Agent of the Unknown Read online

  The harness couldn't possibly have belonged to Fran. That was the first point. She must have been taking care of it for someone, a friend or a lover, over whose use of the device she was deeply distressed. That would account for everything—her nervousness and lack of rationality, her attack of the use of the harnesses, even her insistence that Don take the pills she had brought. Perhaps to her in her nervous, overwrought state alcoholism had begun to seem as serious a danger as addiction to the paschein harness.

  Now that he had thought of these things, he felt much better. Of course he still had the attack on him by the robot to worry about, but he was almost sure that the sliver gun darts had been deliberately aimed wide. The attack had been meant to intimidate, not to kill. Presumably, the idea was that when an effort to get the doll away from him was made, the attack would have rendered him disposed to be co-operative.

  He folded Fran's message and shoved it into his pocket, smiling, His fingers touched the box she had given him. Oh, ugh, the pills. Well, he'd promised. He might as well start taking them.

  He opened the box. They were quite ordinary-looking tablets, white and round, and there were about twenty of them. The directions in the box lid read, "One every four hours." The same message was given below in isotypes—a round pillule followed by four clock faces, each with the hour hand advanced by one hour.

  Don filled a glass from a font and put a pill on his tongue. It had a slight soapy, saline taste. He swallowed it.

  Payne came out in the kitchen while he was dosing himself. "Sick, Haig?" he asked curiously. He watched Don put the box away in his pocket.

  "Not exactly."

  "Oh." Payne inspected him critically. "You look O.K.," he said finally. "Lost a little weight, maybe, but nothing to worry about ... Say, unh, you know that doll you had? Could you let me have another look at her?"

  "Why?" Don asked after a second.

  "Dunno, exactly," Payne answered. He rubbed his nose. He sounded as if he were a little surprised at himself. "I'd just like to look at her."

  "I'm sorry." Don went over to the heap of dakdak pods piled on a salver and began to work on them. "I'd rather not."

  "Why, you let me see her once before. You asked me to look at her." Payne sounded indignant.

  "I know. I'm sorry." There was no use trying to explain to Payne the reluctance he felt toward showing the doll.

  Payne glared at him. He began throwing scraps and used plates into the disposer clatteringly. He was cross all the rest of the day.

  By fifteen that afternoon Don's hands were so sore from dakdak spines that he went out and bought a pair of siskin gloves. They helped a lot. He wondered why he had not thought of them before.

  A little before the restaurant closed he took a second dose of Fran's medicine, and he swallowed a third pill before he went to sleep. The pills might as well have been chalk, he thought; they did not even nauseate him.

  He woke early, just as the sun was coming up. Lying on his bed of sand—surprisingly comfortable, if one smoothed out its irregularities carefully before lying down on it—he watched the sky turn from translucent blue to pink, amber, apple green, scarlet and burning gold. Then the sun was up. The glory faded. He went back to sleep.

  He woke for good about nine. He bathed in the milk-sweet surf—he would have liked to swim, but that would have meant either letting the doll out of his grasp or swimming in his trousers—and rinsed himself in the fresh water from the spring with the agate pebbles. He cupped water in his hand and gulped down another of Francine's pills. He decided to go see Kunitz. He hadn't seen him for nearly a week, since before Francine's visit.

  He walked along the sun-dappled path, whistling. Long-tailed birds shot out across the path on both sides of him, disturbed by his passing. The air was full of their brilliant notes. Once Haig himself began to sing, in his uneven baritone, and a bird somewhere to the right of him took up the challenge, singing more and more loudly, until at last it burst into a volley of defeated squawks and shrieks. Don laughed.

  He picked a blossom from a ginger plant and set it behind his ear. When he had gone on a few steps more, he got out the doll and looked at her.

  As always, he was shaken by her beauty. When he was not looking at her, he forgot how beautiful she was. She stayed in his mind as a kind of wooing sweetness and richness, something which was, by a thousand tiny enchantments, leading him from his coldness and self-hatred back into the warmth of life. But when he looked at her he perceived that her beauty was armed; that, for all her nakedness and tears, she was clothed in power.

  He put her away at last. It must be jealousy that made everyone advise him to part with her. His pleasure in her was too deep to let him smile.

  A rustle in the thicket made him start, but it was only one of the robot gardeners. What had he been expecting, anyhow? Another attack, like the one in Fran's room? He wished he could dismiss the fear as foolishness. Perhaps it was. And then, one fear bringing up another, he thought, Am I losing weight? Both Fran and Payne had mentioned it. Bendel had spoken of loss of weight and pain in the bones.

  He wouldn't think of it. Bendel's story had been, he was almost certain, a fabric of lies, designed to cause fright. He wished he were quite certain of it, but that couldn't be helped. He had the doll. She was his. He was going to keep her. Don walked on briskly toward Kunitz' house. But he was not whistling now.

  The next bend in the path would bring him in sight of Kunitz' place. The leaves rustled crisply under foot. He wasn't on Fyon any more.

  Without surprise, he saw that he stood in a grove of red and gold maple trees. Their leaves were yellow, amber, scarlet, crimson, and a deep, almost purple, red. The leaves which had fallen lay in drifts about his feet. Overhead the sky was a pale bright blue. The air was crisp and winey, like a bright autumn day on earth.

  Ahead of him there was a group of tall, dark pines. The shadows were black between their branches, and he thought he could smell the balsam of their needles from where he stood. On the topmost boughs of the pine trees, burnished and splendid, were three golden birds.

  They seemed made of the pure metal, and yet they were living. After a second, he knew what they were. "The cocks of Hades," he thought. "Miracle, bird or handiwork? More miracle than bird or handiwork." They were the stars which had lit upon the golden boughs. Yes, it was perfectly clear.

  He walked toward the pine trees, smiling with recognition. The trees rose straight up before him, like a rampart. Their green was darker than any black. There was a gray and green sphinx lying under them.

  She was a small sphinx, with a sad, eroded, mossy face. The wisdom of humanity had made her sad. A rungless ladder stood beside her and reached up into the branches of the trees.

  He stood looking up at them, thinking. The birds were silent. But he knew they had voices. When the cocks crowed, it would shake the heavens. It would be louder than trumpets, it would split the sky open. When they shook out their wings ...

  He must hear them. He would hear them. But there was a condition. Before they would crow, he must give them to eat from his own hands.

  He turned to the sphinx. She was watching him steadily with her polished nephrite eyes. The eternal riddle hovered unvoiced in the air between.

  He gathered up his forces to speak to the wise monster. "The answer is man," he said.

  She nodded. She half rose on her gray haunches. With a motion like stone, she broke off her long hands.

  They were grayish green, like her body. He snapped them twice more, easily. Then he fitted them on the ladder to serve as rungs.

  He mounted on it. Up he went, up and up and up. The sphinx and her wisdom had vanished. He could not see the bottom of the ladder. There was only a mist of fine silver below him. It was curdled a little, and looped like a stream. At the top of the ladder the golden birds waited for him.

  What could he offer them that would be worthy? Their changeless metal could not accept common food. Humbleness made him dizzy. He had nothing. And y
et it was useless to hope that they would utter the sky-splitting sound unfed.

  He stood on the ladder musing. A cold, vaporous cloud floated close to him and drifted away again. There was something ... He had something the birds would feed on, if he could remember what it was.

  He made a great effort. Then he pulled Vulcan's weeping doll from his pocket and offered it to them.

  The first two birds refused it with their gleaming emerald eyes. But the third—Don was giddy with rapture—put out his golden bill. He would accept the offering. He pecked at it.

  At the last moment, Don jerked the doll back. He felt a dim surprise at himself. Now he would never hear the voices of the cocks of Hades. Never, never. The ladder wavered. With a cry, he fell backward into the mist.

  The sphinx turned an astonished face to him as he went past.

  When he came to himself, he was on Fyon once more. His mouth was dry, his tongue parched and thick. He felt empty and emotionless, alien to himself, as if he had been on a drug debauch.

  What had happened? He looked about him vacantly. The shadows of the trees were long; it must be late afternoon.

  What had happened to the day?

  He was sitting under an ilangilang tree, on the path that led to Kunitz' place. Kunitz? Yes, he had been on the way to visit Kunitz when ... when ...

  Sudden terror invaded him. The dream of the sphinx and the birds receded swirlingly, and he knew he had been duped, tricked, drugged. What if he had been robbed while he was beside himself, and she, his little miracle, she—?

  Sick with anxiety, he fumbled in his pockets. The tablets Francine had given him were gone. But the doll—he had jerked the doll back in time from the threatening beak. She was still there.

  Chapter Eight — The Cave

  "ALL the evidence points that way," Kunitz said patiently. "Look at it objectively, Don, as far as you can. Your foster sister insists on your taking a drug which she says will cure alcoholism, even though you tell her repeatedly that you are no longer alcoholic. Even at the time, her insistence on this point impresses you as unmotivated and unreasonable. All clear so far?" He stopped and poured himself a drink.

  "I guess so. Yes." Haig made the admission slowly and reluctantly.

  "She gives you a drug which, from your description of its taste and effects, was almost certainly alaphronein. Now, alaphronein is not only a very dangerous drug, it is also an extremely expensive one. More than that, its manufacture is virtually an SSP monopoly. One hears stories, probably true, about the semi-official uses members of that organization make of it. You contend that your sister got the drug 'from some quack' and gave it to you innocently. But what would a quack be doing passing out alaphronein?"

  There was a moment's silence while Kunitz poured the phlomis down his throat. Don said defensively, "It may not have been alaphronein."

  Kunitz shrugged. "The third point," he said, "is your own conviction, on waking from the drug trance, that there had been an attempt to rob you of the doll? That's what your first thought was, wasn't it?"

  "Well, yes. But of course I wasn't myself."

  Kunitz drew in his breath impatiently. "Blast it, but you're stubborn, Haig. All right, then. Take my final point—the nature of your fantasy. That certainly points to a suggestor, as the alaphronein addicts call it."

  "What do you mean? I always heard the addicts imagined everything."

  Kunitz shook his gray head. "Their fantasies are much more coherent and vivid when somebody is present to give them verbal suggestion on point after point. Now, your drug hallucination was, if I understood you correctly, based on an old poem of which you are fond. Isn't your fondness for that poem known to Francine?"

  "She—oh, shut up."

  Kunitz chuckled. "I must have touched on a tender spot."

  "Never mind that. Look here, Kunitz. Why would Francine do such a thing?"

  The older man shrugged. "Might be lots of reasons. Economic pressure, possibly. Blackmail, more likely. Suppose your sister has got mixed up in something discreditable. Or she might have become addicted to some cult practice or drug, and the SSP could lever on her by threatening to shut off her source of supply ... Did you say something?"

  "No."

  "Or just simple intimidation. The robot with the sliver gun, for instance. I don't believe the robot was trying for you. Even a robot wouldn't mistake a woman for a man. Francine knew it was meant for her. That's why she was so upset."

  "... I don't believe it."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I can't. Francine—why, Francine and I went everywhere together when we were kids. My foster parents were just—people. They took me out of the institution because of the bonus. But Francine and I were friends. I used to take her to entertainments and chorics and diwans. She wouldn't do a thing like that. If Francine gave me alaphronein, it was by mistake. My drug hallucination must have been entirely subjective."

  "Stubborn son, aren't you?" Kunitz scratched the hair on his chest. "How about trying to check up on it?"

  "What do you mean? How could we check up on it?"

  "Well, I'm positive your hallucination had some basis in reality. I think a suggestor was involved, and perhaps objects which, when you were in the drug state, could play the role of what you felt and saw. Suppose we go looking for them."

  "All over Fyon?"

  "Of course not. You were on your way to see me, weren't you, when the drug took effect? If we were to look about in the area where you were when that happened, we might find something."

  "Oh, all right." Haig got to his feet. Kunitz latched the door behind them. They started down the path.

  "It was about here," Haig said at last. He looked about him listlessly.

  "Not much use looking for traces," Kunitz observed. "Not with rain regularly every afternoon. But I'll see what I can find." He began moving outward from the spot Don had indicated, in widening circles, with an intent and earnest face.

  After a moment, Don sat down beside a champak tree. He crossed his legs and fiddled nervously with the strap of his sandal. He was still feeling the aftermath of the drugging in the form of a restlessness which was at once languid and irritable. A lizard, brilliant kingfisher blue, darted like a flash of blue fire past his feet. He hoped Kunitz would not find anything.

  From somewhere up ahead Kunitz' voice came faintly. "Hey ... Haig ... come ... here ... Found ...", and then another long "Hey ..." Don rose reluctantly.

  When he found Kunitz, the older man was standing beside an opening in a low tree-grown hill. "We've found the locus of your hallucination," Kunitz said. He was looking pleased.

  "Here?"

  "No, inside the cave. (It's not really a cave—just a place where the robots can store gardening tools.) Come inside. There's light enough for you to see." He took Don by the arm.

  The cave was a small place, not much larger than a niche, which seemed to have been scooped out of the rock. There were pruning tools on shelves in it, and on the rock floor a heap of grayish tarpaulins. At the right a rickety ladder was standing, its top resting against a stone ledge.

  "Pretty obvious, isn't it?" Kunitz commented. "The sphinx was the tarpaulins, of course. Now climb up the ladder, Don, and take a look at what's at the top."

  Haig obeyed. The ledge, he found, was about six inches wide and coated thickly with dust. Three flower pots of yellowish plastic stood at intervals along it. At the top of the ladder there was a broad smear in the layer of dust.

  "The mark in the dust was where your suggestor sat, of course," Kunitz observed. "I've proved my point, haven't I? Come on down, Haig. There's nothing else up there for you to see."

  At the foot of the ladder the men confronted each other. "Don't you see what this means, Don?" Kunitz asked after a second. "You can't go on in the old way, living here on Fyon, working when you feel like it, and enjoying your own unique and personal little miracle, Vulcan's doll. They—the people who gave you the alaphronein—aren't going to let you go on in the old way.<
br />
  "It was alaphronein. The most dangerous of all drugs, the only one which has a twenty-eighty chance, from the first dose, of raising inter-cranial pressure to the point where the brain tissue bursts. You're lucky, Don, if I may say so. You didn't lose the doll, and you're still sane.

  "But you've got to get out of here. Alaphronein means the SSP. How are you going to resist a force like that? You can't. You must disappear.

  "Now, listen. I know a space-ship captain. I did something for him once. I have reason to believe he won't refuse to do me a favor. With him helping, you can disappear.

  "After a while, when it's safe, you can come out of hiding. You'll have a new identity, and if we can find a discreet surgeon, new eyes and a new face.

  "It's the only thing for you to do, Don. Don't you see? We can't risk having any more Francines work on you." He laughed.

  Until that moment, the issue had hung in doubt. Don had been very near consenting. But there was something in the shape of Kunitz' mouth when he said "Francines," a heaviness and smugness and self-assurance in his laugh, that turned Haig's frustration, doubt and fear into abrupt rage. "I won't," he said.

  "What? Don't be foolish."

  "No. I won't," Haig hunted for words. "Is everything a mask?" he asked almost desperately. "You say that Francine was lying to me, that she gave me a drug that might have killed me, so that the SSP could get the doll. Very well. Perhaps she was lying. What about you?

  "How can I tell? How do I know you didn't arrange that proof you're speaking of?" He gestured around the cave at the ladder, the flower pots, the tarpaulin. "It wouldn't be difficult. If Francine was lying, if there're nothing but masks around me—how about you?"

  He turned and walked away. His motions were wavering and unsteady. At the door of the cave he hesitated. Then he went on down the path.

  Kunitz looked after him, frowning and scratching the hair on his chest. He spat the reddish saliva of Betla nut chewing on the floor. "They must capture him," he said.

  Chapter Nine — Weialala