For love and pleasure, fear and hatred, honor and ambition were all doors that could be opened or shut.
Pain was the key.
Early the following morning, alone in his inner office, Spangler looked unhappily into his desk screen, from which the broad, gray face of Claude Keith-Ingram stared back at him.
"You asked Pembun why he hadn't divulged this information earlier?" Keith-Ingram asked sharply.
"I did," Spangler said. "He answered that he had assumed we already knew of it, since the Empire was known to possess the finest body of knowledge in the field of security psychology in the inhabited Galaxy."
"Hmm," said Spangler's superior, frowning. "Sarcasm, do you think?"
Spangler hesitated. "I should like to be able to answer that with a definite no, but I can't be sure. Pembun is not an easy man to fathom."
"So I understand," said Keith-Ingram. "However, he has an absolutely impeccable record in the Outworld service. I don't think there can be any question of actual disloyalty."
Spangler was silent.
"Well, then," said Keith-Ingram testily, "what about this alleged pseudo-hypnotic ability of the Rithians? What does it amount to?"
"According to Pembun, complete control under very favorable conditions. He says, however, that the process is rather slow and limited in extent. In other words, that a Rithian might be able to take control of one or two persons if it could get them alone and unsuspecting, but that it would be unable to control a large group at any time or even a small group in an emergency."
Keith-Ingram nodded. "Now, about this other matter of the protean ability—" he glanced down at something on his own desk, outside the range of the scanner—"none of the available agents who have served in the Rithian system have anything even suggestive to report in that regard."
Spangler nodded. "That could mean anything or nothing."
"Yes," said the gray man. "On the whole, I'm inclined to feel as you evidently do, that there's nothing in it. Pembun may be competent and so on, but he's not Earth and he's not Security. Still, I don't have to remind you that if he's right on all counts, we've got a very serious situation on our hands."
Spangler smiled grimly and nodded again. Keith-Ingram was noted for his barbed understatements. If Pembun was right, then it followed that the Empire's agents in the Rithian system had carried back no more information than the Rithians wanted them to have…
Keith-Ingram rubbed his chin with a square, well-manicured hand. "Now, to date, the normal procedures haven't produced any result."
"That's correct," Spangler admitted. Using all available personnel, it would take another four days to complete the house checks. Before that time, negative results would prove nothing.
"And according to Pembun, those procedures are no good. Now, has he proposed any alternate method, other than that beryllium-salts scheme of his?"
"No, sir. He held out no hope of results from that one under two and a half months."
"Well, he may have something more useful to suggest. Ask him. If he does—try it."
"Right," said Spangler.
"Good," said the gray man, giving Spangler his second-best smile. "Keep in touch, Thorne—and if anything else odd turns up, don't hesitate to call me direct."
The screen cleared.
Spangler stared at the vacant screen for a few moments, pursing his lips thoughtfully, then leaned back, absently fingering the banks of control studs at the edge of his desk.
Without any conscious warning, he found himself mentally reviewing the film, taken in the Rithian system, which had been used in briefing Security personnel for the spy search.
First you saw only a riotous, bewildering display of green and gold; the shapes were so unfamiliar that the mind took several seconds to adjust. Then you perceived that the green was a swaying curtain of broad-leafed vines; the splashes of gold were intricate, many-petaled blossoms. Behind, barely noticeable, was a spidery framework of metal, and beyond that, an occasional glimpse of mist-blue that suggested open space.
Then the Rithian moved into view.
At first you thought "Spiders!", and Spangler remembered that he had jumped; spiders were a particular horror of his. Then, when the thing stopped in front of the camera, you saw that it was no more like a spider than like an octopus or a monkey.
Curiously, its outline most resembled those of the great golden blossoms. There was a circlet of tentacles, lying in gentle S-curves, and below that another. The thing's body was a soft sac that dangled beneath the lower set of tentacles; there was a head, consisting almost entirely of two huge, dull-red eyes. The creature's body was covered with short, soft-looking ochre fur or spines.
To some people, Spangler supposed, it would be beautiful— the sort of people who professed to find beauty in the striped, oval bodies of big beetles.
The thing turned quickly, hung still for another moment, and then clambered in a blur of limbs up the vine again.
Then there was another scene: darker green, this time— the gloom of a forest rather than a garden city. A Rithian moved into view, clinging to the slick purplish bole of a tree. Three of its fore-tentacles held a long, slender object that was obviously a weapon. It hung motionless for some minutes; then the gun moved slightly and a brilliant thread of violet flame lanced out from it. Far in the background something reddish shrieked and plummeted through the branches.
That was all, but that little was impressive enough. The weapon the film showed, evidently the equivalent of a light sporting rifle, compared favorably in performance with a Mark LV Becket.
There were other films; Spangler had not seen them, but he could imagine the kind of thing they must be. Pictures of Rithian factories, Rithian spaceships, Rithian laboratories. No matter what they were like in detail, in mass they had been impressive enough to convince Earth's strategists that making war on the Rithians might be disastrous.
So the slow campaign had begun: economic sabotage, subversion, propaganda. Nothing overt; nothing that could be surely traced to the Earthmen masquerading as non-Empire traders in the Rithian system. The tiny disruption bombs that had destroyed many another, weaker world would not be planted: the Rithians were a space-faring people, with colonies and a space fleet, and such a people can retaliate if their home world is destroyed. The campaign would be simply one of slow, patient attrition, designed to weaken the Rithians as a race and as a galactic nation; to divide them politically, hamper them economically and intellectually? to enmesh them in so subtle a net of difficulties that eventually, without knowing how it had come about, the Rithians would find that the crest of the wave had passed them by; that they were settling into the trough of history. It would take centuries. Earth could wait.
But the Rithians had discovered their enemies. And now the situation was grotesquely changed. No part of Earth's knowledge of the Rithians could any longer be considered reliable. The Rithians might be stronger or weaker than had been thought; the one thing that appeared certain was that they were not as they appeared in the films and the written reports that had reached Earth.
Even the best planning could not always succeed, Spangler thought. It was conceivable that Earth had finally met an antagonist against whom neither force nor subtlety would be of any use. Wonderingly, Spangler allowed his mind to focus on the idea of a universe in which the human race had been exterminated, like so many other races that had met superior force, superior subtlety. It was like trying to imagine the universe going forward after one's own death, intellectually, it was perfectly easy, emotionally, impossible.