“Two credits,” she whispered, “flat rate, if you don’t take too long, two credits, you can take your pick . . . .”
“This is something special,” he said. He told her what ho wanted, then slipped her a ten-credit note.
“But where?”
“There’s a motel behind there.”
“He might kill me.”
“He won’t kill anybody, don’t worry.”
He watched her go back into the diner. Ten minutes later she came out with a heavy-set, stupid-looking man with a trucker’s cap on. They walked back to the motel office, then clown the darkened path toward the cabins.
Alexander moved after them silently. He couldn’t count on handling a hulking truck driver alone, but there are times when a man is helpless. He hoped the woman would remember the signal, and fought down the intense wave of self-loathing that welled up in him. There was no stopping now, no turning back to order and precision and the proper running of things, no turning back to the warm, easy security of Absolute Stability, the peaceful quiet of not having to think or worry. A week before he would not have dreamed of doing the things he was doing now as a matter of course.
But it was not as a matter of course, not now, he thought. It was a matter of survival.
He heard them inside, heard the woman’s voice, low and suggestive, then dropping into a stream of underworld jargon so filthy Alexander was afraid for a moment she would frighten the quarry away. Then it was quiet, with only murmuring sounds, and he waited for the signal.
Silence. It took an instant to register that it was too quiet, suddenly deathly still. He gripped the latch, turned it and burst into the darkened room.
Then he screamed as the light hit his eyes, glaring, blinding, burning white, searing his retinas, and he clamped his hands over his face . . . .
He felt the blow at the back of his head, and then the glare-whiteness dissolved into blackness.
He was in a room without windows, a single door, a single chair, utterly black, although he could feel other presences there, other light breathing quite near him. He could not move his head, and he realized, quite suddenly, that it was clamped into a frame on the chair.
And it was silent, except for the voice that was asking him questions. It had been asking them for a long time, it seemed, and he tried to orient himself, to remember when the questions had started, and what they had been about.
But only now could he focus on the voice, slowly repeating a question, pausing, then another, pausing, a curiously metallic, unmodulated voice like a person talking with laryngitis.
He had heard that voice before, years before in the communications shack in Antarctica, transcribing messages from Control in Washington, and he remembered now, with a jolt of fear, what the voice was.
It was the characteristic electronic voice of a tik-talker.
Part III
The Tiger Pit
Chapter Eleven
Libby Allison was kneeling on the floor playing googly-goo with the tow-headed baby in the playpen when Julian Bahr walked in, threw his coat on the bed-couch, and walked around a few seconds impatiently while she continued to ignore him. Then his impatience seemed to evaporate, and he sat heavily on the edge of the relaxo, and with a half-groan, half-sigh began to pound his fist into the palm of his left hand.
Libby looked up then. “Trouble?” she asked.
Bahr’s only answer was a sudden vicious smack of fist against palm, as if in his mind he had just driven his knuckles into the fragile bone-structure of somebody’s face.
“DEPCO?”
“That too.”
She put the youngster back in the playpen, and brushed her hair back where his small hands had been pulling at it. “What else?” she said.
He didn’t answer for a minute or more. His jaw was knotted in anger, his huge body tense, but there was something else in his face, perhaps just in his eyes, when he looked at her. Then he shook his head helplessly. “The elephant, again.”
Libby turned sharply, the baby forgotten, her heart suddenly thumping wildly, her trained psychologist’s mind focusing abruptly on an almost simultaneous kaleidoscope of incidents, remarks, mannerisms, and the few desperate grudging revelations that formed in her mind the clinical picture of Julian Bahr.
“Last night,” he said angrily. “Actually this morning, just before I woke up.” He held out his left hand for her to see. The knuckles were cut and bruised.
“Julian . . . .”
“I was hitting the wall. I hurt my hand, I guess that was what woke me up.” He sat quietly for a moment, his breathing shallow and rapid. Holding his hand, she could feel the furious pounding of his pulse, watch the slow tensing of back and shoulder muscles as if he were trying by sheer physical force to throw off an ugly, frightening memory.
Finally he stood up, jammed his hands in his pockets, walked around the room once, then came back and sat down. “All right,” he said. “It’s the first time in two years. Why did it come back, Libby? I went to sleep all right. I worked until I was ready to collapse, I can always get to sleep then, but I woke up at three in the morning beating my fist on the wall, and all I can remember is the elephant.”
“Did it start out the same way? Out in the street?”
“Yes, the same way. The same woman, too. Some man was looking for her, and she had to hide, so I went into the building with her. There was the long hall with doors all up and down, and little rooms opening into it, and the elephant was at the end of the hall.”
She nodded wearily. It was the same, detail for detail. “And the elephant picked her up?”
“Just like before—in his trunk. He wasn’t hurting her any but he was going to carry her off, and she screamed for me to get a blanket and put it over his eyes so he couldn’t see. So I took the blanket and threw it over the elephant’s eyes, but it stuck on his tusks and only partly covered his eyes. He started to come down the hall, and I knew he could see me, and I had to run, only I couldn’t run fast enough, so I went into one of the little rooms and closed the door. The elephant went right on by, but when he got to the end of the corridor he started back, with people going past him like he wasn’t there. There was no way out of the room, and I couldn’t jump, and the elephant began pushing in the door . . . .”
He stopped for breath, and straightened his back for a moment. “Then I woke up. I was hitting the wall and I woke up.” He sighed again, his breathing deep and labored.
“The woman,” Libby said. “Did you know her?”
“No.”
“Was she with the elephant when he was chasing you?”
“No,” Bahr said. “After I started to run she wasn’t there at all.” He looked up at her, suffering in his face and eyes. “What does it mean, Libby? Why does it . . . scare me like that? Why does it start coming back now? I haven’t had it in two years.”
She sat down, shaking her head and holding his hand between hers. “Julian, the last time, I told you . . . .”
“But what have I got to be scared of?” he roared, jerking to his feet. “You want to dig and poke and scrape things open in my mind, but those things are all gone now, they aren’t ever going to come back again; I won’t let them come back!” He collapsed into the seat again, the anger fading as suddenly as it flared. “It’s no good, Libby, it’s just no good. I can’t do it your way.”
“It’s the only way I can help you. And I want to help you, you know that.”
“I know.” He leaned back, breathing slower again, more relaxed. “Thank God I can come here sometimes,” he said, almost to himself. “Sometimes things start pressing in until it’s more than I can stand. Here I can rest.”
“How do you feel now?” she asked.
“Better, I guess. Pretty good. God, I’m hungry! Haven’t you got something to eat?”
“I’ll make some sandwiches and coffee,” she said, and went out into the tiny kitchenette.
Bahr paced up and down the room a few times as she put the coffee on t
he sonic unit. Then she didn’t hear him walking any more, and she glanced out to see if he had left.
He was crouched, one knee on the floor beside the playpen, poking his huge finger at the child, who struggled to thrust it aside, and then grabbed onto it with small un-co-ordinated hands. Finally Bahr chuckled and picked up the baby in his huge hands. He began to swing the child up and down, toss him in the air, the pale blue eyes regarding him with wide surprise, and each time Bahr caught him he would whisper a soft “Ahhhhhh . . . .”
Then Bahr, the lesser, began to squall, and the big man glanced around the room guiltily, and seeing that no one was looking, lowered the loud one back into the playpen.
“The kid’s crying,” Bahr said roughly. “Why don’t you feed him?”
“I will,” Libby said. When he’s alone, she thought, when he’s alone he’s different. He’s almost human until he thinks people are looking at him.
Suddenly Bahr was behind her, jabbing his thumb into her ribs, laughing as she jumped. “What’s the matter?” he said. “I’m starving, and you let the coffee boil over.”
“Just thinking,” she said, but there were tears in her eyes.
She waited until he had finished his coffee before she told him about Adams’ visit during the afternoon.
“You must have been out of your mind,” she said. “I told you DEPCO would be watching that announcement speech. And then you stood up there and shouted to the world that we were being invaded.”
Bahr looked at her and grinned. “I hope they got plenty to see. I put it on the line, all right. Somebody had to.”
“Oh, you put it on the line, all right. Do you know what you looked like, out there with all those cameras? Like Marc Antony doing ‘friends and Romans.’ Do you think the people in DEPCO are idiots?”
“The ones I know.”
“Julian, you cut your own throat with that speech. DEPCO doesn’t have to wait until they interview you. They can slap an injunction on your job on plain suspicion of Instability and schedule you for interview when they have time.”
“They aren’t going to have die time,” Bahr said. “Look . . . they’re scared. They can pull that Instability bunk and jerk men out of their jobs when there’s nothing on fire, but not during an emergency.”
“They can, and they will,” she said.
“How many people did they dump out of jobs during the last Condition B? What about the Southwest during the last Chinese landing down there, when they had the blowups? How many key people did they dump then because they twitched or doodled the wrong way? The answer is not a damned one, and they’re not going to pull me out now, because there’s nobody to replace me. And if they were going to do it, Adams would already have run it through after the conference yesterday.”
“Did you have a run-in with Adams?”
“Englehardt did. He’s the head of Robling, and he believes in doing something instead of patting the public on the fanny and telling them everything is going to be all right.”
Libby looked up at him, and her face was suddenly white. “What does he propose to do?”
“Build spaceships and go after them.”
“Spaceships! But, oh, that’s ridiculous. Everyone from DEPCO right down to the Machines will stop it. You mean he actually proposed that?”
“He’s got backing. The military and DEPEX are with him.”
“They don’t count. DEPCO has the final say on something like that.”
“Well, maybe this time DEPCO won’t,” Bahr said sharply. “You and your damned psych-docs mumbling about symbols and fixations. I’m the one who’s got to fight the aliens, and they’re not going to turn up for analysis. This is no little guerrilla campaign this time; we may need those ships to survive. Did you ever think of that? Your therapy and adjustments aren’t worth a damn when it comes to staying alive.”
“That’s not the important thing right now,” Libby said. “All DEPCO has ever tried to do was to change a few minor things, like wars and squalor and neurosis. And that means catching those things at the roots.”
“Garbage,” Bahr said. “Englehardt put his finger on it when he said we had no place to go, and that is why everybody is afraid. If they had something to do, they wouldn’t be afraid any more.”
“Do you have something to do?” she asked him.
“You bet your life I have. Run the DIA. Get to the bottom of this alien business.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Certainly not. I’m too busy to be afraid. I . . .”
“But you dream about elephants.”
Bahr’s mouth closed and he was silent. Libby stood up to avoid his eyes. It hit him where he couldn’t fight back, she knew, but somehow the only way she could make an impression on Bahr was to hurt him. “You don’t understand,” she said slowly, “and you’ve got to understand. There are things that drive people to do things, and they don’t even recognize the reason. They think up all sorts of fantastic cover-lies to somehow justify doing things that they just can’t help doing. That’s why DEPCO was set up—to spot those drives and do something about them, dig them out by the roots. That’s why I’ve been trying to help you for four years now, Julian, because you don’t even understand what’s happening inside your own mind; you just keep finding reasons and excuses and urgent necessities for everything you do, and blaming other people for everything that’s done to you or everything that blocks you. I’ve tried to show you that it’s all inside you, in your own mind, but you just say no, stall DEPCO, get me a white card, I won’t let them stop me . . . .” She broke off helplessly. “You don’t even know why you want a white card.”
“I certainly do,” Bahr said. “I can’t get anywhere without a white card stability rating. A green card is two strikes against me everywhere I turn.”
“And if you got a white card . . . Suppose you got a white card, and you got everything you wanted . . . then what?”
“What do you mean, then what?”
“What would you do if you had everything you wanted?”
“I’d change things,” Bahr said harshly. “I’d change everything that got in my way.”
“But after you’d done all that . . . after you’d done everything you wanted . . . then what would you want?”
Bahr stared at her, not comprehending. “That couldn’t happen. Everybody gets in my way, tries to stop me. I could never get everything I want.”
Libby sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. “On that one thing, you’re right, Julian,” she said. “You don’t know how right you are.”
She had hoped that maybe she had reached him somehow, that possibly some spark of contact or understanding had been struck, but when he asked her later, “Well, what about Adams?” she knew that she hadn’t reached him at all.
“I’ll try to stall him as long as possible,” she said. “I don’t think it will do much good. Adams is suspicious, and he’s taking a personal interest.”
“I hope he does,” Bahr said sharply, “because I’m taking a personal interest in him. What do you know about him?”
“Why?”
“Because if he’s what I think he is, I’ve got a couple of specialists on my staff who can quiet him down for good.”
She whirled on him. “Julian, you wouldn’t . . . .”
“Look, you don’t seem to understand. Adams or nobody like him is going to put me out of a job on a Stability check.”
“You think you can blackmail him out of it? It wouldn’t do you any good. There are other people in DEPCO just as big as Adams, and they can’t be bought off or blackmailed. Julian, there’s a storm working up in my office. Aliens or no aliens, I can guarantee that you’ll be up against a prelim by tomorrow. And you won’t pass it.”
“I passed the other probes.”
“Because I told you the answers beforehand, question by question. But I can’t do that on a prelim; they use a polygraph.”
“They just poke around the sore spots, don’t they? They skip the question
s that you don’t bounce on, and just dig in the soft spots?”
She hesitated. “Yes, they study the prelim awhile before they go into a deep probe.”
“Fine,” Bahr said. “Then you can brief me on it.”
“You couldn’t use dummy answers under a poly, they’d bounce all over the place. With your adrenals . . . .”
“I can control my reactions,” he said.
“Your face muscles—maybe. Not your blood pressure and your sweat glands.”
“Not even under hypnosis?”
“Even then, even with suggested reactions to specific trigger questions, I still don’t know if it would work. You’d have to know the questions.”
“You can find out the questions.”
“No,” Libby said.
He stared at her. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean up until now I could always say I’d mis-evaluated your pers scores, or I was emotionally involved and didn’t know it. But deliberate faking on a prelim is a federal offense.”
He sat silent for a minute. Then he spread his hands wide. “Look, I’ve never asked you for much. I’ve always just told you, before, and you did what I told you. Now I’m asking you, and if asking doesn’t do it, by God, I will tell you. I’ve got too much at stake to trip on this thing now. You’ve got to get me past this prelim.”
“I can’t do it,” she said. “If they caught me, I’d be through. I’d never get a professional rating again.”
“I’m not talking about professional ratings,” Bahr said quietly. “I’m talking about you and me.”
“No,” Libby said.
“I’ll make a deal with you. You’ve always wanted to find out about the elephant. You’ve always wanted to get me into deep analysis and run me straight through from scratch. You know even DEPCO can’t get me into deep analysis if I block; I’d have to be willing, co-operative. All right, you get me through this prelim. As soon as I get this alien thing and Englehardt’s project squared away just enough so it doesn’t take all my time day and night, I’ll let you start analysis. I won’t fight you, I’ll co-operate.”
The Invaders Are Comming! Page 15