by Rafe Bernard
He said, "So the gorgeous Windflight was your father's second ambition?"
Tom Claus halted, fork midway to mouth. "Is that a good guess, Mr. Trome, or ESP?"
"Call me David. What do you think it is?"
Tom chewed slowly. "You couldn't have known Dad. You've been quiet for a few minutes. Could be logical deduction. I'll settle for that. Yup. Dad always said, 'Come your twenty-first, son, I'll get you the best car in town.' Well, all I am and all I've got is due to him—so I just naturally got myself the best car in town."
"No wife? No friends? Nice young fellow like you?"
Tom grinned. "Big brain, big money, big secrets. Right now they don't go with a wife, or a steady. Not around here. Once in a while I whoop it up plenty and disappear to the coast. Plenty friends there. Whoop it up plenty. You married?"
David shrugged. "I've got similar problems. But I don't hole up in a mountain and there's not much time to whoop it up."
"Gotta make time, fella. Once in a while I hitch me a star, brother, and I go orbiting way, way out! Dad taught me that too. Folks get tangled up, he said. Real tangled. They whoop it up in the wrong places. Get all snarled up with wives and bosses and what-have-you."
"Can't you whoop it up with a family?" David smiled.
"Sure, sure you can, but the lone worker needs something different. You're a loner, aren't you? I can tell. See it in your eyes. Feel it all around you. That's why I talk. You got troubles, friend?"
David nodded. "I've got troubles, friend. Not of my making, though."
"But you aim to solve them?"
"Could be."
"You passing through?"
"I'll stay awhile. There's people to see, back in the city."
"Tough," said Tom. "Very tough talk there. Like no place you've ever been. Come and see my car. The check's on me."
"No, on me. My pleasure."
"Flip for it."
They tossed a coin. David paid.
"Happy birthday!" he said again.
They walked around the car, climbed in and all over it, checked motor and transmission.
"And now you're off to the coast to whoop it up, new car and all?" said David. "She's a beauty."
Tom chuckled. "Soon, very soon. Got a pile of work to see to first."
David waved a casual hand in the direction of High-way 640. "They tell me you have pileups along there. Watch your paintwork," he joked.
The change was startling.
"Who told you that?" Tom snapped. "Lies! Safest highway in the country. Goddam rumormongering!"
"Hey! Hold it. I just heard, that's all. So it's safe. So aren't they all? It's not the roads. It's only drivers who are bad."
The tension eased. "Just go careful, that's all. Folks are touchy around here. We made the highway. We make most of the cars that use it."
"Ah!" David spoke softly. "Automated plants using some of your programming. Gives you a feeling of being part of it too. Sorry. I didn't understand."
"You do now," said Tom briskly. "So long."
David went to his car. Watched the immaculate white convertible glide out toward the highway, then followed at a discreet distance.
Tom Claus kept to the sixty lane. The little German car purred along about a quarter of a mile in the rear. Highway 640 was sculpted in graceful curves and undulations. A broad, fast, safe highway slicing through the foothills and pinewoods. One of the few highways he'd ever traveled where billboards were banned. He admired the landscaping, noting how cars kept more than the normal distance apart, thus minimizing the risk of multiple crashes, and wondered how much truth there was in his mystery caller's statements.
There came a lull in the traffic in the passing lane, and no slower vehicles ahead of him in the slow lanes. The big white car was clearly visible as it breasted a rise. David's car had closed up slightly. Perhaps Tom had slowed the Windflight? David mused idly on this when suddenly the Windflight's tail end swung violently.
The car zigzagged with a wild bucking slide. Its nose hit the safety fence. The whole car lifted, swung, plummeted across the lanes, bounced off the safety fence, then caromed, broadside on, back across the track and slammed against a pylon set a hundred yards inside a field. The Carasel had mowed down the strip-fencing as if it were matchsticks.
The little German car, which had been hitting seventy, came up close as the white car left the road. David's car sped by, but using gears and brake he tooled it around and over the soft shoulder, stopping a few yards short of the splintered fence. He climbed out, rushed into the field, wrenched open the buckled door of the convertible.
Young Tom Claus lay hunched over the steering wheel, his head at a strangely awkward angle, close to the metal window support strut against which it had slammed. Gently, David eased the boy back from the wheel and in those seconds knew, from the sightless eyes and lolling head, that death had come—swift and probably painlessly. The welt on the temple was evidence of the force that would have stunned, even killed, if the whiplash of body against wheel had not broken the boy's neck. But David very carefully checked the pulse, then the heartbeat before whispering, "Poor Tom! Poor brilliant, lonely Tom in your joyous coffin!"
He rested the body gently against the cushions and walked back toward the highway. The sight amazed and sickened him. He knew the wrecked car must be clearly visible from the road, yet not one vehicle had stopped, not even slowed. They all were speeding faster than when he and Tom had been driving along the highway.
He felt he was living a nightmare. The sort of dream where you call out or wave like mad at streams of people, yet none of them see or hear you. He realized then he was indeed waving as he ran. Waving both arms like crazy. He halted, lowered his arms, half ashamed at this futile display of sudden panic. What's the hurry? The boy is dead.
David wiped sweat from his forehead and neck, turning to look back. The sun was high to his left, the skyline shredded with woolly white clouds. Beyond the pylon, a green field ran to pine trees, giving a dark backdrop to the white car. It wasn't dazzle. It couldn't be dazzle. Sun reflection flared from the offside rear of the car, but it was distinctly different from the opaque yet glistening, flickering light that flowed around the steering wheel and exposed upper part of Tom Claus's body.
"Like a halo!" David whispered. "Dear heaven—just like a halo!" Then anger snapped the awe from his mind and he cried aloud, "Damn and blast you! Murderers!"
Swiftly he controlled this outburst and started back toward the Windflight.
It was almost anticlimax. Almost as if he knew exactly what would happen. He heard voices behind him, but did not turn.
Tom Claus was moving slowly from the driving seat, the opaquely silver light slowly being absorbed into his body.
Chapter 3
DON'T BE SORRY, MISTER
Suddenly nothing was right. The voices belonged to policemen. Not highway patrols either.
"Hey, you! Hold it!"
David Vincent halted. Tom Claus was walking slowly around the wrecked car, saw the police, came toward them as they closed on David.
"Okay, Mister. We'll take it from here." He was big, chunky, hard-eyed.
The other policeman was almost effeminate-looking in comparison, dark hair, olive complexion, brown-flecked spaniel eyes, slim. He said, "It's young Tom Claus."
"Well, whaddya know!" said the big man.
Coming close, walking kind of stiff and slow, Tom said to the big man, "Dan Hicks, isn't it?"
"Hi, there! You know Meria Deltora?"
"Sure. We've met. You guys found Dad. Helped me a lot."
Unreal, it was. Unnatural. Nothing right. David knew it. Couldn't, or dare not, say it.
"Glad you're not hurt, Tom." He hoped his voice was natural. "Sorry about your new car." Then he made a mistake as he asked, "Was your father killed on this highway?"
Tom stared at him, blue eyes coldly appraising.
"Who is this guy?" he rasped, flat-toned.
"What's it to you?" said Hicks
, glaring at David. "You saying you know Tom?"
"We've met."
"He doesn't seem to know that," said Deltora softly. "How long have you known him?"
David threw it away. Grinned, shrugged.
"We talked awhile back there—over breakfast. That's all. He told me about himself. Mentioned his father. I guess the accident has shocked him so he doesn't remember me."
"You a doctor?" Hicks snapped.
"No."
"A psychiatrist, maybe?"
"No."
"I got a handle." Hicks patted his uniform. "Like officer, see?"
David played along. "Yes, officer."
Deltora smiled warmly. "So you saw the crashed car and were hurrying to find pickings."
"Pickings?"
"Sure, happens all the time. Driver knocked out Helping stranger lifts wallet, watch, bags, anything loose. Guess we saved you from trouble, Mister."
Tom said, "One of those, is he?"
"Not proved," said Deltora. "Eh, Danny?"
Hicks swung a massive fist into the palm of the other hand, staring unwinkingly at David.
"Son of a bitch! I should rattle your brains for you."
David kept quietly calm, watchful.
Deltora smiled at him. "But, like I say—not proved."
"Like we didn't see you," said Hicks. "If we had…" He slammed the fist again. "The good Samaritan racket, huh? You a good Samaritan?"
David shrugged. "Not particularly."
"So you ain't a good Samaritan? So you pass by when you see a guy in trouble?"
"No. Not always."
"Why stop now?"
"That's natural, isn't it? I saw his car go off the road so I pulled over and ran to help."
Hicks flickered a glance at Tom.
"Says he saw you go off the road, Tom."
"We didn't," said Deltora. "We were parked back aways. We didn't see you go off the road."
David paused, knowing he was trapped. Knowing jvhat they had to do, knowing he was the only man in the whole country who would know what these men had to do at this moment. Yet he dare not play up to them too much. That would mean he wasn't being natural while to themselves they believed they were being natural. This weird, nebulous atmosphere of knowing they were one thing yet acting another. He waited.
"I was off the road," said Tom. "I heard the rear axle give out so I pulled over. And I guess the master brake cylinder failed as well. I had no brakes after I was off the highway."
"Could have killed yourself," said Hicks.
"These new models," said Deltora sadly. "Not enough testing. Sure are dangerous."
Hicks stabbed a finger into David's chest. Hard, hurtful stabs. But he stood his ground.
"You heard the man," Hicks snarled. "So why say you saw something you didn't see? Where're you from?"
"Chicago."
"It's a good place to go back to."
"Better than around here," said Deltora. "We don't like liars around here. Or troublemakers."
"Or German cars," said Tom.
"So don't be sorry, Mister," said Hicks, giving one final stab.
"Like you will be if you stay," said Deltora. "We're being nice—you know that?"
"I thank you for your courtesy, officers," said David. "Pardon me for my mistake." He, looked squarely at Tom Claus. "I'm glad you weren't hurt."
"Why should I be?" Tom spoke arrogantly, aggres-sively. "I expected that punk car to crack up on me. If you see a friend in one, you can warn him. Okay?"
"Yes." David nodded. "I sure will."
Hicks's big hands gripped David's shoulders, spun him round to face the road.
"That lets you out, Mister."
"So long," said Deltora, warmly, like saying goodbye to his mother. "Don't come back." His gun slid lightning-blur into his hand. Two bullets spanged inches away from David's feet. Deltora laughed. "In your guts next time I see you. Remember."
David kept moving, but glanced back over his shoulder. They were watching him zombielike, without feeling. Sweat bubbled on his forehead. Damp skin pulled against his shirt collar. The sun was high and hot. Yet he shivered from the icy cold deep within him. He didn't look back again as he climbed into the car and drove off.
He checked in at the Ancaster Arms on Auto City's Seventh Street. Here he had established the identity of David Trome by paying three months in advance for the fourteenth floor apartment and sending forged letters of reference from Chicago. He had also mailed himself necessary identity and credit cards in that name.
Following a hunch to check Highway 640 had been almost disastrous. Hunches could be like that. But he knew, from experience by now, that hunches were his strongest ally. The aliens had a power of their own. An unseen power, capable of amazing and frightening performances. It would not have been natural if, in fighting the fight of David Vincent from all the great strength of his own beliefs, he hadn't also discovered a power within himself.
But he had come to Auto City with, as usual at the start of any of his investigations, a mind unhampered by set thoughts and procedures. This was where all the established authorities failed in their attempts to understand the invading force that might one day engulf them. At present the incidents were widely scattered. Linked to hysterical reporting, to improvable facts seen by panic-stricken people, and discounted because their own fear failed to make their truth appear real. The authorities and the men who functioned in the upper echelons of the police and other investigating forces had, of necessity, a set of rules and laws and substances of fact by which and through which they had to operate. So their very existence and purpose were factors against them in any investigation into this alien menace.
He had not before witnessed an identical transmutation. If seeing one actually take place had been the result of a hunch, then he was satisfied that hunches—-those nebulous and often inspired begetters of human physical action—were a weapon in his defense. Once again he was proving that cold logic was not the effective weapon the authorities so dearly loved to claim it to be.
You can perhaps fight logic with logic, but you cannot apply coldly logical reasoning to something that the limitations of the logical mind will not accept as real. He had seen a young man die. Had checked that there were no signs of life. Yet a few moments later that body walked away from the wrecked car. The body of Tom Claus—but not the personality of Tom Claus in that body.
His investigations had proved this to be a common factor, this personality change. Friends, family, business acquaintances, all vouched for the change in many cases he had investigated. But no one had ever been present when that change occurred. No one knew for certain if that person had died and, at the moment of dying, been "occupied" by an alien. They knew only that the person had changed and become cruelly aggressive, intolerant and unreliable, whereas before he had been friendly, cheerful, tolerant and dependable.
So you have to have someone to stand by you. And when official Washington won't listen, won't really give you any backing, then you have to turn to a friend. You don't like to con a friend, just because he has State con-nections, into thinking you're doing a top security job, so hush-hush you can only hint at it. But Stern believes in you, and he could get action if Federal help became essential in an emergency. David picked up the phone, called a Washington number.
"Star Two," he said, "this is Star One." He waited while Star Two spoke the code reply. Then gave his phone number. "I see signs of a possibly massive infiltration. I need information." He gave details.
"I'll call you, Star One. Stand by."
Chapter 4
LINKAGE
Star Two came through in about an hour. This had given David time to fit the scrambling device in the phone circuit of his apartment, also to fix up certain gadgets in well-chosen places. His normal protective procedure against phone tapping, bugging, or occasional uninvited callers who were foolish enough to make their own phone calls from his premises. All these things he had suffered in the past. At last the phone rang
.
"Star Two calling," said the voice. "Are you clear to receive?"
David chuckled. "What kept you? I've shaved, showered, changed, got settled in and rigged all necessary devices."
Star Two laughed grimly. "You'll find out why. Here are some answers, but a gag is operating between police and the industrial security forces in Auto City. The security forces are very powerful. I could not obtain all the details needed unless we claimed rights under Federal law."
"Save the alibi," said David, "give me what you have."
"Here it is. The person who fits your background details is Mrs. Carmen Verrel, widow of Chick Verrel, a racing driver killed in strange circumstances, though the verdict was accidental death. Chick Verrel claimed a UFO sighting and subsequent malformation in persons he knew and worked with in the auto industry. The Verrels had one daughter, Liane, who is engaged to Wayne Draycott, a Grand Prix and sports-car driver. Mrs. Verrel lives at 1197 Holly Mount, on the south side of Auto City. There are several other cases of widows with similar backgrounds, but none who fit the Verrel one in connection with UFO sightings, and most of those are in very scattered parts of the country."
"Deductions from official files is your job," said David. "I'll follow that lead. What else have you?"
"Very patchy stuff. Our contact in Auto City is Willard Knight, chief of police. He co-operated fully. When he passed us to Records we found the local Sergeant Banner quite cagey. Willard is an old friend of ours and Banner dared not refuse information after being ordered to release it by the chief, but he made us dig for each item. You have ideas on this?"
"I could have, if the police patrol officers named Hicks and Deltora were ever involved in a car crash."