He’s lying, Jeremy’s mind shouted at him. He’s got to be lying. All this is some clever set of tricks. It can’t be true. It can’t be!
In a sudden paroxysm of rage and terror and frustration Jeremy hurled the gun high into the rain-filled night, turned abruptly and walked away from Rungawa. He did not look back, but he knew the old man was smiling at him.
It’s a trick, he kept telling himself. A goddamned trick. He knew damned well I couldn’t kill him in cold blood, with him standing there looking at me with those damned sad eyes of his. Shoot an old man in the face. I just couldn’t do it. All he had to do was keep me talking long enough to lose my nerve. Goddamned clever black man. Must be how he lived to get so old.
Keating stamped down the marble steps of the Sacred Way, pushed past the three raincoated guards who had accompanied Rungawa, and walked alone and miserable back to the pensione.
How the hell am I going to explain this back at headquarters? I’ll have to resign, tell them that I’m not cut out to be an assassin.
They’ll never believe that. Maybe I could get a transfer, get back into the political section, join the Peace Corps, anything!
He was still furious with himself when he reached the pensione. Still shaking his head, angry that he had let the old man talk him out of his assigned mission. Some form of hypnosis, Keating thought. He must have been a medicine man or a voodoo priest when he was younger.
He pushed through the glassed front door of the pensione, muttering to himself. «You let him trick you. You let that old black man hoodwink you.»
The room clerk roused himself from his slumber and got up to reach Jeremy’s room key from the rack behind the desk. He was a short, sturdily-built Greek, the kind who would have faced the Persians at Marathon.
«You must have run very fast,» he said to Keating in heavily accented English.
«Huh? What? Why do you say that?»
The clerk grinned, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. «You did not get wet.»
Keating looked at the sleeve of his trench coat. It was perfectly dry. The whole coat was as clean and dry as if it had just come from a pressing. His feet were dry; his shoes and trousers and hat were dry.
He turned and looked out the front window. The rain was coming down harder than ever, a torrent of water.
«You run so fast you go between raindrops, eh?» The clerk laughed at his own joke.
Jeremy’s knees nearly buckled. He leaned against the desk. «Yeah. Something like that.»
The clerk, still grinning, handed him his room key. Jeremy gathered his strength and headed for the stairs, his head spinning.
As he went up the first flight, he heard a voice, even though he was quite alone on the carpeted stairs.
«A small kindness, Mr. Keating,» said Rungawa, inside his mind. «I thought it would have been a shame to make you get wet all over again. A small kindness. There will be more to come.»
Keating could hear Rungawa chuckling as he walked alone up the stairs. By the time he reached his room, he was grinning himself.
BORN AGAIN
Assuming the UFO believers are right, and we are being infiltrated by a generally benign race of intelligent extraterrestrials, why have they come to Earth and what do they want of us?
In «A Small Kindness,» we saw the first meeting between Jeremy Keating and the alien Black Saint of the Third World, Kabete Rungawa.
Now we see the result of that meeting, and how it changes Keating’s life. Changes it? In a literal sense, it ends his life.
Which leads to the title of the story.
The restaurant’s sign, out on the roadside, said Gracious Country Dining. There was no indication that just across the Leesburg Pike the gray unmarked headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency lay screened behind the beautifully wooded Virginia hills.
Jeremy Keating sat by force of old habit with his back to the wall. The restaurant was almost empty, and even if it had been bursting with customers, they would all have been agency people—almost. It was the almost that would have worried him in the old days.
Keating looked tense, expectant, a trimly built six-footer in his late thirties, hair still dark, stomach still flat, wearing the same kind of conservative bluish-gray three-piece suit that served almost as a uniform for agency men when they were safely home.
Only someone who had known him over the past five years would realize that the pain and the sullen, smoldering anger that had once lit his eyes were gone now. In their place was something else, equally intense but lacking the hate that had once fueled the flames within him. Keating himself did not fully understand what was happening to him. Part of what he felt now was excitement, a fluttering, almost giddy anticipation. But there was fear inside him, too, churning in his guts.
It had been easy to get into the agency; it would not be so easy getting out.
He was halfway finished with his fruit juice when Jason Lyle entered the quiet dining room and threaded his way through the empty tables toward Keating. Although he had never been a field agent, Lyle moved cautiously, walking on the balls of his feet, almost on tiptoe. Watching him, Keating thought that there must be just as many booby traps in the corridors of bureaucratic power as there are in the field. You don’t get to be section chief by bulling blindly into trouble.
Keating rose as Lyle came to his table and extended his hand. They exchanged meaningless greetings, smiling at each other and commenting on the unbelievably warm weather, predicted an early spring and lots of sunshine, a good sailing season.
When their waitress came, Lyle ordered a vodka martini; Keating asked for another glass of grapefruit juice. The last time Keating had seen Jason Lyle, the section chief had ordered him to commit a murder. Terminate with extreme prejudice was the term used. Keating had received such orders, and obeyed them willingly, half a dozen times over the previous four years. Until this last one, a few weeks ago.
Now Lyle sat across the small restaurant table, in this ersatz rustic dining room with its phony log walls and gingham tablecloths, and gave Keating the same measured smile he had used all those other times. But Lyle’s eyes were wary, probing, trying to see what had changed in Keating.
Lyle was handsome in a country-club, old-money way: thick silver hair impeccably coiffed, his chiseled features tanned and taut from years of tennis and sailing. He was vain enough to wear contact lenses instead of bifocals, and tough enough to order death for his own agents, once he thought they were dangerous to the organization—or to himself.
Keating listened to the banalities and let his gaze slide from Lyle to the nearby windows where the bright Virginia sunshine was pouring in. He knew that Lyle had carefully reviewed all the medical reports, all the debriefing sessions and psychiatric examinations that he had undergone in the past three weeks.
They had wrung his brain dry with their armory of drugs and electronics. But there was one fact Keating had kept from them, simply because they had never in their deepest probes thought to ask the question. One simple fact that had turned Keating’s life upside down: the man that he had been ordered to assassinate was not a human being. He had not been born on Earth.
Keating nodded at the right places in Lyle’s monologue and volunteered nothing. The waitress took their lunch order, went away, and came back eventually with their food.
Finally, as he picked up his fork and stared down at what the menu had promised as sliced Virginia ham, Lyle asked as casually as a snake gliding across a meadow: