V 15 - Below the Threshold

by Allen L Wold (UC) (epub)

  As Jack watched, Dwight came into view from one side and went to one of the technicians. “How’s the signal strength on channel eleven?” he asked.

  “Back within subliminal limits,” the technician answered. “As far as the viewers were concerned, it was just a mild static.”

  “Fine,” Dwight said, and went to another technician.

  “Bring the frequency down two points,” he said, “then back up again when the comedy comes on.” He moved on to another console. “Any further interference on twenty-eight?” he asked.

  “None,” the technician answered. “Just a line leak, I think.”

  Jack inched back around the comer and looked up at his three companions. Walter nodded, Sally took a deep breath, Pedro smiled. Jack got to his feet. “Now,” he said.

  The four of them sprang from concealment, guns leveled. “Hands up everybody,” Jack snapped. The technicians just turned to stare, half frozen at their consoles, but two of the four guards tried to draw their weapons. They were burned down before their guns cleared their holsters. One of the technicians, caught in the crossfire, fell from his chair. The other two guards raised their hands. It was only then that Jack noticed that Dwight was nowhere in sight.

  “Where did he go?” Sally asked.

  “Never mind him,” Jack said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Jack and the others ripped wires from the electronic equipment surrounding them, sometimes causing showers of sparks, and used the wires to bind the five technicians and two surviving guards. The sixth technician, lying by his console, was unconscious but still living. They left him there.

  Using whatever came to hand—chairs, phones, gun butts—Jack, Walter, and Pedro smashed as much of the equipment as they could, toppling cabinets, ripping out more wires. Sally, in the meantime, was trying to locate the access to the transmitter loft as indicated on the floorplan.

  “I found it,” she called after what seemed a frighteningly long time. She was pushing a freestanding set of lockers to one side. Behind it was a narrow stairway, going up.

  They emerged in a vast, cavernous space, lit by only occasional bare bulbs in industrial reflectors. The ceiling was low, but there were no walls, just columns reaching up to support the roof, the tops of the elevator shafts, and other structural elements. Something glittered in the distance, toward the center of the area. They went to it.

  Here, scattered around the concrete pillars supporting the mast that rose above the roof of the Wagner Building, were shiny new and powerful transmitters, control panels, and other electronics, connected by cables and busses to the base of the mast, and to newly installed connector plates in the unfinished floor.

  They didn’t have enough explosives to go around. All they could do, moving as quickly as they could, was put charges on the largest pieces of equipment, paying special attention to one device that looked like it might be a central unit, and to the base of the mast.

  When all the charges were in place, they set their detonators, tying as many together as they could. They set the timers for one hour, and on Jack’s signal, started them all at once.

  There was no time to lose. They hurried back to the stairs, and down to the studio below. Everything was as they had left it. They went to the door by which they had come in, but as Jack, in the lead, stepped out into the hall beyond, he was greeted by a fusillade of laser fire. His jacket was seared, and one shot took the gun out of his hand. Walter and Sally were so close behind him he almost wasn’t able to duck back through the door and out of range.

  They retreated to the middle of the studio, where Jack picked up one of the guard’s guns. The door, still half concealed behind the cabinet of electronics, burst open and red-uniformed Visitors came charging in. They all went down under the withering fire of the four saboteurs.

  “We’ve got to find a back way out,” Walter said, moving to a place of better concealment in anticipation of the next assault.

  “There isn’t any,” Sally said, “unless we want to go back up to the transmitters.”

  “Dwight’s secret exit,” Pedro said. “Did anybody see which way he went?”

  There was no time for an answer, laser shots buzzed into the studio from the still-open door. Beyond, the guards and soldiers were more careful now, not charging but firing from cover. Jack, using the heavier weapon, blasted the cabinet that concealed the door, and it exploded in a shower of sparks and a rush of black smoke.

  Sally grabbed one of the bound technicians, but he was dead, caught in the friendly fire from the doorway. Another technician, wounded, spat venom at her as she tried to approach him.

  “There’s somebody missing,” Jack said suddenly, and looked frantically around the room. At the door, more guards were clearing away the wreckage.

  “What are you talking about,” Walter cried.

  “There he is,” Pedro said, pointing to the far wall. They could see black-booted feet just disappearing behind a rack of electronics as the one unbound technician pulled himself across the floor and out of sight.

  A laser shot from the doorway speared between Jack and Sally. Their return fire drove their attackers back for a moment. Pedro was already running toward the equipment rack, with Walter close behind him. By the time Jack and

  Sally got there, the two fifth columnists had caught the technician, just as he was about to close a sliding panel at the top of the set of steep, narrow, newly built stairs.

  They pulled the wounded technician to his feet. “He knows the way,” Pedro said. Holding the technician securely, Pedro and Walter descended the stairs, with Jack and Sally on their heels. There was a door at the bottom, and they burst through into darkness.

  Then lights came on, blindingly. Jack threw his arm up over his eyes.

  “It’s all over,” he heard Dwight say.

  He lowered his arm to see six Visitor guards, facing them like a firing squad, with Dwight standing happily behind them.

  File Twenty-eight: Saturday Morning

  Jack expected the six guards to open fire at any instant, but they just kept their weapons trained and did not shoot. Walter and Pedro let the wounded technician drop. The man fell to the floor, and one of the guards slung his gun from his belt so that he could drag the technician out of the way.

  Jack dropped his gun on the floor, and the other three saboteurs did likewise. Two of the guards grabbed Pedro, jerked him to one side, searched him quickly and thoroughly, then cuffed his hands behind him before putting him back with his friends.

  It was Walter’s turn next, and then Sally. The guards had no qualms about searching a woman. Jack got the same treatment.

  Only then did the other guards lower their weapons. Two of the guards picked up the wounded technician and carried him off while the other four prodded Jack and his friends, forcing them to follow Dwight through another room, into a corridor, and then into the office where he had spoken to them such a short while ago. Two of the guards came in with them, and took places on either side of Dwight’s desk.

  Dwight seemed very calm and rather happy as he went to sit behind his desk. He leaned back and looked the four of them over.

  “Well, Pedro,” he said. “I was wondering where you really stood. Didn’t you think that I accepted your betrayal of your friends just a little too readily?”

  Pedro did not answer. He just turned his face away. “Northampton,” Walter said, “certainly ought to be pleased with you.”

  “Northampton knows nothing about this,” Dwight said. “With the political situation the way it is in the rest of the country, they would never have allowed me to perform this little experiment of mine.”

  “You asked them, 1 suppose,” Jack said sarcastically. “Indeed I did. I went to my superiors two years ago with an early version of my plan. But even then they were cowards. Northampton was much more vulnerable then, of course. But Freeport was also a softer target. Today, if they had any idea of what I was up to, they would demote me and transfer me, at the very least. They
are so concerned with preserving the status quo that even the remotest possibility of you humans finding out about my work with ELF and subliminal persuasion would make them panic. Not without cause, of course. If word did leak out to the northern states, what’s left of your federal government could make things very uncomfortable for us in Northampton. And elsewhere. There was considerable risk to this experiment, but it was a risk I thought I should take. I think you can understand why I was so concerned when I discovered that Miss Velasquez had actually taken pictures of me with Kline and Oswald, right here in Freeport. I dared not let any word, any hint of my business here get into the public eye.”

  “That’s something you still have to worry about,” Jack said.

  “Not anymore,” Dwight told him. “I’m almost ready to move. Those photos cannot be a threat to me, no matter where they are. Before they can be made public, before anything can be done about them, my experiment will be finished.”

  “And what about Kline and Oswald?” Sally asked. “Just feed them to the wolves?”

  “Why not? By the time I start them moving, they’ll be too busy fighting each other to pay any attention to public opinion. There just isn’t—”

  “Excuse me,” a technician said from the doorway.

  “Not now,” Dwight said snapped.

  “The studio’s destroyed,” the technician said hastily, half backing out the door.

  Dwight came slowly the rest of the way to his feet. His annoyance faded into a look of disbelief, and then unhuman rage. He took the gun from the guard standing at his right, grinned, and shot Pedro through the head, then shot Walter the same way. The technician, still in the doorway, flinched.

  The rage went out of Dwight at once. “Damn, I shouldn’t have done that,” he said as he handed the startled guard back his weapon. “They could have told me a lot more about the fifth column than Annette did before she died.” He sat back down. “But that’s just a nuisance, now,” he said. He looked at the technician. “Drag those two traitors out of here,” he commanded.

  “Yes, sir,” the man said and stooped down to grab Walter clumsily by one leg.

  “Not that way,” the guard on Dwight’s left snapped. He slung his weapon from his belt and went to give the frightened technician a hand. He picked Pedro up under the arms, and started to drag him out the door. The technician tried to imitate him, but Walter was too much for him, so the other guard went to his assistance.

  “I want them burned,” Dwight shouted after them.

  “I don’t often lose control that way,” he went on when the guards and bodies were gone. “And I won’t do it again. You two know too much to be wasted like that. You will be interrogated, at great length, and when you have told me everything you know, right down to your secret vices and the names of your grade-school playmates . . he paused to smile. “Then you will still be of some use. I happen to have developed a taste for human flesh.”

  Sally gagged.

  “You eat your own, too?” Jack asked. He didn’t really care what happened to his body after he was dead.

  “No, Dr. Page, we are not cannibals. But there’s no hurry. Before you die, I want you to observe the fruits of my efforts. You may not find the thought of winding up on my table as distressing as Miss Greenstreet obviously does, but I think that witnessing my total subjugation of the entire population of Freeport will be a little less easy for you to stomach. And I will get considerable satisfaction from that.

  “Because, you see, once my plan goes into effect, I will become the chief administrator of Freeport, at first under the provisional government, and then permanently. I will be in charge, not just some third rank official. Freeport will be my city, to do with as I please.”

  He came around the desk and stood right in front of Jack.

  “Because it will have been my plan, my effort and sacrifice, that brought Freeport under Visitor control. My superiors will have to acknowledge me then, admit that my ELF broadcasts are efficacious. And Freeport will be a far better city to hold than Northampton, because I’ll keep using my subliminal broadcasts, and the humans of Freeport will cooperate with me, instead of resisting, or sullenly complying. Every human in Freeport will be my willing slave.” Jack wanted to lash out at the alien, regardless of the consequences, but his hands, real and false, were still shackled. Dwight laughed at his abortive, clumsy movement, but Jack felt a thrill run through him. The strap that had been tom in his fight with Marty Patrushka finally gave way. The prosthesis, no longer firmly fastened to the stump of his left upper arm, slid an inch down its sleeve.

  “I thought I could get to you,” Dwight was saying, a nasty smile on his sardonic nordic face. “You may not fear for yourself, but you do care about Freeport, don’t you?” “I’m going to kill you,” Jack said. He grabbed his left wrist in his right hand and gave the false arm a tug. The loose buckles gave way.

  “You may certainly try,” Dwight said, laughing at Jack’s struggles.

  And then the prosthetic arm slid down and out of the sleeve, and even as Dwight noticed the sudden and peculiar emptying of the sleeve, Jack swung the arm clear and brought it around as hard as he could. The metal and plastic prosthesis, powered by Jack’s nearly double-strength right arm, smashed into the side of Dwight’s head, ripping away false face, false hair, exposing reptilian features below, spattering green blood across the room.

  Dwight staggered back, and made a half turn toward his desk. Jack swung the prosthesis again, crashing with a sound of breaking plastic and bone into the back of Dwight’s head. Dwight slumped to his knees, reaching across the desk toward an intercom panel. Jack stepped up and clubbed him again—and again, and again, until Dwight, his head a soft pulp, slid off the desk and onto the floor.

  “Oh God, oh God,” Sally moaned. Jack turned to her, still holding the false arm, turned her around, and undid the handcuffs on her wrists. Sally turned back and, her hands shaking, managed to free Jack from his ruined left arm.

  “A damn good nine thousand dollar prosthesis shot to hell,” Jack said as he let the ruined arm fall. He grabbed Sally by the shoulders and strode with her to the door, where she fumbled at the handle.

  “Come on,” he said, “those timers are going to go off any minute now.”

  She got the door open at last and they rushed down the corridor, toward the central elevators. The elevator doors were actually open, the car waiting, when they got there.

  “No,” Jack said as Sally started to enter. “When the charges go, they’ll blow out the elevator cables too.”

  He threw his shoulder against the stairwell door, and it sprang open. With Sally right behind him, he started racing down. Just as they passed the third landing, the building jerked under their feet. Falling chips of concrete, and a prolonged shaking just made them go faster.