Robert Silverberg: The Silent Invaders

But this was not Darruu.

And he remembered a phrase from his indoctrination: it will help to create a sexual relationship for yourself on Earth, by way of camouflage .

The surgeons had changed his metabolism in that respect, too, making him capable of feeling sexual desires for Terran feelings. The camouflage theory held that no one would expect a disguised alien being to engage in romantic affairs with Terrans; it would serve as an effective bit of sidetracking.

“Excuse me!” said Harris and the female Terran in the same instant.

His training reminded him that simultaneous outbursts by two people were cause for laughter on Earth. He laughed. So did she.

Then she said, “I guess I just didn’t see you. I was hurrying along the corridor and I wasn’t looking.”

“The fault was all mine,” Harris insisted. Terran males are obstinately chivalrous , he had been instructed. “I opened my eyes and just charged out blind. I’m awfully sorry.”

He looked at her. She was tall, nearly his height, with soft, lustrous yellow hair and clear pink skin. She wore a black body-tight sheath that left her shoulders and the upper hemispheres of her breasts uncovered. Harris found her attractive.

Wonderingly he thought, Now I really know the surgeons have changed me. She has hair on her scalp, and enormous bulging breasts, and yet I can feel desire for such a creature!

She said, “It’s my fault and it’s your fault both. That’s the way most collisions are caused. Let’s not argue about it.” She threw him a dazzling smile. “My name is Beth Baldwin.”

“Major Abner Harris.”

“Major?”

“Interstellar Development Corps.”

“Oh,” she said. “Just arrived on Earth?”

He nodded. “I’m here on vacation. My last stint was Alpheratz IV.” He grinned and said, “You know, it’s silly to stand out here in the hall discussing things. I was on my way down below to get something to eat. How about joining me?”

She looked doubtful for a moment, but only for a moment. Then she brightened.

“I’m game,” she said.

They took the gravshaft down and ate in the hotel’s third-level restaurant, which was an automated affair with individual conveyor-belts bringing food to each table. Part of his hypnotic training had been intended to see him safely through social situations such as this, and so he ordered a dinner for two, complete with wine, without a hitch.

She did not seem shy. She told him that she was employed on Rigel XII, and had come to Earth on a business trip. She had arrived only the day before. She was twenty-nine, she said, unmarried, a native-born Earther like himself. She had been living in the Rigel system for the past four years, she finished.

“And now tell me about you,” she said, reaching for the wine decanter.

Harris shrugged diffidently. “There isn’t very much to tell, I’m afraid. I’m a fairly stodgy career man in the IDC, age forty-two, and this is the first day I’ve spent on Earth in ten years.”

“It must feel strange.”

“It does.”

“How much vacation do you have?”

He tapped his fingertips together. “Six to eight months. I can have more if I really want it. When do you go back to Rigel?”

She smiled strangely at him. “I may not go back at all. Depends on whether I can find what I’m looking for on Earth.”

“And what, pray tell, are you looking for?”

She chuckled lightly. “That’s my business,” she said with finality.

“Sorry.”

“Never mind the apologies. Let’s have some more wine.”

After Harris had settled up the not inconsiderable matter of the bill, they left the hotel and went outside to stroll a while. The streets were crowded; a clock atop a distant building told Harris that the time was shortly after seven in the evening.

He felt warm, now that he had adjusted his temperature controls. The unfamiliar foods and wines in his stomach gave him an oddly queasy feeling, though he had enjoyed the meal.

The girl slipped her hand through his looped arm and squeezed the inside of his elbow in an affectionate way. Harris smiled at her.

He said, “I was afraid it was going to be a terribly lonely vacation.”

“Me too. You can be tremendously alone on a planet that has twenty billion people living on it.”

“Especially if you’re a stranger on your own world,” he said glibly. “Having been away for ten years.”

They walked on. In the middle of the street a troupe of acrobats was performing, using nullgrav devices to add to their abilities. Harris chuckled and tossed them a coin, and a bronzed girl saluted to him from the top of a human pyramid.

Night was falling. Harris considered the incongruity of walking arm-in-arm with an Earthgirl, with his belly full of Earth foods, and enjoying it.

Darruu seemed impossibly distant now. It lay eleven hundred light-years from Earth; its star was visible from here only as part of a mass of blurred dots of light, without individuality.

But yet he knew that it was there. And he missed it.

“You’re worrying about something,” the girl at his side said.

“It’s an old failing of mine.”

He was thinking: I was born a Servant of the Spirit, and so I was chosen to go to Earth. I may never return to Darruu again .

As the sky darkened they strolled on, over a delicate golden bridge airily spanning a river whose dark depths twinkled with myriad points of light. Together they stared down at the water, and at the stars reflected in it. She moved closer to him, and her warmth against his body was strangely pleasing to him.

Eleven hundred light-years from home.

Why am I here?

He knew the answer, of course. Titanic conflict was shaping in the universe. The Predictors held that the cataclysm was no more than two hundred years away. Darruu would stand against its ancient adversary Medlin, and all the worlds of the universe would be ranged on one side or on the other.

He was here as an ambassador. Earth was a mighty force in the galaxy—so mighty that it would resent the role it was scheduled to play, that of pawn between Darruu and Medlin. Darruu wanted, needed Terran support in the conflict to come. Obtaining it would be a delicate problem in the art of engineering consent.

A cadre of disguised Darruui, planted on Earth, gradually manipulating public opinion toward the Darruu camp and away from Medlin—that was the plan, and Major Abner Harris, born Aar Khülom, was one of its agents.

They walked through the city until the hour had grown very late, and then turned back toward the hotel. Harris was thoroughly confident now that he had established the sort of relationship with the girl that was likely to shield him from all suspicion of his true origin.

He said, “What do we do now?”

“Suppose we buy a bottle of something and have a party in your room?” she suggested readily.

“My room’s a frightful mess,” Harris said, thinking of the many things in there that he would not want her to see. “How about yours?”

“It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”

They stopped at an autobar and he fed demi-unit pieces into a gleaming machine until the chime sounded and a fully wrapped bottle slid out of the receiving tray. Harris tucked it under his arm, made a mock-courteous bow to the girl, and they continued on their way to the hotel.

The signal came just as they entered the lobby.

It reached Harris in the form of a sudden twinge in the abdomen; that was where the amplifier had been embedded. He felt it as three quick impulses, rasp, rasp, rasp , followed after a brief pause by a repeat.

The signal had only one meaning: There is an emergency. Get in touch with your contact-man at once. Emergency !