CHAPTER TWO--FANCY MEETING YOU HERE
EARTH LOOKED little different to Hannibal Fortune than it had when he had last seen it almost two hundred years ago. That had been in the time of Napoleon; Fortune had been half of a Resident Team then, their task to prod the Corsican corporal into becoming the Emperor of France. Fortune sighed, those had been the days. Champagne, parties, swordplay, wenches of various talents and temperaments; he wondered if any of their descendants had turned out as insanely wonderful.
It was not part of his assignment to speculate upon the romantic proclivities of Earth's female population, but it would have been entirely out of character for Hannibal Fortune to have done otherwise, even in the most harrowing circumstances. It was partly because of his customary attention to such extraneous detail and partly despite it that he was rated among Temporal Entropy Restructure and Repair Agency's top half-dozen operatives. Somehow it contributed to Fortune's fantastic knack for snatching victory out of the ashes of defeat, which had earned him the coveted License to Tamper--for when one is restructuring a time line, a seemingly extraneous event can often turn into a crucial pivot point.
Never having been a pawn, the handsome, debonair agent was often referred to by those in the Agency's upper echelons as a Bishop or Rook in the mind-staggering chess game between the Federation and Empire. The mere fact that it was Hannibal Fortune and not some lesser agent who had been assigned to find out what had happened to Sorobin Kimball guaranteed the gambit to be of the highest priority, a mission of great urgency. The fact that his tour of the Seven Planets had been interrupted by the emergency may have had something to do with his current speculations on the amorous inclinations of Earth's present female population. Nevertheless, he did not allow it to intrude upon the immediate task at hand, which was to conceal the temporal transporter which had brought him and his partner Webley through time and space to their present location.
The machine was a streamlined model, equipped with all the gadgetry T.E.R.R.A.'s technicians could build into it, including a remote phase-out control which looked remarkably like a mid-20th Century wristwatch. A time machine no matter how you looked at it, Fortune mused, thumbing the control stem. The bulky transporter winked out of sight, temporally phased ninety degrees ahead of itself. That part of it was easy, like pushing a button; getting it back was the tricky part, Hannibal reminded himself. It was a little like pushing a button that would kill you if you happened to shift your position to the wrong place once you'd pushed it. The techs had been very specific on that point putting on the airs of superiority that techs often resort to when in the presence of mere operatives.
"Clever, huh?" Fortune said aloud.
"Astonishing," Webley's bored voice hissed three inches from his left ear. "Someday they'll teach 'em to think; and the machines will take over completely."
"Ready to start hunting?"
In answer, Webley flowed into a compact ball, dragging his semi-solid other half delicately across the back of Fortune's neck. Hannibal shifted his stance accordingly, for his partner, although light on his pseudopods, weighed almost fifteen pounds. It took but a few seconds for the symbiote to reassemble himself, warping his pliant protoplasm into a working semblance of a large bird. A moment later, without a word of farewell, Webley flapped off into the night. It was one of his favorite forms, and a good one for reconnaissance.
Fortune, more conventionally constructed, was stuck with the limitations of his man-shape. He could neither flow, fly nor flit, nor was he telepathic like his partner. But his dossier at T.E.R.R.A. Control left no doubt that if anyone could find out what had happened to Sorobin Kimball, Hannibal Fortune was the man to do it. Resourcefully, he found a stump and sat down to wait.
The struggle between Empire and T.E.R.R.A. was an odd chess game, he reflected, with billions of pawns who neither knew nor cared, pawn-fashion, who the real opponents were, and who would have been unable at any rate to comprehend the prize which awaited the winner--a prize more than six hundred years in the future, involving the forty-seven inhabited solar systems in one galaxy. What man on Earth could conceive of a struggle which involved forty-seven solar systems? What mere global strategist could imagine that the subjugation of scores of thickly populated planets would depend upon the outcome of his own puny single-planet battles? What Earthman could seriously contemplate such a holocaust when the potential vaporization of his own insignificant ball of mud was too mind-staggering for him to really take seriously? It was a concept which often eluded Fortune himself, who had grown to manhood on just such a world. It was a concept so elusive that most of T.E.R.R.A.'s agents had to content themselves with arbitrary statements of policy and unquestioning obedience to the tactical decisions plotted by the Galactic Federation's master computer. Only a handful, such as Hannibal Fortune, were Licensed to Tamper.
Sorobin Kimball had not been a member of that select group. His last message to T.E.R.R.A. Control had concerned Empire intervention in Earth's current war and his discovery of a suspected Empire agent in the U.S. Air Force. That, combined with his earlier report of a concentration of Empire skimmers--which the natives quaintly dubbed "Flying Saucers"--had prompted Control to cut short Fortune's vacation. Skimmers, in an observation capacity, had been flitting about Earth's atmosphere for several decades, but never before had there been quite so many of them. Kimball's assignment had included keeping track of them and staying out of sight. Now both he and his symbiote, Glarrk, a counterpart of Fortune's Webley, seemed to have disappeared. As far as Earth-time was concerned, Kimball's last message had been broadcast half an hour ago, although Control had taken two weeks to complete their preparations for Fortune's arrival. The temporal transporter had taken up the time-slack, so that Hannibal and Co. would have fresh tracks to follow--which was what Webley was doing now.
Within ten minutes Webley was back, a flurry of feathers braking near Fortune's head and settling gently on his shoulder, where he immediately flowed back into his customary yoke-like position.
"Half a mile to the east," the symbiote reported. "I felt a presence. I think it's Glarrk, but I'm not sure. There are no traces of Empire in the area, though." Fortune was already on his feet, walking toward the faint glow of false dawn. "What do you mean, you're not sure it's Glarrk? Didn't you make esper contact?"
"He wouldn't mesh. Or couldn't. The presence was very faint."
Hannibal patted his pockets as he walked, checking once more his equipment. The suit was in the style of 1966, two button, medium lapel, which fit his six-foot frame as if tailored by one of Earth's top clothiers. Its one significant difference was that it was indestructible, its component pieces having been individually woven to exact size in order to get around the impossibility of cutting the finished fabric. Holstered neatly inside the jacket was a small, flat handgun with a charge sufficient for three hundred shots. Its mechanics were a diabolical refinement of the laser principle. With their customary thoroughness, the techs had taught Fortune to take it apart and put it back together again.
In another pocket nestled a flat, dull-finished case which contained, among other things, three highly specialized cigarettes. One was merely explosive, the second produced a gas which was guaranteed to provide several minutes of acute discomfort for a roomful of people, and the third contained a tiny transmitting device which would pick up and broadcast anything within an effective thirty-foot radius. In addition, the case contained a device which would shoot paralyzing narco-pellets with reasonable accuracy and with sufficient force to penetrate normal epidermis up to sixty feet away. The tech who had engineered this devious toy had been awarded a special T.E.R.R.A. citation for thinking mean.
Built into Fortune's belt was a flexible steel dagger which could be used, when needed, as a burglary tool. Completing the itinerant arsenal was an expensive looking Florentine gold cigarette lighter with a flame which could kindle cigarettes or, with a minor adjustment, cut through one half inch of tempered steel. Not knowing precisely what sort of troubles he might encounter, T.E.R.R.A. had equipped him to deal with a variety of possible situations. In the past, Fortune had found such Gimmickry totally superfluous and agreed to carry only those items whose potential usefulness clearly outweighed the trouble of packing them around.
Hannibal Fortune had been one of the first wave of T.E.R.R.A. recruits. In a sense, Temporal Entropy Restructure and Repair Agency was still a young organization, having been created by secret vote of the Galactic Federation Security Council in 2558. Its base-time now was the year 2572, which made T.E.R.R.A. only fourteen years old. Fortune had been with it for twelve of those fourteen years.
The first wave of cadets, including Fortune, had been slummed from among the top history students of the forty-seven member planets of the Galactic Federation. T.E.R.R.A. had used the most enticing bait possible to recruit avid history nuts: the opportunity for a man to actually live in his favorite period of history, to see it firsthand. Fortune had known that a time machine had been invented in 2548, and that by '54 the G.F. had declared it illegal. He'd never heard of Gregor Malik and the sinister organization called Empire until after T.E.R.R.A. had recruited him. But now, thanks to the illegal temporal transporter which T.E.R.R.A.'s scientists were continually perfecting, he'd logged some sixty years' experience fighting Empire. The agent grinned. Quite an accomplishment in twelve years of service.
But T.E.R.R.A. had accomplished much in its fourteen years, scattering some ten thousand highly skilled Resident Agents among forty-seven planets and along time-lines reaching back as far as forty-two centuries, with another ten thousand administrative, technical and clerical workers within the huge artificial planet in the exact center of the galaxy which housed T.E.R.R.A. Control. It seemed ironic that this sprawling organization had to be formed to protect the universe against the evil ambitions of one man, Gregor Malik, Tyrant of the planet Borius, and his fourteen unscrupulous henchmen.
Sorobin Kimball's headquarters was a modest farmhouse in central Kansas where the agent, posing as a novelist and freelance magazine writer, had kept tabs on Earthian activities. The grounds were as deceptively constructed as Fortune's personal equipment. Towering high above the Kansas plain was a windmill topped with an assortment of antennas which, to the casual observer, looked like nothing more than a rig designed for distant TV reception but which was capable of sending sub-spacial signals to the center of the galaxy. The farm's "pumphouse" generated four thousand kilowatts of power. Halfway up the tower was an innocent looking device which made laser communication as old-fashioned as Marconi's first wireless. The brief, infrequent bursts of energy from this apparatus caused TV sets to flicker and radios to crackle for fifty miles around, but had always been interpreted by the natives as heat lightning. Somehow, though, Empire had obtained a fix on Kimball's transmitter and had put both him and it out of commission.
Hannibal Fortune approached the farmhouse with caution, knowing the type of security devices Kimball had installed all around it. The symbiote shifted slightly, his tension matching that of his partner.
"Is he still there?"
"The presence is very weak. And confused."
Fortune took a small instrument from his pocket and turned slowly to sweep the area in front of him. The needle on its face flickered twice.
"The alarm sensors are self-functioning."
"I can fly ahead and dismantle them."
"It won't be necessary, if you're sure there's no one there but Glarrk."
"I'm sure."
A shadow among shadows, Fortune and the symbiote moved into the farmyard. Parked in the circular driveway which encompassed the house was a long, low-slung vehicle which looked, even in the darkness, as if it were posed, ready to leap into motion at the slightest touch on its control mechanisms. On one end was a black sign with silver letters: Jaguar. Fortune assumed it was an internal combustion drive, as that was the prevalent vehicular power of the century. If it was Kimball's car, the agent had lived fairly well for his time. Fortune grinned; T.E.R.R.A. agents were notorious for such behavior. Making sure the vehicle was unoccupied, they circled past it to the rear of the house.
Light spilled from the open back door, but no sounds met their ears. Fortune moved to a window and peered inside, viewing the scene of destruction. He could see the shattered recorder and one corner of the demolished couch. Silently, Webley extended a pseudopod which oozed under the closed window frame like a strip of animated cellophane. Once inside, the end of it formed an eyeball which scanned the entire room. Then, just as silently, the pseudopod withdrew.
"Empty," Webley reported.
They returned to the open door and walked inside. Now Fortune saw the evidence on the charred wall, Kimball's silhouette. Looking closely now, he found evidence to corroborate the silhouette: everything in the room was covered with a fine film of dust--all that remained of Sorobin Kimball. It was so completely unlike anything Kimball had ever been, however, that even without his T.E.R.R.A. training Fortune would have had a hard time becoming sentimental over it. He ran his finger over the tabletop and carefully blew the dust away. "Even dead, he's still working for us."
"How so?"
"His ashes are everywhere. Undisturbed. Proves that nobody else has been here before us. But well have to work quickly, because if I know Empire they'll be back."
"You think they just killed him and left, without touching anything?" The symbiote gathered himself on his partner's left shoulder.
"Obviously. They came by skimmer--they'd have to, to get here so quickly after he started his transmission. The disadvantage to Empire's skimmers is that they're strictly three dimensional. This is a fairly isolated area, but there are still people around who might raise an alarm if they saw me. Our friends will use a more conventional means of travel when they return. See if you can find Glarrk while I look around for things we wouldn't want falling into Empire's hands."
Webley dropped from Fortune's shoulders and assumed the shape of a furry, four-footed creature with a magnificently plumed tail and began prowling about. Hannibal turned his attention to the table, which supported a typewriter and a litter of papers, mostly manuscript all filmed with Kimball's dust. A cursory examination showed the bulk of it to be cryptic notes which fitted into that portion of Kimball's broadcast which Fortune had heard at T.E.R.R.A. Control. A great deal of the jottings, he suspected, were the sort of documentation which would be almost useless without Kimball around to interpret it.
Among the typescript was a newspaper clipping dated two days ago. It featured a picture of a pretty girl holding a large cat. The headline writer had had his customary fun, slugging the item:
SAUCER SIGHTER SAYS SPACESHIP SOLID AS STEEL: AIR FORCE STILL STUCK WITH SWAMP GAS STORY
Miss Marilyn Mostly, age 20, claims to have encountered a UFO last night while searching for her tomcat, Casanova. The spacecraft, which she says was "definitely saucer shaped," was about six feet tall and twenty feet across. It apparently had landed in a field near Miss Mostly's home. She says she found the cat walking around on top of it, acting as if he owned it. "He thinks he owns everything," Miss Mostly explained.
She leaned against the edge of the strange vehicle while trying to coax the cat to come to her. It was warm to the touch and "hard as steel."
The cat she says, jumped down on the other side and "played tag" with her for almost a quarter of a mile before she managed to corral him. Looking back the way she had come, she saw the mysterious object rise slowly in the air to a height of "a hundred feet or so" and then streak away at a "tremendous speed."
Miss Mostly reported the experience early this morning. The Air Force had "no comment" at first, but several hours later released a statement that UFO sightings were common this time of year by people who mistook glowing marsh gases for solid objects.
This is the third alleged saucer sighting in central Kansas in less than a week. Recent reports of unidentified objects in the sky have come from Michigan, Vermont, Massachusetts and Arizona.
An Air Force spokesman refused to elaborate on the Mostly sighting, but hinted that an investigation team would probably check out her story.
Miss Mostly lives alone on the eastern edge of Fallwood, at 1115 E. Thomas.
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