“Any trouble?”
“No, it was easy,” she told him. “I pulled him in with the Cleveland-contest-three-years-ago routine. He was smooth about it, I’ll say that for him: pretended not to be interested, you know, but he must have bitten hard. I found that out a few seconds later when I told him I loved him and he asked me right off to come up to his apartment.” She chuckled. “The poor, pathetic incompetent! As if any normal American human male would react like that—without so much as a remark about my beautiful eyes and how cute I am and how different I am and how about another drink, baby.”
The Huguenot pulled at his lip dubiously. “And yet the uniform-disguise is a fine one,” he pointed out. “That shows a high degree of competence.”
“So what?” the woman shrugged. “He can design a good uniform, he can think up a splendid disguise, but what good is that if he’s slip-shod about his performance? This one’s barely learned anything about human methods and human manners. Even if I hadn’t known about him before, I’d have spotted him on the basis of his love-making in the cab.”
“Bad, eh?”
“Bad!” She rolled her eyes for maximum emphasis, “Oh, brother! I pity him if he ever pulled that clumsy counterfeit on a real human female. Bad isn’t the word. A cheap fake. A second-rate ad-lib, but from hunger. No conviction, no feeling of reality, nothing!”
Alfred glared at her through the wide-open wounds of his ego. There were holes in her performance, he thought savagely, that would have closed any show the first night. But he decided against giving this critical appraisal aloud. After all, she had the weapon—and he had no idea how ugly a mess that little red cylinder might make.
“All right,” said the Huguenot, “let’s put him in with the other one.”
As the red cylinder prodded into his backbone, Alfred marched up the main basement corridor, turned right at their command, turned right again, and halted before a blank wall. The Huguenot came up beside him and rubbed his hand across the surface several times. A part of the wall swung open as if on hinges, and they stepped inside.
Secret panels, yet! Alfred was thinking morosely. Secret panels, a female siren, a Huguenot master-mind—all the equipment. The only thing that was missing was a reason for the whole damn business. His captors evidently had not discovered that he was a human counterspy, or they would have destroyed him out of hand. They thought he was a—what was it?—a Vaklittian. A Vaklittian sneak, no less? So there were two sets of spies—the Huguenot had said something about putting him in with the other one. But what were these two sets of spies after? Were they both grappling for preinvasion control of Earth? That would make his mission much more complicated. To say nothing about trying to tell the police, if he ever managed to get to the police, about two interplanetary invasions!
And look who’d thought he was the counterspy in the picture…
The room was large and windowless. It was almost empty. In one corner, there was a transparent cube about eight feet on each side. A middle-aged man in a single-breasted brown business suit sat on the floor of the cube watching them curiously and a little hopelessly.
The Huguenot paused as he reached the cube. “You’ve searched him, of course?”
Mme. Du Barry got flustered. “Well—no, not exactly. I intended to—but you were waiting when we got out of the elevator—I hadn’t expected you for a while yet, you know—and then we got into conversation—and I just didn’t—”
Her superior shook his head angrily. “And you talk about competence! Oh, well, if I have to do everything, I guess I just have to do everything!”
He ran his hands over Alfred. He took out Alfred’s fountain pen and his cigarette lighter and examined them very closely. Then he replaced them and looked puzzled. “He’s not carrying a weapon. Does that make sense?”
“I think so. He’s not experienced enough to be trusted with anything dangerous.”
The Huguenot thought about it for a while. “No. He wouldn’t be running around by himself, then. He’d be under supervision.”
“Maybe he is. Maybe that’s the answer. In that case—”
“In that case, you both might have been followed here. Yes, that could be it. Well, we’ll fool them. Contact or no contact, we’ll close the operation here as of tonight. Don’t go out again—in an hour or so, we’ll leave the planet and take off with our prisoners for headquarters.” He rubbed his hands against the cube as he had on the wall outside. An opening appeared in the transparency and widened rapidly. With the cylinder at his back, Alfred was pushed inside.
“Give him a small blast,” he heard the Huguenot whisper. “Not too much—I don’t want him killed before he’s questioned. Just enough to stun him and keep him from talking to the other one.”
There was a tiny click behind him. A rosy glow lit up the cube and the basement room. Alfred felt a bubble of gas form in his belly and rise upward slowly. After a while, he belched.
When he turned around, the opening in the transparency had closed and the Huguenot had whirled angrily on Mme. Du Barry. The lady was examining her weapon with great puzzlement.
“I told you I wanted him stunned, not tickled! Is there anything I can depend on you to do right?”
“I was trying to be careful—I didn’t want to kill him, like you said! I aimed right at the control cubicle and I used the medium-low Vaklittian index. I don’t understand how he—how he—”
The Huguenot flapped both hands at her disgustedly. “Oh, let’s get out of here and start packing! When we get back tonight, I intend to ask headquarters to assign me a new female assistant for the next Earth operation. One without so exact a knowledge of human sexual approaches, perhaps, but who can be counted on to disarm a newly captured prisoner and to tell a Vaklittian index from a hole in her cylinder!”
Mme. Du Barry hung her head and followed him out of the room. The door-wall swung shut behind them.
Alfred touched the transparent wall of the cube gingerly. There was no longer any hint of the opening he had been pushed through. The stuff, while as transparent as glass, was rubbery and slightly sticky, something like newly melted plastic. But a plastic, he found out, incredibly strong. And it gave off a whitish glow which enabled him to see through it, dimly, the featureless walls of the secret basement room.
He turned and surveyed his co-prisoner, a few feet away, on the other side of the cube.
The man was looking at him suspiciously, and yet uncertainly, as if he did not quite know what to make of the situation. There was a peculiarly nondescript, uninteresting and ordinary quality to his features which made them somehow remarkably familiar.
Of course! He looked every bit as average as Jones, as Cohen, as Kelly and—in her own submerged feminine way—as Jane Doe. And so Alfred knew who the man had to be.
“John Smith?” he inquired tentatively. “I mean,” he added, as he recollected one of Jones’ earlier remarks, “Gar-Pitha?”
The middle-aged man rose to his feet and smiled relief. “I couldn’t figure out who you were, but you had to be one of us. Unless you were a decoy they were planting here to make me talk. But if you know my real name…What’s yours, by the way?”
Alfred shook his head coyly. “Command Central—Robinson, I mean—has me on a special mission. I’m not allowed to give my name.”
John Smith nodded heavily. “Then you don’t give it—and that’s that. Robinson knows what he’s doing. You can’t go wrong by following Robinson’s orders to the letter. Special mission, eh? Well, you won’t complete it—now. She trapped me the same way. We’re both in the soup and good.”