Robert Silverberg: The Silent Invaders

“Sit down over there.”

He ran his tongue over dry lips. “How come the gun, Beth?”

“You know that answer without my having to tell it to you,” she said. “Will you sit down?”

He sat.

She nodded. “Now that you’ve been to see Carver, you know exactly who I am.”

“He said you were a Medlin agent. I was skeptical, but…” He glanced at the gun.

It was hard to believe, but the proof was staring menacingly at him. He looked at the lovely girl who stood only ten feet away from him, holding a disruptor trained at his brain. Judging from her appearance, the Medlin surgeons were as skillful as those of Darruu, it seemed, perhaps even more skilled, for the wiry pebble-skinned Medlins were even less humanoid than the Darrui—and yet he would have taken an oath on his birth-tree that those breasts, those flaring hips, those long well-formed legs, were genuine and not the product of the surgeon’s arts. Certainly they looked as genuine as was conceivable.

Disconcertingly genuine.

The Medlin who called herself Beth Baldwin said, “We had complete information on you from the moment you entered the orbit of Earth, Abner—or should I rather say, Aar Khülom?”

He started in surprise. The jolt of hearing his own name spoken on Earth was like getting a bucket of icewater in the face.

“How did you know that name?” he demanded.

She laughed lightly. “I knew it the same way I knew you were from Darruu, the same way I knew the exact moment you were going to come out of your room before, when we collided.”

“So that was arranged?”

“Of course.”

“And you also knew in advance that I was coming here to kill you just now?”

She nodded.

Harris frowned and considered the situation. “Medlins aren’t telepathic,” he said doggedly. “There isn’t a single telepathic race in the galaxy.”

“None that you know about, anyway,” she said, a mocking light dancing in her eyes.

He tensed. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. Let it pass.”

He shrugged the idea away. Apparently the Medlin spy system was formidably well organized, perhaps utilizing a traitor or two on Darruu itself. All this nonsense about telepathy was a false lure she was setting up merely to cloud the trail. But the one fact about which there was no doubt whatever was…

“I came here to kill you,” Harris said. “I bungled it. You trapped me. I guess you’re going to kill me now, eh, Beth?”

“Wrong. I just want to talk,” she said.

He eyed her thoughtfully, and began to relax just a little. He said in a flat voice, angry with her now for this cat-and-mouse treatment, “If you want to talk, have the good grace to put some clothing on, will you? Having you standing around wearing next to nothing disturbs my powers of conversation.”

“Oh?” she said, laughing in a silvery, brittle way. “You mean this artificial body of mine stirs some response in that artificial body of yours? How quaint! How very interesting!” Without turning her back on him or lowering the disruptor, she drew a robe from the closet and slipped it on over the filmy gown. “There,” she purred. “Is that easier on your glandular balance?”

“Somewhat.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be in any discomfort on my account,” she said.

The Darruui began to fidget. She was toying with him, making a mock of him. The more he recalled of their earlier conversation, of his mawkish, almost maudlin talk of loneliness and homesickness, the more he detested her for having fooled him this way—though he had to admit his motives had not been of the purest either.

He was deeply troubled, now. There was no way he could possibly activate his emergency signal without moving his hands, and any sudden hand-motion was likely to be fatal so long as Beth kept that disruptor angled down on him. He sat reluctantly motionless while rivers of sweat streamed down the skin they had grafted to his own.

“So you have me,” he said. “What do you want with me? Why don’t you kill me and get it over with?”

“You must think I’m terribly cruel.”

“You’re a Medlin.”

“I admit that much. Are the words ‘Medlin’ and ‘cruel’ synonymous in your vocabulary, Abner?”

“Our worlds have been enemies for centuries. Am I supposed to admire the nobility of the Medlins? Their lofty intelligence? Their physical beauty? Your world is a world of jackals and murderers!” he spat out.

“How kind of you, Abner.”

“Pull the trigger and get it over with!” he raged. “I won’t be taunted this way.”

She shrugged. “I still prefer to talk.”

“Talk, then,” he muttered.

Beth said, “Very well. I’ll tell you what I know about you. You’re one of ten Darruui on Earth. Other agents are on their way from Darruu now, but at the moment there are only ten of you here. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Why should I?” Harris said tightly.

She nodded. “A good point. You’re under no obligation to betray your people. But I assure you that we have all the information about you that we need, so you needn’t try to make up tales for the sake of patriotism. Don’t strain your imagination. To continue: you and your outfit are here on Earth for the purpose of subverting Terran allegiance and winning Earth over to the side of Darruu.”

“I won’t deny that,” Harris said. “But you Medlins are here for much the same kind of reason—to get control of Earth.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” the girl said sharply. “We’re here to help the Terrans, not to dominate them.”

“Oh, of course.”

“You can’t understand motives like that, can you?” she asked, a cutting edge of scorn on her voice.

“I can understand altruistic motives well enough,” he said easily. “I just have trouble believing in altruism when it’s preached by a Medlin.”

She scowled. “I suppose you’ll think it’s more propaganda when I tell you that we Medlins don’t believe in violence if peaceful means will accomplish our goals.”

“Those are very nice words,” Harris said. “They’d look good inscribed on a monument of galactic harmony. But how can you help the Terrans?”

“It’s a matter of genetics.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t expect you to. But this isn’t the time or the place to explain in detail.”

He let that point pass. In a bitter voice he said, “So you deliberately threw yourself in contact with me earlier, let me take you out to dinner, walked around arm-in-arm, and all this time you knew I was actually a Darruui in disguise?”

“Of course I knew.”

“Wasn’t it cynical of you to talk and act the way you did?”

“And what about you?” she shot back at him. “Taking advantage of an innocent Earth girl? Feeding her a lot of lies about yourself?”

“It’s different,” he said lamely.

“Is it?” She laughed. “I also knew that when you were pretending to get sick earlier this evening, it was really because you had to contact your chief operative. And I knew that when you told me you were going to visit a friend, you were actually attending an emergency rendezvous. I also knew what your friend Carver was going to tell you to do—which is why I had my gun ready when you came ringing at my door.”

He stared at her. “Suppose I hadn’t gotten that emergency message, though. Suppose I had no idea of what you really were. We were going to come here to your room and drink and probably make love. Would you… would you have gone to bed with me, even knowing what you knew?”

She was silent a moment.

Then she said, without emotion, “Most likely. It would have been most interesting to see what sort of biological reactions the Darruui surgeons are capable of building.”