Fantastic Stories Presents the Imagination (Stories of Science and Fantasy) Super Pack. Edmond Hamilton
tried to teleport me out of my hotel room. I wonder why he wanted to? Why should he want to kill me?
I’ll have to keep an eye on him. But he’s such a baby. He can’t even control his emotions.
“Your clothing,” she said, studying him with professional concern, “is all wrong. We’ll just have to get some more. Some to fit your personality better. I’ll do that tomorrow.”
Anger crossed his face. He rubbed his hand over his knee and looked down at his trousers. “I like them,” he said in a surly voice.
She was not afraid of him. She had no need to be. He was such an innocent!
Why, she thought, he doesn’t seem to have any information to draw on hardly at all; he’ll be harmless as long as I wish him so.
“I’m a Lyrian traitor, too,” he said.
“You are?”
His accent. She could not remember any accent on Earth like that. He had not learned his English from an earthman. A Lyrian had taught him?
“What are you doing here?” he said.
Boy! she thought. Is his conversation naive! Keep him talking, girl!
She studied his face. She thought: Get ‘em young and raise ‘em to suit yourself, Julia.
*
She added up the facts she had already discovered. He was, like herself, a human mutant. (I must check, she thought, to see if there were any human babies missing during the last flying saucer scare twenty-four years ago, the year I was born.) The mutants had been collected at birth, but the collectors had overlooked her. Walt had traveled here from (where? Mars? Luna?) in order to rectify this oversight by putting her out of the way. Why? Obviously he owed allegiance to the collectors (Lyrians?) from whom he had probably learned—among other things—his atrocious accent. He was—
She had ignored his question, so he asked another one. “Where is the war?”
“War?” Julia repeated. She frowned delicately. “There’s no war. Not right now. The international situation is getting better, I think.” War? she asked herself. He’s got a lot of misinformation about us.
She kept trying to see into the physical structure of his brain. Ah, she thought, yes. Right there—
A bridge there, all right.
It’s probably an easy mutation, she thought. Probably latent in everyone’s genes. The next development of man? (But how many centuries will it take for it to come out again?) How did the collectors produce the mutation in the first place—assuming they did produce (as well as harvest) it?
Could, she thought, a surgeon—operate, as it were—on an adult brain to produce the bridge? . . . I’ll have to take up surgery. A few months to learn technique. I think I could. It’s easy to heal, because of the subconscious pattern (the cellular pattern?) but to—operate—to change—to build into a different structure, so that would require experiments and study, perhaps actual knife work . . . .
“There has to be a war,” Walt said. “Forential told us there was.”
“There isn’t. Not now.” Forential? A non-human? An alien?
“He told us,” Walt said.
“He lied,” Julia said.
“He doesn’t lie.”
Julia shrugged. Walt is a loyal follower, she thought. “There’s no war. Maybe he meant there would be one shortly; maybe it was a premature announcement.” Lord! do these aliens have some way of prodding the Russian bear? she thought. Or how the devil are they—Forentials, wherever they are—thinking of starting a war?
Walt refused to consider her denial. He did not look her in the face. “I like you,” he said. He was desperate to change the subject. “Your smile. You’re so . . . so . . .” nice. He thought the last word; he took the risk that she might peep his other thoughts. He was almost certain she could not; he hoped to peep hers if she thought a reply. Forential couldn’t be a liar!
Julia knew they were both incorrect: his statement and his conviction. But she liked to hear him say he liked her. I guess, she thought, he’s trying to lull my suspicions. Maybe I better lull his, too . . . .
She smiled sweetly.
“You see, I’ve never seen a Lyrian female before,” Walt said. “ . . . except one on the ship just the other day; but just one, before.”
Is Lyria supposed to be a planet? she thought to herself. “You’ve never been to Lyria, then, have you?”
“ . . . we were very young when we left.”
He doesn’t even know he’s a native of Earth! Julia thought. “You know,” she said, “I’ll bet I know more about you than you think I do.”
That brought a fear reaction from Walt.
You don’t need to be afraid of me, Julia thought soothingly.
(She had scarcely half an hour left before the aliens shut off the big transmitter.)
“How soon . . . . When will we get to the hotel?”
“Soon, now,” Julia said.
“We’ll be alone?” Walt said.
“We’ll have a chance to talk; there are a lot of things for us to talk about.”
“Yes,” he said. He began to rub his hands over one another. His growing excitement and his hatred bubbled just below the surface of his mind; Julia could feel the emotions without him being aware that she could.
My, she thought. He’s going to take a lot of re-educating before he makes a very good husband.
*
When they entered the hotel room, Walt found his throat expanding with excitement.
Forential, he thought, will be pleased that I have killed her in secret. No one on Earth will ever know who she was killed by. When she is dead, I can slip out of the hotel and . . . and invisible, I can steal food and drink and stay in empty rooms until the invasion comes; and when it does, then I can start teleporting earthlings and slaying them with my hands, and . . . . She doesn’t suspect, he thought, that I am going to kill her in just a moment.
He complimented himself on how cleverly he had concealed his intentions.
Covertly he surveyed the room. The pitcher on the table? The chair? What with? A sudden numbing blow—like the blow Calvin delivered to John. Then, afterwards, hands, knees, fingers—and she will be dead.
He saw himself rising triumphant from her still body. Saw Forential (when, later, he heard of it) smiling approval, saw his mates listening awe struck . . . . His breath trembled in his throat; his arms ached to be moving.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said.
I will wait until she is off guard, he thought. Smiling in anticipation, he sat down.
. . . she doesn’t, he thought, seem like a traitor. Such bright, clear eyes. She seems, so nice, so trusting, so innocent. It was foolish to have been afraid of meeting her. She’s small and harmless. I wish she weren’t a traitor; maybe—
But Forential knows.
(How about the war? Why did Forential say there was a war?)
Forential knows. He said to kill her.
Julia, studying him with faint amusement, said “Have you looked at your brain? I have a picture of a human brain here. I want to show you how alike they are.”
“Lyrians have a superficial resemblance to earthlings.”
“Look at this. Very similar. The same, almost.”