CHAPTER VI
The next day Parr went first to the post office and from there immediately to the warehouse. He brought with him three manila envelopes containing three city directories, the first responses to his requests. He took them to the roof, checked the three cities off his list, placed the directories at the base of the chute. Later the helicopter would come swishing down from the night sky, collect them, and return tomorrow evening with the compressed and labeled parcels, one to a family, stamped with the requisite postage. The parcels, spilling out of the compressor, would expand to a huge jumbled heap for the natives to handle. And Parr knew he was only one of many advancemen. The cargos would nightly spew to all points of the Earth from the Advanceship slowly circling the globe behind the sun.
Complete coverage was what the Knougs were aiming at. Here advancemen were using the government postal system for distribution; there, making arrangements for private delivery; elsewhere, setting up booths. Earth had been scouted very thoroughly by four prior Intelligence expeditions. It was an inconceivably complex network of planning, possible only through extreme specialization in an organization made frictionless by obedience.
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That night Lauri's pressure increased—or seemed to—and he shook his head like a hooked fish. He began to walk faster, mumbling under his breath.
The solution, he knew, was distance. A partial solution only, for he was bound by assignment to commuting range, not great enough to permit him to lose her completely.
The jangle and clank of a city train roused him. An interurban trolley. It was stopped at the next corner accepting passengers.
He turned and ran the quarter block to board it.
As he rode toward the ocean he could feel the gradual lessening of the pressure; it was a lessening not nearly as pronounced as he would have felt were she trying to center on him as he fled, but sufficient to relax him. He could feel a puzzled pressure shift after a few miles as she checked him briefly, then an over excessive spurt of questing thought which he countered automatically. Even if he only remained shielded it would take her at least a week to localize him except in a very general direction.
He began to feel all of the over-charged tenseness drain out of his muscles. He even began to take an interest again in his surroundings, studying the buildings with appreciation. The incongruity of the architecture was more apparent than before, due to his greater acquaintance with the thought patterns of the natives.
A bizarre sight: a temple in the style of the Spanish, low-roofed, unpretentious, comfortingly utilitarian with no nonsense except for the gleaming gold minaret atop it, its coiled surface outlined with neon tubing.
It drifted away, behind.
Here a huddled shop, antique-filled and sedate, less than a block from a brilliant drive-in in disk form, radially extending like a somnolent spider.
And most paradoxical of all, the false glamor of signs encouraging the spectator to rub shoulders with excitement that was supposed to be inside the door, but wasn't. For people who were incapable of finding it anywhere. Parr felt suddenly sad.
Odd natives, he thought. But even odder thoughts for a Knoug, he knew. Then he felt the savage stirrings inside of him again. It brushed away sadness. The numbered days until the invasion excited him. The emotional surge of danger and trial and obedience were the preludes to the necessary relief.
Parr felt fully relaxed.
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He got off the trolley in Santa Monica, where the night fog was already fingering in from the ocean.
He crossed the wide street, angled toward the Mira Mar hotel.
In his room he stood looking out across the street over the stretch of park that broke suddenly as a dull cliff, dropping jaggedly to the road beneath. Beyond were buildings unusually small and squalid in sea perspective. The beach, curving north to Malibu; and the sea itself was overshadowed toward the Ocean Park Pier by the brazen glitter of red neon.
But the fog was quieting the scene, and isolating it. After a bit there was no world beyond the window but the grey damp world of fog.
Still the excitement beat at him. He projected his thoughts beyond the immediate future to the bright burning of the Oholo System, the atomic prairie fire skipping from sun to sun at the core, leaving the planets ashes—while isolated, the periphery worlds would one by one capitulate to Knoug power, to Knoug will, and become infected with Destiny.
Beyond that?
The doubt came, and he cringed mentally.
He was guilty of something.
His hands whitened on the sill, and staring into the fog he tried to bring all of the weight of Empire to his support.
But there was the memory of revolt by Knougs themselves on a tiny, distant moon.
The depression came back.
... It took the Oholo four nights to locate him.