Robert Silverberg - The Silent Invaders

They had taken him miles from the hotel, then. He fed a small coin into the slot and punched out coordinates as the sign instructed, and a glowing light illuminated the path from his present site to the hotel. It was, he guessed, at least an hour’s journey by helitaxi from here.

He walked on. The spirals of a public helitaxi ramp gleamed yellow in the early sunlight not far ahead. He passed an open-air cafe, and the smell of newly baked bread and fresh coffee clawed at his stomach. But, hungry as he was, he knew he had no time to bother about breakfast until he had gotten in touch with the Darruui chief agent and passed the story along. A waiter came out and smiled at him hopefully, pointing to a vacant curbside table, but Harris shook his head and moved on.

He thought about Beth Baldwin and her words.

It seemed too transparent, too much of a strain on his credulity. All this talk of supermen and altruism, of fledgling mutant races that had to be coddled along and protected from the jealous furies of their obsolescent ancestors.

It made no real sense, Harris thought. Nothing that he knew of Medlin psychology led him to believe they would make themselves parties to any such absurd project. If anything, he reasoned, the Medlins would take quick steps to throttle any upsurge of new and potentially dangerous abilities among the Terrans. As would the Darruui, had they been the ones to discover the alleged mutants.

It was only a simple matter of self-preservation, after all. Supermen represent super-dangers. The universe was a precarious enough place as it was, without standing by complacently while new races came into being. Those that existed now were well enough balanced, strength for strength, in an uneasy but oddly comforting stalemate. Only madmen would allow an X factor to enter the situation—and only very deranged madmen indeed would actually help bring the X factor about.

No, he thought. There were no supermen. The idea made no sense at all—Medlin propaganda was devious stuff, and he had good reason to mistrust it.

Were they as simple as all that, though, to release him merely on his promise of good faith? After all, they knew his murderous intentions. Only some sort of sleight-of-hand on Beth’s part had saved her from death last night. And yet they had released him on his bland say-so of co-operation, after he had snapped and snarled at them for half an hour in scorn. If they were truly altruistic, it made sense, since in his lexicon pure altruists and pure fools were synonymous. But he knew the Medlins too well to swallow the idea that they could be as simple-minded as all that. Darkly he thought that they were using him as part of some larger Medlin plan.

Well, let Carver worry about it, he thought. It was his responsibility to form strategy and to meet Medlin challenges.

Harris reached the helitaxi ramp. A taxi was ready for takeoff, but a plump, pink-faced citizen of obvious self-importance scuttled past the Darruui, his green cape fluttering pompously behind him, and pressed his bulk into the car. Shrugging, Harris signalled for another. It whirred up the ramp and the door opened.

“Where to, Colonel?”

“Spaceways Hotel. And I’m only a Major,” he said, slipping back into character. “Thanks for the promotion, though.”

“Any time, Major.”

Powerful generators thrummed. The taxi lifted off and sought its level, under instructions from the master computer somewhere far beneath the city. Harris closed his eyes and settled back against the faintly acid-smelling cushion. The taxi was old, well worn. He listened to the droning of the computer voice.

He had never dreamed a city could be so huge. On Darruu, the size of cities was limited by an age-old statute to three million persons, and no city exceeded that. Of course, since all the planned urban formations had been developed for millenia, it meant that population was fairly stabilized. No new cities had been founded on Darruu for fifteen hundred years. All of the present cities had their maximum population quota. If you wanted to move to another city, you had to get a permit. That wasn’t so difficult, since there were always enough people moving back and forth to cancel out and keep each city at the statutory limit of three million.

But if you wanted to have a child—ah, that was something different. That had to be balanced against the death rolls, and death did not come early on Darruu. There were couples who had waited out their entire fertility span in fruitlessness without getting a permit, because of an uptick in longevity.

That did not concern Aar Khülom. As a Servant of the Spirit he did not have the right to reproduce himself. It was a sacrifice he freely made.

He did not question the system. It was a good one, he thought. It kept the planet stable, it encouraged emigration to the colony worlds, and it avoided helter-skelter urban scrambles of the kind he was experiencing now. He felt a sense of revulsion as he peered from the helitaxi ports at the city below, the endless city, the city of twenty or thirty or perhaps even fifty million humans, the city that stretched in gray rows to the horizon.

It was inconceivable to him that a city should have such distances that one could travel for fifty minutes by helitaxi within it. And he had not even gone from border to border. No, he had simply journeyed from a point near the southeast limb of the city to one near the heart of the city—and it had been nearly an hour’s trip, which meant a distance of hundreds of miles.

They were coming down, now.

The taxi swung in narrowing circles onto the landing ramp of the Spaceways Hotel. Harris paid the driver and headed straight into the hotel, and up to his room.

He activated the narrow-beam communiator, and waited until the metallic voice from the speaker said in code, “Carver here.”

“Harris speaking.”

“You’ve escaped?”

“Not exactly. They set me free of their own accord.”

“How’d you work that?”

“It’s a long story,” Harris said. “Did you get a directional fix on the building where they were holding me?”

“Yes. Why did they let you go?” Carver persisted.

Harris chuckled. “At their urging, I promised to become a Medlin secret agent. My first assignment,” he said pleasantly, “is to assassinate you.”

The answering chuckle that came from the speaker grid held little mirth. Carver said, “Is this some kind of joke?”

“The gospel.”

“You agreed to assassinate me?”

“First you, then the others.”

Carver paused. “All right, Harris. Fill me in on everything that’s happened to you since I saw you at the club last night.”

“I went back to the hotel,” Harris said. “I went to the Baldwin girl’s room, intending to remove her. But she was ready for me, ready and waiting. When she answered the door she had a disruptor in her hand.”

“What?”

“The Medlins know everything, Carver. But everything . They’re one step ahead of us all the way. I got the gun away from the girl, but she had a stunner on her and she let me have it. She said she’d been keeping tabs on me from the start, that she knew why I was here, that she knew about every phase of the Darruui mission here. Carver, there’s been a leak.”

“Impossible.”

“Is it? Listen, they know how many of us there are. She told me to my face that there are ten Darruui agents on Earth.”

“A lucky guess,” Carver scoffed.

“Maybe. But she knew my name. She knew my name, Carver ! She called me Aar Khülom! Was that a guess too?”

There was an instant of silence at the other end.

“Carver? I don’t hear you.”

“There’s no way she could have known that,” Carver said puzzledly. “No documents she could have captured anywhere that would give that away.”