Chapter VI

It was a summer evening and downtown Chicago was a hot-box of sweltering buildings and steaming tar streets. People stretched out on the lawns in front of Buckingham fountain for any stray breezes that might wander in off the lake or else they curled up in front of fans and read until the small hours of the morning when the temperature had drifted down a few degrees so it was possible to go to bed without drowning in a pool of their own sweat.

A woman walking by the Pure Oil building suddenly saw a shimmering in the air and then a man was standing in the shadowed doorway, staring nonchalantly at her. She almost screamed, then put it down to the heat and hurried by.

Stan strolled up Michigan Boulevard to stop for a moment in front of a bookstore where a man had been staring in the window.

"All set, Fred?"

Tanner nodded. "He leaves the Prudential building in half an hour. He parks his car on the ramp below the street, in the parking lot that runs parallel to the river. It's in the far corner--a sport model." He fumbled in his pocket for a small card. "Here's the license number. The ape is easy enough to recognize. About sixty years old, sport coat, and a pork-pie hat. He's had a small office here for a couple of weeks, doing government work, so he might be carrying a briefcase. Tomorrow he goes back east."

Stan memorized the description. "Just how good is he?"

"The best they've got. Losing him will be quite a blow to the apes. Quite a blow."

Stan stood in the shadows of the bookstore for a few minutes more. He could hear every tiny noise on the street, including the rapid tick-tick-tick of his own wrist-watch.

"I better go down. Be ready to help with the body five minutes after the hour."

He turned and started up the street, to the stairs that would take him to the level below. Hundreds of cars were parked in neat, silent rows below the ramp. Overhead was the cold brilliance of hundreds of fluorescent lamps.

Light enough he thought. It wouldn't be ... sporting ... to shoot the ape scientist down in the dark.

He found the bright, two-toned sports car at the end of the ramp. Nobody was in sight. He smiled to himself and walked on past the car and then stood quietly in the shadows of a concrete pillar. He had a while to wait and disquieting thoughts swam slowly to the surface of his mind.

This city of Chicago. He had been to many cities on the planet but this was the only one that somehow ... bothered him. A city that seemed oddly, tantalizingly familiar. And there was a pressing urgency for him to see some people in it....

But as an agent of Thusca, he could afford no time for such neurotic thoughts. He would tell the doctors about it when he returned, but right now there was work.

He stood there without moving a muscle, thinking of nothing at all, as if Stanley Martin were only an illusion and didn't really exist. It was a quarter to six.

Ten minutes to six.

Six o'clock.

And footsteps thudding on the concrete stairs a block away.

The man in the pork-pie hat was coming to get his car.

* * * * *

Stan set the stud on his heat gun and waited.

An ape.

The man came closer and fumbled at the door of his automobile, trying to get the key into the lock.

Stan pressed the stud and the violet beam flashed out and splashed on the car door six inches from the man's hand. The paint flared into a smoking fire and a neat, thin line raced down the metal, cutting cleanly through the body and the upholstery and the steel frame.

He'd let him squirm for a second, Stan thought coldly, and then move the beam back and cut the ape in two.

_Now!_

He never touched the man. There was a spanging sound and the pillar Stan was leaning against suddenly showed concrete chips. He fell backwards and sprawled on the pavement, the violet beam from his heat gun crazily scorching the concrete overhead.

Somebody yelled to the man crouched by the car....

"_Run! Run, you fool!_"

The man in the pork-pie hat dodged up the ramp. Stan tried to pick him off but the pillar showered concrete again and his aim was spoiled. Then the man was gone and Stan's mind turned to his own problems.

The opposition had finally put in an appearance....

"_Come out now and you can come out alive. Fight, and we'll bring you out dead!_"

A woman's voice, he thought coldly. Coming from a car about a hundred feet down....

He aimed his heater and exploded the gas tank, the flames whooshing out into the closed space.

"_You didn't think we were actually there, did you?_"

He fired again and then a steady shower of concrete chips that sprayed his elbow made him glance at the pillar, alarmed. It had been cut entirely away at the top and now it was being chewed away at the bottom, ready to topple over on him.

He set his heater for a fan-shaped ray to cover his movements and scrambled out from behind the pillar, desperately trying to dodge over to the line of cars.

Something spanged into his shoulder and spun him around. He fell heavily to the pavement, the pain briefly paralyzing his nerves. He waited a split second for the pain to lessen, then tried to scramble for his heater. The cement in front of him exploded into dust and chips that cut his face and almost blinded his eyes.

"_Get up!_"

* * * * *

She stepped out from behind another pillar. A tall, black-haired woman with wide cheek-bones and cold, green eyes. Her face was hard and she carried her hand weapon with all the assurance of one who was thoroughly familiar with it. Two men came with her. They were capable looking men but not the grim, hard-eyed professionals that Stan was used to working with.

The woman walked over to Stan and slapped his face--hard--her nails digging bloody furrows in his skin.

"How does it feel to be a traitor? How does it feel to sell out your native planet for nothing at all?"

He didn't know what she was talking about and his face showed it.

"It was a clever scheme," she continued bitterly. "To win a planet, you first cut off its head--you eliminate the scientists!" She leveled her hand weapon at him. "But that's not all you've had in mind. What other schemes has the renegade earthman thought of?"

The world slipped into a haze of red and his hand darted for the pocket where he kept his heat gun--to pause, uncertainly, when he remembered it lay on the concrete fifteen feet away.

"_I'm no ape!_"

She laughed. "They've made you into a Pavlovian dog that drools whenever they ring a bell--and you don't even realize what they've done to you! They pull the strings and their marionette jerks and dances and does their dirty work for them!"

Stan stared at her coldly. "What are you going to do?"

"Kill you. Now."

She raised the weapon and Stan knew she was perfectly capable of doing it. A moment more and the small pellets would burrow into his body, to explode deep in the flesh. He tensed himself for a final effort to escape, knowing it would be next to useless.

"You poor fool," she said slowly. "You'll be better off dead."

Her finger tightened on the trigger.

She never pulled it. There was a scream behind her and one of her men collapsed to the pavement, a thin swirl of smoke drifting up from his blasted chest. The girl's eyes narrowed, then she suddenly darted towards the river that lapped against the parking level. The remaining man dropped to his knees to cover her escape and the ramp was filled with the spanging sound of his own pistol.

The sound ceased abruptly in another burst of flames and smoke and then Tanner was racing down the ramp.

"_Don't let her get away!_"

Stan ran to the river's edge and Tanner cut the oily surface with lancing rays from his heater.

"She's gone," Stan said in a tired voice. "Save it." He watched the surface for a moment more, than turned back to Tanner. "Who was she? What's her name?"

Tanner shrugged. "I don't know who she is or what she's doing here. I can't tell you."

He wouldn't forget her, Stan thought slowly. That long, black hair and those green eyes. And she had moved like a cat, a sleek cat who was just as willing to kill for a cause as he was.

Tanner was studying his face. "Don't get any ideas about her--she's an ape."

Stan looked at him coldly. "The only idea I have is to kill her before she kills me."

He started walking towards another flight of stairs a block down. How long had it been since he had walked down the ramp? he wondered. There had been the noise and the oily smoke from the automobile. The ramp should have been swarming with curious apes by now. But for some reason it wasn't....

It had shaken him, he thought slowly. His briefing on Thusca had mentioned nothing about an opposition organization of the apes. And in particular, it had mentioned nothing about a ... girl.

He would have to warn the agents in his own organization, he thought abstractly. And it would probably be best to use a code name. He asked Tanner for a suggestion.

"Use a girl's name," Tanner mused. "Say ... Avis."

Stan looked at him sharply and had the odd feeling that was really the girl's name. And then he recalled Tanner racing down the ramp screaming "_Don't let her get away!_" and the disappointed look on his face when she had.

Tanner, Stan decided suddenly, had lied about not knowing her.

"She'll probably be around again," Tanner mused out loud. "And soon."

The second agent disappeared in Paris, two weeks later.