The World Swappers Read Free Page A

armored indeed, or you’d never have ventured here alone. That implies there’s no quick way I could dig the knowledge you claim to possess out of your mind. But I’m patient enough to resort to a long, slow way if I have to.”
    The threat wasn’t even a veiled one. Counce got to his feet and stared down at the other across the transparent table. “I said there was no third choice, Bassett,” he snapped. “Check your detector board. There’s a Dateline Fisheries sub cruising in a tight circle round the limits of your barrier. Bear in mind that a genuine fishguard’s sub wouldn’t know there was a ship here. You’d be well advised to let me swim out to it.”
    “Is that true?” Bassett asked the air; well, it was only to be expected that he’d have eavesdroppers on such an important conversation.
    “Yes,” answered a voice from the ceiling. “But what the hell could a sub do to us behind our screens? Suppose we jump a couple of miles!”
    “I shouldn’t,” said Counce, a hint of amusement edging his tone.
    According to their psych-profile of him, Bassett ought to have been sufficiently fuddled by the strangeness of Counce’s arrival to have failed to see the obvious: that there was nothing a sub could do to them behind so much screening. Counce could feel the tension mounting inside him.
    “I think you’ve been rather stupid,” said Bassett at last. “Yes, Lecoq, by all means jump a couple of miles.”
    Counce sighed, and stubbed his cigarillo.
    “And send a couple of men in here,” Bassett ordered.
    They entered; they were large and muscular and determined, and when Bassett nodded at Counce they closed in, intending to take him prisoner. Apologetically Counce struck each of them under the jaw with enough force to render them unconscious; he hit the one on the left with slightly too much violence, and blood dribbled from the site of a tooth as the man fell.
    “Lecoq!” shouted Bassett, leaping to his feet.
    “I’m putting the ship in orbit,” said the voice from the ceiling. “I daren’t turn loose a gun in there!”
    Trembling all over, Bassett backed as far away from Counce as he could–about four feet.
    “I told you there was no third alternative,” said Counce again, sharply this time, managing to convey that he felt he was dealing with a backward child.
    And in his turn, he disappeared.

CHAPTER III

    There were more than fifty people working around the excavation, and yet never in his young life had Anty Dreean felt so completely alone. Beyond the harsh brilliance of the arc lights the alien stars of Regis’ sky shone jewel-bright, jewel-hard, out of the polar night. His breath, and that of all the other men and women present, misted whitely as they exhaled; they clapped their hands and stamped their feet in spite of the encumbering parkas and fur breeches they wore.
    He stood at the control panel of the lighting system, alert to answer any calls for increased brilliance in the pit before him. This pit was a hundred feet long and perhaps twenty feet wide at its widest. Moving methodically along its floor, carrying sensitive detection instruments, were half a dozen men and women. Occasionally they broke the pattern of their coming and going to claw loose some promisingly hard lump from the frozen soil, crumble it, examine the result, and throw it aside before resuming their task.
    An intruder might have guessed at an archeological survey in progress. The guess would have been more than half wrong. For this was Regis, loneliest outpost of the human race, further from Earth than any other planet men had ever visited, and people had come here so lately and in such small numbers that nothing extracted from the ground would have said anything significant about their doings.
    Yet the guess would have been at least partly right, too. The technique was similar to archeological excavation; the painstaking thoroughness was identical. But the searchers were not after anything as neutral as