Dan Redman walked swiftly and quietly down the broad hallway toward a door lettered: A SECTION
J. KIELGAARD
DIRECTOR
 
As Dan opened the door, his trained glance caught the brief reflection of a strange, strong-featured face, and a lithe, powerful, and unfamiliar physique. Dan accepted this unfamiliar reflection of himself as an actor accepts makeup. What puzzled him was the peculiar silent smoothness with which his hand turned the knob, while his shoulder braced firmly and easily against the opening door. He stepped into the room in one sudden quiet motion.
The receptionist inside gave a visible start.
What kind of a job, Dan asked himself, did Kielgaard have for him this time?
The receptionist recovered her poise, to usher Dan into the inner office.
Kielgaard—big, stocky, and expensively dressed—glanced up from a sheaf of glossy photographs. He said bluntly, "Sit down. We've got a mess to straighten out."
"What's wrong?"
"A few years back, Galactic Enterprises discovered a totally undeveloped planet with no inhabitants. They claimed development rights and got to work to find an economical route to the planet, which is called Triax."
Kielgaard snapped a switch on the edge of his desk and the room lights dimmed out. Three stellar maps seemed to hang in space in front of Dan, one map directly above the other.
Kielgaard's voice said, "Galactic found a route to Triax that promised to be very economical. Watch."
On the lowest map, the word "Earth" lit up, and a silver line grew out from it along the stellar map, then jumped up in a vertical straight line to the second map, traveled along this map almost to a place where the word "Truth" lit up. The line then jumped straight up to the third map and traveled along it to the word "Triax."
The room lighted and the maps vanished.
Kielgaard said, "In two subspace jumps and not too much normal-space traveling, Galactic can ship a cargo from Triax to Earth. That's a good, short route, but it comes too close to that planet called Truth."
Dan said, "Truth is the native name for the planet?"
"Exactly. Truth is inhabited. The inhabitants look much like us, and they're very highly developed technologically, though there is no sign that they use space travel in any form. The problem is that Galactic's cargo ships will pass close enough to Truth so that the inhabitants—call them Truthians—will eventually detect them and may or may not like the idea. Galactic's worry is that after sinking a lot of money into the development of Triax, and just as it's about to make a profit on the planet, these Truthians may blossom out with a fleet of commerce raiders, or else claim sovereignty over all contiguous space and land Galactic in a big court fight." Kielgaard glanced at Dan with a smile. "Suppose you were running Galactic and had this problem. What would you do?"
"Try to vary the route. But subspace being what it is, a mild variation of the starting point can produce an abrupt shift in the place where they come out."
Kielgaard nodded. "There's probably a usable route, but there's no telling when they'll find it. Meanwhile, the development license only runs so long before Galactic has to show proof of progress."
"What's this Truth look like?"
"Earth-type, with cities and towns scattered over its surface at random, some of the cities remarkably advanced, some antique, with forest and wilderness in between, and only haphazard communications between cities."
Dan frowned. "Well, then, I'd set down an information team, brain-spy some of the inhabitants, and ease agents into key cities and towns. At the same time, I'd go on looking for a new route, and do enough work on Triax to keep the development license. When things clear up on Truth, I'd develop Triax further."
Kielgaard nodded. "A sound and sensible plan. That is exactly what Galactic did. And after a slow start, things began to straighten out very nicely, too. The more Truth cleared up, the more Galactic invested in Triax. And then, one day, this photograph came in."
Kielgaard held out a photograph showing a busy street corner in a city at night. A brightly clothed crowd was walking along the sidewalk past store windows showing a variety of merchandise.
Kielgaard said, "Look down that street. You see a low building, part way down the block, with a wide chimney?"
"Yes," said Dan, "I see it."
"Look just above the top of the chimney."
"You mean this arrow-shaped constellation?"
Kielgaard nodded. "There is no such arrow-shaped constellation visible from Truth."
"Then this photo is a fake?"
"They're all fakes. What apparently happened is that someone managed to get a spy into Galactic's planning division, and through him found out when and where Galactic's agents were to be set down. They grabbed the agents one by one soon after each agent landed. Since then, they've sent back reports to build up a purely synthetic picture of the planet. The only reports Galactic can rely on are the original impressions of the information team they set down to begin with."
Dan whistled. "So someone is working Galactic into position to jerk the rug out from under it."
"Exactly."
"What's Galactic doing?"
"They're trying hard to keep this quiet. But meanwhile, no one knows for sure who the spy is."
"A nice situation," said Dan. "What do we do about this planet Truth?"
"Well," said Kielgaard, "the first thing we do is set a man down and let him get the lay of the land. We get more agents ready to move in right behind him. We intend to use the best men available, and nothing but the latest and best equipment. If things turn out as we intend them to, whatever organization started this will come out slit up the middle, stuffed, roasted, and with an apple in its mouth."
Dan said cautiously, "Who's the first agent we set down on this planet?"
"You," said Kielgaard. "And you're going to be up against a deadly proposition. Our opponent is established on the planet, and we're going in cold. Fortunately, we've sunk a good part of our profits into research and it's about to pay off. We have, for instance, installed in your body cavity a remarkably small organo-transceiver. It uses a new type of signal which should escape detection under any circumstances you're likely to face on Truth."
"So I can be more or less constantly in touch with you?"
"In any period of relative calm, yes. During violent action, the interference of other currents in your brain would drown out the signal. But we've also run a series of delicate taps to your optic and auditory nerves, so we should have continuous contact by sight and sound."
"You mentioned that the cities and towns on the planet were separated by wilderness. How do I travel?"
"We have a new type of unusually small mataform transceiver." Kielgaard reached in a drawer and tossed on his desk a smooth olive-colored object little larger than a package of cigarettes. "The range is only a few hundred miles, but it uses the new type of signal I've mentioned, which eliminates the problem of orbiting a set of satellites to relay the signal. The problem of first putting the mataform transceiver in the place where you want to go is tricky, but we have a little glider that ought to do the trick."
He showed Dan how to use the glider, and several other new items of equipment, then frowned and sat back. "The worst of this is, we don't know exactly what to expect on the planet. Some big organization could even be trying to take over the planetary government. If so, a lot will depend on what stage things are in when you land. To give you as much chance as possible, your body has been carefully restructured to give you exceptional strength and endurance. The neuro-conditioning lab has recreated in your nervous system the reflexes of one of the deadliest agents ever known. Don't be surprised if you perform certain actions almost before you're aware of your own intentions. It has to be that way to cut down the risks."
Dan and Kielgaard shook hands, and Dan went out to check his equipment.
Early the next day, he was on a fast spaceship to the planet called Truth.
Dan was dropped low over the night side of the planet in a vaned capsule that whirled straight down, burst open on contact with the water, and sank. From this capsule, a small boat nosed out toward the coast.
In the cramped space inside, Dan checked a little gauge to be sure the boat's outer layer had adjusted to the water around it, so that there would be no sharp difference in the radiation of heat to show up on any infrared detector that might be in range. Then the boat nosed down with a suck-swish from the water-jet engine and began to pick up speed.
Several hours later, a thin flexible cable shot out from shallow water at the edge of the junglelike coastline. The cable whipped around the trunk of a tree well back from the water's edge, there was a faint low hum, a grating noise, and something slid up over the rocks and pebbles and came to rest among the tangled trunks and roots of the trees. A moment later, Dan was out and dragging the boat further inland.
When he was satisfied that the boat was safe, he glanced at his watch. The planet's large moon should soon be up and he intended to waste no time making his position more secure.
He broke open a carton of the little mataform transceivers, clipped several of them on small, almost completely transparent gliders, and checked to be sure the little auxiliary motors of the gliders were in working order. He slid on a helmet that fit tightly over his head and eyes, and sent up the first glider. As the faint whir of the small engine receded, Dan could see before him in the helmet a clear view of the sea, with the thin rim of the planet's moon just rising, huge and blood-red, over the horizon.
The small sensor unit on the glider sent back an image from a safe height above the forest, and Dan switched the helmet from this glider long enough to send up another.
By dawn, he had landed gliders, with their small mataform transceivers, in isolated spots outside three moderate-sized cities within range of the boat. Dan then took another of the mataform units and buried it. Standing nearby, he mentally pronounced a key word.
As he did this, the electro-chemical change in a nervous tract triggered a tiny implanted device that sent its imperceptible signal to the mataform transceiver. The transceiver interpreted the signal, and for an instant Dan sensed a shift in the pattern of things around him.
Abruptly he was standing in the clearing where he had brought down the first glider. Around him were several tall wind-thrown trees. In the gray light of early dawn, he could barely make out the glider and little mataform unit clipped to it. A few minutes later, the unit was temporarily hidden, he had returned the glider to the boat, and he was picking up the second glider in a badly burned tract of forest near the second city.
When the three mataform units were all hidden, Dan paused for a moment to think through the next step. The three gliders, invisible to the naked eye as they passed high above the tree tops, might possibly have shown up on any of a number of detection devices, to give away both the starting point and the places where they had landed. It was now Dan's problem to outwit these detection devices.
Dan clipped another mataform transceiver to a glider, put on the control helmet, and sent the glider dodging low and carefully through the trees. He found a spot about two miles away that suited him and landed the glider. He swiftly unloaded the boat and carried its contents to the buried mataform unit, where he mentally pronounced a new key word, which triggered the unit and took him to the glider and transceiver he had just landed. In a short time, he had the contents of the boat stacked beside the glider.
Dan then disassembled the boat and engine, and stacked the parts beside the boat's piled-up contents. By now, the sun was well up, and Dan was becoming aware of a thrumming drone that grew steadily louder. He quickly dug up the buried mataform unit, clipped it to a glider, and hung the glider to an overhead limb by a green string, knotted so as to come undone at the first sharp pull.
Dan glanced around carefully and listened to the increasing drone. He looked up and studied a bumpy blue-green limb well overhead. This limb was located so that a spy unit on it would cover most of the place where the boat had been. Dan carefully gauged the speed with which the droning was coming closer, then went by the mataform to the pile of goods he had transferred, came back with a long tube, and sighted at the overhead limb. There was a whoosh and a small colorless blob with a tiny bump in the center spread out on the limb. The blob gradually turned blue-gray, matching the limb, and then the spy unit was indistinguishable from the limb's other bumps and irregularities.
The droning noise was now quite loud.
Dan went by the mataform to his new camp and put on the helmet he used to control the glider.
An instant later, the glider gave a whir and jerked forward. The knot came untied, and the glider, carrying the mataform unit and a length of dark-green string, flitted out of sight amid the big tree trunks.
Dan, his hand on a knob at the side of the helmet, shifted his vision rapidly back and forth from the glider to the spy unit over the spot where the boat had been.
There now came into view, in the place where the boat had been, something that looked like a cross between an oversize bloodhound and a tiger. Right behind this came a man with a rifle. Then another man, and another. The angle of vision did not let Dan see exactly where the men came from, but he supposed there was a jetcopter just overhead.
The tiger-like animal snuffled around, pawed at the ground, made trips into the jungle on all sides, and finally ran back toward the shore. The men followed close behind.
Dan, shifting his attention back and forth from this scene to the glider, landed the glider nearby, just as the last of the men left the place where the boat had been. Dan quickly went to each of the three places near cities where he had landed the mataform transceivers, and moved each of them by glider well away from the places where they had landed. He left behind in each place a small spy unit.
He had just finished doing this when several loads of heavily armed men in jetcopters came down in all three places. The men, Dan noticed, wore no uniforms, and the copters were unmarked.
Dan said mentally, "Can you hear me, Kielgaard?"
"Loud and clear," came the familiar voice. "We're getting sight and sound perfectly."
"Have you got your corps of experts working on everything that comes in?"
"Naturally," said Kielgaard. "But I wouldn't advise you to stop and chat right now. Those boys seem to mean business."
"Do they look like planetary police to you?"
"No. They don't look like anything that was born on that planet."
"That's exactly the way they strike me. Well, maybe I can make them some more trouble."
Dan got out a map and noted a long, fairly straight road from one of the cities, near which he had a mataform transceiver, to another distant city. From this distant city, a winding river curled away to a city even more distant. That night, Dan intended to make use of road and river alike. But right now, he spent an hour or so moving his goods to a place further away from the landing; then he partly reassembled the boat, and cat-napped till evening. He was awoken at frequent intervals by sudden drops of men and more of the tiger-like animals, at each of the four places where they had been before. Each time there was sudden activity at one of these places, a little alarm buzzed in Dan's ear, and he slid on the helmet to watch a renewed search of the ground.
He had the impression that someone had reported nothing was to be found, and that this word had been passed along to someone who had said there must be something there, and it had better be found or else. The search this time was much more careful. But it was not till the last place was searched that one of them came very close to the spy unit, and reached out toward it.
Dan regretfully slid back a protective cover at the lower edge of the helmet and pressed a button underneath. There was a dazzling flash, and then the scene was gone.
Dan would much rather have kept them thinking that maybe there was nothing to look for after all. But he could tell from their numbers and zeal that he was not likely to have very much his own way on this planet.
That night, Dan sent a glider under power down the long road to the distant city. The glider was low enough to avoid the usual detectors, but happily free of the need to dodge an endless succession of tree trunks. The river served much the same purpose, so that well before dawn, Dan had mataform transceivers planted near each of the two new cities, and also at a place right at the edge of the river. From this spot, Dan threw out into the river a heavily weighted mataform transceiver. He returned to the partly assembled boat and methodically put it together again. This time, however, he fitted sections together differently and left the heavy engine out entirely. He put his arms around one end of the thing he had put together and mentally said a keyword.
The river water rushed coldly around him, gritty with silt sweeping along the bottom. There was a chug in his ears as the water triggered off the grab anchors around the rim of the shelter. Dan said another key word and he was inside. He snapped on a light and looked carefully around, but found no sign of a leak.
He transferred the rest of his goods, checked to see that the selective membrane panel was keeping the oxygen at the right level inside, then lay down to catch up on sleep.
The following day, he took three of his small transceivers, and went by the mataform to a place outside the nearest city.
A short walk along a winding trail took Dan past a series of huts and cabins to a rough covered stand displaying combs, brooms, and other simple merchandise, along with a dusty case of what looked like soda pop, and a dust-covered carton of what appeared to be candy bars. The soda pop was labeled "GAS," and the candy had a card labeled "TOOTHROT." The girl in charge of the stand smiled and said, "Good morning, Death."
There was no one else around, and the girl spoke in a perfectly natural way, so Dan smiled back and said, "Good morning."
But as he walked on down the trail, he said mentally, "Kielgaard?"
Kielgaard's voice replied, "I heard it, Dan. We're checking at this end to see if it's some error in the vocabulary we implanted in your brain." A moment later, Kielgaard said, "As nearly as we can tell here, 'Death' is the word she used."
"Funny."
Dan rounded a bend in the trail and came to a moderately wide road, paved with smooth blocks of stone. To his right was a wall about ten feet high, with an open gate and a city street visible behind it. From somewhere came the steady beat of a drum. Dan started toward the gate, but had to jump aside as a heavily armed column of troops marched out, their faces set and their feet striking the ground in an unvarying cadence.
As the last of the troops went by, a man standing nearby turned to Dan and said, "Well, there they go. We won't be seeing some of them again in this life."
Dan nodded noncommittally, and the man looked at him sharply, then grinned and said, "Good hunting."
"Thank you," said Dan. He could hear a faint muttering somewhere in the background, which he took to be Kielgaard and his experts, trying to understand this latest exchange.
Dan followed the man through the city gates, and walked past a variety of small shops selling baked goods, meats, groceries, hand tools, books, and appliances.
Dan noted the location of the bookstore, so that on the way back he could buy some books. He wanted to transmit the contents of the books; the staff of experts could learn a great deal from a cross-section of a planet's fiction and non-fiction.
As Dan walked toward the center of the city, he noted that the buildings grew larger, and the shops turned into big department stores. These all looked much the same as the ones on Earth, or on many other technologically advanced planets. The merchandise showed only minor differences in design. Looking in a hardware store, for instance, Dan discovered that ordinary screwdrivers had a short curved crosspiece on the handle—apparently a thumb rest to give greater leverage in turning. Aside from such minor differences, everything seemed the same.
Dan had just decided that the planet looked almost like home when he came to a low building with a paved yard. Into the yard trundled several small carts, similar to the kind used to transfer baggage in railroad and mataform depots back home. On these carts, however, were canvas covers, which were thrown back to reveal fully clothed human forms. On all but one cart, the human forms wore the same kind of white garment, trimmed in various colors. These forms—bodies, Dan supposed—were lifted from the carts by attendants who handled them with the greatest care and respect.
On the other cart, though, the bodies wore street clothes. These bodies were grabbed under the arms, dragged to a black door like the door of a furnace, set in the wall of the building, and shoved through the door head first. As the bodies were shoved in, Dan saw the sunlight glint on what looked like tight metal cords around their necks, bearing oblong metal tags.
Several men had stopped while Dan glanced in to watch this scene. Dan now overheard their comments, which were made in tense angry tones:
"Look at that. If this referendum isn't over soon, it'll dust the lot of us over the forest."
"It's all these charges and accusations that make the trouble. Why we can't do it like civilized human beings, I don't know."
"The trouble is, there's no precedent."
The men walked away.
Dan had the out-of-focus sensation of a man who comes into a room where a joke has already been half-told.
He glanced at the low building. "Are you getting all this, Kielgaard?"
"We're getting it. But I hope it makes more sense to you than it does to us."
"Well, it doesn't."
Dan glanced around, noted the discreet word "DISPOSAL" printed on the face of the small building where the bodies were shoved through what looked like a furnace door. Dan thought he could see what was going on here, but the reasons for the things that were happening were totally obscure to him.
It was in the next block that he began to get some sort of an idea, when he saw a large poster bearing a blue triangle standing point down. Stamped over this triangle were large letters: VOTE YES!
Several blocks away was a big poster showing a green triangle, its base down, and bearing the words: VOTE NO!
Both posters were dented, scratched, and spattered, as if stones and rotten fruit had been thrown at them. But, though Dan watched carefully as he walked on toward the center of the city, he saw no clue as to what the voting was about. He was also puzzled to find that, though there were many stores, and a fair number of what looked like hotels, office buildings, and apartment houses, there seemed to be no factories, large or small.
The people passing here were another source of uncertainty. As Dan approached the center of the city, he began to sense the peculiar air of freedom that he had noticed in resort towns on a dozen planets. And yet this did not look to him like a resort town. Moreover, it was hard to gauge the mood of the people passing by, because nearly all seemed to react to his presence in some way. Some looked suddenly alarmed, a few looked furtive, others seemed pleased and smiled at him. A considerable number of the women had a thrilled look when they saw him.
Dan walked another block and saw part of the reason for the resort-town atmosphere. Across the street was a sweeping expanse of green. In the far end of this green was an enormous swimming pool, with floats and concrete islands dotted through it to hold diving boards that were almost constantly in use.
Dan, wanting to watch the passersby without their watching him, stepped into a quiet, old-fashioned-looking bookstore that fronted on the green. He looked out the many-paned front window and immediately noticed a change in the people. Without his inexplicably disturbing influence, nearly all of the people fell into two distinct categories. One group had a depressed and angry look. The other group looked cheerful and carefree. Aside from their mood, they didn't seem to differ noticeably in dress, age, or any other way.
Dan glanced around the bookstore and saw that it, like the other stores, could be transplanted to Earth, and—except for the unfamiliar lettering on storefront and book titles—would hardly be noticed. He nodded to an elderly woman working at a small desk to one side of the store, then walked to the rear, where the stacks of books left a far corner partially in shadow and out of sight from the front of the store. Dan stooped, glanced at the dusty row of books on the bottom shelf, and slid a mataform transceiver behind the books.
He walked back to the front of the store, stepped out on the sidewalk, and saw a cart come slowly along in the street. This was the kind of cart he had seen earlier. The outstretched figures of men lay bumping loosely on the cart, metal cords with oblong tags tight around their necks. Dan stepped over to note that the tags he could see all read:
—KILL—
UNAUTHORIZED
 
There was a buzz of indignation from the crowd on the sidewalk as the cart went by.
Then there was a sudden silence.
Dan glanced around.
Walking along the sidewalk toward him was a man about his own height and build, who moved with controlled catlike steps.
The man looked directly at Dan and called out: "Hello, Death!"
The people on the sidewalk rushed to get out of the way. Abruptly the man's arm swung back and forward.
"Catch."
Something flashed in the air.
Dan's impulse was to jump aside, then tackle the man. Instead, his body turned slightly. His right hand, already partly raised, whipped in a short arc, caught something, flicked it to his left, and blurred straight out again.
The man opposite Dan blinked and jumped aside.
At the same instant, Dan's left hand shot out.
There was a gasp from the crowd. The man collapsed with the butt of a knife jutting from his chest.
A voice behind Dan said warmly, "Superb! A return attack complete in one stroke!"
Dan turned to see three alert, strong-looking men. One counted bills from a thick roll. The second opened up a square case with carrying handle. The third was unwinding an armband with a badge on it.
The man with the case held it out. "If you'll just put your fingertips on these plates, so we'll be sure to get your mating credits—"
Dan sensed from the waiting attitude of the people watching that this was some kind of test. Unhesitatingly, he held out his fingertips. There were also two bright flashes as a small tube was held to Dan's eyes.
Once Dan could see again, everyone seemed relaxed and friendly. The crowd was excitedly arguing the details of what had happened. The man with the roll of bills handed over a small fistful, saying, "Double, for the return at one stroke."
The man with the armband put it on Dan's arm as he rapidly recited the words of some rote formula, of which all Dan caught was a frequent reference to "the Code," and the words "peril and deadly danger," and the last words, "now say, 'I do.'"
"I do," said Dan, fervently wishing he were somewhere else.
The man with the case was beaming as he snapped the little rod inside. He said genially, "I always know an honest fight when I see it. And these days it's a real pleasure to—"
Just then, he clapped the case shut.
The case gave out a clang like the general alarm on a space cruiser under surprise attack.
The crowd gave a shout. "Unauthorized kill!"
The three men beside Dan jumped forward.
 
Dan's left hand lashed out to smash the nearest of the three men in the midsection. The flat edge of his right hand struck the second man just below the nose; then Dan had thrown the first man back against the third, had whirled around and seen the crowd start to surge across the sidewalk to block his escape. He sprinted directly past this crowd, so that when it completely blocked the sidewalk an instant later, he was cut off from the view of the three men he had just knocked down.
Dan did not doubt that these three men were officials of the planet, and he strongly suspected that they were armed and knew how to use their weapons.
Across the street, at the edge of one corner of the green, was a tall hedge of flowering shrubs, back of which was a grove of young trees. Dan dodged past carts and small, square, silent automobiles, and ran through this hedge. Behind him there was a shout of anger.
To Dan's left were two young trees, growing close together. Dan still had with him two of his little mataform units, and he quickly thrust one of them between the two dark, slender tree trunks.
An instant later, he was in the dark corner of the bookstore, hearing the angry shouts dwindle into the distance outside. The door of the store closed as the elderly woman who ran the store stepped outside, apparently to see what had happened.
A moment later, Dan was in the shelter under the river. He worked quickly with a small brush and some dye, then got out another set of clothes. He checked his appearance swiftly and thoroughly.
Then with more of a tanned look than he had had before, with much darker hair, and wearing entirely different clothes, Dan mataformed back to the bookstore. The elderly woman was standing by the front window as he came forward, to pick up a thin scientific volume lying on a table and say, "I believe you were outside when I came in."
"Oh," she said, "the most frightful thing just happened." She then gave a highly inaccurate account of Dan's fight with the knife man, and described how the crowd was hunting him down right now at the far end of the park.
Dan took his change and said, "I'll have to go look."
He stepped outside and could see the path of the crowd with no difficulty. The flowering shrubs were flattened, and the ground under the trees showed the marks of many feet. Dan recovered his mataform unit and walked a short distance to look down toward the far end of the green, where the swimmers were all out of the pool—probably so that it could be searched for Dan.
He turned around and noticed near the bookstore a large restaurant, built in a style that made him think of an old English tavern. Several men looking well contented came out. Dan realized he was hungry.
He went in, and from a weird merry-go-round serving apparatus got a steak indistinguishable from those at home, and a selection of unfamiliar side dishes that looked good to him, but made other diners nearby wince. Dan paid for his selection and sat down.
During the meal, someone at a nearby table began to talk loudly, and someone else shouted, "Spacerot!" There was a momentary hush in the restaurant, and two burly men in white jackets quickly crossed to the table and spoke firmly to the diners. Peace was restored, and the two burly men wove back through several parties just leaving the restaurant, and separated to stand quietly but alertly near the far wall.
As Dan ate, he thought, "Kielgaard!"
"Right here."
"Do you make any sense out of what we've seen so far?"
"I get the impression something's about to snap, but I don't know what. Or as my experts here tell me, 'It's too early to venture an opinion.'"
"That," thought Dan, "is likely to be the trouble with this place. By the time we find out what's going on, it will be too late to do anything about it. We're going to have to play hunches to crack this one in time."
Kielgaard said fervently, "How we crack it makes no difference to me, so long as we do crack it."
While Dan ate, a considerable crowd of people went out the front door, and two couples came in. The restaurant, however, remained very nearly full.
"Something tells me," Dan thought, "that there must be a lot more to this planet than meets the eye."
He got up and walked toward the back of the restaurant. What he had taken for the rear wall turned out to be merely a wall that divided one section of the restaurant from another equally large, where waitresses served individual tables.
A flight of carpeted steps led down to men's and women's rest rooms and a gently sloping, softly lighted hallway. People were coming up the hall in considerably greater numbers than they went down, and Dan was startled to see that they reacted to him exactly as the crowd outside had, before he had gone into the bookstore to watch them unnoticed.
Dan went to the men's rest room, washed, and inconspicuously studied himself in the mirror. He looked very much different than he had before. Why, then, did the people react in the same way?
Dan concealed a mataform unit in the dimly lit lounge outside the washroom, then went out and down the hall. He had gone perhaps thirty steps when a lithe man coming the other way saw him, whipped out a gun, and shouted, "Death!"
One instant Dan was walking down the right side of the hall. A split fraction of an instant later, he had thrown himself to the other side of the hall.
There was a swift, bright flash.
Someone screamed.
The gun went spinning and Dan had the man on the floor, both hands locked at his throat. It was a severe struggle for Dan to loosen his hands.
A crowd gathered so quickly that there was scarcely room to stand. A man carrying a small box with a handle forced his way through. Dan had his captive, half-unconscious, on his feet. Improvising rapidly, Dan said, "I think that was unauthorized."
The man with the carrying case said grimly, "We'll soon find out." He held the man's fingertips to plates in the case, flashed a small tube in his eyes, and shut the case. There was a loud clang.
Two powerfully built men wearing armbands with shields stepped up. One glanced at Dan and said, "Want to finish him? He's yours, by rights."
Someone in the crowd said, "Question him! Find out which side is behind this!"
The man with the carrying case said sternly, "That's neither here nor there. The only question is, which side is right?"
There was a tense silence. It occurred to Dan that this planet might not be called Truth for nothing. He was still gripping his captive by the arms and wante............