IN CLOUDS OF GLORY
Algis Budrys
“We are the men of the Agency—
We’re steadfast, stout-hearted, and brave.
For a buck we will duck
Through the worst that may come,
And argue the price of a grave.
“Oh, we are the Agency’s bravos—
We peddle the wealth of our skill.
We will rescue your world or destroy it,
Depending on who foots the bill.”
—Anonymous
I
The tidy little orchestra finished the dance set and broke up, leaving behind the quartet nucleus, which began Schubert’s “Fourteenth.” The party guests dispersed through the room, talking in groups while the servants passed among them with refreshments.
Thaddeus Demaris brooded solemnly in a heavy chair near, the fireplace, half-listening to the two well-kept men conversing nearby. One of them was Walker Holtz, the hunter. The other was Captain Romney Oxford, of Her Canadian Majesty’s Legation in Detroit.
Walker Holtz fingered the stem of his boutonniere and took a sip of his liqueur. He leaned against the mantelpiece, let his eyes flick negligently over the crowd, and resumed his conversation.
“My dear Captain Oxford, I’ll grant you artillery. Artillery and, in certain circumstances, infantry. But not aircraft. The British had the quality and the Americans the quantity.”
“I don’t see how you can say that,” Oxford countered. He took a gulp of his drink and set it down firmly. “What about the Trans-Polar Campaign?”
Holtz raised his eyebrows. “I think it’s generally accepted that Vitkovsky was able to commit his reserve fighter wings only because the Alaskan Air Command of the old United States Air Force was snowed in.”
Oxford granted the point easily. “Quite so. And then Vitkovsky’s transports would have suffered, say sixty percent interceptions over Quebec?”
“You’re being generous, Captain,” Holtz rejoindered. He inhaled gently over his glass before raising it to his lips. “I would have said fifty.”
Oxford brushed the polite quibble aside with a graceful wave of his hand.
In his chair, Demaris smiled bitterly and scornfully. These men with their heads for the facts and figures of ancient military history—how many of them had ever heard a shot fired in anger?
“Well, then,” Oxford was saying, scoring his point, “I should like to remind you, Colonel Holtz, that Vitkovsky’s plan necessarily allowed for seventy percent interceptions. As it finally transpired, so many surplus troops landed in Illinois that an emergency quartermaster and clerical staff had to be flown in.”
Holtz frowned, discomfited.
Demaris stood up impatiently and snatched a liqueur from a passing servant’s tray. The heavily flavored cordial bit at his tongue.
And for all the battles won in parlors and drawing rooms, where was Earth’s frontier today?
His lip curled. He swung around and stabbed an extended forefinger at the startled Oxford. “I should like to point out,” he bit off in the astonished man’s face, “that what you have just cited was the USSR’s suicidal policy of wasting men, not the superiority of its air arm, which was consistently hampered and eventually destroyed by a typical Russian insistence on trying to make a rapier do a bludgeon’s work.”
Holtz stepped between them, his temples throbbing and his nostrils white. “You are ungentle, sir.”
Demaris looked at him coldly, a certain amount of anticipation tightening the curl of his fingers. “And you are a fool and an ass.”
The muscles knotted at the corners of Holtz’s thin jaw. He drew back his hand to slap. Demaris lifted his cheek a fraction of an inch, his head tilting to present a willing target. The buzz of conversation was dying in the room, smothering under a wave of rapt silence.
Oxford reached out hastily and pushed himself between Holtz and Demaris. “Eh . . . Colonel Holtz . . . I don’t believe you’ve previously met Thaddeus Demaris. The introduction is my pleasure.”
The pallid urgency in Oxford’s eyes was mimicked by Holtz’s sudden slackness of mouth. His arm lowered limply. “Ah? Uh . . . oh, no, Oxford, my pleasure, I’m sure—”
Demaris smashed the back of his hand across Holtz’s face. The hunter stumbled back, one hand pressed to his nose. Oxford made a noise of protest. Demaris stood motionless, his face set.
Holtz regained his balance. “Really, Mr. Demaris,” he mumbled, waving Oxford back, “my sincere apologies—”
Demaris looked at him with something much like disappointment. He spun on his heel and stalked off.
# # #
Even the night was dishonest. Laden with perfume, the artificially circulated air stirred a sham breeze across the balconade. A sickle of moon drifted among the gray-silver clouds. Behind him, Demaris could hear the last notes of “Death and the Maiden” fading politely away.
How far in the past was Oxford’s and Holtz’s war? Three hundred years. And after finishing that war, how far in the future did Man imagine his Empire of Earth lay, stretching out into the stars? One century? Two? With the interstellar drive and the Terrestrial Space Navy to ride it.
And where, now, was Earth’s frontier, a full hundred years beyond that well-planned future?
Pluto. That’s where it was. Just barely, Pluto.
All right. You could understand that. An empire only goes as far as its enemies will let it. A hundred years ago, the Vilks had drawn the line.
Demaris smashed his flat, horny palm down on the coping of the terrace. The slap of sound startled some of the strolling couples in the formal gardens, but it would have been ungentle for them to stare at him. He knew of their curiosity only by the fact that no face, among all those couples, turned toward him even at random.
His lips twitched back from the points of his teeth.
And with the Vilks fifty years gone in a pyrrhic war with Farla, you could expect the ships of Earth to be going out again. You could expect that.
You could die of the eating hunger in your stomach, expecting it. You could grow old, with strings for muscles and pudding for a brain, expecting it.
You could run up a string of successful, pointless duels. You could go to graceful, inbred gatherings in the elegant, bandbox mansions. You could listen to Schubert quartets and a lot of Delius. But there was damned little Beethoven, and no Stravinsky. There was yearning, and no fulfillment. Nor much of a desire for it. It was considered more gentle to simply yearn.
A servant touched his arm. “Your pardon, Messire—a Mr. Brown is on the vid.”
Demaris fought to keep from spinning around violently. “Thank you,” he said in a voice that, incredibly, was calm enough. He strolled back into the mansion. Brown! Thank God! He’d been going mad, waiting.
“We spill our all for the Agency—
(Our lives are excitingly gory.)
Pink or blue—any hue—
Save the red of our birth—
At the beck of crisp, green glory.”
II
Brown was the code name. Kaempfert was the man. Blocky, with a square face and blunt fingertips, he was one of sixteen men who sat behind their crowded desks in the Agency’s sparsely furnished Assignment Room.
“How are you, Bill?” Demaris said, shaking his hand. “How’re Leni and the kids?”
“Fine, Thad. Getting healthier every day.” He looked down at his stomach and chuckled. “All of us. Sit down. You got here fast. Champing at the bit, Thad?”
Demaris nodded expressively. “I can’t take Earth anymore.” He grimaced distastefully. “Croquet, Mr. Demaris? Liqueur, Messire? Agh! Our society’s like a translucent china dish, overlaid with gilt filigree and wrapped in cotton batting. It’s beautiful, it’s elegant, and safe—but you don’t dare use it to eat from.”
Kaempfert smiled, his eyes sparkling briefly. Then he flicked a hand toward the files on his desk.
“O.K., then—let’s get you out where the red meat is. Briefly, here’s the job:
“Farla’s as good as gone. She may not know it, yet, but the only thing that’s saved her for the time being is Marak’s inability to move in without first slapping down Genis—and vice versa.
“So, Marak’s asked us for a man who’ll keep Genis off balance until Marak can move in on Farla and consolidate. That’s you. You’ll handle strategy, maybe do some on-the-spot generaling.”
Demaris nodded. “Sounds good.” He grinned fiercely. “Sounds damn good!”
Kaempfert handed him a file. “Here’s most of your poop. You get a full-scale briefing tomorrow at eight. That’s Ante Meridiem, son. You’re scheduled for Make-up and Indoctrination at eleven.”
Demaris whistled softly. “Shooting me out in a hurry, huh?”
Kaempfert nodded, his face grave. “It’s faster than I’d like. One day isn’t enough to set up an air-tight job. But it’s a hurry-up situation. We’ll just have to take our chances. If you think somebody’s spotted you, you’re hereby authorized to take the most logical preventive steps under the circumstances.”
Demaris nodded as though in echo to Kaempfert’s expression. The necessity was obvious, but nevertheless, the Agency didn’t often work that way.
Kaempfert broke the silence. “Well. That’s that. Where’re you staying tonight, Thad?”
Demaris shrugged. “Hotel of some kind, I guess. I got here straight from the airport. Still got my bags out in the front office.”
“Well, how about staying over with us?” Kaempfert stared down at his fingertips.
Demaris laughed. “I guess that’s one way of making sure I won’t get into a fight before morning. Sure, Bill. Be glad to, and thanks.”
Kaempfert looked up at him with the traces of guilt fading out of the corners of his eyes.
Demaris winked at him. “Where’d you get the idea I was the pugnacious type, Bill?”
Kaempfert grunted.
# # #
Demaris sprawled his bulk in an easy-chair, his feet thrust out atop a hassock. He felt free and relaxed for the first time in weeks. He’d eaten a quick meal, unconstrained by any necessity for making intricate small-talk. No, he had a lazy evening to look forward to; something he hadn’t had since the last time he’d known he was going out in the morning.
He whistled a snatch of “Heroes All” and chuckled softly.
Leni Kaempfert smiled fondly as she shut the nursery door behind her. “Adding a new verse, Thad?”
“Me? I never wrote that thing.”
Leni’s tongue bulged her cheek. “No?”
“Why, no.”
She shrugged agreeably. “O.K. But if Old Man Sullivan ever proves his suspicions, you’ll be in deep trouble.” She looked at Demaris with mock-solemnity. “The Agency is a serious business enterprise. Let us not go around making snide remarks.”
Demaris took a gulp of his drink. “To hell with Old Man Sullivan!”
“It’s his outfit, Thad,” Bill Kaempfert reminded him. “We just work there. He runs things the way he wants them.”
Demaris reached out spasmodically, as though unconsciously trying to seize hold of his fleeing peace. For an hour, he had forgotten the habitual tensity of his muscles. Now his jaw was hardening again.
“Yeah!” he spat out harshly. “He sits in an office somewhere, where nobody ever sees him, and he runs it. I just go out and bleed dollar bills for him.” Demaris coiled his body into a tense crouch on the chair’s edge.
“Now, come on,” Kaempfert said, “it’s not as bad as all that.”
Demaris lashed out savagely. “Isn’t it? If there were still a TSN—if there were even the faintest chance of working for Earth instead of messing up the stars for Sullivan’s profit—would you stick with the Agency? Would you be selling yourself on every street corner, no reasonable offer refused?” He could see he was embarrassing the Kaempferts, but what he was saying was true.
Bill Kaempfert grinned uncomfortably. “That’s a point, Thad,” he admitted. “But you don’t knock your bread and butter.”
Demaris thumped his empty glass down on the side table. “Would we starve?” he asked. “Would we really wind up begging in the streets? You especially; couldn’t you get a job as a personnel manager with any company you wanted?”
Kaempfert shrugged. “Maybe. If I could think up some explanation for not having any references. It’s been ten years since I’ve held a legal job.”
“O.K. So you’d have a little trouble. But not that much. Besides, we’re off the point.”
Kaempfert raised his eyebrows inquiringly. Demaris inhaled raggedly.
“Let’s face it, Bill—we’re bad enough off now, but we’d cut our throats if we gave it all up and tried to live in this teashop society. We just don’t fit. Our personal frontier doesn’t stop at Pluto.” He grimaced.
“Here we sit. Two prime representatives of a race that used to have guts to spare—that scared the universe half-silly the first time we pushed a rickety tin can to Sirius. And here we sit now—the backwash of the Wave of the Future!”
Kaempfert put up a restraining palm. “Easy, Thad. Most people would figure Pluto was plenty far enough. Most people don’t ever even leave Earth. And we may have scared the universe, but we sure didn’t impress the Vilks.”
Demaris brushed Kaempfert’s palm down as effectively as though there’d been a physical contact. “All right. So the barbarians licked us. That was when the TSN was fifteen ships and a handful of cranky torpedoes. Now the Vilks are gone for good. It was an Earthman that licked ’em, too.”
Kaempfert nodded. “Old Connie Jones.”
“Exactly! Connie Jones—an Agency man hired by Farla. So who got the territory an Earthman won? Who moved in where Earthmen should have been the conquerors? It would have been Farla, buying its military brains from an Agency run by Earthmen. It happened to work out that Farla bled itself to death. So who does move in? Who takes the territory that’s open by default? Does Earth have even that much ambition?
“No, it has to be rabble like the Maraks, or the Geneiids! A pack of jackals. And what does Earth government do about it? Earth government isn’t even interested. And what do individual Earthmen do—the ones who still care? Why,” Demaris suddenly simpered, “we work for Mr. Sullivan’s Agency, and we’d be only too happy to hire out to one of the jackals, wouldn’t we? We’re for sale; lock, stock, and barrel, soul, body, and birthright. We do the dirty work for every stinking little race in the galaxy, and meanwhile Earth government sits primly on its solar system and keeps its hoop-skirts dry.”
“Thad?”
“Yes, Leni?”
“Thad, what you’re angry at is that Bill and I don’t protest as much as you do. But we aren’t arguing. Bill thinks you’re right, and so do I. Still, there’s no way we can change Earth’s present attitude. And we’ve at least got this substitute.
“And tell me this, Thad—honestly, now, and no heroics—will you quit? Will you ever quit, and settle for a life here on Earth? Going from one duel to the next until nobody dares associate with you and you blow out your own brains for lack of some other man to fight?”
Demaris looked at her helplessly. “No,” he admitted.
“Though we are men, at the Agency,
We fight in peculiar skins.
Aptly taught, we’re not caught—
We’ve been thoroughly trained,
In the lore of exotical sins.”
III
The Agency building was dingy. Demaris and Kaempfert walked down the grimy hallway and up the splintered stairs to the second floor. They pushed through the chipped glass door labeled “Doncaster Industrial Linens” and were in the Agency’s front office.
Demaris still felt the irritating memories of last night’s adrenalin. He looked around and shook his head. “There’s no place like home sweet home—even if it’s a false beard.”
Kaempfert shrugged. “Our customers don’t know where the cash-and-carry heroes come from. Why should Earth government? Besides, I can just hear what the government would have to say about its nationals fighting alien battles and chancing all sorts of international complications if their origin is discovered.”
“Government could use a jolt,” Demaris growled.
“Your briefing room’s down the hall,” Kaempfert said. “You’re due there.”
Demaris nodded. “Uh-huh.” He put out his hand. “Bill—I’m sorry I’m such a pop-off. I didn’t really mean to give you a rough time last night. Be seeing you, huh?”
“Sure, Thad. Come home—nothing to forgive.”
They shook hands, tapped each other on the biceps, and separated. Demaris walked down the hall, and Kaempfert went through the front office to his desk.
# # #
He’d memorized his Marak file. Now he turned it in to the technician at the door of the briefing room, who tagged it with his code name and dropped it into a similarly labeled filing cabinet.
“Strip,” the technician said in a bored voice.
Demaris had already begun climbing out of his clothes. He handed the bundle to the technician, who tagged it and put it in a locker. “Stand still, please . . . no facial expression, if you please . . . hold it . . . thank you.” The front and sideview photographs were clipped to Demaris’ check card, and the card was handed to him. “Medical examination over in that corner, please.”
Demaris bobbed his head impatiently. The doctor, standing beside his equipment, was thin but not invisible.
He was given a complete physical, with results noted on his card, and returned to the technician, who wordlessly handed him a set of light coveralls, noted their issue on his card, returned the card, and then nodded him over to the desk where his briefing officer had been sitting all this time.
“Mr. Blue?” the briefing officer said as Demaris came over, addressing him by his code name. “My name’s Puce.” He smiled slightly. “Sit down, please. May I have your card, please? Thank you.”
Demaris handed the card over.
“You’ve studied your file?”
“Memorized it.”
“Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Blue. Just a routine question. You know how it is—mass production. We treat everybody the same way—old hand, newcomer, special recruit; whatever he may be. It’s not as informal as it might be, but—”
“I know.”
“Uh. Well. Now, Mr. Blue—if your rank were that of Tjetlyn in the Marakian Interstellar Air Fleet, and I were a Klowdil, which of us would salute first?”
“Neither of us. You’d be my inferior, so I’d pretend to ignore you. If I wanted anything from you, I’d say so. The salute, as such, is unknown on Marak.” Demaris gave the answer in a bored voice.
“Yes. Well—as a Tjetlyn, you might be invited to official functions at the homes of Chiefs of State. Would it be proper for you to drink three portions of drasos?”
“It would be mandatory—three and as many more as I could hold.”
“Good. Very good, Mr. Blue. Now, assuming that you were on leave and fell into the company of a perfectly respectable but not hostile young pavoja: What would be your course of action?”
“I’d pretend she was Eileen deFleur—up to the point at which my normal Marakian biological urges would, unfortunately, suffer frustration due to accidental circumstances over which no one could possibly prove I had any control.”
Mr. Puce chuckled. “Very good. Now, supposing—”
And so forth, through a veritable nightmare of possible pitfalls which might betray his un-Marakian nature. Demaris threaded his deliberate way through all the vicissitudes Mr. Puce could conjure up for him, and emerged unchallenged—and angry at the redundance of going through this college entrance examination when he knew that Indoctrination would supply him with the unconscious awareness of all these things, driving the knowledge not into his conscious information banks but into his reflexes.
Still and all, he could not deny that the Agency had remained undetected only because of this kind of thoroughness—and that in this case, especially, with no time for the usual three days’ checking to be sure, every possible precaution still might leave some chink unguarded.
“All right, Mr. Blue,” Puce was saying, “I think that about covers it. Now, if you’ll just sketch out a situation map on this board, I think that’ll be all—except for Make-up and Indoctrination, of course.”
Yes—except for that mere trifle. Demaris twitched his upper lip as he picked up Puce’s stylus and laid out the map.
Farla was a cluster of stars shaped like a badly pitted furnace clinker. Adjoining it on the side away from Earth—which he represented by a contemptuous, zero-shaped speck at the foot of the board—was Marak, with its stars grouped like a rat’s head, sniffing at the clinker. To Farla’s right, Genis and her stars were a twisted, mold-eaten orange peel. Working quickly, he sketched in the profile view, which included such scattered breadcrumbs as Ruga, Dilpo, and Stain, all inextricably jumbled in by the fact that stars, unfortunately for diagramatics, occupied three dimensions, were anything but stationary, and were governed by countless dozens of little pocket empires that had seized in any and all possible directions once the Vilk yolk was taken off them.
The pure white stars, he thought—the pure white stars live in a garbage heap.
He turned the board around and pushed it toward Puce, who nodded approval. “Yes, that’s fine. All right, that does it. Thank you, and good luck, Mr. Blue.”
Demaris grunted and stood up, taking his card. Of all the clerks at the Agency, Bill Kaempfert was the only one he could stomach, because Kaempfert was the only one who’d actually done any fighting. He almost turned around to club Puce as the man tried to prove something or the other about himself by loudly—and anything but absently—humming a chorus of “Heroes All.”
Then he shrugged and let it go. The fool was proving his adolescence by somehow making the rollicking tune acquire heroic chords.
Demaris walked into Make-up and Indoctrination to the accompaniment of his own misinterpreted music.
# # #
Make-Up peeled off his skin as neatly as a glove, and put it away for his return. Scalpels clicked against his bones. Weapons sent over a last-resort personal arm that the surgeons buried in his rib cage. Make-up delved into its resources and so disguised the weapon’s unavoidable metal that only the most careful comparative fluoroscopy would detect it.
And the Monster chugged on its dolly beside the operating tank, revamping his brain
When he emerged, at eleven o clock that night, he spoke English with difficulty. His tongue and vocal cords were not adapted to the language.
The Earthman—the dakta—nodded in satisfaction as Demaris sat up groggily.
“Nice control,” the dakta said to himself, noting the weak but sure movements of Demaris’ limbs. Demaris, who had to translate from English to Marakian before he could be sure of the dakta’s exact meaning, was only a bit slower in reaching the same conclusion. He tested the flexibility of his double-jointed fingers, and worked his double-opposed thumbs for a moment.
“Oh, they’ll work fine,” the dakta assured him. “ ’Fdoo seisomysell.”
Demaris groped for the meaning of the idiomatic phrase, which, like most such, had been tossed off casually. “Pardon,” he said. “Would you please speak more slowly?”
“I say—‘If I do say so myself.’ ”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Everything seems to be all right.”
“That’s quite an accent,” the dakta apologized, obviously not having caught Demaris’ statement.
Demaris strained for clarity. “I say—‘Everything seems O.K.’ ”
“Oh! Oh, yes, sure. We really piled it on—much more thorough than usual. A matter of costuming to lend reality to an actor who might not have learned his part too well.”
Demaris shook his head with annoyance at his own incomprehension. He sorted out the dakta’s syllables in his mind, trying to extract their meaning.
“Would you like me to repeat?” the dakta volunteered.
Demaris shook his head in disgust. There really was no point in this clumsy communication. The Monster had superimposed a Marakian personality where an Earthman had been, and there was not much that Earthmen and Marakians had to say to each other.
“Never mind,” he said, enunciating as clearly as possible.
“We do or die for the Agency—
As much of the first as we can—
Heroes who, mashed to glue,
Spent their saved-up back pay,
Are strange to the mem’ry of man.”
IV
The trip out to Marak in the Agency ship took about a week, T.S.T. In that time Demaris recuperated completely, until, by the time the ship ducked down on Marak’s nightside, he was at his physical peak. He grinned with delight at the steel-hard claws which sprang out from his fingertips at will. He paced his cabin relentlessly, a constant growl of satisfaction rumbling up his throat as he felt his supple tendons coiling and uncoiling in fluid motion.
Yet, the bitterness was still there. Paradoxically, it was sprung from the same source as his satisfaction. If Earthmen could take one of their own kind and turn him into a duplicate of any other bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical being—if they had learned that much, and mastered biology to such a point—why did Earthmen have to wear disguises at all? Why did Earth’s fighting men have to fight for every race but their own, and why was Earth itself so helpless?
No, not helpless—spineless.
Some day. Someday, maybe, things would be different.
The growl in Demaris’ alien throat became a caged cough of rancor.
# # #
The ship dropped him in a sparse area, flitting down and leaping back to the sky as soon as his contact turned up. Demaris watched it dwindle, and only after it was gone did he notice his contact’s hungry eyes following it.
“I haven’t been home in a long time,” the contact apologized in perfect Marakian. “I’ve got another three years to go here.”
Demaris grunted. “Believe me—six months and you’ll be begging to sign up for a new tour.”
“I suppose so,” the contact agreed. “I don’t guess it’s changed much?”
“Not the slightest.”
The contact expressed himself in listless oaths. “Well,” he said with a final profane twitch of his mouth, “let’s put the show on the road. I’ve got a car stashed out in some shrubbery down there.”
Demaris fell in behind him. Neither of them spared any particular attention to the thoroughly familiar countryside. They threaded their way through the broken thickets, automatically keeping clear of shrubs that would have left cockleburrs in their glossy fur.
# # #
The Marakian Overchief was growing old. His fur was beginning to lose its sheen, and his skin hung loosely around his neck. Nevertheless, his eyes were incisive and his voice was penetrating. He studied Demaris thoroughly for several moments before he said anything beyond a perfunctory greeting. Then he grunted with satisfaction.
“Good. You look as though you can handle things. I don’t know where Resvik dug you out, but that’s unimportant.”
The contact, standing beside Demaris, made a noncommittal gesture. “As I’ve said from the beginning, we’re not prepared to go deeply into Koil’s past activities. Some of them might be interpreted as having been extra-legal. But he’s thoroughly familiar with all the aspects of what’s expected of him, and he’s got the training required.”
The Overchief surveyed Demaris again, and shook his head in agreement. “He looks it. He ought to, for the price you’re asking.”
“It’s fair,” the contact said.
“Oh, yes—I’ll grant you that. Well—is there anything else, Resvik?”
“No, sir. I’ll get back to my duties. It’s been a pleasure, Overchief. Good luck, Koil.” He slipped out of the office, closing the door gently behind him.
The Overchief gestured toward a bench, and Demaris sat down, quietly watching the Overchief stalk back and forth behind his desk. The first actual contact with the head of an alien culture was usually the most ticklish part of one of these things. But, again as usual, it seemed to be going smoothly.
“Now—what’s your full name?” the Overchief asked.
“Call me Todren Koil,” Demaris answered.
The Overchief grinned thinly. “All right, we’ll call you that. What we want you to do is harry Genis. Within reason, you can do it your own way. I want their navy kept busy—too busy to deploy against our main push. If you do your job right, they shouldn’t even suspect we’re moving in on Farla until we’re well on our way. I have no expectation that you’ll be able to keep their fleet completely tied down after we make our move, but you should be able to hamper them somewhat. That’s all we need—an edge. Your job’s done the day we put a ship on Farla itself. By then we’ll have the old Farlan perimeter well enough defended so that anything they do won’t catch us with our fur wet. Clear?”
Demaris gestured affirmatively.
“I don’t suppose you’re wondering why we hired you?” the Overchief asked. “No. I can see that. Resvik’s undoubtedly informed you about the”—he coughed—“high quality of our military leadership. I don’t expect an affirmative comment from you,” he added, not without a strong trace of the bitterness he must have felt. Resorting to mercenaries after his own officer-training system has proved deficient is never pleasant for a military leader. “All right,” he said with a savage rumble, “what will you need offhand?”
“Some light, mobile stuff. Not much of it. A squadron of Pira Class boats ought to do it. I’ll do all my work through your intelligence agency. I’ll need liaison and authorization. We may have to supplement their demolitions and infiltration groups—I’ll see how their existing forces work out under my methods. I think I can get in a lot of damage before Genis even begins any full-scale retaliation. Give me about fifteen days to start the operation rolling. By then, I’ll know whether I need to ask for anything else.”
“Done.” The Overchief touched the switches of his desk communicator. “Send in Tjetlyn Faris,” he said.
Demaris felt the tension oozing away from him in direct proportion to his mounting excitement. He could feel himself settling into the old familiar state of pleasant anticipation. It might not be for Earth’s sake, but for Mammon’s. It might extend the Agency’s reputation, instead of Earth’s. It might be for cash on delivery—but it was action, nevertheless—action, and, in war, the only peace he could hope to have.
He looked up at Tjetlyn Faris with quicksilver burning through his veins.
Faris was a youngish Marakian of about his own age. He came in the door and stood waiting for the Overchief to speak.
“Sath, this is Tjetlyned Todren Koil,” the Overchief said, indicating Demaris. “Todren, Faris Sath. He’s your liaison and Second in Command. He’ll take you down to our intelligence offices and introduce you to the existing routine. Your authorization will be there ahead of you. From here on, it’s your operation to work out between you.”
Demaris acknowledged Sath’s presence with a shake of his head. The Overchief had made him the Tjetlyn’s superior by one grade, but Demaris had no illusions about that. No Agency man ever worked without his employer’s setting a watchdog over him.
Deep within the Marakian interior, the Earthman smiled. That didn’t always work out the way it was meant to. Old Connie Jones, for instance, working with Farla’s paranoid culture, had so maneuvered his personal watchdog assassin that, in the end, the assassin had seen the expediency not only of not killing Jones but of taking the victorious fleet back to Farla and staging a revolution.
Quis custodiet—But that wouldn’t work here, nor was it necessary. Marak was not Farla, though the two races were descended from the same ancestor. There was no danger here of an attempt to kill the mercenary once he’d done his work.
Demaris wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have welcomed that added fillip.
“At your orders, Tjetlyned,” Sath said. Demaris shot a look past him at the Overchief and saw that he was pointedly ignoring both of them.
Ugh. He’d been daydreaming at the wrong time. He nodded quickly to Sath, and they slipped out the door together.
“Ah, we are the Agency’s offspring,
The brood of a sinful old maid.
There isn’t one chance that she’d sell us out—
Unless things were such that it paid.”
(alternate chorus)
V
Three months later, Sath laid a fresh set of reports on Demaris’ desk. “Here we are, Koil. Top sheet’s the summary.” He dropped down on the bench beside the desk and wearily dug a flask out of his belt. “Have some?” he offered, holding up the flask.
Demaris twitched an ear negatively, and took his own brand out of a drawer. “Can’t stand that gunk you use.” He tilted the flask and touched his tongue to the mild stimulant. Recapping the flask, he yawned broadly. He looked at the report in disgust.
“Same thing?”
Sath nodded. “Yep. In the past fifteen days, our demolitions teams have immobilized such-and-such a tonnage of Geneiid naval vessels. Our infiltrators have immobilized this-and-that additional tonnage by misrouting supplies, disrupting communications, altering fleet orders, et cetera. We can truthfully report that our organization has been doing an excellent job, and that we are performing far above the expectations set down by Staff.”
Demaris grimaced. “And how far behind schedule is the push against Farla?”
Sath coughed. “Well, if you plotted the curve of Staff’s failure against our curve of success, they’d be almost superimposed.”
Demaris shook his head. “Still the same trouble?”
“Yep. Seems like Genis has just as good an intelligence service as we do. Tit for tat, right down the line.”
Demaris clicked his fingertips against the surface of his desk. The situation stank. For every boat that shipped a team of saboteurs into Genis, a Geneiid boat dropped its cargo down on Marak’s planets. Like two giants stabbing pins through each other’s ganglia, Marak and Genis were immobilizing each other.
War in space—war in terms of planetary englobements, massive landings, and blockades—was impossible. The problem of supply and reinforcement became insurmountable over interstellar distances. As the attacker’s supply lines lengthened, the defender’s shortened, until eventually the attrition on the attacker became too great. You could only stage a mass attack on a hopelessly weak foe—such as Farla. Otherwise, it was your infiltrators and demolitions men, crippling your enemy at home, who first had to weaken him. And if your sabotage was balanced by equally effective enemy action, then both of you slowly bled away, matching each other corpuscle for corpuscle, neither ever gaining a relative upper hand.
Demaris wondered how long this could keep up. Agency men weren’t supermen. Man for man, there was no reason why they should be any better than their opposite numbers. The Agency’s selling point was the right man in the right place, at the right time.
Well, so far he was holding his own. But how much longer would the Overchief be satisfied with that?
Demaris grinned to himself, at himself. Face it. What galled him most was his inability to beat his Geneiid adversary. The Agency and its considerations were secondary.
“So, anyway—” Sath was saying, “I just got a call from the Overchief. He wants to see us.”
Demaris inhaled slowly.
# # #
The Overchief was showing the strain. Farla should have been penetrated and taken by now. Instead, the Marakian fleet lay hamstrung in its berths. That the Geneiids were racked by the same frustration was of little comfort to him.
He waved them to benches with a nervous gesture of his arm. Demaris sat down carefully. For the first time since he’d landed on Marak, he became consciously aware of the weapon buried in his chest. Cautiously, he put a slight bit of pressure on his shoulder muscles, and held his breath. He felt the weapon’s barrels slip forward. Then he relaxed. No. If this was a showdown, here, he had no right to fight for his life. The manner of an Overchief’s death would be too carefully investigated. If he were caught now, in these circumstances, the weapon’s other characteristic was his own only escape. He’d have to detonate its charge.
He realized his mind was making mountains out of molehills, and fought down his apprehension. The Overchief might find fault with Todren Koil, and Todren Koil would react accordingly. But the Overchief had no possible reason to think that Todren Koil had ever been a weak, pink-skinned monster whose only real weapon against the universe was the intricacy of his mind.
The Overchief looked up from his desk. “Glad to see you, Todren, Faris. You’re not here for reprimand.”
Demaris heard Sath’s breathing deepen beside him. His own diaphragm relaxed.
“If it wasn’t for you,” the Overchief went on, “we’d be in much worse trouble.” He got up and began to stalk back and forth. “Genis, as we’ve found out, just happened to produce a good intelligence man of its own. We didn’t expect it—we had no reason to. They’re generally no luckier with their officers than we are.” He slapped a thigh with an irritated hand. “We’ve got to remove that officer, or those officers, though the latter possibility gives Geneiid luck altogether too much credit. I want you two to lay out an operation that will accomplish the purpose. I shouldn’t even have to say that any resource, short of a fleet action, is yours to call on. All right, I want a summary of your ideas by tomorrow. Faris, I’ll speak further to Tjetlyned Todren alone.”
Sath inclined his head affirmatively, rose, and slipped out. Demaris looked inquiringly at the Overchief, who was standing with his back to him.
The Overchief turned around. “Todren,” he said softly, “this Geneiid intelligence officer—he seems to have popped up out of the ground. We have no dossier on him. Might he be some relative of yours?”
Demaris had been expecting the question for a full minute. He looked steadily at the Overchief. “I have no relatives.”
The Overchief stared back, his eyes equally unwavering. Finally, he said: “Well, that is as it may be. I suggest that you devote all possible effort to clearing up the situation.”
“Yes, sir.”
He slipped out of the Overchief’s room and joined Sath. They walked down the hall together.
Just how far, he was wondering, did Old Man Sullivan go in his pursuit of a dollar?
“We fight for the Agency’s money—
We draw out our pay with a smile.
For our gold, we’ve been told,
We should barter ourselves
In truly professional style.”
VI
It did not take a fleet action. Not quite. It took a combined operation of all infiltrators and demolitions teams on Genis itself, and the services of a fast cruiser.
The infiltrators pin-pointed the Geneiid intelligence director and cut him off from communication with possible help. The demolitions men blew their way into his headquarters. A Pira boat shuttled him up to the cruiser, and the cruiser, ultimately, delivered him to Demaris. The maneuver completely disrupted the normal schedule of activities against Genis, but Demaris, looking across the room at the captured Geneiid, calculated that it was cheap at the price.
“Well, there he is,” Sath commented.
“So he is,” Demaris agreed, looking dispassionately at the drugged Geneiid. For the life of him, he could see no trace of Make-up’s scalpels on that leathery hide—but then, where were his own scars?
“What now?” Sath asked.
“I’d suggest we put our program back into shape as quickly as possible—and make sure Genis doesn’t try to pull on us what we did to them.”
“I’ve already set up defenses against that kind of stunt. You’re right—I’ll get us straightened out while you handle this beastie.” Sath went over to his own desk and got to work. Half the organization had been lost or compromised in the kidnapping. He had to reassemble and reinforce what was left. But it was downhill work, now. Marak had her edge.
Demaris jerked his head at the medical technicians. One of them jammed a hypodermic through the Geneiid’s skin and shot in a neutralizer. Demaris stood idly by, whistling between his teeth.
It was a touch-and-go business. He’d tried to put himself in the Geneiid’s place, and he’d decided that if he were suddenly kidnapped, he wouldn’t use his Agency weapon, until it became completely obvious that there was no other resort.
So far, so good. The Geneiid—he was a Geneiid—was still alive, and he’d been taken with no more trouble than you’d expect. But the man might revive in a panic.
He whistled a bit more loudly.
“Oh, we are the Agency’s bravos—
We peddle the wealth of one skill—”
The Geneiid’s eyelids fluttered upward. It seemed to Demaris that the man looked at him with an intensity peculiar for even these circumstances.
“Ah, we are the Agency’s offspring,
the brood of a sinful old maid—
The Geneiid sat up and stared malevolently at Demaris. “How did this happen?” he asked in passable Marakian. The technicians giggled; Sath, looking up from his desk, grinned coldly. Demaris smiled without humor.
“. . . Unless things were such that paid.”
The Geneiid looked around the office in dawning comprehension that meant one thing to everyone else and something quite different to Demaris. “I see—” he said slowly. “What now?”
Demaris reflected that there was the best question he’d heard in a long time. He wondered if the other man thought Demaris was in on a deliberate double-cross. If he did, almost anything might happen. He had no idea how he’d react in similar circumstances.
“I fear, my friend,” Demaris said in passable Geneiian, “that the Fates, which might just as easily have conspired against me, have seen fit to trip you up, instead.” It wasn’t a bad start. From an observer’s point of view it was the kind of dialogue you might expect from two opposed professional men in the apparent circumstances.
Well, it was, Lord knew—it was. No matter what your concept of the circumstances might be.
The Geneiid looked at the floor in glum anger. Demaris could understand that. It was only by the grace of making the first move that he himself was not sitting in a Geneiian office somewhere, slowly digesting the fact that he was one of two ends being played against Old Man Sullivan’s middle.
“All right,” Demaris said. He turned to Sath. “Think there’s anything we need to know from him right now?”
Sath shook his head negatively. “Not immediately. I suggest we save him for later. We’ve got lots of work to do.”
Demaris gestured to a couple of armed guards. “Put him away where he’ll keep.” He looked the Geneiid in the eyes. “I’ll be talking to you later.”
The man lifted his eyes off the floor, agreeing wordlessly. Rising, he went with his guards.
Demaris plunged into the work of shaping the battered organization for the final, crippling blow. He entertained no thoughts of not completing his job. Mr. Sullivan would not be handed the weapon of a broken contract to wield when Demaris returned to New York and his revenge.
# # #
Only gods and television audiences see the pattern of human events. What he did in his office touched on the histories of four races, but, for Demaris, the movement of men and armed forces translated itself into the shifting of reports from IN to HOLD to OUT, and the roar of rockets became the rattle and ping of bookkeeping machines.
For two days, he and Sath reassigned, regrouped, deployed, redeployed, canceled, substituted, implemented, and supplied. Only the gameslike transposition of figures from one table of organization to another furnished its own synthetic excitement.
Demaris wondered, in a few brief snatches of stolen relaxation, whether he hated Mr. Sullivan most for double-crossing him or for placing him in a position where the outcome of the battle became a foregone conclusion, now that his personal opponent was prematurely taken. From a strategist, he had descended to a clerk. It was war, but it was not magnificent.
Well, at least it was over at the end of the second day. Between them, he and Sath had shaped Marak’s intelligence service into the means for completely hamstringing Genis, now that her own expert was gone.
Certainly, her own expert. As much as Demaris was Marak’s own.
He felt his mouth curl sardonically.
Sath dropped the last order into his OUT box, pushed his bench away from his desk, and stretched. Demaris rubbed a hand across his tired eyes.
“It’s done,” Sath said with relieved finality. “All over.”
Demaris growled agreement with his Second’s mood. Blinking, he peered around at the office. Half the subordinate staff was asleep on cots pushed into dimmer corners. The other shift half-slumped over its desks. No one had left the office since the Geneiid’s capture. Given enough breathing space, Genis might have been able to throw out a desperate taskforce to intercept the Marakian fleet, which had set out for Farla the moment the Geneiian saboteurs lost direction and purpose.
“Call up the Overchief and let him know, will you?” Demaris said to Sath. He felt washed out. The job was done, and soon he’d be back on Earth.
And this time, after he got through with Mr. Sullivan—provided he could dig him out of this sanctum—there might not even be any more Agency jobs.
Hunting? Police work of some kind? Demaris didn’t know. Uselessness was a bitter strain in his throat.
Sath put his phone back on his desk and looked puzzledly at Demaris. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “I told the Overchief we were set. He just mumbled perfunctory thanks. Then he said it wasn’t our fault, but we weren’t going into Farla. He wants to see us.”
Demaris sucked in his lower lip and scowled. Possibly he was becoming a monomaniac, but he nevertheless wondered what Old Man Sullivan had done now.
# # #
“There’s something that’s cute in the Agency—
Some sweet little winning appeal.
For its dough it will go
Through your pockets at night,
And what’s not glued in it will steal.”
VII
The Overchief sat behind his desk, half-facing the boarded-up window shattered in night-before-last’s abortive Geneiid attempt to get their man back.
He moved his hands in an unsettled gesture. “I don’t understand how they knew,” he repeated, and dropped his hands into his lap.
Demaris, mystified, stared across the room at Resvik, the contact, who had been there when he and Sath came in. Beside him, Sath was also frowning, trying to make sense out of the situation. Resvik was impassive.
The Overchief seemed not to realize that Demaris and Sath had no idea of what he meant. He rambled on.
“Almost exactly to the moment. As soon as we and Genis became preoccupied with each other.”
Sath cleared his throat and ventured the question. “Sir—I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’m a bit fagged out. May I ask you to repeat what’s happened?”
The Overchief turned toward Sath. His gaze was weak and unsteady. He squinted across the room. “What? Oh, Sath—Yes. It’s Stain. I just got word. Their ships have been in Farla for the past month.” He gestured again, his palms slapping down on his thighs. “There is no more Farla.”
Demaris felt his facial muscles twitch in an uncontrollable surprise reaction. Then he became expressionless. Beside him, Sath was breathing erratically.
Demaris looked at Resvik with careful deliberation. They were both in immediate, pressing danger. The Overchief’s previous line of speculation about him had been very close to truth. But the contact seemed unconcerned.
“They moved in against almost no opposition,” the Overchief was continuing. “What they did meet was hopelessly indecisive, unorganized, and lacked any initiative whatsoever. They moved in rapidly, set up bases, and are now completely consolidated. It would take years to undermine them to the point where we could hope to engage them successfully.”
Sath had obviously gotten well past his initial shock, and his mind had been working rapidly. “Well, sir, that is a setback, of course. But we have an efficient and well-directed staff, apportioning credit to Tjetlyned Todren, who deserves it. It seems to me that the immediate institution of a vigorous program would—”
The Overchief cut him off with a muddy waving of his hand. “No, no, I appreciate your enthusiasm, Tjetlyn Faris, but this is a defeat . . . a defeat—” he repeated in a barely audible mutter. “We have been bested—”
“But, sir—”
Oddly enough, the Overchief displayed no surprise or anger at Sath’s repeated overreachings of privilege. He merely shook his head hopelessly, and Sath must have realized there was no purpose in pressing the point. He shot Demaris a baffled look, but found no help there.
Resvik addressed himself to the Overchief. “Sir, if you’ll find the time to conclude that business we spoke of—”
The Overchief started at the sound of his voice. Obviously, he’d completely forgotten the man was there. He stared bewilderedly at Resvik for a moment before he collected himself.
“Yes, yes, of course—Tjetlyn Faris, I’ll speak further to Groil Resvik and Tjetlyned Todren.”
“Yes, sir.” Plainly baffled and shocked at the Overchief’s irresolution, Sath slipped out after one more fruitless look at Demaris.
Demaris continued not to speak mainly because he had no idea of what to say. The Overchief had become incomprehensible, and Resvik’s position was totally unclear to him. The fact that this was the working of still another scheme of Old Man Sullivan’s no longer struck him with much novelty. He wondered, briefly if he would ever discover just exactly where and how far all of the Agency’s tentacles extended.
Resvik stood up and came over to him. “Well,” he said, “that’s that. We’re wound up here. I’ve got the pickup ship coming tonight. You and I and Holtz—”
“Walker Holtz?”
“Sure, the Geneiid.” The contact grinned cynically. “We can’t leave him here for that Faris hot-shot to question, can we? It’s a shame he got out of here so fast,” he mused.
Demaris rolled his eyes frantically toward the Over-chief. Had the contact gone out of his head?
Resvik followed the direction of the glance and sniffed contemptuously. “Him!” He flexed the muscles of his forearm and the nose of a hypodermic pistol slipped out between his fingers. “Four micro-cc’s of lobotomol, right into the forebrain. What’s he going to pay attention to?”
Demaris stared at the contact. Almost unconsciously, he reached out and eased Resvik’s forearm aside until he was out of the line of fire.
VIII
Holtz laughed pleasantly as the three of them sat in the pickup ship’s lounge. The sound came out of his Geneiian throat with very little of its Terrestrial urbanity.
“I’d say it was quite admirable of Old Man Sullivan,” he commented in his barbarous accent. He laughed again. “Picture the complexity—the intricacy of the organization. Mr. Black is planted on the capital planet of an empire—” Holtz’s bow toward Resvik, attempted with a Geneiian spinal column, was grotesque. “He is assimilated into the imperial government, probably with the aid of that ingenious instrument in his hand, and thereafter devotes himself to the groundwork of systematically lobotomizing such key figures as display any inordinate talent. When a crisis arrives—as, with Old Man Sullivan’s ubiquitous help, it inevitably must—Mr. Black offers to supply the talent so unfortunately lacking in the native personnel. Then you, Mr. Demaris, and I, perform our duties—and Old Man Sullivan grows richer, and richer, and richer. Fabulous! And what a sublime disregard for human decency!”
Resvik was watching them impassively. Since the three of them had come aboard the ship, five T.S.T. days ago, he had talked only when spoken to. Most of the conversation had been between Holtz, whose attitude was manifest, and Demaris, who had gleaned as much as he could and was now becoming impatient and irritated as Holtz’s personality wore thin.
“But can you picture it, man!” Holtz demanded. “The intricacy of the enterprise—the beautifully working plan, endlessly repeated with every race that an Earthman can possibly be made to resemble! I need hardly point out that this means practically every race with which terrestrial minds can communicate at all! Beautiful! Beautiful! And if not for your commendable enterprise, Mr. Demaris, neither of us would ever have been in a position to realize it. Why, not even Mr. Black, here, is anything but another cog in this lovely machine—”
Resvik—Mr. Black, if you preferred the other nom de guerre—stood over Holtz. “I think that’s about enough,” he said flatly. He looked from Holtz to Demaris and back again, spreading his contempt between them. “What are you, anyway?” he said at Holtz. “A misfit hunter, trying to find a new kind of quarry to kill. And you”—he turned to Demaris—“a thug, half a cut below an assassin. You stink with neuroses, both of you. You’re misfits. There isn’t room for you on Earth. Where else would you go, if there was no Agency?”
“Funny,” Demaris said, looking up at him evenly. “Here I am, a thug. When I’m not dressed up for one of these things, I look like a killer. I act like one. And the charming Mr. Holtz is the prototype of all gentleman pickers-off of lowlier life. But you, my friend—I’ll bet you don’t in the least really resemble Machiavelli.”
Resvik sat down suddenly, hate brooding out of his eyes at Demaris.
Demaris smiled as well as his Marakian jaws would let him. “I’d add a nice word about the efficiency of Old Man Sullivan’s recruitment teams, if I were you,” he said to Holtz.
# # #
His hide itched. He scratched fiercely and uselessly at his forearms, then steeled himself by an effort of will and kept his hands motionless. He was having trouble with his vision, too—he’d become accustomed to a slight turn of the head for direct seeing.
“Why do you want to see Old Man Sullivan?” Bill Kaempfert asked.
Demaris set his jaw stubbornly. “I think you’ve got a pretty fair idea.”
Kaempfert began a gesture, exhaled in frustration, and thumped his hands on the edge of his desk. “What am I going to do with you?” he asked, more to himself than to Demaris. He looked exasperatedly at his friend. “Look—do you want me to go to Old Man Sullivan and tell him one of his employees disapproves of his business methods, and would like an hour’s time to tell him so?”
“I disapprove of being put in an unnecessarily dangerous position!” Demaris corrected him. “Suppose Genis had decided to pick off the opposition first? That ninny, Holtz, would never have issued instructions to kidnap, instead of kill. What am I—a tin soldier for Sullivan to move about as he pleases?”
“Have you read your contract lately?”
Demaris looked across the desk. “So that’s the policy, is it?”
Kaempfert did not drop his eyes. “The policy is to execute each operation with no avoidable casualties to Agency personnel. This was a toughie. You were warned of that from the beginning. One of these three-way switches is always precarious.”
“Precarious? Is that the word?” Demaris looked around at the other supervisors in the room, leaned forward, and lowered his voice. “Bill, I’ve already decided you couldn’t refuse to ship me out into that squeeze-play. That’s understandable. What it does to our friendship, neither of us can say as yet. Nothing, I hope. But that’s beside the point. Look—this has been nagging at me. You know, and I know, that the Agency started a long time ago. We know it was somehow illegal in nature then, though nobody knows precisely how. We both know what Earth’s government’s like. But, look—is there a chance, any chance, no matter how slim, that it’s gradually drifted over and become a secret government arm? I could understand this sort of thing, then.”
Kaempfert looked at him silently for a minute. His eyes were weighing something, and at the same time they were aware of all the things Demaris had said, that night before he was shipped out. Then he shook his head slowly. “No. No chance at all.”
Demaris sighed and sat back in his chair for a moment. Then the anger returned to his face. “Well, then—”
“Thad,” Kaempfert said, “I want to show you something.” He got up from his desk. “Come on.” He squeezed between his desk and the next, and walked out into the front office with Demaris following him. He fumbled in his pocket and took out a key ring.
Demaris watching him, frowning, as he unlocked a door.
“Come on in,” Kaempfert said. Demaris walked through the door. They were in an empty closet. Kaempfert selected a new key, moved a section of molding, and unlocked the concealed door at the back of the closet.
Demaris stepped through the door. He was in a small, bare office. There was no window. Kaempfert turned on the light.
The office was stale and musty. Dust lay thick and furry on the desk, the chair behind it, and the floor.
Demaris spent a minute looking at it. Then he turned to Kaempfert. “So. There is no Old Man Sullivan.”
Kaempfert shook his head. “Not any more—not for fifteen years. That’s when I quit being an operative. I’m the guy you mean when you talk about Sullivan.”
“I don’t get it—”
“Sullivan was everything you’ve called him,” Kaempfert interrupted. “And the Agency never was, and is not now, constituted to be anything but a private, money-making enterprise. I run it.”
Demaris shook his head and looked at Kaempfert without a trace of recognition. He began to speak, but Kaempfert cut him off again.
“You’ll get your chance. Now you tell me what the Agency does.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“The Agency,” Kaempfert explained patiently, “supplies Earthmen to do the military planning for all those races which can be reached by us. Right?”
“Yes—”
“What’s our military record?”
“Perfect.”
Kaempfert smiled wanly. “Not quite. But close enough. All right, next question: What has the Agency done for you?”
“Given me a job.”
“All right, it’s given you a job. It’s also provided an outlet for all the drives and irascibilities that make life on Earth a chancy proposition for you. You’re antisocial. You don’t fit. The Agency puts you where you do fit.”
“Sure. I’ve admitted that. But—”
“You’re one of hundreds. We located you—which isn’t hard, considering that all you misfits, myself included, kick up such a row. We trained you, we put you in the best kind of Agency jobs for your personality, and we shipped you out. Right?”
“Admitted. But that doesn’t give you the right to make our lives more dangerous than necessary!”
“I could argue about necessities, but I won’t. I gather that what you want is a private hunting preserve.”
“No! Look, I’m no killer. If I can change something with my brain instead of my gun, I damn well will!”
“O.K. Then mull this over in your brain: With our ‘perfect’ military record, and with Sullivan’s efficient system, which I don’t dare monkey with—how much have the other races in the universe progressed?”
“Plenty! Stain’s a major power, just because of you.”
“Oh, yeah? And next year, is it still going to be?
What about Farla, that inherited the Vilk Empire? Charging back and forth isn’t progress. Small but steady forward motion is. You don’t fight wars in space—not big, slam-bang fleet actions, you don’t. But you do infiltrate, and you do sabotage. And next year, the guy you skunked sabotages you. How far do you get, working that way?
“Thad, you’ve been griping about Earth government not moving out of the Solar System. Even if their motives are bad, they’re right, in a way.
“Except that you, and I, and hundreds of others can’t take it. So we’re all in the Agency, with new ones joining up every day. And now you tell me—what do you call an outfit that pushes forward when the government wants to stay home? What do you call an organization that operates beyond the accepted frontier, that has its force of fighting men, its politicians, and its board of directors? What do you call an organization set up to penetrate foreign territory, to indulge in extranational politics, to support its employees? Well you might call it The British East India Company, or the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company, or Mr. Sullivan’s Agency. But I call it a private government. And I say this is the one kind of government that’s set up to clear the road for the day Earth—all of Earth, under its own government—steps out into the stars again.”
Demaris had been trying to interrupt at Kaempfert’s every pause for breath. Now he realized that he was out of breath himself—and that he suddenly had no real points to argue. The Agency was a business. It ran for profit, and the system was designed for profit only.
He looked around the office again. With a little cleaning up, it wouldn’t be half-bad—
No. The head of an outfit like this was too used to, and too much in need of, protective coloration.
“Well,” he said. “Well, Bill, let’s lock it up and see if we can find me some desk space out in Assignments.”
“So, we are the Agency’s boy scouts—
We do our good deeds every day.
Remember our names to our kids, my boys,
When we have drifted away.
And teach ’em that crime doesn’t pay, my boys,
Except every thirtieth day, my boys,
And hold out for raises in pay.”