looked away for a moment. He felt like smashing things, but he held himself perfectly still. My brother, he thought, my baby brother.
“He was just a kid,” he said.
“Well, he must have been a damned unhappy kid. Nobody with his head screwed on right would take the nickel. Hardly anybody ever does.” Something flashed momentarily in Gorton’s eyes, and Demeris sensed that to these people selling yourself to the Spooks was the ultimate surrender, the deepest sort of self-betrayal. They had all sold themselves to the Spooks, in a sense, by choosing to live in the Occupied Zone; but even here there were levels of yielding to the alien conqueror, he realized, and in the eyes of Spook City people the thing that Tom had done was the lowest level of all. He felt the weight of Gorton’s contempt for Tom and pity for him, suddenly, and hated it, and tried to throw it back with a furious glare. Gorton watched him quietly, not reacting.
After a little while Demeris said, “All right. There’s nothing I can do, is there? I guess I’d better go back to Albuquerque now.”
“You’d better go back to your hotel and wait until the hunt is over,” said Gorton. “It isn’t safe wandering around in the open while the critters are loose.”
“No,” said Demeris. “I suppose it isn’t.”
“Take him to wherever he’s staying, Mack,” Gorton said to his man. He stared for a time at Demeris. The sorrow in his eyes seemed genuine. “I’m sorry,” Gorton said again. “I really am.”
***
MACK HAD NO DIFFICULTY RECOGNIZING Demeris’s hotel from the description he gave, and took him to it in a floating wagon that made the trip in less than fifteen minutes. The streets were practically empty now: no Spooks in sight and hardly any humans, and those who were still out were moving quickly.
“You want to stay indoors while the hunt is going on,” Mack said. “A lot of dumb idiots don’t, but most of them regret it. This is one event that ought to be left strictly to the Spooks.”
“How will I know when it starts?”
“You’ll know,” Mack said.
Demeris got out of the wagon. It turned immediately and headed away. He paused a moment in front of the building, breathing deeply, feeling a little light-headed, thinking of Tom on the Spook planet, Tom living in a Spook palace, Tom sleeping on satin Spook sheets.
“Nick? Over here, Nick! It’s me!”
“Oh, Christ,” he said. Jill, coming up the street toward him, smiling as blithely as though this were Christmas Eve. He scanned her, searching for traces of some Spook gleam, some alien shimmer. When she reached him she held out her arms to him as though expecting a hug. He stepped back to avoid her grasp.
In a flat tight voice, he said, “I found out about my brother. He’s gone off to the Spook world. Took their nickel.”
“Oh, Nick. Nick!”
“You knew, didn’t you? Everybody in this town must have known about the kid who came from Free Country and sold himself to the Spooks.” His tone turned icy. “It was your father the mayor that told me. He also told me that he doesn’t have any daughters.”
Her cheeks blazed with embarrassment. It was so human a reaction that he was cast into fresh confusion: how could a Spook learn to mimic a human even down to a blush? It didn’t seem possible. And it gave him new hope. She had lied to him about being Ben Gorton’s daughter, yes, God only knew why; but there was still the possibility that she was human, that she had chosen to put on a false identity but the body he saw was really her own. If only it was so, he thought. His anger with her, his disdain, melted away in a flash. He wanted everything to be all right. He was rocked by a powerful rush of eagerness to be assured that the woman he had embraced those two nights on the desert was indeed a woman; and with it, astonishingly, came a new burst of desire for her, of fresh yearning stronger than anything he had felt for her before.
“What he told me about was that you were a Spook,” Demeris said in a guarded tone. He looked at her hopefully, waiting for her to deny it, praying for her to deny it, ready to accept her denial.
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
It was like a gate slamming shut in his face.
Serenely she said, “Humans fascinate me. Their emotions, their reactions, their attitudes toward things. I’ve been studying them at close range for a hundred of your years and I still don’t know as much as I’d like to. And finally I thought, the only way I can make that final leap of understanding is to become one myself.”
“Doing masks,” Demeris said in a hollow voice. Looking at her, he imagined he could see something cold and foreign peering out at him, and it seemed to him that great chilly winds were sweeping through the empty caverns of his soul. He began to see now that somewhere deep within him he must have been making plans for a future that included this woman, that he had wanted her so much that he had stubbornly refused to accept any of the evidence that had been given him that that was unthinkable. And now he had been given the one bit of evidence that was impossible to reject.
“Right,” she said. “Doing masks.”
He knew he should be feeling fury, or anguish, or something, at this final revelation that he had slept with a Spook. But he hardly felt anything at all. He was like a stone. Perhaps he had already done the anger and pain, on some level below his consciousness. Or else he had somehow transcended it. The Spooks are in charge here. All right. We are their toys. All right. All right. You could go only so far into despair and then you stopped feeling it, he supposed. Or hatred. Hating the Spooks was useless. It was like hating an avalanche, like hating an earthquake.
“Taking human men as your lovers, too: that’s part of doing masks, isn’t it?” he asked. “Was my brother Tom one of them?”
“No. Never. I saw him only once or twice.”
He believed that. He believed everything she was saying, now.
She seemed about to say something else. But then suddenly a flare of lightning burst across the sky, a monstrous forking shaft of flame that looked as though it could split the world in two. It was followed not by thunder but by music, an immense alien chord that fell like an avalanche from the air and swelled up around them with oceanic force. The vault of the sky rippled with colors: red, orange, violet, green.
“What’s happening?” Demeris asked.
“The hunt is starting,” she said. “That’s the signal.”
Yes. In the wake of the lightning and the rippling colors came swarming throngs of airborne creatures, seeming thousands of them, the delta-winged dragon-like herders and their snake-like pilots, turning the midday sky dark with their numbers, like a swarm of bees overhead, colossal ones whose wings made a terrible droning sound as they beat the air; and then Demeris heard gigantic roaring, bellowing sounds from nearby, as if monsters were approaching. There were no animals in the streets, not yet, but they couldn’t be very far away. Above him, Spooks by the dozens flickered in the air. Then he heard footsteps, and a pack of humans came running frantically toward them out of a narrow street, their eyes wild, their faces weirdly rigid. Did the Spooks hunt humans too? Demeris wondered. Or was one of the monsters chasing after them? The runners came sweeping down on him. “Get out of the way, man!” one of them cried. “Out of the way!”
Demeris
