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.Some of them had dug out the information I had needed.A few, like this one, had been Finders of places and things hidden in places.“I’m Elke,” she said.“I suppose it’s a waste of time asking your name.”“The less you know the less you can tell if you ever get caught.”She was still smiling.“I thought people like you had ways of making sure nobody talked.You know—tchk!” She drew a finger across her throat.“You don’t sound too scared at the prospect.” She shrugged.“What’s so good about living? Life expectancy is the interval between now and the moment a Barb decides you’re in his way.” She squirmed her bottom on the bed and said, “Excuse me.”When she was resting all her weight on one cheek she prised her fingers between herself and the bedcovers.Slowly, but with sure deliberation, she drew out a contrivance that looked like a shallow metal jar with its lid not quite properly screwed down.“Simple but nasty,” she said.“It’s got a fifty-pound spring between the top and the bottom.If you hadn’t said the right words I only had to shift my weight a little.End of you and me.” She lifted two side clips and pressed them down to anchor the two parts of the bomb together.“Now,” she said.“Let’s talk.” A real professional, as I had already classed her.You would have thought I was back in England and my hostess had just poured the afternoon tea.“It’s safe? What about the old man and his wife?”“Them! They’re only part of the set-up.They’re not my parents, of course.In fact they’re not even married.They didn’t meet until I got word of your coming.This place is his but his real wife died more than twenty years ago.The woman is really an invalid—we try to use part truths to give an image of total truth.But they’re just.actors, you could say.”“Like us?”“Except that they’re only bit players.They’re safe.I saw to that.Got them so scared that he pussyfoots around and she daren’t leave the bed if she could.They think I’ve got the whole place booby-trapped.”“And have you?”“I’ll tell you later.You gave me the right passwords.But the real you could be dead and you could be a Barb wearing his human make-up kit.It’s up to you.Maybe early morning is a funny time to be going to bed, but the sooner you get stripped off and into bed with me the sooner I’ll know you really are a Memory and not a Barb.”“If I don’t come up to expectations?”“That’ll be when you find out about the booby-traps.”“You know,” I said as I started to strip off, “this identification business isn’t foolproof.I’ve been thirty hours on the road.I could get myself killed just because I was too tired to function.”She laughed.“Why do you think I got this job ? I used to be in another line of business.In Berlin.A business that happens to provide the qualifications needed for this one.With me, mister, nobody is too tired to function.I guarantee it.”The least she could have done was turn her head.I guess it didn’t occur to her that some men are modest.Even at the moments when modesty would appear to be uncalled far.She watched until I was skin naked.“You certainly look human,” she conceded.“Very much so if you don’t mind a compliment.But I’ve heard they can fake even that.There’s only one thing they can’t fake.” She did that womanish contortion that allows them to undo a full length back zipper in one movement.“You’re pretty human yourself,” I returned the compliment.She crooked a coquettish finger.“Let’s see if you are or aren’t.”* * * *Precisely one hour and fifteen minutes later she woke me as I had asked.We got dressed immediately.Nothing to do with modesty now.Modesty was a forgotten luxury.But there’s something about being naked that makes you feel defenceless.You can be armed to the teeth as they say, but without your clothes you can’t convince yourself you’re not more vulnerable than you would be dressed.And we were vulnerable enough as it was without being psychologically hampered in any way.“How long have we got?” I asked the girl.“Not long.They’re generally out and about around eight every morning.It’s almost that now.”“Where do they hang out?”“In the university.Took the building over soon after they landed.You know what I mean by soon ?”“I know.As long as it took them to destroy every source of electricity with an orgy of mass atrocities thrown in just to hammer home the impression of how futile it would be to organize any resistance.You seem to have fared better than some cities I’ve seen.If it wasn’t that I’ve learned how thorough they are I would have been surprised to find them this far north.Cold seems to be the only thing that gets them.”Elke said, “January and February, when the estuary was iced over, they never left the university.That’s how I managed to dig up the information you want.”“Even then,” I admired, “it couldn’t have been easy.Their Eyes are everywhere.”She nodded.“We were worried about them at first.” She didn’t explain, but I guessed she meant the local resistance group.“We couldn’t understand how they worked.The Barbs had robbed us of electrical power; we couldn’t communicate, we couldn’t fabricate.And, as you well know, any sort of transmission—radio, television, what-have-you —is lethal to them after a few minutes’ exposure.So we couldn’t tally this with the Eyes.Not until we found they were alive.”I executed my party piece as a Memory.“Uni-functional laboratory grown protoplasm.Non-sentient.Capable only of aerial motion, pseudo-ocular observation and of reporting its findings to its masters by what Montilla of Madrid believed to have been telepathic means.”“Believed? Past tense? One of yours?”“Montilla? No.They got him.Inevitable.He couldn’t dissect the Eyes quick enough.Not before they reported he was taking hostile action.Got to admire him.He must have known what would happen.”“Oh, sure.Everybody’s a hero.”I could have asked about the flat cynicism in her voice.But I didn’t have to.There was nothing especially heroic about fighting for your very existence.Maybe you could say not everybody did it, but then the world always was made up of those who accept the boot of oppression on the neck and those who kick back.And because the kickers brought down even sterner oppression they were no more loved than the enemy.Elke and myself, we were kickers.We were two out of many.Or if you took it globally we were two out of a very small proportion of the human race.We survived—and most of us had a pitifully ephemeral span—by one simple stratagem: we licked the boot of oppression.We were latter day stool pigeons.Finks incorporated.What the Barbarians couldn’t discover with their Eyes they got from us
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