The invasion of the base by the Alien had shocked them all, and few
people had slept during the night. On his way to breakfast, Norden
could feel the attention that was riveted on him. To the others, he was
probably one of the most likely targets for whatever attack had been
intended. He'd wondered about it himself, sick with a feeling of close
disaster; but he could find no logical basis for the fear.
Miles waited until they had finished with their food, his own face a
study in grim anxiety. Then he stood up, and faced them. "No work this
morning," he announced. "There's going to be a fluoroscopic test of
every person on the base!"
Norden felt a wrench at his mind that left his thoughts spinning. He
caught himself, just as he heard a gasp from Armsworth, a few places
down. But Miles went on as if nothing had happened.
"The guards have already been checked. They'll lead us all down to the
explosive test chamber. We'll go in, one at a time, and stand on a
marked square. The fluoroscope results will show on a television screen
visible to all of us. If you pass, you'll go across the chamber to the
cleared rooms beyond.
"Any man resisting or proven non-human will be shot at once. The
Alien last night _looked_ human, but he didn't breathe oxygen, so
his internal structure must be different. However, if anyone wants
to declare that he's an Alien, he'll be treated as a prisoner of war
instead of a spy."
Nobody made such a declaration, and Miles nodded to the guards who
had filed in, while fear-ridden faces were still staring at their
neighbors. Norden wondered how long a confessed Alien would last before
the men tore him to bits. Discounting hate was fine at long range--but
not when the danger was at your elbow.
Miles and Pat went into the chamber first, with the expected
result--human skeletons and shadowy organs showing up on the screen.
Norden stared in fascination, while fear built up tensions inside him.
Armsworth passed in and found his position, with a face that was
somehow both taut and frozen. The guards took a look at the screen and
waved him on. He half staggered to the exit, his features distorted
with an emotion that was unreadable.
Norden tried to fight down his own panic. Surely it would be madness
to doubt the outcome. But a doubt began to throb in his mind. He could
remember so little. He'd thought the Aliens had never found him. But
if they had actually captured him, tampered with his mind, and turned
him back again, would he know it? Suppose he was an Alien--one given
a spurious, hypnotic belief he was Norden until the right signal to
become himself again....
It was ridiculous, absurd! But the speculations ran on in his tormented
mind. He didn't belong here. Men apparently took it for granted that
a confessed spy could keep his life--and Norden took it equally for
granted that death was the only answer. He didn't think like the rest
of them. There had been that week on the asteroid. His memories were
spotty....
"Dr. William Norden!" the speaker announced.
He shuddered convulsively. Then he caught himself, and forced his
reluctant legs to move. The door shut behind him, and ahead lay
the white square on which he was to stand. He approached the spot
automatically, bracing himself to face straight ahead toward the
fluoroscopic screen.
_Now!_ It was almost a physical voice in his head. And his mind seemed
to shift, to shout something down. _Not yet! Look!_
"Okay, Dr. Norden," the speaker said. His eyes flicked to the screen
where a human skeleton showed dimly.
Crazy, he told himself. Hagridden with fears no sane human mind could
have endured and retained its sanity. No wonder the psychologists had
been uncertain about him. Unbalanced--but human!
Pat smiled weakly at him as he entered the room beyond, to join
the ranks of the elect. Then they watched as their group passed
successfully, to give place to a number of rocket men from the freight
gang.
The sixth rocket man came through the door boldly enough--and suddenly
leaped toward the side of the chamber where another door was. His hands
were jolting at the locked barrier when the rifles sounded. A violent
blast of greenish-yellow explosion rocked the chamber and shook the
floors beyond. When it cleared, the Alien was dust and vapor, with
nothing that could be studied for evidence.
Two workers who had been standing in line in a building beyond broke
through the seal together, without waiting their turn, and headed with
desperate haste for the shelter of a nearby barracks. A rifle bullet
tore into one, and both exploded instantly.
By the time the rest had been proved safe in a testing ordeal as grim
as death, it was the hour for lunch--a shocked, silent interlude at
first. Then one of the men caught sight of a neighbor busily shaking
his fork, and glancing sideways to emphasize some point. A tiny gadget
appeared, and was concealed quickly under the steak on the man's plate.
Ten seconds later, when the man cut into the meat, there was a cowlike
bellow and the meat leaped six inches up, and two feet sideways. There
was a shout of laughter that grew into a roar, and everything was
suddenly normal again.
Norden shook his head. The incident appeared grotesque to him.
Fluoroscope or not, something was wrong with him. He couldn't have been
so different from other men before the ordeal on Hardwick's asteroid.
That ruined steak had cost a small fortune to transport from Earth,
and the man would lose valuable time while waiting for another to be
cooked. And yet, Norden could see that somehow it had been effective
therapy, had relieved an almost intolerable tension.
They spent the afternoon sending out the test "balloon" rockets with
the various elements of Hardwick's screen. On the way back to the
barracks, Norden noticed there were now six guards stationed about the
laboratory, two of whom instantly fell into step behind him. He had
been shifted to the dormitory over the Headquarters building, where
he would be in the least danger--and also have the least freedom from
observation!
But he forgot it the next day as the results of the tests came in.
The shields had been completely ineffective. Dead rabbits still were
unmolested, but live ones had been picked off in everything they had
sent out.
Miles accepted the result with a despairing shrug, but Pat was hit hard
by it. None of the other research teams seemed to be getting anywhere.
There was no way to detect Aliens, and no way to screen humans.
On the fourth day, when the last possible variation of Hardwick's
formula had proved useless, and the Aliens had moved their lines up to
fifty million miles from Earth's orbit, Pat was down early, re-checking
the translation the computer had made. Norden came in, saw the results,
and swore.
For three hours, he pored over the Japanese scientist's
mathematics--and as before, he found his mind reaching for something,
only to begin some useless side speculation that threw him off. It was
as if he had a censor in his mind telling him he could go no further.
He considered the grim prospect of ten days or more of life for
himself, and the men here, until the noonday signal sounded.
Somebody had put a new plastic glue on the handle of his knife and
fork, and it was fifteen minutes before he could locate a solvent that
removed it. Pat laughed at his plight along with the others. He checked
his anger, swallowed it--and suddenly realized that in a strange way,
the practical jest played on him was a mark of acceptance.
He went back to the laboratory trying to think of something ingenious
enough to enable him to live up to their queer code. An idea that had
nagged him tantalizingly, just below consciousness, nibbled again at
his mind, but he let it go. If he could fit a protogravity generator
under a plate....
And abruptly, he was digging for the complete set of Hardwick's notes,
and scanning the nonsense that the computer had declared meaningless.
He picked up the telephone and called the library. "Give me what you've
got on Martian sand lizards!"
Most of it was useless. They were typical low-grade Martian life, tiny
things covered with fur, but vaguely lizard-like. Then the significant
part came. "The females demonstrate a remarkable ability to locate the
rare males at extreme distances. Janiekowski found that a female with
all sense organs removed could locate a male at a distance of five
kilometers, even when the male was enclosed in an airtight box of
laminated copper and soundboard. No satisfactory explanation is known."
It _had_ to be some form of telepathy or sensitivity to the life forces
of the male lizards! He went over the work done with the creatures a
dozen times, and could find no other explanation. And suddenly his mind
was milling about, trying to slide away from it again.
"Taboo!" he muttered. "_Damn_ the taboo!" It was too late for a taboo
to interfere now, whatever the reasons behind it. And fortified by his
growing certainty that something had been done to him, it only served
to confirm the fact that he was on the right track at last.
Pat listened to his summary of what he'd found, and nodded hopeful
agreement. "A quick test! It's what we need, all right. We still may
not find the insulator for the shield, but we can run tests fast enough
to have a chance. Metals first, then the other broad classifications,
until something vital turns up. Bill, I guess this makes me, and the
computer look pretty silly. And after all the yelling I've done about
flexibility being needed, too. I hope some zoo or laboratory on Earth
has a collection of the little beasts."
It turned out that Harvard was well stocked as a result of a research
plan to rework Janiekowski's experiments. In less than five hours,
twelve females and two rare males were lying in front of Norden. They
looked like small lizards covered with chinchilla hair, and possessing
eight legs apiece. The females, with scant modesty, were trying busily
to break down the wall that kept them from the males.
Pat had already installed three television pickups and cages at various
distant points, doing the work herself to insure secrecy, and picking
places most difficult to break into. Now she came back to move the
females to their new homes, where they immediately began trying to
crawl toward the torpid males, as shown by the television screens. The
walls of their cages were equipped with pressure-measuring devices to
test the strength of their efforts.
The mummy cloth drew a complete blank, as did the bat's blood. But the
ground mandrake set the males to pawing at their cake with their triple
tongues out, trying to reach it, while the distant females went berserk.
Pat took the stuff away, snorting at them. "They'll die of frustration
in another minute. To them an active male seems to be a combination
billionaire, video star, and accomplished Cassanova in the art of love.
I guess I know how they feel."
He was getting better at reading her glances, and he frowned as her
eyes rested upon him. He liked Pat, but sometimes she--
She laughed. "Forget it, Bill. I was only ribbing you. You have about
as much romantic appeal to me as my grandfather."
It was ten minutes later before he realized what a typical masculine
_human_ reaction to such a remark would have been. He frowned, while
his mind chilled at the implications. How could he doubt any longer
that the Aliens had caught him and done something to him--something
drastic? He wasn't quite human, despite what the bones of his body had
seemed to confirm.
And that could only mean that Hardwick's shield had never worked. He
stopped short, and then reconsidered. The difficulty he had forcing his
mind to think about tests for the lizards still spelled a taboo in his
mind--and that indicated there might be a shield. It left him exactly
where he was, except for the problem of what the Aliens wanted. If he
could solve that, and defeat it....
Nothing they tried gave any positive result, though Pat thought that
the variation in the female activity had been slightly more than normal
when they'd tried the potassium salt solution around the males. They
gave up late, and Norden went back to his bunk, and to the familiar
pattern of lulling himself into a semi-conscious condition by the
ritual of reviewing the day with his hands locked behind his head.
Then he swore. It was a pointless habit. He returned his arms to his
side and held them rigid, while his head squirmed unpleasantly. Habits
could be broken--and any compulsion he had as a result of whatever had
happened to him was a luxury he couldn't permit himself.
There would be no recovery until he had overcome the taboos and filled
all the gaps in his mind with useful things. Perhaps the Aliens had
already succeeded. They might have decided somehow that he was the only
man who _could_ solve the problem, and had tampered just enough to make
sure he'd fail, while keeping him competent enough to insure that no
other man would replace him.
He yanked his arms down again, and started to turn over. Fifteen
minutes later, he came out of a complete blackout with his hands at the
back of his neck again and a queer feeling that his mind had remained
active, with only his memory of its activities missing. His glance
darted to the door, but it was still locked, and his clothes lay on the
floor where he'd kicked them.
Apparently he hadn't moved from the bed while he'd been short-circuited
from his memory, at least.
He thrust himself up from the bed in disgust, pulled on his clothes,
and headed down the hall, back towards the laboratory. He passed the
cubicle where General Miles should have been sleeping and noticed a
trace of light shining under the door. For a second, he remembered
the man's words--a spy who confessed would be treated as an honorable
prisoner of war.
Only damn it, he wasn't a spy, whatever else he might be. And there was
no time left to find someone else to solve the problem that had been
dumped into his lap. He couldn't turn himself in while that problem
remained a race with death.
Inside his mind was a slowly growing hatred of the Aliens, and he clung
to it tenaciously. They'd denied him his right to be a normal human
being--and while their imposed attitudes made it impossible for him to
understand the absurd conduct of men, he was beginning to realize that
the fault lay with him, and not with the rest of humanity. It was not a
pleasant thought.
Fresh guards had replaced the original pair. They swung in behind him,
and then stopped at the entrance of the laboratory. He'd insisted that
they stay outside, since he wanted no one to watch his experiments with
the lizards. Complete ignorance of events was the only sure protection
against spies.
He headed around the computer by letting his feet guide him, and
reached for the switch. It clicked, just as a voice sounded in front of
him.
"Norden, you damned fool! Leave those lights off!"
But they were already on, showing the tall, unmoving figure of
Armsworth standing before the cage of the lizards with a knife in his
hand.