"There were scientists present, of course?"
"Yes; you have brilliant men on Earth, Lieutenant. They are good thinkers. I am certain they were interested in me for more than the sole fact that I am an alien of a race so precisely a replica of your own. But it is again the old factor, cultural difference. Your entire world simply regards women differently than we. I imagine my request, to persons less learned than those with whom I spoke, would be quite shocking anywhere on the planet."
"Perhaps," Judith murmured. "Yet somehow I wonder. Somehow I wonder how much two hundred years has really changed us. Our history in such things is not pleasant, Kriijorl. Many of our women once gave their bodies for money. Shock us? I"m not sure you really could. For your breeders simply give their bodies to produce the flesh for war. And there was a time when we did that, too."
There was silence between them for a while, and then Lance began directing the Ihelian"s attention to points of interest as the air phase of the diplomatic tour got under way.
The blue-green beauty of the Pacific stretched lazily below them from the colorful California sh.o.r.e line to the west. Surrounding air traffic was light, and the tour proceeded smoothly eastward; over the Great Divide, and then swung north. Kriijorl seemed impressed and grateful for the momentary respite.
It was near the end of the tour"s air phase that Mason remembered Judith"s request, and Kriijorl obliged with an amused smile, producing a personal mentacom for Judith to examine.
"And the receiver simply fits about the head like earphones?"
"Like this," Kriijorl said. They were nearing Denver, and air traffic at their level had picked up, and the helio was proceeding more slowly so that Kriijorl"s demonstration caused him to miss little of the tour.
He fitted the compact headpiece to his ears and flicked a small switch. It was suddenly bathed in a warm orange glow. "This way, the device functions as a limited range mentacom," he began. And then he flicked the switch again. "And now, as a teleprobe, you see, I could tell you, Lady Judith, just what--"
She flushed furiously, but Kriijorl had suddenly stopped speaking. His face had blanched, and a look of bewildered fury was suddenly in his eyes.
"Lieutenant! That air bus! There!" He pointed to a thick egg shaped vehicle speeding to the north. "Tell your chauffeur to pursue it at once! It carries a full pa.s.senger-load of Earthwomen!"
For a moment Mason thought the Ihelian was attempting some strange joke. But a look at the man"s face told him that here was no joke; that here was something he was failing to understand.
"Earthwomen? Sure--"
"Plus two other beings, Lieutenant. Two others using Thrayxite probe screens!"
On Mason"s order the government chauffeur swiftly heeled the helio about. "Those buses can make nearly a full Mach when they"re wide open like that one," he told Kriijorl. "We can"t overtake them, but maybe we can keep up. I"ll have the chauffeur try for radio contact--"
"No, no! They"ll be alert for any signs of awareness of their presence! Wait--" The Ihelian made a third adjustment on the mentacom, and it emitted a slight humming sound, and the orange glow vanished.
"This will screen us for a short period, at least," he said. "And if we"ve not been already detected, perhaps we"ll be able to follow. If you"ll continue to help me, Lieutenant--"
"Looks as though they"ve got some of ours, doesn"t it?" Mason said evenly. There was a strange heat in his veins now, and with the Ihelian, his nervousness was somehow evaporated. "But how the devil--"
"They are clever, Lieutenant. We were somehow followed here even as we at first followed you in your Scout ship. We may have been probed before you were taken aboard our screened destroyer."
"But you said nothing about destroying _their_ breeders," Judith said above the throbbing roar of the helio"s fast accelerating jets. "Why would they want--" and she let the sentence die as comprehension snapped in her gray eyes. Her dark, slender eyebrows arched nearly together as she pushed the thought further.
The borderlands of Canada sped beneath them, and then there was pine forest, but the helio kept the fleeing bus in sight even as the shadows of a dying day crept inexorably from the east to engulf them.
And then, abruptly, the bus had started down.
"They"re hanging a neat frame on you, sir," Mason said. "Making certain you don"t get the women you ask. By kidnaping some, they plan sure as h.e.l.l to make it look as though Ihelian desperation is responsible. And bingo, your side"s in the dog house in nothing flat.
No deal!"
"They"re d.a.m.nably cunning," Kriijorl said. "It will not be the first time they have come near making utter fools of us. I can"t understand that."
"But how would they have gotten those women?" Judith asked. The helio was slanting downward, and was now less than five miles distant from the fast vanishing bus. It began to skim the tree tops of a great tract of spruce, its chauffeur awaiting Mason"s signal to drop quickly out of their quarry"s line of sight.
"Video ads, of course," Mason answered quickly, straining his tensed eyes to estimate distance in the fast gathering darkness. "Some big deal. s.p.a.celiner hostess at twice the going rate of payment. Anything like that...."
The bus finally vanished less than a half-mile ahead of Mason"s helio, and there was a dark vertical shadow jutting just above the tree tops.
He knew it was one of their shuttle boats, and from its apparent size would easily hold all the bus would be able to carry--perhaps a full three hundred. He gave orders quickly to the chauffeur, and then the helio was hovering inches above the tree tops, and he tossed a plastiweave ladder over the side.
"Don"t use the radio," he snapped to Judith. "Just get back to New-UN headquarters. Inform them any way possible of what"s going on, and then flash the air patrol and tell "em to come gunning!"
He didn"t give her a chance to argue. He simply swung over the helio"s side, Kriijorl after him, and within moments they were on the ground, and running with what silence they could through the darkness toward the towering Thrayxite ship a quarter-mile distant.
"Their action is incomprehensible to me," the Ihelian grunted between gulps of air. "It violates the most basic tenets of the ancient Book of the Saints, sacred to us both--"
"Better save your breath for running," Mason told him, and they sprinted across the soft pine needle forest floor, shielding their eyes from treacherous, low hanging boughs, dodging the trees themselves as best they could in the moonlit darkness.
And they burst upon the clearing in which the Thrayxite ship had landed almost before realizing it.
Mason caught a glimpse of Earthwomen, being led as though drugged into the yawning flank of the silent vessel.
There was a sudden movement in the darkness to his left, and he heard the start of an outcry on the Ihelian"s lips. But it was all he heard or saw. There was a quick knifing pain in his skull, and he crumpled to the ground.
III
"You may wait in here, sergeant," the New-UN orderly said. She was ushered into a small, comfortably appointed chamber adjoining the main conference hall, and the perfectly controlled coolness of her bearing was at its peak. To the casual glance of the orderly, perhaps, it flawlessly masked the vital convictions which had long seethed within her and made her the little known woman she was. The studied mask itself had made her the efficient s.p.a.ce officer she was. And at the moment she was glad for it, because it also concealed the anxious uncertainty that twisted coldly inside her.
She was to wait, the Council had informed her. Wait, while the information she had given them was a.n.a.lyzed, digested. As though, perhaps, what she had said was part of some insidious plot; as though it were too fantastic to be the truth.
They had not even immediately authorized the dispatch of a patrol cruiser to the spot where she"d left Lance and Kriijorl over two hours ago, and by now--?
She tried not to think or what the Earthman and the Ihelian might be facing, alone and in the darkness. Nor of the conclusions to which the Council, called into emergency session by the President General himself when her information had been rapidly relayed through the correct channels to him, might arrive.
She could only wait.
And her waiting was terminated with an abrupt suddenness that made the twisting cold thing inside her a churning confusion. It had been only minutes, hardly minutes.
Only one of them came into the small room where she sat. She rose quickly to attention. It was an aide to the President General himself; a brevet-Colonel wearing the uniform of the World Police.
"Sergeant Kent," he said, "it is the Council"s decision that you be placed under temporary arrest. Your case will be heard at the next sitting of the martial court to which your unit is a.s.signed. If you will accompany me, please...."
"May I ask, sir, what the charge against me is?" Her voice was steady by cultivated habit.
"You are to be held on suspicion of acting as accessory before and after the fact of conspiring to a.s.sist an alien power in the achievement of its objective within the governmental jurisdiction of Earth without official permission of the New United Nations."
"But the Ihelians have not done that, sir!" she protested. "It is a plot of their enemy, as I explained to the Council--"
"You will be given full benefit of due legal process, sergeant," the officer said. "You will come with me, please."
The Women"s Detainment Barrack was not unpleasant, yet, Judith thought, it may as well have been a medieval dungeon. But her own problem, she knew, was nothing beside the cunning success of the Thrayxites.