The Incandescent Ones by Fred Hoyle

Author:Fred Hoyle [Hoyle, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1979-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

‘My only real problem was to determine your serum type,’ Dolfuss explained to me some hours later, after I bad managed to eat some dinner without ill effects.

‘I had to be sure the death injection they use would induce a catatonic state in you,’ he continued. ‘It is a delicate difference of chemistry between a human and an Outlander.’

I found it odd to listen to the big man speaking in this way. My first impression of Dolfuss, as a hulking farmer with his ancient truck and his load of pigs, was hard to slough away.

‘But it is my speciality, so you had no cause to worry.’

This seemed to me too light-hearted a view of my former situation, but 1 refrained from saying so.

‘You see,’ Dolfuss rumbled, ‘it is very hard to extract anybody who is alive. But every agency becomes careless once it is believed that a person is dead. It is my speciality,’ he repeated.

‘Will they be looking for me now?’

‘No, no, not How should that be? It is believed that you are cremated. Would they be looking for smoke then?’

‘But I wasn’t cremated.’

‘Ah, now! But some person was! A person whom it was planned to dissect. It will be for him that they will now be looking. Eh? Perhaps you don’t understand?’

I remembered the other body in the morgue-like place.

‘So you switched the bodies?’

‘Only the labels on the coffins. It was not necessary to be dramatic.*

‘Where is Edelstam?’ I asked, abruptly changing the subject.

For answer, Dolfuss put the first finger of his right hand to his lips. ‘Shush,’ he said, ‘we do not mention the gentleman. But in confidence I will tell you that his mission has been accomplished.’

‘So I can consider myself free then?’

‘If it pleases you to follow the same route I will make arrangements for it. That’s why you were brought to this place.’

‘Follow Edelstam! I certainly have a few points to take up with him.’

‘Doubtless. It is a way that he has,’ Dolfuss observed drily.

‘I don’t see how I can return to the U.S.A., or to Russia.’

‘You would need to change your function to a clandestine role.’ This remark of Dolfuss’s made me wonder just what I’d been doing over the past few months. When I said so, he went on, ‘Ah, but you have behaved in a free and instinctive manner. It would be necessary for you to change to working according to plans. That would be different.*

‘How different?’

‘You might have to work long hours as an ambulance attendant, for instance. Gone would be your carefree swooping down sunlit slopes of snow. Eh, now?’

‘But if I decide to follow Edelstam I still continue in a free and instinctive way?’

‘That would be so,’ said the big man, nodding. ‘It would be better for you. But you must think it over. There is time.*

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