Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (8 page)

But he wasn’t yet out of the bag. Police on the station expected to see people carrying luggage anytime of day or night. Cops in the city streets were different, being more inclined to question the reason at such an indecent hour. They were nasty-minded about burdened walkers in the night.

That problem could be solved by the easy expedient of taking a taxi—only to create another problem. Taxis have to be driven. Drivers have mouths and memories. The most taciturn of them could become positively gabby when questioned by the Kaitempi.

“You take anyone off the 11:20 from Radine?”

“Yar. Young fellow with a case.”

“Notice anything suspicious about him? He act tough or behave warily, for instance?”

“Not that I noticed. Seemed all right to me. Wasn’t a native Jaimecan though. Spoke with a real Mashambi growl.”

“Remember where you took him,
hi?”

“Yar, I do. I can show you.”

There was an escape from this predicament; he took it by dumping the case in a rented locker in the station and walking away free of the betraying burden. In theory the case should be safe enough for one full Jaimecan day. In ominous fact there was a slight chance of it being discovered and used as bait.

On a world where nothing was sacrosanct from their prying fingers the Kaitempi had master-keys to everything. They weren’t above opening and searching every bank of lockers within a thousand miles of the scene of the crime if by any quirk of thought they took it into their heads that to do so would be a smart move. So when he returned in daytime to collect the case he’d have to approach the lockers with considerable caution, making sure that a watch was not being kept upon them by a ring of hard characters.

Pacing rapidly home, he was within half a mile of his destination when two cops stepped from a dark doorway on the other side of the street.

“Hey, you!”

Mowry stopped. They came across, stared at him in grim silence. Then one made a gesture to indicate the high-shining stars, the deserted street.

“Wandering around pretty late, aren’t you?”

“Nothing wrong with that, is there?” he answered, making his tone slightly apologetic.

“We
are asking the questions,” retorted the cop. “Where’ve you been to this hour?”

“On a train.”

“From where?”

“Khamasta.”

“And where’re you going now?”

“Home.”

“You’d have made it quicker in a taxi, wouldn’t you?"

“Sure would,” Mowry agreed. “Unfortunately I happened to be last out. Someone always has to be last out. By that time every taxi had been grabbed.”

“Well, it’s a story.”

At this point the other cop chipped in. He adopted technique Number Seven, namely, a narrowing of the eyes, an out-thrusting of the jaw and a harshening of the voice. Once in a while Number Seven would be rewarded with a guilty look or at least a hopelessly exaggerated expression of innocence. He was very good at it, having practiced it assiduously upon his wife and the bedroom mirror.

“You wouldn’t perhaps have been nowhere near Khamasta,
hi?
You wouldn’t perhaps have been spending the night taking a nice, easy stroll around Pertane and sort of absentmindedly messing around with walls and windows, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,’’ said Mowry. “For the reason that nobody would pay me a bad guilder for my trouble. Do I look crazy?”

“Not enough to be noticed,” admitted the cop. “But somebody’s doing it, crazy or not.”

“Well, I can’t blame you fellows for wanting to nab him. I don’t like loonies myself. They give me the creeps.” He made an impatient gesture. “If you’re going to search me how about getting the job done? I’ve had a long day, I’m dog-tired and I want to get home.”

“I don’t think we’ll bother,” said the cop. “You show us your identity-card.”

Mowry dug it out. The cop gave it no more than a perfunctory glance while his companion ignored it altogether.

“All right, on your way. If you insist on walking the streets at this hour you must expect to be stopped and questioned. There’s a war on, see?”

“Yes, officer,” said Mowry, meekly.

He pushed off at his best pace, thanking heaven he had got rid of his luggage. If he’d been holding that case they’d have regarded it, rightly enough, as probable evidence of evil-doing. To prevent them from opening it and inspecting the contents he’d have had to subdue them with the Kaitempi card. He didn’t want to make use of that tactic if he could help it until sometime after Pigface’s killing had been discovered and the resulting uproar had died down. Say in at least one month’s time.

Reaching his apartment, he undressed but did not go immediately to sleep. He lay in bed and examined the precious card again and again. Now that he had made time to ponder its full significance and obvious potentialities he found himself torn two ways—should he keep it or not?

The sociopolitical system of the Sirian Empire being what it was, a Kaitempi card was the prime scare-device on any Sirian-held planet. The mere sight of this dreaded totem was enough to make ninety-nine percent of civilians get down on their knees and salaam, their faces in the dust. The fact made a Kaitempi card of tremendous value to any wasp. Yet Terra had not provided him with such a weapon. He’d had to grab it for himself. The obvious conclusion was that Terran Intelligence lacked an original copy.

Out there amid the mist of stars, on the green-blue world called Earth, they could duplicate anything save a living entity—and could produce a very close imitation even of that. Maybe they needed this card. Given the chance, maybe they’d arm every wasp in existence with a mock-majorship in the Kaitempi and by the same token give life to some otherwise doomed to death.

For himself, to surrender the card to Terran authority would be like voluntarily sacrificing his queen while playing a hard-fought and bitter game of chess. All the same, before going to sleep he reached his conclusion: on his first return to the cave he would beam a detailed report of what had happened, the prize he had won and what it was worth. Terra could then decide whether or not to deprive him of it in the interest of the greater number.

The wasp buzzed alone, unaided, but was loyal to the swarm.

At noon he made cautious return to the station, hung around for twenty minutes as if waiting to meet an incoming traveler. He kept sharp, careful watch in all directions while appearing bored and interested in nothing save occasional streams of arrivals. Some fifty or sixty other people were idling about in unconscious imitation of himself: among them he could detect nobody maintaining a sly eye upon the lockers. There were about a dozen who looked overmuscled and wore the deadpan hardness of officials but these were solely interested in people coming through the barriers.

Finally he took the chance, ambled casually up to his locker, stuck his key in its door while wishing to God that he had a third eye located in the back of his neck. Opening the door, he took out the case and had a bad moment as he stood with the damning evidence in his hand. If ever it was going to occur, now was the time for a shout of triumph, a sudden grip on his shoulder, a bunch of callous faces all around.

Still nothing happened. He strolled away looking blandly innocent but deep inside as leery as a fox who hears the dim, distant baying of the hounds. Outside the station he jumped a crosstown bus, maintained a wary watch for followers.

Chances were very high that nobody had noticed him, nobody was interested in him, because in Radine the Kaitempi were still running around in circles without the vaguest notion of where to probe first. But he could not take that for granted nor dare he underestimate their craftiness. There was one chance in a thousand that by some item he’d overlooked or hadn’t thought of he’d given them a lead straight to the lockers and that they had decided not to nab him on the spot, hoping that if left to run loose he’d take them to the rest of the presumed mob.

So during the ride he peered repeatedly backward, observed passengers getting on and off, tried to see if he could spot a loaded dynocar tagging along somewhere behind. He changed buses five times, lugged the case along two squalid alleys, walked into the fronts and out the backs of three department stores.

Satisfied at last that there was no surreptitious pursuit he made for his apartment, kicked the case under the bed, let go a deep sigh. They’d warned him that this kind of life would prove a continual strain on the nerves. It sure was!

Going out again, he bought a box of envelopes and a cheap typewriter. Then using the Kaitempi paper he spent the rest of the day and part of the next one typing with forceful brevity. He didn’t have to bother about leaving his prints all over this correspondence; Terran fingerprint treatment had turned his impressions into vague, unclassifiable blotches.

When he had finished that task he devoted the following day to patient research in the city library. He made copious notes, went home, addressed a stack of envelopes, stamped the lot.

In the early evening he mailed more than two hundred letters to newspaper editors, radio announcers, military leaders, senior civil servants, police chiefs, prominent politicians and key members of the government. Defiantly positioned under the Kaitempi heading and supported by the embossed seal of its winged sword, the message was short but said plenty.

Sallana is the first.

There are plenty more to come.

The list is Long.

Dirac Angestun Gesept.

That done, he burned the envelope-box and dropped the typewriter in the river where it ran deep. If he had occasion to write any more letters he’d buy another one and afterward get rid of it the same way. He could well afford to buy and scrap a hundred typewriters if he thought it necessary. The more the merrier. If the Kaitempi analyzed the type on threatening correspondence and found a number of untraceable machines being used, they’d get the idea that a gigantic organization was at work. Furthermore, every purchase helped inflate the Jaimecan economy with worthless paper.

His next step was to visit a drive-yourself agency and rent a dynocar for a week, using the name of Shir Agavan and the address of the hotel where first he’d holed-up. By its means he got rid of five hundred stickers distributed over six small towns and thirty villages. The job was a lot riskier than it had been in Radine or Pertane.

The villages were by far the worst to handle, the smaller in size the more troublesome they proved. In a city of a quarter million to two million population a stranger is an insignificant nonentity; in a dump of less than one thousand inhabitants he is noticed, remarked upon, his every move watched.

On many occasions a bunch of yokels gave him the chance to slap up a sticker by switching attention from him to his car. Twice somebody took down the cars number, just for the ducks of it. It was a good thing he’d given a blind-alley lead when hiring it because police inquiries about the widespread rash of subversive stickers would almost certainly make them relate the phenomenon to the laconic, fast-moving stranger driving dyno XC17978.

He had been on Jaimec exactly four weeks when he disposed of the last of the stickers from his bag and thus reached the end of phase one. It was at this point he began to feel despondent.

In the papers and over the air officialdom still maintained complete silence about traitorous activities. Not a word had been said about the slaughter of Pigface Sallana. All the outward evidence suggested that the government remained blissfully unaware of waspish buzzings and was totally unconcerned about the existence of an imaginary
Dirac Angestun Gesept.

Thus deprived of visible reactions Mowry had no way of telling what results he had achieved, if any. In retrospect this paper-war looked pretty futile in spite of all Wolf’s glib talk about pinning down an army with little more than gestures. He, Mowry, had been lashing out in the dark and the other fellow wasn’t even bothering to hit back.

That made it difficult to maintain enthusiasm at the first feverish pitch. Just one public squeal of pain from the opposition or a howl of fury or a tirade of threats would have given him a big boost by showing him that at last he had landed a real wallop on something solid. But they wouldn’t give him the petty satisfaction of hearing them breathing hard.

He was paying the psychological penalty of working alone. There was no companion-in-arms with whom to share stimulating speculations about the enemy’s hidden countermoves. Nobody to encourage or from whom to receive encouragement. Nobody sharing the conspiracy and the danger and—as is usual among two or more—the laughs. In his waspish role he was thrown wholly upon his own moral resources which needed feeding with factual evidence that so far had not been forthcoming.

Swiftly he built up a blue spell so dismal and depressing that for two days he hung around the apartment and did nothing but mope. On the third day pessimism evaporated and was replaced with a growing sense of alarm. He did not ignore the new feeling. At training college they'd warned him times without number always to heed it.

“The fact that one is hunted in deadly earnest can cause an abnormal sharpening of the mental perceptions almost to the point of developing a sixth sense. That’s what makes hardened criminals difficult to catch. They get hunches and play them. Many a badly wanted crook has moved out one jump ahead of the police with such timeliness that they’ve suspected a tip-off. All that had really happened was that the fellow suddenly got the jitters and took off good and fast. For the sake of your skin you do the same. If ever you feel they’re getting close don’t hang around and try to check on it—just beat it someplace else!’’

Yes, that’s what they’d said to him. He remembered now that he had wondered whether this ability to smell danger might be quasi-telepathic. The police rarely pulled a raid without a stakeout or some sort of preliminary observation. A hound hanging around a hole, sharp-eyed, sharp-toothed and unable to avoid thinking of what he was doing, might give the one in hiding his mental scent that would register not in clear thought-forms but rather as the inward shrilling of an alarm-bell.