“Speaking of psychodynamics, how are you coming along with your own conditioning?”
“Pretty well, I think. I’ve been attempting to split off a personality fraction for myself. I’m not sure how effective my efforts have been. Frankly, autohypnosis was never my strong suit. Still, there are a few facts that I can’t afford to expunge from my mind completely—but on the other hand, I can’t afford to let the enemy have them. I’ve buried them in the alternate ego, and keyed them to a trigger word. The same word is tied to my heart action.”
“In other words—if anyone cues this information, it’s suicide for you.”
“Correct,” Felix said cheerfully. “I need the basic power of the survival instinct to cover this information. I’ve given you the key word under hypnosis. Your subconscious will know when to use it.”
“Pretty drastic, isn’t it?”
“It’s tricky business, trying to outguess a virtually unknown enemy; but from their interest in brains, it’s a fair guess that they know a bit about the mechanics of the human mind. We can’t rule out the possibility that they possess a technique for controlling human mental processes. I can’t let them control mine. I’ve got too many secrets.”
I chewed that one over. “You may be right. That tank driver didn’t behave like a man who was running his own affairs. And whatever it was that hit him—and the major—”
“It could have been an amplified telepathic command—to stop breathing, perhaps—or shutting off the flow of blood through the carotid arteries. From the fact that it didn’t affect you, we can assume that their technique is selective; it probably requires at least a visual fix on the object, for a start.”
“We’re assuming a hell of a lot, Felix. We’d better do some more fieldwork before we reason ourselves right out onto the end of a long limb.”
Felix was looking thoughtful. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange shielding around the personality center area; a platinum-gauge micro-grid with a filament spacing of about—”
“Oh-oh. This sounds like another expedition into the seat of what I once thought of as my intelligence.”
Felix clucked. “I can handle it with a number 27 probe, like building a ship in a bottle. It could make a great difference—if it works.”
“There’s too much guesswork here, Felix.”
“I know.” He nodded. “But we’ve got to extract every possible ounce of intelligence on the enemy from the few fragments of data we have. I don’t think we’re going to have much in the way of a second chance.”
“We’ll be doing well if we have a first one.”
“You are getting nervous.”
“You’re damned right! If I don’t get going soon, I may funk the whole act and retire to a small farm near Nairobi to write my memoirs.”
Felix cackled. “Let’s dial ourselves a nice little entrecôte avec champignons and a liter or two of a good burgundy, and forget business for an hour or two. Give me three more days, John; then we’ll make our play—ready or not.”
* * *
The night air was cold and clean; gravel crunched under my feet with a crisp, live sound. Felix tossed our two small bags in the boot of the car, paused to sniff the breeze.
“A fine night for trouble,” he said briskly.
I looked up at the spread of fat, multicolored stars. “It’s good to be out, after fifty days of stale air and scalpels,” I said. “Trouble or no trouble.” I slid into my seat, taking care not to bend any metal.
“We’ll have to register you as a lethal weapon when this caper is over,” Felix said, watching me gingerly fasten my seat belt. “Meantime, watch what you grab if I take a corner a trifle too fast.” He started up, pulled off down the drive, turned into the highway.
“It’s not too late to change plans and take the Subsea Tube to Naples,” I said. “I have a negative vibration when it comes to rocket flights; why not go underground, the way the Lord intended us to travel?”
“I won the deck-cut, old boy,” Felix said. “For myself, I’ve had enough of the underground life; I want a fast transit to New York.”
“I feel a little exposed right now,” I said. “Too bad we don’t have two OE suits.”
“Wouldn’t help if we did; you couldn’t wear one aboard an aircraft, tube, or anything else without showing up on a dozen different monkey-business detectors. But we’ll be all right. They aren’t looking for me—and your own mistress wouldn’t know you now. You’re good-looking, boy!”
“I know; I’m just talking to keep myself occupied.”
“You have our prize exhibit all cozy in your trick belt?”
“Yep.”
We drove in silence for the next mile. The city lights glowed on our right as we swung off on the port road. We pulled into a mile-wide lot under banked poly-arcs, then rode a slipway to the rotunda—a glass-walled arena under a paper-thin airfoil, cantilevered out in hundred-yard wings from supporting columns of ferro-concrete twelve feet thick at the base. I concentrated on walking without hopping, while Felix led the way across to an island of brighter lights and polished counters, where showgirls in trim uniforms stamped tickets and gave discouraging answers to male passengers with three-hour layovers to kill.
I watched the crowd while he went through the formalities. There were the usual fat ladies in paint and finger rings; slim, haughty women with strange-looking hats; bald businessmen with wilting linen and a mild glow expensively acquired at the airport bar; damp-looking recruits in rumpled uniforms; thin official travelers with dark suits, narrow shoulders, and faces as expressive as filing cabinets.
Once I spotted a big black and tan German shepherd on a leash, and I twitched; my foot hit a parked suitcase, sent it cannonballing against the counter. Felix stepped in quickly, soothed the fat man who owned the mishandled luggage, and guided me toward a glass stairway that swept up to a gallery lined with live-looking palms. We headed for a pair of frosted glass doors under three-foot glare-letters reading Aloha Room in flowing script.
“We have nearly an hour before takeoff; time for a light snack and a stirrup cup.” Felix seemed to be in the best of spirits now; the fresh air had revived me, too. The sight of the normally milling crowds, the air of business-like bustle, the bright lights made the memories of stealthy horrors seem remote.
We took a table near the far side of the wide, mosaic-floored, softly-lit room. A smiling waitress in leis and a grass skirt took orders for martinis. Across the room, a group of dark, bowlegged men with flamboyant shirts and large smiles strummed guitars.
Felix glanced around contentedly. “I think perhaps we’ve overestimated the opposition, John.” He lit up a dope-stick, blew violet smoke toward an ice-bucket by the next table. “Another advantage of rocket travel is the champagne,” he remarked. “We can be nicely oiled by the time we fire retros over Kennedy—”
“While we’re overestimating the enemy, let’s not forget that he has a number of clever tricks we haven’t quite mastered yet,” I put in. “Getting out of Tamboula is a start, but we still have the problem of contact when we reach the States. We won’t accomplish much hiding out in back rooms over tamale joints, sneaking out at night for a pictonews to find out what’s going on.”
Felix nodded. “I have some ideas on that score. We’ll also need a quick and inconspicuous method of identifying ‘human’ aliens. I think I know how that can be done. We can work with the radar albedo of the alien skin, for example; it must be a rather unusual material to withstand puncturing steel doors.”
He was smiling again, looking happy. He leaned toward me, talking against a strident voice from the next table.
“I’ve been working for twenty years, preparing for what I’ve termed a ‘surreptitious war,’ based on the premise that when the next conflict took place, it would be fought not on battlefields, or in space, but in the streets and offices of apparently peaceful cities—a war of brainwashing techniques, infiltration, subversion, betrayal. It’s been in the air for a hundred years: a vast insanity that’s kept us flogging away, nation against nation, race against race—with the planets at our fingertips . . .”
Something was happening. The music was changing to a sour whine in my ears. The chatter at the tables around me was like the petulant cries of trapped monkeys in vast, bleak cages.
Felix was still talking, jabbing with a silver spoon to emphasize his points. My eyes went to the double doors fifty yards distant across the brittle-patterned floor. Beyond the dark glass, shapes moved restlessly, like dim shadows of crawling men . . .
I pushed my chair back. “Felix!” I croaked.
” . . . could have established a permanent colony of perhaps five thousand. Carefully picked personnel, of course—”