From somewhere, far off in the dusk of this world of near night, there was a trampling of feet, many feet. Battle drew himself on the alert, snapped out miniature revolvers, one in each hand. He thought briskly that these elephant-pistols had been, half an hour ago, the most dangerous handguns on Earth, whereas here—well?
The trampling of feet attached itself to the legs of a centipede, a very small centipede that was only about two hundred times the length of the Lieutenant.
Its sharp eyes sighted him, and rashly the creature headed his way.
The flat crash of his guns echoing strangely in the unorthodox construction of this world, Battle stood his ground, streaming smoke from both pistols. The centipede kept on going.
He drew a smoke-bomb and hurled it delicately into the creature's face.
The insect reared up and thrashed for a full second before dying. As Battle went a long way around it, it switched its tail, nearly crushing the diminished soldier of fortune.
After the equivalent of two miles' walk he saw before him a light that was not the GE's, filtering down from the smoking room of the Billionaire's Club, but a bright, chemical flare of illumination.
"It's them," breathed the Lieutenant. "In person!" He crouched behind a towering wood-shaving and inspected the weird scene. It was a city that spread out before him, but a city the like of which man's eyes had never before seen.
A good, swift kick would have sent most of it crashing to the ground, but to the tiny Lieutenant it was impressive and somehow beautiful. It was built mostly of wood-splinters quarried from the two-by-fours which braced the sofa; the base of the city was more of the same, masticated into a sort of papier-mache platform.
As the soldier of fortune looked down on it from the dizzy height of two feet, he felt his arms being very firmly seized.
"What do we do about this?" demanded a voice, thin and querulous. "I never saw one this size."
"Take him to the Central Committee, stupid," snapped another. Battle felt his guns being hoisted from their holsters and snickered quietly.
They didn't know—
Yes they did. A blindfold was whipped about his eyes and his pockets and person were given a thorough going-over. They even took the fulminate of mercury that he kept behind his molars.
"Now what?" asked the first voice. Battle could picture its owner gingerly handling the arsenal that he habitually carried with him.
"Now," said the second voice, "now freedom slowly broadens down."
Clunk! Battle felt something—with his last fighting vestige of consciousness he realized that it was one of his own gun-butts—contact his head, then went down for the count.
THE NEXT THING he knew a dulcet voice was cooing at him. The Lieutenant had never heard a dulcet voice before, he decided. There had been, during his hitch with the Foreign Legion, one Messoua whose voice he now immediately classified as a sort of hoarse cackle. The blonde Hedvig, Norwegian spy he had encountered in service with Los Invincibles de Bolivia had seemed at the time capable of a dulcet coo; Battle reallocated the Norse girl's tones as somewhere between a rasp and a metallic gurgle.
The voice cooed at him: "Get up, stupid. You're conscious."
He opened his eyes and looked for the voice as he struggled to his feet.
As he found the source of the coo he fell right flat on his back again. J.
C. Battle, soldier-of-fortune extraordinary, highest-priced insurrectionaire in the world, had seen many women in the course of his life. Many women had looked on him and found him good, and he had followed the lead with persistence and ingenuity. His rep as a Lothario stretched over most of the Earth's surface. Yet never, he swore fervently to himself, never had he seen anything to match this little one with the unfriendly stare.
She was somewhat shorter than the Lieutenant and her coloring was the palest, most delicate shade of apple-green imaginable. Her eyes were emerald and her hair was a glorious lushness like the hue of a high-priced golf-club's prize putting-green on a Summer morning. And she was staring at him angrily, tapping one tiny foot.
"Excuse me, madame," said Battle as he rose with a new self-possession in his bearing. He noted that she was wearing what seemed to be a neat little paper frock of shell pink. "Excuse me—I had no notion that it was a lady whom I was keeping waiting."
"Indeed," said the lady coldly. "We'll dispense with introductions, whoever you are. Just tell your story. Are you a renegade?" She frowned.
"No, you couldn't be that. Begin talking."
Battle bowed. "My card," he said, tendering it. "I presume you to be in a position of authority over the—?" He looked around and saw that he was in a room of wood, quite unfurnished.
"Oh, sit down if you wish," snapped the woman. She folded herself up on the floor and scrutinized the card.
"What I am doesn't concern you," she said broodingly. "But since you seem to know something about our plans, know that I am the supreme commander of the—"
She made a curious, clicking noise. "That's the name of my people. You can call us the Invaders."
"I shall," began Battle. "To begin at the beginning, it is known that your—Invaders—plan to take over this world of ours. I congratulate you on your location of your people in a mohair sofa; it is the most ingenious place of concealment imaginable. However, so that the sofa will not be fumigated, you must perform operations at long-range—
posthypnotic suggestion—I imagine—on the minds of the servants at the Billionaire's Club. Can you explain to me why you cannot perform these operations on the club-members themselves?"
"Very simple," said the woman sternly, with the ghost of a smile. "Since all the billionaire members are self-made men they insist that even the lowest bus-boy have advanced college degrees and be Phi Beta Kappas.
This betokens a certain type of academic mind which is very easy to hypnotize. But even if we worked in twenty-four hour relays on "Old Jay" we couldn't put a dent in him. The psychic insensitivity of a billionaire is staggering.
"And,' she added, looking at Battle through narrowed eyes, "there was one member who noticed that the bus-boys never fumigated the sofa.
We tried to work on him while he slept, but he fought us back. He even subconsciously acquired knowledge of our plans. Thought he'd dreamed it and forgot most of the details."
Battle sighed. "You're right," he admitted. "Cromleigh was his name, and he tipped me off. Where are you Invaders from?"
"None of your business," she tartly retorted. "And where, precisely, do you come from?"
"This Cromleigh," said Battle, "was—and is—no fool. He went to a psychologist friend and had his mind probed. The result was a complete outline of your civilization and plans—including that ingenious device of yours, the minimifyer. He had one built in his lab and paid me very highly to go into it. Then I was dropped by him personally into this sofa with a pair of tweezers."
"How much does he know?" snapped the woman.
"Not much. Only what one of your more feeble-minded citizens let him know. He doesn't know the final invasion plans and he doesn't know the time-schedule—if there is any as yet."
"There isn't," she said with furrowed brow. "And if there were, you imbecile monsters would never learn it from us." Suddenly she blazed at him: "Why must you die the hard way? Why don't you make room for the super-race while you have the chance? But no! We'd never be able to live in peace with you—you—cretins!"
Then her lip trembled. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't mean to be harsh—
but there are so few of us and so many of you—" The dam broke, and the little lady dissolved in a flood of tears.
Battle leaped into the breech like a veteran He scored 99.9807 on the firing range consistently and that was pretty good, but when it came to comforting weeping female soldiers-of-fortune Battle really shone.
SOME MINUTES LATER they were chummily propped up against the wall of the wooden room. Her weeps over, the little lady—who had identified herself as Miss Aktying click! Byam—began: