“Then Englehardt prepared the ‘ships’ that exploded?” Alexander asked. “What about the Moon?”
“If you remember that Englehardt has been making intercontinental missiles for years, capable of carrying fusion warheads, it isn’t hard to see how he could place a half a dozen unmanned drones on the Moon. The difficult part—in which BRINT co-operated—was handling the leaking of information that followed each successive incident. Bahr knew it was a hoax, and it fit into his plans perfectly. Once started, it all followed nicely: the circulation of a pulp scare-book to prepare the public for the panic that would follow; the step-by-step creation of a national peril which could be met and answered only by a drive to build a space fleet. Vanner had proved that the conquest of space would ultimately require a national effort comparable to a full-scale war, but if Federation America were to support it, it had to be an emotional cause, a fear-cause with a leader who could draw the people along and supply the great force needed to burst through thirty years of entrenched anti-space conditioning.”
MacKenzie spread his hands. “We needed a man with the drive and strength to leap into the breach and use the crisis. We had to have Bahr, but he moved too fast; he was too successful. He didn’t fight DEPCO the way we expected him to; he simply walked around DEPCO and left them standing there. Earlier, we might have been able to control Bahr. Now he is out of control, and in a matter of weeks he will have a continent under his thumb, and a military and technical program straining the nation to its limits. In six months he will want the world, and we won’t be able to stop him . . . .”
“Can’t Englehardt stop him?” Alexander asked. “Surely he has the power.”
MacKenzie gave him an odd look. “Englehardt is dead,” he said slowly. “Curiously enough, he was shot down on the street an hour after Bahr made his appeal to Congress.” The BRINT man shrugged. “The assassination was blamed on DEPCO fanatics who were determined to block the space project, and Englehardt was given a state funeral. Bahr’s speech at the funeral was very touching. When it was over, he nationalized Robling holdings by edict, and doubled the pay of every man in the organization.”
The two men sat silently for a few moments. “It seems to me,” Alexander said, “that the job is only half done. You have to leave Bahr in power until he’s carried Project Tiger to a fruitful point.”
“And shaken the government apart, and entrenched himself like an iron fist,” MacKenzie said. “What do we do when Project Tiger is half-completed and Bahr has made himself invincible?”
“Then we dump him,” Alexander said.
MacKenzie was about to make a sharp retort, but he looked at the major’s face, and realized that he was serious. “We can’t do it by brute force. Do you have an idea?”
“I have an idea,” Alexander said. “I think Julian Bahr’s great strength can be his weakness. I’ll need help. But if I’m right, when the time comes, I’ll dump Julian Bahr.”
“At the height of his power?” MacKenzie asked.
“Like die tragic hero,” said Alexander.
Chapter Seventeen
To Libby Allison it seemed as if the world of nightmare had suddenly become reality. There were people here, a million people in the rooms and corridors, all talking at once, milling around, laughing too loudly, shaking hands too eagerly, with smiles on their faces and fear deep in their eyes. It had all been over after the speech, everybody knew that, yet they had waited for the formality of congressional approval, waited until the resolution had been formally read, and debated, and carried without a dissenting vote. And then the reporters were there by the thousands, flash-bulbs popping, a hundred questions in the air, and every eye was on Julian Bahr.
He was the center of attention, talking, laughing, proclaiming, as all the little men with pads jotted down his words. He was flushed and voluble, almost as though he were drunk. When die vote results came down four men moved in to his side, heavily-built men dressed in psychophantic imitation of Bahr, keeping the crowding groups of people from coming too close.
She watched him in growing horror, and in growing fascination. There had been times when she had seen this clearly, the thing that had been coming from the very first. Now, suddenly, all the restraints were broken, all the barriers down. He had stamped and pounded and bulldozed through the field, and suddenly it was empty before him; he was in command. He stood there, talking, his ego swelling, power and confidence in every word, every movement of his head, every gesture of his hands. And still he was chiving forward, fighting . . . .
He will change the whole country, everything in Federation America into a dynasty, she thought. He will set civilization back six hundred years. There will be no stopping him if he succeeds in this. He is thirty-four years old, and in a week he will be ruling a continent, but that will not be enough. He could be the master of the world, and that would not be enough. By the time he is fifty, the idolatry of ten billion people might still make him feel unloved.
It seemed to her that this was unreality, a dream she was floating through, and she could only see it with a sense of detachment, as though it were not really happening to her. Even when Bahr was at her side, taking her arm through the crowds, smiling and talking about reform and the part she would play in it, there was no sense of reality. She saw him, and realized with a shock of horror that she was proud of him, excited for him, eager for him. He had fought so hard, he had even fought her, and now he had won, in spite of everything. And now he was making her a part of the victory.
His white goddess. His empress. His wife, his lover, his concubine, his first love, his partner, his daughter, his sister, his mother . . . .
Reality broke in on the dream with sudden brutality, and the vast panoramic nightmare-lens clamped down to a tight, narrow channel and came into focus on Adams’ face.
Adams, pushing his way through the room, his coat lapels flapping, lank blond hair awry, face white and distorted and ugly as he made his way across toward them. He thrust at the crowds of people that were intervening, and they stepped back as his anger swept the room like a wave. He approached Julian Bahr, and two of Bahr’s men appeared at Adams’ side, suddenly, each taking an arm, holding him as he writhed to break away from them. But his hate-filled eyes were not turned toward Bahr at all; they were turned toward Libby.
“You bitch!” he screamed at her, lunging forward to glare into her face. “You bitch! You did it, it’s yours. Aren’t you proud! Vanner should be proud of his bastard daughter. Oh, yes, he should be proud, and your whore mother, too! You’ve done their work well for them, haven’t you? You’ve betrayed everything they ever believed in, and now see what you’ve won for yourself , . .”
She had a drink in her hand, and she hit him in the face with it so hard that the glass shattered. Something snapped in her mind, and she threw herself on Adams, gashing his face again and again with the broken glass, pouring out all the hatred she had ever felt. And then she heard somebody screaming, and it was Adams screaming, and his face looked like the skin had been hacked off. She stepped back, gasping, and at her side Bahr was laughing, and the DIA men were grinning at her and holding Adams so he couldn’t move, and Adams kept screaming, “Traitor! Traitor!”
Then Bahr nodded, a curt order, and the men dragged Adams out through the door, and Libby was sick, more violently sick than she had ever been in her life. Somebody was helping her across the room, into a lavatory. In the mirror she saw herself, and there was blood all over her hands and arms and dress, and some of it was her blood, but most of it was Adams’.
All the way home, through the dark wet streets, something in her mind was screaming at her that the nightmare was real, the nightmare was real, the nightmare was real . . . .
He didn’t notice that she was not there for quite a long time, and then only vaguely, as he caught himself looking around the room, trying to see where Libby had gone. He chuckled to himself. She had turned on Adams, all right. God how she had turned on him! He hadn’t thought that she had
it in her, and he felt his pride swell as he thought of it. He’d been right about Libby. She would help him. She knew the DEPCO organization, she would know whom to keep, whom to get rid of. With Libby at his side . . . .
But she was not in the room, and he spoke to one of his men, who vanished from his side for live minutes or so, then returned, frowning.
“She’s gone, Chief. She left the lavatory, and somebody saw her hail a cab outside.”
Alarm leaped in his mind, and he blinked, trying to think it through. Not a word to him, nothing, and there were people she would have to see, work to do, plans to be made. “Get a car,” he said, “and get these parasites out of here.”
How long had it been since she left? He tried to wade through the drunken exhilaration of the past hours, and he couldn’t remember. But something cold was eating away at his chest, and he snarled at the driver and slammed his fist into his palm, wondering why it was that he was actually feeling pain in his chest, physical pain, as though something were crushing the life and breath out of him.
Outside the apartment building he leaped from the car, jammed the elevator button with his thumb, then cursed and started up the stairs three at a time, with his men panting behind him. He ran down the corridor, digging for keys in his pocket, but he didn’t need the key. He stopped at the apartment door, and saw that it was hanging wide open into the darkened room.
Inside, with the lights on, there was nothing. She was gone. The closet doors hung open, clothes gone as though grabbed up in a desperate sweep of the hand. A suitcase was gone from the shelf. Dresser drawers yawned at him, empty. And in the back room the crib was also empty.
He stared at the room, unable to believe what he saw, shaking his head helplessly as he tried to fight down the rising wave of fear in his mind, surging in to fill the void left by the shock.
He looked up at his men, and told them to wait in the hall. He was trembling; he couldn’t control the shaking of his hands. He saw his face in the mirror, and slammed off the light switch with a snarl of rage. He stood in the darkness, and then walked over to the window, stared out at the lights of the city, trying to make his hands hold still by gripping the sill with all his strength.
She was gone as if she had never been there. But now, in the silent room, things were blurred in his mind, confused. Was it Libby who was gone, or was it someone else? Suddenly, it seemed that it had all happened before, so long ago that he could hardly remember, and the bafflement and rage and pain he was feeling now was the same bafflement and rage and pain he had felt then, when someone, someone . . . .
Ruth. A door opened in his mind. Click, a light went on! A face stood stark and revealed. A faceless woman he had dreamed about, a woman and an elephant. Even the thought brought a shudder of fear through his body, and he clenched the window sill. Out across the city he seemed to see fires rising, blazing infernos, with yellow flames licking up into the black sky. A woman’s face, but he could see it now stark in every line and hollow, and it was Ruth’s face. And he knew that the elephant was only a symbol of the one he did not even dare to dream about.
Ruth had left him, just as Libby had left him. He had cast it away, buried it, driven it from his mind, but now it was hack, fearfully back, etched in orange and crimson on the black night sky.
Ruth had left him. But that was another place, in another time. Bitterly, then, Julian Bahr remembered it all.
1995, and the desert installation of the XAR rocket ships. He was twelve years old, an angry, lonely, bitter twelve years in a world where there was no love, no understanding, no place to anchor firmly—a world of absolute authority, utter loneliness, and uncertain affection. He did not know what Howard did on the spaceship, he was an engineer of some sort, working eighteen hours a day in the testing labs, seldom home, and when he was home, the endless siege that Julian could only watch helplessly from the sidelines. Ruth was sick so much of the time, gone so much of the time, and those month-long absences were barren for Julian, utterly barren. Then, when Ruth came back from the hospital, or from the coast where she was “resting,” things became warm and alive again. She sang, she chattered, she hugged him and wept over him and drowned him with tearful demonstration. Those returns were the oases of his life, but then Howard would come in, bone weary, and the laughing and singing would stop. In a few days Ruth’s warmth would recede, and her nervousness would begin again, and Julian would fold inward again.
Life was life, and the facts of life were simple and unyielding. First there was Howard, who was to be obeyed, with his sarcasm, his cruelty, and the long bitter battles that drove Ruth away again and again. Above his father was a uniformed unknown, the Army, which was powerful and treacherous. His mother, when she came into his life at all, brought warmth and happiness and love. But then she was gone again, without warning, and he was alone with Howard.
He hated it. His rebellion was total, and oblivious to consequences. There were the schoolyard fights, the petty larceny, the bitter obsessive competition. His classmates hated him because he hurled back their overtures of friendship with sarcastic bitter words from Howard’s mouth. His teachers hated him, and he returned this with interest. And as the reports sifted home, into Howard’s hands, he knew that Howard hated him, and was disgusted with him, and despised him, and for this there was no answer, no way to fight back.
He found himself one day pointing a rifle at his father’s back. He could not remember the circumstances; he could remember clearly the long, glinting barrel of the rifle, the sight at the end, his father’s back through the open window clearly outlined. The gun was loaded, and he could see the exact spot where die bullet would hit; he could visualize excitedly the exact action of his father falling forward against the desk, collapsing to the floor, writhing and spurting blood and dying. He saw it coldly, clinically, without the slightest flicker of concern or affection. He could do it, and then Ruth would come home and stay home. His finger was tightening on the trigger when it occurred to him that Ruth would probably be upset, so he lowered the gun and returned it carefully to the gun rack. The next day he took the rifle out to a quarry and threw it into thirty feet of water.
Then, incredibly, the crash, and the storming of the Rocket Project. He was thirteen when the mobs smashed into the compound at White Sands, murdering, sacking and burning their way to the hated spaceships and all who had worked on them. The rumors of the “gasoline day” gauntlet spread with the growing national riot, where scientists and engineers and technicians were wrapped in gasoline-soaked rags, set aflame, and forced to race each other a hundred yards to a single waterfilled drum, as the mob lined up screaming on either side.
The mob came to their part of the compound, and Julian’s father did not hesitate a second. He snatched up a box of shells, and opened the gun rack as the shouting, angry, blood-hungry gang reached the front door. But the rifle was not in the gun rack.
Three of the men were killed and two others beaten senseless before they broke Howard Bahr’s arm and knocked him down and dragged him out into the street. They caught Julian and Ruth and hauled them out to watch the beating and mutilation, and finally the inferno, all of which Howard endured with stubborn, scornful silence. That day Julian realized something very surprising about his father, yet even as he watched the orange flames consuming the dead body he felt a strange excitement and release.
He wrung free of the man holding him, picked up a gasoline can and sloshed it in the face of the bully who had led the execution. The man roared and lunged at him, but Julian jumped back over the fire. The flames caught the man, and while he thrashed and screamed and rolled on the ground Julian broke and ran through the compound, dodging into the flickering shadows thrown by the fires, running until there were no more footsteps, until he was gasping for air choking with exhaustion and fear. In the distance he heard the shrill tortured screams, but they did not interest him. He had killed a man, but that was not enough. There was more to do before the job was complete. He had to kill them all.
He found Ruth standing in the shadows waiting for him in the smoking ruins of the houses when he returned, after the men had gone. She had not gotten away, and she had not been killed. Her mouth was drawn into a thin line, and she moved very slowly and painfully, and she would not look into his eyes.
A confusion of nightmare days and nights, then. There was violence, and more violence, as everyone connected with the space projects fled for their lives. Julian lived with Ruth in part of an abandoned church, and he begged, and stole, and foraged, like everyone else in the early days of the crash, seizing anything to live on or trade with. Ruth was changed, she never seemed to be herself. She was always talking and laughing without making sense, talking about her school days in Vermont and her father’s pipe, and acting as though there hadn’t been any crash.
One night she had shown Julian a small bottle, and he had been afraid it was poison until she explained. “I’ve kept it for weeks. A very expensive fragrance.” She held it to his nose, her eyes bright, and his flesh crawled on his spine as he realized it was nothing but perfume. “Of course it’s worthless now,” she said. “All fine beautiful things are worthless now. I’ll have to go home soon.” She had held his hand against her cheek, kneeling beside him in the darkness as if she expected him to say something reassuring, but there was nothing to say. He couldn’t steal enough to feed both of them. He had pulled his hand away.
And the next night, when he came home from scavenging, Ruth was gone. All the food, clothes and cigarettes he had been hoarding were also gone. He searched for two days, but he could not find her. Then he made an impossible decision, crept through the guarded double-fence of the Military Police compound and headed toward the well-lit barracks in the officer’s quarters.
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