“They seemed to me to be out of line, or staggered,” Breedlove answered carefully, “but the appearance might have been caused by their different sizes.”
Upton was scribbling notes now, and the compelling eyes were lowered, but he raised them shortly to inquire, “Did you notice if the jams and jellies in the C rations were particularly favored by the Kanabians?”
“Yes, they were.”
Moving on to a description of the twilight ceremony, he tried to convey the home longing and the sadness of exile he had felt in the singing of the group, but he refrained from mentioning the peculiar vision he had experienced during the session. There was the matter of his credibility, and these men were mostly interested in objective facts.
“This singing,” Upton said, “was it performed with a vibrating sound from deep within their throats?”
“Yes. It was similar to a cat’s purr, but louder and more rhythmical.”
“Or like the drone of swarming bees!” It was not a question from Upton but an exclamation, voiced with a sense of discovery.
Breedlove felt it was an accurate metaphor and said so. At this point Dr. Teach asked Upton a question in a low voice, and Upton almost screeched, “Socially functional structural differentiation.” Teach laughed with a scorn that brought a buzz of low-voice argumentation from Upton until Harper intervened to permit Breedlove to resume his account.
He related an edited version of his dinner conversation with Kyra in Seattle and gave a sanitized account of their good-night kiss.
“While you were kissing,” the man called Slade asked, “did she make any sexual advances?”
From his question the black-garbed poseur would be a psychiatrist, Breedlove assumed.
“None whatsoever.”
“Ranger, would you recognize a sexual advance if you saw one?”
It was an outright jibe not worth an answer, and Breedlove could not have given one over the laughter. He was beginning to lose confidence in these men, not in their expertise but in their wisdom and maturity. Yet for Kyra’s sake he finished his talk with a plea.
“Gentlemen, Kyra and her small band of exiles come in peace and wish to leave in peace. To me it’s obvious that the risks we incur from granting her request for a small amount of uranium is less than the risk we incur by denying her, yet I have already heard arguments to the contrary. This is a moment of grave crisis for Kyra Lavaslatta. For humanity it is the ultimate crisis. If we fail these pilgrims we will have destroyed ourselves so completely it will matter no longer whether she stays to eliminate a lesser breed or is herself exterminated, for by our acts we would have abandoned those qualities which distinguish us from brutes and forfeited forever the Biblical status which once put us only a little lower than the angels.”
To his surprise, a smattering of applause greeted his words, and his opinion of the group rose slightly. It mounted another notch when Upton stood to address the group in a shrill but certain voice: “I don’t know where the rest of you stand, but I can say, before I feed the data to the computer, let’s give the female anything she wants and get her off the planet, fast.”
Clutching his note pad and tape recorder to his chest, Upton scurried from the room.
Someone in a back row called, “Teach, did Upton give you any idea what he’s up to?”
“He’s invading my turf with some fuzzy idea about the social organization of the Kanabians,” Teach answered. “He thinks the study of insects qualifies him as a sociologist.”
“There’s no social organization there,” someone volunteered. “It’s an anarchic matriarchy.”
“Not anarchic,” Hargrove demurred. “Highly stratified but not anarchic. Her state withered away, and her people have achieved the ultimate synthesis of law and order.”
“Kannerer, how long before her profile emerges?”
“Maybe a week,” a swarthy man answered. “Her Gestalt’s a humdinger.”
“That’ll be drawing heavily on her limited time.”
“Can’t be helped. She’s mid-Victorian about sex, so we have to approach those areas by indirection.”
Breedlove was eager for them to pursue this subject further, but Harper tapped his shoulder. “Breedlove, I’d like for you to meet your contact, Richard Turpin, a gifted member of the intelligence community… Gentlemen, please do not discuss this subject across departmental lines. The debriefing is over.”
With the babble of voices continuing unabated behind him, Breedlove turned to shake hands with a blond, blue-eyed man of about thirty who had the high cheekbones and slab jaws of an Oklahoman. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Turpin.”
“Call me Dick, Tom. We’ll be seeing lots of each other.” The trace of a drawl supported Breedlove’s estimate of Turpin’s origins.
“Dick Turpin,” Breedlove commented. “A famous name in the annals of crime.”
“Glad you’ve heard of me. I’m not Mr. Hoover, but I’ve solved my share of crimes.”
“Then you’re with the FBI.”
“Was,” Turpin corrected. “I’m now with the Special Security Squad.”
“Excuse me, Breedlove.” Harper tapped his shoulder again. “Attorney Cohen’s waiting to see you in the passageway, and he’s getting impatient.”
“Show him in.”
“He’s not cleared for the ready room… Gentlemen, the debriefing is over, repeat, over.”
“Excuse me, Dick,” Breedlove said, “I’ve got to see my lawyer.”
“You can’t be excused, Tom. We’ll see your lawyer.”
Not wishing to see his relationship with his contact begin on a note of acrimony, Breedlove said, “Then come along, Dick.”
They walked into a corridor filled with people, mostly women, who awaited the men inside. Glancing over the people, Breedlove could not see Cohen, but Turpin called, “Hi ya, Abe! Here’s your client.”
A tall, well-tailored man with an attaché case moved toward them with the straight-line precision of a Manhattanite. The hand he extended to Breedlove was cordial, but his voice was exasperated. “My office relayed your call to me. I had to cancel a hearing to get here, then Harper keeps me cooling my heels for ten minutes. Glad to meet you, Ranger Breedlove. I’m Abe Cohen.”
“You’re not the Abe Cohen who gave me your card this morning.”
“Nevertheless, I’m Abe Cohen.”
“What did the other Abe Cohen look like?” Turpin asked.
“About sixty, with drooping jowls, receding gray hair, and large brown eyes.”
“This is a matter for Ben Slade,” Turpin said. “Excuse me.”
He turned and went back into the ready room.
“What’s going on here, Ranger?” Cohen asked.
“It’s top secret. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to you without Turpin listening in.”
“Nonsense. The lawyer-client relationship antedates security regulations by a few hundred years. From what Peterson tells me, you’ve some sort of jurisdictional problem with a woman you’re trying to palm off as exotic fauna. It sounds less like a legal problem than a psychiatric problem.”
“It’s real. Kyra Lavaslatta, a girl from another planet, landed a spaceship in the Selkirk Area. I brought her to Seattle to get radioactive uranium enough to power her liftoff.”
“The uranium would be handled by the AEC. If she’s an emissary and her papers are in order, she’s under the jurisdiction of the State Department. If her papers aren’t in order, she’s a matter for Immigration.”
“We know that, Mr. Cohen, but we were hoping—”
“Hoping I’d find a loophole! It follows.”
“That’s not all. The military wants me to pinpoint the location of the spaceship, possibly to destroy it, and I don’t want to tell them.”
“If you’re not under oath you don’t have to tell them anything, and if all this is so hush-hush they won’t subpoena you. A subpoena would take a court order. But if she has no fuel for a liftoff, why is the military concerned?”
“They’re afraid she might lift off and return and attack the planet with eight other women and a boy.”
“Preposterous, but typical,” Cohen snapped. “There’s a peculiar angle to this case: the penalty for illegal entry is expulsion from the country, which is precisely what the alien wishes, and the expelling country must provide the means of transportation, which in this case is uranium. Illegal aliens do have some rights, you know.”
He was beginning to sound very similar to the first Abe Cohen, Breedlove thought, as he continued: “The main problem here is that the dispensation of enriched uranium is outside the national parameters under the terms of the Nonproliferation Treaty. It would have to meet the approval of the signatory powers, but that shouldn’t take more than two or three months.”
“That is the problem, Mr. Cohen. She’s got to be off the planet by June twentieth, and don’t ask me why. Couldn’t we go straight to the President?”
“Certainly, but he has no authority to act unilaterally on the matter. The man to expedite any transfer is the Chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, but he could not act without the Atomic Energy Committee’s recommendation.”
“Where have all our leaders gone?”
“Gone to committees, every one,” Cohen said.
“But what about the girl? Does she have to be held in custody?”
“There are no procedural grounds for her retention in situ, and of course we could spring her with a mere threat of habeas corpus. But she’d have to remain in protective custody, which is another kettle of fish.”
“That’s where we need your help.”
“You have it. I’m on retainer with Interior. This is an interesting legal problem, and one without precedent. It might enable me to establish a rule, the Cohen Rule for Interstellar Immigrants. Now it’s obvious we’re going to have to put our minds to the establishment of space law.”
Cohen stuck out his hand, this time in farewell. “You already have my card so keep in touch. I’ll talk to the girl.”
With a quick, pumping handshake, Cohen was gone—a very busy man indeed. Breedlove felt as confident in the lawyer as he had in the first Abe Cohen, although to this Abe Cohen Kyra was only an interesting legal problem. Every man Breedlove had talked to so far had looked at Kyra from a particular angle of vision. No one saw her steadily and saw her whole. No one seemed to grasp the simple morality of her plight: she was a pilgrim dying of thirst in a land overflowing with water.
But Cohen II had shown him the face of the enemy, the formless indecisiveness of interlocking committees. By the time Kyra’s simple request had worked its way through the committees concerned, the nose of her spaceship would be under twenty feet of snow.
“Where’s Cohen?”
The question came from Turpin. He had returned, bringing Slade, who stood listening, a hawklike intentness to his hooded gaze.
“He couldn’t wait.”
“Did you tell him about our visitor?”
“Cohen’s clean.” It was Slade who dismissed Turpin’s question. “Leastways, that Cohen is. About this other Cohen, son”—he turned to Breedlove, who wondered if the term “son” was used fatherly or as a contraction—“did he have a face like a beagle hound and sidle along like a land crab?”
“That’s the man.”
Slade’s eyes narrowed, and he spat one word, “Ajax!”
“You know him, then,” Breedlove said.
“Israeli agent.” Slade nodded. “Former member of the Irgun. Deadly little bastard. What’d you tell him?”
Breedlove looked at Turpin, and Turpin read his expression.
“You can talk to Ben Slade, Tom. He’s the ranking member of the local intelligence community, sort of a godfather of The Family. He’s in charge of overseas security and cleared for all information.”
“I told him what I told them in there, but he didn’t interrupt me. How did he get onto me so quickly?”
“You and Kelly left a mile-wide trail from Spokane, and Kelly has a permanent tail.”
“We’re not at war with Israel,” Breedlove said. “Does it matter if an Israeli knows about Kyra?”
“The smaller countries are the more dangerous. They try harder,” Slade said. “Was there anything in Kyra’s room that she brought from her planet?”
“Nothing. Her clothes belong to my sister, and she took her bag with her.”
“No documents?”
“Well, I showed Cohen… Ajax her photographs, a couple of before-and-after shots of her hair coloring.”
“Let us see them,” Slade said.
Breedlove took out his billfold, but the photographs were gone. He stood looking at his wallet in stupefied amazement until Slade spoke, in what sounded to Breedlove like a tone of apology: “Ajax was an honor graduate of the Buenos Aires school for pickpockets. Now, if we find Kyra’s room ransacked, I’ll know he searched it and found nothing. It’s his modus operandi. When Ajax finds what he wants, he leaves the room in apple-pie order. There was nothing in your room?”
Beginning a shrug of negation, Breedlove suddenly remembered the radiation shield in his suitcase. If the pink ball was missing, that could mean trouble, but he was dubious about letting these men in on the secret. He trusted them less than he had trusted the first Abe Cohen.
“No documents of any kind,” he finally said.
“We’ll tail you back to the motel and check out your rooms,” Slade said. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other, boy, because you need guidance. In matters of security you’re the biggest American leak since the Johnstown flood.”
Flanked by the security agents, Breedlove walked to the elevator. Since the interview with Chief Pilsudski, he realized, his sense of reality had been disintegrating. Dr. Condon had steadied it slightly, but Admiral Harper had canted it further. Slade and Turpin, two burlesque spooks from a spy melodrama, were the most bizarre distortions yet, and nothing they said in the elevator helped enhance their reality.
“What’s your cover for this operation, Ben?”
“No cover, Dick. I’m out in the open: Ben Slade. I want them to know I’m here to give them a diversionary target. They’ll know they’ll have to get me before they take her.”
“Why should anyone want to take her?” Breedlove asked.
“Her technological savvy,” Slade said.
“She couldn’t have a detailed knowledge of her technology.”
“She doesn’t need detailed knowledge. Her brains are an archive of concepts we never dreamed of. She’s an adventure into the possible who can point out areas of exploration that won’t lead us down blind alleys. Take her invisible spaceship. If Ghana had that secret, Ghana could conquer the world; and if she landed in Ghana, they’d get the secret. I know. I set up the operation in Ghana.”