She knew he was lying, and suddenly she didn’t care. He didn’t know he was lying now. Right now he thought he meant it, and even though she saw through the mask with perfect, frightening clarity, she couldn’t help herself.
“Will you take a BHE and sign the paternity papers if I do?”
Bahr nodded. “If I get past the prelim.”
She leaned back against his shoulder, suddenly infinitely tired, more weary than she had ever been in her life before. “You know, it would have been so easy,” she said. “All this running and fighting; it would have been so much easier if you had let me start deep analysis two years ago.”
He stiffened against her. “Easier?”
“You wouldn’t have the elephant, and the sleeplessness, and you wouldn’t be boiling up with hate and beating your fist against the wall in your sleep, and you wouldn’t have this prelim coming up.”
“And I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere,” Bahr said.
Chapter Twelve
From: BRINT USNXY
To: BRINT HQX LONDON
Priority: IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
Distribution: HQX-K7 ONLY
Dear Roger:
I’m using our private channel for this letter because I am becoming more certain every hour that our normal channels are under constant DIA surveillance, and I clearly cannot route my personal opinion of the situation over here through Julian Bahr’s hands if I have any hope of keeping my Scotch neck in one piece and serving any useful purpose in the future.
As you might guess, Arthur and his people in the NY office are rather at a loss, with the city walled off by the recent communications edict. I am relying on the usual private channels to keep in touch with my groups, and particularly with Carl Englehardt. So far every report in my hands indicates that the pot of water is heating at a far greater rate of speed than we had originally assumed would be the case.
Arthur persists in adhering to our original immediate and long-range plans, ignoring the almost incredible pattern that has been emerging in the past weeks, and he feels that we must try to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. He has sent (against my outcries of warning) a note to Bahr suggesting a meeting which could be nothing more than a ceremony of agreement.
I oppose this.
“Normal” in Federation America is at best a relative term; I am certain now that if Bahr proceeds unchecked, he will in a matter of weeks have initiated an irreversible reaction, and that “normality” in the present sense of the word will never be seen again. If we could predict, even in the broadest terms, where this reaction would end, I would be enthusiastically in favor of riding it out. Unfortunately, I don’t think that Bahr himself knows where it will end, and this alone makes his position intolerably dangerous.
We have assumed from the start that DEPCO, with all its systematic precautions to keep emotionally unstable personalities out of key spots, would have automatically harnessed a man like Bahr very early in the game. This has not happened. His emergence confirms what I have been telling you for several years: that the DEPCO system has been in a spiraling decay since the death of Larchmont, and that something new is certain to emerge.
At this writing, that “something new” is taking the shape of Julian Bahr.
Bahr has seized the alien crisis as his chance for power. This is hardly surprising. I predicted it, you recall, when Project Frisco was first launched. What I could not predict was the simple fact that Bahr has run headlong into the DEPCO restraint system and broken the restraints one by one. Ironically, the DEPCO philosophy, which aimed at controlling and inhibiting men like Bahr, is inadvertently guaranteeing his success. If he succeeds in destroying DEPCO, there are no strong men at the top in Federation America to oppose him.
I think it is most important to realize this early. If Bahr succeeds, there will surely be very strong central control emanating from a single point, and no chance for us to encourage internal schism as we have in Asia and USSR. Nor would it then be safe to think of replacing him with a puppet if he were deposed or in some way removed from power.
It is my considered opinion that if Bahr is allowed to reach that point, we will have lost everything we have been working for. Unfortunately, we have needed him badly, and right now we continue to need him. I believe that Englehardt will support Bahr at all costs in order to get the Space Project in operation. I will talk to Carl personally about this as soon as possible, but I have very little hope of dissuading him.
Meanwhile, it is imperative that we be ready to cope with the political and economic changes which I think are about to begin; ultimately we must be in a position to cage Bahr or destroy him. Bahr may have considerable information on our activities, so we must be alert to a purge of some kind. He is very abrupt and direct in his actions; with the alien threat to justify him, he may move without warning at any time.
I wish I could be more optimistic, but I honestly think it is all as bad as I have outlined. I think things will be a bit tricky for quite a while, and I may have to move quickly without clearing through you or Arthur. There is one item of genuine promise, the matter of the elusive major that I mentioned before. Here is a man who has successfully thwarted Bahr, and he still remains at large. Indications are that he can be extremely useful to us . . . or extremely dangerous to us. I am bending all efforts at present to locate him. Saunders had his trail in St. Louis, but lost it. I will have more to report on this at a later date.
Meanwhile, if you see some brilliant chess move that will put us back in a position of advantage, contact me without delay through Talbot. Repeat, night or day.
Best wishes,
Paul MacKenzie
Chapter Thirteen
At one a.m. the phone jangled insistently, and Bahr, still sleepless, reached over and seized it. “Bahr,” he growled.
“Abrams, Chief. I just wanted to co-ordinate with you on discontinuing the search.”
Bahr sat upright, suddenly tense. “On what?”
“The drag . . . for Alexander. I just wanted to advise you I was dropping it. I’m checking out the field units now . . . .”
“Scrambler,” Bahr said. “Four-three-nine. Baker.” He punched the scrambler buttons on his own phone and tested. Then: “What in hell are you talking about, dropping the search? Did I give you orders to drop it?”
A long silence. “No . . . but . . . .”
“You get those field units back into operation in three minutes, or I’ll greencard you so fast . . . .”
“But, Chief, didn’t you hear? He’s been picked up.”
“Where?”
“East St. Louis. They booby-trapped a motel room. I’d lost him an hour before, just picked him up again two hours ago and then they landed him. Another DIA unit. Didn’t you get the report?”
“Must have been a slip-up in the tracer relay,” Bahr growled. “They’re probably trying to locate me now.” Then, cautiously, “Which unit was it picked up the major?”
“They didn’t sign through the roadblocks as a unit,” the man said. “It was on a personal chit. Only I didn’t know you had any informal units working this drag with us.”
“Whose personal chit?”
“Carmine’s. But I don’t see why they didn’t notify us they were shadowing, too. I mean, it’s customary. Unless you . . . .”
“You’re certain it was Alexander they picked up?”
“Positive, Chief. There’s no mistake.”
“Okay, drop the search. I’ll pick up the story from this end. And thanks for the call.”
Bahr hung up, flipped the scrambler off, and dialed the locator relay. “Bahr speaking. Any calls come in for me?” He knew before he asked that there had been no call.
“No call, sir.”
“Where can I locate Frank Carmine, DIA-43P”
He heard the whir of the locator file on the other end. “He’s in transit now. Destination, Red Bank, New Jersey. Field Unit HQ there. Planned arrival two A.M. Shall I try to make contact when he arrive
s?”
“Just deliver a message. Tell him to meet me at two-thirty at the Red Bank Ground Terminal. There won’t be any answer. I’ll be leaving shortly for that same destination number.”
He was resetting the scrambler when Libby sat up, turning up the light. “Trouble, Julian?”
“Go back to sleep,” Bahr said. “I’ve got to take a little trip.”
“But you’ve got the prelim tomorrow.” She glanced at her watch. “This morning!”
“I’ll be back. It’s only over in Jersey.”
“You can’t take the prelim on no sleep. The suggestions won’t cue in properly if you’re too tired. We can’t risk all the work we did this afternoon.”
He continued placing his call, and motioned her to silence as it came through. “Bahr speaking. Get one of the dummies ready. Tell him to take a ’copter to Rahway, and a ground train from there to Red Bank Ground Terminal. Tell him to get there at two-thirty. No, nothing else, just report back afterwards. And,” he added, “tell him Condition B when he hits Red Bank. Use his stunner if he has to.
Double A security on this, too. And see that his stride is right. I take big steps. Okay, see you.”
“Sending a dupe?” Libby asked.
Bahr nodded as he disconnected the alarm from his Markheim stunner on the knee table, hefting the sleek, surprisingly heavy weapon thoughtfully.
“What is it, Julian? Aliens?”
“Maybe,” Bahr said, dressing hurriedly. “Maybe . . . .”
“Are you taking a ’copter unit with you? Are you sure you’ll be back in time for the prelim?”
“Where are the keys to your Volta?”
“On the sill. But what do you want the Volta for?”
“If anyone calls, I’m on my way to the ground terminal. Don’t mention the Volta.” He tucked the stunner into his shoulder holster.
“You’re not going there alone! Julian!”
The door closed quietly behind him.
2001, the fourth year of the crash that had staggered North America and most of the rest of the world, a year of desolation, a year of retrenching and finally coming to grips with the horror of the crash, when some semblance of order was pounded, often quite unmercifully, out of chaos. Federation America, a broken nation . . . a nation without jobs or purpose, without the stability of money, with broken-down communications and impossible transportation and the imminent, momentary, endless threat of war.
2001, and Julian Bahr had been rounded up with a lot of other drifters, young and old, and hauled to the Indianapolis Processing Center for testing and relocation in line with the personnel policies of the Department of Exploitation in the fledgling Vanner-Elling Stability government. He had been fingerprinted, photographed, weighed, measured, and run through the maze—the personality and intelligence tests that, unrealized by him, were going to mark off the sharp limits of his future for him.
After a year of shiftlessness, hunger, ration lines, pilfering, and completely unlimited freedom of movement, Bahr was hostile and suspicious of the newly-designated authority figures.
“How old are you, kid?”
“Thirteen.”
“You’re too big for thirteen. You’re fifteen.”
“Go to hell.”
They found the ID card he hadn’t bothered to show them, and sent him into the testing center. The testing procedures were routine, the operators bored and indifferent. They paid no attention to Bahr’s resentfulness and hostility; when he scored a sloppy dull-normal on the initial tests, the test teams looked no further, assumed the worst, and hustled him through the Rorschach, thematic apperception and Vornay without ever getting far enough behind the shell to even glimpse what the big, belligerent youth’s mind was really like. He looked big, tough and stupid. They sent him to Riley to let the military knock the rough comers off.
Fort Riley Infantry Tech School, the new kind of military academy, where boys in their early teens were molded into the toughest guerrilla troops in the world. Just as they reached the beginning of their peak years in stamina and physique, they were offered the option (which they all accepted) of a ten year enlistment in the 801st. The weeding-out was enormous; screened before they entered, only twenty percent survived as guerrilla fodder, while the rest were sloughed off into the normal backwaters of Army administration and logistics. The Hitler youth groups in its most fanatic hour had never approached the tremendous group pressure techniques that drove, goaded, and quite often crushed the raw material into the proper shape.
In the first few days at Riley, Bahr moved mechanically at the furious bellowing of the non-coms, still too stunned to realize what was happening to him. Then came the initiation, the inevitable judgment of his fellows—could he take it?
A framed-up infraction, which Bahr knew was a frame, and a kangaroo court of second-year supervisors in a locked barracks squad room.
“Ten belts,” the second-year “judge” said. “If the prisoner flinches he will be restrained and the sentence doubled. Assume the position.” The mocking, overbearing authority drove the blood from Bahr’s face and made his fists clench, but he had made up his mind that they were not going to break him, and he bent over, mute and burning with anger. The belts were delivered with a flat paddle longer than a baseball bat and swung with two hands so it struck like a mule-kick and left welts and black-and-blue marks for a week.
He took nine blows impassively. Then a voice was raised. “The prisoner flinched. Any witnesses?”
“Yes, I saw it. The prisoner moved evasively.” There was a clamoring of assent in the excited circle of men. Bahr mentally estimated twenty more blows. “The prisoner will be restrained. Rope. Double him over the railing and tie . . . .”
Bahr straightened up, turned slowly. “Nobody ties me up,” he said.
“No? You’ll get twenty more for insubordina—” But the new threat was too late. Bahr grabbed the paddle out of the executioner’s hand and swung it sidewise against the fish-sergeant’s head with a loud thunk, knocking him sprawling and unconscious to the floor.
In the stunned silence Bahr leaned on the paddle and looked into the circle of shocked white faces.
“Next?”
They tried. For two weeks, gangs of upperclassmen tried to gang up on him, beat him up, break him. But when they crept into his barracks at night they found him gone, and returned to discover their own bedding soaked and knotted with far more imagination than they could achieve. One day five of them cornered him, beat him up and broke his nose; one by one they suffered return engagements and were beaten and mauled with systematic ferocity. The dispensary medics became experts at setting broken noses.
The silent cure, ostracism, fell flat because to his own classmen, in spite of indoctrination lectures, Bahr was a hero. In a grimly silent mess-hall Bahr could tell a dirty joke and the whole first year class would laugh on cue.
Halfway through the first year, the training officers at Riley consulted the BRINT people who were responsible for the 801st.
“He’s a misfit,” they explained. “He has too much drive, too much intelligence. We can’t see why DEPEX sent him here in the first place.”
“But a natural leader, you say,” the BRINT contact man said.
“Highest morale a first-year group ever had. But a maverick is dangerous if he can’t be controlled. Question is, should we weed him out now, or keep him and hope he falls in line?”
The BRINT man thought it over. “Your field maneuvers are coming up, am I right? Which is your weakest platoon, poorest in training and discipline?”
“Third, Baker Company.”
“Put this Bahr chap in charge of it during maneuvers.”
The Riley people didn’t like it. “They’re fourth-year men. They’ll never take orders from a first-year man. The platoon will fall apart the first day out.”
“Let’s try it anyway,” the BRINT man said with a note of finality. “We’ll prepare his orders.”
Baker Three was still legendary at Rile
y years after the maneuvers of ’02. Bahr’s mission was given to him by BRINT, and by the time he reported to their field unit in Ontario three weeks later with sixty percent of his platoon still intact and uncaptured, and with four prisoners, the Army, the police and the DIA were weary of the fruitless search and were posting imposing rewards for any of his troops who would turn themselves in.
BRINT spent a week interrogating Bahr, his troops and prisoners, on the tactics, techniques and devices they had used to avoid capture, then swore them to absolute secrecy on the methods; but enough fragments had crept out so that when Bahr and his men got back to Riley it was almost a victory parade.
The next three years were almost anticlimactic. Bahr was a made man. All work, play and friendship groups led to him. But while he built his little encysted empire in power relationships at Riley, getting ready for a hitch in the 801st, the same psych-testing machinery that had misplaced him before had been growing, spreading and self-fertilizing. The powerful DEPCO had begun to emerge in the government as the great peg-placer. They were feared, admired, hated, worshipped, but unquestioningly recognized except at Riley and a few other similar sociological eddies.
Bahr’s first contact with DEPCO came when he applied for Commissioned Officer’s School, and he ran headlong into a stone wall.
After two days of testing, with polygraph, Brontok symbols and Vargian analysis, Bahr returned to Riley baffled and angry by the continual procession of impassive young men and women who didn’t seem to listen to what he said, but only to how he said it.
DEPCO’s report to Riley was uncompromising. Bahr had too much drive to fit into a leadership position in a government that was fighting, at all costs, for stability. He was too ambitious for the new Army of administration and logistics that DEPCO was planning. What the Army needed was administrators, not executives. The decisions were to be made elsewhere, many of them by computors working against the VE equations.
The Invaders Are Comming! Page 16