Robert Silverberg - The Silent Invaders

Abner Harris

He came to Earth to destroy Medlins, but killing Darruui seemed a better idea.

Carver

In the interests of Darru supremacy, there was no room for traitors or Earthmen.

Beth

Not even the conflict between Medlins and the Darruui was as important to her as Earth had become.

Coburn

His devotion to Earth meant the obsolescence of his own race.

Wrynn

Were his kind destined to rule the universe or die aborning?

The Voice

It seemed to know all the answers and seemed immune to all adversity.

The prime-class starship Lucky Lady came thundering out of overdrive half a million miles from Earth, and phased into the long, steady ion-drive glide at Earth-norm gravitation toward the orbiting depot. In his second-class cabin aboard the starship, the man whose papers said he was Major Abner Harris of the Interstellar Development Corps stared anxiously, critically, at his face in the mirror. He was checking, for what must have been the hundredth time, to make sure that there was no sign of where his tendrils once had been.

There was, of course, no sign. He looked the very image of an Earthman.

He smiled; and the even-featured, undistinguished face the medics had put on him drew back, lips rising obediently in the corners, cheeks tightening, neat white teeth momentarily on display. It was a good smile; an Earthman’s smile down to the last degree.

Major Harris scowled, and the face darkened as a scowling face should darken.

The face behaved well. The synthetic white skin acted as if it were his own. The surgeons back on Darruu had done their usual superb job on him. His appearance was a triumph of the art.

They had removed the fleshy four-inch-long tendrils that sprouted at every Darruui’s temples; they had covered his deep golden-hued skin with an overlay of convincingly Terran white, and grafted it so skillfully that by now it had become his real skin.

Contact lenses had turned his eyes from their normal red to a Terran blue-gray. Hormone treatments had caused hair to sprout on head and body, thick Earthman hair where none had been before. The surgeons had not meddled with his internal plumbing, because that was too great a task even for their skill. Inwardly he remained alien, with the efficient Darruui digestive organ where a Terran had so many incredible feet of intestine, and with the double heart and the sturdy liver just back of his three lungs.

Inside he was alien. Behind the walls of his skull, he was Aar Khülom of the city of Helasz—a Darruui of the highest class, a Servant of the Spirit. But he had to forget his Darruui identity now, he had to cloak himself in the Earthman identity he wore. He was not Aar Khülom, he told himself doggedly, but Major Abner Harris.

He knew Major Harris’ biography in the greatest detail, and reviewed it constantly, so that it lay beneath the conscious part of his mind like the hidden nine-tenths of an iceberg, ready to come automatically to use when needed in an emergency.

Major Abner Harris, according to the identity they had created for him, had been born in 2520, in Cincinatti, Ohio. (Cincinatti’s a city , he thought. Ohio is a state. Remember that and don’t mix them up!) Ohio was one of the United States of America, which was a large political sub-unit of the planet Earth.

Major Abner Harris was now aged 42—with a good hundred years of his lifespan left. He had attended Western Reserve University, studying galactography; graduated ’43. Entered the Interstellar Redevelopment Corps ’46, commissioned ’50, now holding the rank of Major. Successful diplomatic-military missions to Altair VII, Sirius IX, Procyon II, Alpheratz IV, and Sirius VII.

Major Harris was unmarried. His parents had been killed in a highway jet-crash in ’44. He had no known living relatives with a greater consanguineity than D+. Height five feet ten, weight 220, color fair, retinal index point 033.

Major Harris was visiting Earth on vacation. He was to spend eight months relaxing on his native world before reassignment to his next planetary post.

Eight months, thought the alien being who called himself Major Abner Harris, would certainly be ample time for Major Abner Harris to lose himself in the swarming billions of Earth and carry out the purposes for which he had been sent.

The Lucky Lady was on the last lap of her journey across half a million light-years, bearing passengers to Earth and points along the route. Harris had boarded the starship on Alpheratz IV, after having been shipped there from Darruu via private warpship. For the past three weeks, while the giant vessel had slipped gently through the sleek gray tunnel in the continuum that was its overdrive channel, Major Harris had been practicing how to walk at Earth-norm gravity.

Darruu was a large world—its radius was 11,000 miles—and though its density was not as great as Earth’s, still the gravitational attraction was half again as intense. Harris had been born and raised under Darruu’s gravity of 1.5 Earth-norm. Or, as Harris had thought of it in the days when his mind centered not on Earth but on Darruu, Earth’s gravity was .67 Darruu-norm.

Either way, it meant that his muscles would be functioning in a gravitational field two-thirds as strong as the one they had developed in. For a while, at least, he would have a tendency to lift his feet too high, to overstep, to exaggerate every motion. If anyone noticed, he could use the excuse that he had spent most of his time in service on heavy planets, and that would explain away some of his awkwardness.

Some of it, but not all. A native-born Earther, no matter how many years he spends on heavy worlds, still never forgets how to cope with Earth-norm gravity. Harris had to learn that from scratch. He did learn it, painstakingly, during the three weeks of overdrive travel across the universe toward the system of Sol.

Now the journey was almost over. All that remained was the transfer from the starship to an Earth shuttle, and then he could begin his life as an Earthman.

Earth hung outside the main viewport twenty feet from Harris’ cabin. He stared at it. He saw a great green ball of a world, with two huge continents sprawling here, another land-mass there. A giant moon was moving in slow procession around the planet, keeping one pockmarked face eternally staring inward, the other glaring at outer space like a single beady dark eye.

The sight made Harris homesick.

Darruu was nothing like this. Darruu, viewed from space, had the appearance of a giant red fruit, covered over by the crimson mist that was the upper layer of its atmosphere. Beneath that, an observer could discern the great blue seas and the two hemisphere-large continents of Darraa and Darroo.

And the moons, Harris thought nostalgically. Seven glistening blank faces ranged like gleaming coins in the sky, each at its own angle to the ecliptic, each taking its place in the sky nightly like a gem moved by subtle clockwork. And the mating of the moons, when the seven came together once a year to form a fiercely radiant diadem that filled half the sky…

Angrily he cut the train of thought.

You’re an Earthman, remember? You can’t afford the luxury of nostalgia. Forget Darruu.

A voice on a speaker overhead said, “Please return to your cabins, ladies and gentlemen. In approximately eleven minutes we will come to a rest at the main spaceborne depot. Those passengers who are intending to transfer here will please notify their area steward.”

Harris returned to his cabin while the voice methodically repeated the statement in several of the other languages of Earth. Earth still spoke more than a dozen major tongues, which he was surprised to learn; Darruu had reached linguistic homogeneity some three thousand years or more in the past, and it was odd to think that so highly developed a planet as Earth still had many languages.