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.