you when you came home late, Martin. She used to accuse you of
stealing in the stores."

Lies, Stan thought. But he didn't dare talk back.

"Your brother, Larry. He was always your mother's favorite, wasn't he?
She always did a lot of things for him that she never did for you,
didn't she?"

"Larry never...!"

"Fred."

"_I'm sick_," Stan whimpered. "_Honest to God, I'm sick!_"

"You hate the city," Mr. Malcolm repeated coldly. "You hate your
family."

"I think you're crazy," Stan said weakly. "I want a lawyer."

Mr. Malcolm turned back to his reports.

"Take him to the other cell, Fred."

Back to a cell, Stan thought weakly, following Tanner out. Where at
least he could lie down....

But the other cell was too small to lie down in. It measured two feet
square and there was no room to lie down. Or even sit down. The most he
could do was lean.

He touched the wall with his hand and screamed with pain. The walls
were wired for electricity, a thin strip of insulation separating them
from the floor. He couldn't lie down, he thought. He didn't have room
to sit down and he couldn't even lean against the walls. The only thing
he could do was stand up ... and stand still.

They took him out eight hours later, when he was too hoarse to scream
and the electric walls had no effect on his sagging body.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a different room, this time. A comfortable room with carpets on
the floor and pictures on the wall and an over-stuffed sofa of some
plastic material along one side.

The man waiting for him was the same young, saintly faced man who had
picked him up on the street.

"This is Mr. Ainsworth," Tanner said in a low voice, and nudged him
forward.

Mr. Ainsworth looked at him, shocked. "My God, son, haven't they taken
care of your cuts?"

Stan just stared at him. Mr. Ainsworth's shocked look faded into one of
grim efficiency.

"We'll have to do something about that, son--and right away!" He
pressed a button and turned to Tanner. "Take this man to the infirmary
immediately, Fred! And don't bring him back here until he's been bathed
and issued new clothes!"

He looked back at Stan, his face a study in sympathy and pity. "Believe
me, I had no idea...."

It was a reprieve from hell.

He was taken to an infirmary where doctors and nurses, their faces
entirely hidden behind gauze masks, bathed him and washed his cuts and
covered them with collodion and gave him a hypodermic shot of something
that relaxed his muscles and banished his pain completely. They
destroyed the rags he had on and in their place he was issued a suit of
blue serge, like the one Tanner wore.

When he went back to the room with the carpets and the sofa, Mr.
Ainsworth had set up a small dinner table. The room was thick with the
fragrance of fried eggs and bacon and hot buttered toast and steaming
coffee.

Stan's stomach knotted and turned and he suddenly was sick.

"Take it easy," Mr. Ainsworth said gently. "Go slow at first."

Stan pulled a chair over to the table. He felt weak. Eggs and bacon and
coffee.... After he had finished, he sat back and took the cigarette
that Mr. Ainsworth offered him.

"What am I doing here, Mr. Ainsworth? Why can't I get a lawyer?"

"I wish I could answer all your questions," the saintly faced man said
thoughtfully. "But you have to understand that I'm just a hired hand
here. There are some things I'm not at liberty to tell you."

"If I'm not in jail, then just where the hell am I?" Stan asked
bitterly.

Mr. Ainsworth held up his hands. "I'm sorry, Stan."

Things weren't adding up, Stan thought, confused. Where was he if he
wasn't in jail? The cell and the slightly curving corridor, all of
metal. And the doctors and the nurses, their faces almost hidden behind
their gauze masks....

"They took me to see a Mr. Malcolm the other day," Stan said in a low
voice. "He told me I hated the city and that I even hated my own mother
and brother. Can you beat that? Honest, this character...."

His voice trailed away. Mr. Ainsworth was staring at the floor, a frown
on his face.

"Everybody builds up resentments against parents who are overly strict,
Stan. And it's not unusual for a mother to favor one of her children
over the others."

Stan stared at him, open-mouthed.

"But you're agreeing with Mr. Malcolm," he whispered. "Honest, you must
be a little crazy, too."

Mr. Ainsworth looked hurt.

"I'm your friend, Stan--I wouldn't lie to you! I didn't save your life
just so I could tell you lies!"

It was crazy, Stan thought. He had been on his way to the stockyards
one morning and the roof had fallen in. He had been kidnapped and
tortured apparently for no other reason than to be told he hated his
family.

It didn't make sense.

He dropped his cigarette on the carpet and ground it out under his
heel. "You're just as bad as the others--you're working right in with
them!"

Mr. Ainsworth looked disappointed and pressed a button on his desk.
Tanner appeared in the doorway, his face as impersonal as ever.

"You'll have to take him back, Fred." He looked at Stan sadly. "We're
trying to be your friends, son, and you won't let us. We're only
telling you the truth!"

Stan started to shake. "You can go to hell," he blurted.

Tanner took him by the arm to lead him out and the very touch of his
hand made Stan tremble even more. He was shaking like a leaf, and he
couldn't stop it. It had been such an odd thing. When he had told Mr.
Ainsworth he was as bad as the others, Mr. Ainsworth had ... flickered.




                              CHAPTER III


They stripped him and put him in a room that felt like the inside of a
packing-house refrigerator. His breath came in little wisps of fog and
if he stood in one place too long, his feet started to freeze to the
floor. He had to keep moving to keep warm and he realized he couldn't
keep moving forever. It was cold and damp and at periodic intervals, it
rained from pipes overhead. Water that quickly froze on the floor and
made his hair a mass of frosted crystals and then started to freeze on
him.

He only lasted four hours in the cold room. When they took him out, his
nails were broken from clawing at the door frame and he had started to
bleed at the fingertips.

Mr. Malcolm questioned him again.

Why wouldn't he admit that he hated his family? His mother was
responsible for his father deserting the family. And his brother used
to squeal on him when he was small and had even taken money that Stan
used to leave on the dresser.

Stan made the mistake of laughing and ended up in a cell where he
couldn't stand, where he had to remain stooped all the time. A small
tray of slops appeared after each time he slept and once every sleeping
period, somebody cleaned it out.

Mr. Ainsworth questioned him next and it meant a bath and food and
cigarettes and rest. He took them and enjoyed them.

Then he told Mr. Ainsworth what he thought of him. They threw him in a
small, pitch-black cell and left him there. For weeks. Months.

He spent his time huddled in a corner, thinking of the city and his
mother and Larry and what Spring looked like and how leaves that ended
up in the Fall as large as your hand, started out as nothing more than
a strip of green no bigger than his fingernail. A dozen times a period,
he went over the last scene his eyes had glimpsed from Mr. Ainsworth's
car. The drab houses and the green trees and the tiny stretch of blue
beyond....

And then there were the days when he didn't think of anything--though
he was to wonder later if it had been days or weeks or even only hours.
There was nothing by which to judge time, though he tried to keep track
of his own pulse and counted the beats into minutes and the minutes
into hours and the hours into days.

It was Mr. Ainsworth who rescued him.

"It's been a long time since I've seen you, son."

"You know where I've been."

"Don't hate me, Stan. I'm only trying to help you."

"I appreciate it," Stan said dryly.

And the odd thing was, he honestly _did_ appreciate it. Ainsworth
represented sleep and a bath and food and clean clothes. And he was
grateful. Like any dog that had been kicked and starved and then wagged
its tail when it was patted on the head.

And knowing all of this didn't change his reactions in the least.

"Stan," Mr. Ainsworth said quietly, "they want you to say that you hate
your family. You say you don't. Perhaps you believe that. But would it
hurt to merely _say_ that you do? You don't have to actually believe
it." He paused. "And to be perfectly truthful, I'm afraid that you
might not live very much longer if you're not willing to go that far."

Stan jerked, as if somebody had jabbed him with a pin. To come so near
to dying so many times had made life seem infinitely precious.

And what did it matter, actually? Some of the things they had been
telling him--they weren't exactly lies.

"All right," he said dully. "So I hate the city. And I hate my folks."

Somewhere in his mind, a keystone crumbled.

"That's the way, son. Play it smart!" Mr. Ainsworth looked very proud
of himself, as if Stan had just passed a difficult test.

"It's not supposed to stop there, is it?" Stan asked. "What am I
supposed to believe in next, so you people won't kill me?"

"I don't think you're looking at it in the right light," Mr. Ainsworth
said coldly, and Stan was panic-stricken for fear he would call in Fred
and have him taken back to the cold room or the small cell. "We're just
telling you things about yourself that you didn't know before."

"Sure," Stan said quickly, trying to sound sincere. "You're just
telling me things I never would have suspected."

He got better treatment after that. They assigned him to a cell where
he could lie down and sleep and when they talked to him, they offered
him cigarettes and joked with him. Even Mr. Malcolm went out of his
way to be pleasant. They were uncannily accurate when they told him
about his past life and he got to thinking more and more that there was
something in what they said.

His mother had been no prize and his brother was a lying, little sneak.

Almost a year went by before they led him up to the big one.

When they told him, point blank, that he hated humanity.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stan felt like somebody had knocked the wind out of him.

"You can't be serious!"

Mr. Ainsworth sighed and shook his head. "Stan, do you remember when I
first picked you up? Three of your fellow human beings had dragged you
into an alley and were beating you up--you would have been killed if I
hadn't come along." He shrugged. "That's the human race for you, son!"

"But they were only three individuals!" Stan objected.

"And the others are so much different?" Mr. Ainsworth sneered. "Nobody
cared about you, Stan--not even your own family. No human being cares
for anybody else but himself! There's a war every generation where they
slaughter each other by the millions. And sickness. Have they ever made
any really concerted drive against it? Have they ever really tried to
stamp out poverty?"

His lip curled. "They're apes! Nothing but apes!"

"You talk like you're not human!" Stan said, and then realized that he
had made a mistake.

Mr. Ainsworth started to flicker again, like film in a projector that's
run down. Stan gripped the sides of his chair and froze, trying
desperately not to show his fear.

Mr. Ainsworth was watching him closely. "I think we should tell you
what this is all about, Stan. Watch."

He pressed a button on his desk and the wall behind him started to
glow, then drifted away like cigarette smoke. Stan closed his eyes,
feeling dizzy and sick and horribly afraid that he was going to fall.
He opened them again, slowly.

The end of the room opened out on a harsh, black sky dusted with the
tiny pin points of stars. Stars that didn't twinkle but shone with a
bright, steady blaze. To his left and below he could see a huge segment
of a mottled green and blue globe, laced over with shifting shreds of
white.

He was almost sick again and then the grandeur of the scene struck him
and he caught his breath, sharply.

He was somewhere in space, suspended thousands of miles above his home
planet and seeing the universe as man had never seen it before. The
blazing infinity of stars and the slowly rolling, green globe that was
the Earth....

"The home of the apes," Mr. Ainsworth mused. He paused. "We can use
that planet to far better advantage than the human race. We intend to
take it. And you're going to help us."

Stan looked at Mr. Ainsworth coldly.

"What's in it for me?"




                              CHAPTER IV


"Half the world," Mr. Ainsworth said slowly. "One half of your whole,
wide world!"

Stan stared at him coldly for a full minute, then started to
laugh--laughter that ripped out of him like waves and washed against
the sides of the room.

Sick laughter, because he knew the price he was going to have to pay
for it.

He sobered. There was a time, he thought, when every human being had to
stand up and be counted as a brave man or a coward. This was his.

"And you thought I would take it! You thought I would sell out the
whole human race!" His face was seamed with hate and he thumped his
chest proudly, suddenly not caring what happened to himself. His voice
was hoarse. "I'm one of the apes, remember? They're _my_ people and
it's _my_ planet...."

Mr. Ainsworth's face looked like it was carved from a block of ice.

"Look at me, Martin! _Look at me!_"

Stan looked and felt the sweat pop out on his forehead and his stomach
knot into a small, hard ball.

Mr. Ainsworth was fading, the frames slipping past so slow Stan could
count them. And the image that was building up in Mr. Ainsworth's
place....

Stan screamed and staggered back against the bulkhead, his arm raised
before his eyes.

"_You're going to help us_," the creature said in a horribly liquid
voice. "_You're going to help us because you want to. We need advance
men to soften this planet up. You're going to be one of them. And after
you've done your work, our fleet will arrive!_"

It paused dryly.

"_But I see you've still got some indoctrination to go through!_"

They took him back to one of the cells and starved him and let him live
in his own filth until he wasn't sure if he was a human being or some
sort of animal. They made him horribly afraid of pain until he screamed
in agony when they merely laid the knives on the table. And with pain
as a wedge, they took his personality apart piece by piece and flayed
it and tortured it until it no longer resembled the personality that
had once been Stanley Martin.

He was cut off from all contact with human beings--or creatures who
had masqueraded as human. Tanner had disappeared and Mr. Ainsworth and
Mr. Malcolm no longer bothered to appear as homo sapiens. They saw him
every waking day and if their interviews had been harsh before, now
they were brutal beyond belief.

He believed what they said and he thought what they wanted him to think.

Not to have done so would have meant death.

But there was still ... resistance. The personality that had been
Stanley Martin wasn't entirely gone. There were still shattered
fragments of memories and wishes and desires that hadn't been entirely
obliterated. Tiny fragments that made him unreliable.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the last day, he was strapped into a machine with clamps that
fastened tightly to his head and chest.

The lights dimmed and he was alone in the darkness.

"What is your name?"

The tiny fragments of personality struggled and thought and then
collapsed in bewilderment.

"I ... I'm not sure."

The voices from nowhere continued.

"You have a family. You hate that family."

A faint, drifting haze of memories. Of a woman who had cooked his
meals and tucked him into bed at night when he was very young. Of
somebody named Larry who had once bailed him out of a street fight by
making like Bob Feller with some good-sized rocks....

But what was bed?

What was street-fights?

What was Bob Feller?

"I ... guess so."

The room exploded in blinding light that seared his eyes and lanced his
brain.

"Are you sure?"

"_Oh yes! Oh God, yes!_"

The agony was over and once again the room was mercifully black.

"You hate the cities."

The cities.

The decaying houses and the rotting tenements. The stinking alleys and
the littered parks and the filthy buildings.

And the lawns and the happy kids and the beaches....

He didn't answer.

Somewhere within his mind a wheel started to spin. Slow. Then faster
and faster until he was sweating and shaking with nausea and then
it felt like he was flying apart into small fragments that tore and
buffeted each other and pained....

_Of course he hated the cities._

For a moment, peace.

"The apes. You hate the apes. You hate the human race."

The human race. _His_ race. The pieces that were Stanley Martin started
to flow together, to coalesce once more into a single individual....

And then his nerve endings and ganglions felt sharp, searing pain. Pain
that threaded along his nerves and burned into every segment of his
body, pain that threatened to fry his cortical centers.

Pain that scattered the particles of personality that were Stanley
Martin and shriveled them to nothingness. Pain that obliterated the
last traces of conscience and memory.

"You hate the human race," a voice repeated smoothly.

"Yes," Stan said, not hesitating. "I hate the human race." And then he
started to sweat and shake with an unreasoning anger that flooded him
as suddenly as if somebody had turned on a hose. The pain.... The pain
for which the apes were responsible.

"_I hate the apes! I hate their goddamned guts!_"

A silent wave of exultation swept the compartment. They had fashioned
the mold and had made their monster....

Five minutes later, the space ship departed for its home system.

"I hate the human race." And....




                               CHAPTER V


He was 24 years old. A tall, unsmiling, handsome man dressed in a
blue serge suit and a hat that he liked to pull down over his eyes so
he could look at the world as if it were in a frame. He wasn't the
type who made friends and there was a subtle air of menace about him
that frightened the people with whom he came in contact. He was a
stranger who looked at the world with cold and calculating eyes, like a
scientist might look at a piece of lab apparatus. Women were intrigued
by him, made their approaches, and hastily left--a little insulted and
far more frightened.

Apes.

He was no longer 17, he was no longer a boy, and he wouldn't have shed
a tear if he had been stretched on the rack. A hardness and a sense of
power showed in the lines of his face and the set of his shoulders.
People who talked to him felt inferior, as if they had been talking to
a superman. And to a large degree they were absolutely right.

A small Thuscan flyer set him down one night on a fog-bound, Scotch
moor, not far from Paisley. The next afternoon he had rented an
apartment in Bristol and installed the first load of equipment. For
the next three months, he did nothing but observe and travel--and buy
up some small parcels of property in fifty different cities spread far
and wide over the globe.

He started to set up an organization, though he had difficulty finding
men to staff it. Most of those who would have qualified had been
executed or were behind bars for life. But by the end of six months,
his organization was almost complete. Reynolds, Langerman, and Caldwell
were his lieutenants--the men who got their hands dirty and directed
those in the next echelon down.

His right hand man was sent to him by Thusca. A powerful,
urbane-looking man who smiled often with his mouth but never with his
eyes. A guard let him in and he stood quietly in the rear of the room
while Stan continued with his briefing session.

There were a dozen new men at the meeting, listening intently to what
he had to say.

They were the type whose loyalty was to money, Stan thought, amused.
Hard-faced men who had probably fought for a dozen different causes and
switched sides as easily as changing a shirt.

Stan had almost finished with the briefing.

"Essentially, it's a simple smuggling operation. Only you're not to
know what you're smuggling and under no condition are you to open your
packages."

A man up front suddenly interrupted. "Why not?"

Stan smiled bleakly. "The packages are triggered, Piazza, I'm very much
afraid if you tried to open it your head would be blown off. Satisfied?"

He turned back to the others. "We pay very well--very well, indeed. A
smart man, who isn't too curious, will find it well worth his while.
We'll give you the packages and tell you where to leave them. In some
cases, it will involve extensive travel on your part. Be cautious, be
careful, and be quick on the trigger in case anybody tries to take them
away from you."

       *       *       *       *       *

The man whom Stan had called Piazza stood up and started for the door.
Stan watched him quietly until his hand was on the knob.

"What's the matter, Piazza?"

The man turned and spat on the carpet. "I don't like your proposition.
I think it stinks. We take all the risks and we don't even know what
we're doing!"

Stan shook his head sadly. "I'm sorry, Piazza. Really sorry. I had
hoped we could use you."

Piazza whitened. "I'm no stoolie, Mr. Martin."

"We can't take the risk," Stan said simply.

In a movement that only one pair of eyes could follow, he reached
inside his coat and shot through the cloth of the lapel.

Piazza looked faintly surprised and slumped limply to the floor.

Stan smiled coldly at the others.

"I assume the rest of you can be counted on?"

After the others had left, the man in back walked up and introduced
himself, flashing the small, fluorescent identity card that labeled him
as having come from Thusca.

"Tanner." Stan frowned. "Funny, I think I've heard the name before but
I can't place it."

"I met you briefly on Thusca," Tanner said easily.

Stan shook his head. "No, it's before then." He paused. "But that's
impossible!"

Tanner raised his eyebrows. "Why?"

Stan looked surprised. "Didn't they tell you? Just before I started
on this mission, I lost my memory. Crack on the head or something. I
only saw two people before I left and they were busy filling me on what
I was supposed to do here. Didn't have time to see the doctors." He
walked to the liquor cabinet and started mixing himself a drink. "I'll
be seeing Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm in a few months and maybe they
can help me then."

"You don't think your memory is liable to come back ... here, do you?"
Tanner asked curiously.

Stan laughed. "Not a chance--there's nothing that's apt to be familiar
on _this_ planet!" He dropped in the ice cubes. "Still, it's awkward.
For all I remember of my past life, I might as well have been born in a
vat."

Tanner smiled faintly. "I didn't know you were in the smuggling
business."

"It's a good front and one in which we won't get our own fingers dirty.
Besides, you haven't asked me what we were smuggling."

Tanner swirled his drink so the ice cubes clinked against the side.

"Alright, what are we smuggling?"

"Sometimes packages, sometimes suitcases, sometimes hat-boxes. Our men
take receipt of the packages and deliver them to different destinations
where they think they're going to be picked up. Perhaps a broom closet
in a building, perhaps a trash box on a city street, maybe a locker in
a train station. There's only two things I haven't told the men--what's
in the boxes, and the fact that they're never going to be picked up."

"What happens then?"

Stan sat down in a leather upholstered chair and threw a leg over the
arm. "Nothing. Not until November 4th, that is. At twelve noon, London
time, half the cities of this world will be blown off the globe."

Tanner looked puzzled. "So? The air forces the fleets, and the armies
will still be intact."

"They'll be much too busy to fight us," Stan said smoothly. "You see,
Tanner, they'll be fighting each other."

Which actually was very clever, Stan thought slowly. The divide and
conquer theory. Each of the packages contained a Thuscan fusion weapon.
Once they were set off, each country would think that another had
sprung a sneak attack.

November 4th, Tanner and he would strike. November 5th, the world would
be in chaos.

November 6th, the Thuscan fleet would land.

Tanner walked to the middle of the room and stood over the body of
Piazza. "What are you going to do with our friend?"

"Send him away--I think to Africa." Stan picked the body up and lugged
it into what had once been the bedroom. Now it was a room jammed with
transmitting equipment and, against the far wall, a single hoop of
shining metal standing upright on a black marble base. The hoop was
large, over six feet in diameter, with a thin, metal filament winding
around it.

       *       *       *       *       *

He turned a dial set in the base. The filament glowed red and then a
brilliant white. The hoop itself shimmered and faded, while at the same
time a whirling circle of brilliant black built up where it had been.
He tensed his muscles and heaved and Piazza's body hit the circle and
disappeared, like a man plunging into quicksand.

"Where will he land?"

"In a doorway on the Street of Lepers in Casablanca." Stan turned the
dial again and the whirling circle slowed and became translucent and
then faded out altogether as the hoop sprang back into view.

Tanner gestured to the other equipment. "What's all this for?"

"Transmitting equipment to set off the fusion packages." Stan pointed
to two box-like structures against the far wall. One held a bank of
fifty small, white lights. The other, a bank of fifty red. "The white
lights are the operators themselves--I can tell immediately if anything
happens to them. The others represent the fusion packages. If one of
them goes, I know the package has been tampered with."

Even as he watched, one of the white lights flickered and died.

Tanner looked surprised. "What happened?"

"We just lost an agent," Stan said grimly. "Chicago sector." He glanced
over at the bank of red lights--they were still lit. "It couldn't have
been about the fusion packages. It must have been about the ... other
operation." He looked at Tanner. "The one you were sent to handle."

"What are you going to do about it?"

Stan shrugged. "We'll handle it ourselves, and then recruit another
agent." He leafed through a filing cabinet, then finally pulled a
dossier and gave it to Tanner. "Trace this man and find out what you
can. We'll meet there in a week."

Tanner tapped the card lightly against his knuckles. "Mr. Ainsworth
didn't think you'd be meeting any opposition."

Stan blanked his face of expression. He wasn't exactly sure why, but he
didn't like Tanner.

"I didn't expect to."

There was a short silence and then Tanner walked to the hoop and worked
the dial. The shimmering black sprang up and he stepped up on the
marble. Just before he went through, he said: "What are you going to do
about the ... opposition?"

"When we find them, we'll smash them," Stan said coldly.

After Tanner had gone through, Stan shut off the hoop. As the circle
faded it caught his image and held it briefly, like a mirror.

He stared at it abstractly.

The problem of possible opposition bothered him but there was something
that worried him even more. Something he caught himself thinking about
when he woke up in the morning. Something he thought about all day and
something he couldn't get out of his mind when he went to bed at night.

Who was he?




                              CHAPTER VI


It was a summer evening and downtown Chicago was a hot-box of
sweltering buildings and steaming tar streets. People stretched out on
the lawns in front of Buckingham fountain for any stray breezes that
might wander in off the lake or else they curled up in front of fans
and read until the small hours of the morning when the temperature had
drifted down a few degrees so it was possible to go to bed without
drowning in a pool of their own sweat.

A woman walking by the Pure Oil building suddenly saw a shimmering in
the air and then a man was standing in the shadowed doorway, staring
nonchalantly at her. She almost screamed, then put it down to the heat
and hurried by.

Stan strolled up Michigan Boulevard to stop for a moment in front of a
bookstore where a man had been staring in the window.

"All set, Fred?"

Tanner nodded. "He leaves the Prudential building in half an hour. He
parks his car on the ramp below the street, in the parking lot that
runs parallel to the river. It's in the far corner--a sport model." He
fumbled in his pocket for a small card. "Here's the license number. The
ape is easy enough to recognize. About sixty years old, sport coat, and
a pork-pie hat. He's had a small office here for a couple of weeks,
doing government work, so he might be carrying a briefcase. Tomorrow he
goes back east."

Stan memorized the description. "Just how good is he?"

"The best they've got. Losing him will be quite a blow to the apes.
Quite a blow."

Stan stood in the shadows of the bookstore for a few minutes more.
He could hear every tiny noise on the street, including the rapid
tick-tick-tick of his own wrist-watch.

"I better go down. Be ready to help with the body five minutes after
the hour."

He turned and started up the street, to the stairs that would take
him to the level below. Hundreds of cars were parked in neat, silent
rows below the ramp. Overhead was the cold brilliance of hundreds of
fluorescent lamps.

Light enough he thought. It wouldn't be ... sporting ... to shoot the
ape scientist down in the dark.

He found the bright, two-toned sports car at the end of the ramp.
Nobody was in sight. He smiled to himself and walked on past the car
and then stood quietly in the shadows of a concrete pillar. He had a
while to wait and disquieting thoughts swam slowly to the surface of
his mind.

This city of Chicago. He had been to many cities on the planet but this
was the only one that somehow ... bothered him. A city that seemed
oddly, tantalizingly familiar. And there was a pressing urgency for him
to see some people in it....

But as an agent of Thusca, he could afford no time for such neurotic
thoughts. He would tell the doctors about it when he returned, but
right now there was work.

He stood there without moving a muscle, thinking of nothing at all, as
if Stanley Martin were only an illusion and didn't really exist. It was
a quarter to six.

Ten minutes to six.

Six o'clock.

And footsteps thudding on the concrete stairs a block away.

The man in the pork-pie hat was coming to get his car.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stan set the stud on his heat gun and waited.

An ape.

The man came closer and fumbled at the door of his automobile, trying
to get the key into the lock.

Stan pressed the stud and the violet beam flashed out and splashed on
the car door six inches from the man's hand. The paint flared into
a smoking fire and a neat, thin line raced down the metal, cutting
cleanly through the body and the upholstery and the steel frame.

He'd let him squirm for a second, Stan thought coldly, and then move
the beam back and cut the ape in two.

_Now!_

He never touched the man. There was a spanging sound and the pillar
Stan was leaning against suddenly showed concrete chips. He fell
backwards and sprawled on the pavement, the violet beam from his heat
gun crazily scorching the concrete overhead.

Somebody yelled to the man crouched by the car....

"_Run! Run, you fool!_"

The man in the pork-pie hat dodged up the ramp. Stan tried to pick him
off but the pillar showered concrete again and his aim was spoiled.
Then the man was gone and Stan's mind turned to his own problems.

The opposition had finally put in an appearance....

"_Come out now and you can come out alive. Fight, and we'll bring you
out dead!_"

A woman's voice, he thought coldly. Coming from a car about a hundred
feet down....

He aimed his heater and exploded the gas tank, the flames whooshing out
into the closed space.

"_You didn't think we were actually there, did you?_"

He fired again and then a steady shower of concrete chips that sprayed
his elbow made him glance at the pillar, alarmed. It had been cut
entirely away at the top and now it was being chewed away at the
bottom, ready to topple over on him.

He set his heater for a fan-shaped ray to cover his movements and
scrambled out from behind the pillar, desperately trying to dodge over
to the line of cars.

Something spanged into his shoulder and spun him around. He fell
heavily to the pavement, the pain briefly paralyzing his nerves. He
waited a split second for the pain to lessen, then tried to scramble
for his heater. The cement in front of him exploded into dust and chips
that cut his face and almost blinded his eyes.

"_Get up!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

She stepped out from behind another pillar. A tall, black-haired
woman with wide cheek-bones and cold, green eyes. Her face was hard
and she carried her hand weapon with all the assurance of one who was
thoroughly familiar with it. Two men came with her. They were capable
looking men but not the grim, hard-eyed professionals that Stan was
used to working with.

The woman walked over to Stan and slapped his face--hard--her nails
digging bloody furrows in his skin.

"How does it feel to be a traitor? How does it feel to sell out your
native planet for nothing at all?"

He didn't know what she was talking about and his face showed it.

"It was a clever scheme," she continued bitterly. "To win a planet, you
first cut off its head--you eliminate the scientists!" She leveled her
hand weapon at him. "But that's not all you've had in mind. What other
schemes has the renegade earthman thought of?"

The world slipped into a haze of red and his hand darted for the pocket
where he kept his heat gun--to pause, uncertainly, when he remembered
it lay on the concrete fifteen feet away.

"_I'm no ape!_"

She laughed. "They've made you into a Pavlovian dog that drools
whenever they ring a bell--and you don't even realize what they've done
to you! They pull the strings and their marionette jerks and dances and
does their dirty work for them!"

Stan stared at her coldly. "What are you going to do?"

"Kill you. Now."

She raised the weapon and Stan knew she was perfectly capable of doing
it. A moment more and the small pellets would burrow into his body,
to explode deep in the flesh. He tensed himself for a final effort to
escape, knowing it would be next to useless.

"You poor fool," she said slowly. "You'll be better off dead."

Her finger tightened on the trigger.

She never pulled it. There was a scream behind her and one of her men
collapsed to the pavement, a thin swirl of smoke drifting up from his
blasted chest. The girl's eyes narrowed, then she suddenly darted
towards the river that lapped against the parking level. The remaining
man dropped to his knees to cover her escape and the ramp was filled
with the spanging sound of his own pistol.

The sound ceased abruptly in another burst of flames and smoke and then
Tanner was racing down the ramp.

"_Don't let her get away!_"

Stan ran to the river's edge and Tanner cut the oily surface with
lancing rays from his heater.

"She's gone," Stan said in a tired voice. "Save it." He watched the
surface for a moment more, than turned back to Tanner. "Who was she?
What's her name?"

Tanner shrugged. "I don't know who she is or what she's doing here. I
can't tell you."

He wouldn't forget her, Stan thought slowly. That long, black hair and
those green eyes. And she had moved like a cat, a sleek cat who was
just as willing to kill for a cause as he was.

Tanner was studying his face. "Don't get any ideas about her--she's an
ape."

Stan looked at him coldly. "The only idea I have is to kill her before
she kills me."

He started walking towards another flight of stairs a block down. How
long had it been since he had walked down the ramp? he wondered. There
had been the noise and the oily smoke from the automobile. The ramp
should have been swarming with curious apes by now. But for some reason
it wasn't....

It had shaken him, he thought slowly. His briefing on Thusca had
mentioned nothing about an opposition organization of the apes. And in
particular, it had mentioned nothing about a ... girl.

He would have to warn the agents in his own organization, he thought
abstractly. And it would probably be best to use a code name. He asked
Tanner for a suggestion.

"Use a girl's name," Tanner mused. "Say ... Avis."

Stan looked at him sharply and had the odd feeling that was really the
girl's name. And then he recalled Tanner racing down the ramp screaming
"_Don't let her get away!_" and the disappointed look on his face when
she had.

Tanner, Stan decided suddenly, had lied about not knowing her.

"She'll probably be around again," Tanner mused out loud. "And soon."

The second agent disappeared in Paris, two weeks later.




                              CHAPTER VII


It was eight o'clock Thursday evening when Stan stepped out of a
faintly glowing circle of black light in a small alley off the Rue
Pigalle in Paris. He calmly lit a cigarette and walked down the street
to a small cafe.

It was bigger on the inside than it looked from the street. A long,
low-ceilinged room with a tiny platform and a small band, almost hidden
by the cigarette smoke, at the far end. Tanner and Reynolds, one
of Stan's lieutenants, were seated at a small table along the side,
earnestly talking to a frightened little man with an old-fashioned
walrus moustache.

Stan squeezed in next to the little man and introduced himself. He
ordered wine, then said: "You know the arrangements?"

The little man looked stubborn. "I'm not sure I like it."

"We're not asking much--and we'll pay well."

The little man made a show of licking his lips and nervously twisting
his moustache.

"I don't get you, guv'nor. You want to give me a hundred thousand
francs just to deliver a package to the souvenir stand at the top of
the Eiffel Tower?"

"You're to give the girl a hundred francs," Stan cut in smoothly. "And
ask her if she'll hold it for a Monsieur Lorenz."

The little man's eyelids drooped suggestively. "You're up to no good
and a hundred thousand francs doesn't seem to me to cover it."

Stan moved in closer, threateningly. The little man thrust out his chin
and glared at him.

"Just you watch your step, guv'nor! All I 'ave to do is 'oller 'elp and
fifty people will be on your neck. And what's to keep me from talking
about this anyways?"

"I could kill you right while you sit there," Stan said quietly. "I
could do it and you wouldn't make a sound and nobody would know you
were dead until ten minutes after we left."

The little man's eyes showed white and he nervously twisted a heavy
ring on his finger. "You wouldn't dare, guv'nor. A bloke like you
wouldn't dare!"

"You'll do exactly as we say," Stan interrupted coldly. "And if we
wanted you to, you'd do it for exactly nothing." He smiled grimly.
"Your real name is William Clark. You're in this country without a visa
or a passport. You jumped ship from a British freighter during the war.
Your wife died shortly after you signed up for your last voyage and
there was some talk about it. But you disappeared and they never found
you again or heard from you and the case was dropped."

He paused. "Do you want me to go on?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The little man's eyes were wide and beads of sweat were dripping off
the ends of his moustache.

"Why now, you wouldn't turn in an old man, would you, guv'nor? I've
been clean ever since I been over 'ere! I 'aven't done a thing!"

Stan stared at him coldly. "Will you or won't you? You know the woman
who runs the stand. It shouldn't be difficult."

The little man pretended to think about it for a moment.

"Why now, it doesn't seem like much," he mumbled. "Just a suitcase and
you say all you want me to do is leave it with the woman?"

He had him, Stan thought.

"Be careful how you handle the suitcase and under no circumstances drop
it--you'd be damned sorry if you did."

The little man drained his glass of wine. "When do I get my quid?"

"When we deliver the suitcase. Tomorrow."

The little man shivered and stood up.

"All right, I'll do it." He sidled past Tanner and stopped at the edge
of the table. "Your eyes, guv'nor," he said suddenly, looking at Stan.
"I swear to the Almighty, they're 'angman's eyes!"

Hangman's eyes.

Somewhere, someplace, Stan mused, he had thought that about somebody
else. About Fred Tanner.

But he couldn't remember where it had been, or when.

Tanner fumbled in his wallet and gave the heavy man sitting next to
him, a bill. "Reynolds, order up some more wine and see if they have
any sandwiches, will you?" After Reynolds had left, he turned to Stan.
"How many will this make?"

Stan ticked them off on his fingers.

"One in Chicago's Palmolive building, one in the Woolworth building on
Manhattan Island, one in a dressing room of the Old Howard in Boston.
Glasgow, Tokyo, Moscow, London, Rome and 41 others. And now Paris.
They're all covered. Fifty ape cities--none of them long for this
world."

Tanner nodded thoughtfully. "Mr. Ainsworth will be very pleased. Very
pleased indeed."

Reynolds was back with a wine bottle in a small wicker basket and a
plate of tired looking sandwiches. Stan drank the wine and ate the
sandwiches without actually tasting them at all.

The cities were dirty, filthy ghettoes of brick and stone and the
people were only apes, he mused. But somehow....

       *       *       *       *       *

William Clark lived in a small, stuccoed rooming house in a suburb
midway between Paris and Versailles. It looked old even for a rooming
house in France, Stan thought. There was a mustiness and an age you
could sense even from the outside. The ivy that climbed the walls was
dead, the stucco was chipped in spots, and the curtains he could see
through the windows looked yellowed and limp.

He climbed the front steps and worked the heavy knocker, then stood
back waiting for the concierge to show up.

She didn't.

He tried the knocker again and then the door knob. There was a sudden
snapping sound, the door creaked open, and he stepped in.

Dust--billows of it--rose from the hall rug. Dust that almost choked
him before it settled once more on an ancient window seat and clung to
the moldering drapes.

He turned to Tanner and felt a shock of surprise. Tanner was cradling
his heat gun in his hands, ready for instant action. His face was grim.

"What kind of a man would you say Clark was, Martin?"

"Offhand, kind of a tidy little man and...."

"Not the type who would be living in an ancient rooming house?"

"That's right--he wasn't the type."

"Where did Clark say he lived?"

"Second floor--end of the hall."

"Let's go!"

Stan hesitated a moment. He was supposed to be in charge of the
operation, yet Tanner was taking over. For a very good reason--Tanner
knew something that he didn't. He followed Tanner up the stairs, his
feet sending out little puffs of dust from the stair treads. Clark's
room was closed and he knocked lightly on the door.

There was no answer.

He tried the knob.

Locked.

"Reynolds--break it down."

The big man hunched his shoulders and drove for the door. The panel
burst like it had been made from paper and he stumbled to the center of
the room before he could stop himself.

"That was a foolish thing to have him do, Martin."

"Why?"

"You didn't know what to expect--it could have been a trap."

Stan's voice chilled. "You've been acting like a cat on a hot griddle
ever since we walked in. Just what were you expecting?"

Tanner didn't answer. He sauntered into the room. "Well, where's Clark?"

That was a good question, Stan thought. Just where was Clark? He
glanced around the room. The average rooming house cell, the kind so
many people on this planet seemed to live in. A bureau and an unmade
bed, the blankets rumpled and twisted....

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a linen runner on top of the bureau and on top of that was a
glass, neatly wrapped in cellophane. He walked over and barely touched
it, intent on moving the glass to get a better look at a photograph
behind it.

The cellophane cracked and crumbled at his touch.

The photograph behind it wasn't important, Stan thought. A photo of a
ship on which Clark had been a crew member.

What was important was the cellophane that had crumbled at his touch
and the dusty linen runner which hung in tattered shreds where it
overlapped the top of the bureau.

As if the weight of the cloth had become too much for the strength of
the linen thread.

Old.

Incredibly old.

Tanner was standing by the window, looking out. When he moved back, his
arm touched the curtain. The curtain collapsed and powdered, sifting
down to the dusty carpet.

Stan watched it with intense curiosity, then moved over to the bed. The
bed clothes were rumpled but they weren't lying flat. They were bunched
in spots--as if somebody might still be underneath them.

He held his heat gun in one hand and flicked the blankets aside with
the other. Like the curtains, they ripped and powdered.

Beneath the blankets was a skeleton--a few tattered pieces of cloth
lying inside the gaunt bones. "I see you've found Clark," Tanner said.

"Clark?"

Stan could feel the sweat pop out on his forehead. Nobody on Thusca had
ever told him that a man could die and the flesh on his bones shrivel
to dust all in one evening. He bent over the bed. The skeleton was that
of a man, a very old man, whose bones had started to calcify at the
joints. There was nothing about it to link it with William Clark.

The little man with the walrus moustache had been middle-aged. He
hadn't been old, he certainly hadn't been senile to the point where his
joints were hardening.

Then he saw the ring on one of the finger bones. He touched it gingerly
and rubbed away the green verdigris. The same ring he had seen Clark
toy with at the tavern.

But the age! The incredible age!

He turned to Tanner, questioning. The narrow-eyed, dapperly dressed man
was standing at one side of the window, his heat gun cocked. He was
staring steadily through the glass and didn't bother to turn around.
His voice was hard.

"You want to know what it's all about, don't you, Martin? Well, come
on over and take a look for yourself."

"What about me?" a frightened voice suddenly rattled. "When's somebody
going to tell me what's going on?"

Reynolds. They had forgotten all about him, Stan thought. Now the big
man was shaking with fear, fear of the unknown. Stan wrinkled his nose.
The ape was sweating and you could smell him clear across the room.

Tanner laughed easily. "I'll give _you_ a full explanation later on,
Reynolds. But right now we're in trouble!"




                             CHAPTER VIII


Stan ran to the other window and stared at the street below. It didn't
seem any different than when he had come in a few minutes earlier. The
wide boulevard of stucco houses, the shade trees and the lawns. And a
few of the apes on the sidewalk, hurrying to work....

Only they weren't hurrying, he noticed after a moment. One man was
halfway down the house steps across the street, a brief case under
his arm. But he wasn't moving. He was frozen in mid-air, off-balance,
one foot halfway down to the next step. A housewife had stopped in
mid-stride two doors down, her shopping bag swung forward at an
awkward angle. At the corner, a small Renault car was poised in the
middle of the street, caught in the process of turning.

Further down the block, two small boys in short pants and berets had
been playing catch. One was crouched, his hand out. The other was
standing, one foot in the air and one upraised arm behind his head.
Stan narrowed his eyes and located the ball. It was about ten feet from
the thrower, crawling slowly through the air.

Even as he watched, the ball slowed and stopped, hovering twenty feet
above the asphalt.

"The air!" Reynolds suddenly screamed. "It's getting hard to breathe!"

"It'll get harder!" Tanner said grimly. "This will last for about half
an hour. Slow your breathing and whatever you do, move slow. You move
too fast and the air friction alone will set your clothes on fire!"

He swung slowly forward and brought the butt of his heat gun against
the glass. Small cracks lanced through the window but it didn't break.
Tanner pushed against it and the pieces slowly folded outwards.

"We're in the fast field, Martin--and so are they."

"They?"

"Avis and her men. The ones who caught you flat-footed under the ramp
the other day. They're the ones who put up the field, who killed Clark."

Clark. Avis, Stan thought, could probably speed things up as well as
slow them down. Clark was to have stayed home today, to wait for them.
Avis and her men had waited until everybody but Clark had left, then
they had turned on the field and aged the house and Clark by a hundred
years in five minutes. It explained the skeleton, it explained the
dust, it explained the crumbling cellophane and the yellowed curtains
that powdered at the touch.

And the day on the ramp in Chicago. Avis had speeded things up, then.
What had seemed to him to take half an hour, had actually occurred in
minutes.

"How come we're not standing still like the others?"

"Neutralizers--they're built into your belt. If they weren't, you could
have died a long time ago. Our own fields shield Reynolds."

He broke off.

"_Here they come!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

Across the street, a figure darted from one parked car to another. A
man suddenly ran behind the car that was poised on the corner. Stan
could make out other figures moving behind the windows across the
street.

There was the familiar spanging sound and a series of holes stitched
themselves in the fragments of glass left in the window frame, three
inches from his cheek. There was an impression of speed and heat and a
crackling sound as the tiny projectiles thudded into the plaster behind
him.

A pale, violet glow flashed out from Tanner's window and one of the
figures on the street suddenly raised its hands in agony as flames
crisped its clothing and burned its flesh. It staggered a few feet and
finally fell in a flaming mass, its screams of agony splitting the
still air.

Stan let his breath out slowly. He hadn't got a good look at the figure
and for one brief moment he had thought it was ... Avis.

Which was an odd way to feel about a woman who would gladly slit his
throat, he thought.

"_One!_" Tanner said grimly.

Stan flamed one of the automobiles and narrowly missed a small figure
which scuttled out from behind it. He stole a look at Tanner. The man's
face was flushed and shining, a half grin of expectancy was painted on
it.

He himself did it as a duty, Stan thought soberly.

But Tanner enjoyed killing.

The spanging sounds sounded harder. Outside the window frames, Stan
could see gouts of concrete and stucco being chiseled out of the
walls. There was practically nothing left of the frames themselves
but splinters of wood, held in place by small lumps of disintegrating
mortar.

They were taking the house apart, he thought. They were dissecting it
as casually as you would a frog, until the entire front part of the
room would be exposed and there would then be no place to hide.

He turned up a notch on his heater and sprayed the other side of the
street with a wide angle beam. There was an abrupt cessation of noise
and then it started in again, louder than before. The small bedroom was
becoming foggy with concrete and brick dust.

He caught sight of a figure moving behind the shrubs across the street
and took careful aim. There was a sharp cry and then he had to dodge
quickly back inside the window. Something had grazed his cheek, cutting
it so a thin stream of blood angled down from the cheek bone.

He waited a second and stole another quick look out.

Two men had taken refuge behind some trees, further down the block. He
took aim, then hesitated. The frozen figures of the two boys who had
been playing catch were directly in the line of fire.

He tightened his finger, then sweat crept into the corners of his
eyes and he blinked for a moment. He took aim again ... and wavered
slightly. The sweat was heavier now and he could feel it soak the shirt
on his back. Once more ... only apes....

"What are you waiting for?"

Stan calmly chose another target.

"The apes that are hiding--they won't stay there forever. They'll move
someplace else and when they do, I'll get them."

       *       *       *       *       *

Tanner laughed and aimed out the window. A moment later, two blazing
torches had crumpled to the asphalt. Almost simultaneously, the trees
went up in flames and two fiery figures stumbled out from behind them.

"Don't ever let your emotions interfere with your better judgment,"
Tanner said shortly. "Mr. Ainsworth wouldn't like it. Neither would I."

Stan hardly heard him. It didn't mean anything to him one way or the
other, he kept telling himself. They were apes.

Just apes.

"What will the apes say when this is over and they discover the
shattered houses and the bodies?"

Tanner picked off another running figure.

"There'll be no bodies. The wind disperses the ashes as soon as the
field is let up. As for the rest--the apes are ingenious in thinking
up explanations. They never believe in anything they haven't seen
themselves."

The room was thick with dust and the noise of the spanging; the front
wall was holed in half a dozen different spots. Then there was a rush
of figures across the street and Stan caught his breath. In the lead
was Avis, black hair streaming, urging the others on....

Tanner suddenly ran to the back of the room and pushed the bureau and
the bed over by the front wall. He stripped the closet and piled the
clothes by the furniture.

There was a lull in the spanging and a quiet sobbing suddenly filled
the room. Stan turned.

Reynolds had collapsed in a corner, half out of his mind with fear.
Tears straggled down the big man's face and sobbing convulsed his chest.

Tanner gestured to the front wall. "Get over there, Reynolds!"

The frightened man half crawled, half stumbled over to the tumbled
furniture.

"You wanted an explanation, didn't you?" Tanner asked sharply.

Stan knew what was coming. Reynolds had ended up by knowing too much.
Which was just too bad for Reynolds.

Reynolds' frightened babbling gradually made sense.

"_Get me out of here, Mr. Tanner! Please get me out of here...._"

"Gladly," Tanner said grimly. He brought up the heater and a violet
beam danced over the crouching man and the bureau and the piled
clothing. There was a short, pitiful screaming and then flames shot
high into the room and billows of smoke curled casually through the
broken windows.

       *       *       *       *       *

Something inside Stan felt sick and he cursed himself for his own
weakness.

"Get the suitcase and let's go, Martin."

The suitcase.

It wasn't there. While they had been busy at the windows, Stan thought,
somebody had stolen the case. Reynolds hadn't even seen them and even
if he had--the ape was now beyond questioning.

"It's gone?" Tanner laughed. "Avis is an amateur, Martin. And a
bungling amateur at that! She could have killed us again and instead
she preferred the case! One call to Ainsworth and we'll replace that
tomorrow!"

They were feeling their way down the back stairs when the thick feeling
to the air disappeared. Suddenly the street was filled with screams as
passersby noticed the instantaneously ruined house and the burning cars
and the suspicious mounds of ashes that swirled up into the morning air.

A block away, Stan stopped and wiped the sweat and soot from his face.
Tanner looked at him sharply. "Something wrong?"

"Yes, there's something wrong!" Stan swung around and grabbed Tanner
by the lapels, crossing his hands so the cloth was drawn tight around
Tanner's throat and his knuckles dug into the flesh.

"I haven't been getting the answers," he said in a thin voice. "The
girl's no ape--she knows too much, her weapons are too far advanced,
her men are too well organized!" His voice started to shake with
nervous reaction. "I'm supposed to be running the operation down here
and I don't even know what's going on!"

"The answers should have occurred to you," Tanner said, his face a
mask. "We're not the only ones who want this planet, Martin!"

Not the only ones! Stan relaxed his grip and let his arms hang limply
at his side.

"Avis is an Aurelian," Tanner went on. "Her system and ours have fought
many bloody battles for this planet. We're still fighting them--down
here, now." He paused. "You haven't been told everything--operators are
fed knowledge bit by bit, when they can fit it in. As a Thuscan agent,
Martin, you're told just as much as the high command thinks necessary!"

His voice softened, became more persuasive. "We kill but not blindly,
Stan. This is an important war--it's a war for an entire planet. We
have to be brutal but the stakes are high. We're fighting to capture
this planet for our own ... flesh and blood."

"I'm sorry," Stan whispered. "Forget what I did."

He wouldn't make the same mistake again, he thought. He'd do what he
was told and he wouldn't forget that Avis and all of her kind were his
implacable enemies, the enemies of his people.

But there was still something that bothered him.

In talking to him, Tanner had sounded like somebody he had heard once
before....




                              CHAPTER IX


The nightmares started in Beirut. Stan's apartment was a modern one,
just a block from the American University. He had opened the wood-slat
Venetian blinds and had gone to bed, feeling dead tired. It was late
August and things had not gone too well. Agents had disappeared. Fusion
packages had disappeared from their hiding places.

But worries could not compete with physical exhaustion. He was asleep
as soon as he hit the pillow.

The nightmares were terrifying. He was no longer Stanley Martin,
patriotic agent for the planet Thusca. He was 17 years old once more,
playing in the city streets of Chicago and fighting in a pillow fight
with his older brother and running errands for his mother or watching
her while she made meat loaf and took loaves of freshly baked bread
from the ovens.

And then there was the smell of printing ink on freshly printed papers
and reporters yelling "Copy boy!" at him and the twice weekly trips to
the stockyards to pick up the live-stock reports.

The stockyards. He had stopped by an alley one morning and three men
had jumped him, slugging him in the stomach and kidneys and hitting ...
hitting ... hitting....

He woke up, shaking. His pajamas and the bed sheets were soaked with
perspiration. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his head in his
hands.

He had dreamt that he was an ape.

He got up and went to the bathroom for a glass of water. He didn't go
back to sleep.

The nightmare the next night was different. Once again he saw two small
French boys playing in the street. One moment, thin, bandy-legged
kids in short pants and berets ... the next, two blazing torches that
crumpled silently to the asphalt.

And then there was the hideous, horribly shrill screaming of Reynolds
when Tanner had played the heat gun over him. The terrible screaming
that Stan knew would haunt him for years....

He woke up again, rolled to the side of the bed, and was sick.

The nightmares, the goddamned nightmares.... He fumbled for matches
and cigarettes on the bed table. The tiny flame of the match shook
nervously in the gloom of the bedroom.

He _had_ to stop them, if it meant dosing himself with drugs before he
went to bed. He couldn't stand the dreams, he couldn't take the false
memories that kept cropping up.

The next night he made up his mind. There were pieces still missing
from the puzzle of who he was. There were things, he felt sure, that
Tanner had never told him. Things, no doubt, that the high command had
felt he wasn't ready to know yet.

A good agent wouldn't question higher authority, he thought slowly,
sweating. But he _had_ to know them! He had to know the answers, he had
to know about his first 25 years of life.

And there was one person who might be able to give him some
information. One person who had once called him a traitor, who had
implied he was a renegade and had been conditioned. One person who knew
things about himself that he didn't.

The girl, Avis.

Eventually, he had to find her--to kill her. But right now, he wanted
to find her to get information.

       *       *       *       *       *

He got dressed, set the dial of the transport-hoop for London and
stepped through. Tanner was waiting for him on the other side.

"Where is she?" Stan asked.

Tanner raised his eyebrows. "The North American continent. Chicago."

"Exactly where?"

"I don't know ... exactly. We've been trying to trace the radiations
from the fusion package but it keeps moving about the city." Tanner
grimaced. "We haven't been successful in following it. We've lost quite
a number of agents trying to follow it, as you know."

He stood up and fished in his pocket for a pipe and a small pouch of
tobacco. He looked very casual, very urbane, Stan thought.

"You going after her, Martin?"

"That's right--I'm going after her."

Tanner studied him curiously.

"You're taking a risk. Our agents will locate her sooner or later."

"They haven't so far," Stan said sarcastically. "Why leave it to
chance?"

Tanner shrugged. "Good luck." Then he added seriously: "Don't talk to
her, Martin. Don't give her a chance to pull something. Kill her on
sight."

"I'll do that," Stan lied. He checked his heat gun, then worked the
dial on the hoop once more and stepped through the shining oval....

... onto a street on Chicago's south side, a few doors down from the
Hyde Park theatre. He walked into a nearby drug store and made a phone
call, then walked back to the corner to wait. A moment later, one of
his chief lieutenants, Caldwell, drove up.

"We lost Jones and Hagerty, Mr. Martin--just a few hours ago. I was
making up a report on them when you called."

"You got the indicator?"

The man held out a small gadget that looked a little like a light
meter. Stan swung it around experimentally. A small light mounted on it
flickered briefly. He swung it back again and the light glowed, went
out, and then glowed strongly again.

"You know, I don't see how you trace a person with that," Caldwell
said, curious. "How does it work?"

There were a lot of things that Caldwell didn't know, Stan thought. He
didn't know that the deal was anything more than a smuggling operation,
he didn't realize that this was not a gang war but was one for much
higher stakes but if his curiosity kept up, some day he would stumble
on the truth.

Which would be rather fatal for Mr. Caldwell.

"You're paid for what you do, Caldwell, not for being curious."

"Okay, okay--I just asked."

Stan slid into the back seat. "Let's go."

Caldwell threw the car in gear and they drove silently north through
the crowded streets. The light on the small indicator waxed and waned
and grew steadily brighter as the faint radiation from the fusion
material increased.

"You don't want to get too close," Caldwell said suddenly. "That's
what happened to the other boys. They got too close and then they were
ambushed."

The indicator light slowly increased in brilliance, then started to die
again. They were about three blocks away, Stan thought, passing it at
right angles.

"Okay, Caldwell, let me out here."

"You sure you won't need help, Mr. Martin? I could get some of the
boys...."

"Wait on the corner. If I'm not back in an hour, then notify Tanner.
He'll know what to do."

He got out of the car, palming the indicator in his hand. Avis--or at
least the package--was somewhere in the area.

He glanced at the indicator and started walking, stopping occasionally
to look in a store window and steal another look at the indicator. A
block and a half down. One door, two doors....

And back one.

An office building. The usual miscellany--dentists and doctors and
small professional firms.

He walked in, his eyes documenting everybody in the lobby. Any two or
three of the men idling in the lobby could be her men, he thought.

And if any one of them had made a false movement, there would have
been a sudden massacre.

"Top floor, please."

The elevator crept slowly up and let him out on the fifth floor.

The reaction on the indicator was strong. He went down to the fourth
floor where it was stronger, then down to the third.

The second floor and the light dimmed slightly. It was the third floor
then.

He walked quietly back up the stairs and paused at the landing,
listening. There were no sounds of anyone in the corridor. He
walked casually down it. A doctor's office, a dentist's office, a
hairdresser's, and an employment agency.

The employment agency, he thought sharply. The perfect front, the
perfect cover.

The perfect way to recruit agents.

He stopped quietly outside and unlimbered his heat gun from its
shoulder holster. He turned the knob and walked in.

And was suddenly aware that all noise had stopped, the air was heavy,
and the dust motes in the stream of sunlight that lanced through the
window were perfectly still.

       *       *       *       *       *

"You took a long time getting here, Martin."

She was standing in front of her desk, looking exactly as when he
had seen her on the ramp in Chicago and on the street in the Paris
suburb. A tall woman, a little on the thin side. Thick black hair that
hung loosely about her face, making a frame for a pale skin and cold,
green eyes. It was a hard, capable face with just a suggestion that at
another time and another place, it might have been a beautiful face.

Now.... A drawn face, with a tinge of sadness to it.

Stan leveled his heat gun. She didn't move a muscle but patiently
waited for him to press the stud.

Don't talk to her, Tanner had said. Kill her on sight. But he hadn't
come to kill her. Not yet. Not before he found out some information.

He lowered his arm.

"Don't tell me you've finally gotten sick of killing people," she said
quietly.

"No doubt it runs into hundreds," Stan said sarcastically. "I suppose
any day now the apes will be getting suspicious."

She shook her head, bitterly. "Not--they won't. It happens all the
time. People die in lonely little rooms, people have accidents, people
commit suicide. Or so the Terrans think. They never seem to look
beyond."

"You forget," Stan pointed out. "We've lost men, too. And I'm sure that
not all of them died from natural causes."

"Who have you lost, Martin? Thieves, dope peddlers, murderers, and
worse? And what have I lost? Patriots, scientists, statesmen--the few
who understand and believe and are willing to work with me."

Stan shrugged impatiently. "You said I had taken a long time in getting
here. I suppose you planned it that way."

She looked surprised. "Why else do you think we stole the fusion
packages? Just to keep you from replacing them? The Thuscans can supply
you with all the packages you need. We wanted to give you something by
which you could trace me."

"It's a wonder you weren't killed before this."

A half smile broke the granite lines of her face. "Nobody but you would
have gotten this far, Martin."

"So you got me here. What do you want?"

She looked at him thoughtfully for a full minute, weighing him.

"I want you to change sides, Martin. I want you to help us."

He stared at her in disbelief. "You must have known I wouldn't
agree--even before you asked me."

"We need your help," she said steadily.

"You're doing all right."

"We're losing," she said, her face looking even more pale. "We've
lost close to three hundred agents and we've located only ten fusion
packages. I don't know your exact time table but I know it's sometime
in November. It's late August now." Her face twisted. "We haven't got a
chance, and you know it!"

"That's right," he agreed. "You haven't got a chance. What do you want
me to do? Sell out?"

"You've already sold once," she said brutally.

There was that hint again, he thought sharply. The hint that she knew
something about himself that he didn't. Or at least, she thought she
did.

"Why should I sell out to a group of aliens?" he asked curiously.

"Because we're not a group of aliens," she said calmly. "Because this
planet is _our_ planet, everybody on it is an Aurelian. And so are you!"

"You expect me to believe that?"

"It's true!" she blazed. "But you've been conditioned! You believe
everything the Thuscans tell you and you've never questioned it. Now
it's time somebody told you the truth!"

       *       *       *       *       *

She leaned closer to him and he caught a trace of faint perfume. "This
whole world could go up in smoke, Martin, and it actually wouldn't be
important. Not to the Thuscans and not to my own people. You know why?
Because it's a sidelight! An unimportant little skirmish in a battle
your mind couldn't even conceive of!"

"You're lying," he said, without conviction.

She walked to the window and gestured outside.

"This Earth--it's not the home of the human race, Martin. It's a colony
planet--colonized thousands of years ago, like a hundred other systems.
For the last fifty thousand years, Aurelia has expanded throughout the
galaxy. We don't keep contact with all the planets we've colonized--we
can't. Our mission was to sow the human race far and wide and let them
develope as they would.

"That was a mistake." She walked back to the desk. "Eventually we ran
into the Thuscans--your so-beloved friends, Martin! They were expanding
too, towards us. We had to fall back to try and defend our primitive
little colony planets. And that wasn't easy. It wasn't easy at all."

Her face clouded and the look of sadness deepened.

"We had been peaceful for too long. And we weren't professional
militarists. And we were so few. So pitifully few! The most we could
hope to do was to combat the Thuscan system of infiltration, and then
try to convince each planet of its own peril, so they could look to
their own defenses."

Stan sneered. "You haven't been successful, have you?"

"What do you think would happen if we showed ourselves and set down
a ship?" she asked curtly. "Most of the planets would be paralyzed
with terror! They'd consider us suspect and they would hate us because
we were more advanced. I do what I can. I try to convince a few. And
when I do, they usually try to help." She looked at him again and her
face was sheer hate. "Patriotic men, Martin--men that you've helped to
slaughter!"

For a fraction of a second, she looked like she was going to break
down. Then her face hardened again. Her voice was husky.

"I've manned the barricades on a thousand different planets, Martin!
I've fought the Thuscans for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I've
succeeded, more often I've failed. And when I've failed, I've had to
run away." Her voice changed to steel. "But I'm not running anymore. If
I lose, I'm staying here."

"You picked the wrong person to give a speech to," Stan said coldly. He
started for the door and then stopped. "You said I was an Aurelian, a
human being. What did you mean by that?"

"You were born in this city 25 years ago," she said in a low voice.
"You worked here, your family lived here. You had a mother and a
brother named Larry. You were ... exceptional. All the indications
are, that you would have made a great man. You loved the world and
the people in it. When you were seventeen, you were kidnapped by the
Thuscans and conditioned to what you are now. They intentionally
made you lose your memory, so that you would have no memories and no
will--no will but theirs."

"I don't believe you," he said heavily.

"You don't want to." She paused. "You better leave, Martin. You better
go back to the marionette makers and the string pullers."

He took one last look, realizing that something inside him was
struggling to give the girl comfort, to say something that might help
her. Then he shrugged and walked out the door.

He was two blocks away before he realized that both he and the girl
could have killed each other at almost any time.

But neither of them had made any attempt to.




                               CHAPTER X


He was two men, after the meeting with the girl, Stanley Martin, the
loyal Thuscan agent who continued to mastermind the betrayal of a world.

And Stanley Martin, the man who wondered at and was repelled by his own
action. The man to whom the city of Chicago was strangely familiar. The
man who distrusted Tanner and who knew there was a reason for it. The
man in whose mind small bits of memory kept bobbing to the surface,
like a ship that was breaking up beneath the sea and planks and spars
kept rising to the top.

He also knew that that way lay ... madness. Two minds could not
continue to dwell in the same body. He could not continually war with
himself. The weaker, the fainter of the two would have to die.

Which meant that the person who had brought his weaker memory to the
surface would have to die.

Avis was slated for death.

He worked at it consciously and carefully. One of the fusion packages
was planted in a small store in Chicago, near the intersection of 63rd
and Halsted. One of Avis' agents tried to pick it up and was killed.
Two more tried the next day--and failed.

The word filtered out that the package was a special package, that its
importance overshadowed that of other fusion packages. But no more
agents tried for it.

By the end of October, opposition had apparently dwindled and faded.
Avis had vanished from sight. There were reports that she had been seen
in Stockholm and once that she had been glimpsed in a Moscow suburb.
Then the reports ceased entirely.

Stan was not deceived. Avis would try once more, he thought. She would
try for the package in Chicago. So he prepared for her, for the final
ambush.

The 31st of October, agents were reported filtering down to the
intersection and Stan decided to step in personally.

He stepped out of the circle of shimmering light in an alley near
63rd street. Nobody noticed him at all. People were streaming past
him, racing through the alley to get away from the intersection. Stan
grabbed a man running past him.

"What's going on?"

The man was sweating with fear, his eyes rolling wildly.

"Christ, Mister, don't go out there! They got guns that shoot flames
and there's fifty people lying dead in the intersection! All in a
minute, I'm walking past on my way to Sears and all of a sudden the
streets are loaded with corpses!"

Stan let him go and raced up the alleyway. He could hear the quiet,
singing noises of the heat guns and the rapid, spanging gunfire of
Avis' men. She had come out in the open, trying desperately to convince
the apes that they were threatened by alien groups. She had turned off
the time projector halfway through the battle and it must have seemed
like carnage had sprung up instantaneously.

There were at least two dozen crumpled figures lying on the pavement
near the intersection. Some were crisped to near ash and others had
been blasted with the spanging pellets. Two cars were blazing furiously
and the windows in Sears and Wieboldt's had been shattered.

       *       *       *       *       *

A pellet whizzed past his ear and he ducked low, glancing swiftly
around the intersection. A thin, violet beam was playing from a
doorway in Sears and he dodged towards it, ignoring the other spanging
projectiles that ripped through the air and caromed off the building
walls behind him.

Tanner was in the doorway, nursing a bleeding shoulder, his face
glowing with the joys of battle.

"_Tanner, what happened?_"

"She's playing it in the open," Tanner snarled. "She's trying to
convince the apes that way!"

She might succeed, Stan thought slowly, but it was more likely that the
apes would blame it on a gang war of some kind. They wouldn't believe
the truth. They wouldn't want to.

Tanner pointed down the street a block. "Cover it down there and we'll
try to drive them towards you!"

Stan raced down half a dozen doors, then suddenly stiffened. There was
the wail of sirens. And then the heavy chatter of a machine gun and the
drifting choking of tear gas.

The spanging sounds and the violet beams suddenly stilled and figures
slipped quietly from the buildings towards the side streets. Stan
hesitated and then started running, away from the intersection.

He collided with Avis when she darted from a doorway. The granite face
had broken and tears were streaking down it. Before he realized it, he
was holding her tightly around the shoulders while she sobbed into his
chest.

He had been fooling himself all along, he suddenly knew. He couldn't
kill her. He couldn't come anywhere near to it.

He didn't want to.

"In every game," he said quietly, "there has to be a side that wins and
a side that loses."

Her sobs broke off and she looked up at him, shaking her head to clear
the hair from her face.

"I'm not crying because I've lost," she said quietly. "I'm crying
because ... a brave man is dying! Because so many brave men have died!"
She paused and the lines of weariness etched themselves back into her
face. "I should have told you, Stan. I should have told you long ago.
Maybe it might have helped."

She pointed to the intersection. "He won't ... last long. Go out and
say good-bye."

       *       *       *       *       *

He stared back at the intersection. It was quiet now, powdered concrete
dust settling slowly out of the air. Police were circling among the
quiet forms lying on the pavement while curious onlookers began to form
a ring around the corner.

He walked quietly back to the street.

"Over here, Stan." The voice was faint. "You better ... hurry!"

A figure was slumped by one of the cars, its whole left side a singed
and blackened mass of ash.

Stan walked over to him. The man coughed and spewed a gout of red over
the front of him. "We always wondered what had happened, Stan ... Mom
and me. And then Avis found me and told me you had sold out." The low
hacking cough again and a spasmodic heaving of the chest. "N ... never
believed it. You weren't the type." His eyes closed in brief pain.
"Told her that a hundred ... a thousand times, I guess." He paused for
a moment and Stan thought he was gone. Then the eyes flickered open.

"I was g-gonna break the whole story in tomorrow's editions. Guess ...
your man got wind of it."

Stan couldn't bring himself to look down at the left side where the
clothing was burned and where half of the waist was carbonized. He knew
Tanner's work with the heater and he knew how well the man liked to see
his victims squirm.

The cough started in again and suddenly the man was sitting up, his
face twisted with pain and tears. "_Y-you don't even remember me! Y-you
d-don't even remember your own damned brother!_"

And just before he died he said: "I'm s-sorry, Stan. God bless...."

And then he was gone and Stan knew that the man he was holding was
nothing more than dead clay. He crouched there, his face wet, and the
bits and tiny pieces of personality that had once been Stanley Martin
coalesced and recombined into the individual they had been eight years
before.

He stood up, the tears streaming down his face, and looked down at his
brother Larry. A flood of memories were surging back. The games they
had played, the arguments they had had, the way they had stuck up for
each other....

And he could remember that morning when he had been slugged and the
Thuscans had picked him up. Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Ainsworth and Tanner
and the knives and the machines that had broken his spirit.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. A policeman had his notebook out
and was looking at him curiously.

"You knew this man?"

"Once," Stan said slowly. "A long, long time ago."

He turned and walked up the street.

"Hey, you can't go! We need your help for questioning!"

He had more important business, Stan thought. With Mr. Ainsworth and
Mr. Malcolm.

And his fellow renegade, Tanner.

       *       *       *       *       *

Avis was waiting for him in the alley, standing in the shadows by the
circle of whirling black. Her face wasn't the collection of hard
planes and angles it usually was and he realized dimly there was a
beauty about her he had never appreciated before. A beauty and a
certain sympathy....

He stood helplessly and looked at her. There was nothing he could say.

There was nothing _to_ say. He had betrayed his world and she knew it.

"It's not too late," she said quietly.

He shook his head. "It's all over but the gloating." He felt himself
start to shake. "_My God, I've condemned a world to death!_"

"You can stop it."

"There's no time!"

"There's four days."

Four days, he thought wildly. Four days in which to recover fifty
fusion packages hidden in cities that circled the globe. Four days in
which he had to baffle his own agents ... and Tanner.

"I'm only one man, Avis. I could try--but I wouldn't make it!"

"If you want help," she said, "all you have to do is ask."

She still had her own organization, Stan thought. It wasn't as large
as his own but its members were willing to die for a cause and they
were brave and courageous. They didn't have the advantage of the
transport-hoops, but then they were already spread out around the
globe. It would be easy for Avis to communicate with them.

All he had to do was to give her the locations. And then, between
himself and her agents....

It might be possible at that.

"All right," he said grimly. "Let's try it." He checked his heat gun
and the two of them stepped through the shimmering haze....

... into the apartment in Bristol. He cautioned Avis to be quiet, and
then opened the door silently into the living room. Tanner wasn't there
but his lieutenant, Langerman, was. A small, wiry man with a rodent's
face and sliding eyes who preferred looking at the small of a man's
back rather than looking him straight in the eyes.

It had been necessary for Tanner and he to include one man in their
confidence, one man who would hold down the fort in Bristol and watch
the panels that marked the location of the fifty fusion packages and
the agents.

Langerman was sitting by the fusion package panel, reading a newspaper.

He looked up when Stan stepped into the room. "How's it going, boss?"

"It's going all right," Stan said casually. He reached into his pocket
for some money. "How about going down to the corner and having some
lunch sent up? Anything that looks good."

       *       *       *       *       *

Langerman grabbed the coin, shrugged, and sauntered towards the door.
"Sure thing. Sandwiches and tea."

As soon as he was gone, Stan motioned Avis into the room and started
writing down the exact locations of the fusion packages. Suddenly there
was a voice behind him.

"Hey, what's going on? How'd the chick get in?"

Langerman had come back, his shirt faintly spattered with rain drops.
He had gotten as far as the front door, Stan thought, discovered the
state of the weather, and come back for a rain coat.

_Nothing was going right...._

It was too late for explanations. Langerman's hand had snaked beneath
his suit coat and come out with a small pistol.

"Tanner would like to hear about this," he said, his eyes narrow.

He should have thought of that long ago, Stan thought coldly. Tanner
hadn't trusted him, never had. Tanner had watched him. And when Tanner
wasn't around to do the watching, he had made sure that somebody else
was.

He didn't argue. He straightened out and dove for Langerman's legs.
There was a sharp report and a splintering sound behind him and then
Langerman was down, frantically trying to hit Stan in the face with
the pistol butt.

Stan rolled him violently against the wall and grabbed for the hand
that held the pistol. He caught it and tried to force it back. The two
arms wavered, then Langerman began to give a little, his arm moving
slowly back.

A world was in the balance, Stan thought grimly, and with a surge of
strength he had the pistol. He slashed at Langerman's head and the
little man went limp.

He stood up and thrust the list into Avis' hand. "There it is--all
fifty. I've marked the ones I'll try to work myself."

She took the list and started back to the whirling circle.

"We'll meet again?" he pleaded.

"Right here," she said calmly. "On November 4th."

He watched her disappear, then worked the dials for another destination
and stepped through to the unknown.

He had four days, he thought, in which to save a world.

Four short days.




                              CHAPTER XI


The night clouds rolled across the steeples of Bristol and the muffled
voice of a church clock somberly rolled across the city, striking the
hour of ten. The hush of a chill autumn night lay across the city,
mantling the fog that started to deepen in the city streets.

In a small apartment on Regent street, a box-like machine sat quietly
in a corner, staring at the growing gloom with fifty red, unwinking
eyes.

At five minutes after the hour, there was a flickering and then there
were only forty-nine. By eleven o'clock, the eyes had been cut down to
forty-six.

The evening of the first, there were only thirty-nine.

By the third, there was only a dozen. And every hour that went by saw
another light wink out....

He stood in a Moscow subway station, watching the trains thunder past
and keeping an eye on a trash can in a little niche near an elaborate
mosaic of Malenkov. None of the comrades, he thought, would think of
depositing litter near the mosaic of the leader and so the can had
never been used.

And since the cleaners knew it was never used, there was no earthly
reason why it should have to be disturbed and emptied. So the can sat
there and had never been touched.

Except once.

For a moment the platform was deserted and Stan walked rapidly back to
the can. A moment later he held the fusion package in his hand....

Somebody barked something at him and he looked up, startled.

A few yards away, there was a man in the uniform of the people's
police. He could have been hiding for any one of a number of reasons,
Stan thought. He could have been watching for petty thievery or perhaps
there had been a drive against littering the platforms.

But it didn't matter why he was there. The point was he was asking
questions in Russian and Stan couldn't answer him.

Another train roared in and people poured out of it, crowding together
on the platform. Stan turned and darted for a washroom, breaking
the wrappings on the fusion package as he ran. A moment later he
had snapped the detonating wires and broken the delicate, clockwork
mechanism and the almost infinitesimally small transceiver.

He threw the remains of the package under the wheels of the train at
the same time a pistol shot roared above his head, chipping off some of
the tile of the ceiling.

Then he had made it to the washroom door, passed his hand over a brass
plaque, and darted through the circle of black that appeared into....

... a dark corner of a bazaar in Damascus.

The bazaar stretched down both sides of the street, terminating against
a mosque at one end. There were small, open shops that sold copperware
and incense burners and large metal dishes, ornately tooled. There were
tables and boxes of elaborate mosaic work--tables with veneers of rare
wood and inlaid with mother of pearl. There were small restaurants and
notion stores and shops that displayed bolt after bolt of silk and
brocade.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stan watched the people wandering past, then brushed past a small
native boy begging for coins, and walked into one of the silk shops.

"Yes, M'sieur?"

"You're holding a bolt of brocade for a Mr. Liebman. May I see it
please?" Stan flashed a card.

The little clerk waddled to the back of the store and returned with a
small bolt of silk. Stan reached for it but the small man held it back.

"You are Mr. Liebman?"

Stan was sweating. "I'm a friend of his."

"I'm sorry, M'sieur. I was told not to release this to anybody but Mr.
Liebman."

The little man wanted to stand and argue while the world went up in
flames, Stan thought. He pulled out his wallet and slid a five dollar
bill across the counter.

"I don't think Mr. Liebman would want this quite as much as I would."

The little man was not convinced. "Perhaps not but...."

Stan thrust out the flat of his left hand and pushed the clerk back
against the shelves. Bolts of cloth rippled down from them and Stan had
to dig beneath them to get the one he wanted.

A moment to open the bolt and cut the wires of the package and then he
was out in the street once more, the clerk's shrill, indignant screams
echoing after him.

He raced to the end of the street, near the mosque, for the dark corner
that looked a little too dark and a little too glossy and then....

... out again in a small street a block from the Vatican in Rome. It
was early evening. Twelve more hours to go, he thought, for the last
one. That wouldn't take long and he could double-check any that Avis'
agents might have missed.

He hailed a taxi and sped out to the ruins of the old Forum. He
waited until the taxi had left and then walked over to the column of
Trajan--the tall, marble column that had been erected in order to
commemorate the victories and the accomplishments of the old Roman
emperor. He vaulted the low iron fence that surrounded the column and
broke the lock on the door that led to an interior stairway.

The package was still in its niche at the top of the stairs. Stan tore
at the wrappings and pulled, its teeth, then crushed the package in his
hands. That was the end of....

There was the sound of racing footsteps up the winding stairwell.

       *       *       *       *       *

He flattened himself against the wall until they came into view, then
launched himself down the stairs, landing squarely on the chest of a
burly man so they both rolled down the steep flight of stairs.

Tanner had finally gotten wind of what was going on, Stan thought
sharply. But it was too late to do anything about it now. The invasion
had been set, you couldn't stop a fleet once it rolled into motion.
The overconfident Thuscans would land--to discover to their shocked
surprise that there was organized resistance.

Mr. Ainsworth's "apes" wouldn't be a pushover....

"_Bastarde...._"

The burly man wasn't alone. There was another at the bottom of the
stairs. Stan twisted his body, holding the first Italian in front of
him. There was a pistol shot and the sound of a bullet smacking into
solid flesh. The man whom Stan held screamed shrilly, his eyes flaring
wide.

Then all three of them were down. Stan leaped for the door and slammed
it after him. A moment later he was sprinting through the low midway of
tumbled arches and forlorn columns of the glory that had once been Rome.

He caught another taxicab by the Colliseum, slipped the driver the
contents of his wallet, and sagged against the cushions exhausted.

A shot shattered the rear window of the cab and he felt vainly in his
coat pocket for his heater. It must have fallen out during the long
fall down the flight of stairs, he thought. Which meant that he was
defenseless.

He left the cab a few doors down from the alley and sprinted into the
darkness, another shot whistling past his ear. He was almost up to the
circle of shining black when the bullet plowed into the fleshy part
of his back and he half stumbled, half fell into the pool of whirling
blackness....




                              CHAPTER XII


"_You didn't succeed, Martin. Come on--wake up so I can tell it to your
face. You and the rest of the apes have lost forever!_"

He stirred and gagged and then rolled on his side, feeling the pain
from his shoulder lance through his body. There had been the shot and
he had felt himself falling and then there had been a voice....

Tanner's voice.

His eyes jerked wide open and he sat up, wincing at another flash of
pain.

"Finally awake, are you?"

He turned. Tanner was on the small pedestal that held the hoop,
standing nonchalantly in front of the circle of whirling black.

"You'll be sorry you woke up, Martin. Frankly, I should think you would
be wishing you were dead." He half smiled to himself. "There's knives
in the kitchen, incidentally, in case you should want to do something
about it. I imagine you have quite a guilt complex."

Stan whipped his head around to look at the small box-like machine that
kept score of the fusion packages. Only one light was still lit.

The light for Chicago.

Tanner smiled lightly. "Don't think you've won just because there's
only one light left. Fifty fusion packages was our safety factor. We
actually only needed one."

Stan's face mirrored what he thought and Tanner read the look.

"That's right," he nodded. "Only one. We wanted to create panic and
one will do that. When it goes off, that's all we need. The rest of
the world will hear about it seconds later. And then the flight will
be on." He paused. "You don't think that people--anywhere--are going
to remain in their cities, do you? All the police, all the commissars
in existence, couldn't make them do that. And then the air fleets
will spring into action. One fleet because it demands vengeance, and
the other because the only defense is a good offense, as the ape
politicians are so fond of saying."

He shrugged. "You see? It really only takes one for disaster."

Stan gathered his muscles for one last lunge....

Tanner caught the movement and raised his eyebrows.

"You wouldn't want to do that, Martin. For one reason, I've got Avis.
And for another, it would be too late. The blast went off ten seconds
ago."

He waved and stepped into the blackness.

Stan reeled over to the set and dialed Chicago. The sheet of blackness
formed, wavered, and then faded back to the edges of the hoop.

He had lost, Stan thought, dazed. The city he had been born and raised
in was one with the drifting atoms of the air.

Tanner had won, completely. And Tanner had Avis.

Stan huddled in the center of the room, his mind a melee of flickering
thoughts. Then a noise at the window caught his ear. The noise of doors
slamming and the starting of a thousand automobiles and people running
through the streets. He didn't bother to look--he knew what it was.

The exodus of a billion people from ten thousand towns and cities was
on the way.

There was six hours to go before the start of the brief, abortive war.
Six hours before the air fleets would arrive at their destination.

A day later the Thuscan fleet would settle from the skies to begin the
mopping up operation, the operation that would change the face of a
green, water world to a world that would be another colony planet for
Thusca.

A world in which the human race would play no part.

_And there was the matter of the girl...._

       *       *       *       *       *

The noise outside the street was a steady roar, now. The street was
gorged with people on foot and on bicycles and in automobiles, fighting
to get out of the city. He could hear screams and curses and over all,
the faint crackle of flames.

In a few hours, the city would be a roaring inferno, he thought. There
would be nobody left behind to put out the fires. And the scene would
be duplicated a thousand times over before the sun went down.

And the next day there would be the final, terrible tempest when the
Thuscans arrived. When humanity would go out in a short, confused
struggle.

There was nothing left to do but prepare to die....

Then he thought again of Avis and knew there was one last, forlorn
chance.

He raced back to the communications room and pressed the switches on
the small television set with which he and Tanner used to communicate
with Mr. Ainsworth on the Thuscan flag ship.

Avis had mentioned that her own fleet was standing by. A small fleet
perhaps, but certainly not one without possibilities.

He waited a moment for the tubes to warm up, then dialed the frequency
Avis had once mentioned. There was a pause and the screen grew bright.
A face wavered on it for a moment and then grew steady. It was the face
of a middle-aged man dressed in a dull blue uniform. His eyes looked
like they had seen all there was to see of both heaven and hell.

Stan explained the situation urgently. The face nodded acceptance of
what had happened.

"Can you get out of the city?"

The sounds outside were a steady roar now. Stan hesitated a moment,
then said yes.

"We'll try to pick you up. Take the main artery out of the city to the
small wooded park."

"What are you going to do?"

The lines in the man's face deepened. "Outside of pick you up, there's
nothing we can do."

Stan flicked off the switch and started for the door. So there was
nothing they could do. Nothing they could do to save a world or to save
Avis.

Well, that remained to be seen.

       *       *       *       *       *

He opened the street door and was almost swept into the tightly
packed, fast moving throng. He stepped back into the doorway for a
moment, letting the fighting, struggling mob sweep by. A father held a
squawling baby high above his head. A woman was crying, hugging a small
bundle of clothes to her as she struggled on. Suddenly she slipped and
fainted and slid beneath the thousand feet of the mob. Stan didn't see
her reappear.

He closed the door and ran to the back. The alley was crowded but not
nearly so packed as the street.

Perhaps half an hour had passed since Tanner had appeared in the hoop,
he thought. He had five and a half hours to go before the bombs started
dropping.

His back pained him and he could feel the blood start to well where
he had been shot. He grimaced and struggled on. A man next to him was
lugging a small, portable radio and Stan could hear the frightened
announcer reading off the government's mobilization orders and
exhortations to remain calm.

They were useless, Stan thought bitterly. They could have no more
effect on the tidal waves of humanity leaving its cities than Xerxes
had on the ocean, when he had ordered it to be whipped. Humanity was
leaving its huddling places and there was nothing that could stop them.

An hour later and he made two miles through the packed outskirts of the
city. The crowd was thinning now and he thought he could make out the
wooded sections of the park, not more than three or four blocks ahead.
It couldn't be too much longer, he thought. He wasn't sure of how much
more he could take....

His shirt was torn and the wound in his back was bleeding freely.
Worse than that had been the sights he had seen on the way--women and
children trampled underfoot, and the few neurotic souls who had given
up and taken the short way out by leaping from windows.

It was slaughter, even without the war, he thought. Humanity was
destroying itself in senseless panic. And then he was in the wooded
area that had grown close to the city. He pushed through the brush and
trees until he found a small clearing. The mass of people streamed past
it, anxious to put miles between themselves and the buildings that so
obviously spelled destruction.

He had waited for perhaps an hour when a small life boat rocket put
down in the clearing. He looked at his watch before stepping aboard.

Time had narrowed to three hours.




                             CHAPTER XIII


The war rockets from Avis' home system of Aurelia stretched through
space like a thin, red string. There were more than a hundred there,
Stan thought, but he knew without asking that they were hopelessly
outnumbered by the Thuscan ships.

The small rocket maneuvered over the lead ship--a hatch slid back--and
the rocket settled slowly through the opening.

A moment later and Stan was in the main cabin, facing half a dozen
tired looking men wearing the same dull blue uniform as the man on the
screen. They were supposed to be fighting men, Stan thought, but they
didn't look the part.

They looked more like frightened civilians who had been drafted.

The man Stan had seen on the screen introduced himself as Elal and
smiled wryly.

"We're not the professionals you've associated with until lately,
Martin. Fighting is something new for us. It will be a while before we
achieve the hardened look of the warrior race."

His voice was soft and tired. The voice of a man who had lost his
spirit, who had ceased to hope.

"What's the situation?" Stan asked.

Elal shrugged. "You should have been able to size it up quickly. We are
outnumbered--about ten to one, I would say. We had been hoping until
the last minute that perhaps Avis would succeed, that she would be able
to prevent the subversion of the planet."

"Just what would that have accomplished?"

"You Terrans are not without the means of defense," Elal pointed out.
"In many ways you may be backward and primitive but you have deadly
weapons. And a planet, strongly organized for resistance, would be very
difficult for the Thuscans to take over. They have never succeeded in
storming one outright. They have always had to rely on infiltration."

"Your weapons aren't puny either," Stan said. "You have the time
fields."

"They have limited application--they are good for only small fields and
only for short times. And the Thuscans have neutralizers."

Another man, who looked oddly familiar, spoke up.

"What's happened to Avis?"

Her father, Stan guessed shrewdly.

"She was captured by Tanner."

There was a short silence and the men looked oddly helpless.

"Well, what are you going to do?" Stan burst out. "You're the only hope
that's left!"

Elal shrugged. "What is there to do? We have you. Perhaps you will be
of help, if you can remember much of Thusca. So far as we know, you are
the only man who has been there and returned. Outside of...." And then
he broke it off.

"You're going to leave the world go by default?" Stan asked coldly.
"And Avis, too?"

The group of Aurelians looked annoyed. "What would you have us do?"
Elal asked. "We gambled and we lost. We are outnumbered ten to one.
And this is not the only world we have to worry about, Martin. There
are a thousand others."

"And you'll be outnumbered at each one, won't you?" Stan asked
grimly. "You'll be continually retreating but the odds will never
get any better. As your ring of defenses collapses and allows you to
concentrate more and more, the area the Thuscans have to concentrate on
will be steadily getting smaller. You have to make a stand for it--why
not here?"

"It wouldn't work. We would lose. And we're far too large a part of our
total fleet to take the risk."

They wanted to give up because it looked bad on paper, Stan thought.
They didn't want to see blood spilled, they didn't want to get their
fingers dirty.

"Where's the Thuscan fleet?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The young man at the controls worked the dials of a screen which lit up
to a luminous black. There was the Earth at one end of the screen--a
green globe the size of a basketball--and then the star-flecked, velvet
sky.

Stan watched a small collection of brilliant lights move slowly across
the screen. The operator pressed another button and that segment of the
heavens suddenly leaped forward into the viewscreen. The collection
of lights swiftly evolved into the glowing, rod-like ships of the
Thuscans. They were arranged into a triangle, a large, reddish colored
ship at the apex.

Mr. Ainsworth would be on that ship, Stan thought. Mr. Ainsworth and
Mr. Malcolm and maybe even Tanner.

It was ... logical that Tanner would be there. His work on Earth was
done. And it was probable that Avis was on the ship with him. She would
be valuable as a hostage.

He stared thoughtfully at the screen. It wasn't a neat triangle, it
wasn't a really militaristic formation. The files of ships were a
little straggly, as if their commanders weren't really expecting any
opposition. From any quarter.

"We could go down," Stan said thoughtfully. "We could force the lead
ship to land in Europe. It would be Exhibit A, it would stop the war.
You would have time to make explanations and if I know the ... apes ...
they wouldn't be such pushovers after that."

"You think it would succeed?" one of the men asked sarcastically.

"There's always the element of surprise," Stan said bitingly. "It's
probably the last thing they would be expecting you to do." He paused.
"You say that you are outnumbered and your weapons are not the best.
Have you ever tried the oldest one of all--courage?"

There was a dead silence.

"You're being very inspirational," Elal said after a moment. "But I
don't think you're being very practical."

Stan glanced around the compartment. The pilot was young. He looked
expectant, and somewhat hopeful. He would be willing to dare, Stan
thought. The others had never fought a war, they didn't know how.

Stan turned to the pilot. "Take it down--towards the lead ship in the
Thuscan Fleet!"

"How do we know he's changed?" a voice bleated. "Maybe he's still in
league with Thusca!"

Stan turned, the blue of a heat gun shining in his fist. "I have no
time to argue--but it's not true." To the pilot: "Take it down!"

"You forget that I'm the leader here," Elal said quietly.

"You've abdicated your position," Stan said softly. "A leader is a man
who can lead. You can't. _I_ can." His eyes blazed.

"_We're going down!_"




                              CHAPTER XIV


They plummeted through space, towards the lead ship in the Thuscan
fleet that was circling ever closer to the planet below. Stan glanced
at his watch. Barely an hour remained before the planet below would be
fighting a hideous, futile battle.

Barely an hour left in which he had to accomplish the impossible.

"Look!" somebody shouted. "Look at the screen!"

Stan glanced at it briefly. There was the Thuscan fleet laid out
below--much nearer now--and the small, flashing dot that represented
his own craft.

Behind him, strung out like a lazy figure C, was the rest of the
Aurelian fleet. They were following the leader down, even though they
recognized the enormous odds at which they were going to be fighting.

Courage, Stan thought, feeling something catch in his throat. The
unknown weapon.

But just how much could it accomplish?

"Contact in half a chrono," the pilot said.

Stan walked over to him.

"Show me how this works."

It was simple enough, Stan discovered. The firing studs for the
different, directional rockets could be played like the keys of a
piano. And the radar that indicated distance from another object was
accurate to the yard.

Stan studied the pilot for a minute, trying to guess at his reflexes.
"When we make contact, do exactly as I tell you."

He shifted his gaze to the viewscreen. The Thuscan fleet was much
nearer now, but the formation was changing slightly. The triangle was
more ragged, more uncertain looking. They weren't sure of what was
going to happen, Stan thought, and they were worried.

Which was just what he wanted.

"You'll kill us all!" a voice behind him screamed.

"Maybe I will," Stan mused softly. "I don't promise you a thing!" They
were brief miles away now.

"_Fire left!_"

The port rockets lifted the ship slightly and they flashed directly
over the Thuscan lead rocket, a bare half mile beneath them. The wash
from Stan's rockets flared lightly over the Thuscan ship and then they
were pulling away.

"Try again."

The pilot turned the rocket in a circle and headed back. Beneath them,
the lead Thuscan ship was belching flame and breaking out of formation,
trying desperately to get away from the insane men who were bent on
committing suicide.

Stan flashed them again, even closer. There was no place for the
Thuscan ship to go but down.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stan laughed outright and drove it like a dog herding sheep, hounding
them too close for them to bring their weapons into play, and daring
death every time he drove at them.

He was courting death and he knew it. And didn't care. The minutes were
ticking slowly by and he knew that time was running out for half a
billion people on the green globe below.

He glanced again at the viewscreen. Space was a tangle of flaring
lights and rocket trails. But confused as the picture was, he knew one
thing. Surprise and courage had been the elements they needed.

They were winning.

He turned to Elal. "Get the Thuscans on the viewscreen."

A moment later, the picture on the screen faded and another control
cabin faded in. The creature in the picture recognized Stan and a
moment later the sober face of Mr. Ainsworth was staring out at him.

"You shouldn't be doing this, Stan," Mr. Ainsworth said, his voice
sounding bewildered and hurt. "Is this the way you pay back friendship?
Is this how you repay hospitality?"

He could listen to the words and know they were lies. He could look at
Mr. Ainsworth and know what lay beneath that saint's face. But he still
wanted to believe. He wanted desperately to believe. To be told by Mr.
Ainsworth that all was forgiven.

His throat was dry and he was dripping sweat. His conditioning wasn't
going to disappear over-night, he knew. It would be a battle all the
time. And this was just the first round.

"I'm going to force down your ship and kill you," he said quietly.
"But first, we're going to play tag over every civilized capital on
the globe. We're going to let them know just what the story is. And
then, if the Thuscan fleet still wants to come in, they can go ahead
and try it. But I wouldn't advise it, Ainsworth! The apes won't be easy
pickings!"

He flicked off the set. They were in the atmosphere now and the air was
screaming past the hull. He could feel the temperature inside the cabin
rise and then the refrigeration went into action.

They rocketed over the ocean and then they were over London, a bare
five miles up. The ships and their exhaust were clearly visible to the
frightened millions camping outside the city.

Stan drove the Thuscans over Paris and Moscow and Tokyo and Washington,
timing his rocket blasts and forcing them whichever way he wanted them
to go. He threatened to crash them from above if they tried to leave,
and threatened to ram them from below if they tried to land.

Governments watched, frightened at the scene and realized what must be
waiting out in space. Huge planes that had been winging over arctic
wastes and across vast stretches of sea suddenly got crackling messages
that forced them to turn abruptly in their courses and head for the
nearest air field--whether it was friend or late enemy.

Far out in space, the void was filled with hulled ships and flaring
rockets that suddenly mushroomed into gigantic explosions. Down below,
Stan drove the Thuscan ship around the world and then towards Europe
again.

He finally forced it to crashland in the Tiergarten in evacuated Berlin.

       *       *       *       *       *

His own ship landed a block away.

The dazed officers in the compartment looked at him for guidance and
he realized that he was still the leader, that they still didn't quite
know what to do.

"You'll go out that airlock and you'll fight them," he said crisply.
"Hand to hand, if you have to. But you'll have to fight them--and to
kill them." He strode to the airlock. "Good luck!"

There was no motion about the other rocket and he thought for a
frightening moment that everybody on board had been killed. Then he
realized that they were waiting for him to make a move, to show himself
for an easy target.

He found a hiding place behind a bit of rubble and adjusted the stud on
his heat gun.

They weren't going to stay in their ship long, he thought. He would
_make_ them come out.

He turned the stud to high and aimed the gun at a port near the control
room. The crystal in the port colored, glowed, and suddenly fused.
Stan could dimly make out the control console and flashed his heater
at that. The violet beam touched the controls and they turned red and
fused. Then the beam caught a thin fuel line in the console and there
was a sudden spurt of white heat.

Seconds later, the fuel tanks erupted with a roar that showered bits of
red hot metal over the whole area.

A moment more, he thought....

The air about him was suddenly thick with lancing, violet beams and
he felt one touch him lightly on the shoulder, crisping the flesh and
setting his shirt on fire. He winced and beat out the flames, keeping
an eye on the hatch.

Then the hatch flew open and figures boiled out.

The slaughter was brief, and very thorough. But of all the creatures
that boiled out of the hatch, Stan didn't see the two he was looking
for.

When it was all over, he walked out to the field and glanced at the
bodies. There were none that looked like Tanner or--thank God--Avis.

He was touching one body gingerly with his foot when the young pilot
ran up to him.

"There was no action on the other side of the ship, was there, sir?"

"No. Why?"

"One of the ports, sir--fused. And there were no flames near it!"

Stan started running for the other side of the ship. There was the
blasted port and then footsteps in the carbonized grass that had
been flamed when the ship had landed. He ran quickly over the grass,
following the footsteps, then glanced ahead into the city.

He caught one brief glimpse of them. Two figures disappearing behind
some rubble, running toward one of the side streets....

And the hoop that Stan knew was in an alley behind the Russian owned
and operated department store in the Eastern sector.

Stan dashed through the streets. They were two blocks ahead of
him--Tanner and a girl, whom he was half pushing, half pulling.

A beam flared above Stan's head and he ducked and zig-zagged from one
side of the street to the other.

The figures turned a corner and Stan fired one last, futile shot at
them.

When he finally turned into the street, there was nobody in sight--only
the whirling black velvet of the hoop.

He hesitated and then dove through it....

... to a street he had seen once before. The Street of Lepers in
Casablanca.

The street was deserted--there were no signs of either Tanner or Avis.
He walked slowly down the street, and then there was a rustling noise
behind them. He whirled, just in time to see Tanner and Avis disappear
into the hoop again.

He ran and plunged in after them. It was going to be difficult, he
thought. He would have to leave the vicinity of the hoop to look for
them. And once his back was turned, they would be going through the
hoop once more.

       *       *       *       *       *

He caught a quick glimpse of Tanner in the deserted streets of
Barcelona, Spain. He almost ran into the two in the empty streets of
Shanghai. Madrid, Paris, Stuttgart, Leningrad, Los Angeles, Dallas--the
cities flashed by like a deck of cards that was flicked past his eyes.
The unending succession of black velvet hoops through which he moved
like a man traveling through an infinity of dimensions....

And then the apartment in Bristol and Tanner was there, waiting for
him. Simply standing against a table, waiting. Avis was in the far
corner, her face frightened and drawn.

Stan paused, eyeing the situation.

"It's been quite a chase, hasn't it?" Tanner asked.

Still the urbane Mr. Tanner, Stan thought.

"I caught you, though, didn't I?"

"It all depends on how you look at it. Perhaps _I've_ caught _you_."

Tanner held an unfamiliar weapon in his hand. Stan looked at it
curiously and then knew exactly what it was. Tanner had gotten hold of
Avis' time pistol. He was going to kill him like William Clark had been
killed.

Tanner was going to age him a hundred years in a second.

"Think you'll get away with it, Tanner?"

"Why not? There's nobody to stop me!"

How many times had he died in the last eight years? Stan wondered. How
many times had his life been hanging by a thread, waiting for somebody
to cut it?

"_Stan! Duck!_"

Tanner had been distracted just long enough by the shout. Stan dropped
to the carpet and rolled against Tanner's legs. Then they were both
on the floor. Stan grabbed for the arm which still clung to the time
pistol. Tanner grunted and twisted and then....

Stan paled and almost gagged.

Tanner was flickering.

In the background, Avis screamed. And then Mr. Ainsworth was looking at
him.

"I'm your friend," the creature said weakly.

Stan weakened and almost let go.

"I'm your friend," the creature repeated softly, triumphantly. "I saved
your life, didn't I?"

He was lying in the alley again, back in Chicago, lying there hurt
and bleeding. And Mr. Ainsworth had come up to help him. Out of all
the millions of people in the city, it was only Mr. Ainsworth who had
helped.

"I'm your friend," the creature purred again.

That still, quiet morning when the chill air had hung heavy over the
city....

And then the conditioning was totally gone and Stan felt exultant. He
hadn't realized....

He gripped the arm harder and twisted and the time pistol went
skittering across the carpet.

Mr. Ainsworth looked surprised and faded back into Tanner. A powerful,
cold-eyed Tanner who suddenly wrenched free and bent Stan under him.
He reached for a water carafe from the table to bring it down to smash
Stan's skull.

Stan jerked his head to one side and doubled his legs under him and
lashed out with them, catching Tanner in the chest. Tanner staggered
backwards towards the hoop, his foot unintentionally pressing the on
switch. The circle of black started to build up.

The time pistol was only a few feet away. Stan snatched at it and
turned it on the still reeling Tanner. It caught the creature flush at
the same time as he toppled back through the black velvet circle.

Stan's last glimpse of The Enemy was of a suddenly very old and aging
man--hair whitened and thinning, lines etched deeply in the face,
clothes sagging limply from a suddenly shriveled frame--toppling
backwards into the hoop.

And then the solid circle of black suddenly broke and faded into the
frame again.

Stan turned on his side and got sick. The Bristol hoop had been tuned
to Chicago. Only there was no more Chicago and no more hoop there. But
Tanner had toppled through--to where?

The creature that had been Mr. Ainsworth and Tanner was lost in a
space that had no beginning and no end.

And no exit.




                              CHAPTER XV


They stood on a parapet of the first building to be erected in New
Chicago and watched the tiny flares of the workmen who had come from
all over the world to rebuild the city. It was night--a cool, almost
clear night with only a few faint clouds scudding across the face of
the full moon. The stars blazed down, a million tiny candles flickering
against a background of black.

Avis moved her head a fraction and said: "Do you love me?"

"What do you think?"

After a moment, she said: "I have to go back tomorrow."

"I know."

"I ... don't want to leave."

"Why not?"

She smiled in the darkness. "You know why not. I don't want to leave
you."

He hunkered down on the parapet and she sat down beside him.

"They never told you my last name, did they?" she asked suddenly.

"It's Tanner, isn't it?"

"He was my brother."

He waited a moment, then asked: "What happened to him?"

"He wanted power," she said quietly. "Our society wouldn't give it to
him. So he sold out. Of his own free will--he hadn't been conditioned
like you were." She paused. "I suppose as long as there's a human race,
there will be people who want power and who will be willing to sell
their fellow man to get it."

Stan frowned. "That's why they sent you down to try and stop him,
wasn't it?"

She nodded. "I was the most qualified." Pause. "A Thuscan eventually
took his place, I know. But I wonder how he actually died. Did you ever
hear about him on Thusca?"

"He died a hero," Stan lied.

She smiled in the dark. "Thanks anyways. But I knew him, too."

"They used him as a model," Stan said. "Like Mr. Ainsworth and Mr.
Malcolm. There actually were human beings like that. Somewhere along
the line, the Thuscans captured them and studied them so they could
imitate them. Ainsworth and Malcolm and your brother served as models."
He shuddered. "Perhaps on some world there's an imitation Stanley
Martin walking around."

They watched the stars for a while and then Avis said: "You're a strong
man, Stan. How did they ever ... break you?"

"A simple technique--brain-washing you could call it. The Thuscans
set up Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Ainsworth and I was the man between. Mr.
Malcolm was the enemy, Mr. Ainsworth was the friend. Mr. Ainsworth
would 'rescue' me from Mr. Malcolm. There's no quicker way to build
up a friendship. I felt obligated, in a sense. And then there was
torture ... and machines. When my memory came back, I thought I had
it all figured. I only made one mistake. I never thought Tanner was a
Thuscan."

"He fooled a lot of people, including myself. You shouldn't feel bad."

"But I do! If Tanner had been a real human being, then they would never
have needed me.... Clever psychologists though they were, they had to
work through a human agency as a safety factor. If Tanner had been
real, they could have done it through him."

"You broke the conditioning," she pointed out. "How?"

He smiled. "That morning when they jumped me. They beat me up for half
an hour and nobody came to my rescue. Nobody but Ainsworth. Even in
Chicago, people don't stand by and let a 17 year old kid get killed by
three men. Tanner had used the time pistol. What had seemed to take
a half hour for me actually occurred in seconds. Nobody could have
helped me if they had wanted to!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He stared moodily at the sky. "You know, there isn't much here for me,
Avis. I lost my whole family when Chicago was wiped off the map. Larry
had died before then, of course." He lowered his voice to a brooding
sadness. "And the indoctrination I had, it hasn't entirely worn off.
Sometimes I think of people as ... apes again."

"What do you want to do, Stan?" Her voice was cautious.

He stood up and waved at the sky.

"I'm going back with you! There's a thousand worlds up there I've never
seen, a thousand adventures I've never had! And there's still Thusca!"

She laughed softly. "Anything else?"

He ran his fingers through her hair and brushed her lips. "You know
better than that...."

"We leave tomorrow," she repeated after a moment.

He kissed her softly and then lay back on the parapet and stared at the
flickering stars overhead. A breeze came in off the lake and tugged at
his hair and he imagined it sweeping on, blowing to a thousand worlds
he had never seen.

And a thousand adventures he had never had....



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