James Schmitz - Agent of Vega & Other Stories

"How did you find that out?"

Harding said, "The duplicate global scanner I told you about. After all, the rogue could have been Weldon. Aside from you two, he could have been almost anyone involved in the operation. He might have been masquerading as one of our own telepaths! Every location point the diex field turned to during that 'test run' came under instant investigation. We were looking for occurrences which might indicate the rogue had been handling the diex projector.

"The first reports didn't start to come in until after the Weldon imitation had taken the projector into the conduit. But then, in a few minutes, we had plenty! They showed the rogue had tested the projector, knew he could handle it, knew he'd reestablished himself as king of the world—and this time for good! And then he walked off into the conduit with his wonderful stolen weapon. . . ."

Arlene said, "He was trying to get Dr. Ben and me to open the project exit for him again. We couldn't of course. I never imagined anyone could experience the terror he felt."

"There was some reason for it," Harding said. "Physical action is impossible in nonspace, so he couldn't use the projector. He was helpless while he was in the conduit. And he knew we couldn't compromise when we let him out.

"We switched the conduit exit to a point eight hundred feet above the surface of Cleaver Interplanetary Spaceport—the project he's kept us from completing for the past twenty-odd years—and opened it there. We still weren't completely certain, you know, that the rogue mightn't turn out to be a genuine superman who would whisk himself away and out of our reach just before he hit the marblite paving.

"But he wasn't. . . ."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

"Agent of Vega" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction , July 1949. "The Illusionists" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction , in March 1951, under the title "Space Fear." "The Second Night of Summer" was first published in Galaxy , December 1950. "The Truth About Cushgar" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction , November 1950. (The four Agent of Vega stories were first collected and issued in book form under that title by Gnome Press in 1960.) "The Custodians" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction , December 1968. "Gone Fishing" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction , May 1961. "The Beacon to Elsewhere" was first published in Amazing , April 1963. "The End of the Line" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction , July 1951. "Watch the Sky" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction , August 1962. "Greenface" was first published in Unknown , August 1943. "Rogue Psi" was first published in Amazing , August 1962.

Eight large ships came individually out of the darkness between the stars that was their sea, and began to move about the planet Noorhut in a carefully timed pattern of orbits. They stayed much too far out to permit any instrument of space-detection to suspect that the Noorhut might be their common center of interest. Though the men who crewed the eight ships bore the people of Noorhut no ill will, hardly anything could have looked less promising for Noorhut than the cargo they had on board.

Seven of them were armed with a gas which was not often used any more. A highly volatile lethal catalyst, it sank to the solid surface of a world over which it was freed and spread out swiftly there to the point where its presence could no longer be detected by any chemical means. However its effect of drawing the final breath almost imperceptibly out of all things that were oxygen-breathing was not noticeably reduced by diffusion.

The eighth ship was equipped with a brace of torpedoes, which were normally released some hours after the gas-carriers dispersed their invisible death. They were quite small torpedoes, since the only task remaining for them would be to ignite the surface of the planet that had been treated with the catalyst.

All those things might presently happen to Noorhut. But they would happen only if a specific message was flashed from it to the circling squadron—the message that Noorhut already was lost to a deadly foe who must, at any cost now, be prevented from spreading out from it to other inhabited worlds.

IN THIS SERIES:

Telzey Amberdon

T 'n T: Telzey & Trigger

Trigger & Friends

The Hub: Dangerous Territory

Agent of Vega & Other Stories

Baen Books by Eric Flint:

Mother of Demons

1632

The Philosophical Strangler

The Belisarius series, with David Drake:

An Oblique Approach

In the Heart of Darkness Destiny's Shield

Fortune's Stroke

The Tide of Victory

with Dave Freer:

Rats, Bats & Vats

Pyramid Scheme