Robert Silverberg - Invaders From Earth

He locked the door behind him and went around back to the garage. He put his luggage in the trunk compartment, got into the car, and drove down onto the main road without looking back.

Ten minutes later he was in town. “Town” consisted of two or three stores, a bank, a post office, a church. It probably had not changed much in the past century; small towns always resist change longer than large cities. Kennedy drove down the county road into the main square and parked near the clock, which was a big old one that had been standing in the center of the town well over a century, and of course still used the twelve-hour system. He glanced up at it, frowning a bit as he computed the time. The hands read 4:45, which he translated back into the more familiar 1645. Less than three hours had passed since his landing at Spacefield Seven.

It was an hour at which the town was quiet. The afternoon movie show still had ten or fifteen minutes to run; those who weren’t at it were home waiting for dinner.

Kennedy left his parked car and stepped into Schiller’s, the combined pharmacy-newsstand-luncheonette-department store that served the township. Two or three locals were sipping sodas at the fountain as he came in. Kennedy scooped change from his pocket and found he had no telephone tokens. The phone in Schiller’s did not have an automatic vending machine in the booth, either.

He put a quarter on the counter and said, “Give me two phone tokens, please.”

“Sure. Oh, hello there, Mr. Kennedy.” Schiller looked at him speculatively a moment. He was a man in his sixties or seventies, old enough certainly to remember well back into the last century; his eyes were still clear blue, his hair only recently had gone white. He wiped his hands on his stained white smock and said, “Couple of men were in here just a minute ago asking for you. Wanted to know which road to take to get out to your place, so I had my boy show them. Must have been friends of yours.”

“I’m not expecting any,” Kennedy said. He took the tokens from the counter.

“Hey, there they are!” Schiller exclaimed, pointing.

Through the plate-glass front window, Kennedy saw two men in dark brown business suits and austere violet traveling cloaks coming out of the bank. They were grim, efficient-looking men. Corporation men, Kennedy thought. He started to walk quickly toward the telephone booths in the rear of the store.

“Hey, Mr. Kennedy,” Schiller called. “You better go out there and see those fellers before they get into their car and go chasin’ all the way out to your place.”

“I don’t have time to see them. I’ve got to get into the city on some important business.”

“You want me to go out there and tell ’em that?” Schiller asked helpfully.

“No—that’ll only offend them. Let them make an appointment with me next time they want to see me at home.” He ducked into the telephone booth in time to cut off one of Schiller’s stale monologues on the ways of the new generation, and how they charged around so fast they never had time to talk to each other.

Kennedy asked for Information, got the number of the ticket deck at Roosevelt Airport, and was told that the next flight for Milwaukee was departing at 1951 that evening, arrival time in Milwaukee 2113 Milwaukee time. That sounded fine to Kennedy.

“Make a reservation for one,” he said. “The name is Engel.” He gave the name almost unthinkingly, automatically.

“First name, please?” came the impersonal reply.

“Ah—Victor. Victor Engel.”

“Thank you, sir. Would you please pick up your reservation no later than an hour before departure time?”

“I’ll do that,” Kennedy said. He hung up, listened to his token click down into the depths of the phone, and left the booth.

Schiller said, “Just like I told you, Mr. Kennedy. Those friends of yours drove off toward your place while you were on the phone. Guess they’re going to waste some time now.”

“I guess so,” Kennedy said. He grinned. “I just didn’t have time to see them, though. I have to get down to the city in a hurry. My boat leaves at 1900.”

“Boat?”

Kennedy nodded. “I’m going to Europe for a month on company business. Don’t tell a soul, of course. I really don’t want it getting around or all my friends will expect me to bring back souvenirs.”

He waved genially and left. As he drove rapidly down the Thruway toward New York, he thought about Schiller and the two bleak-faced Corporation men. They were certain to come back to town once they found his house empty; perhaps they would stop in at Schiller’s again, and in that case they were certain to get drawn into conversation with the old man.

He hoped they had a nice time looking for him on the departing boats to Europe.

He drove down into New York City; cutting left on the Thruway and taking the artery that led out. along the south shore of Long Island Sound to the big new airport. Roosevelt Airport was a city in itself, practically; its rambling acres covered a great chunk of Long Island. It served as the airline capital of the world.

Kennedy reached the parking area at 1747 and turned his car over to the attendant.

“Want her shined up, sir? Refueled, overhauled?”

Kennedy shook his head. “Sorry, thanks.”

“Those deflectors look like they could use—”

“No,” Kennedy said. He took the parking ticket, which had the time stamped on it, and folded it away in his wallet. The attendant was going to be surprised when no one ever showed up to claim the dented ’42 Frontenac.

He made his way toward the shining plastic building that housed the central ticket offices and got on a line that moved slowly toward a window labelled Reservations For Today’s Flights.

When he reached the window he gave his name: “Victor Engel. I’m going to Milwaukee.”

“Of course, Mr. Engel.” The girl performed three quick motions with her hands and slid a crisp white folder under the grill toward him.

“One hundred thirteen fifty,” she said.

Kennedy took two bills from his wallet, passed them over and received his change. Normally he would have paid by check—but the reservation was in Engel’s name, and he would have had to sign the check that way. There would have been immediate catastrophe. It was impossible to pass a bad check when the lightning-fast receptors of the Central Clearing House in Chicago could check his signature against their files and report back within fifteen seconds.

It was too bad he had to buy round-trip tickets, too. The return half would expire in thirty days, and he had no intention of returning East so soon. But a one-way trip might arouse suspicion, and he wanted to keep Victor Engel as free of suspicion as possible.

Victor Engel. The first name had been a sudden guess. It had been a curious moment when he realized he had never known the dead linguist’s first name.

He moved out of the ticket deck onto the promenade. In the distance, outlined against the setting sun, a huge plane was coming in—one of the FB-11 stratoliners, the five-hunded-passenger jet jobs that crossed the country from New York to California in just under two hours. He watched it taxi in, like a great bird returning to its nest.

He ate alone in an automatic restaurant—a light meal, protoid sandwich and milk, for he was far from hungry just now—and bought an evening ’fax-sheet at a vending stand. Quickly, he made his way past the West Coast baseball scores, past the usual item on the weather, past the latest on the Yugoslavian ministerial shake-up. He found a squib on the return of the Ganymede ship. There was no mention of the public relations man who had fled the spacefield hotly pursued by Corporation mobsters.