Harris felt a teeth-chattering chill as he began to come awake. The
stunner-bolt had temporarily overloaded his motor neurons, and the
body's escape from the frustration of paralysis was unconsciousness.
Now he was waking, and the strength was ebbing slowly and painfully
back into his muscles.
The light of morning streamed in through a depolarized window on the
left wall of the unfamiliar room in which he found himself. He felt
stiff and sore all over, and realized he had spent the night--where?--
He groped in his pockets. His weapons were gone; they had left his
wallet.
He got unsteadily to his feet and surveyed the room. The window was
beyond his reach; there was no sign of a door. Obviously some section
of the wall folded away to admit people to the room, but the door and
door-jamb, wherever they were, must have been machined as smoothly as a
couple of jo-blocks, because there was no sign of a break in the wall.
He looked up. There was a grid in the ceiling. Airconditioning, no
doubt--and probably a spy-mechanism also. He stared at the grid and
said, "Okay. I'm awake now. You can come work me over."
There was no immediate response. Surreptitiously Harris slipped a hand
inside his waistband and squeezed a fold of flesh between his thumb and
index finger. The action set in operation a minute amplifier embedded
there; a distress signal, directionally modulated, was sent out to any
Darruui agents who might be within a thousand-mile radius. He completed
the gesture by lazily scratching his chest, stretching, yawning.
He waited.
Finally a segment of the door flipped upward out of sight, and three
figures entered.
He recognized one of them: Beth. She smiled at him and said, "Good
morning, Major."
Harris glared sourly at her. Behind her stood two males--one an
ordinary-looking sort of Earther, the other rather special. He was
about six feet six, well-proportioned for his height, with a regularity
of feature that seemed startlingly beautiful.
Beth said, "Major Abner Harris, formerly Aar Khiilom of Darruu--this is
Paul Coburn of Medlin Intelligence and David Wrynn of Earth."
"A real Earthman? Not a phony like the rest of us?"
Wrynn smiled pleasantly and said, "I assure you I'm a home-grown
product, Major Harris." His voice was like the mellow boom of a
well-tuned cello.
The Darruui folded his arms. "Well. How nice of you to introduce us
all. Now what?"
"Still belligerent," he heard Beth murmur to the other Medlin, Coburn.
Coburn nodded. The giant Earthman merely looked unhappy in a calm sort
of way.
Harris eyed them all coldly. "If you're going to torture me, why not
get started with it?"
"Who said anything about torture?" Beth asked.
"Why else would you bring me here? Obviously you want to wring
information from me. Well, go ahead. I'm ready for you."
Coburn chuckled and fingered his double chins. "Don't you think we know
that torture's useless on you? That if we tried any kind of forcible
neural extraction of information from your mind your memory-chambers
would automatically short-circuit?"
Harris' jaw dropped. "How did you know--" He stopped. The Medlins
evidently had a fantastically efficient spy service. The filter-circuit
in his brain was a highly secret development.
Beth said, "Relax and listen to us. We aren't out to torture you. We
know already all you can tell us."
"Doubtful. But go ahead and talk."
"We know how many Darruui are on Earth. And we know approximately where
they are. We'd like you to serve as a contact-man for us."
"And do what?"
"Kill the other nine Darruui on Earth," Beth said simply.
Harris smiled. "Is there any special reason why I should do this?"
"For the good of the universe."
He laughed derisively. "For the good of Medlin, you mean."
"No. Listen to me. When we arrived on Earth--it was years ago, by
the way--we quickly discovered that a new race was evolving here.
A super-race, you might say. One with abnormal physical and mental
powers. But in most cases children of this new race were killed or
mentally stunted before they reached maturity. People tend to resent
being made obsolete--and even a super-child is unable to defend himself
until he's learned how. By then it's usually too late."
It was a nice fairy-tale, Harris thought. He made no comment, but
listened with apparent interest.
Beth continued, "We discovered isolated members of this new race here
and there on Earth. We decided to _help_ them--knowing they would help
us, some day, when it became necessary. We protected these children. We
brought them together and raised them in safety. David Wrynn here is
one of our first discoveries."
Harris glanced at the big Earthman. "So you're a superman?"
Wrynn smiled. "I'm somewhat better equipped for life than most other
Earthmen. My children will be as far beyond me as I am beyond my
parents."
"Our purpose here on Earth is to aid this evolving race until it's
capable of taking care of itself--which won't be too long now. There
are more than a hundred of them, of which thirty are adult. But now
Darruui agents have started to arrive on Earth. Their purpose is to
obstruct us, to interfere with our actions, and to win Earth over to
what they think is their 'cause.' They don't see that they're backing a
dead horse."
"Tell me," Harris said. "What's your motive in bringing into being this
super-race?"
"Motive?" Beth said. "You Darruui always think in terms of motives,
don't you? Profit and reward. Major, there's nothing in this for us but
the satisfaction of knowing that we're bringing something wonderful
into being in the universe."
Harris swallowed that with much salt. The concept of altruism was not
unknown on Darruu, certainly, but it seemed highly improbable that
a planet would go to the trouble of sending emissaries across space
for the sole purpose of serving as midwives to an emerging race of
super-beings on Earth.
No, he thought. It was simply part of an elaborate propaganda maneuver
whose motives did not lie close to the surface. There were no
supermen. Wrynn was probably a Medlin himself, on whom the surgeons
had done a specially good job.
Whatever the Medlins' motive, he determined to play along with them. By
now Carver had probably picked up his distress signal and had worked
out the location of the place where he was being held.
He said, "So you're busily raising a breed of super-Earthmen, and you
want me to help? How?"
"We told you. By disposing of your comrades before they make things
complicated for us."
"You're asking me to commit treason against my people, in other words."
"We know what sort of a man you are," Beth said. "You aren't in
sympathy with the Darruui imperialistic ideals. You may _think_ you
are, but you aren't."
_I'll play along_, Harris thought. He said, "You're right. I didn't
want to take the job on Earth in the first place. What can I do to
help?"
Coburn and Beth exchanged glances. The "Earthman" Wrynn merely smiled.
Beth said, "I knew you'd cooperate. The first target is the man who
calls himself Carver. Get rid of him and the Darruui agents are
without a nerve-center. After him, the other eight will be easy
targets."
"How do you know I won't trick you once you've released me?" Harris
said.
Coburn said, "We have ways of keeping watch."
Harris nodded. "I'll go after Carver first. I'll get in touch with you
as soon as he's out of the way."
* * * * *
It seemed too transparent, Harris thought, when they had set him loose.
He found himself in a distant quarter of the city, nearly an hour's
journey by helitaxi from his hotel.
All this talk of supermen and altruism! It made no sense, he
thought--but Medlin propaganda was devious stuff, and he had good
reason to distrust it.
Were they as simple as all that, though, to release him merely on his
promise of good faith? If they were truly altruistic, of course, it
made sense; but he knew the Medlins too well to believe that. Darkly he
thought he must be part of some larger Medlin plan.
Well, let Carver worry about it, he thought.
Though he was hungry, he knew he had no time to bother about breakfast
until he got in touch with the Darruui chief agent. He signalled for a
helitaxi and gave his destination as the Spaceways Hotel.
When he finally arrived, fifty minutes later, he headed straight for
his room, activated the narrow-beam communicator, and waited until the
metallic voice from the speaker said in code, "Carver here."
"Harris speaking."
"You've escaped?"
"They set me free. It's a long story. Did you get a directional fix on
the building?"
"Yes. Why did they let you go?"
"I promised to become a Medlin secret agent," Harris said. "My first
assignment is to assassinate you."
The chuckle that came from the speaker grid held little mirth. Carver
said, "Fill me in on everything that's happened to you since last
night."
"For one thing, the Medlins know everything, but _everything_. When
I went to visit the girl last night she was waiting for me with a
gun. She stunned me and carted me off to the Medlin headquarters.
When I woke up they gave me some weird line about raising a breed of
super-Earthmen, and would I help them in this noble cause?"
"You agreed?"
"Of course. They let me go and I'm supposed to eradicate all the
Darruui on Earth, beginning with you."
"The others are well scattered," Carver said.
"They seem to know where they are."
Carver was silent for a moment. Then he said, "We'll have to strike at
once. We'll attack the Medlin headquarters and kill as many as we can.
Do you really think they trust you?"
"Either that or they're using me as bait for an elaborate trap," Harris
said.
"That's more likely. Well, we'll take their bait. Only they won't be
able to handle us once they've caught hold of us."
Carver broke contact. Carefully Harris packed the equipment away again.
He breakfasted in the hotel restaurant after a prolonged session under
the molecular showerbath to remove the fatigue and grime of his night's
imprisonment. The meal was close to tasteless, but he needed the
nourishment.
Returning to his room, he locked himself in and threw himself wearily
on the bed. He was tired and deeply troubled.
Supermen, he thought.
Did it make sense for the Medlins to rear a possible galactic
conqueror? Earthmen were dangerous enough as it was; though the spheres
of galactic influence still were divided as of old between Darruu and
Medlin, the Earthmen in their bare three hundred years of galactic
contact had taken giant strides toward holding a major place in the
affairs of the universe.
Their colonies stretched halfway across the galaxy. The Interstellar
Development Corps of which he claimed to be a member had planted
Earthmen indiscriminately on any uninhabited world of the galaxy that
was not claimed by Darruu or Medlin.
And the Medlins, the ancient enemies of his people, the race he had
been taught all his life to regard as the embodiment of evil--these
were aiding Earthmen to progress to a plane of development far beyond
anything either Darruu or Medlin had attained?
Ridiculous, he thought. No race breeds its own destruction knowingly.
And the Medlins are no fools.
Certainly not fools enough to let me go on a mere promise that I'll
turn traitor and aid them, he thought.
He shook his head. After a while he uncorked his precious flask of
Darruui wine and poured a small quantity. The velvet-textured dark
wine of his homeworld soothed him a little, but the ultimate result
was simply to increase his already painful longing for home. Soon, he
thought, it would be harvest-time, and the first bottles of new wine
would reach the shops. This would be the first year that he had not
tasted the year's vintage while it still held the bouquet of youth.
Instead I find myself on a strange planet in a strange skin, caught up
in the coils of the devil Medlins. He scowled darkly, and took another
sip of wine to ease the ache his heart felt.