Robert Silverberg: The Silent Invaders

The other nodded. “Good to meet you. I’m John Carver. There’s a table waiting for us inside.”

“Inside” turned out to be a place that called itself the Nine Planets Club, across the street. The atmosphere inside was steamy and smoke-clouded; bubbles of coolfire drifted round the ceiling, half a dozen colors of it that gave a rainbow effect to the greasy clouds of smoke. A row of long-limbed nudes pranced gaily to the accompaniment of the raucously discordant noise that passed for music on Terra. The surgeons, Harris thought, had never managed to instill a liking for Terran music in him, whatever other wonders they had succeeded in performing.

A bar-girl came over. She was a Rigelian megamastid, exceptionally well endowed, practically exploding out of her scanty yellow tunic. She flashed a synthetically voluptuous smile whose cynicism turned Harris’ stomach and said, “What’ll it be to drink, boys?”

Carver answered, “A Nine Planets Sling.”

“And you?”

Harris hesitated. “Make it the same,” he replied after a moment.

The girl stalked away, her bosoms swaying. Harris said, “What have I just ordered?”

“It’s all the rage this year. You’ll see.”

The Nine Planets Sling turned out to be something cloudy and cool in a tall glass brimming with ice. Harris tasted it, and found it musky but not unpleasant. It seemed to be a mixture of half a dozen different liquors and some sort of fruit juice. He sipped it slowly.

Carver said in a low voice, “Have you had any trouble since you arrived?”

“No. Should I have been expecting any?”

The lean man shrugged inconclusively. “Trouble is brewing. It may come any day.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“There are one hundred Medlin agents on Earth right now,” Carver said. “Yesterday we stumbled onto an important cache of secret Medlin documents. Now we have the name of the hundred and their photographs. We also know that they plan to wipe us out in the very near future.”

Harris bit into a lump of ice and chewed it reflectively. “How many Darruui are on Earth right now?” he asked.

“You are the tenth to arrive.”

Harris’ eyes widened. He hadn’t thought the situation was as bad as all that. One hundred Medlins here already, against only ten Darrui!

“Stiff odds,” he said.

Carver nodded. “Agreed. But we know their identitities, while they are ignorant of ours. We can strike first. We must strike first. Unless we eliminate them, we will not be able to proceed with our work here.”

The music reached an ear-splitting crescendo. Moodily, Harris stared at the nude chorus-line as it gyrated. Strangely, he felt some glandular disturbance at the sight of the girls, and frowned. Was his Earthman’s outward form betraying him? There was no reason for him to be aroused by those cavorting girls. By any Darruui standards, the girls were obscenely ugly.

But this was not Darruu.

He tightened his grip on his nearly empty glass and said, “How do we go about eliminating these hundred Medlins?”

“You have weapons. I’ll supply you with the necessary information. You know the odds. If you can manage to get ten of them before they get you—and if each of the rest of us can do the same—we’ll be all right.” Carver drew a billfold forth from his tunic and extracted a snapshot from it with lean, edgily nervous fingers. “Here’s your first one, now. Kill her and report back to me. The job should be easy because she’s staying at the Spaceways Hotel, the same as you.”

Harris felt a jolt. “A Medlin at my hotel?”

“Why not? They’re everywhere. Here. Take a look at the picture.”

Harris accepted the photo from the other Darruui and scanned it. It was a glossy tridim in natural color. It showed a blonde girl wearing a low-cut black sheath. The shot seemed to have been taken by a hidden camera at some sort of party. The girl was laughing and waving a cocktail glass in the air, and other figures could be seen behind her in the picture.

Controlling his voice, Harris said, “This girl’s much too pretty to be a Medlin agent.”

“That’s why she’s so deadly,” Carver said. “Kill her first. She goes under the name of Beth Baldwin.”

Harris stared at the photo a long while. A pulse pounded in his forehead, and a strange swirl of emotions rushed through his brain. This girl? A spy? He thought back over the day, the pleasant time he had had with her, the feeling of warmth, of friendship. Kill her first , Carver had said.

“Something the matter, Major?”

“No. Not at all.”

“You look very… preoccupied.”

“It’s just a reaction from my travelling,” Harris said. He handed the incriminating photo back to Carver and nodded his head. “Okay. The assignment has been received. I’ll get in touch with you again when the job’s done.”

“Good. Another drink?”

Harris was uncertain. The first one had left him a bitgiddy, and vaguely ill at ease in the pit of his stomach. His Daruui metabolism was not really comfortable handling these alien hydrocarbons.

But he nodded abruptly. “Yes. Yes, I think I’ll have another.”

It was nearly two in the morning when Harris returned to his hotel. He had spent something over an hour with the man who called himself John Carver. Harris felt tired, confused, wan. He found himself faced with decisions that frightened him, here at the very outset of his tour of duty on Earth.

Beth Baldwin a Medlin spy?

How improbable that seemed! But yet Carver had had her photo. Could there have been some mistake? No. Carver would not make a mistake on a matter like that. Beth had been definitely identified as a spy, or else Carver would not have given the assassination order.

And it was Harris’ job to kill her, now—a task he had no option of refusing. He was a Servant of the Spirit. He could not betray his trust.

But before he committed himself to any irrevocable course of action, he told himself, he would do a little checking in advance. Carver might not be infallible. He did not want the blood of an innocent to live as a blemish on his soul.

He took the gravshaft to the 58th floor, but instead of going to his own room, he turned left and headed down the corridor toward the room whose number Beth Baldwin had given him—5820.

He paused a moment outside her door, then nudged the door-signal.

There was no immediate response. He frowned and nudged it again. This time he heard the sound of a door-scanner humming just above him, telling him that she was awake and just within the door.

He said, “It’s me. Abner. I have to see you, Beth.”

“It’s late. It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you. It’s important that I talk to you.”

“Hold on,” came the sleepy reply from inside. “Let me get something on, Abner.”

He waited. A moment passed, and then the door slid silently open. Beth smiled at him warmly. She had “put something on,” all right, but the “something” had not been very much. She had donned a flimsy gown that concealed her body as if she were wearing so much gauze.

But Harris was not interested in the contours of her body now, attractive though that body happened to be. He was staring at the tiny glittering weapon that she held firmly in her hand, trained on his skull.

Harris recognized the weapon.

It was the Medlin version of the disruptor-pistol.

He had the confirmation he had come to get. But he had not expected to gain it this way.

“Come on in, Abner,” she said in a cooly calm voice, gesturing with the disruptor.

Numbly he stepped forward, too stunned to speak. The door shut behind him. Beth pointed toward a chair with the disrupter’s snout.