Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction February 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
ASSASSIN
BY J. F. BONE
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
The aliens wooed Earth with gifts, love, patience andpeace.
Who could resist them? After all, no one shoots SantaClaus!
he rifle lay comfortably in his hands, a gleaming precisioninstrument that exuded a faint odor of gun oil and powdersolvent. It was a perfect specimen of the gunsmith's art, asemi-automatic rifle with a telescopic sight—a preciselyengineered tool that could hurl death with pinpoint accuracyfor better than half a mile.
Daniel Matson eyed the weapon with bleak gray eyes, the eyes of ahunter framed in the passionless face of an executioner. His blunthands were steady as they lifted the gun and tried a dry shot at animaginary target. He nodded to himself. He was ready. Carefully helaid the rifle down on the mattress which covered the floor of hisfiring point, and looked out through the hole in the brickwork to thenarrow canyon of the street below.
The crowd had thickened. It had been gathering since early morning,and the growing press of spectators had now become solid walls ofpeople lining the street, packed tightly together on the sidewalks.Yet despite the fact that there were virtually no police, the crowddid not overflow into the streets, nor was there any of the pushingcrowding impatience that once attended an assemblage of this sort.Instead there was a placid tolerance, a spirit of friendly good will,an ingenuous complaisance that grated on Matson's nerves like thescreeching rasp of a file drawn across the edge of thin metal. Heshivered uncontrollably. It was hard to be a free man in a world ofslaves.
It was a measure of the Aztlan's triumph that only a bare half-dozenpolice 'copters patrolled the empty skies above the parade route. Thealiens had done this—had conquered the world without firing a shot orspeaking a word in anger. They had wooed Earth with understandingpatience and superlative guile—and Earth had fallen into their handslike a lovesick virgin! There never had been any real opposition, andwhat there was had been completely ineffective. Most of those who hadopposed the aliens were out of circulation, imprisoned in correctionalinstitutions, undergoing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation! a six bitword for dehumanizing. When those poor devils finished their treatmentwith Aztlan brain-washing techniques, they would be just like thesesheep below, with the difference that they would never be able to beanything else. But these other stupid fools crowding the sidewalks,waiting to hail their destruction—these were the ones who must besaved. They—not the martyrs of the underground, were the importantpart of humanity.
A police 'copter windmilled slowly down the avenue toward his hidingplace, the rotating vanes and insect body of the craft starklyoutlined against the jagged backdrop of the city'