Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (22 page)

“Not here, sir. There is one at the next main road block. We have a field telephone.”

“All right, I’ll use that.” A little later. “You hopeless imbecile! This Halopti is wanted all over the planet! And you let him slip through your hands—you ought to be shot! How long has he been gone? Did he have anyone with him? Will he have passed through Palmare yet? Sharpen your wits, fool, and answer me! Did you note the number of his car? No, you did not—that would be too much to expect.”

And so on and so on. Yes, the balloon would go up most anytime. Perhaps in three or four hours, perhaps within ten minutes. The thought of it made Mowry maintain what was a reckless speed on such a twisting and badly surfaced road.

He shot through small and sleepy Palmare half expecting to be fired upon by local vigilantes. Nothing happened except that a few faces glanced out of windows as he went by. Nobody saw him turn off the road a little beyond the village and take the crude track that led to the Pertane-Valapan artery.

Now he was compelled to slow down whether he liked it or not. Over the terrible surface the car bumped and rolled at quarter speed. If anything came the other way he’d be in a jam because there was no room to pull aside or turn. Two jetplanes moaned through the gathering dusk but carried straight on, indifferent to what was taking place below. Soon after a ’copter came low over the horizon, followed it a short distance, dropped back and disappeared. Its course showed that it was circling around Pertane, possibly checking the completeness of military positions.

Eventually he reached the Pertane-Valapan route without having encountered anything on the track. Accelerating, he made for the forest entry-point. A number of army vehicles trundled heavily along but there was no civilian traffic to or from distant Pertane. Those inside the city could not get out, those outside did not want to go in lest they be detained there for weeks.

At the moment he reached the identifying tree and tombstone the road was clear in both directions. Taking full advantage of the opportunity he drove straight over the verge and into the forest as far as the car could go. Jumping out, he went back and repeated his former performance of carefully eliminating all tire tracks where they entered the forest and checking that the car was invisible from the road.

The dark of night now was halfway across the sky. That meant he had to face another badly slowed-down traipse to the cave. Alternatively he could sleep overnight in the car and start his journey with the dawn. The latter was preferable; even a wasp needs rest and slumber. On the other hand the cave was more peaceful, more comfortable and a good deal safer than the car. There he could enjoy a real Terran breakfast, after which he could lie full length and snooze like a child instead of rolled up with one ear and one eye open. He started for the cave at once, trying to make the most use of the fading light while it lasted.

With the first streaks of morning he came wearily and red-eyed through the last of the trees. His finger-ring had been tingling for fifteen minutes so that he made his approach with confidence. Clumping along the pebble beach he went into the cave, fixed himself a hearty meal. Then he crawled into a sleeping-bag and surrendered consciousness. The transmission of his report could wait. It would have to wait: communication might bring instructions impossible to carry out before he’d had a good spell of slumber.

He must have needed it because he lay without stirring through the entire day. Dusk again was creeping in when he awoke. Setting up another feed, he ate it, felt on top of the world, expressed it by flexing his muscles and whistling badly off-tune.

For a short while he studied the massed containers and nursed a few regrets. In one of them reposed material for repeated changes of appearance plus documents to cover no less than thirty more fake identities. The situation being what it was he’d be darned lucky to get through three of them. Another container held publicity stuff including the means to print or mail more letters.

Ait Lithar was the fifth.

The list is long.

Dirac Angestun Gesept.

But what was the use? The Kaitempi had claimed that kill. Moreover he needed to know the names of any mail-bomb victims so that D.A.G. could exploit those too. He lacked this information. Anyway, the time for that kind of propaganda had now gone past. The entire world was on the jump, reinforcements had been poured in from Diracta, battle-stations had been taken up against a revolutionary army that did not exist. In such circumstances threatening letters had become mere fleabites.

Dragging out Container-5 he set it up, wound it into action and let it run. For two and a half hours it operated silently.

Whirrup-dzzt-pam! Whirrup-dzzt-pam!

“Jaimec calling! Jaimec calling!”

Contact was established when the gravelly voice said, “Come in. Ready to tape.”

Mowry responded, “I'm on Jaimec,” then babbled on as fast as he could go and to considerable length. He finished, “Pertane isn’t tenable until things quiet down and I don’t know how long that will take. Personally, I think the panic will spread to other towns. When they can’t find what they’re seeking in one place they’ll start raking systematically through all the others.”

There was a long silence before the faraway voice came back with, “We don’t want things to quiet down. We want them to spread. Get working at once on phase nine.”

“Nine?” he ejaculated, “I’m only on four. What about five, six, seven and eight?”

“Forget them. Time is running short. There’s a ship getting near to you with another wasp on board. We sent him to tend phase nine thinking you’d been nabbed. Anyway, we’ll beam instructions that he’s to stay on the ship while we pick him another planet. Meanwhile you get busy.”

“But phase nine is strictly a pre-invasion tactic.”

“That’s right,” said the voice, dryly. “I just told you time is running short.”

It cut off. Communication had ended. Mowry stacked the cylinder back in the cave. Then he went outside and gazed at the stars.

Phase nine was designed to bring about a further dispersal of the enemy’s overstretched resources and to place yet another great strain upon his creaking war-machine. It was, so to speak, one of several possible last straws.

The idea was to make panic truly planet-wide by spreading it from land to water. Jaimec was peculiarly susceptible to this kind of blow. On a colonial world populated by only one race of only one species there had been no national or international rivalries, no local wars, no development of navies. The nearest that Jaimec could produce to a sea-going force consisted of a number of fast motor-boats, lightly armed and used solely for coastal patrol work.

Even the merchant fleet was small by Terran standards. Jaimec was underdeveloped and no more than six hundred ships sailed the planet’s seas on about twenty well-defined routes. There wasn’t a vessel larger than fifteen thousand tons. Nevertheless the local war effort was critically dependent upon the unhampered coming and going of these ships. To delay their journeys or ruin their schedules or bottle them up in port would play considerable hob with the entire Jaimecan economy.

This sudden switch from phase four to nine meant that the oncoming Terran spaceship must be carrying a load of periboobs which it would scatter in the world’s oceans before making a quick getaway. Almost certainly the dropping would be done by night and along the known sea-lanes.

At college Mowry had been given full instruction about this tactic and the part he was expected to play. The stunt had a lot in common with his previous activities, being designed to make a thoroughly aggravated foe hit out left and right at what wasn’t there.

He’d been shown a sectionalized periboob. This deceitful contraption resembled an ordinary oil-drum with a twenty-foot tube projecting from its top. At the uppermost end of the tube was fixed a flare nozzle. The drum portion held a simple magneto-sensitive mechanism. The whole thing could be mass produced at low cost.

When in the sea a periboob floated so that its nozzle and four to six feet of tube stood above the surface. If a mass of steel or iron approached to within four hundred yards of it, the mechanism operated and the whole gadget sank from sight. If the metal mass receded, the periboob promptly arose until again its tube poked above the waves.

To function efficiently this gadget needed a prepared stage and a spotlight. The former had been arranged at the outbreak of war by permitting the enemy to get hold of top secret plans of a three-man midget submarine small enough and light enough for an entire flotilla to be transported in one spaceship. Mowry now had to provide the spotlight by causing a couple of merchant vessels to sink at sea after a convincing bang.

Jaimecans were as capable as anyone else of adding two and nothing together and making it four. If everything went as planned the mere sight of a periboob would cause any ship to race for safety while filling the ether with yells for help. Other ships, hearing the alarm, would make wide, time-wasting detours or tie up in port. The dockyards would frantically switch from the building and repair of cargo vessels to the construction of useless destroyers. Numberless jetplanes, ’copters and even space scouts would take over the futile task of patrolling the oceans and bombing periboobs wherever they might be found.

The chief beauty of this form of naughtiness was that it did not matter in the least if the enemy discovered he was being kidded. He could trawl a periboob from the depths, take it apart, demonstrate how it worked to every ship’s master on the planet and it would make no difference. If two ships had been sunk, two hundred more might go down. A periscope is a periscope, there’s no swift way of telling the false from the real and no captain in his right mind will invite a torpedo while trying to find out.

Alapertane (little Pertane) was the biggest and nearest port on Jaimec. It lay forty
den
west of the capital, seventy
den
northwest of the cave. Population a quarter million. It was highly likely that Alapertane had escaped most of the official hysteria pervading elsewhere, that its police and Kaitempi were less suspicious, less active. Mowry had never visited the place and therefore neither had
Dirac Angestun Gesept.
So far as Alapertane was concerned he had little grief to inherit.

Well, Terra knew what it was doing and orders must be carried out. He would have to make a trip to Alapertane and get the job done as soon as possible. On his own, without the dubious help of Gurd and Skriva—who so long as the hunt was on—remained dangerous liabilities.

Opening a container, Mowry took out a thick wad of documents, thumbed through them and carefully considered the thirty identities available. All of them had been devised to suit specific tasks. There were half a dozen that established his right to roam around the docks and peer at shipping. He chose a set of papers that depicted him as a minor official of the Planetary Board of Maritime Affairs.

Next he made himself up for the part. It took him more than an hour. In the end he was an elderly, bookish bureaucrat peering through steel-rimmed spectacles. That done, he amused himself blinking at his image in a metal mirror and talking nonsense in characteristically querulous tones.

Long hair would have perfected his appearance since he still had the short military crop of Halopti. A wig was out of the question; except for spectacles, the strict rule of facial disguise was to wear nothing that could be knocked, blown or taken off. So he shaved a patch of cranium to suggest approaching baldness and left it at that.

Finally he found himself another case, inserted its plastic key and opened it. Despite all the risks he had taken and might again take this was the action he detested most. He could never get rid of the notion that explosive luggage was highly temperamental, that many a wasp had been blown to the nether regions with a phantom key in his hand and that Terran authorities had kept silent about it.

From yet another container he took three limpet mines, two for use and one as a spare. These were hemispherical objects with a heavy magnetic ring projecting from the flat side, a timing-switch on the opposite, curved side. They weighed eleven pounds apiece and together made a load he'd rather have been without. Putting these in the case, he stuffed a pocket with new money, checked his gun. Switching on Container-22 he set forth, again through the dark.

By now he was becoming more than fed up with the long, trying journey from the cave to the road. It hadn’t looked much on an aerial photograph when seen through a stereoscopic viewer but the actual doing of it was tough. Especially when trudging through the dark and carrying a load. Repeatedly he cursed his choice of a hideout while reluctantly admitting that his cache had been protected by its very remoteness.

He reached the car in broad daylight, thankfully dumped the case on the back seat, checked the road for passing vehicles. The coast was clear. Racing back to the car he got it out fast, parked it while he scuffed tire tracks from the verge. Then he headed for Alapertane, choosing a route that kept him as far as possible from the angry capital.

Fifteen minutes later he was compelled to pull up. The road was filled with a convoy of army vehicles that were bucking and rocking as they reversed one by one into treeless space. Troops who had dismounted were filtering in ragged lines between the trees on both sides of the road. A dozen glum civilians were sitting in one truck with four soldiers to guard them.

As Mowry sat watching a captain came alongside the car and asked, “Where’re you from?”

“Valapan.”

“Where d’you live?”

“Kiestra, just outside Valapan.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Alapertane.”

This seemed to satisfy the other. He made to move off.

Mowry called, “What’s happening here, Captain?”

“A round-up. We’re collecting the windy and taking them back where they belong.”

“The windy?” Mowry looked baffled.

“Yar. The night before last a lot of yellow-bellied
sokos
bolted out of Pertane and took to the woods. They were worried about their skins, see? More followed early yesterday morning. By now half the city would be gone if we hadn’t pinned them in. Civilians make me sick.”