Chapter II

It took twenty minutes by helitaxi to reach the metropolitan area from the spaceport. Handling the Terran currency as if he had used it all his life, Harris paid the driver, tipped him, and got out. He had asked for and been taken to a hotel in the heart of the city--the Spaceways Hotel. There was one of them in every major spaceport city in the galaxy; the spacelines operated them jointly, for the benefit of travelers who had no place to stay on the planet of their destination.

He signed in and was given a room on the 58th floor. The Earther at the desk said, "You don't mind heights, do you, Major?"

"Not at all."

He gave the boy who had carried his bags a quarter-unit piece, received grateful thanks, and locked the door. For the first time since leaving Darruu he was really _alone_. Thumbing open his suitcases, he performed the series of complex stress-pressures that gave access to the hidden areas of the grips; miraculously, the suitcases expanded to nearly twice their former volume. There was nothing like packing your belongings in a tesseract if you wanted to keep the customs men away from them.

Busily, he unpacked.

First thing out was a small device which fit neatly and virtually invisibly to the inside of the door. It was a jammer for spybeams. It insured privacy.

A disruptor-pistol came next. He slipped it into his tunic-pocket. Several books; a flask of Darruui wine; a photograph of his birth-tree. Bringing these things had not increased his risk, since if they had been found it would only be after much more incriminating things had come to light.

The subspace communicator, for example. Or the narrow-beam amplifier he would use in making known his presence to the other members of the Darruui cadre on Earth.

He finished unpacking, restored his suitcases to their three-dimensional state, and took a tiny scalpel from the toolkit he had unpacked. Quickly stripping off his trousers, he laid bare the desensitized area in the fleshy part of his thigh, stared for a moment at the network of fine silver threads underlying the flesh, and, with three careful twists of the scalpel's edge, altered the thermostatic control in his body.

He shivered a moment; then, gradually, he began to feel warm. Closing the wound, he applied nuplast; moments later it had healed. He dressed again.

He surveyed his room. Twenty feet square, with a bed, a desk, a closet, a dresser. An air-conditioning grid in the ceiling. A steady greenish electroluminescent glow. An oval window beneath which was a set of polarizing controls. A molecular bath and washstand. Not bad for twenty units a week, he told himself, trying to think the way an Earthman might.

The room-calendar told him it was five-thirty in the afternoon, 22 May 2562. He was not supposed to make contact with Central for ten days or more; he computed that that would mean the first week of June. Until then he was simply to act the part of a Terran on vacation.

The surgeons had made certain minor alterations in his metabolism to give him a taste for Terran food and drink and to make it possible for him to digest the carbohydrates of which Terrans were so fond. They had prepared him well for playing the part of Major Abner Harris. And he had been equipped with fifty thousand units of Terran money, enough to last him quite a while.

Carefully he adjusted the device on the door to keep intruders out while he was gone. Anyone entering the room would get a nasty jolt of energy now. He checked his wallet, made sure he had his money with him, and pushed the door-opener.

It slid back and he stepped through into the hallway. At that moment someone walking rapidly down the hall collided with him, spinning him around. He felt a soft body pressed against his.

A woman!

The immediate reaction that boiled up in him was one of anger, but he blocked the impulse to strike her before it rose. On Darruu, a woman who jostled a Servant of the Spirit could expect a sound whipping. But this was not Darruu.

He remembered a phrase from his indoctrination: _it will help to create a sexual relationship for yourself on Earth_.

The surgeons had changed his metabolism in that respect, too, making him able to feel sexual desires for Terran females. The theory was that no one would expect a disguised alien to engage in romantic affairs with Terrans; it would be a form of camouflage.

"Excuse me!" Harris and the female Terran said simultaneously.

His training reminded him that simultaneous outbursts were cause for laughter on Earth. He laughed. So did she. Then she said, "I guess I didn't see you. I was hurrying along the corridor and I wasn't looking."

"The fault was mine," Harris insisted. _Terran males are obstinately chivalrous_, he had been told. "I opened my door and just charged out blind. I'm sorry."

She was tall, nearly his height, with soft, lustrous yellow hair and clear pink skin. She wore a black body-tight sheath that left her shoulders and the upper hemispheres of her breasts uncovered. Harris found her attractive. Wonderingly he thought, _Now I know they've changed me. She has hair on her scalp and enormous bulging breasts and yet I feel desire for her._

She said, "It's my fault and it's your fault. That's the way most collisions are caused. Let's not argue about that. My name is Beth Baldwin."

"Major Abner Harris."

"Major?"

"Interstellar Development Corps."

"Oh," she said. "Just arrived on Earth?"

He nodded. "I'm on vacation. My last hop was Alpheratz IV." He smiled and said, "It's silly to stand out here in the hall discussing things. I was on my way down below to get something to eat. How about joining me?"

She looked doubtful for a moment, but only for a moment. She brightened. "I'm game."

* * * * *

They took the gravshaft down and ate in the third-level restaurant, an automated affair with individual conveyor-belts bringing food to each table. Part of his hypnotic training had been intended to see him through situations such as this, and so he ordered a dinner for two, complete with wine, without a hitch.

She did not seem shy. She told him that she was employed on Rigel XII, and had come to Earth on a business trip; she had arrived only the day before. She was twenty-nine, unmarried, a native-born Earther like himself, who had been living in the Rigel system the past four years.

"And now tell me about you," she said, reaching for the wine decanter.

"There isn't much to tell. I'm a fairly stodgy career man in the IDC, age forty-two, and this is the first day I've spent on Earth in ten years."

"It must feel strange."

"It does."

"How long is your vacation?"

He shrugged. "Six to eight months. I can have more if I really want it. When do you go back to Rigel?"

She smiled strangely at him. "I may not go back at all. Depends on whether I can find what I'm looking for on Earth."

"And what are you looking for?"

She grinned. "My business," she said.

"Sorry."

"Never mind the apologies. Let's have some more wine."

After Harris had settled up the not inconsiderable matter of the bill, they left the hotel and went outside to stroll. The streets were crowded; a clock atop a distant building told Harris that the time was shortly after seven. He felt warm now that he had adjusted his temperature controls, and the unfamiliar foods and wines in his stomach gave him an oddly queasy feeling, though he had enjoyed the meal.

The girl slipped her hand through his looped arm and squeezed the inside of his elbow. Harris grinned. He said, "I was afraid it was going to be an awfully lonely vacation."

"Me too. You can be tremendously alone on a planet that has twenty billion people on it."

They walked on. In the middle of the street a troupe of acrobats was performing, using nullgrav devices to add to their abilities. Harris chuckled and tossed them a coin, and a bronzed girl saluted to him from the top of a human pyramid.

Night was falling. Harris considered the incongruity of walking arm-in-arm with an Earthgirl, with his belly full of Earth foods, and enjoying it.

Darruu seemed impossibly distant now. It lay eleven hundred light-years from Earth; its star was visible only as part of a mass of blurred dots of light.

But yet he knew it was there. He missed it.

"You're worrying about something," the girl said.

"It's an old failing of mine."

He was thinking: _I was born a Servant of the Spirit, and so I was chosen to go to Earth. I may never return to Darruu again._

As the sky darkened they strolled on, over a delicate golden bridge spanning a river whose dark depths twinkled with myriad points of light. Together they stared down at the water, and at the stars reflected in it. She moved closer to him, and her warmth against his body was pleasing to him.

Eleven hundred light-years from home.

_Why am I here?_

He knew the answer. Titanic conflict was shaping in the universe. The Predictors held that the cataclysm was no more than two hundred years away. Darruu would stand against its ancient adversary Medlin, and all the worlds of the universe would be ranged on one side or on the other.

He was here as an ambassador. Earth was a mighty force in the galaxy--so mighty that it would resent the role it really played, that of pawn between Darruu and Medlin. Darruu wanted Terran support in the conflict to come. Obtaining it was a delicate problem in consent engineering. A cadre of disguised Darruui, planted on Earth, gradually manipulating public opinion toward the Darruu camp and away from Medlin--that was the plan, and Harris, once Aar Khiilom, was one of its agents.

They walked until the hour had grown very late, and then turned back toward the hotel. Harris was confident now that he had established the sort of relationship that was likely to shield him from all suspicion of his true origin.

He said, "What do we do now?"

"Suppose we buy a bottle of something and have a party in your room?" she suggested.

"My room's a frightful mess," Harris said, thinking of the many things in there he would not want her to see. "How about yours?"

"It doesn't matter."

They stopped at an autobar and he fed half-unit pieces into a machine until the chime sounded and a fully wrapped bottle slid out the receiving tray. Harris tucked it under his arm, made a mock-courteous bow to her, and they continued on their way to the hotel.

The signal came just as they entered the lobby.

* * * * *

It reached Harris in the form of a sudden twinge in the abdomen; that was where the amplifier had been embedded. He felt it as three quick impulses, _rasp rasp rasp_, followed after a brief pause by a repeat.

The signal had only one meaning: _Emergency. Get in touch with your contact-man at once._

Her hand tightened on his arm. "Are you all right? You look so pale!"

In a dry voice he said, "Maybe we'd better postpone our party a few minutes. I'm--not quite well."

"Oh! Can I help?"

He shook his head. "It's--something I picked up on Alpheratz." Turning, he handed her the packaged bottle and said, "It'll just take me a few minutes to get myself settled down. Suppose you go to your room and wait for me there."

"But if you're sick I ought to--"

"No. Beth, I have to take care of this myself, without anyone else watching. Okay?"

"Okay," she said doubtfully.

"Thanks. Be with you as soon as I can."

They rode the gravshaft together to the 58th floor and went their separate ways, she to her room, he to his. The signal in his abdomen was repeating itself steadily now with quiet urgency: _Rasp rasp rasp. Rasp rasp rasp. Rasp rasp rasp._

He neutralized the force-field on the door with a quick energy impulse and opened the door. Stepping inside quickly, he activated the spy-beam jammer again. Beads of sweat were starting to form on his skin.

_Rasp rasp rasp. Rasp rasp rasp._

He opened the closet, took out the tiny narrow-beam amplifier he had hidden there, and tuned it to the frequency of the emergency signal. Immediately the rasping stopped as the narrow-beam amplifier covered the wavelength.

Moments passed. The amplifier picked up a voice speaking in the code devised for use by Darruui agents alone.

"Identify yourself."

Harris identified himself according to the regular procedure. He went on to say, "I arrived on Earth today. My instructions were not to report to you for about two weeks."

"I know that. There's an emergency situation."

"What kind of emergency?"

"There are Medlin agents on Earth. Normal procedures will have to be altered. Meet me at once." He gave an address. Harris memorized it and repeated it. The contact was broken.

_Meet me at once._ The orders had to be interpreted literally. _At once_ meant right now, not tomorrow afternoon. His tryst with the yellow-haired Earthgirl would just have to wait.

He picked up the house-phone and asked for her room. A moment later he heard her voice.

"Hello?"

"Beth, this is Abner Harris."

"How are you? Everything under control? I'm waiting for you."

Hesitantly he said, "I'm fine now. But--Beth, I don't know how to say this--will you believe me when I say that a friend of mine just phoned, and wants me to meet him right away downtown?"

"Now? But it's after eleven!"

"I know. He's--a strange sort."

"I thought you didn't have any friends on Earth, Major Harris. You said you were lonely."

"He's not really a _friend_. He's a business associate. From IDC."

"Well, I'm not accustomed to having men stand me up. But I don't have any choice, do I?"

"Good girl. Make it a date for breakfast in the morning instead?"

"Lousy substitute, but it'll have to do. See you at nine."