“I know that, dear. Anyway, nobody paid much attention. Not even when the prospectors swore they’d been given the power of walking through fire without being burned, putting themselves into catalepsy, even levitating themselves. However, then they began doing it in front of witnesses.” She took another spool of tape from her desk, then two more.
“This one’s synoptic eye-witness accounts. This one’s a report from Engineering on possible ways that the phenomena may have been faked. And this other one’s a rebuttal from Unexplained Data, covering similar unexplained phenomena of the past forty-odd years.”
“Keep an even balance, don’t we?” grinned Gull, pocketing the spools.
“For God’s sake, Johan, don’t get them mixed up. Well, anyway. About half of Syrtis Major decided the prospectors were fakes and tried to lynch them. The other decided they were saints, and began to worship them. There’s a whole revivalist religion now. They think that the saucer people own us—”
“Oh, yes,” said Gull. “I know about that part.” Indeed, it was hard not to have seen some of their riotous, chanting mass meetings, to dodge their interminable parades or to have failed to observe the slogans they had painted all over Marsport Dome.
“Then you won’t need these other tapes,” Gloria sat back, frowning over her checklist. “Well, that’s about it, th—”
A bright golden light flashed on the girl’s desk.
In the middle of a word she stopped herself, picked up the scarlet hushphone marked Direct and listened. She nodded. “Right, sir,” she said, replaced the phone, made a quick notation on the fax sheet before her and returned to Gull.
“—en,” she finished. “Any questions?”
“I think not.”
“Then here are your operating instructions, submarine reservations, identification papers and disguise kit.” She handed him another reel of tape, a ticket envelope, a punch-coded card with a rather good likeness of an idealized Johan Gull on it and a bottle of hair color.
Gull accepted them and stowed them away. But he paused at the girl’s desk, looking at her thoughtfully. “Say. Would you like me to take you home tonight?”
“Good heavens, no. I haven’t forgiven you that much.” She made two check marks on the fax sheet. “Anyway, you won’t have time.”
“Why do you say that? My submarine doesn’t leave for four hours?”
She smiled. “That call was from .5’s office.”
Gull said gloomily. “Cripes. I suppose that means extra lines.”
“Absolutely essential you complete two one-hour refresher courses before leaving,” the girl quoted. “McIntyre was quite emphatic. Said to remind you that .5 was a stickler for maintaining high levels of training; half-trained agents jeopardize missions.” Gull sighed but surrendered. No doubt .5 was right. “What’s the score?” he asked.
“One hour in color-code recognition, but don’t think I reported you. Probably .5’s office was monitoring us. The other—let me see—oh, yes. Basic fuse-spitting, refresher course. Good luck, Johan. Drop me a card from Syrtis Major.”
Gull kissed her lightly and left. He paused in the entranceway, studying his tickets and operating orders. He was faintly puzzled.
That in itself was all right. He remembered and liked the feeling. It was a good sign; it was the operations where one couldn’t quite see the drift at first that often turned out to be the most exciting and rewarding. Yet he wished he knew how this mission was going to be.
He turned his back on the flickering, darting lights that came from the great turning Martian globe and began to trudge up the stairs. All right, so Syrtis Major had got the wind up. Mass hysteria, surely. In itself, that sort of thing was hardly worth Security’s while to bother with. There was no sign of the opposition’s fine Machiavellian hand in it, less reason to believe that there would be real danger.
Yet McIntyre had warned of “unusual danger.”
Surely he was wrong. Unless…
Unless, thought Johan Gull with a touch of wonder, as he sat back in the barber’s chair and felt the warm lather gliding along his cheek, as the shoeshine robot waited to pull the lever that would drop him into the chute to Plans & Training… unless there really were people from flying saucers on Mars.
III
Smells of fungi, smells of the sea. The tang of hot-running metal machinery and the reek of stale sewage. Johan Gull expanded his chest and sucked in the thousand fragrances of the Martian waterfront as he shouted: “Boy! My bags. To my cabin, chop-chop!”
He followed the lascar-robot at a slow self-satisfied pace, dropping ashes from his panatella, examining the fittings of the submarine with the knowing eye of the old Martian hand. He did indeed feel well pleased with him-self.
In the role Costumery had set up for him, that of a well-to-do water merchant from the North Polar Ice Cap, he had arrived at the docks in a custom Caddy. He cast largesse to the winds, ordered up a fine brandy to his cabin and immediately plunged into a fresh-water bath. When you were playing a part, it was as well to play a wealthy one, he thought contentedly; and when he had luxuriated in his bath for fifteen minutes and felt the throb of the hydrojets announce the ship’s getting under weigh, he emerged to dress and play his tapes with a light heart.
To all intents and purposes, Gull must have seemed the very archetype of a rich water vendor of substantial, but not yet debilitating, age. He sat at ease, listening to the tapes through a nearly invisible earplug and doing his nails. He did not touch the eye patch which gave his face distinction, nor did he glance toward the framed portrait of Abdel Gamal Nassar behind which, he rather thought, a hidden camera-eye was watching his every move. Let them damned well look. They could find nothing.
He sat up, stretched, yawned, lighted an expensive Pittsburgh stogie, blew one perfect smoke ring and resumed his task.
The T Coronae Borealis was a fine old ship of the Finucane-American line. As a matter of fact Johan Gull had voyaged in her more than a time or two before, and he looked forward with considerable pleasure to his dinner that night at the captain’s table, to a spot of gambling in the card room, perhaps—who knew?—to a heady tête-à-tête with one of the lovely ladies he had observed as he boarded. The voyage to Heliopolis was sixteen hours by submarine, or just time enough for one’s glands to catch up with the fact that one had changed one’s mise-en-scène. Ballistic rockets, of course, would do it in fifty minutes. In Johan Gull’s opinion, ballistic travel was for barbs. And he was grateful that Mars’s atmosphere would not support that hideous compromise between grace and speed, the jet plane. No, thought Gull complacently. Of all the modes of transport he had sampled on six worlds and a hundred satellites, submarining through the Martian canals was the only one fit for a man of taste.
He snapped off the last of the tapes and considered his position. He heard with one ear the distant, feminine song of T Coronae’s, nuclear hydrojets. Reassuring. With every minute that passed they were two-fifths of a mile closer to the junction of four canals where Heliopolis, the Saigon of Syrtis Major, sat wickedly upon its web of waters and waited for its prey.
Gull wondered briefly what he would find there. And as he wondered, he smiled.
The knock on the door was firm without being peremptory. “Another brandy, sir?” called a voice from without.
“No, thank you, steward,” said Gull. No Martian water vendor would arrive at dinner half slopped over. Neither would Gull—if not because of the demands of his role, then because of the requirements of good manners to the handiwork of T Coronae’s master chef. Anyway, he observed by his wrist chronometer that it was time to think things over.