Watchers of the Dark (4 page)

But now he had fired her. Her pride was hurt. She felt that her employer was unjustly casting aspersions on both her loyalty and her competence, and she resented it.

He was also underestimating her stubbornness, and she resented that, too.

With binoculars she watched from a curtained window across the street while Jan Darzek packed his suitcase.

She knew the suitcase. It had been made to Darzek’s specifications, and it would thwart forcible entry by any device less potent than an acetylene torch. Once when Darzek temporarily mislaid his keys an expert locksmith had toiled for five hours trying to open it—unsuccessfully.

Miss Schlupe watched openmouthed as Darzek methodically fitted equipment into the suitcase. “Isn’t he taking any clothing at all?” she wondered.

He always carried extra ammunition on a trip—but so much? And were those the gas grenades he’d told her about? And could that be a submachine gun?

“Gracious!” she murmured awesomely. “He’s going to start a war!”

* * * *

In the basement of a house in an old, eminently respectable section of Nashville, Tennessee, Jan Darzek stepped through an oddly designed transmitter frame.

He emerged in a small circular room, bare except for the transmitting receiver. Through two arched openings could be seen a larger circular room that surrounded it. Curiously he released his heavy suitcase, watched it settle slowly toward the floor, caught it again.

He turned to greet Smith, who emerged from the transmitter on his heels.

“So here we are,” he said.

Smith reached for the instrument panel. “Yes—”

A third party shot out of the transmitter and crashed into Smith. The momentum carried both of them through an arch and into the room beyond. Smith lay dazed, too bewildered for speech. Miss Effie Schlupe picked herself up and primly smoothed down her skirt.

“Where are we?” she asked innocently.

“Schluppy!” Darzek exclaimed. His suitcase floated away as he collapsed in laughter. “You followed us—” He wiped his eyes. “You followed us to Nashville?”

Miss Schlupe perched on the wide ledge that ran around the circumference of the outer room. “A hell of a chase you gave me,” she complained.

“How’d you get into the house?”

“I picked the lock. You didn’t really think you could get away with it, did you? Firing me from the only job I ever had that I really liked. The idea!”

Smith got slowly to his feet and tried unsuccessfully to speak.

“It’s my fault,” Darzek told him. “I should have expected something like this. Miss Schlupe has a certain bulldog tenacity—female bulldog tenacity, which is the worst kind. Just what were you trying to do, Schluppy?”

“I’m coming along,” Miss Schlupe said. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“Obviously you’ve come along, but this is where you get off. Sorry, Schluppy. I’m going to be gone a long time, and Smith thinks the odds are decidedly against my ever coming back. Even when I allow for his naturally pessimistic disposition, I have to admit that the outlook isn’t good. There will be dangers the likes of which neither of us have ever imagined. I won’t have you mixed up in it. Do your stuff with the controls, Smith, and we’ll send Miss Schlupe back to Nashville. Then you’d better throw the switch fast. She has an uncanny sense of timing. Another two seconds, Schluppy, and your dive through the transmitter would have brought you nothing more than an embarrassing familiarity with the basement wall.”

“Poo!” Miss Schlupe said. “I’d have made it with plenty of time to spare if you hadn’t kept me waiting on those creaky basement stairs until my leg went to sleep. Don’t think you can scare me. If there are dangers the likes of which I’ve never imagined, I want to see them.”

Smith spoke for the first time. “Impossible. I could not permit it.”

Darzek turned slowly. “What do you have to say about it?”

“My instructions are precise on that point. Supreme requested yourself only.”

“Our agreement,” Darzek said coldly, “was that I accept your commission and its general objectives, but that I am to have complete freedom in accomplishing these. Did I misunderstand you?”

“No. That arrangement should be fully satisfactory to Supreme.”

“Surely that freedom includes the right to select an assistant.”

Smith did not answer.

“Miss Schlupe and I wish to converse privately,” Darzek said. “No, just stay where you are.” He led Miss Schlupe to the far side of the circular room.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“According to Smith, we’re on a spaceship somewhere beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto.”

“That’s nice,” Miss Schlupe said cheerfully. “Is there a view?”

“Be serious.”

“What do you expect when you make silly statements like that?”

“Miss Schlupe,” Darzek said sternly. “If I weren’t an abnormally sane man, the events of the past few days would have reduced me to gibbering idiocy. They still may do so if I have to argue with you about them.”

“All right. We’re on a spaceship. What are we doing here?”

“Our Able-Baker-Charlie-Dog tandem hails from outer space. That’s why they had all of us running in circles. They know tricks I don’t even believe after seeing, and they have gadgets I never will believe. How did you ever manage to get a line on that Nashville headquarters?”

“I didn’t follow Smith-Dog. I followed
you.
But—outer space?”

“It’s true. They wear a synthetic epidermis to make them look human, and it succeeds remarkably, in a dead-fish sort of way. I made Smith remove his, and I have never seen more convincing proof of anything. They really are from outer space.”

“What do they want with you?”

“It seems that I once did some work for them.
I
don’t remember it, but I must have given satisfaction. Now they’ve hired me again.”

“And me,” Miss Schlupe said confidently. “I never had any fun in my life until I went to work for you. You’re not firing me now. What did they hire us to do?”

“That’s where things start getting complicated. It seems that this galaxy of ours, which we vulgarly call the Milky Way, has habitable worlds without number, with equally numerous intelligent life forms whose appearances would tax the imagination if it weren’t for the fact that any healthy imagination would reject them out of hand. Our galaxy also has something that might be loosely referred to as a government; with most of the burdensome appurtenances that this implies. One outstanding exception is a military establishment, which has never been needed. Our galaxy is made up of maybe millions of worlds existing peacefully in free association with each other.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It is not only beyond comprehension, but also beyond knowledge,” Darzek agreed. “One has to accept it on faith. These worlds get along together under one loosely organized galactic government in a peace that defies the laws of nature. So Smith describes it, and if he’s capable of either mendacity or subterfuge I haven’t been able to catch him at it. The main reason for this halcyon condition is that any world that might upset it is kept isolated and not permitted to play with the others until it’s demonstrated that it can be trusted to observe the rules. Which is why we humans don’t know anything about it. We have a well-documented predilection for making up our own rules. Earth is what they call an
uncertified world.
Smith’s cohorts belong to a certification group that takes our temperatures at regular intervals and seeks to stuff medicine into us without our knowing about it. When they decide that we’ve been cured of our disposition for foul play, they’ll certify us. That doesn’t seem likely to happen in the foreseeable future.”

“You haven’t answered my question. What did they hire us to do?”

“Well—their system worked very well until, as their time goes, recently. Now they’re afraid that this galaxy—don’t laugh—is being invaded from outer space. A neighboring galaxy, known to us as the Large Magellanic Cloud, is suspect. It has arms trailing in our direction, and several expeditions sent in that direction vanished from the ken of mortal men, if it is correct to refer to the galaxy’s collective populations as ‘men.’ A logical inference would be that whoever or whatever resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud got curious as to where the unwelcome expeditions were coming from, and decided to investigate. Hence our Milky Way galaxy is being invaded from outer space. Now what’s the matter?”

Miss Schlupe had burst into wild, uncontrolled laughter. “Excuse me,” she said, raising her spectacles to dab at her eyes. “But it’s so
silly!
The galaxy is being invaded. That sounds like a military operation on a scale that would make World War II look like a fracas in a flowerpot. So what do they do about it? They call in a private detective!”

“Smith couldn’t explain it, so don’t ask me to. Supreme, whoever that may be, asked for me by name, and what Supreme asks for Supreme gets. Look. Some menace from outer space, which they refer to as the Dark, is gobbling up worlds in huge gulps. They haven’t been able to figure out what it is, or how it manages to do the gobbling. That’s the job they’re handing to me. I’ll be a spy, with a very good chance of being shot at the dawning of some sun I never knew existed.”

“Then I’ll be shot with you. It’ll be better than rusting away in my rocking chair.”

Darzek smiled at her. “This will be a grim sort of business. I’m tempted to take you along for the laughs. I may need a few.”

“Ha ha. I’m coming along to
work.”

“You will,” Darzek promised. “And you may not like it. We start by going to school. Before we can move freely in a strange civilization we’ll have to learn everything from the language to how to hold our teacups. It won’t be easy.”

“Can I go back to New York before we leave?”

“You’ll have to. If you don’t do something about your apartment, Missing Persons will be looking for you. If you don’t pack a suitcase—carefully—you may be doing some looking yourself. Macy’s won’t have any branches where we’re going.”

“I gave up my apartment before I left, and I have a suitcase packed. Carefully. It’s in Nashville.”

“Then why do you want to go to New York?”

“My sister has what was left of my rhubarb beer. I want to take some along.”

Darzek threw up his hands despairingly. “Smith, our departure will be delayed while Miss Schlupe inventories her beer.”

Smith stepped into view and said blankly, “I don’t understand.”

“Miss Schlupe comes with us. Her suitcase is in Nashville and her beer is in New York. A deplorable state of affairs. Get her to both places, so we can leave.”

Smith stoically turned toward the transmitter.

They arrived—somewhere—and transmitted from the spaceship to a sealed suite of rooms in Smith’s Certification Group Headquarters. They studied. They learned to talk, read, and write
large-talk.
They learned a supplementary universal alphabet whose characters turned out to be numbers, allegedly capable of arrangement in combinations that could depict the sounds of any of the uncounted spoken languages of the galaxy. There was also a universal
touch
alphabet, for species of intelligent life incapable of phonation, and special modifications for species with sundry other handicaps. Darzek found himself gloomily contemplating the problem of communicating with a species that possessed no senses whatsoever.

“I know of none,” Smith said, with a slight gurgle that Darzek had begun to suspect was a laugh. “But anything is possible. It takes all kinds to make a galaxy.”

“I believe you,” Darzek said fervently.

Smith was one of them. He had shed his epidermis as soon as they shed Earth’s Solar System, and he appeared vaguely human in the way a human might look after he’d been run over by a steamroller: flattened out. Immensely broad when viewed from the front, but unbelievably thin in profile. His face was caved in, its features weirdly inverted. The enormous eyes were widely separated and almost on a line with the single, gaping nostril. The mouth was a puckered gash in the chin, the neck a slender pipe. There were no ears or hair. The flesh was of a distinctive hue that Miss Schlupe at once labeled
oxygen-starvation blue.

“If he wants to remove
that
epidermis, too, it’s all right with me,” she had confided to Darzek.

Smith added absently, “There are even species that have rather involved communication systems based upon odors, but no one has ever been able to reduce these to symbols.”

“Thank God!” Darzek exclaimed.

“You must have a fair mastery of
large-talk,
and if you remain long on a world you may want to learn the local languages, assuming that you are physiologically capable of doing so. You needn’t worry about the more complicated forms of communication, but you should know about them. For example, a strange male who approaches and touches a female on your world would be guilty of criminal misconduct. In interstellar society the action would be recognized as a search for someone with an understanding of touch speech.”

“There’d be the same understanding on Earth,” Darzek said, “but the woman probably wouldn’t like what was being said.”

“I mention this so that if it should happen to Miss Schlupe she would not react in the accepted manner of your Earth women.”

Miss Schlupe blinked innocently. “I’d take it as a compliment—on Earth or anywhere else.”

“If all we need to know is
large-talk,
let’s get on with it,” Darzek said.

“Large-talk,”
Smith agreed gloomily. “And manners and customs and finance and business and practical technology and—and the Council of Supreme is becoming impatient. There is so little time, and you learn so
slowly.”

Finally there was a brief farewell ceremony with Smith, and Darzek and Miss Schlupe drank a toast with the last of Miss Schlupe’s rhubarb beer, which Smith refused to touch. They stepped through a special transmitter hookup to a passenger compartment of a commercial space liner. With that step they crossed their Rubicon. They knew, now, that they could not turn back. They did not even know how to get back.