One day, finally, his watching was briefly rewarded; though what he observed left him, if anything, more puzzled than before. But afterwards, he found that a faint echo of the chill Zamm’s voice first aroused in him had returned. In his mind, it now accompanied the slight shape which came occasionally through the shadowed passage before his cabin and, much more rarely, paused there quietly to look in on him.
Simultaneously, he discovered that a sense of something depressing and frightening had crept into his concept of this stupendously powered ship of Zamm’s, with its electronic mentality through which sensations and reflexes flashed in a ceaseless billionfold shift of balances, over circuits and with meanings to which nothing remotely like a parallel existed in any human brain. Its racing drive through apparent nothingness, at speeds which no longer could be related mentally to actual motion, was like the expression of some fixed, nightmarish purpose which Bropha’s presence had not changed in any way. For the moment, he was merely being carried along in the fringe of the nightmare—soon he would be expelled from it.
And then that somehow terrible unit, the woman of a race which mankind had long regarded as if they were creatures of some galactic Elfland—beings a little wiser, gentler, a little farther from the brute than their human brothers—and her train of attendant robots, of which there seemed to be a multi-shaped, grotesque insect-swarm about the ship, and finally the titanic, man-made monster that carried them all, would go rushing off again on their ceaseless, frightening search.
For what?
Without being able to give himself a really good reason for it even now, Bropha was, in brief, profoundly disturbed.
But one day he came walking up into the control room, completely healed again, though still a little uncertain in his stride and more than a little dissatisfied in his thoughts. Vega was now some twenty-five light-years away in space; but in the foreshortening magic of the ship’s vision tank, its dazzling, blue-white brilliance floated like a three-inch fire-jewel before them. A few hours later, great Jeltad itself swam suddenly below with its wind-swept blues and greens and snowy poles—to the eyes of the two watchers on the ship much more like the historical Earth-home of both their races than the functional, tunneled hornet-hive that Terra was nowadays.
So Bropha came home. Being Bropha, his return was celebrated as a planetary event that night, centered about a flamboyant festival at his fine house overlooking the tall, gray towers of Government Center. Being also the Bropha who could not leave any human problem unsettled, once it came to his attention, he tried to make sure that the festival would be attended both by his rescuer and by her boss—his old friend, the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan Confederacy.
However, only one of them appeared.
* * *
“To tell you the truth,” Bropha remarked, “I didn’t expect her to show up. And to tell you the truth again, I feel almost relieved, now that she didn’t.” He nodded down at the thronged and musical garden stretches below the gallery in which they sat. “I can’t imagine Zamm in a setting like that!”
The Co-ordinator looked. “No,” he agreed thoughtfully; “Zamm wouldn’t fit in.”
“It would be,” said Bropha, rather more dramatically than was customary for him, “like seeing some fever-dream moving about in your everyday life—it wouldn’t do!”
“So you want to talk about her,” the Co-ordinator said; and Bropha realized suddenly that his friend looked soberly amused.
“I do,” he admitted. “In fact, it’s necessary! That Agent of yours made me extremely uneasy.”
The Co-ordinator nodded.
“It hasn’t anything to do,” Bropha went on, “with the fact of her immense personal attractiveness. After all, that’s an almost uniform quality of her race. I’ve sometimes thought that racial quality of the Daya-Bals might be strong enough to have diverted our sufficiently confused standards of such abstractions as beauty and perfection into entirely new channels—if their people happened to be spread out among our A-Class civilizations.”
The Co-ordinator laughed. “It just might be, at that! Perhaps it’s fortunate for us they’ve lost the urges of migrating and dominating the widest possible range of surroundings.”
Bropha didn’t agree.
“If they hadn’t lost them,” he said, “they’d be something other than they are—probably something a good deal less formidable. As it is, they’ve concentrated on themselves. I’ve heard them described as metaphysicists and artists. But those are our terms. Personally I think the Daya-Bals understand such terms in a way we don’t. While I was living among them, anyway, I had a constant suspicion that they moved habitually in dimensions of mental reality I didn’t know of as yet—”
He stopped and hauled himself back.
“You were going to speak of Zamm,” his friend reminded him.
“Well, in a way I am speaking of her!” Bropha said slowly. “Obviously, the mere fact that a Daya-Bal is working for you, for the Department of Galactic Zones—and operating one of those really hellish robot ships of yours—is a flat contradiction to everything we know about them. Or think we know! A fallen angel would seem much less of a paradox. And there was the manner in which she killed Greemshard—”
The Co-ordinator raised a bushy gray eyebrow.
“Naturally,” Bropha assured him, “I’m not blaming her for Greemshard’s death. Under the circumstances, that had become unavoidable, in any case. But Zamm killed him”—he was selecting his words carefully now—”as if she were under some inescapable compulsion to do it. I don’t know how else to describe the action.”
He waited, but Zamm’s boss offered no comment.
“There were two other incidents,” Bropha continued, “on our way back here. The first was on the same day that we took off from that chunk of ice of a moon. We chased something. I didn’t see what it was and I didn’t ask her. There was a little maneuvering and a fairly long, straight run, about two minutes. We got hit by something heavy enough to slow us; and then the ship’s automatics went off. That was all. Whatever it was, it was finished.”
“It was finished, all right!” the Co-ordinator stated. “That was a Shaggar ship. They seem to be migrating through that section. Zamm reported the incident, and as I was following your return with interest, I heard of it directly.”
“I’m not questioning the ethics of your Agent’s work, you know,” Bropha said after a pause. “Having seen something of what the Shaggar will do to anybody who can’t outfight them, I also realize that killing them, in particular, is in a class with destroying a plague virus. No, the point is simply that I saw Zamm’s face immediately afterwards. She came past my cabin and looked in at me for a moment. I don’t believe she actually saw me! Her eyes looked blind. And her face had no more expression than a white stone—”
He added doubtfully, “And that’s not right either! Because at the same time I had the very clear impression that she was staring past me at something. I remember thinking that she hated whatever she saw there with an intensity no sane being should feel against anything.” He paused again. “You know now what I’m trying to say?”
“It’s fairly obvious,” the Co-ordinator replied judicially, “that you believe one of my Agents, at least, is a maniac.”
“It sounds thoroughly ungrateful of me,” Bropha nodded, “but that’s about it—except, of course, that I don’t actually believe it! However, for the sake of my own peace of mind, I’d be obliged if you’d take the trouble to look up the facts on Zone Agent Zamm and let me know what the correct explanation is.”
It was the Co-ordinator who hesitated now.
“She’s a killer, certainly,” he said at last. He smiled faintly. “In fact, Bropha, you’ve been granted the distinction of being rescued by what is quite probably the grand champion killer of the department. Zamm’s a Peripheral Agent—roving commission you might call it. No fixed zone of operations. When she runs out of work, she calls in to Central and has them lay out a pattern of whatever foci of disturbance there are in the areas she’s headed for. She checks in here at Jeltad about once a year to have her ship equipped with any worthwhile innovations Lab’s cooked up in the interval.”
He reflected a moment. “I don’t know,” he said, “whether you were in a condition to notice much about that ship of hers?”
“Not much,” Bropha admitted. “I remember, when she called it back to pick us up, it seemed bulkier than most Agent ships I’d seen—a big, dull-black spheroid mostly. I saw very little of its interior. Why?”
“As an Agent ship, it’s our ultimate development in self-containment,” the Co-ordinator said. “In that particular type, camouflage and inconspicuousness are largely sacrificed to other advantages. Self-repair’s one of them; it could very nearly duplicate itself in case of need. Those are the peripheral ships—almost perpetual travelers. The Agents who direct them prowl along the fringes of our civilizations and deal with whatever needs to be dealt with there before it gets close enough to cause serious trouble.”