"Perhaps they had to."
"Never. Weaklings, that's all."
All of which gave me pause to think, and with thought came suspicion and after this the dawning light of discovery. Pieces began to fall into shape in my mind and I tried not to get too excited. It was a formless idea yet—but if it worked—if it worked!
Then I would know how the Cliaandians managed their invasion trick. Simple, like all good ideas, and foolproof as well.
"I'll need your help," I told Taze. "I'll stay in the Space Armada, at least for the moment, since I can learn more there. But I won't leave this planet. This is where the Cliaandians are the weakest and this is where they are going to be beaten. Have you ever heard of the Special Corps?"
"No."
"Well you have now. It is, well, it is the group that is going to help you. I work for them and they should be keeping an eye on me. They saw the fleet leave Cliaand and are certain to have followed it here. That was one of the developments we had planned for. Right now a message drone should be circling this planet. It will relay any messages to the Corps and we will have all the help we need. Can you get access to a medium powered radio transmitter?"
"Yes—but why should I? Why should I believe you? You could be lying."
"I could be—but you can't take the chance." I scratched feverishly on a message form. "I'm leaving you now, I have to get back to my ship before they begin to wonder where I have gone. Here is the message you are to transmit on this frequency. You can do it without getting caught, it's easy enough. And you lose nothing by doing it. And you may save your planet."
She was still doubtful, looking at the paper.
"It's so hard to believe. That you are really a spy—and want to help us."
"You can believe he is a spy, take my word for it," a voice said from the doorway behind me and I felt a cold hand clamp down on my heart. I turned, slowly.
Kraj, the man in gray was standing there. Two other gray uniformed men stood behind him leveling their weapons at me. Kraj pointed his finger like a third gun.
"We have been watching you, spy, and waiting for this information. Now we can proceed with the destruction of your Special Corps."
Chapter 13
"People seem to be popping up in doorways a lot today, ha ha," I said with a joviality I certainly did not feel. Kraj smiled a very wintry smile.
"If you mean the colonel, yes, I had him watching you. Now try to act the fool. Pas Ratunkowy, or whatever your name really is."
"Hulja, Vaska, Lieutenant in the Space Armada."
"Flight-Major Hulja has been found in the Dosadan-Glup Robotnik Hotel, which discovery put us on your trail. Yours was a most ingenious plan and might have succeeded had not an optical pickup burned out. The repairman sent to order the matter discovered the Flight-Major and his delusion about the date and this was brought to my attention. I'll take that."
Kraj lifted the message form from Taze's unresisting fingers. He seemed very much in control of the situation. I clutched my chest in the area of my heart, rolled up my eyes and staggered backwards.
"Too much…" I muttered. "Heart going… don't shoot… this is the end."
Kraj and his two men looked on coldly while I was going through all this for their benefit, until the dramatic moment when I clutched at my throat and shrieked with pain, my body arched and every muscle taut, then fell over backwards through the window.
It was nicely done with plenty of crashing glass, and I flipped in midair and landed on my shoulder and did a roll and came up to my feet, ready to run.
Looking right up the barrel of a gaussrifle held by another silent and unsmiling man in gray. He scored zero as a conversationalist and for the moment I could think of nothing bright to say myself. Kraj's voice came clearly through the broken window behind me.
"Take the girl to the prison camp, we have no further need for her. The rest of us will return with the spy. Be on guard constantly, you have seen what he can do."
Not very much, I thought to myself in a sudden gloomy depression. Not very much at all. I had penetrated all right, and found out what I wanted to know, but I had not been able to get my information out. Which made it useless. Worse than useless. Kraj might be able to turn my message to his own ends which I was sure were pretty nasty ones. This dark state of mind persisted while the rest of the doom-faced gray men surrounded me and trotted me off to a waiting truck. There was no chance at all to escape: they were very efficient with those guns.
It was a brief trip, though a remarkably uncomfortable one. The vehicle was a captured Burada truck that must have been used for the transport of garbage or something worse. I was the only one who seemed bothered by the permeating smell. The gray men neither commented on it nor took their eyes from me once during the trip. At least the vehicle was silent and smooth; it burned gas in a fuel cell to generate electricity—supplied to a separate drive motor in each wheel. I considered desperate plans of ripping up one of the cables where it passed by my feet, of leaping out of the rear of the truck and so forth. None of this was much good and we reached our destination with our relative positions unchanged. At gunpoint I was herded into a commandeered building, into an empty room where, still at gunpoint, I was ordered to strip. With a portable fluoroscope and cold probes, most humiliating, they removed all devices and gadgetry from my person, then gave me new clothes.
These clothes were something else again. A single-piece overall made of soft and flexible plastic they provided protection and warmth for the wearer. Yet they were the ideal prison dress because they were completely transparent. This continual shielded-nakedness was certainly not morale building and I began to have even more respect for the gray men. And everything done in silence despite my attempts at conversation. The final sartorial touch was a metal collar that locked around my neck. A cable ran from the collar to a box one of the gray men held. All of this had a very ominous look to it. My suspicions were justified when the others left with all of the weapons and he faced me, box in hand.
"I can do this," he said in a voice as gray as his garb and pressed a button on the box.
The thing I experienced next was quite unexpected and singularly painful. In a single instant I was blinded by exploding lights of a color and fury I had never seen before. Sound greater than sound filled my ears and every square inch of my skin burned with fire as though I had been dropped into an acid bath. These interesting things went on for a longer time than I really appreciated and then suddenly vanished as quickly as they had begun. Sight and hearing returned and I found myself lying on the floor with a sore spot on the back of my head where I had cracked it when I fell. It felt rather good just to lie there. That little box must generate neural currents on selected frequencies. No need to torture the body when you can feed specific pain impulses into the nervous system.
"Stand," my captor said, and I did rather quickly.