Color Me Deadly
Fantasy & Science Fiction – October 1973
(1973)*
Randall Garrett

	The hiss and glare of the infrabeam, cutting through the moonlit darkness a few centimeters from my head, would have made me jerk aside if I hadn't been ready for it. The beam cut into an evergreen four meters behind me; the dark exploded off in a gout of steam and flame, filling the air with a heady, spicy gust of partially burnt, partially vaporized resin from the Monterey pine that the beam had slashed.

	I stayed motionless behind my rock, wishing to hell I were somewhere else. My left cheek was warm and tingling from the side radiation of the beam.

	If you've never seen any infrared laser beam more powerful than an ordinary handgun, you may be wondering about that flash of light and heat. IR is invisible and inaudible, as any fool knows. Sure. But what the fools don't take into account is that an infrared laser beam of sufficient power to cut through trees and melt stone throws out a devil of a lot more energy than a handgun.

	A handgun can kill a man because the IR radiation, in a beam eight millimeters in diameter, chars the surface and cooks the flesh to a depth of better than twenty centimeters. But that doesn't take much power.

	The beast that was firing at me was a semiportable projector, massing better than a hundred kilos, with all kinds of power behind it. The infrared coming out of the damned thing had enough joules pushing it to heat the air in its path to instant visibility.

	And unless the men operating that semiportable had floaters on it—an unlikely possibility—they weren't going to be able to move it too quickly.

	In the sudden darkness that followed the glare of the beam, I rolled away from my boulder to a clump of smaller rocks some four meters away. I just barely made it. The semiportable hissed and glared again, superheating the air and blazing off the boulder I had just deserted, splashing molten minerals all over the place. The rock cracked violently from the internal stresses caused by the sudden influx of unbearable heat.

	The glare died, leaving only a floating fingernail of moon to illuminate the brush-filled landscape.

	I rolled again. A second semiportable opened up almost immediately from a position some fifteen meters to the left of the first, slapping that boulder with another dose of high-energy heat radiation. They had had me spotted all right.

	When the incandescence died, I rolled farther away. No need to be quiet; the rustling of my movements was drowned out by the splitting of breaking rock and the crackling of burning wood. It was a good thing that this was January and the rains had soaked the area; otherwise, Mission Canyon would soon be in a blaze that would threaten Santa Barbara and points south—maybe all the way to Los Angeles if those semi portables had kept smashing away in a summer forest Los Padres National Forest was noted for its ability to blaze up dangerously if the season was right But the chuckleheads behind those heavy-duty lasers had thwarted themselves. They'd spotted me with an infrared detector and had then proceeded to make enough high-temperature radiation centers in the neighborhood to drown out my feeble output completely.

	Yo, ho, ho. I lobbed half my grenades and my communicator over behind the boulder they were firing at the communicator had a two-second time switch on it, and when it landed behind that nearly red-hot rock, it began screaming for help.

	Of course, their own communicators picked it up, and this time, not one or two, but three semiportables hit it as one.

	The boulder dissolved in a hellish splash of lava, and the grenades went off with a tremendous roar.

	I felt the detonation, but I didn't see it; by that time I was rolling down a forty-five degree slope toward the bottom of the shallow gulch nearby, putting plenty of earth and rock between myself and the explosion. Even so, the supersonic vibrations of the shock wave from the polarized detonate was enough to addle my brain for a few seconds, and it must have really jarred my opponents.

	The cold shock of the water running through the bottom of the ravine brought me out of my daze with a snap. Water at five degrees Celsius is not too comfortable as a bath, even if only your face and hands get it. The thermal watetproof coverall I was wearing protected the rest of my body.

	I pushed myself erect and started slogging down the bed of Mission Creek toward Santa Barbara. I hadn't left any footprints getting away from my boulder, and I didn't intend to leave any now. The rocky bottom of Mission Creek was difficult to navigate, but I wouldn't have left much trace on it if it had been dry,' and the icy water would wash away anything I left behind now.

	I must have walked a full half kilometer before I began to feel the bruises that my roll down that rocky slope had imprinted on my body, but by the time I had precariously navigated the two-plus kilometers to where my own car was parked, I felt as though someone had massaged me, far from gently, with a couple of one-kolo single-jack hammers.

	My car was still parked where I'd left it, on Foothill Road near the Mission. It didn't look as though it had been disturbed or even noticed, but I got out my instrument pack and stayed in the shadows while I checked for a trap, while the fingernail moon slowly settled toward the horizon.

	The car they had traced me by was one I had stolen on San Roque Road earlier in the evening. I'd driven it up the old Lauro Canyon Road toward South Portal and abandoned it to give them a clue. Clues leading up the canyon, I needed; clues leading back down, I didn't.

	Everything seemed clear. I moved quietly, keeping in the'' shadows of the now moonless night. The air was chilly, and a fog was blowing in, bringing with it the aroma of the Pacific coast—salt and dead sea-things from the; beach.

	I spent fifteen minutes circling in on the car, watching my instruments all the way except when I was eyeballing the terrain. Nothing. Safe as a stasis field.

	Finally, I casually opened the door, climbed in, and hit the firing switch. Within five seconds, I had plenty of steam pressure; I eased her into gear and moved out. Nothing moved; nothing stirred;! nothing showed on my detectors. I was off and away. I headed west toward U,S. Freeway 101.

	When I came to the on-ramp. I turned on the autoguide and let the Freeway Computer take over the control of the car. The FC took hold, and the car began moving north at a tightly controlled hundred-and-fifty kilometers per hour.

	I moved over to the right-hand seat and started shucking my coveralls. They had been damned useful out in the cold, wet woods, but they might look freaky elsewhere—like an Eskimo in parka and mukluks strolling into an expensive Virgin Islands hotel.

	I put on a comfortable, conservative, royal blue tunic-and-kilt business suit, turned on the TV to a music program, leaned back and went to sleep. I felt that I deserved it.

	"... AND NOW THE NEWS! A SPECIAL BULLETIN FROM SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, ISSUED BY THE ..."

	The voice woke me up. I turned down the volume a little. A glance at the trip indicator told me I was well past Paso Robles, which meant I'd been napping more than an hour.

	The voice of the newscaster continued in a more subdued tone.

	"... o'clock this evening in a stolen car which was spotted by alert Santa Barbara police. For the past two days, this California town has been the center of an intensive search by U.N. Special Forces, with the aid of Federal, state, and local police, trying to locate and apprehend the alien being who stepped out of the first interstellar ship to return to Earth just five days ago."

	Apprehend! Ferddrech! They wanted to kill me, pure and simple.

	"The alien fled into the forest just south of the Santa Ynez mountains. After abandoning his car, he kept going on foot, but he was finally surrounded. He was ordered to surrender, but he fired back and was killed during the fire fight that ensued."

	The newsman's face was replaced by a shot of the landing pad at Vandenberg Spaceport, where the pinnace from the Neil Armstrong was still standing where I'd set it down five days before.

	"When the alien stepped out of the landing craft, it apparently used some sort of device to jam the electronic circuits in the television cameras, and so there is no record of what it looked like. Even eyewitness accounts of its appearance vary so widely that no description of the alien is possible."

	I got a small chuckle out of that line. I had been wondering what excuse they'd give for not even looking at me when I came out of the hatch.

	"Official sources," the newsie blithered on, "state that at this time it is impossible to determine the exact location of the Neil Armstrong. It did not go into an Earth orbit when the pinnace dropped from it, and the satellite tracking stations can get no fix. One high official has expressed doubt that the interstellar ship from which the pinnace was launched was actually the Neil Armstrong, strongly suggesting that it might be an alien ship."

	The rest of the newscast was the usual blah, but I watched it because I hadn't yet picked up all the little nuances in the differences between this world and the one I had left. Five days is not quite long enough for that much reorientation, even with an expanded mind.

	When the newscast was over, I relaxed and went back to sleep.

-

	The alarm roared in my ears, snapping me out of sleep almost instantly. I started to slap the cutout plate, then stopped. I wanted to hear the warning. Ahead, a hologram sign told me that I was approaching the Silver Avenue turnoff, which was the one I had programmed for. I was headed into the southern part of San Francisco.

	The warning came. The speaker said: "Warning One. You are approaching Silver Avenue, your programmed departure point from Speedway One Oh One. If you wish to reprogram, you have one minute from the signal tone. If net, you will be prepared to take manual control three minutes after the signal tone. PING!"

	I slapped the cutout plate just to show the computer that I was awake and functioning. No need to wait for Warning Two, which would tell me that if I didn't take over manual control when the signal came, I would be detoured into a detention lot, where a cop would give me a ticket for ignoring the warning.

	I drove around until I spotted a phone kiosk. I parked the car and walked back to the kiosk. I fed the phone a couple of coins, punched the information number and waited for the light signal on the screen. When it came, I punched for" "Dominguez" with the hope that the man I was looking for wasn't dead or simply gone from the area.

	The list appeared on the screen. I looked for "Richard Heinrich" and found it. Had to be the same man; not many people named Dominguez with a pair of front handles like that. The phone number had changed, but the house address was the same.

	I got my coins back, put them in again and punched the number—-and put my hand over the vision pickup.

	A voice said, "Dominguez residence." I recognized the voice. "Sorry," I said. "Wrong number." I cut off and went back to my car.

	Ten minutes' driving took me to the house on Folsom, on the south side of Bernal Hill, a plush residential district.

	I parked the car half a block away and looked at the house. There were lights on, and I could see signs of movement through the heavy translucent panes of the windows. It seemed right; Dr. Dominguez was still up and lively at oh four hundred.

	Well, hell, you cain't lose nothin' by tryin'.

	I climbed out of the car, locked it and marched resolutely to the door of the house. I touched the announcer plate. After a moment, the most luscious—in fact, the only—blonde I had seen in years came on the screen in the door. 

	"Yes?" she asked sweetly. 

	"Would you tell Dr. Dominguez that Edward Chang would like to speak to him? He knew my father."

	"One moment, Mr. Chang, I'll see." The screen blanked.

	When it came on again, I got my first temporal displacement shock. Dominguez was still tough and hard-looking, and his eyes still had that sardonically humorous sparkle, but the lines in his face were more numerous and etched more deeply, and his handlebar mustache was gray. So were his sideburns. His eyes widened a trifle as he saw my face. "Edward Chang?"

	"Yes, sir," I said. "I understand you knew my father."

	"You're Terry Chang's kid?" The smile came back to his eyes.

	"Yes, sir."

	"I'd have known," he said. "You're an absolute replica of Terry. Come on in."

	The door clicked softly and swung open. I entered a short hallway which was decorated by the blonde I had seen on the screen. ."Mr. Chang, come in," she said.

	I had taken four paces forward when the voice behind me said, "Hold it, Mr. Chang. Don't move." I came to a neat military halt and clasped my hands behind my head.

	"You have a nice voice, ma'am," I told the woman behind me. "I'll be real happy to obey any order you give."

	"Did you notice that, Dorothy?" the voice said, ignoring me.

	The blonde nodded curtly. "He began to come to a halt and raise his hands a fraction of a second before you spoke."

	"Shucks, ma'am," I said, "that panel doesn't make much noise, but I heard it open."

	"Interesting," said the voice. "Search him, Dorothy." Then, as the blonde came toward me, the voice added: "If you give Dorothy any trouble whatever, Mr. Chang, I will shoot you."

	Dorothy began checking my clothing and body thoroughly. By the time she was through, she had checked every place a human being could carry anything larger than a pen.

	"He's clean, Clara," she said.

	"Clara," I said, "you can put away the stun pistol now."

	"What makes you think I couldn't have blasted you dead?" said the cool Clara.

	I turned slowly around to face her. The stun pistol was at her side, not pointing at me. One does not traditionally expect stunning blue-eyed redheads to be cool and calm, but this one was.

	"Because you don't sound or look stupid enough to allow Dorothy to get that near the target of a deadly weapon, and she doesn't sound or look stupid enough to risk it," I said.

	She grinned suddenly. "All right, let's go up and see the doctor."

	We went out of the corridor, turned right and went up a flight of stairs, single file all the way. Dorothy opened a door and stood aside. I walked on into Dominguez' study.

	"Mr. Chang, Doctor," Clara said. "He's clean."

	Dominguez, sitting behind eighteen square feet of jet-black desk top, grinned up at me, but his words were for Clara. "If he shares anything with his father besides an almost identical face, I wouldn't bet on that. Terrance Chang could conceal an umbrella in his umbilicus." Then, to me: "Are you clean, boy?" 

	"Yes, sir."

	"I believe you." To the girls: "Leave us, my ladies, we have things to mutter over, I think."

	"But—" was all Clara got out.

	"Go, mi palomacita." he said gently, "and stand not upon the ceremony of thy going, but go."

	They went.

	Dr. Dominguez leaned back in his chair and looked up at me. He gestured. "Sit down, my boy, relax. Your father and I were great friends, you know. Care for a drink."

	"I know. Yes, a Marguerita." 

	A big finger tapped a switch. "Margueritas," he said.

	The room was big enough to be operational and small enough to be comfortable—six meters by ten, at; a shrewd guess. There was the faint but unmistakable aroma of frank-. incense hanging about the pale-blue sound-absorbing walls.

	"Your father," Dominguez said smoothly, "was one of the great heroes of his generation. I knew him well. However—" He made a casual gesture with his left hand., "—I never heard him mention a son."

	"It was an unhappy liaison," I said. "Apparently, my father cared more for space than he did for my mother."

	The blonde Dorothy brought in the drinks and retired silently.

	"You have a good staff," I commented quietly.

	He chuckled. "I thank you for the implied compliment, my boy, but curb your rampant imagination. Both of them are trained nurses; Clara also has an M.D. tacked after her name. She also happens to be my wife. Dorothy is my daughter by a previous marriage."

	"I see," I said.

	"Sure," he said blandly. "You remember Silverlocks."

	Temporal displacement shock again, in spite of the training my nervous system had undergone. "Silverlocks?"

	"Don't try to con an old con man, my boy," Dominguez said with a broad smile. "You haven't aged much, but I have the feeling you've changed more than I have in twenty years. But it hasn't been twenty years for you, has it?"

	"Closer to five," I admitted. "I wasn't trying to con you; I was just being cautious. So platinum-blonde Baby Silverlocks has grown up to be golden-blonde Dorothy. I approve."

	"Naturally." He leaned back in his chair and stroked his heavy mustache with a thick finger while he searched my eyes with his own. I caught a flicker of high-speed computing from his mind, but I didn't probe.

	"I'm playing detective, Terry," he said after a moment He grinned. "It's a fun-game. You are, of course, the mysterious alien that nobody can describe or get pics of—if I can believe the newscasts. And you're also very dead—again, if I can believe the newscasts. Deduction: I can believe part of the newscasts part of the time, but ..." He turned a hand palm up, shrugged, and let the sentence hang.

	"That's not a deduction, Don Ricardo," I told him. "That is a self-evident truth that has been basic to human knowledge ever since the early hominids invented speech. Try again."

	"Spare me. I haven't matched wits with you for twenty years, remember. And it's been close to five for you, you say? How does that compute?"

	"Eight years and nine months out at an average velocity of point nine-nine C. Ship time, one year and thirty-six days. Double that for the trip back and add the two and a half years we spent exploring the Sirius system. Those are rough figures, but I'm not going to quote the log to you."

	"Many thanks; I'm a medicine man, not a spaceman. Now you will kindly explain to me why you and the nine other people who crewed the Neil Armstrong aren't enjoying parades and state dinners and medals and all the rest of that deadly hullabaloo? And don't tell me you are all modest."

	I laughed. I had to. What I wanted to do was go to the south window and look out at the lights of the city of San Francisco and take a few minutes to recheck my decisions about how much to tell Dominguez—how much truth, how much lie, and how much silence. "It isn't modesty; it's caution." I stood up and walked slowly toward the window talking as I moved. "We found something ... out there." Outside the window, bright Sirius hung low over the mountains to the south. I turned back to face Dominguez. "I came down to reconnoiter; the rest are waiting in the Armstrong." I paused, then asked a sudden question. "How many interstellar expeditions have there been?"

	"Three," he said. "The Yuri Gagarin left for Alpha Centauri twenty-nine years ago and hasn't been heard from since. Then your outfit headed for Sirius. Nine years ago, the Martin Cooper headed for Tau Ceti."

	"And we're the first ones back. Right?"

	"Sure. The Tau Ceti expedition hasn't even gotten there yet"

	I sat down in the chair again. "Forget Tau Ceti," I said. "They don't even enter into the picture as far as I know. Besides, Tau Ceti is a hell of a long way from Alpha Centauri, but Sirius is only about ten light-years from Alpha Centauri."

	Dominguez was looking at me with an expression of utter incomprehension, but he didn't ask any questions.

	"I can't tell you everything, Don Ricardo; it would be too dangerous for both of us. You're going to have to take a hell of a lot on faith."

	His dark gray-green eyes narrowed. "Sure. Faith. Now let's get back to Alpha Centauri. How does that tie in with your expedition?"

	"We don't believe that we are the first expedition back," I told him. "We have reason to believe that the Yuri Gagarin returned to the Solar System about a dozen years ago. But the crew were not human—any more."

	His face didn't change. "All right. I guess I can believe that. But if we on Earth haven't heard anything about the Yuri Gagarin, how did you get the news when you were damn near nine light-years away?"

	"Would you believe telepathy?" 

	"Sure: I'll believe anything." 

	"Then you go ahead and believe telepathy," I told him.

	Dominguez reached over to his pipe rack and selected a pipe. "What is this 'something' you found out there?" he asked as he filled it.

	"I can't tell you that, Rick, not yet"

	He picked up a pipe lighter and applied the flame to the tobacco. Not until he had puffed the pipe into a satisfactory state of combustion was he ready to ask his next question. "Do you know where the Yuri Gagarin is right now?"

	"Except that it is somewhere in the Solar System," I said, "and probably in an orbit somewhere between here and Mars, I haven't the least notion."

	"Then where is the Neil Armstrong?"

	"I can't tell you that," I said with a sigh.

	He clamped down—not too hard—on his amber pipestem. "Terry," he said through his teeth, "just what the hell did you come to me for, anyway?"

	"I need your help, Don Ricardo."

	"Another question. How did you manage that trick when you climbed out of the landing craft? I mean the business of setting things up so that there were no photos and no description? How did you disguise yourself as a—a bug-eyed monster?"

	"I didn't exactly," I said. "I'll tell you about that sometime, but now just now."

	He rose—suddenly but smoothly—to his feet. A hundred twenty kilos of mass and a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters of height, he outmassed me by twenty kilos and topped me by ten centimeters. As someone had once said about him, "He looms awful heavy."

	"You said you want me to help you," he said. "How?"

	"Lend me about five thousand; give me that antique .44 Magnum of yours with fifty rounds of ammo; help me forge some papers so I can move around; and lend me either your wife or your daughter for forty-eight hours."

	He stared down at me, eyes wide and then looked up at the ceiling. "Damn it, Terry, this is ridiculous! Twenty years ago, I could trust you implicitly. Down deep, God help me, I still do. But the logical, rational part of my mind tells me I'd better watch you like a Dakin cell watches a fusion generator."

	"Go ahead and watch me," I said. I unlatched my tunic, let it drop to the deck and shucked my shirt.

	He ignored me. "But you won't tell me anything; you hint at stuff you can't prove; you refuse to answer my questions. Frankly, this is the flakiest story I've heard since my grandmother told me that the way I came into this world was as a special worm in an agave plant. I grew up feeling I should have been a bottle of pulque."

	I unbuckled my kilt, dropped it and slid out of my shorts. "Look at me and tell me I'm a liar," I said.

	"I am looking at you," he growled, "and I don't think you're a liar." He continued his pacing. "I think I need more information before I go out on a damn fragile limb!"

	I took off my socks and boots. "You can risk it if you keep your eye on me." I told him.

	"Oh, I will. I will But you can't—" He stopped, staring out the south window at Sirius. "How did you know that I still have that old .44 Magnum automatic?" he asked softly.

	Stark naked I climbed up on top of his desk and assumed the lotus position. "You are too smart to lose it, too shrewd to allow it to be stolen, and you loved it too much to sell it. Conclusion: you still have it." I released him.

	He swung around to face me. "Dammit, Terry—" He gave me a glass-eyed stare and gawped. "What the hell?" he asked weakly.

	"You said you were watching me," I told him.

	"I was. I did," he said, still flabbergasted.

	I climbed down off the desk and started putting my clothes on.

	"You did not," I told him flatly. "You never looked at me once."

	He sat down rather heavily in his chair. "How did you do that?" he asked.

	"It's a little trick I learned out Sirius way. It's not telepathy; I'm not reading your mind or anything like that. Think of it as the brain sending out a message to other brains in the vicinity that gives them a subconscious urge to avoid looking at the person who's doing the broadcasting. You asked me how I 'disguised' myself as an alien. Well, that's it. No disguise necessary; nobody could describe me because nobody looked at me. The television men couldn't even focus their cameras on me."

	"Now that I know about the effect," he said, "wouldn't it be possible to overcome it, to resist it?"

	"Sure, you could stare straight at me, but you would become uncomfortable and embarrassed as if you were staring at someone with; a disfigured face. Want to try it?"

	"No. Later, maybe. Not now." He drummed four blunt, heavy fingertips on his desk for a moment. Then he said, "Terry, about the crew of the Yuri Gagarin. You said they aren't human any more. Are they dangerous? Where are they?"

	"I think they're dangerous, and; they're on Earth. They know I'm here, and they know I am as dangerous to them as they are to Earth. They may or may not think I'm dead, but I have to assume they don't. I'm going after them."

	"And you want five thousand, a gun, some forged papers, and Clara."

	"Or Dorothy."

	"Clara. She's tougher, harder, more experienced. And I'm going with you."

	I shook my head. "You're doing no such of a damn fool thing. You know too much. You'd radiate it all over the place. If you got within two meters of one of them, he'd have your skull picked dry in no time. It will be risky enough with Clara, but she won't know anything except the carefully concocted lies we feed her."

	He was lighting his pipe again. "Then they do read minds?" 

	"And worse."

	"Dammit!" he snapped, "the whole picture is as fuzzy as a wooly-bear caterpillar! I don't know a damn thing, and you tell me I know too much. Well, I'll tell you right now that I know better than to go in on any such vague scheme without further information!"

	It took me three more hours to convince him that things had to be done my way, and I was afraid I had told him entirely too much by then. It couldn't be helped. No way. During the next four days, Dominguez and I fought and talked in private, while he called me "son" in front of his wife and daughter.

	I kept an eye on the newscasts. Even after the alleged death of the "alien," there .was a lot of speculation about the fate of the Neil Armstrong. World Wide Television seemed particularly hot on chattering and blithering about the Sirius expedition. Not one word was said about the Alpha Centauri expedition, and only a few minor mentions of the Tau Ceti ship.

	KWWT San Francisco even put on some twenty-year-old pics of the Armstrong's crew—including me, of course. But the only pic they had, evidently, was a bad one of me inside my space helmet. A few small changes in my face, and I'd be unrecognizable. Sure, I'd still look Oriental, but they couldn't go around trying to check every gentleman of the Chinese persuasion in San Francisco.

	On the afternoon of the third day, I was sitting in a lounger, staring at a convenient wall, when Dorothy walked in with a glass of wine in each hand. Without tilting either glass, she crossed her lovely legs and flowed into a semilotus in front of me. I pulled my eyes down and looked at her. She held out one of the glasses.

	"Charles Krug, Cabernet Sauvignon '24," she said softly.

	I took the glass wordlessly and tried a sip. It was marvelous and I told her so.

	"I thought you might like it," she said, looking at me with her royal-blue eyes. "Chang, you have termites."

	I must have blinked. "Termites?"

	She gestured with the glass. "Termites. Something's eating your basic wood."

	Languages change; we hadn't said it that way the last time that I was on Earth. But I understood.

	"Nothing serious," I told her. "Just rolling things over."

	She looked down at her glass. "Drek." she said. "Pure unadulterated drek. Talk to me." Those royal-blue eyes focused on me again. "If you don't let it go, it's really going to get under your bark."

	There was a wave of temporal displacement again. Le#an had warned me about it, but Le#an couldn't cover everything. (The consonant I represent as a "#" has no counterpart, insofar as I know, in any human language. It's something between a uvular "R" and an English "TH" unsounded—with a lot of gurgling saliva.)

	I remembered Dorothy as a baby. Six years ago. And now she was an adult, warm, human female. A generation's difference reduced to nothing.

	She reached out suddenly and put her hand on mine. "Sorry, love. Can't you talk about it?"

	I think I swallowed. I know my mouth had gone dry. "No. Not yet."

	"Can you talk about why you can't talk about it?"

	I pulled my hand out from under hers and stood up. "No," I said, "I can't.'' I walked over to the window and stared out at the night sky. Sirius hovered near the horizon. I hadn't realized it was so late.

	All she said was: "Mind if I turn on the news, love?"

	"No," I said without turning. "No. Of course not."

	The voice came on quickly and smoothly. I didn't turn.

	"... in Zanzibar, following the death of an estimated forty persons today. The rioting was analyzed this morning by Dr. Ian Bruner at the London University Sociometric Studies Group ..."

	Gug. Twenty years hadn't changed a damn thing. Human beings were still behaving like absolute idiots. Surrounded by a hostile Universe, they'd still rather kick each other's heads in than look at the Galaxy around them.

	Out there, beyond the sky, were a thousand million stars. Other races—some older, some younger than man—were struggling to reach beyond the apparent sky that held them in. Earthmen had made three tries and given up. Back in the late Twentieth Century, they had done the same thing: a few trips to the moon and then—forget it. A half dozen robot ships to the outer planets and nothing else.

	If it hadn't been for the Bending Converter, combined with the Sanders Field Scoop, no one would have thought of trying for the stars. And even so, after three tries, the fools had given up.

	"... and tonight, an ultimatum by Baron Munreis, concerning the finances of Tunning Enterprises ...

	Blither, blather, burble. Worse than children. Slightly overdeveloped animals. Maybe they weren't worth saving, but something had to be done to prevent the things of Alpha Centauri III from reaching the Sirian system.

	I turned away from the window to look at the screen. Some sort of demonstration was taking place in Denver.

	"... the Right Reverend Rabbi Israel Agmont said that he and Father Ettick will continue to establish commune congregations within the limits of the court order, but in Denver ..."

	The newscast went on, but I didn't pay any attention. The voices and sounds had become a flow of meaningless noise, and the picture had become a play of dancing, shifting shadow-and-light patterns of color. Somewhere in there, Doc Dominguez came in the room, but I paid no attention to him, either. He said something that I don't remember. He was still talking when my eyes closed.

	"Wake up, Terry. Wake up, love." The voice was soft.

	Something warm and gentle was caressing my cheek. "Come on now, wake up."

	I eased my eyes open. Dorothy was stroking my cheek with her fingertips. I had never been awakened so delightfully before.

	The TV wallplate was dead, and the lights had been turned down low. "Sorry," I said. "I must have dozed off."

	"Yes. I let you sleep awhile."

	Her mouth was so close to mine that my reaction was almost automatic. I put my palms to her cheeks, brought her head forward and kissed her. Her co-operation was enthusiastic and profound.

	Minutes later, she said, "Come on now, love. It's time to go to bed."

	I got very little sleep that night. When I woke up, the sun was glaring brightly through the bedroom window. I winced, then rolled over to look at the clock. 

	1150. Yeeps!

	I got up and headed for the fresher in a sleep-dazed fog.

	It wasn't until I was relaxing in the warm dryer that memory came flooding back. I stomped out, got dressed fast, and went downstairs to Dominguez' study. He wasn't there, naturally; he was down on the ground floor, where the lab and office were, looking at patients. So were Clara and Dorothy. Business as usual. Crap.

	I went into the study and started checking through his reference books. There were several hundred books lining the walls, but the sections weren't labeled, and I had to search for the psych books.

	It was a book I'd never heard of before, since it was only five years old, according to the copyright date, but I knew immediately that it was the book I wanted.

	Sex Magick and the Mind, by J. D. Klecs. M.D., Ph.D., Pn.Ch.

	There was a bookmark in it, and so I flipped it open to the marked page. On the bookmark was written:

	Old pal your ingenuity should have led you to this book. The section you seek begins on this page. Good luck. RHD.

	My emotional level at that point was at a slow seethe. But I read the five pertinent pages.

	Dominguez came into the study at precisely 1230 hours. I was still on low simmer. He was carrying a tray with food on it.

	"Time to eat, my boy. Never get mad on an empty stomach, son; it upsets the metabolic processes and ruins your digestion."

	"I don't like anyone stirring around in my mind," I said as coldly as I could. "I don't like anybody taking things out of it or putting things in—except me."

	"Then get mad at the Sirians, not me." He put my breakfast on a corner of the desk and took his own lunch around to the other side so he could sit in his chair.

	After a sip of hot coffee, he looked at me and said, "Now let's get one thing straight, son. I didn't take anything out of your mind. Nothing. Not even information. Do you know what happened?"

	"You mean about last night?"

	"Certainly, last night. Before and during the newscast."

	"Well, I was talking to Dorothy. She asked if she could turn on the news. I said sure, why not. I began to get a sort of detached feeling—as though I wasn't part of the human race, just an observer. It was as though I were floating face-down on the surface of a clear sea, moving up and down on gentle swells, watching the queer creatures on the bottom."

	Dominguez nodded with a definitely satisfied air. "Ee-yup. Exactly. I saw you and got a hunch. I went downstairs and eavesdropped on your alpha waves. You, son, were in a state of acute meditation. I unashamedly took advantage of it."

	I gestured toward the bookcase. "With magick?"

	"Call it magick. Call if psionics. Call it superhypnotism. You may call it Ermintrude, if you wish. I don't know what you learned out Sirius way, but you might be surprised to learn that we poor simple humans have learned a lot about our own minds in the past twenty years. Do you know what pulled your mind out of contact?"

	"Sure," I told him. "Dorothy sensed that I had something on my mind and wanted me to talk about it. I told her I couldn't Then she said, 'Can you talk about why you can't talk about?' And I couldn't do that either. So I got to wondering why I couldn't talk about why I couldn't talk about ..."

	"Can you talk about it now?"

	"I think so. Apparently Le#an was a little too cautious."

	He bunked. "Who?"

	"Le#an. Our—uh—mentor on Do*ar."

	Dominguez grinned. "That sounds cute. Do*ar. With a Bantu click, yet." His face faded. "Planet, I assume."

	"Only habitable planet Sirius has—if you don't mind a summer temperature of one-ten Celsius in the tropic zone and a UV input that'll give you second-degree burns in four minutes."

	"And what does this Legchan—" He gave it a Germanic ch.

	"Le#an," I corrected him. "But you're close."

	"What does he look like?"

	"Humanoid," I said. "That is, if you consider a being that looks like a hairless cross between a chimpanzee and an aardvark to be humanoid."

	"As a physician," he said, "I wish I had him here for a physical checkup. Him? Was it a him?"

	I swallowed an egg-and-bacon mouthful and said, "No. It ain't a him, if s a her. Le#an is of the child-bearing gender."

	"Pray tell me more about these Do*arians, dear boy."

	"Physically? Aside from the fact that they range between a hundred and ten and a hundred and forty centimeters in height, have a body temperature of fifty-seven point three degrees Celsius, and have fire-engine-red skin, I can't tell you much. I didn't perform any autopsies."

	"Pity," he murmured. "Tell me the rest of it"

	"Only the important parts," I told him. I paused. "Can you imagine a meaner, tougher, more aggressive, nastier race of beings than the human race."

	"With difficulty, yes."

	"Very well, add on to that a total disregard for any other life form. Think of a race of beings that actively hates any other form of life that displays what we call intelligence."

	Dominguez was stoking up his pipe. "Sounds human to me. Remember when you were in school and every stupid clod who knew that you were brighter than he wanted to kick your head in? Remember the people who wanted to kill off the dolphin and the sea otter, just because they displayed something approaching human intelligence?"

	"All right. Just consider them human beings cranked up a couple of notches nastier."

	"You're not talking about the Do*arians. now, are you?" he asked.

	"No, fughead, of course I'm not. I'm talking about those bastards from Alpha Centauri and about what they did to the crew of the Yuri Gagarin."

	I was beginning to enjoy the conversation, and so was he. It was like the old days, except that the "old days" were twenty years in his past and only six in mine.

	"When the Yuri Gagarin found a planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri A," I said, "they sent down a pinnace. Two of the crewmen were nabbed, and their minds were—changed. They went back up to the orbiting Gagarin and ..."

	"And they put a hex on the other eight. But why?"

	"Technology," I told him. "We have a sublight drive now and are on the verge of getting a faster-than. They want to go out exploring—and they have a conquer-and-despoil complex in their minds that would make the old Spanish conquistadors look like Quakers."

	"Then why come here? Why not just take apart the Yuri Gagarin, see what makes it tick and go about their business? Pry the info out of the crew's minds, if necessary. Why send them back home?"

	"Technology," I repeated. "They haven't even discovered radioactivity yet, much less atomic and nuclear physics. Apparently, their planet is unified and run something like Brave New World or 1984. We wouldn't care for it. They have psionics down to a fine art. Not levitation or precognition or teleportation, but the more subtle mental areas. They can pry your mind open and restock it as they want.

	"But they don't know a damn thing about relativity theory, and they don't even know about the electromagnetic spectrum. Computer theory, ditto. They have a well-run, highly efficient agrarian society that has basic powered industry without ever having had an industrial revolution. They—"

	"Just a second," he interrupted. "Where did you learn all this?"

	"Basically, from Le#an"

	He slitted his eyes. "And where did she get it?"

	"I asked you if you'd believe telepathy, remember?"

	"Sure, I remember. And I said I'd believe it. Now tell me what it really is and how it works, and I'll believe that, too."

	"Gimme cigarette, Pancho Villa, and I tell all," I said. We had to keep it light at that point, and we both knew it.

	"I'm sorry, senor, but you no smoke, anyhow, and eef you no tell me facts pretty damn queek, I keel you."

	I could have stopped him. By the time he had that .44 Magnum out from under his desk and pointed it at me, I could have paralyzed his right arm so stiff he couldn't have moved it. Instead, I held control of his trigger finger, and pretended I hadn't even noticed the big heavy pistol.

	"Let's take three races of sentient beings of reasonably high intelligence. Call them Sirians, Centaurians and Solarians, just so we can avoid juggling around alien words.

	"Mentally, these three races have developed in different, almost divergent ways. And yet, each one has at least one area it can share with at least one of the other two. The Solarians and the Centaurians both study the material universe, although we are technologically far ahead of them. The Sirians just accepted the universe as it is and made no attempt to find out anything about it except for the pragmatic, empirical knowledge that any living thing needs to know in order to exist. Cats and dogs don't need to know anything about genetics in order to reproduce; they don't need to know anything about redox equations to avoid fire; they don't need to know anything about four-dim matrix grav formulas to know how to jump around and to avoid cliff edges; they don't need to know anything about medicine to heal their bodies.

	"The Centaurians are like the Sirians, in that they have put a great deal more emphasis on mental development than on the physical. But morally they aren't worth two hoots in hell. Are you following me so far?"

	"To a hairline," he said.

	For the first time, I looked down at that .44 Magnum barrel. "Not to a hairline," I said. "About three and a half centimeters below it."

	The gun wavered for the first time, then centered again.

	I looked back up to his eyes. "Still games? Then I'll go on. You have to know one thing: Am I alien or not? And all this yammer isn't going to prove a damn thing, is it? No.

	"So shoot me."

	I said that and waited.

	"Ah." The gun didn't move. "Good question, Terry, my boy. What can you do to prove you aren't? Answer? Damnifino. As I have said several times now, this is the flakiest story anybody ever heard. You have convinced me that something happened to you out there—something that changed the way your mind operates. But that's damn well all I know!"

	"So shoot me."

-

	The gun felt heavy in my hand, but it didn't waver. Beyond the muzzle, Terry was just looking at me with those hard brown eyes of his. There was no doubt in my mind; he—or whatever was possessing him—was relying on our friendship of twenty years before to keep me from squeezing that trigger.

	If we had seen each other often during that twenty years, it might have been different. But two decades is a long time without reinforcement, and the Terry Chang I had known was a memory a generation old.

	Besides, I knew beyond any shadow of doubt that it was Terry Chang—not any hypothetical team of Centaurians—that was the great threat to humanity.

	I squeezed the trigger of the .44 Magnum.

	The automatic bucked in my hand. The roar of that big cartridge in the room was almost deafening. A tongue of flame eight inches long spurted from the muzzle.

	At point-blank range, a .44 slug is more than just deadly; it is incredibly messy. The slug struck the bridge of his nose, just between the eyes. It made a hole the size of your thumb going in. It went on through, and the back of his head—splashed.

	What was left of his head snapped back as though he'd been slammed in the face by a hard-swung baseball bat. His body followed, toppling backwards and taking the chair with it to the floor.

	The wall behind him . was splashed with crimson and gray. In the center of the splash was a .44 caliber bullet hole.

	The smell of burnt powder was strong, and there was a faint haze of smoke in the air.

	I put the gun on the top of my desk and stood up, looking over the desk at the floor.

	He looked pretty bad. The hydrostatic shock within his skull had made his eyes bug out, and they were horribly bloodshot. The blood from the great wound in the back of the skull was pouring out into a widening pool on the pale green rug.

	I sat down again, folded my arms on the desk top, put my head down on them and began to cry.

-

	I watched Don Ricardo lower the gun to the desk, stare for a moment and put his head on his arms to cry. Hell of a thing to do to a man, but I had to convince him and do it fast.

	I relaxed control a little, keeping just enough to reduce the shock.

	And I got a shock. As my control dropped below a certain threshold, it was snapped away, suddenly and completely.

	Ricardo suddenly sat erect. His cheeks were damp with tears, but those hard eyes were no longer crying.

	I had flashed my shields up instantly.

	"You ... son ... of ... a ... bitch," he said in a low, flat voice.

	After long seconds, a slow smile came over Dominguez' face. "Yeah. We've learned a lot in twenty years. Not as much, apparently, as you did in six—but some." He took a tissue out of his desk drawer and wiped his face. I said nothing. It was up to him, now.

	"Wow." His voice was still soft, but no longer flat "That was real." He picked up the pistol again, smelled it. Then he checked the cartridges. All ten were unfired. He put it back in its place in the special bolster attached to the underside of his desk.

	"You've made your point, Terry," he said. "If you could do that and were inimical to me or the human race, I would be doing what you wanted me to without argument." He leaned back, puffed out his cheeks and blew gently, fluttering his great mustaches. "Now we've settled that, what's next on the agenda?"

	"I've changed my mind," I told him. "Do you know anything about setting up a shield cone?"

	"A cone of power? Certainly. That only takes half what I've got—and only a small fraction of what you've got."

	"What changed my mind was the way you flipped away my control," I confessed. "How good are the girls?"

	"Clara and Dorothy? Good. Damn good."

	"That's what I'm banking on, Doc. Can we get together this evening? I have to find some people."

	"The ten from the Gagarin?" 

	"Only nine," I said. "I know where Number One is. He's been radiating all over the place ever since my landing was announced. That's why I didn't sneak in."

	"How about your nine on the Armstrong?"

	"Don't worry. They'll be down as soon as we need 'em."

	"Why don't we get started now?" he asked.

	"Midnight's better. We'll get some early sleep. I have some things to do." I stood up. "And no need saying anything to Clara and Dorothy just yet. I'll want to check them out before tonight. And don't worry; I won't hurt them."

	He looked up at me with those gray-green eyes. "You know, Terry, if anyone else had said that, I'd have laughed."

-

	Midnight. 2400 or 0000, whichever you prefer. 

	"Shield erected." 

	"Check."

	"Begin shaping field." 

	"Field shaping. Check." 

	"Hold shield." 

	"Shield holding. Check." 

	"Continue, hold, and check." 

	Four of us sat, sky-clad, in the lotus position, knees touching those of the person on either side, on the soft-pile carpeting in front of the flickering fireplace in the Dominguez living room. To my right was Dorothy—tall, seemingly cool, and touched with some quality of the moon that flooded in through the south window. Clara, to my left, seemed to partake of the fire element, red hair gleaming, all motion and strength. Dominguez himself gave the feeling of darkness meeting, not unwillingly, with light—big, powerful, dangerous when he wanted to be, he faced me across the circle.

	"Shield holding." 

	"Check."

	"Field shaping. Almost ready for charge." 

	"Check."

	The fire had burned almost to coals, shedding a flickering red-gold light across the tall comfortable chairs and turning their shapes into odd shadows that I seemed to bounce off the pale walls. Hands held around the circle, there was no need for words.

	"Field shaped and ready." 

	"Check. Shaped and ready; begin charging."

	"Shield holding. Charge beginning."

	"Check. Hold and charge." 

	The moon was full and almost glaring through the south window; an intense spotlight invading the big window to the south, casting a rectangle of silver on the floor. But bright Sirius, hanging on the horizon, would not be shadowed or dimmed.

	"Field charge beginning. Hold shield."

	"Check. Hold and charge." 

	We were the elements of something both ancient and modern—something that extended for the moment. The room blazed with the hot orange-red of fire and was drowned in the coolness of the silver-white light of the moon, pierced by the blue-white pinpoint of Sirius. We were one mind, one spirit, one concentration. 

	"Increase charge." 

	"Continuing." 

	"Check."

	Clara's eyes were wide and almost fixed. I had never seen them that way before. She moved slightly, not breaking the touch, but as if to reassure herself that the darkness beyond would not touch her, secure in the knowledge that it would not.

	"Charge at max."

	"Check and hold."

	"Prepare to dilate apex of cone."

	Dr. Dominguez was absolutely motionless, looking more Oriental than I felt.

	"Ready for dilation."

	"Begin dilation. Keep it smooth and gentle."

	"Check."

	"Hold field. Shape and charge."

	"Holding. Check."

	Dorothy seemed to be motionless, too, glossed over with the light of the dropping moon, still and calm, but focusing like a bubbling creek that laughs its way over a course of rocks.

	"Field ready. Charged."

	"Shield holding. Ready,"

	"Apex open. Ready and holding."

	"Exude field."

	"Check. Ready and holding." 

	The light changed—dimmed and cast other shadows. We were more complete now.

	"Field up. Beam out."

	"Up and out, check. Contact Nine of Armstrong."

	"Searching ... Searching ... Searching ..."

	"Contact.'"

	We were even more complete, more deeply contemplative of the gathering, reaching closer to each other and to them. The moon's silvery rectangle had become a parallelogram as it shifted across the floor.

	"Armstrong Nine in. Mesh and search?"

	"Mesh and search. Check."

	"Check."

	The fire was only coals, glowing dim and red; there were no shadows left in the room.

	"Hold and observe."

	"Check. Holding and observing."

	"Number One plain and clear?"

	"One, plain and clear." 

	"Check."

	Outside, the moon was far to the west. The oblique light made the plants and trees look alien. Bright Sirius had fallen behind the distant hills.

	"Two, London."

	"Two, London. Check."

	"Three, New York."

	"Three, New York. Check."

	"Four, Moskva,"

	"Four, Moskva. Check." 

	"Five, Washington." 

	"Five, Washington. Check." 

	Six. Seven. Eight Nine. And Ten. We pinpointed them all. It took time, but we had every one of them down pat. We had them isolated and encapsulated physically. All that remained was to take care of the them physically.

	"Nine of Armstrong. We can set down in twelve hours. Give us an extra sixty hours to be in position." 

	"Sixty hours. Can do. Check." 

	"Make and check. Contact seventy-two hours."

	"God bless, loves. Out." 

	"God bless. Out." 

	There was a splutter from the fireplace, and I turned to look. Clara half-twisted toward the sound. Dorothy smiled and Doc Dominguez made a low sound. The dying flare of a piece of eucalyptus caught our eyes with flickering orange.

	We looked at the light and began to laugh.

-

	The next three days were hell and heaven combined. For symbolic reasons, we set up what might be called a war map, with varicolored pins marking the locations of the ten crew members of the old Gagarin. One of the strong advantages we had that they didn't was their necessity to disguise themselves and masquerade as someone else. That required that they hold a shield about themselves, and that, in turn, took psychic energy to produce and hold. We had them by the short; hair, and we knew it But they didn't.

	They knew that the Armstrong had returned, and they knew that-one of its crew had landed and was after them. That had given them the stakes, which had allowed us to pinpoint them, but they still didn't realize that they were all dead, gone, and finished.

	Not one whisper of information had gone across the four light-years to Alpha Centauri.

	We made damn sure of that. Our problem was getting our hands on Number One. I won't bore you with the details of all the sweating we did to get a channel to Number One—getting papers forged, setting up phony identities, making spurious appointments, tightening schedules, and so on—I because we never used any of it—I was doing some of that detail work in Don Ricardo's office one morning when Dorothy came in,; looked at what I was doing, and said, "Junk it, love. Trash-can the whole lot We have to start all over."

	I looked up at her. "What the devil?"

	"Just got a call from a friend of mine, Anita Strickland. She's getting married tomorrow."

	I smiled willingly. "How nice. And you've been invited?"

	"That's right love. She was quite apologetic that my name hadn't been on the list of invitations when they were sent out and was very sorry about the oversight I'm to pick up the invitations this afternoon."

	"Invitations? Plural?"

	"I told her I couldn't possibly go without my fiancé, Edward Toy."

	"All right, you have information I don't have," I admitted. "Who is Anita Strickland?"

	"The daughter of Lieutenant General Leslie Strickland, Commanding Officer of the Military Reservation of the Presidio of California at San Francisco."

	"Ho, ho, ho," I said without laughing. "Our little friend will have to be there."

	"Of course. No way out," she agreed.

	"You didn't check with your friend, Anita?"

	"No. It would have seemed odd. But Number One will be there. No question."

	"Then you're right. We junk Plan One. Call in the troopies; we have to do some hard rethinking."

	By thirteen hundred, the four of us were in solemn conclave set. Dorothy told Doc and Clara about the wedding.

	"Is it a trap?" Dominguez asked.

	"Could be," I said. "It does look a little too convenient." I looked at Dorothy. "What do you think?"

	"I think it's legit. I think she honestly intended to invite me. We've known each other since college and have kept in touch ever since. She would have invited me."

	"It hasn't been in the news, has it?"

	"The engagement was announced three months ago. No date set."

	"You know some of her other friends who would have been invited," I said. "Get on the phone. Use the Isn't-it-just-wonderful-about-Anita's-wedding ploy. When was the date set?"

	"Got it." She went into the other room.

	I looked at Clara. "Any ideas? Or comments?"

	"I don't know Anita all that well, but I think you're right in saying that it looks just a little too convenient. They wouldn't be that sloppy."

	"The old problem of 'Which hand is it in?' " Doc said.

	"Och, aye." I said. "Let's look at it. If the enemy hasn't spotted us, then the invitation is straight. No problem. We walk in, do our bit, and live happily ever afterward. Right?"

	"Right," Clara agreed. "And if the enemy has spotted us, then it's a baited trap. But if that's the case, it seems crudely done, as if they wanted us to see the trap."

	"Then what do they want us to do?" Dominguez asked. "If this is a phony trap, they must want to force us to another elective. But, if so, what is that other elective? I don't see it."

	He stopped as the door opened and Dorothy came in.

	"I checked," she said. "The wedding's been scheduled for over six weeks. What do we do now?"

	We discussed it for another twenty minutes, but we had to come up with the obvious answer in the end. We would go in.

	We went to work making the new arrangements and phasing out the old.

-

	I neither like nor dislike weddings. Usually they bore the hell out of me, but if the couple is composed of people I particularly like, who I think will be good for each other, then I can enjoy the ancient ceremony. This one would be different. I didn't know Anita Strickland, and I didn't know Lieutenant Colonel James Kettering. But I knew I wasn't going to be bored.

	It was one of those foggy winter afternoons that San Francisco is famous for. Up on the slope of Bernal Hill, it wasn't so bad, but looking down Folsom, it seemed as if the world ended at Courtland. We entered the gray mist, turned left on Courtland to Bayview. Dorothy was driving; I was busy doing magick.

	We turned left on Bayshore and followed it to the on-ramp to 101. She let the automatics take over and meshed her mind with mine.

	Armstrong Ten, mesh for check.

	Mesh for check. 

	All in position? 

	All in position and ready. 

	Signs of activity? 

	None. If they're preparing a trap, as suggested last night, it's a hell of a subtle one.

	They're all in their places? 

	With smiles on their faces. 

	It looks too easy. 

	Maybe it is easy. 

	We can't afford to think so. Stand by.

	Standing by and ready. 

	As programmed, we turned off 101 at Turk Street, and Dorothy took control again. We followed Turk in silence, but when Dorothy turned right on Arguello Boulevard, heading toward the Presidio, she said, "I'm scared." She didn't sound it.

	"I know," I said. 

	And that was all we said. When we crossed West Pacific Avenue and entered into the Presidio, Arguello became a winding, curving road that led eventually to the Officer's Club—the oldest adobe building in San Francisco, still in good repair after centuries of use.

	A uniformed serviceman checked our invitations and identification, then guided us to the parking area.

	Three minutes later, we were inside the Officer's Club of the Presidio of San Francisco.

-

	There weren't many people there, considering the social importance of the wedding. At a guess, I'd have said more than a hundred, but less than a hundred and fifty. It had been kept out of the news, and the only ones invited, besides friends of the bride and groom, were the top crust of the upper layer of the ultra-ultra. The governor was there, tall and impressive, as was the governor's lady, with her silver hair and her massive breasts and belly, all encrusted and sheathed in the best of jewels and cloth. General Strickland was in full dress, lean, balding a little, and looking both pleased and flustered. He had been a widower for eight years.

	There were three or four senators, a double handful of legislators from various lower houses, an equal number of. Supreme Court judges from all over, and all kinds of judges from lesser courts. There were lawyers from big corporations, bank executives from all over the Bay Area, and a healthy sprinkling of very wealthy or powerful Native Sons.

(The miners came in 'forty-nine. 
The whores in 'fifty-one; 
And when they got together. 
They produced the Native Son.) 

	Up in a special booth was a private photographer with his TV recorder, getting everything down for posterity, watching his multi-bank console to get every angle from all the lenses around the room. Selected sections would be released to the newsies later.

	And, of course, the place was absolutely seething with high-ranking officers from the various services in their full-dress uniforms. It was—dare I say it?—a gala occasion.

	The ceremony started twelve minutes late, which isn't bad for that sort of thing. The celebrant was a brigadier in the Corps of Chaplains.

	The whole thing went through without a hitch, all the way from "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here ..." to "... may you so live together in this life that, in the world to come, you may have life everlasting."

	James and Anita were man and wife.

	The reception began immediately afterward.

	Wedding cake cat. Champagne all around. Toasts by bigwigs of various persuasions. light laughter. Happiness.

	I held a tight shield covered by a light, bubbly surface. With a glass of champagne in my left hand and a happy smile on my face, I walked over to the governor's lady, shoved the .44 Magnum in my right hand against the side of her belly, and pulled the trigger.

	She splattered, and the resulting psychic shock wave brought chaos.

	The TV pickups continued to roll.

-

	I stepped back into the crowd as she collapsed to the floor.

	Her face began to change.

	I knew that Dorothy had induced the photographer to get a shot of the governor's lady and that all the camera would pick up on me would be the back of my head. But it would, record what was happening to her—to her face and her body.

	Everyone in the place except Dorothy and me was dazed, shocked and horrified. They were totally incapable of thinking logically or coherently. MP officers were trying to make sense out of the confusion, but they couldn't even make sense out of themselves.

	I continued to make my random way toward the door, trying to stick as closely as possible to the path that Dorothy was clearing for me. She was already outside in the car, but her newly awakened mind was doing its job.

	There was no MP at the door, nor any outside. Forgetting their training, they had charged inside to the focal center of the psychic shock wave.

	Dorothy was ready in the driver's seat of the car as I climbed in. We weren't the only ones who were leaving; there were many who had panicked and were running away instead of toward the shock focus. But we had a head start and got out ahead of the traffic.

-

	I don't think I need go into detail about the next three days; the news broadcasts were full of those wedding pictures. Nearly everyone in the world saw what happened and saw the woman's features change as the muscle control dissolved. And they saw the dead purple thing that had been in a case strapped to her front. When she came to, with her own mind back, she was identified as Marsha Morgan, astrogator of the Yuri Gagarin, She did not know what had happened to the governor's real wife. That unfortunate woman was never found and never will be.

	The same is true of nine other prominent people around the globe. At the moment the psychic shock wave from the Centaurian's sudden death hit, their features began to reform into their natural faces.

	All of them told their stories as best they could, but there was a lot of holes left wide open. There had to be.

	At the moment of the shock wave, each of the Gagarin people was invaded, taken over, and cleaned up by one of the Armstrong people. The momentary stunning alone would not have done the job, but it allowed us to get in and do it.

	Analysis of what was left of the Centaurian after the bullet and blast from the Magnum hit it convinced the medics and biologists and biochemists that it had never been spawned on Earth, and the psych experts have seen what that sort of control can do to people. They've learned a lot, and they'll learn even more. And we all have to learn more, because there are more things than we know—and more "things" than we know—waiting for us out there.

	The first place we'll have to check out is the Sirius system. Those people are entirely too much like human beings for me to trust them.

	Especially Le#an.

The End