by Keith Laumer
David Vincent believed. A few wise men in the corridors of State power believed. And this belief gave knowledge of many things—things that couldn't be proved by cold, human logic. But if the people didn't believe, and they certainly did not, they couldn't fight it, because you cannot fight something or somebody you don't believe is there. The whole thing was a paradox, a UFO fantasy, a gimmick sponsored by a political opposition party—anything but what it really was.
It gave David a quirkily humorous feeling to think of himself as a clay pigeon—to set himself up as something the invaders wanted to shoot down. It baffled them, made them move into the open. Or rather it made their transmutes move. As Sergeant Banner and Hicks were moved by the controlling power.
David sat quietly assessing the day's events, particularly his evening at the Racing Wheel Club, before he began to make up his case notes. Then, the facts and assessments marshaled, he started recording:
"Conclusion of first day Auto City Case. Events up to evening period already recorded. Visited Racing Wheel Club, social and business venue of all racing drivers, test drivers and executives of auto industry, whether visiting or working in Auto City. Facts emerging:
"Two racing drivers, Rod Baker and Ace Blumen, a test driver for Carasel—ex-racing driver Grif Mason—and top security executive Gineas Rumbold have all been involved in car crashes within the past year. In my opinion, these are all transmutations.
"Chick Verrel, killed on the mountain circuit, sighted a UFO landing about six months before. Two witnesses—Mrs. Carmen Verrel and Wayne Draycott—saw Gineas Rumbold holding an instrument aimed at the mountain track. Verrel's body burst into flames. The car crashed but, although badly damaged, no trace of fire could be found in the wreckage other than burns on the driver and part of the driving seat. From description of instrument, which Gineas Rumbold later claimed to be a new type of high-speed camera, I'm convinced it was an invader's ray gun. Rumbold was at this time a transmute, having crashed two weeks previously.
"Chick Verrel had told his wife about his theory that supernatural forces were infiltrating key sectors of the automobile industry. He didn't know how or why, but was accumulating evidence and proposed to contact me. He told only one other person—his lifelong friend, Gineas Rumbold—whose attitude both Mrs. Verrel and Draycott claim had changed considerably since his crash, though apparently he wasn't injured. Rumbold furiously denied Verrel's claims and threatened Chick with security penalties if he persisted in his theory. I believe Rumbold murdered him.
"Individual murders by invaders are carried out only under direction from their control, and for specific purpose. For example: Once I declare to a transmute—that is, a person apparently normal but who has died and been 'occupied' at the moment of death—that I believe in UFO landings and the infiltration of a certain sector of our society, then I must be killed, and my body 'occupied' by an alien. But if I merely make myself a nuisance by querying something, or being present at some alien incident, I shall be pressured to keep quiet by one or more of the aliens' transmutation forms, such as police or security.
"This is not because they don't like killing but because they do not want to release the power they believe we possess. The atmosphere of pressure created around Mrs. Verrel is easing slightly now that she has made it obvious she will not discuss her late husband's theories, nor does she claim to believe in them. This is a blind spot in the aliens' procedure because while they've achieved transmutation—which is complete occupation of a human—they cannot yet enter and control any living mind at will and influence its thoughts.
"In this respect they are quite amazingly honest in their own sphere of life. They have no speech as we know it, but can transmit waves or thought influences far faster than speech, and over incredible distances. In their studies of earth humans they've learned to understand our speech, but cannot understand a lie. In their own methods of communication it's not possible to tell a lie. Therefore, they believe everything they hear us say. The transmutations do not, because they are using human processes, but they don't think for themselves. They are always under control. And when Mrs. Verrel, her daughter or Wayne Draycott says, laughingly, 'Aliens? Invaders? I don't believe it!', this is accepted by the control. And while it is accepted, Mrs. Verrel and her family are safe. That's why the pressure on her is being eased. I've impressed upon these three people that they must not discuss Chick Verrel's theories, and if Gineas Rumbold seeks to trap them, they are to pour scorn on the whole idea.
"There is no doubt that the aliens are selecting those people they need to occupy and thus control, through key positions, in the auto industry here. In the Monarch Auto Plant's transmission division during the past three months there have been two mystery explosions, and workmates believed four of their friends had been killed. The 'dead' men got up, scrambled through the debris and later resumed work. The Carasel Company's axle assembly line had a major accident when overhead carriers collapsed. Two inspectors—Sam Kyatt and Ben Bow—should, by all accounts, have been dead. I met Kyatt tonight. He and Ben Bow, a colored man, are inveterate gamblers. Both are definitely transmutes.
"A bigger, equally mysterious accident on the main assembly line at Carasel Motors should have killed at least six men. Again, workmates thought they were dead, but these men emerged alive from the wreckage of heavy machinery. I met two of them at a crap table in the gaming room. They are Saul Conifer and Mitch Forrester. Both definitely transmutes.
"So already the infiltration into major sectors of Auto City society has taken place. Undoubtedly it is more widespread than these few firsthand examples I've met and noted. How far has it gone? I suspect it will be found at executive levels in local TV, radio and press. It is present in police and security forces, and among key drivers, testers and production staff in the plants. At present it doesn't seem large enough to do any lasting damage to the auto industry here, but it's causing labor troubles within the plants, and no doubt we shall find transmutations among union leaders, as well as rank and file members, in sufficient numbers to create severe disruption in several plants.
"In my earlier report I dealt with an incident on Highway 640. From talks with drivers and others at the club—not transmutes—I learned that many of them avoid driving on Highway 640. The racing drivers claim it has a jinx on it. They refer to it as 'The Halo Highway.' It appears that most of these drivers are convinced the accidents are not natural—though what a 'natural' accident is seems hard to explain. But it does seem that many accidents have been caused by new cars which suffer sudden brake failures, axle seizures, or transmission breakups.
"Wayne Draycott tells me it's generally agreed that suppression of reports of these accidents is necessary to safeguard the auto industry, and therefore the living of most people in Auto City. In one way or another, all citizens in this town rely on the auto industry for their livelihood, as do thousands of people in other towns and industries. Reports of repeated failure of new cars would cause alarm and despondency throughout the country—possibly panic.
"No doubt this is true. But is it the work of the aliens through their key positions in the new services and police? Or is it a natural ganging together of interested parties and therefore a perfectly human reaction? I should have thought the aliens would try to make those accidents as public as possible, if their aim is to destroy and take over one of the largest sections of our industries.
"There could be a double twist to this aspect, and our own people could be playing into the aliens' hands by suppressing the facts—because it must break sooner or later, and when it does, the impact will be even more severe once the public learns it's been hushed up."
"This concludes the main assessment of my report to date. I now have to inform you of my plans for the immediate future. Through the influence of Wayne Draycott and Mrs. Verrel, and their connection with Thias Rumbold, I'm to be given a trial drive with a view to becoming a temporary test driver at Carasel Motors. I've driven on the circuits in Europe and here, so I'
m not a complete fool in speed cars. And tomorrow I shall be visiting Clawgut Mountain to undergo a strict test over the mountain circuit, before returning to the works for my official test. So I request most urgently your attention to provide me with an international driving license in this name. This is one document I foolishly overlooked, because it should have been obvious I would need a form of introduction." David paused, laughed softly.
"If I crash, it may well be by design of the aliens and, if so, they will 'occupy' me. I shall then become a transmutation, and I'd hate to be in your shoes when you try to decide whether or not I am one. This report now ends."
He stretched the tiredness from his limbs.
"Well, I don't see why you shouldn't sweat it out a bit as well." Then he sat up suddenly and exclaimed: "Oh hell! David, your damn fool sense of humor!" Then he shrugged. "Ah, the hell with it," and went to bed.
Chapter 7
BREAKAWAY
District Attorney Clive Shelden and Police Chief Willard Knight sat in the sun loggia of the District Attorney's house facing David. They were not very happy men, being prickly with what appeared to be hurt pride more than anything else.
"You have been in Auto City for three days now," said Shelden. "I should have thought you would have contacted either or both of us immediately you arrived. I tell you now, Mr. Vincent—"
"Trome, if you don't mind," said David with a smile.
Clive Shelden napped a hand in an irritated manner.
"All this cloak and dagger stuff! I don't go for it—not at anything less than government level."
"But this must be considered government level, Clive," said Willard Knight quietly. "We both have been tipped off to help Mr. Trome, and know the reasons must not be made public. I agree that this business irritates me."
"Irritates!" said David. "Do you not feel there is a better word for the possible destruction of your major industry?"
Willard Knight rubbed a hand across his forehead and frowned. "This is too big for me to accept. Being chief of police in a town like Auto City is not the same as in other places. I think that goes for our district attorney as well. We have a very powerful security force employed by the industry, which has its own legal department and security enforcement officers."
"This is what bothers me," said Clive Shelden. "I feel that we're putting ourselves out on a limb in cooperating with you, while our colleagues in the security forces are not made officially aware of your presence."
"You're not officially aware of my presence," said David sharply. "I don't exist officially." He stared at them hard. "Gentlemen," he said quietly, "I am not going to mince words. A fool is not necessarily a dishonest man, but a dishonest man is always a fool. I think it is time for us to be perfectly honest with each other and for you to declare your honesty of purpose, as I have. You have sought proof in order to test my integrity, but offer me none that I may test yours. I think that your normal high intelligence is now being blocked by a natural but unnecessary and entirely provincial pettiness of pride in your respective positions. Let us get that out of the way. I'm sorry you are not able to sit behind your official desks in your official offices, in which surroundings you would feel greatly my superiors, but this is not a time for any of us to feel superior about anything. I most certainly do not."
Clive Shelden began to bristle like a terrier at a strange cat, but Willard Knight, a big man with a craggy face and handsome mane of hair, took it very well.
"Simmer down, Clive." He grinned at the district attorney. "None of this is in your book or mine. Neither of us has officially been informed, but that doesn't stop us remembering what we've read and seen on television about a certain David Vincent. Nor should we forget that, like millions of others in this country, we have been concerned lest there was some truth in his beliefs. But like most of those millions we laughed at it, we shrugged it off, we said to ourselves—so what? Some nut has some crazy idea. Could be he's right. If he is, let him prove it. If he isn't—lock him up, or shut him up. But, we said to ourselves, in any case it won't happen to us. These miracle vehicles, or whatever you call them, from some galaxy in outer space won't come anywhere near our right little, tight little city. So none of us even thought—much less planned—what we should do if they did come."
"This is against all the rules of evidence," said Clive Shelden. "I couldn't take this case into a court of law."
"You wouldn't need to," said David. "Unless you stop these aliens you won't have any courts of law. You won't have anything as you know it now."
"Oh, come now, Mr. Trome! Whatever the powers of these so-called aliens, they can't wipe out 160 million people, so don't try and kid me that they can."
"I have never suggested they would wipe out vast numbers of people in one all-out attack. That is not their aim. They are not equipped to do it. Their aim is to infiltrate. They are growing stronger and more knowledgeable all the time while you and, as you say, millions of others are shutting your eyes and ears to the possibility of the aliens. I beg you to forget your rules of evidence and your courts of law and accept, even without understanding, that there are in your midst a number of zombielike people who are known to you and to others in your town as respectable citizens. Their change in personality and character has, in all cases, been put down to the fact that they were involved in an accident, or a car crash."
David looked at Willard Knight. "Did you investigate the room in the bowels of your police department building?"
"I did it myself. I had to use a special tool to get the door open because there's no key available. There were no items on the racks and the room was bare. But in the place you described there was a jagged circle of whitish powder over the floor, as if the concrete had been subjected to fierce heat which had bleached it and left a powdery deposit."
"That was what remained of Dan Hicks," said David.
"You see!" Clive Shelden exclaimed. "The one rather doubtful piece of evidence you give us of your own activities is some form of evidence of murder by you."
"Nonsense," said David. "You cannot murder somebody who is already dead. Not according to the law—your law. Oh, for Pete's sake, man, shut your mind to the endless materialism of your daily routine of law and order and enforcement. These things no longer apply when you're dealing with this alien force. Accept that it can be done because it is being done—the entering of the bodies of numerous citizens of your town so that they continue to live a fairly normal life but are, in fact, under control of a power whose true force we have yet to discover but that we know must be stopped."
Clive Shelden sat smoking steadily for a few minutes. Long minutes they were because Willard Knight also had caught this mood of reflection and sat puffing at his cigar and staring unseeingly through the loggia window at distant Clawgut Mountain. David let them stay quiet. He had experienced this sort of reaction before on a number of occasions and could almost repeat from memory the reactions of any worthy and important citizen of any community when faced with this problem. Irritation, disbelief, fear, resentment, anger—all took their turn until finally, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, this silence came. It had to come if the men he faced were honest and intelligent, thinking men.
"All right," said Clive Shelden at last, "I'll go along with you. I accept. It's absurd, fantastic, impossible—but I accept."
"I'm with you," said Willard Knight. He chuckled. "Although I don't know what good it will do you if we follow your Washington friend's advice and not know you. This means we can't come out in the open and support you in anything you do."
"I don't want you to," said David. "That causes too much interference, too much explanation to others. What I need from you right now is an intensive check through every car accident on your Highway 640 and anywhere else in the city limits during the past six months. You will then check as far as possible the people who survived those crashes, note where they are working and with whom they are working, and check also for changes in personality and character status. I've a
lready given you a clear picture of what an occupied person looks like, but I admit that they're very hard to detect, so we'll assume that all those who survived a car crash, especially on Highway 640, will have been occupied. This will give you a list of the army that is growing within your midst. I cannot operate the sample ray gun, and Washington agrees that it cannot be activated by any known means—that is, human means. But I've every reason to believe that those guns need not always kill. They are peculiar-looking objects and could, in some circumstances, be mistaken for a camera with a telescopic lens. They have a large viewfinder—large in relation to the size of the article—but will close up to fit into a pocket without too much of a bulge. I suggest that you make a thorough check along each side of Highway 640, having obtained a graph of all the accidents occurring to that highway. I think you will find adequate places, say, up to two hundred yards from the scene of the accident, where a man with one of these weapons could have hidden himself. We will then begin to understand the pattern of these accidents. How they are caused, and why."
"And in the meantime you will be doing your best to kill yourself?" said the police chief.
David grinned. "Thanks to Wayne Draycott and a little help from Washington, I'm assured of a temporary post as a test driver."
"Who passed you?" Clive Shelden asked.
"Gineas Rumbold screened me for security. But as Wayne Draycott is director of competitions for Carasel Motors, I didn't need to go through personnel. A man named Ollie Temper—the chief production-car tester—is taking me over the mountain circuit. It's company policy for all sports-car testers to be vetted by another department, no matter what their reputation may be in the motor-racing world."
Clive Shelden said, "It's one thing to be supplied with documents and vouched for by a company executive, but driving one of those speed wagons over the Clawgut test circuit is twenty other things. I know—I've tried to pass Ollie Temper's test. Thought I could drive a car, but, brother!"