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.