Ten From Infinity | Page 8

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