"Little chance of that, Inskipp, aging con man yourself. You are short of good field agents as it is. You need us more than we need you. So consider this chewing out at an end and get on with the business. I have been chastised." I tore a button off the front of my jacket and threw it across the desk to him. "Here, rip off my medals and reduce me to the ranks. I am guilty. Next case."
With a final simulated growl of anger he filed the papers in the wastebasket and took out a large red folder that buzzed threateningly when he touched it. His thumbprint defused the security device and the folder dropped open.
"I have a top secret gravely important assignment here."
"What other kind do I ever get?"
"It is hideously dangerous as well."
"You are secretly envious of my good looks and have a death wish for me. Come on, Inskipp. Stop sparring and let me know what the deal is. Angelina and I can handle it better than the rest of your senile and feeble agents."
"This job of work is for you alone. Angelina is, well…" His face reddened and he examined the file closely.
"Whoopee!" I shouted. "Inskipp the killer, daredevil, master of men, secret power in the galaxy today. And he can't say the word pregnant! How about baby? Wait, sex, that is a goodie. You blush to think about it. Go ahead, say sex three times fast, it will do you good—"
"Shut up, diGriz," he growled. "At least you finally married her which shows you have a single drop of honesty in your otherwise rotten carcass. She stays behind. You go out on this one-man job. Probably leaving her a widow."
"She looks awful in black so you can't get rid of me that easily. Tell."
"Look at this," he said, taking a roll of film from the folder and slipping it into a slot in his desk. A screen dropped down from the ceiling and the room darkened. The film began.
The camera had been handheld, the color was off at times, and it was most unprofessional. But it was the best home movie I had ever seen because the material was so good. Authentic, no doubt about it.
Someone was waging war. It was a sunny day with white puffs of clouds against a blue sky. And black puffs of antiaircraft fire in among them. But the fire was not heavy and there was not enough of it to stop the troop carriers that came in low and fast for landing. This was at an average sized spaceport, with the buildings in the far background and some cargo ships nearby. Other craft roared in low and bomb explosions readied skyward from what must have been the defense positions. The impossibility of what was happening finally came home to me.
"Those are spaceships!" I gurgled. "And space transports. Is some numbskull government so stupid as to think that it can succeed in an interplanetary war? What happened after they lost—and how does it affect me?"
The film ended and the lights came up again. Inskipp steepled his fingers on the desk and leered over them.
"For your information, Mr. Know-it-all, this invasion succeeded—and so did the other ones before it. This film was taken by a smuggler, one of our regular informants, whose ship was just fast enough to get away during the battle."
This was a stopper. I dragged deeply on the cigar and considered what little I knew about interplanetary warfare. There was little enough to know. Because it just doesn't work. Maybe a few times in the galaxy when local conditions are right, say a solar system with two inhabited planets. If one planet is backward and the other advanced industrially the primitive one might be invaded successfully. But not if they put up any kind of a real defense. The distance-time relationships just don't make this kind of warfare practical. When every soldier and weapon and ration has to be lifted from the gravity well of a planet and carried across space the energy expenditure is considerable, the transport demands incredible and the cost unbelievable. If, in addition, the invader has to land in the face of determined apposition the invasion is impossible. And this is inside a solar system where the planets are practically touching on a galactic scale. The thought of warfare between planets at different star systems is even more impossible.
But, once again, it has been proven that nothing is basically impossible if people want to tackle it hard enough. And things like violence, warfare and bloodshed are still hideously attractive to the lurking violence potential of mankind, despite the centuries of peace and stagnation. I had a sudden and depressing thought.
"Are you telling me that a successful interplanetary invasion has been accomplished?" I asked.
"More than one." That evil smirk was decorating his face as he spoke.
"And you and the League would like to see this practice stopped?"
"Right on the head, Jim my boy."
"And I am the sucker who has been picked for the assignment?"
He reached out, took my cigar from my numb fingers and dropped it into the ashtray—then solemnly shock my hand. "It's your job. Go out there and win."
I slipped my hand from his treacherous embrace, wiped my fingers on my pants leg and grabbed back my cigar.
"I'm sure that you will see that I have the best funeral the Corps can afford. Now, would you care to squeeze out a few details or would you prefer to blindfold me and shoot me out in a one-way cargo rocket?"
"Temper, my boy, temper. The situation seems to be quite clear. There has been little word about this in the news media because of a certain political confusion surrounding the invasions, plus a rigid censorship by the planets under consideration. As we have reconstructed it—and good men have died getting this information—the responsible world is named Cliaand, the third planet in the Epsilon Indi system. There are two score planets orbiting this sun, but only three are inhabitable. And inhabited. Cliaand took over both the sister worlds some years ago, but we considered this no cause for alarm. What is alarming is the fact that they have expanded their scope. Interstellar conquest, heretofore considered an impossibility. They have invaded and conquered five other planets in nearby systems and seem poised for bigger and better things. We don't know how they are doing it, but they must be doing something right. We have had agents on the conquered worlds but have learned little of value. The decision has been made, a high level one I assure you—you would stand and salute if you heard some of the names of the people involved—that we must get a man to Cliaand to root out the problem at the core of the woodpile and cut the Gordian knot."
"Other than being contained in a mixed and disgusting metaphor I think the idea is a suicidal one. Instead of this we could…"
"You are going. There is no possible way to wriggle out of this one. Slippery Jim."
I tried. But nothing worked. I was given a copy of all the known details, a cortex recording of the language and the master key to a fast pursuit ship to take me there. I returned gloomily too our quarters where Angelina, tired of doing her hair and her nails, was throwing a knife at a head-sized target on the far wall. She was very good. Even underhand, after a quick draw from her arm sheath, she could hit the black spot of either eye.
"Let me get a pic of Inskipp," I said. "It will make a more interesting target and one that you can get a degree of pleasure out of."
"Is that evil old man sending my darling out on a job?"
"That dirty old goat is trying to get me killed. The assignment is so top secret I can't tell a soul about it, particularly you, so here are all the papers, read them for yourself."
While she did this I slipped the Cliaand language recording into the stamping machine. This recorded the material directly on my cortex without the boring and time consuming intermediary of any learning process. The first session would take about a half an hour with a dozen or more shorter reinforcing sessions after that. I would end up speaking the language and having one hell of a headache from all the electronic fingering of my synapses. But there was a period of total unconsciousness while the machine operated and that was just what I felt like at the moment. I slipped the helmet down over my ears, settled on the couch and pressed the button.