Ten From Infinity Part 4

Bright's throat bobbed as the astonishing implication came home to him.

"h.e.l.l, man! You mean--"

"I mean these specimens do not merely bear a resemblance to each other.

They were not just similar as to organisms and physical structure. They were all _exactly_ alike; as alike as eight new cars of the same make and model lined up side by side ..."

_Identical._ Hagen didn't know anything about that. He hadn't seen the others. But he knew that there was something frightening about the one they'd picked up in Chicago. At first glance he could have been Mr.

Anybody, from Anywhere, U.S.A. A youngish-looking forty, you would have figured, with a sprinkling of gray at the temples and a face women could have found interesting. He had the unpaunched figure of a man who had taken good care of himself; he was quietly dressed in a blue suit; he looked like a decent-enough guy who just happened to have gotten stiff on the double hooker he'd ordered and sounded off without meaning to.

In fact, he was still sounding off when they got him into the interrogation room. And when the barflies called his talk treasonable, they hadn't been fooling.

Brent said, "Identical, gentlemen, even to the finger-prints; to the very last ridge."

Pender's eyebrows tried to crawl up his forehead and disappear into his hairline. "That's utterly and completely ridiculous."

Brent smiled. "Then, at least, I've gotten one idea over to you--that a public release on this thing would be greeted with hoots of derision by the realistic American public."

"And perhaps deservedly so?"

"I think not," Brent said gravely.

_Is it some incredibly ingenious hoax?_ Hagen asked himself the question and found no answer. He only remembered the words and the eyes and the tone of the creature that walked like a man ...

"He was our--father. They had him a long time before we--came. He was our father, and after we came they told us what we were to know and we knew--it."

There it was--that odd little break, cutting off the word at the end of each sentence. It gave the impression of a mind groping, yet not really groping; a mind sure of itself, yet wondering.

"What did you know?"

"We knew what we were--for. Our--reason. We knew what we were created to do--here."

"How many of you were there?"

"Ten of--us."

"You said, 'created to do here.' Where do you come from?"

"There."

"Where is _there_?"

At this point the man or the creature, or whatever you wanted to call him, pointed upward.

At this point, Cantrell, another of the interrogation group, turned away in disgust. "A kook! A kook with a religious compulsion. A character, and we got called out of bed to--"

"--to get you ready to be destroyed," the creature cut in.

"By fire and brimstone on judgment day?" Cantrell asked sarcastically.

"No. By rendering you helpless by--"

Here the creature swallowed, blinked and looked surprised--and changed magically. He--if it really was a he--didn't jump up and kick a hole in the ceiling or anything like that. In fact, nothing tangible happened.

There just seemed to be an invisible barrier that rose suddenly around him.

Then there was the thing that chilled every man in the room; a thing as tangible as the walls and the furniture; yet a thing no man could define in words.

This was when Cantrell, a high-strung individual at best, reacted violently to the change in the creature. In an instinctive blaze of anger and frustration, Cantrell reached out and slapped him brutally across the face.

Velie, the agent in charge, also acted instinctively as he lunged forward to restrain Cantrell. But then he froze, as did all the men in the room, to stare.

It was not what the prisoner did; it was what he did not do. There was absolutely no reaction to the blow--no reaction physically, emotionally, or mentally. It was as though the blow had not been struck; as though this were some kind of a moving, breathing zombie.

So tangible, so seemingly sourceless was this feeling of loathing, that Hagen would have been sure it had affected only himself if he had not seen its effect on the others.

Yet none of them referred to it. Nor was this strange, because there just weren't any words to describe the feeling one gets from contact with a pleasant-faced, quietly dressed example of the walking dead.

Backing away from this powerful emotional reaction, Hagen forced himself onto an intellectual level, and asked himself what had brought about the change in the creature. Why had it--Hagen now had to regard the strange, walking enigma as neuter--after functioning to some extent as a human, reverted suddenly to what seemed to be its natural state?

He conceded that if he knew the answer to that one, he could be of great service to the FBI and the nation--and, no doubt to the world ...

Pender of the Army now had a question. "What information have you gotten from the surviving man?"

"Not a great deal, as yet. However, in our experiments we've learned something rather frightening."

"And what's that?"

"He is totally impervious to drugs of any description whatever."

"That's impossible!"

"So it would seem. But the sodium pentathol injection he was given could just as well have been so much water."

The group pondered this information, each after his own fashion. Then Birch of the State Department made a precise, scholarly observation.

"Incredible!"

Brent smiled faintly. "One point of vital importance. We do know that there were, originally, ten of these creatures roaming the country.

Eight are accounted for. The other two are still at large."

Jones of the Air Force asked, "Were all eight apprehended in large cities?"

"Yes."

"Shouldn't that mean something to us?"

"Well, it's a pattern, all right, but no one's been able to give it any meaning--so far."

No one had any further comment on that point. Brent waited a moment and then threw the bombsh.e.l.l. "We are quite sure that these creatures are of extraterrestrial origin."

For a time it seemed as though Brent's bombsh.e.l.l had been a dud. There was no comment from around the table--no sound of any kind. But each man was evaluating the information after his own fashion. The key thought, no doubt, other than a natural and instinctive moment of sheer unbelief, was that this marked a giant, forward lunge in world history. And also, no doubt, in this group of responsible men, there was a common question: It would appear that our world had at last come to grips with the universe around it. Was our world ready?