Robert Silverberg - The Silent Invaders

For a moment, his old loyalties surged forward hotly, until he remembered what he had seen in Carver’s mind. Only a sick man refuses to admit that he is sick , Harris thought, chastened.

He said, “What can I do—to help?”

“Seek out your Darruui comrades,” Beth said.

“And?”

“They must die.”

Her voice was firm. Harris said, “How can you heal thousands of years of hatred with new acts of bloodshed?”

“The point is well taken,” Beth said. “But we do not have time to heal your comrades. They are too far gone in hatred. They’ll have to be written off. If we don’t dispose of them quickly, they’ll hamper us in troublesome ways we can’t afford.”

“You want me to kill them?”

Beth nodded silently.

Harris did not reply. He stared at nothing in particular. The five who waited for him on the street nearby were Servants of the Spirit, like himself; members of the highest caste of Darruui civilization, presumably the noblest of all creation’s beings. At least, so he had been taught from the earliest.

To kill a Servant of the Spirit was to set himself apart from Darruu for ever. Every man’s hand would be against him. The shame of it would be impossible to conceal.

“Well?” Beth asked.

“My… conditioning lies deep,” he said. “If I strike a blow against them, I could never return to my native planet.”

“Do you want to return?” Beth asked.

“Of course I do!” Harris cried, surprised.

“Do you?” she asked. “Now that you’ve seen into the mind of a countryman? Your future lies here, don’t you see that? With us.”

Harris considered that. He weighed the possibility that he was still being deceived, and scowled the idea into oblivion. His suspicious Darruui nature would never rest, he saw. But it was impossible now to believe “that this was Medlin deception. He had seen . He knew .

After a long moment he nodded. “Very well,” he said. ” Give me back the gun. I’ll do the job you want.”

“Once before you promised that,” Beth said. “We knew then that you were lying to us.”

“And now?” he asked.

She smiled and gestured to Coburn, who handed him the disruptor he had dropped. Harris grasped the butt of the weapon, hefted it, and said, “I could kill some of you now, couldn’t I? It would take at least a fraction of a second to stop me. I could pull the trigger once.”

“You won’t,” Beth said.

He stared at her. “You’re right.”

He rode alone in the gravshaft and emerged at street-level, in the lobby of the great building. The lobby was less crowded now. He had gone down into the Medlin headquarters in the middle of the day, but unaccountably hours had passed. It was very dark now, though the lambent glow of street-lights brightened the path. He wondered if the other five had waited for him all this time, or if they had gone along to their own places.

The stars were out in force now, bedecking the sky. Harris paused in front of the building and looked up. Up there somewhere was Darruu, not visible to the eye, but there in one of those glittering clusters all the same. Perhaps now was the time of the mating of the moons on Darruu, that time of supernal beauty that no living creature could fail to be moved by.

Well, never mind, he thought. It did not matter now.

He reached the corner where they had arranged to wait for him. Earthers moved by, rapidly, homeward bound. Harris looked around, at first seeing no one, then catching sight of Carver standing casually by the lamppost, his sharp-featured slabjawed face a study in suppressed, simmering impatience.

As Harris approached, Carver said, “You took long enough about it. Well?”

Harris stared at the other man and thought bleakly of the squirming ropy thoughts that nestled in the other’s brain like festering, living snakes.

He said, “They’re all dead. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Sure we did. But we couldn’t be sure.”

“Where are the others?”

“I sent them away,” Carver said. “It was too risky, hanging around here all day. How did you manage to spend so much time up there?”

“They were scattered all over,” Harris said. “I was waiting to get the greatest number of them at the same time. It took time.”

“Hours, though?”

“Sorry,” Harris said.

He was thinking, This man is a Servant of the Spirit, a man of Darruu. A man who thinks only of Darruu’s galactic dominion, a man who hates and kills and spies, a man whose mind is a nesting-place for every revolting monstrosity that can be imagined .

“How many of them did you get?” Carver asked.

“Five,” Harris said.

Carver looked disappointed. “Only five? After all that time?”

Harris shrugged. “The place was empty. I waited and waited, but no more showed up. At least I got five, though. Five out of a hundred. That’s not bad, is it?”

“It’ll do for a start,” Carver said gruffly. He put his hand to his forehead and pressed it, and muttered a curse.

“Something wrong?” Harris asked.

“Headache,” Carver grunted. “Hit me all at once. I feel like I’ve been blackjacked.”

Harris looked away and smiled. “It’s the gravity,” he said. “It does peculiar things.”

He realized he was stalling, unwilling to do the thing he had come out here to do.

A silent voice said within him, Will you betray us again? Or will you keep faith this time ?

The street was too busy, too crowded, even now after dark. He could not do anything here. If he activated the subsonic, people would drop like flies for forty feet around. He had to get Carver alone.

Carver was saying something to him, Harris realized. He did not hear it. Carver said again, “I asked you—were there any important documents there?”

“No,” Harris said.

A cold wind swept in from the river. Harris felt a chill.

He said, “Look, let’s go get a drink somewhere, Carver. I feel pretty tired out. And it’ll be good for your headache too. We can celebrate—we’ve killed our first five Medlins.”

Carver shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

They started up the street. Carver pointed to a gay, brightly-lit saloon, but Harris shook his head. “Too noisy in there. Let’s find someplace quiet.”

They turned the corner, onto a narrow sidestreet. A winking sign at the end of the block advertised a bar, and they headed toward it. An autobar, Harris thought. That was what he wanted.

They went in.

The place was empty. Glistening banks of control devices faced them. As they crossed the threshold, a dull, booming voice from an overhead grid said, “Change is available to your left. We change any denomination of any accepted currency. Change is available to your left. We change any denomination of any accepted currency. Change is avail…”

“All right!” Carver snapped. “We heard you!”

The robot voice died away. Harris took an Earther bill from his pocket and laid it across the platen of the change-making machine. A shower of small coins came tinkling down.

“What do you recommend this time?” Harris asked.

Carver shrugged. “There’s a Terran whiskey called Scotch. Very ancient. Try some.”

Harris put a coin in the slot, waited, took the drink. He bought another one for Carver, and they settled down at a table. The emptiness of the bar was eerie. There were no sounds but the clicking of relays somewhere behind the facade of gadgetry, the soft purring of complex mechanisms.

Harris gulped the drink so fast he hardly tasted it. His raw, scraped nerves cried out for relaxation. He put another coin in the slot.