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  Zimmerman said, “The People’s Republic, for instance.”

  Li Ching flared, “China does not commit assassinations.”

  Zimmerman said very softly, “Chink, all countries will commit assassination, or just about anything else, if it is felt to be necessary enough. Offhand, I can’t think of an exception in history.”

  “Look here, this is a fascinating conversation, very cheering, but I haven’t eaten since dinner last night. What do you say we stop at one of the automated cafeterias along the route here and get a sandwich or something?”

  Brett-James said, “You might be recognized, Brecht.”

  “I suspect we could find one practically empty at this time of day.”

  Mary Lou said, “I could go in first and case the joint. If it’s empty, or if there’s some sort of alcove, then we can all go in.”

  They were speeding along the highway in the direction of the city.

  Azikiwe asked, “Why not wait until we get back to the Reunited Nations Building?”

  Brecht replied, “Because when we do we’re going to be ass-deep in newspapermen and everybody else, and we won’t get a chance to eat.”

  Brett-James said, “There’s one now, and no cars are parked in front.”

  Zimmerman pulled up and Mary Lou got out and went into the roadside auto-cafeteria. She came out shortly and reported, “Nobody inside at all.”

  They entered. Just to be sure, they selected the most remote table in the restaurant and Brecht sat so that his back faced the other tables.

  Before he could sit down, Mary Lou put her arms around him. “Darling… you have no idea how relieved I am to have you back.”

  He kissed her, smiling. “Thanks, Yawl. It’s a bit relieving to me, as well.”

  They scanned the menus set into the table tops.

  Zimmerman said sourly, “Do you think that food will ever come back?”

  “I say, what in the hell do you expect, old chap—pastrami?’’

  “Pastrami, ah,” Zimmerman said wistfully. “I guess I’ll have this whaleburger. Imagine them herding those poor whales now as though they were cows.”

  “I think I’ll have the pseudo-shrimp,” Azikiwe sighed. “Does anybody remember when they had real shrimp last?”

  “At twenty pseudo-dollars a serving?” Brecht grunted.

  When they had all punched their orders, they sat back almost contentedly, their ordeal behind them. Then Li Ching said, “Somebody mentioned a while back that the only place to go is the Reunited Nations Building penthouse. But is it? The Kraut is a sitting duck there. I do not admit that the People’s Republic would attempt his life, under any circumstances, but there are all of the others.”

  Brett-James looked at her. “Chink, Chink… I say, let’s not be silly. Where else could we go? At least in the penthouse we have guards.”

  “Yes,’.’ Azikiwe said. “And one of them might be the potential assassin. People have been assassinated by their guards before. Or how about somebody posing as a newspaper photographer with a concealed gun in his camera?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Zimmerman said accusingly to

  Brecht, “why in the hell did you ever find that damn thing?”

  “Not on purpose,” Brecht told him wearily.

  Brett-James said, even as the table top began to descend to bring up their orders, “Well, all I can say, my dear chap, is when you did you should have taken a quick pee on it and then collapsed that shelf over it and never told anybody.”

  Mary Lou said glumly, “And then some day the extraterrestrials would come back and we wouldn’t be prepared for them. We wouldn’t even know they existed.”

  Brecht stood. “Pardon me for a moment. Those characters not only didn’t give a damn about my eating, but about other bodily functions either.”

  “Hurry back,” Zimmerman said, reaching for the dishes he had ordered.

  When he was gone, the five of them looked at each other.

  Azikiwe said, “Somebody’s going to get to him. We’ve been back no time at all, and look—the Soviets worked the Amazon into our suite, and then the Mafia turned up. It’s only been a matter of hours, and each of us, except Mary Lou, has been approached with a scheme to wriggle the secret out of him.”

  “We can’t take him back to that place,” Mary Lou said.

  Zimmerman picked up his knife and fork. “And where can we take him, Yawl?”

  Brett-James said, “Maybe out of the country, somewhere.”

  “Where?” Li Ching said. “There’s no place in the whole world where he’s safe. How can you hide out in this age? You need your universal credit card to eat, to sleep, for transportation—for everything. And we’re as vulnerable as he is. That is, they’d track him down through us if we tried to hide him out. We could hardly breath without our credit cards.”

  “Where in the hell is he?” Brett-James said suddenly.

  Li Ching looked at him. “Why, he’s in the men’s room.”

  “Doing what? Taking a bath, by George?” The Englishman tossed his napkin to the table and left.

  They stared after him.

  He returned in moments, opened his hand, and showed them its contents. He was extremely upset.

  “His electronic I.D. tag,” he said. “Somebody’s got to him again.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They spent the next half hour scouring the neighborhood, completely without results. There was no sign of Werner Brecht whatsoever. Whoever had abducted him this time had managed to remove him without a trace. There wasn’t even a sign of a struggle in the men’s room.

  Had they been followed here? Azikiwe swore that they hadn’t, for she had kept watch at all times through the rear window. But there seemed to be no other answer to the dilemma.

  Was it the Mafia again? If so, it had to be another contingent. The three that they had left at the house were certainly in no condition to take up the pursuit, and didn’t even have a car at their disposal.

  More likely it was some other element interested in the possession of the Peruvian. Mary Lou had a thoughtful look on her face.

  Heavy-hearted, they finally gave up and returned to the Reunited Nations Building. They left the hover limousine in the basement parking pool and took the elevator up to the penthouse.

  There they ran into complete confusion. It seemed that as soon as Foucault had discovered through Colonel Grozny that the Soviet Complex had had nothing to do with the disappearance of Werner Brecht, he had immediately called in the guards and also phoned Director Nilsson Vogel, who promptly hit the ceiling.

  By the time the former Luna team arrived, the suite and reception room and the halls were all jam-packed with newspapermen, TV reporters, and technicians. It was a madhouse.

  They were interviewed in private by the Director of the Ozma Department, by representatives from the Reunited Nations, and by the same four representatives of the space powers they had met earlier.

  They told the story as completely as they could and were then questioned for hours on every phase of it. Their questioners were incredulous. From time to time they eyed each other suspiciously.

  At long last, the news media were allowed to enter and the questioning began all over again. They were still at it when night fell, including appearances on TV.

  Within hours, the world went mad with the news.

  Who had Werner Brecht?

  Everybody accused everybody else.

  The World Government League intensified its “World Union Now” program: End War and Prepare for the Extraterrestrials!

  United America, the Soviet Complex, and Common Europe each immediately dispatched two craft to Luna; the People’s Republic of China sent one. Each craft contained vehicles approximately the same as the one Brecht had utilized when he found the spaceship. The all but hopeless search was on.

  And those who were in charge of conducting it swore mightily at the short-tempered Director of the Ozma Department who had stomped out of his interview with Brecht befor
e asking a wider variety of questions. They didn’t even have a compass direction!

  All they really knew was that Brecht had said it was about five or six miles from the Luna Hilton as the crow flies, and about ten miles the way a Luna vehicle crawls. All they could do was draw a circle around the Luna Hilton with a diameter of six miles and start looking. It resulted in a fantastically vast area of the broken Luna surface to be searched.

  At first it was hoped that they would be able to backtrack the route his vehicle had taken, but they were soon disillusioned on that score. Thousands of tracks crisscrossed the area, made during the period that the Luna Radio Interferometer Observatory and the Luna Hilton and other auxiliary buildings were being constructed. There was no distinguishing his tracks from any of the others.

  They pretended, the different search teams, to be on a friendly, cooperative basis, but everyone knew they were only pretending. At least they were sure of one thing: none of them had Werner Brecht; because none of them had the spacecraft.

  It was a hopeless search, but no one could afford to give up.

  There came a knock at the door of the small room in which he sat reading a newspaper at the table. Werner Brecht looked up, scowling. He didn’t like it; he wasn’t expecting anyone at this time. In fact, he wasn’t expecting anyone until the following day, with his weekly supplies. However, he stood up, went over and unlocked the door.

  Mary Lou Pickett said brightly, “Hello, darling.”

  He stared at her. He couldn’t have been more surprised if she had levitated through a window instead of simply walking in the door. Finally he got out, “How in the hell did you locate me?”

  He closed the door behind her and locked it. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him briefly.

  “Oh, that was no problem. I’m not as stupid as I look, darling. You see, I was beginning to smell a rat almost from the beginning. Parts of your story don’t hold up very well.”

  “Such as…?” He disengaged her arms and frowned at her.

  She smiled innocently at him and said, “Such as the spaceship being under that ledge. How in the world could it ever land on the moon and then move horizontally to a point under a ledge?”

  “How did you find me?” he asked again, ignoring her question. He pulled a chair out for her at the table and resumed his own place.

  She said, “Remember when I kissed you in the restaurant?”

  “I suppose so.”

  She grinned at him. “As I said, I was already smelling a rat, so I dropped my own I.D. tag into your jacket breast pocket. It was a calculated risk. I’ve noticed that men practically never put their hands into their breast pockets, possibly because they seldom carry anything there except a pen or handkerchief. So, when things had quieted down a bit, His Majesty got another fix on you. We thought it was a bit suspicious that you had disappeared from that cafeteria and the vicinity with so little difficulty. You didn’t even shout for help. After the shock wore off, it was somewhat obvious that you had gone willingly, or possibly even on your own. So we got the fix on you, and here you are—way out in the boondocks in a cabin.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “The team, of course. We could have come and got you at any time we wished, but we wanted to figure out what you were up to first. That’s what puzzled us.”

  She grinned at him again.

  “And?”

  “It was the Kike who came up with the answer. He used a process of elimination. It couldn’t be the Americans who had you, because they were trying to work through me to get your secret. Nor Common Europe, since they were working through Brett-James. Nor China, since they had Li Ching. And not the Soviet Complex, since they were working through Max and Foucault. Who else was in on the act, now that we had dispensed with the Mafia? The only answer was the World Government League.” She paused for a moment. “Which is currently, you’ll be glad to learn, coming along marvelously,” she added.

  He shifted unhappily in his chair. “Why should I be glad of that?”

  “Because you are undoubtedly a member, darling, and undoubtedly very involved. And now so are all the members of the team. We’re all behind you, darling—even Li Ching. It was all a fake, wasn’t it?”

  He looked at her for a long time. “Yes, it was all a fake.”

  “There never was an alien spaceship?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The way we figured it,” she said, “was that one of your members of the World Government League, a top photographer, faked the pictures. It wouldn’t have been very difficult to make an authentic-looking model spaceship, and dub in the moonscape background.”

  “Yes, it was no big problem. He is one of the most accomplished photographers in the world.”

  “One of your other members, a psychiatrist, I presume, planted an hypnotic something or other in your mind so that even under the truth serum you told the same story. That must have been a bit more complicated, but we discovered that it was not at all impossible.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you planning to do now, darling?”

  He sighed. “The organization is hiding me out. We’ll wait about a year, until this World Government thing really jells. Total international disarmament, united efforts against pollution and preservation of natural resources, complete cooperation in exploitation of solar energy, exploitation of the oceans and such, international cooperation in population control, so on and so forth. The World Government dream, in short.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I’ll come out of hiding and admit the hoax so that everybody can forget about an alien invasion.”

  For the first time, Mary Lou was aghast. “You fool, they’ll lynch you.”

  “Probably. But by then we will have wound up with world government, which is the only solution to the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

  It was her turn to sigh. “All right, I’ll join you. The other members of the team won’t show. Somebody might tail them and reveal your hiding place. We decided I would be the one to risk it now. A year, eh?” She looked about the cabin. “You’re lucky I showed up. You certainly need a housekeeper.”

  He said huskily, “Not just yet. There’s something I need more.”

  AFTERMATH

  In his dramatic key speech before the Congress of the World Government, the Chairman began by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen of the world, no longer are we Caucasians or Blacks, Mongolians or Semites, Indians—of India or America—Eskimos or Malays, Australian Bushmen, or Congo Pygmies. No longer are we Swiss, Indonesians, Argentines, Zulus, Americans, or British. Ladie”s and gentlemen of the world, united we stand…”

  He wasn’t able to complete his sentence. The applause lasted a quarter of an hour.

  When it died down, he said, “We will now proceed to form the first World Government.”