Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg

of power and authority. Demeris rubbed his wrists where the cord had chafed them and said, “I wasn’t interested in a fight. That’s not the sort of person I am. But sometimes when it builds up and builds up and builds up, and you can’t stand it anymore—”

      “Right. You damn near killed Bobby Bridger, you know that?” His eyes were bugging right out of his head. This is hunt season here, mister. The Spooks will be turning the critters loose any minute now and things are going to get real lively. It’s important for everybody to stay civil so things don’t get any more complicated than they usually are when the hunt’s going on.”

      “If Bridger’s mother had been a little more civil to me, it would all have been a lot different,” Demeris said.

      Gorton gave him a weary look. “Who are you and what are you doing here, anyway?”

      Taking a deep breath, Demeris said, “My name’s Nick Demeris, and I live in Free Country, and I came over here to find my kid brother Tom, who seems to have gotten sidetracked coming back from his Entrada.”

      “Tom Demeris,” Gorton said, raising his eyebrows.

      “Yes. Then I met your daughter, Jill, at some little town near the border, and she invited me to travel with her. But when we got to Spook City she dropped me at some hotel and disappeared, so—”

      “Wait a second,” said Gorton. His eyebrows went even higher. “My daughter Jill?”

      “That’s right.”

      “Shit,” the big man said. “What daughter? I don’t have no fucking daughter.”

      “No daughter,” said Demeris.

      “No daughter. None. Must have been some Spook playing games with you.”

      The words fell on Demeris like stones. “Some Spook,” he repeated numbly. “Pretending to be your daughter. You mean that? For Christ’s sake, are you serious, or are you playing games with me too?”

      Something in Demeris’s agonized tone seemed to register sympathetically on Gorton. He squinted, he blinked, he tugged at the tip of his great nose. He said in a much softer voice, “I’m not playing any games with you. I can’t say for sure that she was a Spook but she sure as hell wasn’t my daughter, because I don’t have any daughter. Spooks doing masks will tell you anything they damn please, though. Chances are, she was a Spook.”

      “Doing masks?”

      “Spooks going around playing at being human. It’s a big thing with them these days. The latest Spook fad.”

      Demeris nodded. Doing masks, he thought. He considered it and it began to sink in, and sink and sink and sink.

      Then quietly he said, “Maybe you can help me find my brother, at least.”

      “No. I can’t do that and neither can anybody else. Tom Demeris, you said his name is?”

      “That’s right.”

      Gorton glanced toward one of his men. “Mack, how long ago was it that the Demeris kid took the Spooks’ nickel?”

      “Middle of July, I think.”

      “Right.” To Demeris, Gorton said, “What we call ‘taking the Spooks’ nickel’ means selling yourself to them, do you know what I mean? You agree to go with them to their home planet. They’ve got a kind of plush country club for humans there where you live like a grand emperor for the rest of your life, comfort, luxury, women, anything you damn please, but the deal is that in return you belong to them forever, that they get to run psychological experiments on you to see what makes you tick, like a mouse in a cage. At least that’s what the Spooks tell us goes on there, and we might as well believe it. Nobody who’s sold himself to the Spooks has ever come back. I’m sorry, man. I wish it wasn’t so.”

      Demeris looked away for a moment. He felt like smashing things, but he held himself perfectly still. My brother, he thought, my baby brother.

      “He was just a kid,” he said.

      “Well, he must have been a damned unhappy kid. Nobody with his head screwed on right would take the nickel. Hardly anybody ever does.” Something flashed momentarily in Gorton’s eyes, and Demeris sensed that to these people selling yourself to the Spooks was the ultimate surrender, the deepest sort of self-betrayal. They had all sold themselves to the Spooks, in a sense, by choosing to live in the Occupied Zone; but even here there were levels of yielding to the alien conqueror, he realized, and in the eyes of Spook City people the thing that Tom had done was the lowest level of all. He felt the weight of Gorton’s contempt for Tom and pity for him, suddenly, and hated it, and tried to throw it back with a furious glare. Gorton watched him quietly, not reacting.

      After a little while Demeris said, “All right. There’s nothing I can do, is there? I guess I’d better go back to Albuquerque now.”

      “You’d better go back to your hotel and wait until the hunt is over,” said Gorton. “It isn’t safe wandering around in the open while the critters are loose.”

      “No,” said Demeris. “I suppose it isn’t.”

      “Take him to wherever he’s staying, Mack,” Gorton said to his man. He stared for a time at Demeris. The sorrow in his eyes seemed genuine. “I’m sorry,” Gorton said again. “I really am.”

      ***

      MACK HAD NO DIFFICULTY RECOGNIZING Demeris’s hotel from the description he gave, and took him to it in a floating wagon that made the trip in less than fifteen minutes. The streets were practically empty now: no Spooks in sight and hardly any humans, and those who were still out were moving quickly.

      “You want to stay indoors while the hunt is going on,” Mack said. “A lot of dumb idiots don’t, but most of them regret it. This is one event that ought to be left strictly to the Spooks.”

      “How will I know when it starts?”

      “You’ll know,” Mack said.

      Demeris got out of the wagon. It turned immediately and headed away. He paused a moment in front of the building, breathing deeply, feeling a little light-headed, thinking of Tom on the Spook planet, Tom living in a Spook palace, Tom sleeping on satin Spook sheets.

      “Nick? Over here, Nick! It’s me!”

      “Oh, Christ,” he said. Jill, coming up the street toward him, smiling as blithely as though this were Christmas Eve. He scanned her, searching for traces of some Spook gleam, some alien shimmer. When she reached him she held out her arms to him as though expecting a hug. He stepped back to avoid her grasp.

      In a flat tight voice, he said, “I found out about my brother. He’s gone off to the Spook world. Took their nickel.”

      “Oh, Nick. Nick!”

      “You knew, didn’t you? Everybody in this town must have known about the kid who came from Free Country and sold himself to the Spooks.” His tone turned icy. “It was your father the mayor that told me. He also told me that he doesn’t have any daughters.”

      Her cheeks blazed with embarrassment. It was so human a reaction that he was cast into fresh confusion: how could a Spook learn to mimic a human even down to a blush? It didn’t seem possible. And it gave him new hope. She had lied to him about being Ben Gorton’s daughter, yes, God only knew why; but there was still the possibility that she was human, that she had chosen to put on a false identity but the body he saw was really her own. If only it was so, he thought. His anger with her, his disdain, melted away in a flash. He wanted everything to be all right. He was rocked by a powerful rush of eagerness to be assured that the woman he had embraced those two nights on the desert was indeed a woman; and with it, astonishingly, came a new burst of desire for her, of fresh yearning stronger than anything he had felt for her before.

      “What he told me about was that you were a Spook,” Demeris said in a guarded tone. He looked at her hopefully, waiting for her to deny it, praying for her to deny