The Project Gutenberg eBook of Cosmic Saboteur, by Frank M. Robinson.

They jumped him when he was walking past an alley, a couple of blocks from the stockyards on Chicago's brawling South Side.

He had gotten off the "El" two stops down because it was a damn fine Spring morning and he liked to walk through the Polish section and watch the city wake up. He was 17 years old and he hadn't grown cynical with the world yet. He liked the clean, fresh smell of the early morning and he got a kick out of the sleepy-eyed housewives in their ratty bathrobes, banging open the front door to bring in the milk and the morning paper.

He'd pick up the live-stock reports, he thought, hop an "El" back uptown and maybe he'd be at Amalgamated News Service only a couple of minutes late. And if they didn't like it, they knew what they could do about it. His kid brother ran copy at the News and he said they could use another boy down there.

"Stan," Larry had said, "you're wasting your time at AMS. You won't get as much dough at the News but you'll learn something."

Which was something to consider because Larry was one bright cookie and someday he was really going to be somebody....

It was early morning and nobody had started to work yet—the streets were deserted. There was a chill in the air and he stopped by an open alley to light a weed and take the clamminess out of his lungs.

A handful of knuckles right in the mouth, splintering his teeth and splitting his lip so he sprayed blood like somebody had squeezed a sponge. It was hard to get a good look because the shock had filled his eyes with tears. But there were three of them and they were grown men and the biggest he had seen outside of a television wrestling match.

He screamed "Help!" just once before a hand as big as a typewriter buried itself wrist deep in his stomach. He doubled up and went limp, gasping for breath. One of the men caught him by the jacket collar and pulled him further into the alley, to the back of a restaurant where there was a small mountain of empty boxes and garbage cans full of orange peels and eggshells and stale doughnuts.

He was still fighting for his breath and feeling sick when they stood him up against the refuse pile and started going over him scientifically, cutting his face and hitting him in the kidneys. He tried to blink away the blood that kept streaming into his eyes, to get a good look at them. But they kept working on his face until all the world was a bloody haze and it was hard to even make out light and shadow....

He lashed out once and heard a satisfying grunt and then somebody hit his wrists with a slat of wood, deadening the nerves so he couldn't close his hands. He tried to scream but he had no wind left and he realized dimly it wouldn't have done much good. The streets were deserted and it was the type of neighborhood where nobody went to anybody else's rescue—least of all, early in the morning.

A fist caught him flush on the side of the jaw and he staggered over against the garbage cans and fell to the bricks, his face half buried in the stinking garbage. He played dead dog for a moment, catching his breath, then scrambled to his knees, clawing handfuls of rotting orange peels and decayed bones to throw at the three silent men in front of him.

The toe of a shoe caught him in the groin and he collapsed again. He didn't even recognize the thin screaming that sounded in his ears as his own.

A voice from a million miles away said: "We're not supposed to kill him!" and he guessed that the men were from out of town because it was an accent that he had never heard before. Then two of them were holding him up, twisting his arms behind him, while the third stuffed garbage in his mouth, choking him so his screams died away to a dull, muffled sob.

They let him go for a minute and he tried to run away. They laughed and tripped him before he had taken three steps. Then they jerked him to his feet and started hitting him again, working him over professionally, chopping at him with fists covered by thin, leather gloves that cut his face and ripped his shirt and jacket.

When he finally slipped limply to the pavement, they let him lay there, kicking him in the thighs and the buttocks. His cap was a dozen feet away, the remnants of his jacket not too far from that. His pants were ripped and his shirt was in shreds, the strips waving like bloody banners in the slight, morning breeze.

One of the three said "I guess it's time to go." Stan could hear running feet and then there was a long silence. He couldn't tell if it was a minute or half an hour later when footsteps again sounded across the bricks and somebody knelt by his side.

The voice was soft and full of compassion, like a minister's might be. The man helped him to his feet and Stan lurched to the street and sat down on the curbstone. He tried to wipe away the blood with a tattered shirt sleeve but it still seemed to be running down his cheeks. Then he realized that he was crying.

He felt something pressed into his hands and wiped at his face with the handkerchief.

"I don't know. I was just walking past the alley and they ... jumped me. I don't know why. Honest to God, Mister, I don't know why!"

He felt close to crying again and shut up for a moment to try and control the convulsive heaving of his chest. Then he looked up at the man standing next to him.

Black shoes, brand new. Neatly pressed gabardines. Tall and somewhat thin. Wearing a light, black topcoat like you might imagine a priest would wear. A tan hat, also brand new. Middle twenties, with the face of a saint. The face of a man you knew you could trust.

"Stan. Stanley Martin." He was still close to sobbing and the name came out with too many syllables.

The man pondered for a moment and Stan thought he looked a little like a high-school principal trying to guess how bright a student might be.

"We'll have to fix you up, Stan. Then we'll have to take you home." He helped Stan to his feet and guided him over to a black car a few yards down the street.

"There'll be time enough for that later," the man said smoothly. There was the faintest suggestion of haste in his voice.

"I oughtta wait," Stan mumbled, but the man pushed him gently into the car and Stan didn't argue. He lay down on the back seat, resting his throbbing head against the cushions and the side of the car. It was a big car, he thought vaguely. Like a rich man's sedan, with a glass partition between the driver and the passengers.

He heard a hissing sound from somewhere and the world started to gray out. And then he suddenly wondered how he could be taken home if the man didn't know where he lived....

"I'm your friend, Stan. Say it to yourself and say it over and over. I'm your friend. I saved your life."

"You're my friend," Stan repeated dully, his mind slipping slowly into a pool of throbbing blackness. "You saved my life...."

The last thing he saw was a quick glimpse of the city streets, the slowly rotting houses, and the bright splashes of green in the front lawns and the cottonwood trees.

His eyes wouldn't focus at first and he stayed flat on his mattress and stared at the hazy outlines of the room. It was a funny kind of hospital. Nobody had bandaged his cuts—they were still caked with blood—and he still had on the same torn clothes that smelled of sweat and dirt.

He shook his head, trying to make out the details of the room, and his vision cleared a little.

The room didn't even come close to a hospital. It was more like a jail. There was the cot that he was sitting on and the washbasin and the flush bowl and the barred door at the entrance. Nothing else. No windows, no desk, no calendar, nothing. Just a small cell of gray, featureless metal.

He stood up, holding on to the cot for support, and touched the bars wonderingly. He hadn't done anything wrong, he thought. Not a damn thing!

There were footsteps outside the cell door and a moment later it swung open. The man who opened it wasn't a guard—at least he didn't dress like one, Stan thought. Just a man in a blue suit. Smiling and urbane and what the ad writers would call dapper.

Except for his eyes. The same kind of cold eyes that an executioner might have. Eyes that had watched people die—slowly.

"I was wondering when you were going to wake up," the man said pleasantly. He held out his hand. "My name's Fred Tanner. You...."

Stan didn't take the hand. "I want to know what's coming off here! Where's the joker who brought me here? Where's...."

"Somebody else can tell you all you want to know," the man said easily. "Just follow me."

It wasn't a question, it was a statement. Tanner stood there, his head half cocked, watching Stan curiously, like somebody might watch an ant or a bird. Stan started to say something but the words died in his throat. Tanner was no weakling. He had thick wrists and a bull neck and a feeling of power that he wore like a suit of clothes.

He shrugged and followed Tanner down the corridor for a hundred feet and then into a room about the size of his own cell. There was an oval shaped desk in one corner and a tubular chair by it, both of the same metal as the walls and the floor. The whole assembly looked like it had been punched out of one sheet.

The man behind the desk looked like an ex-football player ten years later, Stan thought. A husky man, just starting to go to fat, with thick lips and thinning hair.

Tanner casually lashed out with the flat of his hand and caught Stan on the side of the head—hard. Stan staggered against the wall and half-slid to the floor. He could feel the tears start again.

Stan crumpled to the floor, shook his head, and struggled back to his feet. He was dazed but he knew enough not to say anything.

Mr. Malcolm finally put down the reports he had been reading and looked up at him. If Tanner's eyes had been cold, Stan thought, then Mr. Malcolm's eyes were frozen.

"No, you don't," Mr. Malcolm said smoothly. "You told the other copy boys you hated the city and as soon as you could, you were going to leave it."

"We know a lot of things." Mr. Malcolm leaned casually back in his chair, inspecting Stan like he would a butterfly on a pin. "We know that you hate your mother. And your brother."

"Where do you get that stuff?" Stan bleated, his voice rising. "What are you trying to prove?"

The man behind the desk ignored him. "Your mother used to take a strap to you when you came home late, Martin. She used to accuse you of stealing in the stores."

"Your brother, Larry. He was always your mother's favorite, wasn't he? She always did a lot of things for him that she never did for you, didn't she?"

Back to a cell, Stan thought weakly, following Tanner out. Where at least he could lie down....

But the other cell was too small to lie down in. It measured two feet square and there was no room to lie down. Or even sit down. The most he could do was lean.

He touched the wall with his hand and screamed with pain. The walls were wired for electricity, a thin strip of insulation separating them from the floor. He couldn't lie down, he thought. He didn't have room to sit down and he couldn't even lean against the walls. The only thing he could do was stand up ... and stand still.

They took him out eight hours later, when he was too hoarse to scream and the electric walls had no effect on his sagging body.

It was a different room, this time. A comfortable room with carpets on the floor and pictures on the wall and an over-stuffed sofa of some plastic material along one side.

The man waiting for him was the same young, saintly faced man who had picked him up on the street.

Mr. Ainsworth looked at him, shocked. "My God, son, haven't they taken care of your cuts?"

Stan just stared at him. Mr. Ainsworth's shocked look faded into one of grim efficiency.

"We'll have to do something about that, son—and right away!" He pressed a button and turned to Tanner. "Take this man to the infirmary immediately, Fred! And don't bring him back here until he's been bathed and issued new clothes!"

He looked back at Stan, his face a study in sympathy and pity. "Believe me, I had no idea...."

He was taken to an infirmary where doctors and nurses, their faces entirely hidden behind gauze masks, bathed him and washed his cuts and covered them with collodion and gave him a hypodermic shot of something that relaxed his muscles and banished his pain completely. They destroyed the rags he had on and in their place he was issued a suit of blue serge, like the one Tanner wore.

When he went back to the room with the carpets and the sofa, Mr. Ainsworth had set up a small dinner table. The room was thick with the fragrance of fried eggs and bacon and hot buttered toast and steaming coffee.

Stan pulled a chair over to the table. He felt weak. Eggs and bacon and coffee.... After he had finished, he sat back and took the cigarette that Mr. Ainsworth offered him.

"I wish I could answer all your questions," the saintly faced man said thoughtfully. "But you have to understand that I'm just a hired hand here. There are some things I'm not at liberty to tell you."

Things weren't adding up, Stan thought, confused. Where was he if he wasn't in jail? The cell and the slightly curving corridor, all of metal. And the doctors and the nurses, their faces almost hidden behind their gauze masks....

"They took me to see a Mr. Malcolm the other day," Stan said in a low voice. "He told me I hated the city and that I even hated my own mother and brother. Can you beat that? Honest, this character...."

His voice trailed away. Mr. Ainsworth was staring at the floor, a frown on his face.

"Everybody builds up resentments against parents who are overly strict, Stan. And it's not unusual for a mother to favor one of her children over the others."

"But you're agreeing with Mr. Malcolm," he whispered. "Honest, you must be a little crazy, too."

"I'm your friend, Stan—I wouldn't lie to you! I didn't save your life just so I could tell you lies!"

It was crazy, Stan thought. He had been on his way to the stockyards one morning and the roof had fallen in. He had been kidnapped and tortured apparently for no other reason than to be told he hated his family.

He dropped his cigarette on the carpet and ground it out under his heel. "You're just as bad as the others—you're working right in with them!"

Mr. Ainsworth looked disappointed and pressed a button on his desk. Tanner appeared in the doorway, his face as impersonal as ever.

"You'll have to take him back, Fred." He looked at Stan sadly. "We're trying to be your friends, son, and you won't let us. We're only telling you the truth!"

Tanner took him by the arm to lead him out and the very touch of his hand made Stan tremble even more. He was shaking like a leaf, and he couldn't stop it. It had been such an odd thing. When he had told Mr. Ainsworth he was as bad as the others, Mr. Ainsworth had ... flickered.

They stripped him and put him in a room that felt like the inside of a packing-house refrigerator. His breath came in little wisps of fog and if he stood in one place too long, his feet started to freeze to the floor. He had to keep moving to keep warm and he realized he couldn't keep moving forever. It was cold and damp and at periodic intervals, it rained from pipes overhead. Water that quickly froze on the floor and made his hair a mass of frosted crystals and then started to freeze on him.

He only lasted four hours in the cold room. When they took him out, his nails were broken from clawing at the door frame and he had started to bleed at the fingertips.

Why wouldn't he admit that he hated his family? His mother was responsible for his father deserting the family. And his brother used to squeal on him when he was small and had even taken money that Stan used to leave on the dresser.

Stan made the mistake of laughing and ended up in a cell where he couldn't stand, where he had to remain stooped all the time. A small tray of slops appeared after each time he slept and once every sleeping period, somebody cleaned it out.

Mr. Ainsworth questioned him next and it meant a bath and food and cigarettes and rest. He took them and enjoyed them.

Then he told Mr. Ainsworth what he thought of him. They threw him in a small, pitch-black cell and left him there. For weeks. Months.

He spent his time huddled in a corner, thinking of the city and his mother and Larry and what Spring looked like and how leaves that ended up in the Fall as large as your hand, started out as nothing more than a strip of green no bigger than his fingernail. A dozen times a period, he went over the last scene his eyes had glimpsed from Mr. Ainsworth's car. The drab houses and the green trees and the tiny stretch of blue beyond....

And then there were the days when he didn't think of anything—though he was to wonder later if it had been days or weeks or even only hours. There was nothing by which to judge time, though he tried to keep track of his own pulse and counted the beats into minutes and the minutes into hours and the hours into days.

And the odd thing was, he honestly did appreciate it. Ainsworth represented sleep and a bath and food and clean clothes. And he was grateful. Like any dog that had been kicked and starved and then wagged its tail when it was patted on the head.

"Stan," Mr. Ainsworth said quietly, "they want you to say that you hate your family. You say you don't. Perhaps you believe that. But would it hurt to merely say that you do? You don't have to actually believe it." He paused. "And to be perfectly truthful, I'm afraid that you might not live very much longer if you're not willing to go that far."

Stan jerked, as if somebody had jabbed him with a pin. To come so near to dying so many times had made life seem infinitely precious.

And what did it matter, actually? Some of the things they had been telling him—they weren't exactly lies.

"That's the way, son. Play it smart!" Mr. Ainsworth looked very proud of himself, as if Stan had just passed a difficult test.

"It's not supposed to stop there, is it?" Stan asked. "What am I supposed to believe in next, so you people won't kill me?"

"I don't think you're looking at it in the right light," Mr. Ainsworth said coldly, and Stan was panic-stricken for fear he would call in Fred and have him taken back to the cold room or the small cell. "We're just telling you things about yourself that you didn't know before."

"Sure," Stan said quickly, trying to sound sincere. "You're just telling me things I never would have suspected."

He got better treatment after that. They assigned him to a cell where he could lie down and sleep and when they talked to him, they offered him cigarettes and joked with him. Even Mr. Malcolm went out of his way to be pleasant. They were uncannily accurate when they told him about his past life and he got to thinking more and more that there was something in what they said.

Mr. Ainsworth sighed and shook his head. "Stan, do you remember when I first picked you up? Three of your fellow human beings had dragged you into an alley and were beating you up—you would have been killed if I hadn't come along." He shrugged. "That's the human race for you, son!"

"And the others are so much different?" Mr. Ainsworth sneered. "Nobody cared about you, Stan—not even your own family. No human being cares for anybody else but himself! There's a war every generation where they slaughter each other by the millions. And sickness. Have they ever made any really concerted drive against it? Have they ever really tried to stamp out poverty?"

"You talk like you're not human!" Stan said, and then realized that he had made a mistake.

Mr. Ainsworth started to flicker again, like film in a projector that's run down. Stan gripped the sides of his chair and froze, trying desperately not to show his fear.

Mr. Ainsworth was watching him closely. "I think we should tell you what this is all about, Stan. Watch."

He pressed a button on his desk and the wall behind him started to glow, then drifted away like cigarette smoke. Stan closed his eyes, feeling dizzy and sick and horribly afraid that he was going to fall. He opened them again, slowly.

The end of the room opened out on a harsh, black sky dusted with the tiny pin points of stars. Stars that didn't twinkle but shone with a bright, steady blaze. To his left and below he could see a huge segment of a mottled green and blue globe, laced over with shifting shreds of white.

He was almost sick again and then the grandeur of the scene struck him and he caught his breath, sharply.

He was somewhere in space, suspended thousands of miles above his home planet and seeing the universe as man had never seen it before. The blazing infinity of stars and the slowly rolling, green globe that was the Earth....

"The home of the apes," Mr. Ainsworth mused. He paused. "We can use that planet to far better advantage than the human race. We intend to take it. And you're going to help us."

"Half the world," Mr. Ainsworth said slowly. "One half of your whole, wide world!"

Stan stared at him coldly for a full minute, then started to laugh—laughter that ripped out of him like waves and washed against the sides of the room.

He sobered. There was a time, he thought, when every human being had to stand up and be counted as a brave man or a coward. This was his.

"And you thought I would take it! You thought I would sell out the whole human race!" His face was seamed with hate and he thumped his chest proudly, suddenly not caring what happened to himself. His voice was hoarse. "I'm one of the apes, remember? They're my people and it's my planet...."

Stan looked and felt the sweat pop out on his forehead and his stomach knot into a small, hard ball.

Mr. Ainsworth was fading, the frames slipping past so slow Stan could count them. And the image that was building up in Mr. Ainsworth's place....

Stan screamed and staggered back against the bulkhead, his arm raised before his eyes.

"You're going to help us," the creature said in a horribly liquid voice. "You're going to help us because you want to. We need advance men to soften this planet up. You're going to be one of them. And after you've done your work, our fleet will arrive!"

They took him back to one of the cells and starved him and let him live in his own filth until he wasn't sure if he was a human being or some sort of animal. They made him horribly afraid of pain until he screamed in agony when they merely laid the knives on the table. And with pain as a wedge, they took his personality apart piece by piece and flayed it and tortured it until it no longer resembled the personality that had once been Stanley Martin.

He was cut off from all contact with human beings—or creatures who had masqueraded as human. Tanner had disappeared and Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm no longer bothered to appear as homo sapiens. They saw him every waking day and if their interviews had been harsh before, now they were brutal beyond belief.

But there was still ... resistance. The personality that had been Stanley Martin wasn't entirely gone. There were still shattered fragments of memories and wishes and desires that hadn't been entirely obliterated. Tiny fragments that made him unreliable.

On the last day, he was strapped into a machine with clamps that fastened tightly to his head and chest.

The tiny fragments of personality struggled and thought and then collapsed in bewilderment.

A faint, drifting haze of memories. Of a woman who had cooked his meals and tucked him into bed at night when he was very young. Of somebody named Larry who had once bailed him out of a street fight by making like Bob Feller with some good-sized rocks....

The decaying houses and the rotting tenements. The stinking alleys and the littered parks and the filthy buildings.

Somewhere within his mind a wheel started to spin. Slow. Then faster and faster until he was sweating and shaking with nausea and then it felt like he was flying apart into small fragments that tore and buffeted each other and pained....

The human race. His race. The pieces that were Stanley Martin started to flow together, to coalesce once more into a single individual....

And then his nerve endings and ganglions felt sharp, searing pain. Pain that threaded along his nerves and burned into every segment of his body, pain that threatened to fry his cortical centers.

Pain that scattered the particles of personality that were Stanley Martin and shriveled them to nothingness. Pain that obliterated the last traces of conscience and memory.

"Yes," Stan said, not hesitating. "I hate the human race." And then he started to sweat and shake with an unreasoning anger that flooded him as suddenly as if somebody had turned on a hose. The pain.... The pain for which the apes were responsible.

A silent wave of exultation swept the compartment. They had fashioned the mold and had made their monster....

He was 24 years old. A tall, unsmiling, handsome man dressed in a blue serge suit and a hat that he liked to pull down over his eyes so he could look at the world as if it were in a frame. He wasn't the type who made friends and there was a subtle air of menace about him that frightened the people with whom he came in contact. He was a stranger who looked at the world with cold and calculating eyes, like a scientist might look at a piece of lab apparatus. Women were intrigued by him, made their approaches, and hastily left—a little insulted and far more frightened.

He was no longer 17, he was no longer a boy, and he wouldn't have shed a tear if he had been stretched on the rack. A hardness and a sense of power showed in the lines of his face and the set of his shoulders. People who talked to him felt inferior, as if they had been talking to a superman. And to a large degree they were absolutely right.

A small Thuscan flyer set him down one night on a fog-bound, Scotch moor, not far from Paisley. The next afternoon he had rented an apartment in Bristol and installed the first load of equipment. For the next three months, he did nothing but observe and travel—and buy up some small parcels of property in fifty different cities spread far and wide over the globe.

He started to set up an organization, though he had difficulty finding men to staff it. Most of those who would have qualified had been executed or were behind bars for life. But by the end of six months, his organization was almost complete. Reynolds, Langerman, and Caldwell were his lieutenants—the men who got their hands dirty and directed those in the next echelon down.

His right hand man was sent to him by Thusca. A powerful, urbane-looking man who smiled often with his mouth but never with his eyes. A guard let him in and he stood quietly in the rear of the room while Stan continued with his briefing session.

There were a dozen new men at the meeting, listening intently to what he had to say.

They were the type whose loyalty was to money, Stan thought, amused. Hard-faced men who had probably fought for a dozen different causes and switched sides as easily as changing a shirt.

"Essentially, it's a simple smuggling operation. Only you're not to know what you're smuggling and under no condition are you to open your packages."

Stan smiled bleakly. "The packages are triggered, Piazza, I'm very much afraid if you tried to open it your head would be blown off. Satisfied?"

He turned back to the others. "We pay very well—very well, indeed. A smart man, who isn't too curious, will find it well worth his while. We'll give you the packages and tell you where to leave them. In some cases, it will involve extensive travel on your part. Be cautious, be careful, and be quick on the trigger in case anybody tries to take them away from you."

The man whom Stan had called Piazza stood up and started for the door. Stan watched him quietly until his hand was on the knob.

The man turned and spat on the carpet. "I don't like your proposition. I think it stinks. We take all the risks and we don't even know what we're doing!"

Stan shook his head sadly. "I'm sorry, Piazza. Really sorry. I had hoped we could use you."

In a movement that only one pair of eyes could follow, he reached inside his coat and shot through the cloth of the lapel.

After the others had left, the man in back walked up and introduced himself, flashing the small, fluorescent identity card that labeled him as having come from Thusca.

"Tanner." Stan frowned. "Funny, I think I've heard the name before but I can't place it."

Stan shook his head. "No, it's before then." He paused. "But that's impossible!"

Stan looked surprised. "Didn't they tell you? Just before I started on this mission, I lost my memory. Crack on the head or something. I only saw two people before I left and they were busy filling me on what I was supposed to do here. Didn't have time to see the doctors." He walked to the liquor cabinet and started mixing himself a drink. "I'll be seeing Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm in a few months and maybe they can help me then."

"You don't think your memory is liable to come back ... here, do you?" Tanner asked curiously.

Stan laughed. "Not a chance—there's nothing that's apt to be familiar on this planet!" He dropped in the ice cubes. "Still, it's awkward. For all I remember of my past life, I might as well have been born in a vat."

"It's a good front and one in which we won't get our own fingers dirty. Besides, you haven't asked me what we were smuggling."

"Sometimes packages, sometimes suitcases, sometimes hat-boxes. Our men take receipt of the packages and deliver them to different destinations where they think they're going to be picked up. Perhaps a broom closet in a building, perhaps a trash box on a city street, maybe a locker in a train station. There's only two things I haven't told the men—what's in the boxes, and the fact that they're never going to be picked up."

Stan sat down in a leather upholstered chair and threw a leg over the arm. "Nothing. Not until November 4th, that is. At twelve noon, London time, half the cities of this world will be blown off the globe."

Tanner looked puzzled. "So? The air forces the fleets, and the armies will still be intact."

"They'll be much too busy to fight us," Stan said smoothly. "You see, Tanner, they'll be fighting each other."

Which actually was very clever, Stan thought slowly. The divide and conquer theory. Each of the packages contained a Thuscan fusion weapon. Once they were set off, each country would think that another had sprung a sneak attack.

November 4th, Tanner and he would strike. November 5th, the world would be in chaos.

Tanner walked to the middle of the room and stood over the body of Piazza. "What are you going to do with our friend?"

"Send him away—I think to Africa." Stan picked the body up and lugged it into what had once been the bedroom. Now it was a room jammed with transmitting equipment and, against the far wall, a single hoop of shining metal standing upright on a black marble base. The hoop was large, over six feet in diameter, with a thin, metal filament winding around it.

He turned a dial set in the base. The filament glowed red and then a brilliant white. The hoop itself shimmered and faded, while at the same time a whirling circle of brilliant black built up where it had been. He tensed his muscles and heaved and Piazza's body hit the circle and disappeared, like a man plunging into quicksand.

"In a doorway on the Street of Lepers in Casablanca." Stan turned the dial again and the whirling circle slowed and became translucent and then faded out altogether as the hoop sprang back into view.

"Transmitting equipment to set off the fusion packages." Stan pointed to two box-like structures against the far wall. One held a bank of fifty small, white lights. The other, a bank of fifty red. "The white lights are the operators themselves—I can tell immediately if anything happens to them. The others represent the fusion packages. If one of them goes, I know the package has been tampered with."

"We just lost an agent," Stan said grimly. "Chicago sector." He glanced over at the bank of red lights—they were still lit. "It couldn't have been about the fusion packages. It must have been about the ... other operation." He looked at Tanner. "The one you were sent to handle."

Stan shrugged. "We'll handle it ourselves, and then recruit another agent." He leafed through a filing cabinet, then finally pulled a dossier and gave it to Tanner. "Trace this man and find out what you can. We'll meet there in a week."

Tanner tapped the card lightly against his knuckles. "Mr. Ainsworth didn't think you'd be meeting any opposition."

Stan blanked his face of expression. He wasn't exactly sure why, but he didn't like Tanner.

There was a short silence and then Tanner walked to the hoop and worked the dial. The shimmering black sprang up and he stepped up on the marble. Just before he went through, he said: "What are you going to do about the ... opposition?"

After Tanner had gone through, Stan shut off the hoop. As the circle faded it caught his image and held it briefly, like a mirror.

The problem of possible opposition bothered him but there was something that worried him even more. Something he caught himself thinking about when he woke up in the morning. Something he thought about all day and something he couldn't get out of his mind when he went to bed at night.

It was a summer evening and downtown Chicago was a hot-box of sweltering buildings and steaming tar streets. People stretched out on the lawns in front of Buckingham fountain for any stray breezes that might wander in off the lake or else they curled up in front of fans and read until the small hours of the morning when the temperature had drifted down a few degrees so it was possible to go to bed without drowning in a pool of their own sweat.

A woman walking by the Pure Oil building suddenly saw a shimmering in the air and then a man was standing in the shadowed doorway, staring nonchalantly at her. She almost screamed, then put it down to the heat and hurried by.

Stan strolled up Michigan Boulevard to stop for a moment in front of a bookstore where a man had been staring in the window.

Tanner nodded. "He leaves the Prudential building in half an hour. He parks his car on the ramp below the street, in the parking lot that runs parallel to the river. It's in the far corner—a sport model." He fumbled in his pocket for a small card. "Here's the license number. The ape is easy enough to recognize. About sixty years old, sport coat, and a pork-pie hat. He's had a small office here for a couple of weeks, doing government work, so he might be carrying a briefcase. Tomorrow he goes back east."

"The best they've got. Losing him will be quite a blow to the apes. Quite a blow."

Stan stood in the shadows of the bookstore for a few minutes more. He could hear every tiny noise on the street, including the rapid tick-tick-tick of his own wrist-watch.

He turned and started up the street, to the stairs that would take him to the level below. Hundreds of cars were parked in neat, silent rows below the ramp. Overhead was the cold brilliance of hundreds of fluorescent lamps.

Light enough he thought. It wouldn't be ... sporting ... to shoot the ape scientist down in the dark.

He found the bright, two-toned sports car at the end of the ramp. Nobody was in sight. He smiled to himself and walked on past the car and then stood quietly in the shadows of a concrete pillar. He had a while to wait and disquieting thoughts swam slowly to the surface of his mind.

This city of Chicago. He had been to many cities on the planet but this was the only one that somehow ... bothered him. A city that seemed oddly, tantalizingly familiar. And there was a pressing urgency for him to see some people in it....

But as an agent of Thusca, he could afford no time for such neurotic thoughts. He would tell the doctors about it when he returned, but right now there was work.

He stood there without moving a muscle, thinking of nothing at all, as if Stanley Martin were only an illusion and didn't really exist. It was a quarter to six.

The man came closer and fumbled at the door of his automobile, trying to get the key into the lock.

Stan pressed the stud and the violet beam flashed out and splashed on the car door six inches from the man's hand. The paint flared into a smoking fire and a neat, thin line raced down the metal, cutting cleanly through the body and the upholstery and the steel frame.

He'd let him squirm for a second, Stan thought coldly, and then move the beam back and cut the ape in two.

He never touched the man. There was a spanging sound and the pillar Stan was leaning against suddenly showed concrete chips. He fell backwards and sprawled on the pavement, the violet beam from his heat gun crazily scorching the concrete overhead.

The man in the pork-pie hat dodged up the ramp. Stan tried to pick him off but the pillar showered concrete again and his aim was spoiled. Then the man was gone and Stan's mind turned to his own problems.

"Come out now and you can come out alive. Fight, and we'll bring you out dead!"

A woman's voice, he thought coldly. Coming from a car about a hundred feet down....

He aimed his heater and exploded the gas tank, the flames whooshing out into the closed space.

He fired again and then a steady shower of concrete chips that sprayed his elbow made him glance at the pillar, alarmed. It had been cut entirely away at the top and now it was being chewed away at the bottom, ready to topple over on him.

He set his heater for a fan-shaped ray to cover his movements and scrambled out from behind the pillar, desperately trying to dodge over to the line of cars.

Something spanged into his shoulder and spun him around. He fell heavily to the pavement, the pain briefly paralyzing his nerves. He waited a split second for the pain to lessen, then tried to scramble for his heater. The cement in front of him exploded into dust and chips that cut his face and almost blinded his eyes.

She stepped out from behind another pillar. A tall, black-haired woman with wide cheek-bones and cold, green eyes. Her face was hard and she carried her hand weapon with all the assurance of one who was thoroughly familiar with it. Two men came with her. They were capable looking men but not the grim, hard-eyed professionals that Stan was used to working with.

The woman walked over to Stan and slapped his face—hard—her nails digging bloody furrows in his skin.

"How does it feel to be a traitor? How does it feel to sell out your native planet for nothing at all?"

"It was a clever scheme," she continued bitterly. "To win a planet, you first cut off its head—you eliminate the scientists!" She leveled her hand weapon at him. "But that's not all you've had in mind. What other schemes has the renegade earthman thought of?"

The world slipped into a haze of red and his hand darted for the pocket where he kept his heat gun—to pause, uncertainly, when he remembered it lay on the concrete fifteen feet away.

She laughed. "They've made you into a Pavlovian dog that drools whenever they ring a bell—and you don't even realize what they've done to you! They pull the strings and their marionette jerks and dances and does their dirty work for them!"

She raised the weapon and Stan knew she was perfectly capable of doing it. A moment more and the small pellets would burrow into his body, to explode deep in the flesh. He tensed himself for a final effort to escape, knowing it would be next to useless.

She never pulled it. There was a scream behind her and one of her men collapsed to the pavement, a thin swirl of smoke drifting up from his blasted chest. The girl's eyes narrowed, then she suddenly darted towards the river that lapped against the parking level. The remaining man dropped to his knees to cover her escape and the ramp was filled with the spanging sound of his own pistol.

The sound ceased abruptly in another burst of flames and smoke and then Tanner was racing down the ramp.

Stan ran to the river's edge and Tanner cut the oily surface with lancing rays from his heater.

"She's gone," Stan said in a tired voice. "Save it." He watched the surface for a moment more, than turned back to Tanner. "Who was she? What's her name?"

Tanner shrugged. "I don't know who she is or what she's doing here. I can't tell you."

He wouldn't forget her, Stan thought slowly. That long, black hair and those green eyes. And she had moved like a cat, a sleek cat who was just as willing to kill for a cause as he was.

Stan looked at him coldly. "The only idea I have is to kill her before she kills me."

He started walking towards another flight of stairs a block down. How long had it been since he had walked down the ramp? he wondered. There had been the noise and the oily smoke from the automobile. The ramp should have been swarming with curious apes by now. But for some reason it wasn't....

It had shaken him, he thought slowly. His briefing on Thusca had mentioned nothing about an opposition organization of the apes. And in particular, it had mentioned nothing about a ... girl.

He would have to warn the agents in his own organization, he thought abstractly. And it would probably be best to use a code name. He asked Tanner for a suggestion.

Stan looked at him sharply and had the odd feeling that was really the girl's name. And then he recalled Tanner racing down the ramp screaming "Don't let her get away!" and the disappointed look on his face when she had.

It was eight o'clock Thursday evening when Stan stepped out of a faintly glowing circle of black light in a small alley off the Rue Pigalle in Paris. He calmly lit a cigarette and walked down the street to a small cafe.

It was bigger on the inside than it looked from the street. A long, low-ceilinged room with a tiny platform and a small band, almost hidden by the cigarette smoke, at the far end. Tanner and Reynolds, one of Stan's lieutenants, were seated at a small table along the side, earnestly talking to a frightened little man with an old-fashioned walrus moustache.

Stan squeezed in next to the little man and introduced himself. He ordered wine, then said: "You know the arrangements?"

The little man made a show of licking his lips and nervously twisting his moustache.

"I don't get you, guv'nor. You want to give me a hundred thousand francs just to deliver a package to the souvenir stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower?"

"You're to give the girl a hundred francs," Stan cut in smoothly. "And ask her if she'll hold it for a Monsieur Lorenz."

The little man's eyelids drooped suggestively. "You're up to no good and a hundred thousand francs doesn't seem to me to cover it."

Stan moved in closer, threateningly. The little man thrust out his chin and glared at him.

"Just you watch your step, guv'nor! All I 'ave to do is 'oller 'elp and fifty people will be on your neck. And what's to keep me from talking about this anyways?"

"I could kill you right while you sit there," Stan said quietly. "I could do it and you wouldn't make a sound and nobody would know you were dead until ten minutes after we left."

The little man's eyes showed white and he nervously twisted a heavy ring on his finger. "You wouldn't dare, guv'nor. A bloke like you wouldn't dare!"

"You'll do exactly as we say," Stan interrupted coldly. "And if we wanted you to, you'd do it for exactly nothing." He smiled grimly. "Your real name is William Clark. You're in this country without a visa or a passport. You jumped ship from a British freighter during the war. Your wife died shortly after you signed up for your last voyage and there was some talk about it. But you disappeared and they never found you again or heard from you and the case was dropped."

The little man's eyes were wide and beads of sweat were dripping off the ends of his moustache.

"Why now, you wouldn't turn in an old man, would you, guv'nor? I've been clean ever since I been over 'ere! I 'aven't done a thing!"

Stan stared at him coldly. "Will you or won't you? You know the woman who runs the stand. It shouldn't be difficult."

"Why now, it doesn't seem like much," he mumbled. "Just a suitcase and you say all you want me to do is leave it with the woman?"

"Be careful how you handle the suitcase and under no circumstances drop it—you'd be damned sorry if you did."

"All right, I'll do it." He sidled past Tanner and stopped at the edge of the table. "Your eyes, guv'nor," he said suddenly, looking at Stan. "I swear to the Almighty, they're 'angman's eyes!"

Somewhere, someplace, Stan mused, he had thought that about somebody else. About Fred Tanner.

Tanner fumbled in his wallet and gave the heavy man sitting next to him, a bill. "Reynolds, order up some more wine and see if they have any sandwiches, will you?" After Reynolds had left, he turned to Stan. "How many will this make?"

"One in Chicago's Palmolive building, one in the Woolworth building on Manhattan Island, one in a dressing room of the Old Howard in Boston. Glasgow, Tokyo, Moscow, London, Rome and 41 others. And now Paris. They're all covered. Fifty ape cities—none of them long for this world."

Tanner nodded thoughtfully. "Mr. Ainsworth will be very pleased. Very pleased indeed."

Reynolds was back with a wine bottle in a small wicker basket and a plate of tired looking sandwiches. Stan drank the wine and ate the sandwiches without actually tasting them at all.

The cities were dirty, filthy ghettoes of brick and stone and the people were only apes, he mused. But somehow....

William Clark lived in a small, stuccoed rooming house in a suburb midway between Paris and Versailles. It looked old even for a rooming house in France, Stan thought. There was a mustiness and an age you could sense even from the outside. The ivy that climbed the walls was dead, the stucco was chipped in spots, and the curtains he could see through the windows looked yellowed and limp.

He climbed the front steps and worked the heavy knocker, then stood back waiting for the concierge to show up.

He tried the knocker again and then the door knob. There was a sudden snapping sound, the door creaked open, and he stepped in.

Dust—billows of it—rose from the hall rug. Dust that almost choked him before it settled once more on an ancient window seat and clung to the moldering drapes.

He turned to Tanner and felt a shock of surprise. Tanner was cradling his heat gun in his hands, ready for instant action. His face was grim.

Stan hesitated a moment. He was supposed to be in charge of the operation, yet Tanner was taking over. For a very good reason—Tanner knew something that he didn't. He followed Tanner up the stairs, his feet sending out little puffs of dust from the stair treads. Clark's room was closed and he knocked lightly on the door.

The big man hunched his shoulders and drove for the door. The panel burst like it had been made from paper and he stumbled to the center of the room before he could stop himself.

Stan's voice chilled. "You've been acting like a cat on a hot griddle ever since we walked in. Just what were you expecting?"

That was a good question, Stan thought. Just where was Clark? He glanced around the room. The average rooming house cell, the kind so many people on this planet seemed to live in. A bureau and an unmade bed, the blankets rumpled and twisted....

There was a linen runner on top of the bureau and on top of that was a glass, neatly wrapped in cellophane. He walked over and barely touched it, intent on moving the glass to get a better look at a photograph behind it.

The photograph behind it wasn't important, Stan thought. A photo of a ship on which Clark had been a crew member.

What was important was the cellophane that had crumbled at his touch and the dusty linen runner which hung in tattered shreds where it overlapped the top of the bureau.

As if the weight of the cloth had become too much for the strength of the linen thread.

Tanner was standing by the window, looking out. When he moved back, his arm touched the curtain. The curtain collapsed and powdered, sifting down to the dusty carpet.

Stan watched it with intense curiosity, then moved over to the bed. The bed clothes were rumpled but they weren't lying flat. They were bunched in spots—as if somebody might still be underneath them.

He held his heat gun in one hand and flicked the blankets aside with the other. Like the curtains, they ripped and powdered.

Beneath the blankets was a skeleton—a few tattered pieces of cloth lying inside the gaunt bones. "I see you've found Clark," Tanner said.

Stan could feel the sweat pop out on his forehead. Nobody on Thusca had ever told him that a man could die and the flesh on his bones shrivel to dust all in one evening. He bent over the bed. The skeleton was that of a man, a very old man, whose bones had started to calcify at the joints. There was nothing about it to link it with William Clark.

The little man with the walrus moustache had been middle-aged. He hadn't been old, he certainly hadn't been senile to the point where his joints were hardening.

Then he saw the ring on one of the finger bones. He touched it gingerly and rubbed away the green verdigris. The same ring he had seen Clark toy with at the tavern.

He turned to Tanner, questioning. The narrow-eyed, dapperly dressed man was standing at one side of the window, his heat gun cocked. He was staring steadily through the glass and didn't bother to turn around. His voice was hard.

"You want to know what it's all about, don't you, Martin? Well, come on over and take a look for yourself."

"What about me?" a frightened voice suddenly rattled. "When's somebody going to tell me what's going on?"

Reynolds. They had forgotten all about him, Stan thought. Now the big man was shaking with fear, fear of the unknown. Stan wrinkled his nose. The ape was sweating and you could smell him clear across the room.

Tanner laughed easily. "I'll give you a full explanation later on, Reynolds. But right now we're in trouble!"

Stan ran to the other window and stared at the street below. It didn't seem any different than when he had come in a few minutes earlier. The wide boulevard of stucco houses, the shade trees and the lawns. And a few of the apes on the sidewalk, hurrying to work....

Only they weren't hurrying, he noticed after a moment. One man was halfway down the house steps across the street, a brief case under his arm. But he wasn't moving. He was frozen in mid-air, off-balance, one foot halfway down to the next step. A housewife had stopped in mid-stride two doors down, her shopping bag swung forward at an awkward angle. At the corner, a small Renault car was poised in the middle of the street, caught in the process of turning.

Further down the block, two small boys in short pants and berets had been playing catch. One was crouched, his hand out. The other was standing, one foot in the air and one upraised arm behind his head. Stan narrowed his eyes and located the ball. It was about ten feet from the thrower, crawling slowly through the air.

Even as he watched, the ball slowed and stopped, hovering twenty feet above the asphalt.

"It'll get harder!" Tanner said grimly. "This will last for about half an hour. Slow your breathing and whatever you do, move slow. You move too fast and the air friction alone will set your clothes on fire!"

He swung slowly forward and brought the butt of his heat gun against the glass. Small cracks lanced through the window but it didn't break. Tanner pushed against it and the pieces slowly folded outwards.

"Avis and her men. The ones who caught you flat-footed under the ramp the other day. They're the ones who put up the field, who killed Clark."

Clark. Avis, Stan thought, could probably speed things up as well as slow them down. Clark was to have stayed home today, to wait for them. Avis and her men had waited until everybody but Clark had left, then they had turned on the field and aged the house and Clark by a hundred years in five minutes. It explained the skeleton, it explained the dust, it explained the crumbling cellophane and the yellowed curtains that powdered at the touch.

And the day on the ramp in Chicago. Avis had speeded things up, then. What had seemed to him to take half an hour, had actually occurred in minutes.

"Neutralizers—they're built into your belt. If they weren't, you could have died a long time ago. Our own fields shield Reynolds."

Across the street, a figure darted from one parked car to another. A man suddenly ran behind the car that was poised on the corner. Stan could make out other figures moving behind the windows across the street.

There was the familiar spanging sound and a series of holes stitched themselves in the fragments of glass left in the window frame, three inches from his cheek. There was an impression of speed and heat and a crackling sound as the tiny projectiles thudded into the plaster behind him.

A pale, violet glow flashed out from Tanner's window and one of the figures on the street suddenly raised its hands in agony as flames crisped its clothing and burned its flesh. It staggered a few feet and finally fell in a flaming mass, its screams of agony splitting the still air.

Stan let his breath out slowly. He hadn't got a good look at the figure and for one brief moment he had thought it was ... Avis.

Which was an odd way to feel about a woman who would gladly slit his throat, he thought.

Stan flamed one of the automobiles and narrowly missed a small figure which scuttled out from behind it. He stole a look at Tanner. The man's face was flushed and shining, a half grin of expectancy was painted on it.

The spanging sounds sounded harder. Outside the window frames, Stan could see gouts of concrete and stucco being chiseled out of the walls. There was practically nothing left of the frames themselves but splinters of wood, held in place by small lumps of disintegrating mortar.

They were taking the house apart, he thought. They were dissecting it as casually as you would a frog, until the entire front part of the room would be exposed and there would then be no place to hide.

He turned up a notch on his heater and sprayed the other side of the street with a wide angle beam. There was an abrupt cessation of noise and then it started in again, louder than before. The small bedroom was becoming foggy with concrete and brick dust.

He caught sight of a figure moving behind the shrubs across the street and took careful aim. There was a sharp cry and then he had to dodge quickly back inside the window. Something had grazed his cheek, cutting it so a thin stream of blood angled down from the cheek bone.

Two men had taken refuge behind some trees, further down the block. He took aim, then hesitated. The frozen figures of the two boys who had been playing catch were directly in the line of fire.

He tightened his finger, then sweat crept into the corners of his eyes and he blinked for a moment. He took aim again ... and wavered slightly. The sweat was heavier now and he could feel it soak the shirt on his back. Once more ... only apes....

"The apes that are hiding—they won't stay there forever. They'll move someplace else and when they do, I'll get them."

Tanner laughed and aimed out the window. A moment later, two blazing torches had crumpled to the asphalt. Almost simultaneously, the trees went up in flames and two fiery figures stumbled out from behind them.

"Don't ever let your emotions interfere with your better judgment," Tanner said shortly. "Mr. Ainsworth wouldn't like it. Neither would I."

Stan hardly heard him. It didn't mean anything to him one way or the other, he kept telling himself. They were apes.

"What will the apes say when this is over and they discover the shattered houses and the bodies?"

"There'll be no bodies. The wind disperses the ashes as soon as the field is let up. As for the rest—the apes are ingenious in thinking up explanations. They never believe in anything they haven't seen themselves."

The room was thick with dust and the noise of the spanging; the front wall was holed in half a dozen different spots. Then there was a rush of figures across the street and Stan caught his breath. In the lead was Avis, black hair streaming, urging the others on....

Tanner suddenly ran to the back of the room and pushed the bureau and the bed over by the front wall. He stripped the closet and piled the clothes by the furniture.

There was a lull in the spanging and a quiet sobbing suddenly filled the room. Stan turned.

Reynolds had collapsed in a corner, half out of his mind with fear. Tears straggled down the big man's face and sobbing convulsed his chest.

Stan knew what was coming. Reynolds had ended up by knowing too much. Which was just too bad for Reynolds.

"Gladly," Tanner said grimly. He brought up the heater and a violet beam danced over the crouching man and the bureau and the piled clothing. There was a short, pitiful screaming and then flames shot high into the room and billows of smoke curled casually through the broken windows.

It wasn't there. While they had been busy at the windows, Stan thought, somebody had stolen the case. Reynolds hadn't even seen them and even if he had—the ape was now beyond questioning.

"It's gone?" Tanner laughed. "Avis is an amateur, Martin. And a bungling amateur at that! She could have killed us again and instead she preferred the case! One call to Ainsworth and we'll replace that tomorrow!"

They were feeling their way down the back stairs when the thick feeling to the air disappeared. Suddenly the street was filled with screams as passersby noticed the instantaneously ruined house and the burning cars and the suspicious mounds of ashes that swirled up into the morning air.

A block away, Stan stopped and wiped the sweat and soot from his face. Tanner looked at him sharply. "Something wrong?"

"Yes, there's something wrong!" Stan swung around and grabbed Tanner by the lapels, crossing his hands so the cloth was drawn tight around Tanner's throat and his knuckles dug into the flesh.

"I haven't been getting the answers," he said in a thin voice. "The girl's no ape—she knows too much, her weapons are too far advanced, her men are too well organized!" His voice started to shake with nervous reaction. "I'm supposed to be running the operation down here and I don't even know what's going on!"

"The answers should have occurred to you," Tanner said, his face a mask. "We're not the only ones who want this planet, Martin!"

Not the only ones! Stan relaxed his grip and let his arms hang limply at his side.

"Avis is an Aurelian," Tanner went on. "Her system and ours have fought many bloody battles for this planet. We're still fighting them—down here, now." He paused. "You haven't been told everything—operators are fed knowledge bit by bit, when they can fit it in. As a Thuscan agent, Martin, you're told just as much as the high command thinks necessary!"

His voice softened, became more persuasive. "We kill but not blindly, Stan. This is an important war—it's a war for an entire planet. We have to be brutal but the stakes are high. We're fighting to capture this planet for our own ... flesh and blood."

He wouldn't make the same mistake again, he thought. He'd do what he was told and he wouldn't forget that Avis and all of her kind were his implacable enemies, the enemies of his people.

In talking to him, Tanner had sounded like somebody he had heard once before....

The nightmares started in Beirut. Stan's apartment was a modern one, just a block from the American University. He had opened the wood-slat Venetian blinds and had gone to bed, feeling dead tired. It was late August and things had not gone too well. Agents had disappeared. Fusion packages had disappeared from their hiding places.

But worries could not compete with physical exhaustion. He was asleep as soon as he hit the pillow.

The nightmares were terrifying. He was no longer Stanley Martin, patriotic agent for the planet Thusca. He was 17 years old once more, playing in the city streets of Chicago and fighting in a pillow fight with his older brother and running errands for his mother or watching her while she made meat loaf and took loaves of freshly baked bread from the ovens.

And then there was the smell of printing ink on freshly printed papers and reporters yelling "Copy boy!" at him and the twice weekly trips to the stockyards to pick up the live-stock reports.

The stockyards. He had stopped by an alley one morning and three men had jumped him, slugging him in the stomach and kidneys and hitting ... hitting ... hitting....

He woke up, shaking. His pajamas and the bed sheets were soaked with perspiration. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his head in his hands.

He got up and went to the bathroom for a glass of water. He didn't go back to sleep.

The nightmare the next night was different. Once again he saw two small French boys playing in the street. One moment, thin, bandy-legged kids in short pants and berets ... the next, two blazing torches that crumpled silently to the asphalt.

And then there was the hideous, horribly shrill screaming of Reynolds when Tanner had played the heat gun over him. The terrible screaming that Stan knew would haunt him for years....

The nightmares, the goddamned nightmares.... He fumbled for matches and cigarettes on the bed table. The tiny flame of the match shook nervously in the gloom of the bedroom.

He had to stop them, if it meant dosing himself with drugs before he went to bed. He couldn't stand the dreams, he couldn't take the false memories that kept cropping up.

The next night he made up his mind. There were pieces still missing from the puzzle of who he was. There were things, he felt sure, that Tanner had never told him. Things, no doubt, that the high command had felt he wasn't ready to know yet.

A good agent wouldn't question higher authority, he thought slowly, sweating. But he had to know them! He had to know the answers, he had to know about his first 25 years of life.

And there was one person who might be able to give him some information. One person who had once called him a traitor, who had implied he was a renegade and had been conditioned. One person who knew things about himself that he didn't.

Eventually, he had to find her—to kill her. But right now, he wanted to find her to get information.

He got dressed, set the dial of the transport-hoop for London and stepped through. Tanner was waiting for him on the other side.

"I don't know ... exactly. We've been trying to trace the radiations from the fusion package but it keeps moving about the city." Tanner grimaced. "We haven't been successful in following it. We've lost quite a number of agents trying to follow it, as you know."

He stood up and fished in his pocket for a pipe and a small pouch of tobacco. He looked very casual, very urbane, Stan thought.

Tanner shrugged. "Good luck." Then he added seriously: "Don't talk to her, Martin. Don't give her a chance to pull something. Kill her on sight."

"I'll do that," Stan lied. He checked his heat gun, then worked the dial on the hoop once more and stepped through the shining oval....

... onto a street on Chicago's south side, a few doors down from the Hyde Park theatre. He walked into a nearby drug store and made a phone call, then walked back to the corner to wait. A moment later, one of his chief lieutenants, Caldwell, drove up.

"We lost Jones and Hagerty, Mr. Martin—just a few hours ago. I was making up a report on them when you called."

The man held out a small gadget that looked a little like a light meter. Stan swung it around experimentally. A small light mounted on it flickered briefly. He swung it back again and the light glowed, went out, and then glowed strongly again.

"You know, I don't see how you trace a person with that," Caldwell said, curious. "How does it work?"

There were a lot of things that Caldwell didn't know, Stan thought. He didn't know that the deal was anything more than a smuggling operation, he didn't realize that this was not a gang war but was one for much higher stakes but if his curiosity kept up, some day he would stumble on the truth.

Caldwell threw the car in gear and they drove silently north through the crowded streets. The light on the small indicator waxed and waned and grew steadily brighter as the faint radiation from the fusion material increased.

"You don't want to get too close," Caldwell said suddenly. "That's what happened to the other boys. They got too close and then they were ambushed."

The indicator light slowly increased in brilliance, then started to die again. They were about three blocks away, Stan thought, passing it at right angles.

"Wait on the corner. If I'm not back in an hour, then notify Tanner. He'll know what to do."

He got out of the car, palming the indicator in his hand. Avis—or at least the package—was somewhere in the area.

He glanced at the indicator and started walking, stopping occasionally to look in a store window and steal another look at the indicator. A block and a half down. One door, two doors....

An office building. The usual miscellany—dentists and doctors and small professional firms.

He walked in, his eyes documenting everybody in the lobby. Any two or three of the men idling in the lobby could be her men, he thought.

And if any one of them had made a false movement, there would have been a sudden massacre.

The reaction on the indicator was strong. He went down to the fourth floor where it was stronger, then down to the third.

He walked quietly back up the stairs and paused at the landing, listening. There were no sounds of anyone in the corridor. He walked casually down it. A doctor's office, a dentist's office, a hairdresser's, and an employment agency.

The employment agency, he thought sharply. The perfect front, the perfect cover.

He stopped quietly outside and unlimbered his heat gun from its shoulder holster. He turned the knob and walked in.

And was suddenly aware that all noise had stopped, the air was heavy, and the dust motes in the stream of sunlight that lanced through the window were perfectly still.

She was standing in front of her desk, looking exactly as when he had seen her on the ramp in Chicago and on the street in the Paris suburb. A tall woman, a little on the thin side. Thick black hair that hung loosely about her face, making a frame for a pale skin and cold, green eyes. It was a hard, capable face with just a suggestion that at another time and another place, it might have been a beautiful face.

Stan leveled his heat gun. She didn't move a muscle but patiently waited for him to press the stud.

Don't talk to her, Tanner had said. Kill her on sight. But he hadn't come to kill her. Not yet. Not before he found out some information.

"No doubt it runs into hundreds," Stan said sarcastically. "I suppose any day now the apes will be getting suspicious."

She shook her head, bitterly. "Not—they won't. It happens all the time. People die in lonely little rooms, people have accidents, people commit suicide. Or so the Terrans think. They never seem to look beyond."

"You forget," Stan pointed out. "We've lost men, too. And I'm sure that not all of them died from natural causes."

"Who have you lost, Martin? Thieves, dope peddlers, murderers, and worse? And what have I lost? Patriots, scientists, statesmen—the few who understand and believe and are willing to work with me."

Stan shrugged impatiently. "You said I had taken a long time in getting here. I suppose you planned it that way."

She looked surprised. "Why else do you think we stole the fusion packages? Just to keep you from replacing them? The Thuscans can supply you with all the packages you need. We wanted to give you something by which you could trace me."

A half smile broke the granite lines of her face. "Nobody but you would have gotten this far, Martin."

He stared at her in disbelief. "You must have known I wouldn't agree—even before you asked me."

"We're losing," she said, her face looking even more pale. "We've lost close to three hundred agents and we've located only ten fusion packages. I don't know your exact time table but I know it's sometime in November. It's late August now." Her face twisted. "We haven't got a chance, and you know it!"

"That's right," he agreed. "You haven't got a chance. What do you want me to do? Sell out?"

There was that hint again, he thought sharply. The hint that she knew something about himself that he didn't. Or at least, she thought she did.

"Because we're not a group of aliens," she said calmly. "Because this planet is our planet, everybody on it is an Aurelian. And so are you!"

"It's true!" she blazed. "But you've been conditioned! You believe everything the Thuscans tell you and you've never questioned it. Now it's time somebody told you the truth!"

She leaned closer to him and he caught a trace of faint perfume. "This whole world could go up in smoke, Martin, and it actually wouldn't be important. Not to the Thuscans and not to my own people. You know why? Because it's a sidelight! An unimportant little skirmish in a battle your mind couldn't even conceive of!"

"This Earth—it's not the home of the human race, Martin. It's a colony planet—colonized thousands of years ago, like a hundred other systems. For the last fifty thousand years, Aurelia has expanded throughout the galaxy. We don't keep contact with all the planets we've colonized—we can't. Our mission was to sow the human race far and wide and let them develope as they would.

"That was a mistake." She walked back to the desk. "Eventually we ran into the Thuscans—your so-beloved friends, Martin! They were expanding too, towards us. We had to fall back to try and defend our primitive little colony planets. And that wasn't easy. It wasn't easy at all."

"We had been peaceful for too long. And we weren't professional militarists. And we were so few. So pitifully few! The most we could hope to do was to combat the Thuscan system of infiltration, and then try to convince each planet of its own peril, so they could look to their own defenses."

"What do you think would happen if we showed ourselves and set down a ship?" she asked curtly. "Most of the planets would be paralyzed with terror! They'd consider us suspect and they would hate us because we were more advanced. I do what I can. I try to convince a few. And when I do, they usually try to help." She looked at him again and her face was sheer hate. "Patriotic men, Martin—men that you've helped to slaughter!"

For a fraction of a second, she looked like she was going to break down. Then her face hardened again. Her voice was husky.

"I've manned the barricades on a thousand different planets, Martin! I've fought the Thuscans for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I've succeeded, more often I've failed. And when I've failed, I've had to run away." Her voice changed to steel. "But I'm not running anymore. If I lose, I'm staying here."

"You picked the wrong person to give a speech to," Stan said coldly. He started for the door and then stopped. "You said I was an Aurelian, a human being. What did you mean by that?"

"You were born in this city 25 years ago," she said in a low voice. "You worked here, your family lived here. You had a mother and a brother named Larry. You were ... exceptional. All the indications are, that you would have made a great man. You loved the world and the people in it. When you were seventeen, you were kidnapped by the Thuscans and conditioned to what you are now. They intentionally made you lose your memory, so that you would have no memories and no will—no will but theirs."

"You don't want to." She paused. "You better leave, Martin. You better go back to the marionette makers and the string pullers."

He took one last look, realizing that something inside him was struggling to give the girl comfort, to say something that might help her. Then he shrugged and walked out the door.

He was two blocks away before he realized that both he and the girl could have killed each other at almost any time.

He was two men, after the meeting with the girl, Stanley Martin, the loyal Thuscan agent who continued to mastermind the betrayal of a world.

And Stanley Martin, the man who wondered at and was repelled by his own action. The man to whom the city of Chicago was strangely familiar. The man who distrusted Tanner and who knew there was a reason for it. The man in whose mind small bits of memory kept bobbing to the surface, like a ship that was breaking up beneath the sea and planks and spars kept rising to the top.

He also knew that that way lay ... madness. Two minds could not continue to dwell in the same body. He could not continually war with himself. The weaker, the fainter of the two would have to die.

Which meant that the person who had brought his weaker memory to the surface would have to die.

He worked at it consciously and carefully. One of the fusion packages was planted in a small store in Chicago, near the intersection of 63rd and Halsted. One of Avis' agents tried to pick it up and was killed. Two more tried the next day—and failed.

The word filtered out that the package was a special package, that its importance overshadowed that of other fusion packages. But no more agents tried for it.

By the end of October, opposition had apparently dwindled and faded. Avis had vanished from sight. There were reports that she had been seen in Stockholm and once that she had been glimpsed in a Moscow suburb. Then the reports ceased entirely.

Stan was not deceived. Avis would try once more, he thought. She would try for the package in Chicago. So he prepared for her, for the final ambush.

The 31st of October, agents were reported filtering down to the intersection and Stan decided to step in personally.

He stepped out of the circle of shimmering light in an alley near 63rd street. Nobody noticed him at all. People were streaming past him, racing through the alley to get away from the intersection. Stan grabbed a man running past him.

"Christ, Mister, don't go out there! They got guns that shoot flames and there's fifty people lying dead in the intersection! All in a minute, I'm walking past on my way to Sears and all of a sudden the streets are loaded with corpses!"

Stan let him go and raced up the alleyway. He could hear the quiet, singing noises of the heat guns and the rapid, spanging gunfire of Avis' men. She had come out in the open, trying desperately to convince the apes that they were threatened by alien groups. She had turned off the time projector halfway through the battle and it must have seemed like carnage had sprung up instantaneously.

There were at least two dozen crumpled figures lying on the pavement near the intersection. Some were crisped to near ash and others had been blasted with the spanging pellets. Two cars were blazing furiously and the windows in Sears and Wieboldt's had been shattered.

A pellet whizzed past his ear and he ducked low, glancing swiftly around the intersection. A thin, violet beam was playing from a doorway in Sears and he dodged towards it, ignoring the other spanging projectiles that ripped through the air and caromed off the building walls behind him.

Tanner was in the doorway, nursing a bleeding shoulder, his face glowing with the joys of battle.

"She's playing it in the open," Tanner snarled. "She's trying to convince the apes that way!"

She might succeed, Stan thought slowly, but it was more likely that the apes would blame it on a gang war of some kind. They wouldn't believe the truth. They wouldn't want to.

Tanner pointed down the street a block. "Cover it down there and we'll try to drive them towards you!"

Stan raced down half a dozen doors, then suddenly stiffened. There was the wail of sirens. And then the heavy chatter of a machine gun and the drifting choking of tear gas.

The spanging sounds and the violet beams suddenly stilled and figures slipped quietly from the buildings towards the side streets. Stan hesitated and then started running, away from the intersection.

He collided with Avis when she darted from a doorway. The granite face had broken and tears were streaking down it. Before he realized it, he was holding her tightly around the shoulders while she sobbed into his chest.

He had been fooling himself all along, he suddenly knew. He couldn't kill her. He couldn't come anywhere near to it.

"In every game," he said quietly, "there has to be a side that wins and a side that loses."

Her sobs broke off and she looked up at him, shaking her head to clear the hair from her face.

"I'm not crying because I've lost," she said quietly. "I'm crying because ... a brave man is dying! Because so many brave men have died!" She paused and the lines of weariness etched themselves back into her face. "I should have told you, Stan. I should have told you long ago. Maybe it might have helped."

She pointed to the intersection. "He won't ... last long. Go out and say good-bye."

He stared back at the intersection. It was quiet now, powdered concrete dust settling slowly out of the air. Police were circling among the quiet forms lying on the pavement while curious onlookers began to form a ring around the corner.

A figure was slumped by one of the cars, its whole left side a singed and blackened mass of ash.

Stan walked over to him. The man coughed and spewed a gout of red over the front of him. "We always wondered what had happened, Stan ... Mom and me. And then Avis found me and told me you had sold out." The low hacking cough again and a spasmodic heaving of the chest. "N ... never believed it. You weren't the type." His eyes closed in brief pain. "Told her that a hundred ... a thousand times, I guess." He paused for a moment and Stan thought he was gone. Then the eyes flickered open.

"I was g-gonna break the whole story in tomorrow's editions. Guess ... your man got wind of it."

Stan couldn't bring himself to look down at the left side where the clothing was burned and where half of the waist was carbonized. He knew Tanner's work with the heater and he knew how well the man liked to see his victims squirm.

The cough started in again and suddenly the man was sitting up, his face twisted with pain and tears. "Y-you don't even remember me! Y-you d-don't even remember your own damned brother!"

And then he was gone and Stan knew that the man he was holding was nothing more than dead clay. He crouched there, his face wet, and the bits and tiny pieces of personality that had once been Stanley Martin coalesced and recombined into the individual they had been eight years before.

He stood up, the tears streaming down his face, and looked down at his brother Larry. A flood of memories were surging back. The games they had played, the arguments they had had, the way they had stuck up for each other....

And he could remember that morning when he had been slugged and the Thuscans had picked him up. Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Ainsworth and Tanner and the knives and the machines that had broken his spirit.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. A policeman had his notebook out and was looking at him curiously.

He had more important business, Stan thought. With Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm.

Avis was waiting for him in the alley, standing in the shadows by the circle of whirling black. Her face wasn't the collection of hard planes and angles it usually was and he realized dimly there was a beauty about her he had never appreciated before. A beauty and a certain sympathy....

He shook his head. "It's all over but the gloating." He felt himself start to shake. "My God, I've condemned a world to death!"

Four days, he thought wildly. Four days in which to recover fifty fusion packages hidden in cities that circled the globe. Four days in which he had to baffle his own agents ... and Tanner.

She still had her own organization, Stan thought. It wasn't as large as his own but its members were willing to die for a cause and they were brave and courageous. They didn't have the advantage of the transport-hoops, but then they were already spread out around the globe. It would be easy for Avis to communicate with them.

All he had to do was to give her the locations. And then, between himself and her agents....

"All right," he said grimly. "Let's try it." He checked his heat gun and the two of them stepped through the shimmering haze....

... into the apartment in Bristol. He cautioned Avis to be quiet, and then opened the door silently into the living room. Tanner wasn't there but his lieutenant, Langerman, was. A small, wiry man with a rodent's face and sliding eyes who preferred looking at the small of a man's back rather than looking him straight in the eyes.

It had been necessary for Tanner and he to include one man in their confidence, one man who would hold down the fort in Bristol and watch the panels that marked the location of the fifty fusion packages and the agents.

"It's going all right," Stan said casually. He reached into his pocket for some money. "How about going down to the corner and having some lunch sent up? Anything that looks good."

Langerman grabbed the coin, shrugged, and sauntered towards the door. "Sure thing. Sandwiches and tea."

As soon as he was gone, Stan motioned Avis into the room and started writing down the exact locations of the fusion packages. Suddenly there was a voice behind him.

Langerman had come back, his shirt faintly spattered with rain drops. He had gotten as far as the front door, Stan thought, discovered the state of the weather, and come back for a rain coat.

It was too late for explanations. Langerman's hand had snaked beneath his suit coat and come out with a small pistol.

He should have thought of that long ago, Stan thought coldly. Tanner hadn't trusted him, never had. Tanner had watched him. And when Tanner wasn't around to do the watching, he had made sure that somebody else was.

He didn't argue. He straightened out and dove for Langerman's legs. There was a sharp report and a splintering sound behind him and then Langerman was down, frantically trying to hit Stan in the face with the pistol butt.

Stan rolled him violently against the wall and grabbed for the hand that held the pistol. He caught it and tried to force it back. The two arms wavered, then Langerman began to give a little, his arm moving slowly back.

A world was in the balance, Stan thought grimly, and with a surge of strength he had the pistol. He slashed at Langerman's head and the little man went limp.

He stood up and thrust the list into Avis' hand. "There it is—all fifty. I've marked the ones I'll try to work myself."

He watched her disappear, then worked the dials for another destination and stepped through to the unknown.

The night clouds rolled across the steeples of Bristol and the muffled voice of a church clock somberly rolled across the city, striking the hour of ten. The hush of a chill autumn night lay across the city, mantling the fog that started to deepen in the city streets.

In a small apartment on Regent street, a box-like machine sat quietly in a corner, staring at the growing gloom with fifty red, unwinking eyes.

At five minutes after the hour, there was a flickering and then there were only forty-nine. By eleven o'clock, the eyes had been cut down to forty-six.

By the third, there was only a dozen. And every hour that went by saw another light wink out....

He stood in a Moscow subway station, watching the trains thunder past and keeping an eye on a trash can in a little niche near an elaborate mosaic of Malenkov. None of the comrades, he thought, would think of depositing litter near the mosaic of the leader and so the can had never been used.

And since the cleaners knew it was never used, there was no earthly reason why it should have to be disturbed and emptied. So the can sat there and had never been touched.

For a moment the platform was deserted and Stan walked rapidly back to the can. A moment later he held the fusion package in his hand....

A few yards away, there was a man in the uniform of the people's police. He could have been hiding for any one of a number of reasons, Stan thought. He could have been watching for petty thievery or perhaps there had been a drive against littering the platforms.

But it didn't matter why he was there. The point was he was asking questions in Russian and Stan couldn't answer him.

Another train roared in and people poured out of it, crowding together on the platform. Stan turned and darted for a washroom, breaking the wrappings on the fusion package as he ran. A moment later he had snapped the detonating wires and broken the delicate, clockwork mechanism and the almost infinitesimally small transceiver.

He threw the remains of the package under the wheels of the train at the same time a pistol shot roared above his head, chipping off some of the tile of the ceiling.

Then he had made it to the washroom door, passed his hand over a brass plaque, and darted through the circle of black that appeared into....

The bazaar stretched down both sides of the street, terminating against a mosque at one end. There were small, open shops that sold copperware and incense burners and large metal dishes, ornately tooled. There were tables and boxes of elaborate mosaic work—tables with veneers of rare wood and inlaid with mother of pearl. There were small restaurants and notion stores and shops that displayed bolt after bolt of silk and brocade.

Stan watched the people wandering past, then brushed past a small native boy begging for coins, and walked into one of the silk shops.

"You're holding a bolt of brocade for a Mr. Liebman. May I see it please?" Stan flashed a card.

The little clerk waddled to the back of the store and returned with a small bolt of silk. Stan reached for it but the small man held it back.

"I'm sorry, M'sieur. I was told not to release this to anybody but Mr. Liebman."

The little man wanted to stand and argue while the world went up in flames, Stan thought. He pulled out his wallet and slid a five dollar bill across the counter.

Stan thrust out the flat of his left hand and pushed the clerk back against the shelves. Bolts of cloth rippled down from them and Stan had to dig beneath them to get the one he wanted.

A moment to open the bolt and cut the wires of the package and then he was out in the street once more, the clerk's shrill, indignant screams echoing after him.

He raced to the end of the street, near the mosque, for the dark corner that looked a little too dark and a little too glossy and then....

... out again in a small street a block from the Vatican in Rome. It was early evening. Twelve more hours to go, he thought, for the last one. That wouldn't take long and he could double-check any that Avis' agents might have missed.

He hailed a taxi and sped out to the ruins of the old Forum. He waited until the taxi had left and then walked over to the column of Trajan—the tall, marble column that had been erected in order to commemorate the victories and the accomplishments of the old Roman emperor. He vaulted the low iron fence that surrounded the column and broke the lock on the door that led to an interior stairway.

The package was still in its niche at the top of the stairs. Stan tore at the wrappings and pulled, its teeth, then crushed the package in his hands. That was the end of....

He flattened himself against the wall until they came into view, then launched himself down the stairs, landing squarely on the chest of a burly man so they both rolled down the steep flight of stairs.

Tanner had finally gotten wind of what was going on, Stan thought sharply. But it was too late to do anything about it now. The invasion had been set, you couldn't stop a fleet once it rolled into motion. The overconfident Thuscans would land—to discover to their shocked surprise that there was organized resistance.

The burly man wasn't alone. There was another at the bottom of the stairs. Stan twisted his body, holding the first Italian in front of him. There was a pistol shot and the sound of a bullet smacking into solid flesh. The man whom Stan held screamed shrilly, his eyes flaring wide.

Then all three of them were down. Stan leaped for the door and slammed it after him. A moment later he was sprinting through the low midway of tumbled arches and forlorn columns of the glory that had once been Rome.

He caught another taxicab by the Colliseum, slipped the driver the contents of his wallet, and sagged against the cushions exhausted.

A shot shattered the rear window of the cab and he felt vainly in his coat pocket for his heater. It must have fallen out during the long fall down the flight of stairs, he thought. Which meant that he was defenseless.

He left the cab a few doors down from the alley and sprinted into the darkness, another shot whistling past his ear. He was almost up to the circle of shining black when the bullet plowed into the fleshy part of his back and he half stumbled, half fell into the pool of whirling blackness....

"You didn't succeed, Martin. Come on—wake up so I can tell it to your face. You and the rest of the apes have lost forever!"

He stirred and gagged and then rolled on his side, feeling the pain from his shoulder lance through his body. There had been the shot and he had felt himself falling and then there had been a voice....

He turned. Tanner was on the small pedestal that held the hoop, standing nonchalantly in front of the circle of whirling black.

"You'll be sorry you woke up, Martin. Frankly, I should think you would be wishing you were dead." He half smiled to himself. "There's knives in the kitchen, incidentally, in case you should want to do something about it. I imagine you have quite a guilt complex."

Stan whipped his head around to look at the small box-like machine that kept score of the fusion packages. Only one light was still lit.

Tanner smiled lightly. "Don't think you've won just because there's only one light left. Fifty fusion packages was our safety factor. We actually only needed one."

"That's right," he nodded. "Only one. We wanted to create panic and one will do that. When it goes off, that's all we need. The rest of the world will hear about it seconds later. And then the flight will be on." He paused. "You don't think that people—anywhere—are going to remain in their cities, do you? All the police, all the commissars in existence, couldn't make them do that. And then the air fleets will spring into action. One fleet because it demands vengeance, and the other because the only defense is a good offense, as the ape politicians are so fond of saying."

"You wouldn't want to do that, Martin. For one reason, I've got Avis. And for another, it would be too late. The blast went off ten seconds ago."

Stan reeled over to the set and dialed Chicago. The sheet of blackness formed, wavered, and then faded back to the edges of the hoop.

He had lost, Stan thought, dazed. The city he had been born and raised in was one with the drifting atoms of the air.

Stan huddled in the center of the room, his mind a melee of flickering thoughts. Then a noise at the window caught his ear. The noise of doors slamming and the starting of a thousand automobiles and people running through the streets. He didn't bother to look—he knew what it was.

The exodus of a billion people from ten thousand towns and cities was on the way.

There was six hours to go before the start of the brief, abortive war. Six hours before the air fleets would arrive at their destination.

A day later the Thuscan fleet would settle from the skies to begin the mopping up operation, the operation that would change the face of a green, water world to a world that would be another colony planet for Thusca.

The noise outside the street was a steady roar, now. The street was gorged with people on foot and on bicycles and in automobiles, fighting to get out of the city. He could hear screams and curses and over all, the faint crackle of flames.

In a few hours, the city would be a roaring inferno, he thought. There would be nobody left behind to put out the fires. And the scene would be duplicated a thousand times over before the sun went down.

And the next day there would be the final, terrible tempest when the Thuscans arrived. When humanity would go out in a short, confused struggle.

He raced back to the communications room and pressed the switches on the small television set with which he and Tanner used to communicate with Mr. Ainsworth on the Thuscan flag ship.

Avis had mentioned that her own fleet was standing by. A small fleet perhaps, but certainly not one without possibilities.

He waited a moment for the tubes to warm up, then dialed the frequency Avis had once mentioned. There was a pause and the screen grew bright. A face wavered on it for a moment and then grew steady. It was the face of a middle-aged man dressed in a dull blue uniform. His eyes looked like they had seen all there was to see of both heaven and hell.

Stan explained the situation urgently. The face nodded acceptance of what had happened.

The sounds outside were a steady roar now. Stan hesitated a moment, then said yes.

"We'll try to pick you up. Take the main artery out of the city to the small wooded park."

The lines in the man's face deepened. "Outside of pick you up, there's nothing we can do."

Stan flicked off the switch and started for the door. So there was nothing they could do. Nothing they could do to save a world or to save Avis.

He opened the street door and was almost swept into the tightly packed, fast moving throng. He stepped back into the doorway for a moment, letting the fighting, struggling mob sweep by. A father held a squawling baby high above his head. A woman was crying, hugging a small bundle of clothes to her as she struggled on. Suddenly she slipped and fainted and slid beneath the thousand feet of the mob. Stan didn't see her reappear.

He closed the door and ran to the back. The alley was crowded but not nearly so packed as the street.

Perhaps half an hour had passed since Tanner had appeared in the hoop, he thought. He had five and a half hours to go before the bombs started dropping.

His back pained him and he could feel the blood start to well where he had been shot. He grimaced and struggled on. A man next to him was lugging a small, portable radio and Stan could hear the frightened announcer reading off the government's mobilization orders and exhortations to remain calm.

They were useless, Stan thought bitterly. They could have no more effect on the tidal waves of humanity leaving its cities than Xerxes had on the ocean, when he had ordered it to be whipped. Humanity was leaving its huddling places and there was nothing that could stop them.

An hour later and he made two miles through the packed outskirts of the city. The crowd was thinning now and he thought he could make out the wooded sections of the park, not more than three or four blocks ahead. It couldn't be too much longer, he thought. He wasn't sure of how much more he could take....

His shirt was torn and the wound in his back was bleeding freely. Worse than that had been the sights he had seen on the way—women and children trampled underfoot, and the few neurotic souls who had given up and taken the short way out by leaping from windows.

It was slaughter, even without the war, he thought. Humanity was destroying itself in senseless panic. And then he was in the wooded area that had grown close to the city. He pushed through the brush and trees until he found a small clearing. The mass of people streamed past it, anxious to put miles between themselves and the buildings that so obviously spelled destruction.

He had waited for perhaps an hour when a small life boat rocket put down in the clearing. He looked at his watch before stepping aboard.

The war rockets from Avis' home system of Aurelia stretched through space like a thin, red string. There were more than a hundred there, Stan thought, but he knew without asking that they were hopelessly outnumbered by the Thuscan ships.

The small rocket maneuvered over the lead ship—a hatch slid back—and the rocket settled slowly through the opening.

A moment later and Stan was in the main cabin, facing half a dozen tired looking men wearing the same dull blue uniform as the man on the screen. They were supposed to be fighting men, Stan thought, but they didn't look the part.

The man Stan had seen on the screen introduced himself as Elal and smiled wryly.

"We're not the professionals you've associated with until lately, Martin. Fighting is something new for us. It will be a while before we achieve the hardened look of the warrior race."

His voice was soft and tired. The voice of a man who had lost his spirit, who had ceased to hope.

Elal shrugged. "You should have been able to size it up quickly. We are outnumbered—about ten to one, I would say. We had been hoping until the last minute that perhaps Avis would succeed, that she would be able to prevent the subversion of the planet."

"You Terrans are not without the means of defense," Elal pointed out. "In many ways you may be backward and primitive but you have deadly weapons. And a planet, strongly organized for resistance, would be very difficult for the Thuscans to take over. They have never succeeded in storming one outright. They have always had to rely on infiltration."

"They have limited application—they are good for only small fields and only for short times. And the Thuscans have neutralizers."

"Well, what are you going to do?" Stan burst out. "You're the only hope that's left!"

Elal shrugged. "What is there to do? We have you. Perhaps you will be of help, if you can remember much of Thusca. So far as we know, you are the only man who has been there and returned. Outside of...." And then he broke it off.

"You're going to leave the world go by default?" Stan asked coldly. "And Avis, too?"

The group of Aurelians looked annoyed. "What would you have us do?" Elal asked. "We gambled and we lost. We are outnumbered ten to one. And this is not the only world we have to worry about, Martin. There are a thousand others."

"And you'll be outnumbered at each one, won't you?" Stan asked grimly. "You'll be continually retreating but the odds will never get any better. As your ring of defenses collapses and allows you to concentrate more and more, the area the Thuscans have to concentrate on will be steadily getting smaller. You have to make a stand for it—why not here?"

"It wouldn't work. We would lose. And we're far too large a part of our total fleet to take the risk."

They wanted to give up because it looked bad on paper, Stan thought. They didn't want to see blood spilled, they didn't want to get their fingers dirty.

The young man at the controls worked the dials of a screen which lit up to a luminous black. There was the Earth at one end of the screen—a green globe the size of a basketball—and then the star-flecked, velvet sky.

Stan watched a small collection of brilliant lights move slowly across the screen. The operator pressed another button and that segment of the heavens suddenly leaped forward into the viewscreen. The collection of lights swiftly evolved into the glowing, rod-like ships of the Thuscans. They were arranged into a triangle, a large, reddish colored ship at the apex.

Mr. Ainsworth would be on that ship, Stan thought. Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm and maybe even Tanner.

It was ... logical that Tanner would be there. His work on Earth was done. And it was probable that Avis was on the ship with him. She would be valuable as a hostage.

He stared thoughtfully at the screen. It wasn't a neat triangle, it wasn't a really militaristic formation. The files of ships were a little straggly, as if their commanders weren't really expecting any opposition. From any quarter.

"We could go down," Stan said thoughtfully. "We could force the lead ship to land in Europe. It would be Exhibit A, it would stop the war. You would have time to make explanations and if I know the ... apes ... they wouldn't be such pushovers after that."

"There's always the element of surprise," Stan said bitingly. "It's probably the last thing they would be expecting you to do." He paused. "You say that you are outnumbered and your weapons are not the best. Have you ever tried the oldest one of all—courage?"

"You're being very inspirational," Elal said after a moment. "But I don't think you're being very practical."

Stan glanced around the compartment. The pilot was young. He looked expectant, and somewhat hopeful. He would be willing to dare, Stan thought. The others had never fought a war, they didn't know how.

Stan turned to the pilot. "Take it down—towards the lead ship in the Thuscan Fleet!"

"How do we know he's changed?" a voice bleated. "Maybe he's still in league with Thusca!"

Stan turned, the blue of a heat gun shining in his fist. "I have no time to argue—but it's not true." To the pilot: "Take it down!"

"You've abdicated your position," Stan said softly. "A leader is a man who can lead. You can't. I can." His eyes blazed.

They plummeted through space, towards the lead ship in the Thuscan fleet that was circling ever closer to the planet below. Stan glanced at his watch. Barely an hour remained before the planet below would be fighting a hideous, futile battle.

Stan glanced at it briefly. There was the Thuscan fleet laid out below—much nearer now—and the small, flashing dot that represented his own craft.

Behind him, strung out like a lazy figure C, was the rest of the Aurelian fleet. They were following the leader down, even though they recognized the enormous odds at which they were going to be fighting.

Courage, Stan thought, feeling something catch in his throat. The unknown weapon.

It was simple enough, Stan discovered. The firing studs for the different, directional rockets could be played like the keys of a piano. And the radar that indicated distance from another object was accurate to the yard.

Stan studied the pilot for a minute, trying to guess at his reflexes. "When we make contact, do exactly as I tell you."

He shifted his gaze to the viewscreen. The Thuscan fleet was much nearer now, but the formation was changing slightly. The triangle was more ragged, more uncertain looking. They weren't sure of what was going to happen, Stan thought, and they were worried.

"Maybe I will," Stan mused softly. "I don't promise you a thing!" They were brief miles away now.

The port rockets lifted the ship slightly and they flashed directly over the Thuscan lead rocket, a bare half mile beneath them. The wash from Stan's rockets flared lightly over the Thuscan ship and then they were pulling away.

The pilot turned the rocket in a circle and headed back. Beneath them, the lead Thuscan ship was belching flame and breaking out of formation, trying desperately to get away from the insane men who were bent on committing suicide.

Stan flashed them again, even closer. There was no place for the Thuscan ship to go but down.

Stan laughed outright and drove it like a dog herding sheep, hounding them too close for them to bring their weapons into play, and daring death every time he drove at them.

He was courting death and he knew it. And didn't care. The minutes were ticking slowly by and he knew that time was running out for half a billion people on the green globe below.

He glanced again at the viewscreen. Space was a tangle of flaring lights and rocket trails. But confused as the picture was, he knew one thing. Surprise and courage had been the elements they needed.

A moment later, the picture on the screen faded and another control cabin faded in. The creature in the picture recognized Stan and a moment later the sober face of Mr. Ainsworth was staring out at him.

"You shouldn't be doing this, Stan," Mr. Ainsworth said, his voice sounding bewildered and hurt. "Is this the way you pay back friendship? Is this how you repay hospitality?"

He could listen to the words and know they were lies. He could look at Mr. Ainsworth and know what lay beneath that saint's face. But he still wanted to believe. He wanted desperately to believe. To be told by Mr. Ainsworth that all was forgiven.

His throat was dry and he was dripping sweat. His conditioning wasn't going to disappear over-night, he knew. It would be a battle all the time. And this was just the first round.

"I'm going to force down your ship and kill you," he said quietly. "But first, we're going to play tag over every civilized capital on the globe. We're going to let them know just what the story is. And then, if the Thuscan fleet still wants to come in, they can go ahead and try it. But I wouldn't advise it, Ainsworth! The apes won't be easy pickings!"

He flicked off the set. They were in the atmosphere now and the air was screaming past the hull. He could feel the temperature inside the cabin rise and then the refrigeration went into action.

They rocketed over the ocean and then they were over London, a bare five miles up. The ships and their exhaust were clearly visible to the frightened millions camping outside the city.

Stan drove the Thuscans over Paris and Moscow and Tokyo and Washington, timing his rocket blasts and forcing them whichever way he wanted them to go. He threatened to crash them from above if they tried to leave, and threatened to ram them from below if they tried to land.

Governments watched, frightened at the scene and realized what must be waiting out in space. Huge planes that had been winging over arctic wastes and across vast stretches of sea suddenly got crackling messages that forced them to turn abruptly in their courses and head for the nearest air field—whether it was friend or late enemy.

Far out in space, the void was filled with hulled ships and flaring rockets that suddenly mushroomed into gigantic explosions. Down below, Stan drove the Thuscan ship around the world and then towards Europe again.

The dazed officers in the compartment looked at him for guidance and he realized that he was still the leader, that they still didn't quite know what to do.

"You'll go out that airlock and you'll fight them," he said crisply. "Hand to hand, if you have to. But you'll have to fight them—and to kill them." He strode to the airlock. "Good luck!"

There was no motion about the other rocket and he thought for a frightening moment that everybody on board had been killed. Then he realized that they were waiting for him to make a move, to show himself for an easy target.

He found a hiding place behind a bit of rubble and adjusted the stud on his heat gun.

They weren't going to stay in their ship long, he thought. He would make them come out.

He turned the stud to high and aimed the gun at a port near the control room. The crystal in the port colored, glowed, and suddenly fused. Stan could dimly make out the control console and flashed his heater at that. The violet beam touched the controls and they turned red and fused. Then the beam caught a thin fuel line in the console and there was a sudden spurt of white heat.

Seconds later, the fuel tanks erupted with a roar that showered bits of red hot metal over the whole area.

The air about him was suddenly thick with lancing, violet beams and he felt one touch him lightly on the shoulder, crisping the flesh and setting his shirt on fire. He winced and beat out the flames, keeping an eye on the hatch.

The slaughter was brief, and very thorough. But of all the creatures that boiled out of the hatch, Stan didn't see the two he was looking for.

When it was all over, he walked out to the field and glanced at the bodies. There were none that looked like Tanner or—thank God—Avis.

He was touching one body gingerly with his foot when the young pilot ran up to him.

Stan started running for the other side of the ship. There was the blasted port and then footsteps in the carbonized grass that had been flamed when the ship had landed. He ran quickly over the grass, following the footsteps, then glanced ahead into the city.

He caught one brief glimpse of them. Two figures disappearing behind some rubble, running toward one of the side streets....

And the hoop that Stan knew was in an alley behind the Russian owned and operated department store in the Eastern sector.

Stan dashed through the streets. They were two blocks ahead of him—Tanner and a girl, whom he was half pushing, half pulling.

A beam flared above Stan's head and he ducked and zig-zagged from one side of the street to the other.

When he finally turned into the street, there was nobody in sight—only the whirling black velvet of the hoop.

The street was deserted—there were no signs of either Tanner or Avis. He walked slowly down the street, and then there was a rustling noise behind them. He whirled, just in time to see Tanner and Avis disappear into the hoop again.

He ran and plunged in after them. It was going to be difficult, he thought. He would have to leave the vicinity of the hoop to look for them. And once his back was turned, they would be going through the hoop once more.

He caught a quick glimpse of Tanner in the deserted streets of Barcelona, Spain. He almost ran into the two in the empty streets of Shanghai. Madrid, Paris, Stuttgart, Leningrad, Los Angeles, Dallas—the cities flashed by like a deck of cards that was flicked past his eyes. The unending succession of black velvet hoops through which he moved like a man traveling through an infinity of dimensions....

And then the apartment in Bristol and Tanner was there, waiting for him. Simply standing against a table, waiting. Avis was in the far corner, her face frightened and drawn.

Tanner held an unfamiliar weapon in his hand. Stan looked at it curiously and then knew exactly what it was. Tanner had gotten hold of Avis' time pistol. He was going to kill him like William Clark had been killed.

How many times had he died in the last eight years? Stan wondered. How many times had his life been hanging by a thread, waiting for somebody to cut it?

Tanner had been distracted just long enough by the shout. Stan dropped to the carpet and rolled against Tanner's legs. Then they were both on the floor. Stan grabbed for the arm which still clung to the time pistol. Tanner grunted and twisted and then....

"I'm your friend," the creature repeated softly, triumphantly. "I saved your life, didn't I?"

He was lying in the alley again, back in Chicago, lying there hurt and bleeding. And Mr. Ainsworth had come up to help him. Out of all the millions of people in the city, it was only Mr. Ainsworth who had helped.

And then the conditioning was totally gone and Stan felt exultant. He hadn't realized....

He gripped the arm harder and twisted and the time pistol went skittering across the carpet.

Mr. Ainsworth looked surprised and faded back into Tanner. A powerful, cold-eyed Tanner who suddenly wrenched free and bent Stan under him. He reached for a water carafe from the table to bring it down to smash Stan's skull.

Stan jerked his head to one side and doubled his legs under him and lashed out with them, catching Tanner in the chest. Tanner staggered backwards towards the hoop, his foot unintentionally pressing the on switch. The circle of black started to build up.

The time pistol was only a few feet away. Stan snatched at it and turned it on the still reeling Tanner. It caught the creature flush at the same time as he toppled back through the black velvet circle.

Stan's last glimpse of The Enemy was of a suddenly very old and aging man—hair whitened and thinning, lines etched deeply in the face, clothes sagging limply from a suddenly shriveled frame—toppling backwards into the hoop.

And then the solid circle of black suddenly broke and faded into the frame again.

Stan turned on his side and got sick. The Bristol hoop had been tuned to Chicago. Only there was no more Chicago and no more hoop there. But Tanner had toppled through—to where?

The creature that had been Mr. Ainsworth and Tanner was lost in a space that had no beginning and no end.

They stood on a parapet of the first building to be erected in New Chicago and watched the tiny flares of the workmen who had come from all over the world to rebuild the city. It was night—a cool, almost clear night with only a few faint clouds scudding across the face of the full moon. The stars blazed down, a million tiny candles flickering against a background of black.

"He wanted power," she said quietly. "Our society wouldn't give it to him. So he sold out. Of his own free will—he hadn't been conditioned like you were." She paused. "I suppose as long as there's a human race, there will be people who want power and who will be willing to sell their fellow man to get it."

She nodded. "I was the most qualified." Pause. "A Thuscan eventually took his place, I know. But I wonder how he actually died. Did you ever hear about him on Thusca?"

"They used him as a model," Stan said. "Like Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm. There actually were human beings like that. Somewhere along the line, the Thuscans captured them and studied them so they could imitate them. Ainsworth and Malcolm and your brother served as models." He shuddered. "Perhaps on some world there's an imitation Stanley Martin walking around."

They watched the stars for a while and then Avis said: "You're a strong man, Stan. How did they ever ... break you?"

"A simple technique—brain-washing you could call it. The Thuscans set up Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Ainsworth and I was the man between. Mr. Malcolm was the enemy, Mr. Ainsworth was the friend. Mr. Ainsworth would 'rescue' me from Mr. Malcolm. There's no quicker way to build up a friendship. I felt obligated, in a sense. And then there was torture ... and machines. When my memory came back, I thought I had it all figured. I only made one mistake. I never thought Tanner was a Thuscan."

"But I do! If Tanner had been a real human being, then they would never have needed me.... Clever psychologists though they were, they had to work through a human agency as a safety factor. If Tanner had been real, they could have done it through him."

He smiled. "That morning when they jumped me. They beat me up for half an hour and nobody came to my rescue. Nobody but Ainsworth. Even in Chicago, people don't stand by and let a 17 year old kid get killed by three men. Tanner had used the time pistol. What had seemed to take a half hour for me actually occurred in seconds. Nobody could have helped me if they had wanted to!"

He stared moodily at the sky. "You know, there isn't much here for me, Avis. I lost my whole family when Chicago was wiped off the map. Larry had died before then, of course." He lowered his voice to a brooding sadness. "And the indoctrination I had, it hasn't entirely worn off. Sometimes I think of people as ... apes again."

"I'm going back with you! There's a thousand worlds up there I've never seen, a thousand adventures I've never had! And there's still Thusca!"

He ran his fingers through her hair and brushed her lips. "You know better than that...."

He kissed her softly and then lay back on the parapet and stared at the flickering stars overhead. A breeze came in off the lake and tugged at his hair and he imagined it sweeping on, blowing to a thousand worlds he had never seen.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Cosmic Saboteur

Cosmic Saboteur

By Frank M. Robinson

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