Anywhen (7 page)

No one could even guess how long they had known interstellar flight, or where they had come from. The hypothesis that they had originally been Vegans was shaky, based solely on the fact that Vega III was their
most highly developed planet yet discovered. As for facts that argued in the opposite direction, there were more than enough, from Jahnke's point of view.

They had, for instance, a common spoken language, but every one of their civilizations had a different written language, usually irreconcilable with all the others—pictograms, phonetic systems, ideograms, hieratic short-hands, inflectional systems, tone-modulated systems, positional systems—the works. The spoken language was so complex that not even Jahnke could speak it above the primer level, for it was based on phoneme placement inside the word; in short, it was totally synthetic, derived from the Enemy's vast knowledge of information theory, and could be matched up in
part
to any written language imaginable. Thus, there was no way to tell which written language—which always abstracts from speech, and introduces new elements which have nothing to do with speech—might have been the original.

And how can you be sure you know where the Enemy's home planet is, Jahnke brooded, when you can see him still actively exploring and taking over one new system after another, for no other visible reason other than sheer acquisitiveness? How can you tell how long that process has been going on, when
no
new penetration of human beings to more distant reaches of the galaxy fails to find the grey creatures established on two or three promising planets, and nosing in on half a dozen additional cinder blocks which have nothing to recommend them but the fact that they are large enough to land upon?

"They're nothing but rats," Colonel Singh, the CIO (F ), had once told Jahnke, in an excess of disgust unusual for him. "The whole damned galaxy must be overrun with them. They couldn't have evolved any civilization we ever found them in."

"They're intelligent," Jahnke had protested. "Nobody's yet measured how intelligent they are."

"Sure," Singh had said. "I'll give them that. They're more than intelligent; they're brilliant. Nevertheless, they didn't evolve any of 'their' civilizations, John. They couldn't have, because they—the civilizations—are too diversified. The Enemy maintains all of them with equal thoroughness, and equal indifference. If we could just explore some of those planets, I'll bet we'd find the bones of the original owners. How does that poem of Sand-burg's go?"

His brow furrowed a moment over this apparent irrelevancy, and he quoted:

And the wind shifts

and the dust on a doorsill shifts

and even the writing of the rat footprints

tells us nothing, nothing at all

about the greatest city, the greatest nation

where the strong men listened

and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

"That's how it is," Singh added gloomily. "All these grey rats are doing is picking everybody else's cupboards. They're very good at that. They may well be picking ours before long."

That was the second theory; on the whole, it was the most popular one now. It was the theory under which a man like Matthews could torture to death a creature nine times as intelligent as he was, and with a code of customs and a set of moral standards which made Matthews look like a bushman, on the grounds that the Enemy were merely loathsome scavengers, fit only to sick cats on.

Despite his respect for Piara Singh, Jahnke could find
little good to say for the rat theory, either. Both theories pointed, in the end, toward a common military goal—that of finding the Enemy's home planet and destroying it. If Vega III was the Enemy's home, then at least there was a target. If the Enemy were spreading from some other heartland, then the target still remained to be found.

But what good was that? It was military nonsense. The Enemy outnumbered humanity by millions to one. On the highly developed planets like Vega III, the Enemy commanded weapons compared to which humanity's best were only torches to be waved in the face of the inevitable night.

The first moment of open warfare would be the end of humanity.

So far, the grey creatures and humanity were not at war. But the time of the explosion was drawing closer. Jahnke did not really think that the Enemy could be still in ignorance of Earth's practice of picking up its lone scouts for questioning; the Enemy's resources were too great. It was his private theory, shared by Piara Singh, that the Enemy was content to let its scouts be questioned, as long as they were set free unharmed afterwards. After all, the Enemy had once picked up Jahnke under the same circumstances and for the same purpose; it was for that reason that he knew their language better than any other human being; he had lived among them for two years.

But if Matthews' Inquisition methods represented a new and general policy toward these occasional captives, the Enemy would not let that policy go unprotested. The grey creatures were very proud. Jahnke knew that, for they had expected no less pride of him.

And what would happen when one of the Enemy's scouts came nosing acquisitively, at long last, into the Solar system of Earth—even around so cold, dark and useless a world as the satellite of Proserpine, far beyond Pluto? Earth had no use for that rockball, but it would never let the "rats" have it, all the same. Of course, thus far the grey tide had spared the Sol system, but that couldn't last forever. The grey tide had, after all, spared nothing else.

The phone rang insistently, jarring Jahnke out of his bitter reverie. He picked it up.

"Captain Jahnke? One moment, please. Colonel Singh calling."

Jahnke clung to the phone in a state of numb shock, uncertain whether to be delighted or appalled. What could Piara Singh be doing here, out of the high, free emptiness of Outside? Had he been invalided home again, too, or had some failure—

"John? How are you! This is Singh. I called the moment I got in."

"Hello, Colonel, I'm astonished, and pleased. But what—"

"I know what you're thinking," the CIO (F) said rapidly. His voice was high with suppressed eagerness; Jahnke had never heard him sound so young before. "I'm home on my own initiative, on special orders I wormed out of old Wu himself. I brought a prisoner with me—and John, listen, he's the most important prisoner we've ever taken. He told me his name."

"No! They never do. It's against the rules."

"But he did," Singh said, almost bubbling. "It's Hrestce, and in the language it means 'compromise,' isn't that right? I think he was deliberately sent to us with a
message. That's why I came home. The key to the whole problem seems to be in his hands, and he obviously wants to talk. I have to have you to listen to him and tell me what it means."

Jahnke's heart tried to rise and sink at the same time, enclosing his whole chest in an awful vise of apprehension. "All right," he said faintly. "Did you notify CIO? Here in Novoe Washingtongrad, I mean?"

"Oh, of course," Singh said. His enthusiasm seemed to be about to burst the telephone handset—and small wonder, after all the setbacks which had made up his career Outside. "They recognized how important this is right away. They've assigned their best interrogation man to me, a Major Matthews. I don't doubt that he's good, but we'll need you first. If you can get here for a preliminary talk with Hrestce—"

"I can get there," Jahnke said tensely. "But don't let
anyone
else talk to him before I do. This Matthews is dangerous. If he calls before I arrive, stall him. Where are you calling from?"

"At home, on the Kattegat," Singh said. "I have three weeks' leave. You know the place, don't you? You can reach it in an hour, if you can catch a rocket right away. I can keep Hrestce in my jurisdiction for you that long easily. Nobody but you and the CIO knows he's here."

"Don't even let CIO to him until I get there. I'll see you in an hour."

"Right, John. Good-bye."

"Seace tce ctisbe."

"Yes—how does it go?
Tca."

"Tce; tca."

Trembling with excitement and urgency, Jahnke got the rest of his mussed uniform off, clambered into mufti, and packed his equipment: a tape recorder, two dictionaries compiled by himself, a set of frequency tables for the Enemy language which he had not yet completed, and a toothbrush. At the last moment, he remembered to take his officer's I.D. card, and money to buy his rocket ticket. Now. All ready.

He opened the door to go out.

Matthews was there. His feet were wide apart, his hands locked behind his back, his brow thrust forward. He looked like a lowering, small-scale copy of the Colossus of Rhodes.

"Morning, Captain Jahnke," Matthews said, with a slight and nasty smile. "Going somewhere? The Kattegat, maybe?"

The soldiers behind Matthews, those same two wooden-faced toughs, helped him wait for Jahnke's answer.

After a moment of sickening doubt, Jahnke went back into his quarters, into the kitchen, out of Matthews' sight. He found the bottle of cloudy ammonia his batman used for scrubbing his floors, and shook it until it was full of foam. Then he went back into the front room and threw the bottle as hard as he could into the corridor. It seemed to explode like a bomb.

He had to kick one soldier who made it through the fumes into the front room; but he got away over the man's body, his eyes streaming. Now all he had to do was to make it to Singh before Matthews did.

It would be a near thing. Temporarily, at least, time was on his side, Jahnke was pretty sure. Piara Singh's Kattegat home was a retreat, quite possibly unlisted among the addresses the government had for him; Jahnke had learned of it only through a few moments of nostalgia in which the colonel had indulged over a drink. If so, Matthews would have a difficult time searching the shores of
the strait for it, and might think only very belatedly of looking in the wildest part of Jutland.

Also in Jahnke's favor was the fact that Matthews was, after all, only a major. The man whose leave he had to plan on invading was a full colonel, even though only a despised Field officer—and the despite in which Field officers were held was in itself only a symptom of the Home officers' guilt at being Home officers. Matthews would probably pause to collect considerable official backing before venturing further.

All this was logical, but Jahnke knew Matthews too well to be comforted by it.

He got a liner direct to Copenhagen, which cut down his transit time considerably. After that, there was only the complicated business of getting off the islands onto the peninsula, and thence north to Alborg. Colonel Singh had a car waiting for him there, which took him direct to the door of the lodge.

"An hour and a half," Singh said, shaking hands. "That was good time."

"The best. Glad to see you, sir. We're going to have to move fast, I'm afraid; we're not safe even here. This bird Matthews is a dedicated sadist. Do you remember the prisoner that was sent home with me? Well, Matthews tortured him to death just yesterday, trying to get routine information out of him. He'll do the same with your captive if he gets his hands on him. He knows I'm here, of course. Either my telephone wire was tapped—they all are, I suppose—or he knew that you'd call me as soon as the news trickled down to him at CIO."

An expression of revulsion totally transformed Colonel Singh's lean brown face for a moment, but he said decisively: "So it's come to that; they must be cut off from the
real situation Outside almost entirely, and it's their own fault. Well, I know what we can do. I have a private plane here, and my pilot is the very best. We'll just take ourselves upstairs and defy this Matthews to get us down again until we're good and ready."

"Where are we going?" Jahnke asked.

"I don't know at the moment, and it doesn't matter. There are a lot of places to hide inside a thousand-mile radius where Matthews wouldn't think of looking for us, if we
have
to hide. But I think I can pull his teeth through channels before it comes to that. Come on, better meet the prisoner."

He led the way into the next room. The prisoner was looking at a book which, Jahnke could see as he put it aside, was mostly mathematics. He was an unusually big specimen even for an Enemy, with enormous shoulders and arms, a deep chest, and a brow which gave him an expression of permanent ferocity; he looked as though he could have torn Jahnke and the colonel to pieces without the slightest effort, as indeed he probably could.

"Hrestce, John Jahnke," Colonel Singh said.

"Seace tce ctisbe,"
Jahnke said.

"Tce."
Hrestce held out his hand, and Jahnke took it somewhat nervously. Then, drawing a deep breath, he quickly outlined the situation, pulling no punches. When he got to the part about the death of Matthews' prisoner, Hrestce only nodded; when Jahnke proposed that they leave, he nodded again; that was all.

They were aloft in ten minutes. The pilot took them west, toward the blasted remains of the British Isles; they had suffered heavily in the abortive Third World War, and nobody flew over them by preference, or patrolled the air there—there was no territory left worth patrolling.

In the cabin of the plane, Jahnke started his tape recorder and got out his manuscript dictionary. With Hrestce's first words, however, it became apparent that he wasn't going to need the dictionary. The Enemy spoke simply, though with great dignity, and quickly found the speech rate which was comfortable for Jahnke. When he spoke to Singh, he slowed down even more; he seemed already aware that Singh's command of the language did not extend to high-order abstractions or subtle constructions.

"I am an emissary, as Colonel Singh surmised," Hrestce said. "My mission is to appraise you of the search my people have been conducting, and to take such further steps as your reaction dictates. By 'you,' of course, I mean mankind."

"What is the search?" Jahnke said.

"First I must explain some other matters," Hrestce said. "You have some incomplete truths about us which should be completed now. You know that we occupy many dissimilar civilizations; you suspect that they are not ours, and that the original owners are gone. That is true. You think you have never seen our home culture. That is also true; our planet of origin is far out on the end of this spiral arm of the galaxy, from which we have been working our way inward toward the center. You think we have usurped the original owners of these cultures. That is not true. We have another function. We are custodians."