A Jungle of Stars (1976) (6 page)

"Yes, I'm Hunter," Wade confirmed. He took the cigar out of his mouth and studied it. "You really ought to try one of these," he said. "Real Havana.

You must have my money and connections to get them."

Savage folded his arms and studied the man. In his appearance, nothing whatsoever suggested that Wade was anything other than what he appeared to be.

"I suppose you have a lot of questions," Wade prompted.

"Well," Savage replied, "almost everything I can think of is a question.

You, for instance."

Wade's eyebrows shot up. "Me? I've told you all that before, if you remember."

"But where's the real Stephen Wade?"

Wade took a drag on the cigar. "Gone. Dead. He died the moment I took his body, of course." He said this so conversationally, so matter-of-factly, that a chill went through Savage.

"Why so shocked?" Wade asked. "You just killed a man for no purpose at all except petty revenge. I kill someone every sixty years or so -- for survival."

"Santori was different--" Savage started to protest, but Wade cut him off.

"How? He was no threat to you. He could do nothing to you, whereas you were a constant threat to him. On the other hand, I have to make a serious decision on who to kill, or nature would make the choice random. You see, I'm a parasite. Unpleasant word, that, but correct. When you died, your body stayed behind -- but the sentience, the animator part of you, did not. This

"self," the soul, if you will, although robbed of its religious connotations is basically electrical. You, me, everyone and everything animate anywhere in the universe, are all creatures of pure energy. We incubate, grow, and learn in these shells of ours, then are freed from them to join that great synthesis we talked about.

It's not too surprising: nature is a story of processes, of evolution.

This is just a part of it."

"But not you," Savage said flatly.

Wade sighed. "No, not me; not anymore, anyway. The process, you see, continues on beyond the synthesis. My people, well, continued; I have no idea where or how or to what. I hope to find out someday by eventually joining with the next race to reach that point. In the meantime, natural laws bind me, the same as you. Lacking the awesome power of my people, I cannot long sustain my true form and nature. I need a physical shell -- a wall plug to keep me charged up. Sorry, best explanation I can give."

"So what's this place?" asked Savage, changing the subject.

"My Washington headquarters, of course. A handy place: world capitals are where the decisions are made. I have to know those decisions. Particularly here. I have to know, ahead of time, if my organization has been compromised in any way, or if the government's into anything of mine I don't want them to be. You see, my headquarters are close to the United States."

"Your corporate headquarters?"

"Hell, no! Not the petty empire of Stephen Wade! My headquarters!

Remember, I said I was fighting a war?"

"Yeah, I remember -- but it wasn't too clear. Something about your fighting your brother for control of the universe or something like that. I assumed--"

"You assumed wrongly!" Wade cut in sharply. "It's a real war, Savage --

a shooting war. Just like the one you've been in, only on a much larger scale.

Look, come with me."

With that, Wade got up and walked over to the door from which he had entered the room. Savage hesitated a moment, then he got up and followed him.

The door led not to an office but to a small alcove with an elevator door. Wade took a key from his pocket and turned the lock that served as the call button. The door slid open almost immediately and be and Savage entered.

Instead of the usual panel of floor buttons, the elevator had a keyboard that looked very much like that on a touch-tone phone or a calculator. Wade pointed to it.

"About four years ago, we finished this project. We moved part of the house away and excavated here -- had a hell of a time explaining it to the D.C. zoning board. We finally convinced everyone it was a secret government agency operation. There are so many that nobody knows what's going on, anyway.

It was even easier in Moscow.

"This shaft goes down about four hundred feet. It's honeycombed down there -- rooms of all shapes and sizes, mostly filled with computers and other electronic gear, including much that this world hasn't invented yet. And may never invent." He punched out a five-digit combination. "Can't be too careful," Wade explained. "Each story below the house is reached only by one of the two elevators like this one -- and to make the elevators work you have to know the codes for each floor. Punch anything wrong and you're trapped in the elevator, which takes you down to a very nice jail and seenrity headquarters and locks. The codes are changed daily, of course. Not unbreakable, but good enough."

The elevator was moving as he spoke, dropping down into the depths beneath the Georgian-style house. Finally, the door opened and they walked out.

It was a huge room, with busy men and women scurrying about and machines clacking. The center of attraction, however, was a huge representation, perhaps thirty meters square, that covered an entire wall. In front of it was a long, curved table with banks of phones, television units, and computer consoles.

To Savage, it was a movie version of the pentagon Situation Room, but the display was not of the United States or even of the world. It was something out of an astronomy textbook. Pictured in millions of tiny lights was a spiral galaxy.

Although basically white-lit, large areas toward the galactic center were red-lit -- and the red zones seemed to be growing. A small area off to the "south" of the red was now blinking. Savage realized that the blinking sector was probably several light-years in diameter.

"This is the Washington War Room," Wade explained. "Similar ones exist in perhaps half a million or more spots in the galaxy, and I have four more here on Earth, including the really big one at Headquarters, which is about thirty times this size. You walk on that one."

"What do the colors represent?" Savage asked, fascinated.

"The red represents the area now under The Bromgrev's direct control.

The blinking area is the one the computers predict will be the next to go: the old Fraskan Sector. It took him almost a century to conquer his first territory. Another fifty years or so to reach its present size. But he's got allies now, and a hell of an organization. He could probably take half the key planetary systems in the next six or eight years. That's why things are getting so critical."

"Where are we on the map?" Savage asked him.

Wade chuckled. "See that spiral arm on the top left there? We're about two-thirds of the way out on it. Don't worry. We're so far away from The Bromgrev that we're in no immediate danger -- and this is too young an area to be any kind of a threat to him, anyway. That's one reason we're here."

As they went back up to the conference room, Savage was silent, digesting what he had heard, organizing his questions. He had many left.

Sealed once more, another cigar in Wade's mouth, Savage rekindled the dialogue; he was certain he would not have this chance again. Finally, he asked the one question that was at the heart of the matter.

"I'm overwhelmed," he began, "with the operation and the organization.

I'm not too sure I understand the scale of, or even the reasons for, the war.

But, then, that's nothing new. I didn't understand the last one, either. Which boils it down to the same question I had in Vietnam: What has all this to do with me?"

Wade grinned and blew thick smoke into the air. It hung there, almost heavier than the air, a blue-white haze.

"Since it's unlikely that you'll have to risk your neck in this war, it is not really very important to understand it. What your job is is a simple and somewhat screwy one, but not boring, I don't think." His face grew serious.

"You see," he continued, "while Earth isn't really in any danger of a massed attack, my headquarters is here, and The Bromgrev knows that. Even if he took Earth -- which is unlikely, since our big guns are deployed and our defenses are too good to make the effort profitable -- he couldn't get the Headquarters, anyway. It is, well, not quite on Earth.

"There exist other planes than ours, with different laws and frames of reference, yet coexisting in the same time and space as we. They are pretty much barren, lifeless nothings; and we could not normally exist there. But there are some weak points between our plane and the one next door; and sometimes things, well, break through. Over the millennia, enough atmosphere, and other components of our plane have seeped through in sufficient quantities, creating tiny bubbles in theirs. If conditions are just right, you can enter them."

He leaned back and continued puffing on the fat cigar. "My headquarters," he said, "which I call Haven, is a place like that. Except that by technological means I have sustained it and made it habitable. It is untouchable except through the opening nature made and I perpetuate. As no one enters or leaves except through me, The Bromgrev cannot get his agents in.

Since only I can key the way in or out, they can't sneak past, either. But The Bromgrev keeps trying! Sooner or later, it will sink into my brother's coarse mind that the only member of his staff capable of penetrating Haven is The Bromgrev himself." A spark lit up Wade's eyes as he spoke, and his voice raised in pitch. "He'll come like a thief in the night, and in heavy disguise.

He could be anybody -- or anything -- at all, any sentient beastie in the galaxy.

"You, and my other agents here, are my Early Warning System. All of you are former detectives, trained observers with particularly analytical minds.

When he comes, it's your job to spot him, identify him, and then we will win this struggle."

"Terrific," Savage grunted sarcastically. "All I do is identify Superman, put him under arrest, and bring him to you, right? And all he does while I'm doing all this is come docilely along. No thanks! I've had a taste of one of you already!"

"He won't know that you know him," Wade said quietly. "He won't be able to take your body or your mind. I guarantee that. Making you a closed-loop organism, a self-repairing individual, was simple. But those days in the hospital, while you were unconscious, I did far more. I created mental blockages in your mind so impenetrable that nothing, no organism past or present except the whole of a God-race, could break through them. The Bromgrev uses telepathy skillfully, far better than I, from an operational standpoint.

But my mind and powers are equal to his own, and your blocks are so strong that even I cannot penetrate them. I have been trying during this entire interview; and they are so firm that I can't undo them. To a telepath, you don't exist. The 'paths call you boys "zombies" -- you exist when the sense they depend on the most tells them you do not. They can get only the surface thoughts that you verbalize."

Savage sat still for a while, letting the implications sink in. A zombie, huh? Well, that's what he was: the walking dead. He tried to imagine what it must be like to be able to see anyone's innermost thoughts, to probe the depths of memory. Except for a very few.

He suddenly felt confident again, private, secure. No more funny business. He was himself, a closed book to others, as always.

The germ of a plan was in Savage's mind even then, but it had not yet surfaced. He did not have enough facts, not enough to go on. Two problems surfaced immediately: How do you tell which of an infinite variety of organisms is the quarry? And how do you kill an invincible immortal?

"When do I start?" he asked.

"I'll show you your office now, if you like. Then get a hotel room downtown and take two or three days to find a place and get settled. I'll instruct Accounting to get you whatever you need in the way of funds. This will be your district: the southeastern United States. You'll work out of here. And you'll meet your share of characters before you're done."

6

THE JOB DID prove to be interesting at that. He worked, he found, for a nonprofit group called the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, a group that had some very real and quite ignorant members as well as some of Hunter's own people. As with many things, The Hunter had not created the group, but had merely joined it, endowed it, and then let it serve his purposes.

The society was concerned with the investigation of unnatural or apparently unnatural phenomena, from flying saucers to ghosts, poltergeists, rains of frogs, and anything else that science could not explain. It had performed some valuable services, and some interesting tasks were undertaken by reputable scientists on its behalf: a scientific expedition to Loch Ness, another to find Bigfoot, others hunting spectral shapes in the southern swamps. In most cases they came up empty-handed; but, in others, sound scientific and quite rational explanations -- and some extremely nasty and clever hoaxes -- were uncovered and released to the public. A lot of extremely talented and inteffigent people worked, on and off, for the society.

The society also had, needless to say, a full compliment of nuts.

From Savage's point of view, his job was a simple and interesting one: to pick out of the reports, clippings, and news items any events that might be related to enemy activity: the landing of agents and supplies for Bromgrev men, for example. (That meant chasing - a lot of flying saucer reports.) He also kept up with tales of demonic possession and zombie-like activities.

Particularly with the latter two, it had been explained to him, since The Bromgrev had a highly effective and unique way of gaining converts.

In his wanderings through the galaxy, through many lives and in many bodies, The Bromgrev had discovered a large planet organized somewhat like a society of bees. Every organism -- and there were billions of them -- served a specific purpose, each acting like a single component of an organism. Through the years, on this world that apparently had been incredibly harsh, one group of beings had evolved with totally unshielded telepathy.