THE WRONG REACTION
The body lay face down; the back of the jacket heaved as if the chest were rising. I first pulled on gloves—agent’s gloves. I could have stirred boiling acid, yet I could feel a coin in the dark and call heads or tails—once gloved, I started to turn him over and undress him.
The back was still heaving; I did not like the look of it—unnatural. I placed a palm between the shoulder blades.
A man’s back is bone and muscle. This was soft and undulating.
It pulsed…
By Robert A. Heinlein
Published by Ballantine Books:
BETWEEN PLANETS
CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY
THE DOOR INTO SUMMER
DOUBLE STAR
FARMER IN THE SKY
FRIDAY
GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE
HAVE SPACE SUIT-WILL TRAVEL
JOB: A Comedy of Justice
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST
THE PUPPET MASTERS
RED PLANET
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO
THE ROLLING STONES
SPACE CADET
THE STAR BEAST
STARMAN JONES
TIME FOR THE STARS
TUNNEL IN THE SKY
WALDO & MAGIC, INC.
Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
A Del Rey® Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1951 by Robert A. Heinlein
Copyright © 1951 by World Editions, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
The characters, the location, and the incidents in this book are entirely the product of the author’s imagination and have no relation to any person or event in real life.
http://www.randomhouse.com
ISBN 0-345-33014-5
This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc.
Printed in Canada
First Ballantine Books Edition: November 1986
First Revised Edition: January 1990
20 19
Content
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
About the Author
I
Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? I don’t know and I don’t know how we can ever find out. I’m not a lab man; I’m an operator.
With the Soviets it seems certain that they did not invent anything. They simply took the communist power-for-power’s-sake and extended it without any “rotten liberal sentimentality” as the commissars put it. On the other hand, with animals they were a good deal more than animal.
(It seems strange no longer to see dogs around. When we finally come to grips with them, there will be a few million dogs to avenge. And cats. For me, one particular cat.)
If they were not truly intelligent, I hope I never live to see us tangle with anything at all like them, which is intelligent. I know who will lose. Me. You. The so-called human race.
For me it started much too early on July 12, ’07, with my phone shrilling in a frequency guaranteed to peel off the skull. I felt around my person, trying to find the thing to shut it off, then recalled that I had left it in my jacket across the room. “All right,” I growled. “I hear you. Shut off that damned noise.”
“Emergency,” a voice said in my ear. “Report in person.”
I told him what to do with his emergency. “I’m on a seventy-two hour pass.”
“Report to the Old Man,” the voice persisted, “at once.”
That was different. “Moving,” I acknowledged and sat up with a jerk that hurt my eyeballs. I found myself facing a blonde. She was sitting up, too, and staring at me round-eyed.
“Who are you talking to?” she demanded.
I stared back, recalling with difficulty that I had seen her before. “Me? Talking?” I stalled while trying to think up a good lie, then, as I came wider-awake, realized that it did not have to be a very good lie as she could not possibly have heard the other half of the conversation. The sort of phone my section uses is not standard; the audio relay was buried surgically under the skin back of my left ear—bone conduction. “Sorry, babe,” I went on. “Had a nightmare. I often talk in my sleep.”
“Sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine, now that I’m awake,” I assured her, staggering a bit as I stood up. “You go back to sleep.”
“Well, uh—” She was breathing regularly almost at once. I went into the bath, injected a quarter grain of “Gyro” in my arm, then let the vibro shake me apart for three minutes while the drug put me back together. I stepped out a new man, or at least a good mock-up of one, and got my jacket. The blonde was snoring gently.
I let my subconscious race back along its track and realized with regret that I did not owe her a damned thing, so I left her. There was nothing in the apartment to give me away, nor even to tell her who I was.
I entered our section offices through a washroom booth in MacArthur Station. You won’t find our offices in the phone lists. In fact, it does not exist. Probably I don’t exist either. All is illusion. Another route is through a little hole-in-the-wall shop with a sign reading RARE STAMPS & COINS. Don’t try that route either—they’ll try to sell you a Tu’penny Black.
Don’t try any route. I told you we didn’t exist, didn’t I?
There is one thing no head of a country can know and that is: how good is his intelligence system? He finds out only by having it fail him. Hence our section. Suspenders and belt. United Nations had never heard of us, nor had Central Intelligence—I think. I heard once that we were blanketed into an appropriation for the Department of Food Resources, but I would not know; I was paid in cash.
All I really knew about was the training I had received and the jobs the Old Man sent me on. Interesting jobs, some of them—if you don’t care where you sleep, what you eat, nor how long you live. I’ve totaled three years behind the Curtain; I can drink vodka without blinking and spit Russian like a cat—as well as Cantonese, Kurdish, and some other bad-tasting tongues. I’m prepared to say that they’ve got nothing behind the Curtain that Paducah, Kentucky doesn’t have bigger and better. Still, it’s a living.
If I had had any sense, I’d have quit and taken a working job.
The only trouble with that would be that I wouldn’t have been working for the Old Man any longer. That made the difference.
Not that he was a soft boss. He was quite capable of saying, “Boys, we need to fertilize this oak tree. Just jump in that hole at its base and I’ll cover you up.”
We’d have done it. Any of us would.
And the Old Man would bury us alive, too, if he thought
that there was as much as a 53 percent probability that it was the Tree of Liberty he was nourishing.
He got up and limped toward me as I came in. I wondered again why he did not have that leg done over. Pride in how he had gotten the limp was my guess, not that I would ever know. A person in the Old Man’s position must enjoy his pride in secret; his profession does not allow for public approbation.
His face split in a wicked smile. With his big hairless skull and his strong Roman nose he looked like a cross between Satan and Punch of Punch-and-Judy. “Welcome, Sam,” he said. “Sorry to get you out of bed.”
The deuce he was sorry! “I was on leave,” I answered shortly. He was the Old Man, but leave is leave—and damned seldom!
“Ah, but you still are. We’re going on a vacation.”
I didn’t trust his “vacations” so I did not rise to the bait. “So my name is ‘Sam’,” I answered. “What’s my last name?”
“Cavanaugh. And I’m your Uncle Charlie—Charles M. Cavanaugh, retired. Meet your sister Mary.”
I had noticed that there was another person in the room, but had filed my one glance for future reference. When the Old Man is present he gets full attention as long as he wants it. Now I looked over my “sister” more carefully and then looked her over again. It was worth it.
I could see why he had set us up as brother and sister if we were to do a job together; it would give him a trouble-free pattern. An indoctrinated agent can’t break his assumed character any more than a professional actor can intentionally muff his lines. So this one I must treat as my sister—a dirty trick if I ever met one!
A long, lean body, but unquestionably and pleasingly mammalian. Good legs. Broad shoulders for a woman. Flaming, wavy red hair and the real redheaded saurian bony structure to her skull. Her face was handsome rather than beautiful; her teeth were sharp and clean. She looked me over as if I were a side of beef.
I was not yet in character; I wanted to drop one wing and run in circles. It must have showed, for the Old Man said gently, “Tut tut, Sammy—there’s no incest in the Cavanaugh family. You were both carefully brought up, by my favorite sister-in-law. Your sister dotes on you and you are extremely fond of your sister, but in a healthy, clean-cut, sickeningly chivalrous, All-American-Boy sort of way.”
“As bad as that?” I asked, still looking at my “sister”.
“Worse.”
“Oh, well—howdy, Sis. Glad to know you.”
She stuck out a hand. It was firm and seemed as strong as mine. “Hi, Bud.” Her voice was deep contralto, which was all I needed. Damn the Old Man!
“I might add,” the Old Man went on in the same gentle tones, “that you are so devoted to your sister that you would gladly die to protect her. I dislike to tell you so, Sammy, but your sister is a little more valuable, for the present at least, to the organization than you are.”
“Got it,” I acknowledged. “Thanks for the polite qualification.”
“Now, Sammy—”
“She’s my favorite sister; I protect her from dogs and strange men. I don’t have to be slapped with an ax. Okay, when do we start?”
“Better stop over in Cosmetics; I think they have a new face for you.”
“Make it a whole new head. See you. ’By, Sis.”
They did not quite do that, but they did fit my personal phone under the overhang of my skull in back and then cemented hair over it. They dyed my hair to the same shade as that of my newly acquired sister, bleached my skin, and did things to my cheekbones and chin. The mirror showed me to be as good an authentic redhead as Sis. I looked at my hair and tried to recall what its natural shade had been, way back when. Then I wondered if Sis were what she seemed to be along those lines. I rather hoped so. Those teeth, now—Stow it, Sammy! She’s your sister.
I put on the kit they gave me and somebody handed me a jump bag, already packed. The Old Man had evidently been in Cosmetics, too; his skull was now covered by crisp curls of a shade just between pink and white. They had done something to his face, for the life of me I could not tell just what—but we were all three clearly related by blood and were all of that curious sub-race, the redheads.
“Come, Sammy,” he said. “Time is short. I’ll brief you in the car.” We went up by a route I had not known about and ended up on the Northside launching platform, high above New Brooklyn and overlooking Manhattan Crater.
I drove while the Old Man talked. Once we were out of local control he told me to set it automatic on Des Moines, Iowa. I then joined Mary and “Uncle Charlie” in the lounge. He gave us our personal histories briefly and filled in details to bring us up to date. “So here we are,” he concluded, “a merry little family party—tourists. And if we should happen to run into unusual events, that is how we will behave, as nosy and irresponsible tourists might.”
“But what is the problem?” I asked. “Or do we play this one entirely by ear?”
“Mmmm…possibly.”
“Okay. But when you’re dead, it’s nice to know why you’re dead, I always say. Eh, Mary?”
“Mary” did not answer. She had that quality, rare in babes and commendable, of not talking when she had nothing to say. The Old Man looked me over, his manner not that of a man who can’t make up his mind, but rather as if he were judging me as I was at that moment and feeding the newly acquired data into the machine between his ears.
Presently he said, “Sam, you’ve heard of ‘flying saucers’.”
“Huh? Can’t say that I have.”
“You’ve studied history. Come, now!”
“You mean those? The flying-saucer craze, ’way back before the Disorders? I thought you meant something recent and real; those were mass hallucinations.”
“Were they?”
“Well, weren’t they? I haven’t studied much statistical abnormal psychology, but I seem to remember an equation. That whole period was psychopathic; a man with all his gaskets tight would have been locked up.”
“But this present day is sane, eh?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.” I pawed back through the unused drawers of my mind and found the answer I wanted. “I remember that equation now—Digby’s evaluating integral for second and higher order data. It gave a 93.7 percent certainty that the flying-saucer myth, after elimination of explained cases, was hallucination. I remember it because it was the first case of its type in the history of science in which the instances had been systematically collected and evaluated. Some sort of a government project, God knows why.”
The Old Man looked benignly avuncular. “Brace yourself, Sammy. We are going to inspect a flying saucer today. Maybe we’ll even saw off a piece for a souvenir, like true tourists.”
II
“Seen a newscast lately?” the Old Man went on.
I shook my head. Silly question—I’d been on leave.
“Try it sometime,” he suggested. “Lots of interesting things on the ’casts. Never mind. Seventeen hours—” he glanced at his finger watch and added, “—and twenty-three minutes ago an unidentified spaceship landed near Grinnell, Iowa. Type, unknown. Approximately disc-shaped and about one hundred fifty feet across. Origin, unknown, but—”
“Didn’t they track a trajectory on it?” I interrupted.
“They did not,” he answered, spacing his words. “Here is a photo of it taken after landing by Space Station Beta.”
I looked it over and passed it to Mary. It was as unsatisfactory as a telephoto taken from five thousand miles out usually is. Trees looking like moss…a cloud shadow that loused up the best part of the pic…and a gray circle that might have been a disc-shaped space ship and could just as well have been an oil tank or a water reservoir. I wondered how many times we had bombed hydroponics plants in Siberia, mistaking them for atomic installations.
Mary handed the pic back. I said, “Looks like a tent for a camp meeting to me. What else do we know?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing! After seventeen hours? We oug
ht to have agents pouring out of their ears!”
“Ah, yes. We did have. Two within reach and four that were sent in. They failed to report back. I dislike losing agents, Sammy, especially with no results.”
Up to then I had not stopped to wonder about the Old Man himself being risked on a job—it had not looked like risk. But I had a sudden cold realization that the situation must be so serious that the Old Man had chosen to bet his own brain against the loss of the organization—for he was the Section. Nobody who knew him doubted his guts, but they did not doubt his horse sense, either. He knew his own value; he would not risk himself unless he believed coldly that it would take his own skill to swing it and that the job had to be done.
I felt suddenly chilly. Ordinarily an agent has a duty to save his own neck—in order to complete his mission and report back. On this job it was the Old Man who must come back—and after him, Mary. I stood number three and was as expendable as a paper clip. I didn’t like it.
“One agent made a partial report,” the Old Man went on. “He went in as a casual bystander and reported by phone that it must be a space ship although he could not determine its motive power. We got the same thing from the newscasts. He then reported that the ship was opening and that he was going to try to get closer, past the police lines. The last thing he said was, ‘Here they come. They are little creatures, about—’ Then he shut off.”
“Little men?”
“He said, ‘creatures’.”
“Peripheral reports?”
“Plenty of them. The Des Moines stereocasting station reported the landing and sent mobile units in for spot cast. The pictures they sent out were all fairly long shots, taken from the air. They showed nothing but a disc-shaped object. Then, for about two hours, no pictures and no news, followed later by close ups and a new news slant.”
The Old Man shut up. I said, “Well?”
“The whole thing was a hoax. The ‘space ship’ was a sheet metal and plastic fraud, built by two farm boys in some woods near their home. The fake reports originated with an announcer with more sense of humor than good judgment and who had put the boys up to it to make a story. He has been fired and the latest ‘invasion from outer space’ turns out to be a joke.”