Robert Silverberg - Invaders From Earth

What a blaster of a dream that was, he thought, and in the same moment he realized that it was no dream. He had spent three weeks on another world; he had discovered that the values he held to be true were false, and that the cause he had lent himself to was dedicated to wiping out a culture that had incredibly much to offer Earth. The Corporation did not hate the Gannys. They merely stood in the way of making profit, and so they had to go.

A voice said quietly inside him, If you run fast enough they can’t touch you. It’s not too late. You didn’t commit any crime by talking to the Gannys. The Corporation hasn’t started making the law yet, dammit. Not yet.

The big hatch in the wall of the ship was opening, and a catwalk was extruding itself automatically so the men in the ship could reach the ground twenty feet below. Very carefully Kennedy unlaced the webbing that held him in the deceleration cradle. He dropped one foot over the side of the hammock, then the other, and went pitching forward suddenly as the wall of the ship came sweeping up to meet him.

He thrust out his hands desperately, slapped them against the wall, steadied himself. He waited a moment until his head stopped pounding and his feet were less rubbery: He glanced fore and saw the other crewmen still slumped in their cradles, groggy from the gravanol pills. It would be a few minutes yet before they awakened. And they never would have expected their prisoner to have risked, and made, a fully conscious landing.

Kennedy smiled. Quite calmly he made his way forward to the hatch and lowered himself down the catwalk to the ground. Someone in the ship yawned; they were beginning to stir.

The sun was warm and bright. He had forgotten the day, but he knew it would have to be somewhere near the end of July. The sickly heat of midsummer hung over the flat grounds of the landing field.

A few maintenance men were moving toward the ship now, but they ignored him. Somehow he had expected welcomers, video cameras, a galaxy of flash bulbs—not an empty field. But the Corporation had probably preferred a veil of secrecy cast over the arrival.

He made his way across the field and into the area beyond. He spied a taxi passing on the road and hailed it. He felt dazed by the heat after the chill of Ganymede, and the punishment of landing had left him wobbly.

He opened the taxi and slipped into the passenger’s seat. He glanced out the window and looked back at the space-field. By now they were awake aboard the ship, and knew he was missing.

“Step on it, driver. Take me to the city.”

The cab rolled away. Kennedy wondered if he would be followed. It had been so simple to slip away, in the confusion of landing. One of the Ganny maxims he had learned was that through endurance of pain comes knowledge of truth, and therefore freedom. Well, he had endured pain and he had his freedom as a result of it. The unused gravanol pill was still in his pocket.

He had slipped away from them. Like in a dream, he thought, where the figures reach out to clutch you but you slip through them like a red-hot blade through butter.

They would hunt him, of course. Escape could never be this simple; the Corporation would spare no expense to get him and put him away. But if he only had a few days of freedom to accomplish some of the things he had to do, he would be content. Otherwise his surrender would have been pointless; he might just as well have spent his days as a fugitive on Ganymede.

Where can I go? he wondered.

Home?

Home was the most obvious place. So obvious, in fact, that his pursuers might never suspect he would go there. Yes. Home was best. He gave the cabby the address and lapsed back into sullen somnolence for the rest of the trip.

The house looked unusually quiet, he thought, as the cab pulled into the Connecticut township where he and Marge had lived so long.

Maybe Gunther had radioed ahead. Maybe they had intentionally let him slip away at the spaceport, knowing that they could always pick him up at home.

He gave the driver much too big a bill and without waiting for change headed up the drive into his garden.

He found his key in his trouser pocket, pressed it into the slot, and held his right thumb against the upper thumb-plate until the front door slid back. He stepped inside.

“Marge?”

No answer. He half-expected an answering rattle of gunfire or the sudden appearance of the Corporation gendarmerie, but the house remained silent. Only the steady purr of the electronic dust-eater was audible. He went on into the living room, hoping at least to find the cat sleeping in the big armchair, but there was no cat. Everything was tidy and in its place. The windows were opaqued.

The windows were opaqued! Kennedy felt a twinge of shock. They never opaqued the windows except when they expected to be away for long periods of time, on vacations, long shopping tours. Marge would never have left the windows opaqued in the middle of the day like that—

Suspicion began to form. He saw a piece of paper sitting on the coffee-table in the living room. He picked it up.

It was a note, in Marge’s handwriting, but more shaky than usual. All it said was, Ted, there’s a tape on the recorder. Please listen to it, Marge.

His hands trembled slightly as he switched on the sound system and activated the tape recorder. He waited a moment for the sound to begin.

“Ted, this is Marge speaking to you—for what’s going to be the last time. I was going to put this in the form of a note, but I thought using the recorder would let me make things a little clearer.

“Ted, I’m leaving. It’s not a hasty step. I thought about it a long time, and when this Ganymede business came up everything seemed to crystallize. We just shouldn’t be living together. Oh, it was nice at times—don’t get me wrong. But there’s such a fundamental difference in our outlook toward things that a break had to be made—now, before it was too late to make it.

“You worked on the Ganymede thing casually, light-heartedly, and didn’t even realize that I was bitterly opposed to it. Things like that. I’m not leaving because of a difference in politics, or anything else. Let’s just say that the Ganymede job was a symptom, not a cause, of the trouble in our marriage. I hated the contract and what it stood for. You didn’t even bother to examine the meaning of it. So today—the day you left for space, Ted—I’m leaving.

“I’m going away with Dave Spalding. Don’t jump to conclusions, though—I wasn’t cheating on you with Dave. I have my code and I live by it. But we did discuss the idea of going away together, and your leaving for Ganymede has made it possible. That’s why I wanted you to go. Please don’t be hurt by all this—please don’t smash things up and curse. Play the tape a couple of times, and think about things. I don’t want anything that’s in the house; I took what I wanted to keep, the rest is yours. After you’ve had time to get used to everything I’ll get in touch with you about the divorce.

“So that’s it, Ted. It was grand while it lasted, but I knew it couldn’t stay grand much longer, and to spare both of us fifty or sixty years of bitterness, I’ve pulled out. Dave has left the agency, but we have a little money that we’ve both saved. Again, Ted, I’m sorry, sorry for both of us.

“I left the cat with the Camerons, and you can get him back from them when you get back from Ganymede. Nobody but you and Dave and me knows what’s happened. Take care of yourself, Ted. And so long.”

He let the tape run down to the end and shut it off. Then he stood numbly in the middle of the room for a long while, and after that he played the tape over once again from the beginning to end.