Now he shivered in the cold night air, and wished he had stolen the guard’s underclothes as well as his coveralls. At least six sirens had come screaming up Wahanakee Drive before he heard the crunch of gravel at the parking lot entrance. He ducked down low behind a jack-balanced Hydro 22. The car, a Volta sports model, kept inching along on its single wheel, headlight on dim. He saw BJ had left the top down and the dashboard lights on so he would recognize her. Over on the highway he could see the search parties beginning to fan out through the grass and weeds along the drainage ditch, flashlights winking.
He waited until the Volta was almost past him, then tossed a handful of gravel against the plastic side.
“Harvey?” The Volta stopped.
“Right here.” He glanced carefully around, and climbed in the car, rocking it slightly on its single wheel.
“What’s this about your being in trouble?”
“I’ll tell you later. Do you know how to get out of here without running into any police roadblocks?”
“Are all those cars after you?”
“I don’t know. I think so. See, they’re searching the ditches.”
“There was a truck on its side down there,” BJ said. “They didn’t stop me, but I had to go very slowly, and I think the olficer routing traffic was looking into the cars as they went by”
“Well,” Alexander said, “maybe I’d better get out and take my chances. You could get into a lot of trouble if you were caught with me.”
“Don’t be silly.” She looked at him in the ill-fitting coveralls and laughed. “What’s it all about? What have you done?”
“I just broke out of the George Kelley Hospital, for one tiling.”
BJ stopped laughing. “Out of the Kelley? But that’s . . .” She looked again at the blue coveralls with K stamped into I lie plastic. “Okay,” she said, and headed the car out of the parking lot. “Hold on.”
Alexander sat silently, watching her drive as she rolled through the Kingston development, drove across the sidewalk, wove through a Playschool playground and finally onto a golf course. It was one of the new ones with plastic grass that would not wear out or divot, with plastic weeds and trees, the whole thing a curious but ineffective camouflage for the huge meat-processing plant buried beneath it. When they came off the golf course, she turned south onto an old-fashioned road, obviously built in the days of four-wheeled cars, and stepped the Volta up to about ninety. A moment or two later they merged into traffic on one of the new speedways, where the Volta could cruise along at 200 with the rest of the traffic.
“This way will take a little longer,” she said, “but they’d have to get out a state-wide alarm to cut us off now.” She set the car on automatic, letting the photosight follow the white lane strip, and turned to face him.
“Now what’s all this about? What did they have you in the Kelley for?”
“Recoop,” Alexander said.
“You? For recoop? My God, Harvey.”
He told her about the Geiger alert at Wildwood, and how the suddenly-appearing DIA unit suspected him of being involved in the theft, and put him under polygraph. She let him talk until the whole story was out. All the bitterness burst out suddenly, and he talked for quite a while before he had boiled off enough rage to stop talking.
“Then you think there’s something rotten in the DIA?”
“Well, what does it sound like to you?” Alexander said. “Bahr has some of the men so loyal to him that they take orders from him regardless of McEwen or the law.” He chewed his lip, thinking. “I’ve got to contact McEwen, some way, and let him know. Maybe he won’t listen to me, but Julian Bahr is dangerous. McEwen ought to know it.”
“You’re a little late for that,” BJ said flatly. “McEwen died early this morning. Of a heart attack.”
Alexander swallowed hard. “Then Bahr is running the DIA?”
“Pending appointment of a new director, yes.”
He swore. “Then my only chance to avoid recoop, or being shot for implication in the Wildwood theft, is to find out what actually happened to the U-metal that was taken out of the piles.”
BJ frowned. “But they know what happened. DIA denies it, of course, but the European and African news nets have been jabbering about it all day. Radio Budapest has been beaming it over here in English . . . .”
“Beaming what over in English?”
BJ reached out and switched on the radio. She flicked the dial through squalling and static and picked up the nasal voice of the intercontinental Radio Budapest announcer.
“. . . still have not retracted the belligerent and idiotic denial of the theft of a large quantity of atomic materials from the atomic power plant at Wildwood, Illinois, by alleged interplanetary aliens,” the voice was saying, “in spite of the now familiar Canadian interception of the messages sent between the different DIA units that were attacking the saucer at the time the aliens allegedly blew themselves up in a semi-atomic explosion. Radio International has been trying to reach Julian Bahr, new head of the DIA secret police, to find out why the facts about the aliens are not being brought into the open, but Director Bahr cannot be reached.
“Reliable sources in New York now believe that another alien landing has occurred in northern British Columbia near the Yukon border. BRINT and DIA investigating units are now en route to the site of the landing. We will continue to broadcast the true facts on this latest incident, in spite of (he militaristic security procedures resorted to by the DIA secret police . . . .”
BJ turned it off, and looked at Alexander. He shook his head, staring dazedly at the radio. “I saw that thing in the woods before it blew up,” he said finally. “I thought I was sick, seeing things . . . but aliens , . .” He shook his head again. “BJ, I’ve just been through eighteen hours of interrogation on how the U-metal got out of the plant, and I tell you it couldn’t have. Even aliens couldn’t have gotten U-metal out of that plant unless they used the fourth dimension to do it, and then they certainly wouldn’t have set off a Geiger on the road.”
“They think they know how it was done,” BJ said, and told him what Radio Budapest had reported about a neuronic shield.
“But why? And how is Radio Budapest getting all this information if the security lid is on? There must be a hell of a leak somewhere in the DIA.”
“I don’t know, but BURINF is nearly going wild. Even John John got flustered on his TV-cast tonight. And an awful lot of people are listening to the Radio Budapest reports . . . .”
The car whizzed through the thinning residential areas. Alexander sat silent for a long time. “I still say that U-metal couldn’t have gotten out,” he said at last. “There were people at the plant that hated my guts for changing the security system around and making them do some honest work for a change. I wouldn’t put it past one of them to do something deliberately just to get my neck under the axe. I can’t tell about this alien thing, but I know there were plenty of non-aliens at Wildwood who would gladly have seen me thrown out of there.”
BJ gave him a long look. “I hate to say it in these terms,” she said, “but that argument has a very paranoid slant to it. Everybody against you, and everybody wrong but you.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I think . . . well, I think you’re excited, and desperate.”
Alexander didn’t answer. He realized now that he had been blocking from his mind what he had seen in the woods north of Wildwood, because he had seen it and yet could not understand what he had seen. Now he was forced to face it. He needed a plan, some simple stratagem he could act on and carry out to clear himself, but there seemed no place to turn, nothing he could do but wait helplessly until the police or a DIA field unit found him and picked him up . . . .
He saw BJ watching him, her eyes wide with concern, her dark hair framing her thin, sensitive face. She looked as young and vital now as she had twenty years ago, and it came to him in a rush of warmth that just being with her now made him feel quieter, safer and fart
her from danger. Here was a haven in the storm, one person he could trust without a qualm. It was incredibly good to be with BJ again.
He laughed suddenly, as though some tough, unbreakable fiber in him had come to life again. “A hell of a thing,” he said. “I’ve been in the Army for so long I’ve almost forgotten how to fight. They’re going to have to find me before they can drag me in, and I think that’s going to take some doing.”
“What are you going to do?” BJ asked.
I m going to find out what happened to that Uranium,” he said. “It’s the only hope I’ve got, with Bahr running the DIA. If I get any information, I’ll get in touch with BRINT, I can trust them. Can you drive me down to Wildwood?”
“Harvey, if these reports are true, it’ll be crawling with DIA men.”
“Ill have to chance that.”
“All right. We can stop at my place and get you some clothes.”
“Good. I could stand a drink, too.” On the surface he felt a lot easier, but deep in his mind the questions were still nagging him.
DIA was corrupt, and Bahr, in the face of the rigid DEPCO control system, was making a power grab. That much he could understand.
But an alien invasion—what did that mean?
Chapter Six
The flight into Canada took over eight hours, and to Julian Bahr every moment of it was torment.
BRINT had the whip hand, which was intolerable in itself, and they were using it with every evidence of relish. Aside from the bare fact that an unidentified craft had made an unauthorized landing somewhere in the wilderness of northern British Columbia, Bahr had been able to extract no information whatever from BRINT’s New York offices.
They were regretful, but firm. London had been explicit in its instructions. If Mr. Bahr wished, he could contact I heir BRINT agent in Montreal and accompany him to the site of the landing. Every precaution had been taken to seal off the area and preserve it for the DIA investigating team-accompanied by BRINT, of course.
In Montreal he had waited, fuming, for four hours in the rain until the BRINT man, unaccountably delayed, made his appearance. Bahr had had enough experience with BRINT in the past to expect the unexpected; Paul MacKenzie exceeded even his worst expectations. The BRINT man was small and wiry, with sandy hair and a soft Scottish burr, and an air of vacuous naivete about everything he said or did. There was no BRINT team . . . only MacKenzie, extremely apologetic about his “delay,” and obviously not impressed by the presence of the new DIA chief.
Only now, hours later, as the streets and buildings of Dawson Creek slid past below their ’copter, Bahr was realizing uncomfortably that the facade of naivete was only a facade, and that Paul MacKenzie was very sharp, exceedingly sharp, and in perfect command of what he was doing.
After leaving Montreal they had chatted about practically everything except DIA, BRINT, and Project Frisco, and still, somehow, Bahr had been made aware that BRINT had been following Frisco for almost two months, had tracked his ’copter units to Wildwood the night before and set up an intercept team inside US borders within fifteen minutes of the alarm.
This was not news to Bahr; he had suspected something of the sort because he knew that ’copter radios were too weak to reach Canada without phenomenal weather conditions. But the skill with which MacKenzie put the matter on the line was professionally fascinating, as well as professionally disturbing.
And throughout it all Bahr could not shake off the uneasy feeling that the BRINT man was very quietly, very discreetly laughing at him.
“Amazing,” MacKenzie said, looking down at the small armada of ’copters fanning out in their wake, “simply amazing how you Americans manage to get so many machines to work with. You must have two dozen rotors down there.”
“Two field units,” Bahr said, a little defensively.
“I doubt if there are a dozen of those available to BRINT in the whole Western Hemisphere,” MacKenzie said. “We’re always having to borrow them from the Air Force.”
“We used to have the same problem,” Bahr said, “when I first took over the field units. But I changed that.”
“Yes, we’ve noticed quite a few changes in DIA field units since you took over,” MacKenzie said. Then, after a pause, “What are you planning to do with them all up here?”
“I work on the principle that it’s better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them,” Bahr said. He stared down at the wilderness of alder thicket passing below, a succession of rolling forest land, swamp, underbrush, and lakes. “Look, let’s get down to business. You must know something about what happened up here.”
“Not very much,” MacKenzie said. “Radar unit 1237, that’s some fifty miles north of here, picked up an echo at 15:30 this afternoon. Radar unit 1240 confirmed it and together they tracked the trajectory of the target. It was moving fast, and its descending pattern was decidedly curious.” He handed the report to Bahr.
Bahr blinked. “How much verticle coverage does your radar sweep give?”
“At that range about 70,000 feet. And a 15-second sweep cycle.”
“Then why didn’t your unit pick it up before?”
“We were extremely fortunate they picked it up at all,” MacKenzie said. “These are Early Warning units, specialized to pick up missile trajectories. This target didn’t follow any missile trajectory. In fact, no missile, not even a Robling missile, could make a trajectory like this. This target didn’t come over the Pole, it came straight down.”
“But from this, the strike area could be anywhere within a fifty-mile radius!” Bahr burst out.
“One hundred mile, to be accurate,” MacKenzie said mildly.
“How do you expect to search a hundred mile radius of this sort of wilderness?”
“Well, there’s really not much way anything can get out of the area,” MacKenzie said. “Only a single road, the Alaska Highway, which we have blocked and sectored.”
“But all this delay in getting to the target area.”
“Well, we’ve been a step behind you in this thing, so far,” MacKenzie said pointedly. “And what with all this rabid talk of the European nets, we felt obligated to follow through the investigation on a joint basis. Different techniques, and all that . . . .” His talk was light enough, but there was no mistaking the steel-sharp intention to check DIA’s methods.
BRINT plainly did not like this alien thing one bit. “And then, we may have an ace in the hole,” MacKenzie went on. “There’s an American photography team camping in this area; at least, they obtained a permit to camp here. Two men and a Hydro two-wheeler. Professional cinematographers making nature-study documentaries. They’ve worked this area several times in the past three years. One of them is the cameraman, the other chap does the editing, commentary and sound track. If we’re lucky, they may have picked up a disturbance. If they’re actually around, that is.”
“I don’t suppose you know their names,” Bahr said, unable to keep the sarcasm from his voice.
“Stanley Bernstein, age forty-two, height medium, slender physique, married, two children,” MacKenzie said as though running off a tape. “He’s the cameraman. The other chap is Anthony Russel, formerly Russano, age thirty-three, tall, over six feet, also slender physique, dark hair, unmarried. Both men from New York City.” He paused, smiling at Bahr. “We have launching facilities in this region, you know. We could hardly let someone into the area without a check-through.”
“What I can’t see,” Bahr said, “is why an alien craft should pick this region to land in in the first place.”
“Rather obvious, don’t you think? If they hoped to land undetected, that is. They very nearly succeeded.” He peered at the map. “The photographer’s camp should be on this lake, East side. The Highway passes within a mile of shore. Why don’t you have your units drop down and try to spot the camp?”
Bahr picked up the speaker mike and pressed the button. The lake was visible in the late evening light, a small, kidney-shaped body o
f water, almost indistinguishable from the belt of swamp, underbrush, fallen timber and alder growth. Over the lake, two of the ’copters dropped down almost to tree height and began moving slowly along the lake shore.
Ten minutes later the speaker blared. “There’s a tent in the clearing down there, Chief. Shall we land?”
“Ask them to hold off a bit,” MacKenzie said quickly. “I’d like to have a look myself before we take any action.”
“Hold it,” Bahr said into the speaker. “We’ll be right over.” The ’copter swung down. In the fading light a spotlight glared, picked up a small clearing on the lakeshore, and the canvas roof of a tent on the edge of an alder thicket.
“No fire,” MacKenzie said slowly. “Tent looks odd, too. Shall we land and have a look?”
Bahr gave the order to the pilot, and picked up a burp gun from the floor, jammed a clip expertly into place. The ’copter settled quickly in the high ragged grass of the clearing, its spotlight still focused on the patch of canvas. Another ’copter landed beside them, and Frank Carmine jumped down.
When the whine of the engines died, there was dead silence. Not a breath of air stirred. The lake was like glass. Bahr and MacKenzie started across the clearing, with Carmine close behind. Both DIA men carried burp guns. MacKenzie carried a flashlight and his pipe. They walked cautiously over toward the tent.
“I thought that looked odd,” MacKenzie said, stopping. The tent was ripped and shredded, hanging like a ragged washing on a line. One corner of it was entirely cut away, with chunks of canvas lying scorched and partly charred on the ground.
“Jesus,” Bahr said. “It looks like somebody cut through the back of the tent with a blowtorch.”
“Watch your foot,” MacKenzie said sharply. He aimed his Hash on the ground a few inches from Bahr’s toe. There was a twelve ounce can of Bako condensed stew, the top part of the can missing. Together they knelt over the can. It looked as though the top had been burned off, the metal rim curled and blistered. A few shreds of stewmeat and bouillon jelly clung to the bottom of the can.
The Invaders Are Comming! Page 8