Carmine nodded and left the room, pad and pencil in hand. McEwen watched him go, and then looked at Julian Bahr, shaking his head with the slow, baffled uncertainty of an ineffectual parent.
With all the speed, force and precision of a guillotine blade, the blackout fell on the incident of the Wildwood Power Plant raid.
The coverup was fast, and skillful. Frank Carmine talked to BURINF, at Bahr's orders and over McEwen's signature and political support, and the greatest communications network in the world jerked as if it had been hit by a whip.
From somewhere in BURINF emerged a newscast story of a power-line failure between Wildwood and St. Louis, causing a power blackout the previous night. It was a clear, simple, convincing story, broadcast over a tightly controlled net to reach only St. Louis and its suburban centers, and it reassured everyone and explained everything, even though it was a complete and deliberate lie.
North of Wildwood, Road Washed Out signs went up on all wheel-strips leading within twenty miles of the crater, with DIA field units spread out in a wide perimeter around the site of the blast. 'Copter units maintained air coverage to keep unwanted small craft out of the area. Major Harvey Alexander's absence was covered, and the cordon of young, serious-faced DIA men circulating in the plant area proper was convincingly explained as a team of auditors evaluating the plant operations to prevent another breakdown. i In the great Vanner-Elling calculators in Verdon Caverns, the key words "Wildwood," "atomic," "explosion," "demolition," "DIA," "alien," "mystery," and scores of other journalistic leak-words were unobtrusively loaded into the electronic censors that tested every story, column, ad and byline for any contextual association with the Wildwood raid, with results screening continuously into the huge BURINF clearing house.
Likewise, an integrated check-system monitored the TV-casts, and thousands of concealed microphones in playgrounds, washrooms, cafeterias, bars and other strategic places—long the standard emotion-samplers and information-gatherers of the government Stability program—went on active to test the rate of occurrence of any of the key words.
And all this was done so swiftly, so silently, that even the TV stations, press rooms, and standard information services did not suspect that a continental alert was on.
Which was why, when the leak came, it was so unexpected.
Station WDQM-TV in Jefferson City, Illinois, reported on a newsbreak flash that a local hunter in the bush had been wakened during the night by an explosion in the region of the Wildwood Power Plant. A forest ranger had also seen the blast, and noticed the concentration of helicopters in the area.
Bahr only caught the last few lines before the commercial, after a frantic signal came through from the local telecast monitor, but that was enough. Cursing, he ordered the story squelched, and the phone line to WDQM began buzzing. In New York an ace copywriter had a recording of the broadcast and Bahr's personal instructions ringing in his ears began to create, out of nothing, a cover-lie. DlA ground cars intercepted the station's TV field unit en route to the scene, and took the driver and technicians into custody for interrogation and indoctrination.
But the move was not fast enough. Even while the cover-story was being written, Station BCQN in Canada, on a network that was not under DIA censorship, called WDQM for details. Someone at the station blundered and said the story had been killed. Fifteen minutes later, in a scheduled newscast, the Canadian station opened the dike.
"A mysterious explosion last night in the vicinity of the Wildwood, Illinois, Atomic Power Project, has become the subject of a furious DIA censorship move," the announcer said. "Earlier this evening Station WDQM-TV reported two eye-witness accounts of the strange blast, which occurred shortly after midnight, but further details have been totally suppressed. In spite of the censorship move, however, an amateur radio group TBX-57HC3 picked up some police-frequency radio chatter last night, tentatively identified as originating in the blast area. TBX has been able to provide us with a tape recording of this chatter, which we have edited somewhat in preparation for this rebroadcast."
Bahr was on the phone personally before the first sentence of the newscast was finished. He listened as the call went through to make sure it was going to be as bad as it sounded. Finally he was connected with the manager of the BCQN station.
"This is Julian Bahr, Assistant Director DIA, speaking for the director," he said. "We've just caught the beginning of your broadcast, and you seem to have some misinformation about the situation here at Wildwood."
"Really?" the manager's voice said languidly.
"We'll be glad to give you a complete picture of the situation in another half hour, but we'd like to request that you . . . er . . . hold off on that broadcast," Bahr said. "It might cause some . . . er . . . confusion to have different interpretations of the event in circulation."
"Yes, I should think it would," the manager said.
"Then you'll cancel the broadcast?"
"Oh, I'm really afraid that would be out of the question, Mr. Bahr." The voice was infinitely regretful, but quite firm. Bahr caught the remark from the radio about the tape
recording, and realized instantly that TBX was a cover code for one of the Canadian intercepts for BRINT. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
"BRINT picked up our 'copter chatter last night," hp said, looking at McEwen's white face.
"They've got to kill it," McEwen said hoarsely.
Bahr uncovered the mouthpiece. "We would appreciate it very much if you could hold that broadcast, somehow," he said, throwing up the lure. There was no time to lose.
"Er ... do you think we could get a reporting team into the area?" That meant, of course, a BRINT intelligence team.
"I doubt it," Bahr countered, curious to see just how eager BRINT was. "We'll give you a complete report."
"I'm not sure that would be completely satisfactory."
They were eager. Very eager.
"Well, but the Wildwood plant is a highly classified government project," Bahr said, "and our security people are naturally leery about commercial news agencies which aren't subject to our security regulations nosing around . . . not that I doubt your discretion. . . ."
"Of course, I understand the problem you have with security," the manager said, warming to the bargain. In the background Bahr could hear the first fragments of 'copter-chatter coming through—his own voice, directing the Unit Seven 'copters toward the strike area. "Still, we do have an obligation to our public to verify newscasts as thoroughly as we can." Meaning that BRINT knew something was in the wind but hadn't pinned it down yet. Bahr cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to McEwen and Carmine.
"BRINT wants in. Badly. They must have flushed Project Frisco and—"
He never finished the sentence. Quite suddenly McEwen clutched at his chest and moaned, his eyes bulging. His breath went ragged, his face turning blue.
"The chief!"
McEwen coughed, a strangled sound. Then his arms dropped and his body slumped back, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
"Get a doctor!" Bahr roared, slamming the phone down, the Canadian broadcast forgotten. "For Christ sake get a doctorl" He lifted McEwen onto the desk, stripped off his own jacket and put it over the director's chest, felt quickly for a pulse.
A doctor arrived in a few minutes, but it was too late. McEwen was dead, diagnosis coronary occlusion precipitated by overwork and sudden shock.
As the white-coated ambulance attendant carried the stretcher out, Frank Carmine put a hand on Bahr's shoulder. "Well, Julian," he said, "it looks like it's up to you, now."
Chapter Four
LIBDY ALLISON, make-up pencil in hand, was trying ineffectually to smoodi her dark red hair and paint her mouth back into shape as the small private elevator shot up from the lobby of the New York DEPEX building to DIA headquarters on the eightieth floor.
Julian was up there, she was certain of that, even though his office front-runner had denied it when she tried to contact him earlier. She sh
ould have known there was trouble in the wind when Julian didn't call her when he got back into town last night. She had tried to call him after midnight, and had gotten Frank Carmine instead, pleasantly apologetic but pleasantly firm. No, nothing wrong, just a dozen top-level conferences since he'd gotten back to New York. He'd be in touch with her, she shouldn't worry . . .
But, of course, he hadn't. Instead, there was a visit from Adams that morning in her office at DEPCO. Little, weasel-faced Adams, with his warm professional smile and his cold eyes watching her. Libby shuddered. Everything in her years of psychologist's training screamed out whenever Adams came near her, and she had wished for the thousandth time that somehow somebody in the whole great, sprawling social-and-psychological Stability Control organization that was DEPCO would break down just once and say exactiy what he was thinking in plain unadorned English instead of skirting and backing and filling and muddying up the already muddy waters with psychiatric jargon and fuzzy, suspicious, defensive little ideas.
Not that Adams had mentioned Julian, of course. Not a word about Julian. No request to review her case-work on him, no suggestion that a machine-analysis of her reports on him might be in order . . . nothing as straightforward as that from the DEPCO Director. Instead, a lot of smooth, innocent DEPCO jargon about the threat that an aggressive, unstable, ambitious personality in a position of responsibility presented to the smooth functioning of a Truly Stable Society {she could quote Vanner and Larchmont page and verse); some "thoughts" on her sworn duties as a Department of Control psychotherapist to help identify and weed out such unstable personalities before they could constitute a threat; some very vague and veiled and thoroughly nasty remarks to the effect that fornication and psychotherapy were not precisely synonymous and that the former could not really serve as an adequate substitute for the latter, no matter what the non-professional relationship of the therapist and the patient.
Adams hadn't said a single word about Julian, but it was there; he had been talking about Julian every inch of the way, and he knew it, and she knew it, and he knew that she knew it.
She hadn't slapped his face, but she had wanted to, and he knew that, too. There was no voiced threat when he had left her, only the least tangible of implications, and yet Libby knew beyond any shadow of doubt that something had happened last night, something bad, and that Adams knew about it, and hence DEPCO, and that neither Adams nor DEPCO liked it.
The elevator stopped, and Libby stepped across to the DIA reception desk. "I have an appointment to see Mr. Bahr," she told the girl.
"Do you have a pass?"
"I have an appointment."
"I'm sorry, Miss. Mr. Bahr has canceled all appointments. You'd need a special authorization."
So there was something in the wind ... all that commotion on the Foreign and Eastern news nets about an explosion at Wildwood. "Let me speak to him, then." She picked up the desk phone, started to dial Julian's extension.
"I'm sorry, Miss." The receptionist gave Libby an innocent stare. "Mr. Bahr gave orders not to be interrupted."
Libby reached into her handbag and set her white DEPCO card on the desk under the girl's nose. "If I have to get a force-order to talk to him," she said icily, "Mr. Bahr is going to be very unhappy about it." She was surprised, and then irritated that Bahr had forgotten their appointment. No, not forgotten ... his memory was very good. He had ignored it. A moment later the receptionist answered the switchboard, flushed, and nodded to Libby.
"Hello, Julian? Libby." He answered something, quite abrupt. "But I can't," she protested. "Not over the phone. And it's too hot down there anyway." She pulled the receiver away from her ear and glanced angrily at the ceiling as the invective grated over the wire, quite audible ten feet away. "All right," she said finally. "I know you don't give a damn. On the other hand, I do. We don't just skip appointments . . ." She put in the knife. "It looks very bad on a Stability Report, you know . . ."
A moment later she put the phone down and snapped her handbag shut with finality. She smiled warmly at the receptionist. "He'll see me," she said.
The long, high-ceilinged DIA headquarters was the center of a storm of subdued but feverish activity. There were half a hundred men there as Libby passed through, and a haze of cigarette smoke rose in the room, sucked upward by the ventilators. Telephones buzzed sharply; at some of the desks men were handling two and three calls at a time, speaking in rapid, hushed voices. For all the activity there was an unnatural hush over the place; a bank of teletypes clattered along one wall, and a dozen unit-dispatchers were speaking into sound-dampened microphones.
Everywhere was a flurry of clerks, division heads, scribes, all so feverishly intent on what they were doing that they nearly tripped over her as she came down the corridor.
Across the dispatching room she could see a huge wall map, with red flags mounted for each DIA field unit alerted —the focal point for all the activity—and Libby felt a sudden sick, uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. There was an air of tension here, a sense of suppressed urgency that suddenly recalled to her the confused, puzzling nature of the morning TV-cast she had seen. A powder keg smoldering, with the DIA working full strength to keep it under control, working so silendy and smoothly that no one else sensed it, while the whole country coasted along in its usual indifferent, video-hypnotized, confident, imperturbably stable way.
She had a mental picture, suddenly, of a calm ripple-free ocean surface, with monsters locked in some sort of leviathan death struggle just beneath the surface.
The door to McEwen's office was wide open. Julian Bahr sat at the director's desk, the cone of a dictating machine in one hand. Frank Carmine was nearby. A dozen other people were there, shoving reports under Bahr's nose, leaning over to exchange a word or phrase, nodding sharply and hurrying off. He saw her, and said something almost audible and unpleasant to Carmine, and went back to his dictating. His voice cut sharply across the murmur in the room, incisive, impatient, commanding.
She did not see McEwen, and the sick feeling grew stronger. Here was the center of the sense of urgency and tension that pervaded the place. Bahr's face was tense and angry, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth a hard, confident line as he dictated. With her trained psychologist's eye Libby could see the danger signals like foot-tall handwriting on the wall. The controls, the adjustments she had tried so hard to build into his personality were beginning to snap, one by one.
"Julian, I want to talk to you."
He slammed the microphone down and pulled her to the side of the room. "Damn it, Libby, I can't see you now. Go on down below and I'll be down when I can break away."
"We have an appointment now."
"Yes, I know. In an hour."
"You're lying. You're stalling me, and you know it."
His scowl deepened. "So I'm lying. I told you I'm busy."
"I know you're busy. So am I. That's why I've got to talk to you today. Now."
"Look," he said, "I've got a Condition C problem to handle, and a new job to get under control. I don't have time for your . . . interview."
The deliberate vulgar connotation on the last word made her face flush red, but she refused to be driven off with insults. "All right," she said, "then I'll drop your case right now. I'll have another worker assigned to you tomorrow, if you like. A man, in case you don't want any more . . . interviews . . . with women."
Bahr stared at her, his face heavy with anger. She knew she had struck his Achilles' heel—his savage, almost pathological fear of the DEPCO mind invaders, the one beast in his Twenty-First Century jungle he did not know how to cope with. He glared at her, his hand still clutching her arm. Then he nodded to the anteroom that still had his name on the door, and pushed her roughly inside. He kicked the door shut and turned on her. "All right, what do you want?"
"Julian, what's going on here? Where's Mac?"
Bahr told her. It was like a slap in the face. "We're keeping it out of the newscasts until we have things under better control. Of cou
rse we notified the key government people."
"But . . . dead." She shook her head helplessly. Now there was no doubt why Adams had come to her office.
"He's had a bad heart for a long time," Bahr said.
"Particularly since you've been bucking him," Libby said bitterly.
"Look, Lib, you know I'd have gone down on the floor for Mac. When he heard that Project Frisco had been compromised, it was more than he could take."
"And you're the director now," Libby said.
"For the time being, yes. I can't let this Project Frisco sag while DEPCO bickers about a new appointment."
"Oh, it won't sagl Not with Julian Bahr running things." She turned on him viciously. "You should have seen yourself out therel The Commanding General, whipping his whole Army into trembling readiness. They're like a pack of bloodhounds baying for the hunt. You love it, don't you? Blood pressure up, adrenals pumping, ego swelling up like a big purple balloon. . . ."
"That's about enough from you," Bahr said.
"No, it's not quite enough, Julian. Adams was in to see me this morning. You're going to have to resign as director."
"Resign!" The anger fell away from Bahr's face, leaving incredulity in its place. "But I've been working for five year for this job."
"I know that. I've been watching you, and I knew all along it was coming to this. You can't keep the job. DEPCO won't let you."
"They've got to let me," Bahr said flatly. "Nobody else knows what Project Frisco is . . . not even BRINT. They're going out of their minds over there; they don't even know the cover-name for the Project. But since Wildwood, Project Frisco is a Condition C operation. We aren't dealing with Eastern Bloc activity, Lib. It's more than that."
Then he told her about the U-metal, and the exit monitors, and the whole story.
"You mean you think something . . . extraterrestrial . . . was responsible for the raid?"
"For everything. God knows how long it's been going on. The thermite fires, the disappearances . . . Did you know that James Cullen vanished from his home last night? There's no man in the country who knows more about our Stability Control system, and now all of a sudden he's gone. Libby, somebody's got to track this thing down and find out what's happening while there's still time. Nobody else could do it, but I can push it through. I'll do it if I have to run my men into their graves." He stopped suddenly. "You think I'm lying, don't you?"
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