He reviewed what he had heard on the tapes.
Those two prospectors, he thought. Damned confusing thing.
Their names, he recalled, were Harry Rosencranz and Clarence T. Reik. He had checked their dossiers back to pre-emigration days. There had been nothing of interest there: Rosencranz an ex-unemployed plumber from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Reik a cashiered instructor in guerrilla tactics from the nearby Command & General Staff School. Like so many of Earth’s castoffs, they had scraped together money to cover passage to Mars, and enough over to outfit one expedition. They had managed to subsist ever since on what scrubby topazes they could scratch out of the sands of the Great Northern Desert. With, thought Hull, no doubt a spot of smuggling to make ends meet. Duty-free Martian souvenirs into the city, and chicle for the natives out. So much for Harry Rosencranz and Clarence T. Reik, thought Gull, blowing gently on the second coat of polish and commencing to buff his nails to a soft gleam. But it was not who the prospectors were that mattered. It was what they had to say… and above all, what they had done.
Gull paused and frowned.
There was something he could not recognize in the atmosphere. A soft hint of fragrances—tantalizing—it strove to recall something to him, but he could not be sure what. A place? But what place? A girl?
He shook his head. There could be no girl here. He put the thought from his mind and returned to the two prospectors and their strange story.
Their testimony far outran the parameters of normal credibility. Gull could repeat the important parts of what they had said almost verbatim. Reik had been the more loquacious of the two—
Well, Harry was like cooking up our mulligan outside the tent when I thought I heard him yell something. I stuck—
Q. One minute, Mr. Reik. You couldn’t hear what he said clearly?
A. Well, not what you’d call clearly. You see I had the TV sound up pretty loud. Can’t hear much when you got the TV sound up pretty loud.
Q. Go on.
A. Well, I just reached out and turned off the set and stuck my neck out the flap. Geez! There it was. Big as life and twice as scary. It was a flying saucer, all right. It glowed with like a sort of pearly light that made you feel—I dunno how to say it exactly—like, peaceful.
Q. Peaceful?
A. Not only that. Good. It made me sorry I was such a rat.
Q. Go on.
A. Well, anyway, after a minute a door opened with like a kind of a musical note. F sharp, I’d say. Harry, he thought it was F natural. Well, we got to fighting over that, and then we looked up and there were these three, uh creatures, Extraterrestrials, like. They told us they had long watched the bickerings and like that of Earthmen and they had come to bring us wisdom and peace. They had this sealed book that would make us one with the Higher Creation. So we took a couple—
Q. They gave you each one?
A. Oh, no. I mean, they didn’t give them to us. They sold them to us. Twenty-five bucks apiece. We paid them in topazes.
Q. You each had to have a book?
A. Well, they only work for one person, see? I mean, if it’s anybody else’s book you can’t see it. You can’t even tell it’s there.
Gull frowned. It would be sticky trying to learn much about the book if one couldn’t see it. Still, even if the book itself were invisible, its effects were tangible indeed —or so said the account on the tapes. Reik had described his actions on entering Heliopolis:
Harry he lemme his switchblade. I stuck it right through my cheeks, here. I didn’t bleed a drop, and then I kind of levitated myself, and after a while I did the Indian Rope Trick, except since I just had my good necktie for a rope I couldn’t get far enough up to disappear. You have to get like seventy-five per cent of your body height up before you disappear.
Q. Could you disappear if you had a long enough rope?
A. Hell, yes. Only I won’t. You get to a higher cycle of psychic. Oneness like me and you don’t kid around with that stuff any more.
Q. Did you do anything else?
A. Well, not till after dinner. Then I put myself in a cataleptic trance and went to sleep. I didn’t do that any more after that, though. Catalepsy doesn’t really rest you. I was beat all the next day, but I figured, what the hell. I was still only on page seven.
Gull sighed, relit his stogie and contemplated the shimmering perfection of his nails.
And at that moment his door-chime sounded. Through the open switch of the announcer-phone came a sound of terrified sobbing and the throaty, somehow familiar voice of a frightened girclass="underline"
“Please! Open the door quickly, I ‘ave to see you. I beg you to ‘urry, Meesta Gull!”
Gull froze. He realized at once that something was amiss, for the name on his travel documents was not Gull. Steadily he considered the implications of that fact.
Someone knew his real identity.
Gull called, “One moment.” He was stalling for time, while his mind raced to cope with the problems that deduction entailed. If his identity were known, then security had been breached. If security were breached, then his mission was compromised. If his mission were compromised—
Gull grinned tightly, careless of the possible camera-eye that would even now be recording his every move. If his mission were compromised the only intelligent, safe, approved procedure would be to return to Marsport and give it up. And that, of course, was what Johan Gull would never do.
Carefully, quickly, he slid into his socks and slippers, blew on his nails to make sure they were dry and threw open the door, one hand close to the quick-draw pocket in his lounging robe where his gun awaited his need.
“Thank God,” whispered the girl at the doorway. She was lovely. A slim young blonde. Blue eyes, in which a hint of recent tears stained the eyeshadow at the corners.
Courteously Gull bowed. “Come in,” he said, closing the door behind her. “Sit down, if you will. Would you care for coffee? A drop of brandy? An ice cream?”
She shook her head and cried: “Meesta Gull, your life is in ‘ideous danger!”
Gull stroked ‘his goatee, his smile friendly and unconcerned. “Oh, come off it, my dear,” he said. “You expect me to believe that?” And yet, he mused, she was really beautiful, no more than twenty-seven, no taller than five feet three.
And the tiny ridge at the hemline of her bodice showed that she carried a flame-pencil.
“You must believe me! I ‘ave taken a frightful chance to come ‘ere!’
“Oh, yes, no doubt,” he shrugged, gazing at her narrowly. It was her beauty that had struck him at first, but there were more urgent considerations about this girl than her charms. For one thing, what was that she carried? A huge bag, perhaps; it almost seemed large enough to be a suitcase. For another—
Gull’s brows came together. There was something about her that touched a chord in his memory. Somewhere… sometime… he had seen that girl before. “Why do you come her with this fantastic story?” he demanded.
The girl began to weep. Great soft tears streamed down her face like summer raindrops on a pane. But she made no sound and her eyes were steady on his. “Meesta Gull,” she said simply, “I come ‘ere to save your life because I must. I love you.”
“Hah!”
“But it is true,” she insisted. “I love you more than life itself, Meesta Gull. More than my soul or my ‘opes of ‘Eaven. More even than my children—Kim, who is six; Marie Celeste, four; or little Patty.” She drew out a photograph and handed it to him. It showed her in a plain knitted suit, with the three children grouped around a Christmas tree.