The silent invaders

The Lucky Lady was on the last lap of her journey. Harris had boarded her on Alpheratz IV, after having been shipped there from Darruu by private warpship. For the past three weeks, while the giant vessel had slipped through the sleek gray tunnel in the continuum that was its overdrive channel, Harris had been learning to walk at Earthnorm gravity.

Darruu was a large world--radius 11,000 miles--and though its density was not as great as Earth's, still the gravitational attraction was half again as intense. Darruu's gravity was 1.5 Earthnorm. Or, as Harris had thought of it in the days when his mind centered not on Earth but on Darruu, Earth's gravity was .67 Darruunorm. Either way, it meant that his muscles would be functioning in a field two-thirds as strong as the one they had developed in. He could use the excuse that he had spent most of his time on heavy planets, and that would explain away some of his awkwardness.

But not all. A native Earther, no matter how long he stays on a heavy world, still knows how to cope with Earthnorm gravity. Harris had to learn that. He did learn it, painstakingly, during the three weeks of overdrive travel toward the system of Sol.

Now the journey was almost complete. All that remained was the transfer from the starship to an Earth shuttle, and then he could begin life as an Earthman.

Earth hung outside the main viewport twenty feet from Harris's cabin. He stared at it. A great green ball of a world, with two huge continents here, another land-mass there, a giant moon moving in slow procession around it, keeping one pockmarked face eternally staring inward, the other glaring at outer space like a single beady bright eye.

The sight made Harris homesick.

Darruu was nothing like this. Darruu, from space, seemed to be a giant red fruit, covered over by the crimson mist that was the upper layer of its atmosphere. Beneath that could be discerned the great blue seas and the two hemisphere-large continents of Darraa and Darroo.

And the moons, Harris thought nostalgically. Seven glistening blank faces like coins in the sky, each at its own angle to the ecliptic, each taking its place in the sky nightly like a gem moved by clockwork. And the Mating of the Moons, when the seven came together once a year in a fiercely radiant diadem that filled half the sky--

Angrily he cut the train of thought.

You're an Earthman. Forget Darruu.

A voice on a speaker overhead said, "Please return to your cabins, ladies and gentlemen. In eleven minutes we will come to a rest at the main spaceborne depot. Passengers intending to transfer here please notify their area steward."

Harris returned to his cabin while the voice repeated the statement in other languages. Earth still spoke more than a dozen major tongues, which surprised him; Darruu had reached linguistic homogeneity three thousand years or more ago.

Minutes ticked by; at last came the word that the Lucky Lady had ended its ion-drive cruise and was tethered to the orbital satellite. Harris left his cabin for the last time and headed downramp to the designated room on D Deck where outgoing passengers were assembling.

"Your baggage will be shipped across. You don't have to worry about that."

Harris nodded. His baggage was important.

More than three hundred of the passengers were leaving ship here. Harris was herded along with the others through an airlock. Several dozen ungainly little ferries hovered just outside, linked to the huge starliner by connecting tubes. Harris entered a swaying tube, crossed over, and found a seat in the ferry. Minutes later, he was repeating the process in the other direction, as the ferry unloaded its passengers into the main airlock of Orbiting Station Number One.

Another voice boomed, "_Lucky Lady_ passengers continuing on to Earth report to Routing Channel Four. Lucky Lady passengers continuing on to Earth report to Routing Channel Four. Passengers transhipping to other starlines should go to the nearest routing desk at once."

At Routing Channel Four, Harris was called upon to produce his papers. He handed over the little fabrikoid portfolio; a spaceport official riffled sleepily through it and handed it back without a word.

As he boarded the Earth-Orbiter shuttle, an attractive stewardess handed him a multigraphed sheet of paper which contained information of a sort a tourist was likely to want to know. Harris scanned it quickly.

"_The Orbiting Station is located eighty thousand miles from Earth. It is locked in a twenty-four hour orbit that keeps it hovering approximately above Quito, Ecuador, South America. During a year the Orbiting Station serves an average of 8,500,000 travellers_--"

He finished reading the sheet and put it down. He eyed his fellow passengers in the Earthbound shuttle. There were about fifty of them.

For all he knew, five were disguised Darruui like himself. Or they might be enemies--Medlins--likewise in disguise. Perhaps he was surrounded by agents of Earth's own intelligence corps who had already penetrated his disguise.

Trouble lay on every hand. Inwardly Major Harris felt calm, though there was the faint twinge of homesickness for Darruu that he knew he would never be able entirely to erase.

The shuttle banked into a steep deceleration curve. Artificial grav aboard the ship remained constant, of course. Earth drew near.

Landing came.

The shuttle hung over the skin of the landing-field for thirty seconds, then dropped; a gantry crane shuffled out to support the ship, and buttress-legs sprang from the sides of the hull. A steward's voice said, "Passengers will please assemble at the airlock in single file."

They assembled. A green omnibus waited outside on the field, and the fifty of them filed in. Harris found a seat by the window and stared out across the broad field. A yellow sun was in the blue sky. The air was cold; he shivered involuntarily and drew his cloak around him for warmth.

"Cold?" asked the man who shared his seat with him.

"A bit."

"That's odd. Nice balmy spring day like this, you'd think everybody would be enjoying the weather."

Harris grinned. "I've been on some pretty hot worlds the last ten years. Anything under ninety degrees and I start shivering, now."

The other chuckled and said, "Must be near eighty in the shade today."