He looked beyond her. His eyes widened. He said, “Get yourself in hand, Fran. Here comes trouble.”
She knuckled the tears away with a quick gesture, adjusted a smile and rolled over. Jerry Raymond was coming down the beach toward them.
She jumped up quickly and ran to him, her arms outstretched, genuinely glad to see him. “Jerry! Oh, Jerry, where have you been? I’ve been half crazy!”
He fended her off. “Watch it, now! I don’t want that grease on my shirt.”
“We just didn’t know,” Quinn said, “whether to turn it into police business or just wait for you. I had a hunch you knew what you were doing. Now I’m glad we didn’t jump the gun.”
“Where did you go?”
Massio smiled at her and glanced at Quinn. The memories of Jerry had been just slightly vague as far as visualizations of form were concerned and very clear, in so far as color was involved.
He said, “Sometimes you have to be by yourself. When there are things to think over. You know how it is.” He reached very cautiously toward their minds, finding the expected defenselessness, desiring not to alarm them. He read the guilt, their anger at each other. Fran’s gladness to have him back, Quinn’s satisfaction that it was all winding up so neatly.
“Well,” Fran said, “if you want to be mysterious it’s all right with me. I’m just glad to have you back. Quinn, will you mix the drinks, please. This begins to look like a celebration.”
Massio took a deep breath of the alien air, finding it good after so long a time of being inside the Center buildings. These primitives gave him amusement. They were so tangled up in the rights and wrongs of their social customs. Emotional involvement was at such a frenetic peak.
He studied the look of the sea and sky. It could be the sky of Strada.
Fran, standing close beside him, said softly, “Darling, wherever you went it must have done you good. You seem more relaxed — changed.”
“Do I? Maybe I’m less nervous, Fran.”
“Can you stay this way?”
Once again he probed a cautious bit deeper. She frowned and put the back of her hand to her forehead.
They had observed carefully, he thought. This girl was built very much like Faven. Facial alterations would not have to be extreme. And this time it could be done much more quickly because the technicians had satisfied themselves, using Jerry as a specimen, that there was no basic difference in musculature, cutaneous characteristics, nerve network.
It was just that these Earthmen had realized less of their potential and were able to utilize only a fraction of muscle power and electro-chemical neuron force. And the big one was near enough to the appearance of Amro to make it a simple substitution.
He looked along the deserted shore and felt deep excitement. This planet had room. And it had a peculiar availability. The League would have a sad and sudden surprise when full utilization of this planet was made.
Quinn brought back the shaker and they sat in the sand and made conversation. Massio grinned inwardly at the hate the other two felt and concealed from each other and from him. The test that the cautious Lofta had insisted on was going well. Lofta had wanted to make absolutely certain that these Earthmen had no other means of identification than the evidence of their eyes and ears.
When he was satisfied that they accepted him as Jerry Raymond without reservation Massio stood up and sent a clear mental signal to the agent technicians who waited to activate the dark doorway between two worlds.
The shadow, erect and black, sprang into being. “What the hell is that?” Quinn gasped.
Massio reached over, clamped Quinn by the back of the neck, lifted him and hurled him, javelin fashion, toward the doorway. Quinn landed on his feet, fell to his hands and knees. He was close enough to the shadow so that when he scrambled up he was drawn irrevocably through it, disappearing from their sight.
Fran lay there, her face greenish under the deep tan. “What are you?” she whispered.
He did not want to use hypnotic control of the sort he had seen Amro use on Faven after tricking her, because there was no way to assess the mental damage that might ensue. He picked her up and put her under his arm and walked to the doorway. She fought for a moment and then began to scream tonelessly.
“Don’t put me in there, Jerry! Don’t!”
“It won’t hurt you.”
“Jerry, don’t! I couldn’t help it. He made me do it. Jerry!” The last word was a rising scream, cut off abruptly as she was drawn through the shadow. It clicked off as though a power source had been cut.
Massio, using Jerry’s memory, went to the house, changed to Jerry’s swimming trunks and went down into the water. It felt good to stretch his muscles. He cupped his hands and surged powerfully ahead, arcing the water up to sparkle in the sunshine.
Far out dark bodies rolled in the sunlight. He altered his course toward them, curious about them, driving down under water for the last hundred feet of approach. They were huge, four or five hundred pounds apiece, and he saw from the breathing holes on the tops of their heads that they were mammals. As they came up to breathe, they made a rolling motion that pleased him.
They sped away from him and he moved in again, swimming parallel to their course. He saw that he could not match their top speed, but after a time they accepted him. He probed at the beast mind, found nothing but sensory satisfaction that comes from a filled belly, the joy of motion.
He was with them when they attacked a small school of sand sharks and found in their minds the message to kill, the savage joy of killing.
When he began to tire he swam back to the shore and ran fleetly at the surf-line in thirty-foot strides.
Though the more public figures of the League managed to delude themselves into thinking that they guided the destinies of the League and made the decisions affecting basic policy, there usually came a time when they were confronted with an ultimatum from the group sometimes known as The Three.
They had no name for their small committee. They were merely three persons who worked in such obscurity that not one of each hundred underground agents of the League knew of their existence. Had there been any point in keeping records those records would show the score of times that a policy decision by this group of three had frustrated the best laid plans of the Center. Their hate for the Center was a real emotion.
Dolpha was the oldest. He was a granite-faced man who had slowly accumulated a reputation as an administrator on the most distant planets. Then he had apparently died. A body had gone into the furnaces but it had not been Dolpha’s. During the meetings he displayed a courtly dignity, particularly to Renaen.
She was an old lady, as fragile as a cameo, with a mind like the explosive lance of a farris. Her voice and her hands trembled and only Dolpha knew that during her career as an agent, long since terminated, she had made a secret collection of the photographs of those Center officials whom she had forced to commit involuntary suicide.
That had been her specialty. The youngest member, Kama, was potentially the most powerful of the three — a lank damp-looking man with coarse hair and awkward hands who possessed one of the finest conspiratorial minds in the entire League.
“Suppose you summarize, Kama,” Dolpha said.
“During the past four months, ever since the death of Strell, which we suspect but have been unable to prove, was Center work, the Center has been peculiarly inactive. This in itself is cause for grave alarm.
“The easiest way to analyze it is to think of what might cause us to withdraw agents from active operations, pull in our horns, so to speak, and play a waiting game. I can give two guesses. One — the development of a device or weapon superior to anything now existing. Two — the development of a secret base from which to use or launch existing weapons.”