Karnes looked straight at him. “Leaguer!”
The guard nodded. You never could tell when the League would pop up like that.
Even after the collapse of Communism after the war, the world hadn’t learned anything, it seemed. The Eurasian League had seemed, at first, to be patterned after the Western world’s United Nations, but it hadn’t worked out that way.
The League was jealous of the UN lead in space travel, for one thing, and they had neither the money nor the know-how to catch up. The UN might have given them help, but, as the French delegate had remarked: “For what reason should we arm a potential enemy?”
After all, they argued, with the threat of the UN’s Moonbase hanging over the League to keep them peaceful, why should we give them spaceships so they can destroy Moonbase?
The Eurasian League had been quiet for a good many years, brooding, but behaving. Then, three years ago, Moonbase had vanished in a flash of actinic light, leaving only a new minor crater in the crust of Luna.
There was no proof of anything, of course. It had to be written off as an accident. But from that day on, the League had become increasingly bolder; their policy was: “Smash the UN and take the planets for ourselves!”
And now, with Carlson Spacecraft going up in flames, they seemed to be getting closer to their goal.
* * * *
Karnes accepted his weapon and billfold from the guard and led them back down the stairway. “Would one of you guys phone the State Police? They’ll want to know what happened.”
The State Police copters came and went, taking Karnes and the late Mr. Avery with them, and leaving behind the now dying glow of Carlson Spacecraft.
There were innumerable forms to fill out and affidavits to make; there was a long-distance call to UN headquarters in New York to verify Karnes’ identity. And Karnes asked to borrow the police lab for an hour or so.
That evening, he caught the rocket for Long Island.
As the SR-37 floated through the hard vacuum five hundred miles above central Nebraska, Karnes leaned back in his seat, turning the odd cigarette case over and over in his hands.
Except for the neat, even checking that covered it, the little three-by-four inch object was entirely featureless. There were no catches or hinges, or even any line of cleavage around the edge. He had already found that it wouldn’t open.
Whatever it was, it was most definitely not a cigarette case.
The X-ray plates had shown it to be perfectly homogeneous throughout.
As far as I can see, thought Karnes, it’s nothing but a piece of acid-proof plastic, except that the specific gravity is way the hell too high. Maybe if I had cut it open, I could have—
Karnes didn’t push anything on the case, of that he was sure. Nor did he squeeze, shake, or rub it in any unusual way. But something happened; something which he was convinced came from the case in his hands.
He had the definite impression of something akin to a high-pressure firehose squirting from the interior of the case, through his skull, and into and over his brain, washing it and filling it. Little rivers of knowledge trickled down through the convolutions of his brain, collected in pools, and soaked in.
* * * *
He was never sure just how long the process took but it was certainly not more than a second or two. Afterwards, he just sat there, staring.
From far across the unimaginable depths of the galaxy, fighting its way through the vast, tenuous dust clouds of interstellar space, came a voice: “Are you ill, sir?”
Karnes looked up at the stewardess. “Oh. Oh, no. No, I’m all right. Just thinking. I’m perfectly all right.”
He looked at the “cigarette case” again. He knew what it was, now. There wasn’t any English word for it, but he guessed “mind impressor” would come close.
It had done just that; impressed his mind with knowledge he should not have; the record of something he had no business knowing.
And he wished to Heaven he didn’t!
This, Karnes considered, is a problem. The stuff is so alien!Just a series of things I know, but can’t explain. Like a dream; you know all about it, but it’s practically impossible to explain it to anybody else.
At the spaceport, he was met by an official car. George Lansberg, one of the New York agents, was sitting in the back seat.
“Hi, sleuth. I heard you were coming in, so I asked to meet you.” He lowered his voice as Karnes got in and the car pulled away from the parking lot. “How about our boy, Avery?”
Karnes shook his head. “Too late. Thirty million bucks worth of material lost and Avery lost too.”
“How come?”
“Had to kill him to keep him from getting away with these.”
He showed Lansberg the microfilm squares.
“The photocircuit inserts for the new autopilot. We’d lose everything if the League ever got its hands on these.”
“Didn’t learn anything from Avery, eh?” Lansberg asked.
“Not a thing.” Karnes lapsed into silence. He didn’t feel it necessary to mention the mind impressor just yet.
Lansberg stuck a cigarette into his mouth and talked around it as he lit it.
“We’ve got something you’ll be getting in on, now that Avery is taken care of. We’ve got a fellow named Brittain, real name Bretinov, who is holed up in a little apartment in Brooklyn. He’s the sector head for that section, and we know who his informers are, and who he gives orders to. What we don’t know is who gives orders to him.
“Now we have it set up for Brittain to get his hands on some very honest-looking, but strictly phony stuff for him to pass on to the next echelon. Then we just sit around and watch until he does pass it.”
* * * *
Karnes found he was listening to Lansberg with only half an ear. His brain was still buzzing with things he’d never heard of, trying to fit things he had always known in with things he knew now but had never known before. Damn that “cigarette case”!
“Sounds like fun,” he answered Lansberg.
“Yeah. Great. Well, here we are.” They had driven to the Long Island Spaceways Building which also housed the local office.
They got out and went into the building, up the elevator, down a corridor, and into an office suite.
Lansberg said: “I’ll wait for you here. We’ll get some coffee afterwards.”
The redhead behind the front desk smiled up at Karnes.
“Go on in; he’s expecting you.”
“I don’t know whether I ought to leave you out here with Georgie or not,” Karnes grinned. “I think he has designs.”
“Oh, goodie!” she grinned back.
My, my aren’t we clever! His thought was bitter, but his face didn’t show it.
Before he went in, he straightened his collar before the wall mirror. He noticed that his plain, slightly tanned face still looked the same as ever. Same ordinary gray-green eyes, same ordinary nose.
Chum, you look perfectly sane. You are perfectly sane. But who in hell would believe it?
It wouldn’t, after all, do any good for him to tell anyone anything he had found. No matter what the answer was, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. There wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.
Thus, Karnes’ report to his superior was short, to the point,