"Oh, G.o.d, they're going ahead," Nantli exclaimed. "c.o.x-"

"All the way," c.o.x said. He turned back and gripped Vivyan's head. "They lied to you, can you understand? We were wrong. We were the butchers. The Empire, us. We're fighting it now, Vivyan.

You've got to come with us. You must. You owe it, Prince of Atlixco. We can use you in place, in their spy net-"

One of the big sealmen had come up and grabbed c.o.x's shoulder. Vivyan heard Nantli saying something and suddenly the white eyes had left him, they were all gone. Other sealmen and Terrans ran through, but no one bothered him.

He lay with his head whirling and hurting, wondering if it had been all right. His lips seemed to have spoken by themselves, as they did when he was with his friend. Was it all right? He must get out of here as soon as he could stand up.

He drowsed a little and then more sealmen were all around him, hooting, groaning, smelling of burnt flesh and blood. A body b.u.mped him. It was a Terran in a wetsuit oozing blood. The man slumped down, yelling, "Hey Doc, you gloomy sod, we got the G.o.dd.a.m.n transmitters! You b.l.o.o.d.y pervert, Doc!"

he shouted. "The Tlixcan ships are coming in, how about that you gutless mother?"

"They'll burn the planet," the doctor told him. "Cut that off so you can fry clean."

He hauled the man away. Vivyan saw that the pa.s.sage was now clear. Next minute he was out and running back the way he had come.

His memory was perfect, although he felt a little ill. All he had to do was let his feet carry him while his eyes and ears kept watch. Twice he ducked into side tunnels while sealmen went by with their wounded. Then he was at the place where many tunnels met, where they had removed his blindfold trusting to the maze.

Vivyan simply closed his eyes and let his body guide him back. Turn, rough place to the left, bend his head, cool air on his right side, the natural mechanism within him unspooled its perfect tape. He onlyhad to hide once more. These pa.s.sages seemed to be unused.

Presently he was through the inner pool and into the last dark tunnel undersea. This was easier yet, he could hear the water churning under the reef and he ran stooped in the darkness, longing to be out in the clean, away from this peaceless place. Surely they would take him away now to a new place, after he had given all these things to his friend?

He reached the cavern. No lantern now. That didn't matter, Vivyan knew exactly where to dive, how to come up under the reef. He kicked powerfully down into blackness, thinking he must be sure to remember everything. This must be a secret way to the caves, it would be a wonderful surprise.

In a moment he had surfaced and marked the horizon and the stars. There seemed to be fires on the sh.o.r.e. He began to swim eagerly, feeling marvelous now. This would be his best yet. If only the name Canc.o.xtlan didn't trouble his head... but he would forget about that, he felt sure. Peace flooded him as he saw the far light of his friend's house by the cove.

"No one noticed he had gone," the woman told the newsman. "The fight for the Enclave had started and Canc.o.xtlan was there. When the Terrans broke in through the reef tunnel we managed to blow the section between the hospital and the armory. They got the wounded, of course, and Doctor Vose. And Nantli. But it had no effect." Her scarred face was impa.s.sive. "c.o.x wouldn't surrender to save Nantli, she wouldn't have wanted that. The raid diverted one of their core units."

They watched Vivyan's tall figure moving aimlessly along the terrace, glancing in the water. Seen from behind he looked older, stooped under the striking black hair.

"The s.p.a.cers were with us, did you know that?" The woman was suddenly animated. "Oh yes, even the officers. When the cruiser from Atlixco showed up they all came in." She grimaced. "Three days before, we intercepted a s.p.a.ce Command signal about indoctrination to combat, quotes, apathy....

Empires grow old and foolish, even the revolt on Horl didn't wake them up. We'll have Horl next."

She checked herself then. They saw Vivyan glance round quickly and turn toward the wall.

"We found him wandering, afterwards," the woman went on quietly. "Canc.o.xtlan's brother, after all... he never understood what he'd done. We think now he was basically r.e.t.a.r.ded, in addition to the conditioning they'd put him through. Nothing reached. You've heard of idiot savants? He's very gentle and that smile, one doesn't realize."

The newsman remembered his own gut response to the gentle stranger and shuddered. Exquisite tool of empire. A deadly child.

Vivyan had halted before a peculiar carving in an alcove. The newsman frowned. A Terran eagle, here? The boy-man seemed to be whispering to it.

"He carved it himself. c.o.x let him keep it. What does it matter now?" The woman bowed her bleak head. "Listen."

By a trick in the wall structure the newsman could hear perfectly what Vivyan was whispering.

"...he says his name is Keller of Outplanet News. He didn't tell his first name. He says he came from Aldebaran Sector on the Komarov to interview the traitor Prince Canc.o.xtlan. He is about one meter eighty, medium build, gray hair and eyes. He has a scar on his right ear lobe and his timer is forty-five units ahead of planet time..."

MAMMA COME HOME.

The day Papa came home was the day my mama came home to me. That's the way I look at Earth's first alien contact. We may have changed some of our ideas about what's human, but one thing hasn't changed; the big history-tape events are still just background for the real I-Me-You drama. Not true? So, wasn't the U.S.-Sino-Soviet pact signed the week your daughter got married?Anyway, there they were, sitting on Luna. Although it's not generally known, there'd been a flap about a moving source around Pluto the year before. That's when C.I.A. decided that outer s.p.a.ce fell under the category of foreign territory in its job description-at least to the extent of not leaving the Joint Chiefs in total control of contact possible with the galaxy. So our little shop shared some of the electronic excitement. The Russians helped, they're the acknowledged champs at heaving up the tonnage, but we still have the communications lead-we try harder. The British and the Aussies try too, but we keep hiring their best men.

That first signal faded to nothing-until one fine April, evening all our communications went bust and the full moon rose with this big alien hull parked on the Lunar Alps. Sat there for three days, glowing bluishly in any six-power lens-if you could buy one. And you'll recall, we had no manned moon-station then. After peace broke out n.o.body wanted to spend cash on vacuum and rocks. The shape our s.p.a.ce program was in, we couldn't have hit them with a paper-clip in less than three months.

On A-Day plus one I spotted Tillie at the watercooler.

To do so I had to see through two doors and Mrs. Peabody, my secretary, but I'd got pretty good at this. I wandered out casually and said: "How's George doing?"

She gave me a one-eyed scowl through her droopy wing of hair, finished her water and scowled again to make sure she wasn't smiling.

"He came back after midnight. He's had six peanut-b.u.t.ter sandwiches. I think he's getting it."

There are people who'll tell you Tillie is an old bag of bones in a seersucker suit. For sure she had bones, and she's no girl. But if you look twice it can get a little hard to notice other people in the room.

I'd done the double take about three years back.

"Meet me at lunch and I'll show you something."

She nodded moodily and lounged off. I watched the white knife-scar ripple elegantly on her tanned legs and went back through my office, fighting off the urge to push Mrs. Peabody's smile into her Living Bra.

Our office is a little hard to explain. Everybody knows C.I.A. is out in that big building at Langley, but the fact is that even when they built it there it fit about as well as a beagle-house fits a Great Dane.

They go most of the Dane in somehow, but we're one of the paws and tails that got left out. Strictly a support facility-James Bond would sneer at us. We operate as a small advertising agency in a refined section of D.C. which happens to be close to a heavy land cable and the Naval Observatory gadgets.

Our girls actually do some ads for other government agencies-something about Smoky Bear and Larry Litterbug is all over the first floor. We really aren't a big secret thing-not a Biretta or a cyanide ampoule in the place and you can get into our sub-bas.e.m.e.nt anytime you produce front and profile X-rays of both your grandmothers.

What's there? Oh, a few linguists and cold war leftovers like me. A computer N.S.A. spilled coffee into. And George. George is our pocket genius. It is generally believed he got his start making skin flicks for yaks in Outer Mongolia. He lives on peanut b.u.t.ter and Tillie works for him.

So when the aliens started transmitting at us, George was among the facilities. Langley called on to help decipher. And also me, in a small, pa.s.sive way-I look at interesting photography when the big shop wants a side opinion. Because of my past as a concocter of fake evidence in the bad old days. Hate that word, fake. Mine is still being used by historians.

Come lunchtime I went looking for Tillie at Rapa's, our local lifeline. Since Big Brother at Langley found that our boys and girls were going to Rapa's instead of eating G.S.A, boiled cardboard, Rapa's old cashier has been replaced by a virgin with straight seams and a camera in each, ah, eyeball. But the chow is still good.

Tillie was leaning back relaxed, a dreamy double-curve smile on her long mouth. She heard me andwiped it off. The relaxation was a fraud; I saw her hand go over some shredded matches.

She smiled again, like someone had offered her fifty cents for her right arm. But she was okay. I knew her, this was one of her good days. We ordered veal and pasta, friendly.

"Take a look," I invited. "We finally synched in with their beam for a few frames."

The photo showed one side foggy, the rest pretty clear. Tillie goggled.

"It's-it's-"

"Yeah, it's beautiful. She's beautiful. And the dead spit of you, my girl."

"But Max! Are you sure?" Her using my name was a good sign.

"Absolute. We saw her move. This, kid, is The Alien. We've even had every big cine collection in the world checking. It's not any sort of retransmission. See that script on her helmet and that background panel? T'ain't n.o.body's. No doubt where the send is from, either. That ship up there is full of people-type people. At least, women... What's George got?"

"You'll see the co-copy," she said absently, grooving on the photo. "He worked out about two hundred words in clear. It's weird. They want to land-and something about Mother. Like, Mother is back, or is home. George says 'Mother' is the best he can do."

"If that's Mother, oh my. Here's your pasta."

They landed a week later, after considerable international wrangling. At Mexico City, as everyone knows. In a small VTO affair. Thanks to George's connections-in the literal sense-we had it on closed circuit right over the crowd of world dignitaries and four million real people.

The airlock opened on a worldwide hush, and Mother came out. One-and then another-and a third. Last one out fiddled with something on her wrist, and the lock closed. We found out later she was the navigator.

There they stood on their ramp, three magnificent earth-type young females in s.p.a.ce-opera uniforms. Helmets on the backs of their heads and double-curve grins on their long mouths. The leader was older and had more glitter on her crest. She swung back her droopy wing of hair, breathed twice, wrinkled her nose and paced down the ramp to meet the U.N. President.

Then we got it. The U.N. President that year was an Ethiopian about six feet five. The top of his head came just to the buckle on her crossbelt.

I guess the world wide hush quivered-it certainly did in George's projection room.

"About eight-foot-three for the captain," I said.

"a.s.suming the top of the head is normal," George chirped. That's what we love him for.

In the dimness I saw a funny look on Tillie's face. Several girls were suppressing themselves, and Mrs. Peabody seemed to feel an egg hatching in her uplift. The men looked like me-tense. Right then I would have settled for green octop.u.s.s.es instead of those three good-looking girls.

The captain stepped back from President Enkaladugunu and said something in a warm contralto, and somehow we all relaxed. She seemed wholesome, if you can imagine a mix of Garbo and Moshe Dayan. The other two officers were clearly very young, and-well, I told you, they could have been Tillie's sisters except for size.

George got that; I saw his eyes going between Tillie and the screen.

To his disgust, all the talking was being done by our people. The three visitors stood it well, occasionally giving brief, melodious responses. They looked mightily relaxed, and also somewhat puzzled. The two young J.O.'s were scanning hard at the crowd and twice I saw one nudge the other.

Mercifully a Soviet-U.S.-Indian power play choked off the oratory and got the party adjourned to Mexico's Guest Palace-or rather, to an unscheduled pause around the pool while beds were being lashed together and sofas subst.i.tuted for chairs. Our circuit went soft. George shut himself up with his tapes of the aliens' few remarks, and I coped with a flock of calls about our observing devices, which gotb.u.g.g.e.red up in the furniture-moving orgy.

Two days later the party was moved to the Popo-Hilton with the swimming pool as their private bath. Every country on earth-even the Vatican-sent visiting delegations. George was going through fits. He was bound and determined to be the expert on Mother's language by remote control. I had an in with the Mexicali bureau and we did pretty well until about twenty other outfits got into the act and the electronic feedback put us all in the hash.

"Funny thing, Max," said George at morning staff. "They keep asking-I can only interpret as, 'Where are the women?' "

"You mean, like women officials? Women in power jobs?"

"Simpler, I think. Perhaps big women, like themselves. But I get a connotation of grown-up, women, adults. I need more of their talk among themselves, Max."

"We're trying, believe it. They keep flushing all the cans and laughing like maniacs. I don't know if it's our plumbing or our snoops that amuse them. Did you hear about Tuesday?"

Tuesday my shivers had come back. For half an hour every recording device out to a half-mile perimeter went dead for forty minutes, and nothing else was affected.

Another department was getting shivery too. Harry from R&D called me to see if we could get a better look at that charm bracelet the navigator had closed the ship with.

"We can't get so much as a gamma particle into that d.a.m.n boat," he told me. "Touch it-smooth as gla.s.s. Try to move it, blowtorch it-nothing. It just sits there. We need that control, Max."

"She wears it taking a bath, Harry. No emissions we can read."

"I know what I'd do," he grunted. "Those cream-heads up there are in a daze."

A daze it was. The world at large loved them. They were now on grand tour, being plied with entertainment, scenic wonders and technology. The big girls ate it up-figuratively and literally. Balloon gla.s.ses of aquavit went down especially well from breakfast on, and they were glowingly complimentary about everything from Sun Valley to the Great Barrier Reef with stopovers at every atomic and s.p.a.ce installation. Captain Garbo-Dayan really unbent on the Cote d'Azur, and the two J.O.'s had lost their puzzled looks. In fact, they were doing a good deal of what would have looked like leering if they didn't have such wholesome smiles.

"What the h.e.l.l?" I asked George.

"They think we're cute," he said, enjoying himself. Did I tell you George was a tiny little man? That figures, with Tillie working for him. He loved to see us big men squinting up at the Girls from Capella, as the world now called them.

They were from a system near Capella, they explained in delightful fragments of various Earth languages. Their low voices really had charm. Why had they come? Well, they were a tramp freighter, actually, taking a load of ore back to Capella. They had dropped by to clear up an old-chart notation about our system. What was their home like? Oh, much like ours. Lots of commerce, trade. Wars? Not for centuries. Shocking idea!

What the world wanted to know most, of course, was where were their men? Were they alone?

This evoked merry laughter. Of course they had men, to care for the ship. They showed us on a video broadcast from Luna. There were indeed men, handsome types with muscles. The chap who did most of the transmission looked like my idea of Leif Ericsson. There was no doubt, however, that Captain Garbo-Dayan-or Captain Lyampka, as we learned to call her-was in charge. Well, we had female Soviet freighter captains, too.

The one thing we couldn't get exactly was the Capellan men's relative heights. The scenery on these transmissions was different. It was my private opinion, from juggling some estimates of similar background items, that at least some of their men were earth-normal size, though burly.

The really hot questions about their s.p.a.ce drive got gracefully laughed off. How did the ship run?Sorry, they were not technicians. But then they sprang the bombsh.e.l.l. Why not come and see for ourselves? Would we care to send a party up to Luna to look over the ship?

Would we? Would we? How many? Oh, about fifty-fifty men, please. And Tillie.

I forgot to mention about Tillie getting to be their pet. George had sent her to Sun Valley to record some speech samples he absolutely had to have. She was introduced at the pool, looking incredibly like a half-size Capellan. A smash. They loved it. Laughed almost to guffawing. When they found she was a crack linguist they adopted her. George was in ecstasy with hauls of Capellan chatter no one else had, and Tillie seemed to like it too. She was different these days-her eyes shone, and she had a kind of tense, exalted smile. I knew why and it bothered me, but there wasn't anything I could do.

I cut myself into her report-circuit one day.

"Tillie. It's dangerous. You don't know them."

Safe at two thousand miles, she gave me the bare-faced stare.

"They're dangerous?"

I winced and gave it up.

Tillie at fifteen had caught the full treatment from a street gang. Fought against knives, left for dead-an old story. They'd fixed her up as good as new, except for a few interesting white hairlines in her tan, and a six-inch layer of ice between her and everybody who shaved. It didn't show, most of the time. She had a nice sincere cover manner and she wore her old suits and played mousy. But it was permanent guerrilla war, inside.

Intelligence had found her, as they often do, a ready-made weapon. She was totally loyal as long as no one touched her. And she'd wear anything or nothing on business. I'd seen photos of Tillie on a job at twenty that you wouldn't believe. Fantastic-the subtle sick flavor added, too.

She let people touch her, physically I mean, on business. I imagine-I never asked. And I never asked what happened to them afterward, or why the cla.s.sified medal. It did trouble me a little when I found out her chief case officer was dead-but that was all right, he'd had diabetes for years.

But as for letting a friend touch her-really touch her-I tried it once.

It was in George's film vault. We were both exhausted after a fifty-hour run of work. She leaned back and smiled, and actually touched my arm. My arm went around her automatically and I started to bend down to her lips. At the last minute I saw her eyes.

Before I got pastured out to Smoky Bear and George, I had worked around a little, and one of the souvenirs indelibly printed on my memory is the look in the eyes of a man who had just realized that I stood between him and the only exit. He waited one heartbeat and then started for the exit through what very nearly became my dead body, in the next few hectic minutes. I saw that look-depthless, limp, inhuman-in Tillie's eyes. Gently I disengaged my arm and stepped back. She resumed breathing.

I told myself to leave her alone. It's an old story. Koestler told it, and his girl was younger. The trouble was I liked the woman, and it didn't help that she really was beautiful under those sack suits. We got close enough a couple of times so we even discussed-briefly-whether anything could be done.

Her view was, of course, nada. At least she had the taste not to suggest being friends. Just nada.

After the second of those sessions I sloped off with a couple of mermaids from the Reflecting Pool, who turned out to have strange china doork.n.o.bs in their apartment. When the doork.n.o.bs got busted I came back to find Mrs. Peabody had put me on sick leave.

"I'm sorry, Max," Tillie lied.

"De nada," I told her.