The Invaders Plan

In the bookstore I browsed around the technical section. I found a book by Professor Gyrant Slahb called Cells I Have Knownand sure enough, there was his picture on the back of it! I covertly tore it off the book, sauntered around a bit more and then we were aloft again, hovering.

I got out of the bag the things I needed and using the mirror, working back and forth between the picture and my face, applied the techniques of Apparatus School "Visual Deception 21-24, Advanced Age." With the false wrinkle skin, it was easy.

I turned to the driver and showed him my face and the picture. "How's that?"

"Hey, that's quite an improvement," he said. He really was storing up some owed cuffs!

I shed my uniform and do

I pulled out the portable scriber. They are handy rigs. They have a paper feed from the bottom and they use different types. I didn't have to spend much time forging this contract: I would be dealing with somebody very unschooled in administration, who had no access to computer consoles.

The driver was shortly heading for Slum City. Some public-spirited, pompous (bleep) had once tried to build a whole hospital complex "for the poor." It was a sprawling ruin, eighty acres in extent. All around its outskirts were small "professional buildings" where doctors completed ruining the cases the hospital had botched. There are lots of parking places, most of them empty, for who wants to get wrecked even at the low prices of Slum City? But there was enough traffic for it to obscure one more airbus.

We parked some distance away from the wanted address. I hobbled to it, heavily leaning on my cane.

The office of DOCTOR PRAHD BITTLESTIF-FENDER, as the sign said, was in the rattiest of a series of dilapidations. You had to go around fifty garbage cans, assorted dead animals and up three fire escapes to get to it – an obstacle course which patients would have to run: natural selection – it was easy to cure anyone who could make it to the office.

There was no waiting room. There was no nurse. There was just a brand-new diploma. Perfect. As I stepped further in, I thought the place was empty until a pile of newssheets moved on the couch. It was new Doctor Bittlestiffender. He also livedhere!

I sank tiredly down on a stool. I really was a bit weary after the Widow Tayl. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the stool trying to tip over.

Young Doctor Bittlestiffender stood up. He was a tall young fellow, long-boned, almost gawky. He had a remarkably pale head of hair that stood up at all angles like bleached straw. His eyes, bright green, were eager and professional. Women might consider him handsome, but he looked gaunt, half-starved; that very clean operating coat he wore was obviously stolen from the hospital and, from the absence of others in the place, was probably the only indoor clothes he had. Good, good, better, better. My luck was holding.

I ignored his professional greeting. I said, in a quavering, aged voice, "Young man, you probably have never heard of me. I am Professor Gyrant Slahb." The effect was dramatic. His eyes popped. He almost came to attention and saluted.

I drew out the false identoplate and shakily extended it. "As I am unknown to you, please look at this so you can be sure." He did look at it. But he was stammering. "But . . . but . . . P . . . Professor! I am honored! I . . . I first got interested in cellology reading your nursery texts! Er . . . oh ..." He rushed to his desk and opened a bottom drawer and got out two jolt canisters. He rushed over to a culture heater and looked anxiously for a flask that was empty. He dropped the canisters in his effort. Two flasks fell and broke.

"I came to find," I quavered, "if you were competent in your profession." He forgot about the jolt. He raced to a cabinet and slammed open some drawers. He drew out a stack of papers, saw they were the wrong ones, dropped them, found the right ones and, stumbling on a broken floorboard, got them into my lap rather suddenly.

"I . . . I am not like this," he said. "You have startled me. I . . . er . . . I haven't eaten for two days!" Oh, was my luck in! But not all luck. It was knowing your field. That's the way these new graduates are. After ten years of study and five years of doing the work the hospital doctors should have been doing, they are turned out to starve in the glory of total, private, administrative and financial independence. For which they have had not the faintest training: what senior cellologist wants competition? Yet they grind out thousands of them every year.

I looked at what he had offered. It was a schedule of difficult operations with the statistical results. Ninety-nine and a half percent successful! That was high! It's usually thirty percent. No wonder the older independents didn't favor him!

But the hospital examiners had not spared the adjectives in his examinations. They practically recommended him as fit to alter the cells of the Emperor! There were even fifty cases of introducing foreign objects along nerves to regulate vision and hearing!

He didn't know what was coming. He stood there like a starving animal about to be tossed some meat.

Maybe he was too good for Heller. Maybe I was being too smart. A little lingering infection or a wrong cell generating the wrong fluids might be just what Heller needed. But I had gone this far.

"I know," I said, "that you have begun a successful practice and that you would not be willing to be torn away from it or your friends or loving females . . . ."

"Professor! Please, please. I . . . I got to confess. I don't have any friends or loving females. If you want me to do something ..." Di

I fumblingly, with age-palsied hands, found the contract.

"When the government asked for my recommendation, I told them that I could not honestly recommend until I had personally spoken with you." I seemed very doubtful. "You seem like a nice young man and it appears from the records that you are competent enough ..." I hesitated.

He was almost dying on his feet, so great was his anxiety. But that's the way these young fellows get – they are so used to standing up and getting examined that they get into perpetual hysteria about having to pass.

"It is not," I said, "always comfortable to be on some foreign strand, far from home. The air might be good, the local women attractive and compliant, the gravity fine, the food enticing; the pay might be good but, truly, there is nothing to spend it on; really, on such posts there is nothing to do but work with strange cases of complex problems and putter about in the hope of making some universe-shaking discovery." He groaned in near ecstasy. The vacuum he was setting up almost pulled the paper out of my hand.

"The drawback, in this case," I continued, "was the nature of the post – extreme secrecy. One breath of exposure and it could shake the whole Confederacy. It required a doctor who could end off his affairs quietly, attracting no attention, and simply fade from his present scene unremarked. The slightest secrecy breach would, of course, cancel the post!" Oh, he could be secret. The whole profession was built on it. He could fade. He could fade without a trace.

"And then there was the first case. The test case," I continued. "They said they were going to set up a test case and told me not to mention it. But amongst us professionals, I could not expose you to a test without informing you. I made that a condition. But they said that even the slightest hint, to the patient or to anyone, would cancel the contract." Oh, that was no problem! None at all!

"Now," I quavered, "do you think you could successfully introduce foreign objects undetectably along optical and hearing nerves? That's the test case." Oh, no trouble. Do it in his sleep!