Robert Silverberg: The Silent Invaders

Minutes ticked by. The public address system hummed again, finally, and at last came the word that the Lucky Lady had ended its ion-drive cruise and was tethered to the orbital satellite. It was time for him to leave the ship.

Harris left his cabin for the last time and headed down-ramp to the designated room on D Deck where outgoing passengers were assembling. He recognized a few faces of people he had spoken to briefly on his trip, and he nodded to them, stiffly, with the dignity of a military man.

A clerk came up to him. “Is everything all right, sir? Are there any questions?”

“Where is the baggage?” Harris asked.

“Your baggage will be shipped across automatically. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I wouldn’t want to lose it.”

“Everything’s tagged, sir. The scanners never miss. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Harris nodded. His baggage was important.

“Anything else, sir?”

“No. That will be all.”

More than three hundred of the Lucky Lady’s many passengers were leaving ship here. Harris found himself being herded along with the others through an irising airlock. Several dozen ungainly little ferries hovered just outside, linked to the huge starlines by swaying, precariously flimsy connecting tubes.

Harris entered one of the tubes, clinging to the guard rail as he crossed over, and found a seat on the ferry. The ferry filled rapidly, and with a blurt of ionic energy whisked itself across the emptiness of the void in a flight only a few minutes long. In another moment, Harris was once again crossing tubes, as the ferry unloaded its passengers into the main airlock of Orbiting Station Number One.

Bright lights greeted him. His remodeled eyes adjusted easily to the blaze. Another loudspeaker boomed, “ Lucky Lady passengers who are continuing on to Earth report immediately to Routing Channel Four. Repeat: Lucky Lady passengers continuing on to Earth report immediately to Routing Channel Four. Passengers transshipping to other starlines should go to the nearest routing desk at once. Repeat: Passengers transshipping to other starlines…”

Harris began to feel like an article of merchandise. There was something damnedly impersonal about the way these Earthers kept shunting you from pillar to post. On Darruu, there was a good deal more ceremony involved.

But this, as he had to keep in mind, was not Darruu.

He followed a winking green light through a maze of passageways and found himself at a place that proclaimed itself, in an infinity of languages, to be Routing Channel Four. He joined the line.

It took half an hour for him to reach the front. A bland-faced Earther behind the desk smiled at him and said, “Your papers, please?”

Harris handed over the little fabrikoid portfolio. The spaceport official riffled sleepily through it and handed it back without a word, stamping a symbol on the margin of one page. A nod of the head sent Harris onward through the doorway.

As he boarded the Earth-Orbiter shuttle, an attractive stewardess gave him a warm smile. “Welcome aboard, Major. Has it been a good trip so far?”

“No complaints, thanks.”

“I’m glad. Here’s some information you might like to look over.”

He took the multigraphed sheet of paper from her and lowered himself into a seat. The sheet contained information of the sort a tourist was likely to want to know. Harris scanned it quickly.

“The Orbiting Station is located eighty thousand miles from Earth. It is locked in a perpetual twenty-four hour orbit that keeps it hovering approximately above Quito, Ecuador, South America. During a year the Orbiting Station serves an average of 8,500,000 travellers—”

Harris finished reading the sheet, crumpled it, and stuffed it into the disposal in his armrest. As a mental exercise he visualized South America and tried to locate Ecuador. When he had done that to his own satisfaction, he leaned back, and eyed his fellow passengers aboard the Earthbound shuttle. There were about fifty of them.

For all he knew, five were disguised Darruui like himself. He would have no sure way of telling. Or they might be enemies—Medlins—likewise in disguise. Or, he thought, possibly he was surrounded by agents of Earth’s own intelligence corps, who had already penetrated his disguise and who would sweep him efficiently and smoothly into custody the moment the shuttle touched down on the surface of Earth.

Trouble lay on every hand. Inwardly Major Harris felt calm, sure of his abilities, sure of his purpose, though there was the faint twinge of homesickness for Darruu that he knew he would never be entirely able to erase from his mind.

The shuttle banked into a steep deceleration curve. The artificial gravitation aboard the ship remained constant, of course.

Earth drew near. Landing came.

The shuttle hung poised over the skin of the landing field for thirty seconds, then dropped, touching down easily. A gantry crane shuffled out to support the ship, and buttress-legs sprang outward from the sides of the hull.

A steward’s voice said unctuously, “Passengers will please assemble at the airlock in single file.”

The passengers duly assembled, and duly marched out through the airlock, out into the atmosphere of Earth. A green omnibus waited outside on the field to take them to the arrivals building. The fifty passengers obediently filed into the omnibus.

Harris found a seat by the window and stared out across the broad field. A yellow sun was in the blue sky. The air was cold and thin; he shivered involuntarily, and drew his cloak around him for warmth.

“Cold?”

The man who had asked the question shared Harris’ seat with him—a fat, deeply tanned, prosperous man with thick lips and a look of deep concern on his face.

“A bit,” Harris said.

“That’s odd. Nice balmy spring day like this, you’d think everybody would be enjoying the weather. You pick up malaria in the Service, or something?”

Harris grinned and shook his head. “No, nothing like that. But I’ve been on some pretty hot worlds the last ten years. Anything under ninety degrees or so and I start shivering. Force of habit.”

The other chuckled and said, “Must be near eighty in the shade today.”

“I’ll be accustomed to Earth weather again before long,” Harris said easily. “You know how it is. Once an Earthman, always an Earthman.”

“Yeah. What planets you been to?”

“Classified,” Harris said.

“Oh. Oh, yeah. I suppose you have to.”

His seatmate abruptly lost interest in him. Harris made a mental note to carry out a trifling adjustment on his body thermostat, first decent chance he got. His skin was lined with subminiaturized heating and refrigerating units—just one of the many useful modifications the surgeons had given him.

Darruu’s mean temperature was 120 degrees, on the scale used by the Earthers in his allegedly native land. (What kind of civilization could it be, Harris wondered, that had three or four different scales for measuring temperature?) When the temperature on Darruu dropped to 80, Darruui cursed the cold and bundled into winter clothes. The temperature was 80 now, and he was uncomfortably cold, in sharp and revealing contrast to everyone about him. He told himself that he would simply have to go on freezing for most of the day, at least, until in a moment of privacy he could make the necessary adjustments. Around him, the Earthers seemed to be perspiring and feeling discomfort because of the heat.

The bus filled finally, and spurted across the field for a ten-minute trip to a high-domed building of gleaming metal and green plastic. The driver called out, “First stop is customs. Have your papers ready.”