Free Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell by Eric Frank Russell Page B

tagging along somewhere behind. He changed buses five times, lugged the case along two squalid alleys, walked into the fronts and out the backs of three department stores.
    Satisfied at last that there was no surreptitious pursuit he made for his apartment, kicked the case under the bed, let go a deep sigh. They’d warned him that this kind of life would prove a continual strain on the nerves. It sure was!
    Going out again, he bought a box of envelopes and a cheap typewriter. Then using the Kaitempi paper he spent the rest of the day and part of the next one typing with forceful brevity. He didn’t have to bother about leaving his prints all over this correspondence; Terran fingerprint treatment had turned his impressions into vague, unclassifiable blotches.
    When he had finished that task he devoted the following day to patient research in the city library. He made copious notes, went home, addressed a stack of envelopes, stamped the lot.
    In the early evening he mailed more than two hundred letters to newspaper editors, radio announcers, military leaders, senior civil servants, police chiefs, prominent politicians and key members of the government. Defiantly positioned under the Kaitempi heading and supported by the embossed seal of its winged sword, the message was short but said plenty.
    Sallana is the first.
    There are plenty more to come.
    The list is Long.
    Dirac Angestun Gesept.
    That done, he burned the envelope-box and dropped the typewriter in the river where it ran deep. If he had occasion to write any more letters he’d buy another one and afterward get rid of it the same way. He could well afford to buy and scrap a hundred typewriters if he thought it necessary. The more the merrier. If the Kaitempi analyzed the type on threatening correspondence and found a number of untraceable machines being used, they’d get the idea that a gigantic organization was at work. Furthermore, every purchase helped inflate the Jaimecan economy with worthless paper.
    His next step was to visit a drive-yourself agency and rent a dynocar for a week, using the name of Shir Agavan and the address of the hotel where first he’d holed-up. By its means he got rid of five hundred stickers distributed over six small towns and thirty villages. The job was a lot riskier than it had been in Radine or Pertane.
    The villages were by far the worst to handle, the smaller in size the more troublesome they proved. In a city of a quarter million to two million population a stranger is an insignificant nonentity; in a dump of less than one thousand inhabitants he is noticed, remarked upon, his every move watched.
    On many occasions a bunch of yokels gave him the chance to slap up a sticker by switching attention from him to his car. Twice somebody took down the cars number, just for the ducks of it. It was a good thing he’d given a blind-alley lead when hiring it because police inquiries about the widespread rash of subversive stickers would almost certainly make them relate the phenomenon to the laconic, fast-moving stranger driving dyno XC17978.
    He had been on Jaimec exactly four weeks when he disposed of the last of the stickers from his bag and thus reached the end of phase one. It was at this point he began to feel despondent.
    In the papers and over the air officialdom still maintained complete silence about traitorous activities. Not a word had been said about the slaughter of Pigface Sallana. All the outward evidence suggested that the government remained blissfully unaware of waspish buzzings and was totally unconcerned about the existence of an imaginary Dirac Angestun Gesept.
    Thus deprived of visible reactions Mowry had no way of telling what results he had achieved, if any. In retrospect this paper-war looked pretty futile in spite of all Wolf’s glib talk about pinning down an army with little more than gestures. He, Mowry, had been lashing out in the dark and the other fellow wasn’t even bothering to hit back.
    That made it