A shape and a face began forming in it at last; and a voice pronounced her name questioningly.
* * *
“They’re in Cushgar!” said Zamm, the words running out in a brittle, tinkling rush. “I know the planet and the place. I saw them the way it saw them—the boy’s getting pretty big. It’s a gray house at a sort of big hospital. Seventeen years they’ve been working there! Seventeen years, working for them!” Her face was grisly with hate.
The Co-ordinator waited till the words had all run out. He looked rather sick.
“You can’t go there alone!” he said.
“How else!” Zamm said surprised. “Who’d be going with me there? But I’ve got to take the ship. I wanted to tell you.”
The Co-ordinator shook his head.
“You bought that ship with your second mission! But you can’t go there alone, Zamm. You’ll be passing near enough to Jeltad on your way there, anyway. Stop in, and we’ll think of something!”
“You can’t help me,” Zamm told him bluntly. “You can’t mission anybody into Cushgar. You lost every Agent you ever sent there. You try a Fleet squadron, and it’s war. Thousand Nations would jump you the day after!”
“There’s always another way,” the Co-ordinator said. He paused a moment, looking for that other way. “You stay near your transmitter anyhow! I’ll call you as soon as we can arrange some reasonable method—”
“No,” said Zamm. “I can’t take any more calls either—I just got off a long run. I’m hitting Deep Rest now till we make the first hostile contact. I’ve only got one try, and I’ve got to give it everything. There’s no other way,” she added, “and there aren’t any reasonable methods. I thought it all out. But thanks for the ship!”
* * *
The Co-ordinator located the man called Snoops over a headquarters’ communicator and spoke to him briefly.
Snoops swore softly.
“She’s got other friends who would want to be told,” the Co-ordinator concluded. “I’m leaving that to you.”
“You would,” said Snoops. “You going to be in your office? I might need some authority!”
“You don’t need authority,” the Co-ordinator said, “and I just started on a fishing trip. I’ve had a vacation coming these last eight years—I’m going to take it.”
Snoops scowled unpleasantly at the dead communicator. He had no official position in the department. He had a long suite of offices and a laboratory, however. His business was to know everything about everybody, as he usually did.
He scratched his bearded chin and gave the communicator’s tabs a few vindictive punches. It clicked back questioningly.
“Want a location check on forty-two thousand and a couple of hundred names!” Snoops said. “Get busy!”
The communicator groaned.
Snoops ignored it. He was stabbing at a telepath transmitter.
“Hi, Ferd!” he said presently.
“Almighty sakes, Snoops,” said Ferdinand the Finger. “Don’t unload anything new on me now! I’m right in the middle—”
“Zamm’s found out about her kin,” said Snoops. “They’re in Cushgar! She’s gone after them.”
Zone Agent Ferdinand swore. His lean, nervous fingers worked at the knot of a huge scarlet butterfly cravat. He was a race tout at the moment—a remarkably good one.
“Where’d she contact from?” he inquired.
Snoops told him.
“That’s right on my doorstep,” said Ferdinand.
“So I called you first,” Snoops said. “But you can’t contact her. She’s traveling Deep Rest.”
“Is, huh? What’s Bent say?” asked Ferdinand.
“Bent isn’t talking—he went fishing. Hold on there!” Snoops added hastily. “I wasn’t done!”
“Thanks a lot for calling, Snoops,” Ferdinand said with his hand on the transmitter switch. “But I’m right in the middle—”
“You’re in the middle of the Agent-list of that cluster,” Snoops informed him. “I just unloaded it on you!”
“That’ll take me hours!” Ferdinand howled. “You can’t—”
“Just parcel it out,” Snoops said coldly. “You’re the executive type, aren’t you? You can do it while you’re traveling. I’m busy!”
He cut off Ferdinand the Finger.
“How you coming?” he asked the communicator.
“That’s going to be over eighteen thousand to locate!” the communicator grumbled.
“Locate ’em,” said Snoops. He was punching the transmitter again. When you want to get in touch with even just the key-group of the Third Department’s forty-two thousand and some Zone Agents, you had to keep on punching!
“Hi, Senator!”
* * *
If anyone was amusing himself that week by collecting reports of extraordinary events, with the emphasis on mysterious disappearances, he ran into a richer harvest than usual.
It caused a quite exceptional stir, of course, when Senator Thartwith excused himself in the middle of a press interview, stepped into the next office to take an urgent personal call, and failed to reappear. For the senator was a prominent public figure—the Leader of the Opposition in the Thousand Nations. He had closed the door behind him; but his celebrated sonorous voice was heard raised in apparent expostulation for about a minute thereafter. Then all became still.
Half an hour passed before an investigation was risked. It disclosed, by and by, that the senator had quite vanished!
He stayed vanished for a remarkable length of time. In a welter of dark suspicions, the Thousand Nations edged close to civil war.
Of only planetary interest, though far more spectacular, was the sudden ascension of the Goddess Loppos of Amuth in her chariot drawn by two mystical beasts, just as the conclusion of the Annual Temple Ceremony of Amuth began. A few moments before the event, the Goddess was noted to frown, and her lips appeared to move in a series of brisk, celestial imprecations. Then the chariot shot upwards; and a terrible flash of light was observed in the sky a short while later. Amuth bestrewed its head with ashes and mourned for a month until Loppos reappeared.
Mostly, however, these freakish occurrences involved personalities of no importance and so caused no more than a splash of local disturbance. As when Grandma Wannattel quietly unhitched the rhinocerine pony from her patent-medicine trailer and gave the huge but patient animal to little Grimp to tend— “Until I come back.” Nothing would have been made of that incident at all—police and people were always bothering poor Grandma Wannattel and making her move on—if Grimp had not glanced back, just as he got home with the pony, and observed Grandma’s big trailer soaring quietly over a hillside and on into the sunset. Little Grimp caught it good for that whopper!
In fact, remarkable as the reports might have seemed to a student of such matters, the visible flow of history was at all affected by only one of them. That was the unfortunate case of Dreem, dread Tyrant of the twenty-two Heebelant Systems:
” . . . and me all set to be assassinated by the Freedom Party three nights from now!” roared Dreem. “Take two years to needle the chicken-livered bunch up to it again!”
“Suit yourself, chum!” murmured the transmitter above his bed.
“That I will,” the despot grumbled, groping about for his slippers. “You just bet your life I will!”
* * *
“We should be coming within instrument-detection of the van of the ghost fleet almost immediately!” the adjutant of the Metag of Cushgar reported.
“Don’t use that term again!” the potentate said coldly. “It’s had a very bad effect on morale. If I find it in another official communication, there’ll be a few heads lifted from their neck-spines. Call them `the invaders.’ ”
The adjutant muttered apologies.
“How many invaders are now estimated in that first group?” the Metag inquired.
“Just a few thousand, sir,” the adjutant said. “The reports, of course, remain very—vague! The main body seems to be still about twelve light-years behind. The latest reports indicate approximately thirty thousand there.”
The Metag grunted. “We should be just able to intercept that main bunch with the Glant then!” he said. “If they keep to their course, that is. It’s high time to end this farce!”
“They don’t appear to have swerved from their course to avoid interception yet,” the adjutant ventured.
“They haven’t met the Glant yet, either!” the Metag returned, grinning.
He was looking forward to that meeting. His flagship, Glant, the spindle-shaped giant-monitor of Cushgar, had blown more than one entire attacking fleet out of space during its eighty years of operation. Its outer defenses weren’t to be breached by any known weapon; and its weapons could hash up a planetary system with no particular effort. The Glant was invincible.
It was just a trifle slow, though. And these ghost ships, these ridiculous invaders, were moving at an almost incredible pace! He wouldn’t be able to get the Glant positioned in time to stop the van.
The Metag scowled. If only the reports had been more specific—and less mysteriously terminated! Three times, in the past five days, border fleets had announced they had detected the van of the ghosts and were prepared to intercept. Each time that had been the last announcement received from the fleet in question. Of course, communications could become temporarily disrupted, in just that instantaneous, wholesale fashion, by perfectly natural disturbances—but three times!