“Just to make sure,” said Coburn, “I’ll see if I can get a view back down the trail.”
Where the vastness of the sky showed, he might be able to look down. He scrambled up a barrier two man- heights high. There was a screen of straggly brush, with emptiness beyond. He peered.
He could see a long way down and behind, and actually the village was clearly in sight from here. There were rumbling, caterpillar-tread tanks in the act of entering it. There were anachronistic mounted men with them. Cavalry is outdated, nowadays, but in rocky mountain country they can have uses where tanks can’t go. But here tanks and cavalry looked grim. Coburn squirmed back and beckoned to the girl. She joined him. They peered through the brushwood together.
The light tanks were scurrying along the single village street. Horsemen raced here and there. A pig squealed. There was a shot. The tanks emerged from the other side. They went crawling swiftly toward the south. But they did not turn aside where the villagers had. They headed along the way Coburn had driven to Ardea.
Infantrymen appeared, marching into the village. An advance party, rifles ready. This was strict discipline and standard military practise. Horsemen rode to tell them that all was quiet. They turned and spurred away after the tanks.
The girl said in a strained voice. “This is war starting! Invasion!”
Coburn said coldly, “No. No planes. This isn’t war. It’s a training exercise, Iron-Curtain style. This outfit will strike twenty—maybe thirty miles south. There’s a town there—Kilkis. They’ll take it and loot it. By the time Athens finds out what’s happened, they’ll be ready to fall back. They’ll do a little fighting. They’ll carry off the people. And they’ll deny everything. The West doesn’t want war. Greece couldn’t fight by herself. And America wouldn’t believe that such things could happen. But they do. It’s what’s called cold war. Ever hear of that?”
The main column of soldiers far below poured up to the village and went down the straggly street in a tide of dark figures. The village was very small. The soldiers came out of the other end of the village. They poured on after the tanks, rippling over irregularities in the way. They seemed innumerable.
“Three or four thousand men,” said Coburn coldly. “This is a big raid. But it’s not war. Not yet.”
It was not the time for full-scale war. Bulgaria and the other countries in its satellite status were under orders to put a strain upon the outside world. They were building up border incidents and turmoil for the benefit of their masters. Turkey was on a war footing, after a number of incidents like this. Indo-China was at war. Korea was an old story. Now Greece. It always takes more men to guard against criminal actions than to commit them. When this raid was over Greece would have to maintain a full-size army in its northern mountains to guard against its repetition. Which would be a strain on its treasury and might help toward bankruptcy. This was cold war.
The infantry ended. Horse-drawn vehicles appeared in a seemingly endless line. Motorized transport would be better, but the Bulgarians were short of it. Shaggy, stubby animals plodded in the wake of the tanks and the infantry. There were two-wheeled carts in single file all across the valley. They went through the village and filed after the soldiers.
“I think,” said Coburn in biting anger, “this will be all there is to see. They’ll go in until they’re stopped. They’ll kidnap Greek civilians and later work them to death in labor camps. They’ll carry off some children to raise as spies. But their purpose is probably only to make such a threat that the Greeks will go broke guarding against them. They know the Greeks don’t want war.”
He began to wriggle back from the brushwood screen. He was filled with the sort of sick rage that comes when you can’t actively resent insolence and arrogance. He hated the people who wanted the world to collapse, and this was part of their effort to bring it about.
He helped the girl down. “Dillon said to wait,” he said. He found himself shaking with anger at the men who had ordered the troops to march. “He said he was taking pictures. He must have had an advance tip of some sort. If so, he’ll have a line of retreat.”
Then Coburn frowned. Not quite plausible, come to think of it. But Dillon had certainly known about the raid. He was set to take pictures, and he hadn’t been surprised. One would have expected Greek Army photographers on hand to take pictures of a raid of which they had warning. Probably United Nations observers on the scene, too. Yes. There should be Army men and probably a United Nations team up where Dillon was.
Coburn explained to the girl. “That’ll be it. And they’ll have a radio, too. Probably helicopters taking them out also. I’ll go up and tell them to be sure and have room for you.”
He started for the cliff he’d seen Dillon climb. He paused: “I’d better have your name for them to report to Athens.”
“I’m Janice Ames,” she told him. “The Breen Foundation has me going around arranging for lessons for the people up here. Sanitation and nutrition and midwifery, and so on. The Foundation office is in Salonika, though.”
He nodded and attacked the cliff.
It hadn’t been a difficult climb for Dillon. It wasn’t even a long one for Coburn, but it was much worse than he’d thought. The crevices for handholds were rare, and footholds were almost non-existent. There were times when he felt he was holding on by his fingernails. Dillon seemed to have made it with perfect ease, but Coburn found it exhausting.
Fifty feet up he came to the place where Dillon had vanished. But it was a preposterously difficult task to get across an undercut to where he could grasp a stunted tree. It was a strain to scramble up past it. Then he found himself on the narrowest of possible ledges, with a sickening drop off to one side. But Dillon had made it, so he followed.
He went a hundred yards, and then the ledge came to an end. He saw where Dillon must have climbed. It was possible, but Coburn violently did not want to try. Still… He started.
Then something clicked in his throat. There was a rather deep ledge for a space of four or five feet. And there was Dillon. No, not Dillon. Just Dillon’s clothes. They lay flat and deflated, but laid out in one assembly beside a starveling twisted bush. It would have been possible for a man to stand there to take off his clothes, if he wanted to. But a man who takes off his clothes—and why should Dillon do that?—takes them off one by one. These garments were fitted together. The coat was over the shirt, and the trousers fitted to the bottom of the shirt over the coat, and the boots were at the ends of the trouser legs.
Then Coburn saw something he did not believe. It palpably was not true. He saw a hand sticking out of the end of the sleeve. But it was not a hand, because it had collapsed. It was rather like an unusually thick glove, flesh color.
Then he saw what should have been Dillon’s head. And it was in place, too. But it was not Dillon’s head. It was not a head at all. It was something quite different. There were no eyes. Merely holes. Openings. Like a mask.
Coburn felt a sort of roaring in his ears, and he could not think clearly for a moment because of the shrieking impossibility of what he was looking at. Dillon’s necktie had been very neatly untied, and left in place in his collar. His shirt had been precisely unbuttoned. He had plainly done it himself. And then—the unbuttoned shirt made it clear—he had come out of his body. Physically, he had emerged and gone on. The thing lying flat that had lapsed at Coburn’s feet was Dillon’s outside. His outside only. The inside had come out and gone away. It had climbed the cliff over Coburn’s head.
The outside of Dillon looked remarkably like something made out of foam-rubber. Coburn touched it, insanely.
He heard his own voice saying flatly: “It’s a sort of suit. A suit that looks like Dillon. He was in it. Something was! Something is playing the part of Dillon. Maybe it always was. Maybe there isn’t any Dillon.”
He felt a sort of hysterical composure. He opened the chest. It was patently artificial. There were such details on the inside as would be imagined in a container needed to fit something snugly. At the edges of the opening there were fastenings like the teeth of a zipper, but somehow different. Coburn knew that when this was fastened there would be no visible seam.
Whatever wore this suit-that-looked-like-Dillon could feel perfectly confident of passing for Dillon, clothed or otherwise. It could pass without any question for—
Coburn gagged.
It could pass without question for a human being.
Obviously, whatever was wearing this foam-rubber replica of Dillon was not human!
Coburn went back to where he had to climb down the cliffside again. He moved like a sleep-walker. He
