Chapter I: Front Matter

THE VANISHER

By MICHAEL SHAARA

_He was expendable, this Web Hilton, this
young officer with the strange heritage. And
so it was that he was ordered out into space
where he saw the uncovered stars, and met
the naked alien, and became the first man
in history to die more than once._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The two girls stayed to see the picture a second time and when they got out of the movie it was after midnight and raining and they couldn't get a cab. Louise bought a paper and put it over her head and ran off, laughing, in the direction of Albany Street. Ivy folded her kerchief and turned up Livingstone. She did not run. There was nothing wrong with rain, or with getting wet, and she enjoyed the coolness. She plunged her hands deeply into her coat pockets and did not bother to walk quickly at all.

The night was very dark, made darker by the rain, which was heavy and full. But Ivy was unconcerned. She was a small-town girl, country bred, with three huge brothers who knew every man in the county. She had grown up with a strong belief in the natural goodness of things, of people, and although she was young and slim and extremely pretty she had no worry now of walking home in the dark. This was her home town. She had lived here all her life. She passed by huge bushes and under the great clutching branches of trees without thinking at all of the things which could, and did, lurk behind them. She turned up Elmwood Road with her mind at rest, filled with skirts and dances and taffy pulls.

And her faith in people, as it turned out, was justified.

For the long arm that reached out of the bushes, the darkness, and plucked her with a rush into a deep black silence, was an arm of flesh, and an arm of bone, but it was very far from human.

* * * * *

The door opened at the top of the ramp and the colonel peered cautiously inside.

"Nobody here but us chickens," he said, sputtering in the rain, and the guard dropped the muzzle of the machine pistol and saluted.

The colonel stomped in onto the concrete floor, grumbling. He was followed by an enormous lieutenant, an immense, looming, cliff-shouldered man well over six feet tall. The lieutenant had to duck coming through the door, cast a downward salute to the startled guard. The colonel moved out from under the lieutenant's dripping overhang, pointed a lean wet finger down the hall.

"He here?"

"Yessir," said the guard, eyeing the monstrous lieutenant with respect.

The colonel wiped his face with a dry handkerchief, took off his hat and smoothed down his sparse white hair. Then he strode off down the concrete hall, motioning for the lieutenant to follow. Together they came to a bolted steel door. The colonel opened it without knocking, ushered the lieutenant inside.

The room they entered was wide and rich, oak-panelled, in great contrast to the white-washed concrete of the halls outside. In the center of the room was a mahogany desk, at which a small, sad, cigar-smoking man sat absorbedly drawing doughnuts on a white lined pad.

The colonel saluted. The man at the desk, whose name was Dundon, looked up at the big lieutenant and chomped on his cigar.

"Is _this_ our man?"

"Yes sir. Lieutenant Hilton. He knows--"

"Sure is a big bugger," Dundon said, rising. The lieutenant regarded him calmly.

"He knows every phase of the operation, sir," the colonel said.

"Of course. Sit down, boy," Dundon said briefly, waving his cigar. The lieutenant sat. "What's a few extra pounds? May need 'em, by God." He put the cigar in his mouth and clamped his hands behind him, walked around to the front of the desk and sat down on the edge of it.

"When's take-off, sir?" the colonel asked.

Dundon looked at his watch. "Less than an hour. Does he know?"

The colonel whistled. "That soon? No, he doesn't know anything."

The lieutenant had taken off his hat, showing himself to be much younger and blonder than he had first appeared to Dundon. He sat watching both men without any particular expression.

"Well, we'd better get on with it," Dundon said, and reached out a hand toward the colonel, without looking at him. "Do you have the lieutenant's records?"

The colonel reached quickly into his inside coat pocket, drew out a long folded envelope which he laid in Dundon's hand. The small man hefted it, looked briefly inside.

"Hell," he said curtly. "Got to save time. If we have to brief him and get ready I can't go through all this. What's the story?"

Before the colonel could say anything Dundon looked at the lieutenant with a wide, amiable, thoroughly unexpected smile. "Don't mind us son, no time for manners. Have a cigar."

The lieutenant politely refused. The colonel took off his coat and began to dry himself out, talking as he moved.

"Well, as far as I can recall, here's the poop. His name is Augustus Webster Hilton, Second Lieutenant, RA, out of Fort Benning. He's six foot six and a half, weighs two hundred and forty some odd pounds. Age: 25. Nickname: Web. AGCT score of 145."

Dundon's eyes lifted.

"He's got a head on him," the colonel agreed. "Army record superior to excellent. Present assignment instructing in orbits and trajectory at Base Training. Qualities of Organization, Leadership very high. Excellent officer material."

A slight fleeting frown crossed Dundon's face.

"Defects," the colonel said coolly. "Several minor, no major. Minor include a tendency to irk his superiors by failure to consult, by failure to keep his opinions to himself. Nothing unusual for the age, of course. Other defects are his size"--the lieutenant sat without moving through all of this--"and his blood type. He's got some rare kind of thing for which plasma is almost never available. That keeps him from front line duty."

The colonel stopped, began slowly to light a cigarette.

Dundon looked at him oddly.

"Nothing else?"

The colonel shook his head.

Dundon was suddenly flushed. "Wait a minute, son," he said to the lieutenant, and then he took the colonel by the arm and led him briskly into a corner.

"What the hell is this?" he hissed angrily, lowly, into the colonel's ear. "This boy looks like one hell of a good officer, what--"

The colonel held his finger to his lips, gestured cautiously.

"I couldn't tell you in front of him, chief."

"Couldn't tell me what? Listen, I'm not goin' to kill a young kid like--"

"It's Security. The major defect is Security."

Dundon quieted.

"What did he do?"

"Nothing he did. Chief, you won't like this. But it makes a big difference. You know the way Security is. They checked this boy all the way back to the cradle, found out things about him he doesn't know himself. His history checked all right, no trouble anywhere, except for his father. According to the records, he doesn't have any."

Dundon cocked an eyebrow. The lieutenant, unhearing, sat without looking at them.

"His mother claims to have married a man named Bruce Hilton in Chicago in 1930. There's no record of the marriage. Also, none of her friends ever met him. She went away from her home town--Evanston--and stayed for a year and came back with a baby, a wedding ring, and a very sad tale of a husband who died. There's no record of the death of any Bruce Hilton. She made up the name obviously. Her maiden name Finnerty."

Dundon stared. "So what the hell--" he began, but the colonel cut him off.

"So nobody knows. Just the boy's mother and Security. But Security has a special tab for cases like this. They figure like this: suppose the kid gets into a sensitive job, or gets to rank pretty high, and someone finds out about his, well, lack of parentage. You can't figure it. It could mean blackmail, it could mean security risk, or it could mean rumors among officers' wives, and a lot of nonsense like that. I know it doesn't sound like a thing you should hang a guy on, but, well, you know Security. They never take a chance. This kid will get to be a captain, maybe a major, maybe even an L.C. But he has no future in the army."

Dundon was looking down studiously at his shoes.

"So that's what you wanted," the colonel pursued, "somebody competent, but expendable. Right?"

Dundon looked up, his gray eyes filled with disgust. And then he realized that the colonel could not help it, did not like this either, and he patted him on the arm.

"Hell of a reason to kill a kid," he said softly, and turned back to the lieutenant, the man to be killed, who was sitting calmly in his chair and wondering when the brass was going to get to the point.

Dundon came back and sat down, and now with great kindness, told the lieutenant the story.

And so it was that Web Hilton went out into space, and saw the uncovered stars, and met the naked man, and became the first man in history to die more than once.

* * * * *

"You know of course," said Dundon, "that the satellite has been completed and is in orbit. The first crew went up on 9 September. Construction was finished on 20 September and the full crew was aboard within twelve hours. The whole thing went off without a hitch. There wasn't one thing we hadn't anticipated. We sent the green light to the president and sat back to wait for the Russians to find out what was 'up.'" He grinned momentarily at his joke.

"The station was in orbit for a week," he went on, "and we were in constant radio contact. Furthermore, we had it under radar and telescopic observation, either one or the other or both, twenty-four hours a day, from points all over the Earth. Some of that I guess you know. The purpose is mainly to supplement the station's own radar. We don't want anything going near that station without our knowing about it real quick."

"And we know damn well," he said more slowly, his puzzlement beginning to show in his voice, "that nothing went near that station."

Web still waited, not following at all. Dundon sat on the edge of his desk, beginning to fidget now as he talked. His stubby fingers were running continually through his thin gray hair, and tightening his tie, and tugging at his buttons, and toying with the desk top. He had been under a great strain for a long time and it was obvious.

"On 28 September," he said evenly, "--now get this--on 28 September, in the middle of the afternoon, we lost radio contact with the station. It cut off in the middle of a weather observation, just like that. There were no background sounds at all, no noise or confusion. Just silence. We waited, figuring of course that they had blown a tube, or something, but we didn't hear a thing. After a few minutes we began to get worried. They didn't come in on the emergency radio either.

"Radar reported the satellite was still in the regular orbit. Nothing looked wrong, but we couldn't contact her. After a couple of hours we began to get panicky. We figured a small meteor had hit her. A big one would have knocked her out of orbit, but a small one might have penetrated through and knocked out both radios without altering trajectory to any noticeable extent. We figured that that must have been it, because by this time five hours had passed and we hadn't heard a word.

"So then we managed to get Visual, as soon as it got dark and the satellite orbited to position. We had a prearranged system of light signaling to be used in case both radios failed. In the telescopes we could even see the reflectors sitting right out on the hub, completed untouched. But we waited all night and we never got a thing.

"Now dammit, it couldn't have been a meteor!" Dundon began to pace back and forth and both Web and the colonel followed him, absorbed.

"The station is shaped like a doughnut, with solid bulkheads all around. How could one meteor go all around the damn thing, kill everybody in it, knock out two separate radios, and still not disturb the orbit. It would take a swarm, obviously, even if you forget about the orbit, but there would have to be holes. And we had a close up view of that station, as close as the house across the street, and there wasn't a hole to be seen.

"Well, that night we sent up a rocket. Nothing big enough to show on radar had approached the station, or left it, so the only other solution was sabotage. One or more of the men we sent up had to be enemy agents, and they were obviously in control of the station. We had to make damn sure we got them out real quick. If necessary, we were set to blow up the station. And then it got worse."

Dundon stopped, came over and sat down on the desk in front of Web, looking straight at him, watching his reaction. Web was frozen in his chair.

"The rocket," said Dundon slowly, "never came back. It's still up there, floating along a few yards from the station. We can see it clearly. Too clearly, damn it. And the interesting part is this: nobody got out of the rocket. Nobody went into the satellite. The rocket went up and maneuvered itself into orbit alongside the satellite, and there it sits. We haven't been able to contact _it_ by radio either."