We were beginning to revive a little. Hunger was fading to a weariness within us, muscle aches becoming a throb instead of a pain, numbed minds clearing. I felt some return of decisiveness.

  “We’re not too badly off,” I said. “We’re still alive and free, more or less, and we’ve got the prisoner we wanted, even if we can’t deliver her as yet. We’ll think of something.”

  Regelin’s eyes hardened, and he slanted his antennae toward Gellert. “Yes,” he said bleakly, “I think we may as well hold an interrogation.”

  A smile crossed the pseudo-human face. “If you think I am afraid of you—” said Gellert.

  “Look,” I told her, “we’re not sadists. We have no desire to use torture. Nevertheless, this seems to be an issue transcending such scruples.”

  “It is for me too,” said Gellert quietly.

  “Why don’t you tell us your real name at least?” asked Regelin in an almost casual tone.

  She shrugged. “If you wish. I am called Radeef l’al Kesshub.” That is the nearest I can come to those thick syllables. I noticed the throat contracting as she said them; human vocal cords couldn’t master those noises.

  “Now look,” I said, “we already know you must come from the stars, and that you’ve used your peculiar powers to infiltrate the governments of both planets. You’ve egged them on to a war in which you were the real victors. We can also safely assume that there are not too many of you; otherwise, with a weapon like this gun, you could have taken over openly. So you see, we already have the basic facts, and the rest is largely a matter of satisfying our own curiosity.”

  “Remain curious, then,” said Radeef sullenly.

  “This gun, now.” I turned the squat thing over in my free hand. “How does it work?”

  “You expect me to give away military secrets of my people?”

  “They may not be so secret as you think.” Odd how cold and clear my brain was. “I can make an informed guess about this weapon. Both Earth and Mars have been experimenting with sub-molar forces, with a view to designing frictionless machines. I’ve studied some of the declassified results. In theory, it should be possible to generate a dense force-field and project it from some such instrument as this. That would be noiseless and recoilless, too. When the field, sent out in a tight beam, encounters solid matter, it reacts with the intermolecular forces and yields its energy to the molecules themselves. They fly apart with fantastic violence—in all directions, to conserve momentum, but mostly, if the gun is well-designed, in a plane normal to the force beam. Theoretically, the object struck should be reduced to gas, single molecules and atoms; in practice, obviously, it disintegrates into small chunks. Molecular bonds being strong, the chunks don’t get far apart, maybe only a few inches, and there isn’t much noise. The object just falls apart.”

  Radeef remained silent.

  “Why are you doing it?” asked Regelin, very softly. “What harm have we ever done to you?”

  “You exist,” said Radeef. But it was not a malevolent statement, somehow. I thought I heard vague regret in it.

  “I don’t think you are the vanguard of an interstellar invasion,” I went on. “Even if logistics permitted such an operation, there is the question of motive. No reason why a highly advanced culture should have to conquer anyone else. It’d be much easier to make what they needed right at home. Or if you had to overrun somebody, it wouldn’t be a powerful civilization nearly as far along as your own. You’d pick on backward races, primitives, wouldn’t you?

  “In short, I doubt that this is an invasion or the preparation for one. I think you’re a private group, acting on your own, a sort of filibustering expedition. And you had to tackle us because you had no choice; if you have any sense, you’d much rather deal with savages or barbarians. So—were you marooned here?”

  No answer. I hated to use the third degree; it probably wouldn’t accomplish anything, anyway.

  “What puzzles me,” said Regelin, “is why Dzuga should have changed to his natural form when you hit him. None of the others did, you know—blows, bullets, death itself, didn’t make them revert. What was there peculiar about your assault on Dzuga?”

  “Heat?” I wondered. “He got burned, you know.”

  “Possibly. Though it seems precarious. It is too easy, these days, for anyone to touch hot metal. And if you stop to think about it, David, a bullet in the body generates considerable heat.”

  “Then—”

  Lightning glared outside, and thunder boomed after, trembling in the rickety old barn.

  “Electric shock!”

  Regelin nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I think that must be the answer. We can try it out easily enough.”

  Radeef flinched, snarling. “Go ahead,” she jeered. “Waste your time.”

  “We have nothing else to waste,” said Regelin mildly.

  He guarded our prisoner while I went to the car after supplies. There was a Martian flashlight with its powerful 12.3-volt battery. I took out the lens, bulb, and reflector, and used the car’s complete repair kit to bolt the tube to a three-foot length of broomstick which some scratching around in the barn turned up. On either side of the stick I taped spare cables for the husky dieselectric engine, from the battery to the end of the stick, with the wires bared a few inches beyond the end. When I touched them and pressed the button, I felt a tingling jolt. It didn’t seem like much, but—

  “Come here,” I said.

  Radeef snarled and backed away. Regelin followed, covering her with his gun. I forced her into a corner and jabbed.

  The shock rippled through her, body shrinking and thickening, face melting, crest rising out of the naked shape-changing skull. She cursed and fought for balance, flowing back toward human shape. I shocked her again, batting aside the hands that clawed for my rod. Radeef spat and gave up, assuming the alien form.

  I turned with a high sense of victory to look at Regelin. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s how we prove our story. It’s also the simple test by which all of them can be flushed out.”

  “Hm. Yes.” Regelin studied our enemy thoughtfully.

  “Though I rather imagine that the intricate details of histology, and even the internal organs, cannot change so readily as the outer shape. Is that true?”

  Something seemed to collapse in Radeef. She sat down and buried her face in her hands. Her angry defiance had been long and brave, but she’d had a rough time of it too.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “We can adjust the oxygen system to a wide range of different atmospheres, but otherwise, if you dissected the abdominal cavity of one of us, or looked at the brain, or got some cells under a microscope, you would find it unalterable—not Earthling or Martian.”

  “X-rays, then,” said Regelin. “Another test.”

  “But all the men in both our armed services got those,” I protested.

  “Yes, but the aliens have been high officers, remember. They could easily arrange for their physical checkups to be made by doctors who were of their own race. Then the only danger is that one of them might die in battle or accident and be, ah, looked into. But that isn’t a great risk; who would look closely at an unpleasantly mangled heap of intestines?”

  I stared at our captive where she huddled at my feet. “Where are you from, Radeef?” I asked softly.

  She didn’t look up, and her voice was a whisper. “Sirius.”

  “And why did you come here? What do you want of us?”

  “It began long ago,” she said. “Two hundred or more years ago. There are four intelligent races in the Sirian System. They had advanced about as far as you have now—ahead in some ways, behind in others, but on the whole your equals. There was a great war in that system. The people of Sha-eb were masters of biology, they have created things you do not yet dream of at Sol. They wanted spies and infiltrators. They developed us, as artificial mutations.”

  I shook my head, stricken quiet by the vastness of it. Not only the immense way to Sirius, almost nine light-years of utter black distance; not only the concept of other races, other civilizations, isolated in loneliness throughout that enormous dark; no, it was the achievement of Sha-eb. I knew enough biology to realize what was called for in such a protean being: pigmentation cells; flexible tissue; a fantastic calcium system which could grow bones and teeth to order, within seconds (probably depositing them around a cartilaginous base already there, I thought; the calcium-holding cells would be embedded in the cartilage itself); a still stranger nervous system which could control that intricacy down to the minutest details—

  No wonder an electric shock would upset the equilibrium. Nerve currents are themselves electrical. The unbelievable thing was that the duplicate was so stable to all other influences.

  “How long did it take them to create your race?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said tonelessly. “A decade, perhaps. They used forced-growth techniques. They could manipulate individual genes. We don’t know their science any more than you do.”

  She sighed. “With our help, as well as its other weapons, Sha-eb was victorious. Peace was firmly established in the Sirian System. And we, the changelings, we were not needed any more. We were feared, hated, discriminated against, forbidden to assume the shape of any—natural race. As if all life were not born of the same forces! At last we were forbidden children, we must die out.

  “We banded together, secretly, and tried to seize the government of Sha-eb, using our power of disguise. It failed. Most of us were killed. Some of us managed to seize a great spaceship which was to be used for exploring the outer planets. We fled the Sirian System altogether, such few of us as remained. Sol was our choice, because astronomers believed that single stars have more planets. We would have a better chance of finding a home. The voyage lasted almost a hundred years, with most of us spending the time in suspended animation to stretch out the meager supplies.” She chuckled drearily. “Why do I say ‘us’? I wasn’t born yet. But we Tahowwa think of ourselves as a race. It has to be us few banded against a universe that has no room for us.

  “Fifty years ago, we entered the Solar System. Secretly, we scouted it. We found only Earth and Mars fit habitations; everywhere else, we have to live penned in steel and plastic, sunless, windless, dead metal and no earth we could call our own. Carefully, assuming native forms, we studied your worlds. There was no place for us. We might be welcomed, yes, we might even be given a few small reservations to live on, but that was not enough. Always there would be the watchfulness and the unvoiced fear; who could ever wholly trust us? We wanted a planet to call ours. One where we could live openly, as masters, in our natural shapes, where we could bear children and raise them to be free. You cannot know that hunger, you who belong. We have always been the disinherited.

  “Some wanted to push on, some wanted to reveal themselves openly, but the final vote was for remaining here and fighting—in our own peculiar fashion. There are heavy armaments in the great spaceship, where it circles beyond Pluto; if Earth and Mars could be pulled down far enough, we could finish the job ourselves.

  “I need not describe the details of the past fifty years. You can guess them, I suppose. We few thousand worked long, laying the ground. One by one, after they were known in full, high officials of both planets were quietly assassinated with their families—by their guards, who were our people. Their places were taken by us. It has required every member of our race. Children are almost born into their work, raised in secret places and thrown into the task before they are fully mature. I have borne children myself, and not seen them since. It is not easy.”

  Her voice faded out. The rain roared down, and streamers of mist curled through the barn’s gloom.

  “And now,” I said slowly, “you have broken Earth. Not quite, we could still recover fast if we had a chance, but Mars will soon reduce us to helplessness. Then what plans do you have for Mars?”

  She didn’t answer that. Regelin’s chuckle was harsh. “Conquered,” he said. “Conquered by refugees!”

  “It’s a common enough process in history,” I answered. “Look at Rome: the Goths were running from the Huns, who’d been kicked out by the Chinese. Only these—Tahowwa—are smarter about it. They let us do their fighting for them.”

  “So few of them,” said Regelin between his teeth. “So few, so thinly scattered, so easily unmasked if you only knew what to look for. And still we are helpless against them. It is maddening.”

  “We’ll have to keep trying,” I said. “A long-distance call to Yueth? No, the lines are down. A letter? I imagine the mail of all non-aliens of rank is monitored. An attempt to sneak back into the city? Hopeless. But we’ll think of something. We’ve got to find a way.”

  I turned and went over to the car at Alice’s cry. Kit held the little girl close. She was crying herself. Alice babbled something I couldn’t follow, but there was delirium in it.

  -9-

  After dark we drove further, not very sure of just where we were and not feeling that it mattered a great deal. It was about ten when we came into a village, a few houses and a general store and a bank and a farm dealer. Regelin halted out of sight while I went to knock on the door of a lighted home. A man came out, and I stood with my face in shadow and asked the way to the doctor’s. “Had a little accident,” I said. “Got lost in the woods and fell and hurt my arm.”

  He squinted, trying to discern me. “Where you from?” he asked. I imagine news was very scarce here, with mail service irregular and only the official Martian telecasts.

  “I’m on the road,” I said. “Came through Duluth, but there weren’t any jobs there, so I drifted further.”

  “You been drifting a long ways, then.” I could almost read his mind: This guy might turn thief. He might already have stolen.

  “I got an uncle in North Dakota who’ll fix me up when I get there,” I said. “Now where’s the doctor, please?”

  “Two houses down. His name’s Hansen, Bill Hansen.”

  “Thanks.” I turned away, wondering how much I’d betrayed myself. My accent was Eastern, though the years in space had blurred it.

  There was darkness in the doctor’s home. We parked across the road, under a gloom of trees, and I went and knocked again. I hoped he was in.

  Alice whimpered in my arms. Her eyes were bright and blank, they no longer recognized me.

  A window opened overhead. “Who’s there?” An old man’s voice, but still firm and resonant.

  “A patient for you,” I answered as quietly as possible. “Emergency.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right down.”

  The town had electric light, which was unusual; I suppose they’d managed to build a wood-burning generator. The glow from the opened door was sharp in my eyes, and I stepped swiftly inside and closed the door behind me.

  Hansen stood looking me over. He was a lean, somehow aristocratic man, white-haired, his face gaunt and seamed, his eyes blue and steady behind old-fashioned glasses. He’d pulled trousers over his pajamas but not stopped for anything else.

  “The kid’s sick,” I said. “Been running a fever for a good twelve hours, and delirious by now.”

  “Hm.” He took Alice gently in his arms and bore her into the living room. “Switch off the hall light, will you? We’re only allowed one bulb at a time.” He laid her on the couch and opened his bag. I stood in the doorway, watching him work, thinking of Kit sitting out there and holding Regelin’s hand because there was nothing else for her to hold to, nothing in all the world.

  Hansen finished his examination and turned to me. “How’d she get this way?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?” I replied.

  “It sure does. I have to know what she’s been through.”

  “All right.” I dropped one hand into my jacket pocket, where it closed on Regelin’s gun. “She’s been sketchily fed on whatever we could give her, for weeks. She hasn’t gotten anything for the past two days, because we didn’t have anything. She’s been badly frightened, time and again. She’s had inadequate sleep. She’s been in a cold, damp place all this day. That enough?”

  He regarded me for a long time. I must have looked rather unhealthy myself, thin and hollow about the eyes, dirty and unshaven. “It is, Mr. Arnfeld,” he answered. “I understand.”

  “So you’ve heard those alarms too?”

  “How could I avoid it? It was on the nationwide ’casts for days. Only this morning it came on again, with the information that you’d committed murder in the Twin Cities and were believed to have fled northward.”

  I shrugged. “All right. But what about the kid?”

  “Bad case of flu, and it might be complicated by bronchial pneumonia. People who treat children this way ought to be shot.” He said it evenly, without rancor, but there was no smile on his face.

  “We hadn’t any choice,” I replied. “Those who’re after us wouldn’t have cared for her at all, except maybe dig her grave.”

  “Well,” he said, “I think I can pull her out of this. We’ve no penicillin here, but I do have a good supply of abiotin, and it’ll take worse cases than hers. But she’s going to need absolute rest, with care and good food, for quite a while.”

  “I’m afraid we’re broke,” I said. “Nor do I imagine we can stay here very long.”

  “Hardly.” He picked up the girl again. “Why not bring your friends inside while I start tending to her?”

  “And have you call the sheriff? We’d have to fight him too, and we’ve done enough harm.”

  “Don’t be stupider than you can help, Arnfeld. Anyway”—this time he did grin—“I’d kind of like to hear your story.”

  I went out and fetched them while he carried Alice upstairs. As the door closed behind us, he emerged on the landing and stood there unmoving, his imperturbability shaken.

  Surely we were a strange crew. I looked like any tramp, but there was Kit, with her lithe form and loose golden hair and pale, thin, lovely face; Regelin towering over us, dark, amber-eyed, somber in the Martian uniform that still held its hard neatness; and Radeef the monster, shuffling before us at gun point, snouted unhuman head bent so the light glistened off her crested skull. Against that quiet, middle-class home, we were like invaders from somewhere outside all reality.