Chapter 3

It happened so suddenly it would have taken me completely by surprise, if the alarm bell hadn’t started ringing again in some shadowy corner of my mind. It wasn’t clamorous this time, but it was loud enough to make me straighten in alarm, with every nerve alert.

I was standing by a high wall of foliage, close to the lakeside and had just started to light a cigarette. All at once, directly overhead, there was a rustling sound that was hard to mistake, for I’d heard it many times before, and it had a peculiar quality which set it apart from all other sounds.

Something was moving through the shadows above me, rustling dry leaves, slithering down toward me with a dull, mechanical buzzing.

The buzzing stopped abruptly and there was a flash of brightness, a long-drawn whining sound. I braced myself, letting my arms swing loosely at my side.

With startling swiftness something long, glistening and snakelike descended upon me and wrapped itself around my right leg just above the knee. Before I could shake it loose it contracted into a tight knot and the whining turned into a shrill scream, prolonged, ghastly. It was quite unlike the scream of an animal. There was something metallic, rasping about it, as if more than animal ferocity was giving voice to its pent-up rage in a shrill mechanical monotone.

The constriction increased and an agonizing stab of pain lanced up my thigh. I raised my right arm and brought the edge of my hand down with an abrupt, chopping motion. I chopped downward three times, not at random, but with a calculated, deadly precision, for I knew that a misdirected blow could have cost me my life.

I was in danger only for an instant, and not a very long instant at that. The damage I’d done to it caused it to release its grip on my leg, shudder convulsively and drop to the ground.

Damaged where it was most vulnerable, it writhed along the ground with groping, disjointed movements of its entire body. Tiny fragments of shattered crystal glistened in its wake, and two long wires dangled from its cone-shaped head.

Its segmented body-case glowed with a blood-red sheen as it writhed across a flat gray stone on the edge of the lakeshore embankment, and reared up for an instant like an enormous, sightlessly groping worm. Then, abruptly, all the animation went out of it, and it flattened out and lay still. Both of the optical disks which had enabled it to move swiftly through the darkness had been smashed. I was no longer in any danger and it was very pleasant just to know that.

Very pleasant indeed.

An attempt had been made on my life. There could be no blinking the fact. That little mechanical horror, with its complex interior mechanisms, had been set upon me from a distance with all of its electronic circuits clicking by remote control.

From just how great a distance I had no way of knowing. But I didn’t think he’d be staying around, near enough for me to get my hands on him. Killers who made use of such gadgets usually kept their distance, and were very cautious.

But at least I knew now that I had a dangerous enemy, someone who wanted me dead. And there was nothing pleasant about that.

The human mind is a very strange instrument and it’s hard to predict just how profoundly you’ll be upset by an occurrence that’s difficult to dismiss with a shrug.

You can either turn morbid and brood about it, or rise superior to it and pigeon-hole it, at least for the moment. By a kind of miracle I was able to pigeon-hole it, to keep it from standing in the way of what I’d made up my mind to do before I’d heard the rustling in the foliage directly overhead.

I walked back and forth for a moment, resting most of my weight on my right leg, to make sure I could keep using it without limping and when I was satisfied a long walk wouldn’t be in the least painful I left the embankment with a feeling of relief and took the first turn on my left. I was pretty sure it would take me no more than twenty minutes to get back to the spaceport.

I knew that what I’d made up my mind to do wasn’t going to be easy. I had to find out exactly how important a job the Colonization Board had mapped out for me on Mars. She’d called me “Mr. Important Man” because--you don’t get a clearance stamped the way mine was unless there’s a big undertaking in store for you which has to be handled in just the right way. The walk gave me a chance to think about it. My leg didn’t trouble me at all and I was very grateful for that ... I stood for a moment just outside the spaceport’s railed-off, electronically-protected launching platforms, staring up at the three-hundred-foot passenger rockets gleaming with a dull metallic luster in the moonlight, their nose-cones pointing skyward.

The New Chicago Spaceport has and always will attract sightseers, because there’s no other rocket launching site on Earth that can compare with it. It’s not only the largest and the most elaborately equipped. It was built to last. Fifty years from now, in 2070, say, it was a safe bet the big Mars rockets would be taking off at four-hour intervals night and day. Now they took off only twice a month and there were fifty million people in the United States alone who would have given up comfort, leisure, a well-paying job and every joy they’d ever experienced or could hope to experience on Earth to be on one of those big sky ships.

As far back as I can remember I’d hated to force a showdown with people who trusted me and believed in me. And that went double for the Martian Colonization Board, whose members were doing everything possible to keep me informed. Secrecy sometimes has to be imposed, and if you try to crack an information clamp-down prematurely you deserve to be slapped down.

But now I had no choice. I had to find out if my trip could be postponed, if I could wait one more week--a month, even--to get Joan to see things my way. And that meant I had to find out just how big a job they had lined up for me.

I had no trouble getting in to see him. There was a guard at the main entrance of the Administration Building, and when I identified myself and the massive, double-doors swung inward I had to go through it a second time, and six more times in all before I reached his private office on the twentieth floor. But you couldn’t call it trouble, because all I had to do was take out my wallet and display the pale blue card that was only an incitement to violence in certain quarters.

In that massive, almost half-mile-long building, on every floor, there were guards who knew me and guards who had never set eyes on me before. But what that card stood for was treated with respect.

I’d known that building to hum with activity, to come to life with a roar. But now only one floor blazed with light and the rest of the building was as silent as a mausoleum.

It happens sometimes and when it does everyone is grateful--including the man I’d come to visit.

His private office was at the end of a long corridor in Section C 10 Y, and I knew I’d find him there, because a small circle of cold light had been glowing above the office listing board on the main floor. There was a name plate above the numbered listings--BROWN. His name wasn’t Brown, of course. Or Smith, or Jones. The “Brown” was just a safety precaution--the sign and seal of immense power being modest in a genuine way and for expediency’s sake as well.

No man without the kind of card I carried had ever gotten as far as that office listing board and I doubt if the most ingenious assassin would have cared to try. But it was just as well to be on the completely safe side.

A saluting guard stepped back and what was perhaps the narrowest, least impressive door in the entire building opened and closed and I found myself in his presence.

Unless you’re a Gobi desert dweller or live in the precise middle of the Sahara you’ve seen the blue-eyed, mild-mannered little man who was Jonathan Trilling on a hundred lighted screens. In all respects but one he is the kind of man most people would go right past on the street without a second glance.

The thing that made him really not like that at all was something you couldn’t pin down and analyze. If you tried, you’d get nowhere. But it was there, all right, an emanation you couldn’t mistake that stamped him for what he was, radiating out from him.

Equate immense simplicity with immense power and you might come up with a part of the answer. But not all of it.

The office was stripped of all non-essentials; a hermit’s cell couldn’t have been barer. And it seemed to please him when my eyes swept over the almost bare desk, with just an inkwell and a single sheet of paper on it, before coming to rest on his face.

I’m pretty sure he interpreted it as an indication that I was trying to catch him up on something he took pride in, and he admired me for it, and greeted me with a chuckle.

“Well, Ralph!” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here tonight. I thought you’d be home wearing Joan’s patience ragged with the kind of last-minute preparations women never seem to understand. They like to think they never forget anything. But they do. They’re worse that way than we are, but just try getting them to admit it.”

There was only one chair in the office and he was occupying it. I hardly expected him to get up and wave me toward it, but that’s precisely what he did.

“Sit down, Ralph,” he said. “I sit too much. We all do here, I guess. Can’t be helped, but it doesn’t give a man of fifty-five much chance to get the exercise he ought to have, if he’s going to keep his weight down.”

“No--don’t get up for me, sir!” I said, then realized I was being unnecessarily formal.

The chair was empty and he expected me to take it. And I could see that he didn’t like the “sir.” He never had.

“Sit down, sit down. What is it, Ralph? Something worrying you? You’ll have plenty of time for that when you get to Mars. Why start now?”

I decided to come right out with it. I favored bluntness as much as he did, and there was nothing to be gained by talking around what I’d have to ask him before I left.

“There’s something I’d like to know,” I said. “Is the major part of my assignment still under wraps, or could you tell me more about it--even if you’d prefer not to?”

He looked at me steadily for a moment, his lips tightening a little. “Well--I certainly haven’t kept it a complete secret, Ralph. You’ll get full instructions in code later on. There’s naturally a reason for that. I shouldn’t have to go into it, because we’ve discussed it at great length right here in this office.”

“I realize that,” I said. “But could you see your way clear to telling me much more than you have, if I can convince you that it would help me solve a problem I can’t solve otherwise.”

His eyebrows went up a little at that. “What kind of problem, Ralph?”

“It’s as old as the hills,” I said. “The really ancient kind with fossils embedded in them. It goes right back to the Old Stone Age, and maybe a lot earlier. Joan doesn’t want to go to Mars. She’s very stubborn, very determined about it. If I can’t make her change her mind I’ll have to go alone. And I guess I don’t have to tell you what that would do to me. If I just had a little more time, another week or two--”