Robert Silverberg: The Silent Invaders

Inside, Harris found his baggage already waiting for him at a counter labelled HAM-HAT. There were two suitcases, both of them equipped with topological secret compartments that no one was likely to detect.

He surrendered his passport. The customs man glanced at it, then riffled it in front of an optical scanner that made an instant copy of its contents.

“Open the suitcases.”

Harris pressed his thumb to the opener-plate. The suitcases sprang open. The customs man poked through them perfunctorily, nodded, pushed a button that activated an electronic spybeam, and waited for a telltale buzz. Nothing buzzed.

“Anything to declare?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay. You’re clear. Close ’em up.”

Harris locked the suitcases again, and the customs official briefly touched a tracer-stamp to them. It left no visible imprint, but the photonic scanners at every door would be watching for the radiations, and no one with an unstamped item of luggage could get through the electronic barriers.

“Where do I go now?” Harris asked.

“Your next stop’s Immigration, Major.”

At Immigration they studied his passport briefly, noted that he was a government employee, and passed him along to Health. Here he felt a moment of alarm; about one out of every fifty incoming passengers from a starship was detained at random, to be given a comprehensive medical exam by way of plague-watch. If the finger fell upon him, he knew, the game was up right here and now. Ten seconds in front of a fluoroscope would tell them that nobody with that kind of skeletal structure had ever been born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The finger fell elsewhere. He got through Health with nothing more than a rudimentary checkup. At the last desk his passport was stamped with a re-entry visa, and the clerk said, “You haven’t been on Earth for a long time, have you, Major?”

“Not in ten years. Hope things haven’t changed too much.”

“The women are still the same, anyway,” the clerk said with what was meant to be a sly leer. He shuffled Harris’ papers together, stuck them back in the portfolio, and handed them to him. “Everything’s in order, Major. Go straight ahead and out the door to your left. And lots of luck on Earth.”

Harris thanked him and moved along, gripping one suitcase in each hand. A month ago, at the beginning of his journey, the suitcases had seemed heavy to him. But that had been back on Darruu; here on Earth they weighed only two-thirds as much. He carried them jauntily.

Soon it will be spring on Darruu , he thought. The red-leaved jasaar trees would blossom and their sweet perfume would fill the air.

With an angry inner scowl he blanked out the thought. Such needless self-torment was stupid. He was no Darruui. He was Major Abner Harris, late of Cincinnati, here on Earth for eight months of vacation.

He knew his orders. He was to establish residence, avoid detection, and in the second week of his stay make contact with the chief Darruui agent on Earth. Further instructions would come from him.

It took twenty minutes by helitaxi to reach the metropolitan area from the spaceport. Blithely handling the Terran currency as though he had been using it all his life, Harris paid the driver, tipped him precisely fifteen percent, and got out. He had asked for and he had been taken to a hotel in the heart of the city—the Spaceways Hotel. There was one of them in every major spaceport city in the galaxy; the space-liners operated the chain under a jointly-owned corporation for the benefit of travelers who had no place to stay on the planet of their destination.

He signed in and was given a room on the 58th floor. The Earther on duty at the desk checked out his papers and, as he handed Harris the registry plaque, said, “You don’t mind heights, do you, Major?”

“Not at all.”

A boy scooped up his bags. On Darruu, it would be a humiliation to carry another person’s bags. But this was not Darruu, Harris reminded himself once again, and when he reached his room he gave the boy who had carried his bags a demi-unit piece, received grateful thanks, and was left in solitude.

He locked the door. For the first time since leaving Darruu he was really alone . Thumbing open his suitcases, he dextrously performed the series of complex stress-pressures that gave access to the hidden areas of the grips; miraculously, the suitcases expanded to nearly twice their former volume as he unsealed them. There was nothing like packing your belongings in a tesseract if you really wanted to keep the customs men away from your property.

Busily, he unpacked.

The first thing to emerge was a small device which fit neatly and virtually invisibly to the inside of the room door. It was a jammer for spybeams. It insured a good measure of privacy.

A disruptor-pistol came next. Harris slipped it into his tunic-pocket after checking the charge.

Several books; a flask of Darruui wine; a photograph of his birth-tree. Bringing these things had not increased the risks he ran, since if any of them had been discovered it would only have been after much more seriously incriminating information had come to light.

The subspace communicator, for example. Or the narrow-beam amplifier he would use in making known his presence here to the other members of the secret Darruui cadre established on Earth.

Harris finished unpacking, restored his suitcases to their three-dimensional state, and took a tiny scalpel from the toolkit he had unpacked. Quickly stripping off his trousers, he laid bare the desensitized area in the fleshy part of his thigh, stared for a moment at the network of fine silver threads underlying the flesh, and, with three careful twists of the scalpel’s edge, altered the thermostatic control in his body.

He shivered a moment as his metabolism rolled with the adjustment; then, gradually, he began to feel warm. Closing the wound, he applied nuplast; moments later, it had healed. He dressed again.

He surveyed his room. Twenty feet square, with a bed, a desk, a closet, a dresser. There was a small airconditioning grid mounted in the ceiling. The usual plates provided a steady greenish electroluminescent glow. There was an oval window, beneath which was a set of polarizing controls. There was a molecular bath and washstand. It was neither the shabbiest nor the most elegant room he had ever stayed in. It wasn’t bad for twenty units a week, he told himself, trying to think the way an Earthman might.

The room-calendar told him it was half past three in the afternoon, 22 May 2562. He was not supposed to make contact with Central for ten days or more. Closing his eyes, he pictured the Terran calendar and computed that that would mean the first week of June. Until then he was simply acting the part of a Terran on vacation.

The surgeon had made certain minor alterations in his metabolism to give him a taste for Terran food and drink and to make it possible for him to digest the carbohydrates which the Terrans were so damnedly fond of consuming. They had prepared him well for playing the part of Major Abner Harris. And he had been equipped with fifty thousand units of Terran money, which was enough to last him quite a while.

Carefully he adjusted the device on the door to keep intruders out while he was gone. Anyone entering the room surreptitiously now would get a nasty jolt of energy, not enough to kill but enough to annoy. Harris checked his wallet, made sure he had his money with him, and pushed the door-opener.

It slid back and he stepped through, into the hallway. At that moment someone walking rapidly down the hall collided with him, spinning him around. He felt a soft body pressed against his.

A woman!

The immediate reaction that boiled up in him was one of anger, but he blocked the impulse to strike her before it rose. On Darruu, a woman who dared to jostle a Servant of the Spirit could expect a sound whipping.