was not the one I had been born with; it was tightly bound at the breasts, and when I saw my hands the nails were bright orange and one finger bore a ring like a dragon, with wings outspread. Female hands, all right. Certainly not my own. I-she- seemed to be interested in an old-fashioned wristwatch with the hands of Mickey Mouse pointing out the time, but when the vendor spoke to her she put it back and turned away.
As always with the helmet, I was there. I saw everything this body looked at, I felt everything she touched. I smelled a faint wisp of roasting lamb from a pita joint on the corner, and heard the scream of sirens from somewhere nearby-fire, ambulance, police car, I could not tell which, and the body I was occupying was not interested enough to look.
I pulled the helmet off my head, confused. “What am I looking at?” I demanded.
“Keep looking,” Beert advised. “You will see someone you know well, so the other Dan said. These events are not happening now,” he added. “These are recordings of transmissions which were received some time ago. See it for yourself.”
Hesitantly I put the helmet back on. The body I was wearing glanced at her own watch and, now hurrying, crossed the street and turned a corner.
I recognized the entranceway. It belonged to the midtown office building that held the Dannerman Astrophysical Observatory, my grandfather’s legacy to immortalize his name, where I had once gone to work for (and spy on!) my cousin Pat. The body announced herself-the name meant nothing to me-to the floor guard-new since my time-and while she waited for him to call her escort, she was covertly eyeing the man.
I realized that I was looking at a man through the eyes of a woman, and it was instructive to see where her eyes went: face, shoulders (he was pretty solidly built), with special attention to the region of the crotch, both front and back.
Then some other man I didn’t recognize came down, passed her through the turnstiles, into the elevator, up into Pat’s waiting room, and there I saw people I knew quite well.
As I entered the room, Pat’s receptionist, Janice DuPage, got up from her desk and greeted me with a quick hug. “Sorry I’m late,” I-“I”-apologized, and Janice said:
“That’s all right. Just let me sign out and then we can go.”
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Pete Schneyman, just glancing at us as he passed through the reception room. And while Janice was picking up her purse and checking her makeup, the elevator door opened again. The person who came out was someone I knew very well indeed.
It was Dr. Patrice Adcock. My cousin. My Pat. The Pat I loved. The Pat I had lost.
My hostess’s eyes were studying her, too, in her own way, while Janice said, “You remember my friend from the cruise? The one I didn’t take?”
There was an edge to her voice, as of some remembered grievance, but Pat only said, “Of course.” She shook hands, shook her hand. I was actually touching the warm, firm hand of the woman I loved. And then she turned away and went into her own office and I tore the helmet off my head.
“What is this?” I demanded. “Whose body was I in? Was it Patrice?”
“It was not any one of your party,” Beert said heavily, his neck hanging low. “Other humans were implanted with the transmitters.”
I scowled at him. “How could that be?” Then a particularly nasty thought crossed my mind, and I said, “Unless-“
Beert’s little snake head swung toward mine, looking into my eyes. “Yes, Dan,” he said. “The Others have reached your planet now.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I don’t know when Beert left my room. I was under the helmet, obsessively eavesdropping on the many, many unwitting-or sometimes witting-human beings who were wearing the bugs implanted by the Others.
I knew of only six persons who had been bugged and returned to Earth, the five of us in the original batch from Starlab, plus Patrice from the ones who had been in captivity. Now there seemed to be hundreds of them.
So there was no question about it. I had to believe that what Beert said was true. The Others were on Earth- somehow-and going right ahead with their plans. And if I were ever to hope to get back and-somehow-help fight them off, it had to be done quickly.
All the same, I couldn’t help peering out at my planet through the eyes of the bugged ones. They came in all varieties. There was a young woman in what I supposed was China, wearing the tracking collar of a house-arrest prisoner, sullenly trampling seedlings into mud with her bare toes, and seeing nothing but the other young women in the paddy and the old man who was dumping more baskets of seedlings at its rim. There was a store clerk in some hot and Spanish-speaking place; a blackjack dealer on what seemed to be a cruise ship, from the gentle rolling of the floor; a dozen or so in prisons. A lot of the bugged ones were in prisons, and a lot of those I took to be Chinese, from the uniforms they wore and the totally incomprehensible language they spoke.
I didn’t spend much time with the ones who spoke languages I couldn’t understand. There were a fair number of English-speaking ones, and a sizeable number of those were also in some kind of detention. Some, like that first Chinese girl, wore tracking collars as they went glumly about their business. Most were in a cell. Some were being interrogated, and the questioners were getting little joy from the answers they got. Uniformly the bugged ones claimed to have no knowledge of how the little gadgets had been implanted in their skulls.
Once, just once, I saw a face I recognized.
The face belonged to Nat Baumgartner, an NBI agent I had worked with once on the Michigan militia. What Nat was doing was standing in a hospital operating room, looking more worried than any Bureau agent should let himself look in the presence of a prisoner. I was his prisoner. I lay on my back, staring up at the operating-theater lights while someone I couldn’t see was doing something with an IV in my arm. I supposed my host was about to undergo surgery, most likely to remove the bug from his brain, but I never found out for sure. Shortly after that, my carrier went unconscious, and that transmission stopped for good.
And all the time that I was looking through the eyes of other people, one part of my mind was scheming what to do about this situation. Make Pirraghiz take me to the transit machine and go. No, first take a quick snatch-and-
