Collected Short Fiction, page 434
“Nothing is too dangerous now,” Shane said.
They talked to General Whitehall in the Headquarters office.
“Clayton mustn’t know what we’re planning,” explained the slight, old commander. “We’re going to make recordings of his speech and study his unconscious mannerisms. He’s clever enough to trick us if he knew, but his face was cut when Lieutenant Shane captured him. The injury hasn’t been properly repaired. I’ll arrange for you to make an operation on him at once. That will give you an opportunity to study his face.”
“Also,” suggested the woman doctor, “I believe we should make some psychological tests. That is another specialty of mine. I was led into it through a study of the psychology of facial expressions.”
Shane was present in the hospital operating room when Clayton first saw Della Rand. The prisoner’s greenish eyes lit with an instant admiration.
“You are going to complicate my task, Doctor.” Clayton grinned. “I came here to make war on America. Now I see that I’ll have to save your life and take you back with me to New Britain.”
Della Rand caught her breath. It was the first time that Shane had ever seen her air of curt efficiency disturbed. He thought she was pleased as well as flustered. To a woman, he supposed, Clayton must seem quite daring and romantic. In a moment, however, she got back her professional briskness.
“All right,” she said curtly. “Let’s see your face.”
Shane watched the operation. The delicate instruments of bright steel seemed to live in her deft hands. Newly developed adhesives joined the tissue of nerve and muscle and skin, so that no stitches were required. When she had finished, only a tiny line showed where Shane’s acceleration-hurled missile had cut its long slash. Even that would slowly vanish.
Next morning, back in his own room at the hospital, Shane confronted the tall Outsider.
“Now we’ll have to take you to a cell in the Guard prison, unless you want to give your parole and stay here. You will still be under guard, of course, but you will be more comfortable.”
“Sure,” Clayton said promptly.
“Then you give your word not to attempt escape?”
FOR a split-second Clayton seemed to hesitate. Shane thought his greenish eyes flashed, as if with some concealed reckless amusement.
“I do,” he said.
In the days that followed, Clayton proved ready enough to talk to Shane, so long as they kept off certain topics, such as the Black Star. He also insisted on the right to ask as many questions as he answered. Every moment, Shane could see, he was devouring every possible fact about the science, geography and defenses of America. Shane was haunted with a fear that he would escape, in spite of his parole and the guards about the little white hospital, to make some new attack on the Ring Cylinder.
Shane explained that fear to General Whitehall. The commander admitted the danger. Twenty men of the now enlarged Ring Guard were assigned to the duty of preventing the Outsider’s escape.
Clayton’s laugh was a mocking challenge when Shane told him that Della Rand was planning some psychological tests.
“Let her go ahead,” he invited sardonically. “I’ll find out as much as she does. Besides, the tests should be amusing. Della is really too charming to die in America, Lieutenant. I’m going to take her home.”
“If that’s a joke,” Shane retorted, “it isn’t funny. What about Atlantis Lee?”
“Atlantis,” Clayton said, “is a long way from the Midwest Corporation.”
Shane spent many hours with the engineers aboard the Friendship. He learned to operate every mechanism and studied every detail of design, material and construction. He memorized every word on the metal foil rolls and letters, every line on the maps.
Shane was never sure just when Clayton perceived the plan. When the guards let him into the hospital room, on the morning that Della was to begin the operations on his face, he asked Clayton for the massive platinum ring.
“I’d like to keep it,” Clayton protested, covering the heavy bezel of plain white metal, which didn’t even carry a monogram. “It has a sentimental value.”
“I can’t picture you as sentimental,” Shane snapped. “Give me the ring.”
Grinning, Clayton slipped it off and tossed it to him.
“I was wondering whether you would think of it,” he said. “Not that it will help you much.” A cold note of warning came into his voice. “You’re a fool to try this, Shane! To get an idea of your chances, just reverse the situation. Suppose that I had managed to turn up in your place, on my first visit to America.
“Think of all the people I would have had to deceive—your friends, your relatives, your fellow-Guardsmen. Surely, not knowing anything at all about them, I would have made one false step. And one, remember, can be enough to result in the death of a spy.”
His hard, challenging green eyes mocked Shane.
“Maybe Della can give you a copy of my face,” he continued. “But the scars will be visible, to one who knows how to look. I’m a quarter of an inch taller. My eyes and my voice and my hair are different. You may forget one of my habits, which you’ve been studying so carefully, and betray yourself with some little trick of your own.
“Remember, Shane, life is hard Outside. It’s easy to keep alive in America. A naked animal can do it. But it takes a lot of skill and a lot of equipment to keep alive Outside.” He gave a hard little laugh. “Don’t you see that you’re a fool?”
“Thanks for the hints.” Shane grinned at him. “But just keep the situation reversed. Suppose that you were in my place, wouldn’t you take all those risks willingly for your own people?”
Clayton’s lean face grew visibly warmer. In that moment Shane liked and admired the tall Outsider more than he had before.
“Sure I would.”
Then the guards and nurses came to take them to the operating room.
CHAPTER VIII
The Gentle Death
DELLA RAND herself, in Shane’s quiet room at the hospital, removed his bandages. Her dark, close-shingled head made a curt little nod of professional satisfaction. Standing behind her, General Whitehall pursed his thin, wrinkled lips in a silent whistle of astonishment. Della gave Shane a mirror.
He gasped, unable to believe what he saw. It was uncanny. It made shivery cold feet run up and down his spine. He felt just the same, except that his new face was still stiff and painful. But the hard, handsome features that looked at him from the mirror were those of Captain Glenn Clayton!
His dark hair had been bleached and dyed to the bronze of Clayton’s. The magic of bio-chemistry had changed his skin to Clayton’s ruddy brown. His gray eyes, from the delicate injection of special dyes, had taken on the greenish glint of Clayton’s.
“I can’t believe it!”
Even his voice startled him. Clever surgery on his larynx and sinuses had given it the quality of Clayton’s. He looked down at his hands. They also had felt Della’s knife, but the tips of his opposite thumbs and fingers were set together in a characteristic habit of his own.
“That isn’t Clayton,” General Whitehall warned him. “Don’t ever forget that one little gesture. Even a tiny thing like that might destroy you and the hopes of America.”
The day he was to leave, Shane couldn’t resist the temptation to visit Clayton’s guarded room. He was wearing Clayton’s tight gray trousers and tunic, to get used to them, with the paralysis gun at his hip. It surprised him to find Della Rand here, at a little table scattered with her test equipment.
Clayton, seated across from Della with his palms resting on two electrodes, stared up at Shane. For a moment he looked blank with astonishment. Then his handsome face broke into a smile of admiration.
“Splendid, Shane!” he cried—in the voice that was now identical with Shane’s own. “Thanks for letting me see.” His green taunting eyes looked back at Della. “Your gadget must have registered something then, beautiful.”
“Surprise,” said Della’s curt voice. “Point oh sixteen.”
Clayton’s brown, bold face turned back to Shane.
“She thinks she’s learning things from me.” His hard voice had a malicious ring. “But I don’t need a laboratory to tell that she already registers about point oh sixty degrees of love.”
Della’s face glowed with color.
“Stop it,” she ordered curtly, “or I’ll call the guard.”
Yet Shane wondered if Clayton hadn’t told the truth. Clayton grinned at him.
“Splendid, Shane,” he repeated mockingly. “You look exactly like me—to anybody who doesn’t know me. There are a thousand things that can betray an impersonator in a world that he has never seen before. Perhaps you have thought of a hundred of them. There are nine hundred more.”
Shane waved in farewell and went out of the room. That was the moment Clayton had selected to break his parole. Now that Barry Shane looked exactly like him, he also looked exactly like Barry Shane. It would have been foolish not to make some use of such a convenient fact. He, too, had been observing mannerisms and voice inflections. He had planned a desperate masquerade of his own.
WHEN Shane went out, Clayton was left alone with Della Rand. That had been easy to manage, for he was on parole. All the doctor’s reaction tests had not revealed his plan, though he had encouraged her to go on by yielding a few unimportant bits of information about New Britain. He simply refused to cooperate when any guards were present.
Eighty seconds after Shane departed, Clayton followed. Della Rand was left lying across the bed. She was unconscious from an anesthetic needle in her own kit, her mouth and wrists turning blue from the pressure of Clayton’s hands.
Clayton had flung off the bathrobe he had worn. He had torn his underclothing and mussed his hair. Della had scratched his face, injuring her own deft handiwork. But even that helped his planned effect.
In the hall outside, he met the startled guard.
“Where is he?” His breathless, gasping tones were a splendid imitation of Shane’s altered voice. “He overpowered me—took my clothes and gun. He looks like me now—Where’s Clayton?”
The guard blinked and gulped and automatically pointed.
“Lieutenant Shane—I thought he was Shane—just went that way.”
“Fool, that was Clayton!” Clayton’s voice cracked like an angry whip at the confused guard. “He’s getting away. He’s desperate. Spread the alarm! Here, give me your gun!”
“Yes, sir,” croaked the dazed guard.
It was a simple plan, one that had the audacious simplicity that was the spice of life to Clayton. Clutching the gun, he grinned as he sprinted down the twisting corridor in the direction the guard had pointed.
It was neat. Shane would be buried, if nothing went wrong, as the Outsider killed while attempting escape. Clayton himself, calmly carrying out his own masquerade, would be escorted to the Ring and safely through it, by the very men assigned to the duty of guarding him. The first intimation of the truth would be the unexpected descent of a Black Star rocket-bomber fleet on the Ring Cylinder.
Of course there were a good many things that could go wrong, but Clayton was used to risks and he enjoyed them. This attempt, he thought, was no more desperate than Shane’s own plan.
There was only one phase of the affair that Clayton regretted. He wished it had been possible to take Della Rand with him. He had admired her from the beginning, but he had never quite realized how much he really wanted her until those brief, delicious seconds when her lithe slender body struggled in his arms, before the anesthetic took effect.
He turned a corner and saw Shane ahead of him. Clayton flung up the heavy pistol he had snatched from the bewildered guard. It was a more deadly thing than the paralysis gun Shane had taken from him. The sights crossed the back of Shane’s head, but the gun shivered in Clayton’s hand and he didn’t pull the trigger.
Shane wore his own clothing. Shane was walking with his own jaunty walk. That bronze head was his own. The man ahead was himself!
CLAYTON thrust away that brief, uncanny feeling. He tried to forget a sudden, unwilling liking for the quiet-voiced Guardsman. Emotions didn’t matter now. The long-planned final vistory of the Black Star was in sight.
He steadied the gun. But Shane had swung on down the hall and Clayton saw the long mirror at the end of it. At the same instant Shane saw the crouching image of his nearly naked double, tense in the very act of firing.
Clayton’s bullet broke the mirror, but Shane had flung himself aside. There was no time to turn and aim, yet his lightning reaction served him. Before the mirror shattered, he had discharged the paralysis gun at it, toward the image of his double.
The thin beam of dull violet was reflected back to the Outsider. His gun-arm dropped, suddenly numbed. The borrowed weapon clattered on the floor.
Even then, disarmed, Clayton clung to his story. At Shane’s suggestion, the swiftly gathering guards held them both. General Whitehall arrived. Della Rand recovered from the anesthetic needle, gave her account of the affair. They were judges that Clayton could not deceive.
Shane went on, to undertake his adventure Outside.
Handcuffs were snapped on Clayton and he was escorted back to his room. Della Rand’s reaction test equipment had been removed. The room was stripped bare as a cell. He spent the rest of the day in the company of six guards.
Next morning, slight, shrewd-eyed, old General Whitehall came in the room to see him. His thin face was sober, his voice low with regret.
“Clayton,” he said gravely, “you’ve broken your parole.”
Chains jingled cheerfully as Clayton sat up on the bare mattress in the corner. Red and welted where Della had scratched it, his hard, grinning face looked faintly sinister.
“So I have,” he agreed.
“You’re a riddle to me, Clayton.” The old Guardsman shook his head wearily. “I like you personally. Yet, after what you did yesterday, we can’t overlook the fact that you are a ruthless and clever enemy.”
“No, General.” Clayton’s voice had a bitter ring. “You can’t understand me. But if you had lived Outside—if your forefathers had, for two hundred years—you could. If you had seen human beings dying for want of the oxygen in a cup of water, when you knew there were oceans of it lying inside the Barrier, then you could understand.”
“But,” protested Whitehall, “we’re willing to give you water.”
“Perhaps you are now, to save a little for yourselves,” Clayton retorted freely. “But you failed to do it two hundred years ago. America should congratulate herself, General, on two centuries of borrowed time—of stolen life!”
WHITEHALL’S face went stern.
“That attitude is unfortunate,” he said, “both for America and New Britain. But it exists and must be dealt with.” Cold now, his shrewd eyes studied Clayton. “Captain, we are prepared to offer you two alternatives.”
“Only two?” Clayton’s smooth voice mocked.
“There is still time to change your attitude,” Whitehall stated. “You can answer our questions honestly. You can cooperate squarely with our efforts to establish friendly relations and peaceful trade with New Britain.”
Clayton grinned. “The other alternative?”
“Euthanasia,” Whitehall answered soberly.
Puzzled for a moment, Clayton’s green eyes glinted with understanding.
“Oh,” he said softly. “The easy death—your polite and scientific name for murder!”
“If you prefer to call it that. You attempted to destroy the Ring Cylinder. Yesterday you tried to kill Lieutenant Shane. Frankly, Captain, I regret this very deeply, but we feel that you are too dangerous to America to be allowed to live to endanger us.” Clayton’s face lit with a reckless amusement.
“Your regrets are unnecessary. I assure you that in your place I should take the same action, with no regrets at all. You Americans are better men than I thought.”
Whitehall stood silent. In a husky voice, hardly above a whisper, he said: “You’re a strange man, Clayton. This is more painful to me than you can understand. Our surgeon will be ordered to prepare for the operation at once. I assure you there will be no pain.”
“Thank you, General,” Clayton said, “though that is not important.”
He allowed himself a wolfish grin. Who, he wondered, would the surgeon be?
CHAPTER IX
Beyond the Ring
GENERAL WHITEHALL shook hands with Barry Shane before the young Guardsman started for the Ring. Bright with a fresh amazement, his keen blue eyes studied the face, the posture and the odd gray clothing that had been Clayton’s own.
“You almost make me think you’re really Clayton, carrying out his little plot, after all!” His voice suddenly went grave. “This is a mad adventure, Shane, but you can’t fail. It’s too important.”
When Shane grinned, it was Clayton’s own hard grin.
“I’ll do my best,” he promised. “I was just talking to the engineers about our imaginary weapon. They suggest a decoherer—a beam of force that appears to destroy the molecular cohesion of metal, so that good steel crumbles to useless dust. Actually, sir, is there any possibility of such a weapon?”
Wearily Whitehall shook his shaggy head.
“None, I’m afraid. The defenses of America have been neglected for two hundred years. We have depended on the Ring. We don’t even have the machine tools and trained men to create the sort of armament that America had two hundred years ago. Of course we’re trying desperately to get ready for trouble. We’re enlisting men in the Guard. Our few arsenals are working day and night, trying to arm them.”
His blue eyes were bleak with dread.
“But we’ve no protection at all from bombing raids on our cities, or the Ring Cylinder itself from such rocket-bombers as the Friendship. That’s why your mission is so vitally important.”
