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Chapter Three

The Agency building was dingy. Demaris and Kaempfert walked down the grimy hallway and up the splintered stairs to the second floor. They pushed through the chipped glass door labeled "Doncaster Industrial Linens" and were in the Agency's front office.

Demaris still felt the irritating memories of last night's adrenalin. He looked around and shook his head. "There's no place like home sweet home—even if it's a false beard."

Kaempfert shrugged. "Our customers don't know where the cash-and-carry heroes come from. Why should Earth government? Besides, I can just hear what the government would have to say about its nationals fighting alien battles and chancing all sorts of international complications if their origin is discovered."

"Government could use a jolt," Demaris growled.

"Your briefing room's down the hall," Kaempfert said. "You're due there."

Demaris nodded. "Uh-huh." He put out his hand. "Bill—I'm sorry I'm such a pop-off. I didn't really mean to give you a rough time last night. Be seeing you, huh?"

"Sure, Thad. Come home—nothing to forgive."

They shook hands, tapped each other on the biceps, and separated. Demaris walked down the hall, and Kaempfert went through the front office to his desk.

 

He'd memorized his Marak file. Now he turned it in to the technician at the door of the briefing room, who tagged it with his code name and dropped it into a similarly labeled filing cabinet.

"Strip," the technician said in a bored voice.

Demaris had already begun climbing out of his clothes. He handed the bundle to the technician, who tagged it and put it in a locker. "Stand still, please . . . no facial expression, if you please . . . hold it. . . thank you." The front and sideview photographs were clipped to Demaris' check card, and the card was handed to him. "Medical examination over in that corner, please."

Demaris bobbed his head impatiently. The doctor, standing beside his equipment, was thin but not invisible.

He was given a complete physical, with results noted on his card, and returned to the technician, who wordlessly handed him a set of light coveralls, noted their issue on his card, returned the card, and then nodded him over to the desk where his briefing officer had been sitting all this time.

"Mr. Blue?" the briefing officer said as Demaris came over, addressing him by his code name, "My name's Puce." He smiled slightly. "Sit down, please. May I have your card, please? Thank you."

Demaris handed the card over.

"You've studied your file?"

"Memorized it."

"Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Blue. Just a routine question. You know how it is—mass production. We treat everybody the same way—old hand, newcomer, special recruit; whatever he may be. It's not as informal as it might be, but—"

"I know."

"Uh. Well. Now, Mr. Blue—if your rank were that of Tjetlyn in the Marakian Interstellar Air Fleet, and I were a Klowdil, which of us would salute first?"

"Neither of us. You'd be my inferior, so I'd pretend to ignore you. If I wanted anything from you, I'd say so. The salute, as such, is unknown on Marak." Demaris gave the answer in a bored voice.

"Yes. Well—as a Tjetlyn, you might be invited to official functions at the homes of Chiefs of State. Would it be proper for you to drink three portions of drasos?"

"It would be mandatory—three and as many more as I could hold."

"Good. Very good, Mr. Blue. Now, assuming that you were on leave and fell into the company of a perfectly respectable but not hostile young pavoja: What would be your course of action?"

"I'd pretend she was Eileen deFleur—up to the point at which my normal Marakian biological urges would, unfortunately, suffer frustration due to accidental circumstances over which no one could possibly prove I had any control."

Mr. Puce chuckled. "Very good. Now, supposing—"

And so forth, through a veritable nightmare of possible pitfalls which might betray his un-Marakian nature. Demaris threaded his deliberate way through all the vicissitudes Mr. Puce could conjure up for him, and emerged unchallenged—and angry at the redundance of going through this college entrance examination when he knew that Indoctrination would supply him with the unconscious awareness of all these things, driving the knowledge not into his conscious information banks but into his reflexes.

Still and all, he could not deny that the Agency had remained undetected only because of this kind of thoroughness—and that in this case, especially, with no time for the usual three days' checking to be sure, every possible precaution still might leave some chink unguarded.

 

"All right, Mr. Blue," Puce was saying, "I think that about covers it. Now, if you'll just sketch out a situation map on this board, I think that'll be all—except for Make-up and Indoctrination, of course."

Yes— Except for that mere trifle. Demaris twitched his upper lip as he picked up Puce's stylus and laid out the map.

Farla was a cluster of stars shaped like a badly pitted furnace clinker. Adjoining it on the side away from Earth—which he represented by a contemptuous, zero-shaped speck at the foot of the board—was Marak, with its stars grouped like a rat's head, sniffing at the clinker. To Farla's right, Genis and her stars were a twisted, mold-eaten orange peel. Working quickly, he sketched in the profile view, which included such scattered breadcrumbs as Ruga, Dilpo, and Stain, all inextricably jumbled in by the fact that stars, unfortunately for diagramatics, occupied three dimensions, were anything but stationary, and were governed by countless dozens of little pocket empires that had seized in any and all possible directions once the Vilk yolk was taken off them.

The pure white stars, he thought—the pure white stars live in a garbage heap.

He turned the board around and pushed it toward Puce, who nodded approval. "Yes, that's fine. All right, that does it. Thank you, and good luck, Mr. Blue."

Demaris grunted and stood up, taking his card. Of all the clerks at the Agency, Bill Kaempfert was the only one he could stomach, because Kaempfert was the only one who'd actually done any fighting. He almost turned around to club Puce as the man tried to prove something or the other about himself by loudly—and anything but absently—humming a chorus of "Heroes All."

Then he shrugged and let it go. The fool was proving his adolescence by somehow making the rollicking tune acquire heroic chords.

Demaris walked into Make-up and Indoctrination to the accompaniment of his own misinterpreted music.

 

Make-up peeled off his skin as neatly as a glove, and put it away for his return. Scalpels clicked against his bones. Weapons sent over a last-resort personal arm that the surgeons buried in his rib cage. Make-up delved into its resources and so disguised the weapon's unavoidable metal that only the most careful comparative fluoroscopy would detect it.

And the Monster chugged on its dolly beside the operating tank, revamping his brain.

When he emerged, at eleven o'clock that night, he spoke English with difficulty. His tongue and vocal cords were not adapted to the language.

The Earthman—the dakta—nodded in satisfaction as Demaris sat up groggily.

"Nice control," the dakta said to himself, noting the weak but sure movements of Demaris' limbs. Demaris, who had to translate from English to Marakian before he could be sure of the dakta's exact meaning, was only a bit slower in reaching the same conclusion. He tested the flexibility of his double-jointed fingers, and worked his double-opposed thumbs for a moment.

"Oh, they'll work fine," the dakta assured him. " 'Fdoo seisomysell."

Demaris groped for the meaning of the idomatic phrase, which, like most such, had been tossed off casually. "Par-don," he said. "Would you please speak more slowly?"

"I say—'If I do say so myself.' "

"Oh, yes. Of course. Everything seems to be all right."

"That's quite an accent," the dakta apologized, obviously not having caught Demaris' statement.

Demaris strained for clarity. "I say—'Everything seems O.K.' "

"Oh! Oh, yes, sure. We really piled it on—much more thorough than usual. A matter of costuming to lend reality to an actor who might not have learned his part too well."

Demaris shook his head with annoyance at his own incomprehension. He sorted out the dakta's syllables in his mind, trying to extract their meaning.

"Would you like me to repeat?" the dakta volunteered.

Demaris shook his head in disgust. There was really no point in this clumsy communication. The Monster had superimposed a Marakian personality where an Earthman had been, and there was not much that Earthmen and Marakians had to say to each other.

"Never mind," he said, enunciating as clearly as possible.

 
"We do or die for the Agency—
As much of the first as we can—
Heroes who, mashed to glue,
Spent their saved-up back pay,
Are strange to the mem'ry of man."
 

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