His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"What do we do about this?" demanded a voice, thin and querulous. "I never saw one this size."

"Take him to the Central Committee, stupid," snapped another. Battle felt his guns being hoisted from their holsters and snickered quietly.

They didn't know—

Yes they did. A blindfold was whipped about his eyes and his pockets and person were given a thorough going-over. They even took the fulminate of mercury that he kept behind his molars.

"Now what?" asked the first voice. Battle could picture its owner gingerly handling the arsenal that he habitually carried with him.

"Now," said the second voice, "now freedom slowly broadens down."

Clunk! Battle felt something—with his last fighting vestige of consciousness he realized that it was one of his own gun-butts—contact his head, then went down for the count.

THE NEXT THING he knew a dulcet voice was cooing at him. The Lieutenant had never heard a dulcet voice before, he decided. There had been, during his hitch with the Foreign Legion, one Messoua whose voice he now immediately classified as a sort of hoarse cackle. The blonde Hedvig, Norwegian spy he had encountered in service with Los Invincibles de Bolivia had seemed at the time capable of a dulcet coo; Battle reallocated the Norse girl's tones as somewhere between a rasp and a metallic gurgle.

The voice cooed at him: "Get up, stupid. You're conscious."

He opened his eyes and looked for the voice as he struggled to his feet.

As he found the source of the coo he fell right flat on his back again. J.

C. Battle, soldier-of-fortune extraordinary, highest-priced insurrectionaire in the world, had seen many women in the course of his life. Many women had looked on him and found him good, and he had followed the lead with persistence and ingenuity. His rep as a Lothario stretched over most of the Earth's surface. Yet never, he swore fervently to himself, never had he seen anything to match this little one with the unfriendly stare.

She was somewhat shorter than the Lieutenant and her coloring was the palest, most delicate shade of apple-green imaginable. Her eyes were emerald and her hair was a glorious lushness like the hue of a high-priced golf-club's prize putting-green on a Summer morning. And she was staring at him angrily, tapping one tiny foot.

"Excuse me, madame," said Battle as he rose with a new self-possession in his bearing. He noted that she was wearing what seemed to be a neat little paper frock of shell pink. "Excuse me—I had no notion that it was a lady whom I was keeping waiting."

"Indeed," said the lady coldly. "We'll dispense with introductions, whoever you are. Just tell your story. Are you a renegade?" She frowned.

"No, you couldn't be that. Begin talking."

Battle bowed. "My card," he said, tendering it. "I presume you to be in a position of authority over the—?" He looked around and saw that he was in a room of wood, quite unfurnished.

"Oh, sit down if you wish," snapped the woman. She folded herself up on the floor and scrutinized the card.

"What I am doesn't concern you," she said broodingly. "But since you seem to know something about our plans, know that I am the supreme commander of the—"

She made a curious, clicking noise. "That's the name of my people. You can call us the Invaders."

"I shall," began Battle. "To begin at the beginning, it is known that your—Invaders—plan to take over this world of ours. I congratulate you on your location of your people in a mohair sofa; it is the most ingenious place of concealment imaginable. However, so that the sofa will not be fumigated, you must perform operations at long-range—

posthypnotic suggestion—I imagine—on the minds of the servants at the Billionaire's Club. Can you explain to me why you cannot perform these operations on the club-members themselves?"

"Very simple," said the woman sternly, with the ghost of a smile. "Since all the billionaire members are self-made men they insist that even the lowest bus-boy have advanced college degrees and be Phi Beta Kappas.

This betokens a certain type of academic mind which is very easy to hypnotize. But even if we worked in twenty-four hour relays on "Old Jay" we couldn't put a dent in him. The psychic insensitivity of a billionaire is staggering.

"And,' she added, looking at Battle through narrowed eyes, "there was one member who noticed that the bus-boys never fumigated the sofa.

We tried to work on him while he slept, but he fought us back. He even subconsciously acquired knowledge of our plans. Thought he'd dreamed it and forgot most of the details."

Battle sighed. "You're right," he admitted. "Cromleigh was his name, and he tipped me off. Where are you Invaders from?"

"None of your business," she tartly retorted. "And where, precisely, do you come from?"