I pushed the button. I said, “This is Dahl. Let me out, will you please?”
The outer door began to slide back. Just in time, I saw Donnelly’s head bobbing against it; I grabbed him by the shirt-front and hoisted his limp body out of the way.
I walked across the echoing outer chamber; the outermost door opened for me. I stepped through it and held my breath. Down the corridor, three guards leaned over their rifles and toppled all in a row, like precision divers. Beyond them a hurrying civilian in the cross-corridor fell heavily and skidded out of sight.
The clacking of typewriters from a near-by office had stopped abruptly. I let out my breath when I couldn’t hold it any longer, and listened to the silence.
The General was slumped over his desk, head on his crossed forearms, looking pretty old and tired with his polished bald skull shining under the light. There was a faint silvery scar running across the top of his head, and I wondered whether he had got it in combat as a young man, or whether he had tripped over a rug at an embassy reception.
Across the desk from him a thin man in a gray pin-check suit was jackknifed on the carpet, half-supported by a chairleg, rump higher than his head.
There were two six-foot filing cabinets in the right-hand corner behind the desk. Both were locked; the drawers of the first one were labeled alphabetically, the other was unmarked.
I unhooked Parst’s key-chain from his belt. He had as many keys as a janitor or a high-school principal, but not many of them were small enough to fit the filing cabinets. I got the second one unlocked and began going through the drawers. I found what I wanted in the top one—seven fat manila folders labeled “Aza-Kra—Armor,” “Aza-Kra— General information,” “Aza-Kra—Power sources,” Aza-Kra—Spaceflight” and so on; and one more labeled “Directives and related correspondence.”
I hauled them all out, piled them on Parst’s desk and pulled up a chair.
I took “Armor” first because it was on top and because the title puzzled me. The folder was full of transcripts of interviews whose subject I had to work out as I went along. It appeared that when captured, Aza-Kra had been wearing a light-weight bullet-proof body armor, made of something that was longitudinally flexible and perpendicularly rigid— in other words, you could pull it on like a suit of winter underwear, but you couldn’t dent it with a sledge hammer.
They had been trying to find out what the stuff was and how it was made for almost two months and as far as I could see they had not made a nickel’s worth of progress.
I looked through “Power sources” and “Spaceflight” to see if they were the same, and they were. The odd part was that Aza-Kra’s answers didn’t sound reluctant or evasive; but he kept running into ideas for which there weren’t any words in English and then they would have to start all over again, like Twenty Questions.... Is it animal? vegetable? mineral? It was a mess.
I put them all aside except “General information” and “Directives.” The first, as I had guessed, was a catch-all for nontechnical' subjects—where Aza-Kra had come from, what his people were like, his reasons for coming to this planet: all the unimportant questions; or the only questions that had any importance, depending on how you looked at it.
Parst had already given me an accurate summary of it, but it was surprisingly effective in Aza-Kra’s words. You say we want your planet. There are many planets, so many you would not believe. But if we wanted your planet, and if we could kill as you do, please understand, we are very many. We would fall on your planet like snowflakes. We would not send one man alone.
And later: Most young peoples kill. It is a law of nature, yes, but try to understand, it is not the only law. You have been a young people, but now you are growing older. Now you must learn the other law, not to kill. That is what I have come to teach. Until you learn this, we cannot have you among us.
There was nothing in the folder dated later than a month and a half ago. They had dropped that line of questioning early.
The first thing I saw in the other folder began like this:
You are hereby directed to hold yourself in readiness to destroy the subject under any of the following circumstances, without further specific notification:
1, a: If the subject attempts to escape.
1, b: If the subject kills or injures a human being.
1, c: If the landing, anywhere in the world, of other members of the subject’s race is reported and their similarity to the subject established beyond a reasonable doubt....
Seeing it written down like that, in the cold dead-alive-ness of black words on white paper, it was easy to forget that the alien was a stomach-turning monstrosity, and to see only that what he had to say was lucid and noble.
But I still hadn’t found anything that would persuade me to help him escape. The problem was still there, as insoluble as ever. There was no way of evaluating a word the alien said about himself. He had come alone—perhaps— instead of bringing an invading army with him; but how did we know that one member of his race wasn’t as dangerous to us as Perry’s battleship to the Japanese? He might be; there was some evidence that he was.
My quarrel with the Defense Department was not that they were mistreating an innocent three-legged missionary, but simply that the problem of Aza-Kra belonged to the world, not to a fragment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States—and certainly not to me.
... There was one other way out, I realized. Instead of calling Frisbee in Washington, I could call an arm-long list of senators and representatives. I could call the UN secretariat in New York; I could call the editor of every major newspaper in this hemisphere and the head of every wire service and broadcasting chain. I could stir up a hornet’s nest, even, as the saying goes, if I swung for it.
Wrong again: I couldn’t. I opened the “Directives” folder again, looking for what I thought I had seen there in the list of hypothetical circumstances. There it was:
1, f: If any concerted attempt on the part of any person or group to remove the subject from Defense Department custody, or to aid him in any way, is made; or if the subject’s existence and presence in Defense Department custody becomes public knowledge.
That sewed it up tight, and it also answered my question about Aza-Kra. Knocking out the personnel of B building would be construed as an attempt to escape or as a concerted attempt by a person or group to remove the subject from Defense Department custody, it didn’t matter which. If I broke the story, it would have the same result. They would kill him.
In effect, he had put his life in my hands: and that was why he was so sure that I’d help him.
It might have been that, or what I found just before I left the office, that decided me. I don’t know; I wish I did.
Coming around the desk the other way, I glanced at the thin man on the floor and noticed that there was something under him, half-hidden by his body. It turned out to be two things: a grey fedora and a pint-sized gray-leather briefcase, chained to his wrist.
So I looked under Parst’s folded arms, saw the edge of a thick white sheet of paper, and pulled it out.
Under Frisbee’s letterhead, it said:
By courier.
Dear General Parst:
Some possibility appears to exist that A. K. is responsible for recent disturbances in your area; please give me your thought on this as soon as possible—the decision can’t be long postponed.
In the meantime you will of course consider your command under emergency status, and we count on you to use your initiative to safeguard security at all costs. In a crisis, you will consider Lieut. D. as expendable.