Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer

by The invaders are Coming

  As soon as the guard hit the floor Alexander unzipped the front of his light blue duty coveralls. Then he hoisted the limp form to his shoulder and hurried back to the room. Smoke was billowing out the door, and in the distance he heard the fire gong clanging. He held the coveralls and let the guard slide out of them like an egg yolk. Once into the coveralls, he shoved the guard's body into the smoke-filled room.

  At the end of the corridor there was a sudden burst of noise . . . undoubtedly the fire squad. Alexander took a deep breath, and plunged into the smoke. He seized the guard's ankle and began to back out slowly, coughing noticeably as the first of the emergency crew arrived.

  Eager hands assisted him to get the guard, face down, out of the room. Someone started artificial respiration, and Alexander coughed into his hands and backed away as more people and equipment began to arrive. An extinguisher began to spray the smoldering mattress, which threw up great clouds of acrid black smoke. In twenty seconds Alexander was walking slowly away, past several interns who were hurrying toward the noise, and into the main-wing corridor of the George Kelley Hospital.

  With the first step behind him, Alexander moved swiftly toward the service elevator which had brought up the fire-fighting equipment. It was only a matter of time before somebody noticed that the victim in the smoke-filled room was a guard and not a patient; he had to get beyond the hospital walls before the security alarm went off.

  He had long since discarded the idea of posing as a dischargee, impossible because discharge hours were over for the day; or as a guard or even a doctor, impossible because the fingerprint-check would stop him cold at the gate. He knew the hospital used plastic sheets and gowns which were sterilized and remolded after use, so no laundry trucks ever left the compound. Food cartons and supplies came in from outside on standard conveyor strips, X-ray checked as they entered. Garbage and trash were similarly conveyed out in sealed drums.

  But in Buenos Aires, Alexander had noticed a curiosity in that hospital's security procedure which he thought should be present in the Kelley's system as well.

  He found the morgue in the basement, adjacent to a loading platform in the rear of the main part of the building. He reached it through an employee's stairwell and a concrete tunnel leading past the power pile.

  Chicago, like all major cities, had a central autopsy room; and the Kelley, like other hospitals in the city, shipped all its cadavers there on a day-to-day basis. The transit was usually made at night to avoid traffic on Wahanakee Drive. Now Alexander saw that the truck was still waiting, backed up to the loading platform while the drivers were in the cafeteria for coffee. There were four wheeled stretchers, with sheets covering the bodies, loaded into the back of the refrigerated truck.

  Alexander scrambled up the tailgate, peering into the truck. Back of the stretchers the undomed gyro was spinning, an almost inaudible high-pitched hum coming from the flywheel. Back of the gyro unit was a two-foot work space with a spare wheel and half a dozen plastic sheets.

  He heard the drivers returning, and crouched down behind the gyro, half-covering himself with a sheet. Heavy footsteps came to the back of the truck; then the tailgate squeaked up. The doors closed with a clang, and he was locked in with four bodies in a black and freezing coffin.

  The blackness took him by surprise; he hadn't counted on it, and for a moment he fought down a rising wave of panic. In spite of the sheets he began shivering with cold. He heard the driver rev up the motor, and the truck gave a lurch and began moving.

  There were three stops, the last one accompanied by the noise of the exit-gate swinging open. Then they were rolling . . . outside.

  He waited until his teeth were chattering with cold, and he was certain the truck was on open Throughway. Then he groped forward in the darkness until his hand touched the gyro mount. The gyro was one of the air-driven Robling types, very simple, very reliable, the flywheel driven by a tiny stream of air impinging on the peripheral turbine blades. Once it was in motion, very little energy was needed to keep the heavy rotor turning at a high enough speed to stabilize the truck. The flywheel and turbine blades were shielded, but directly under the pressure nozzle there was a slot to let the air out. The air stream produced the hum, and Alexander felt around the rim of the turbine casing until he felt the cool steady jet.

  He moved his fingertip up gingerly until he felt the turbine blades nick the tip of his fingernail like a buzz saw. Then he pulled one of the toilet paper rollers out of his pocket.

  Wrapping his hand carefully in one of the plastic sheets, he

  rammed the metal roller up against the spinning turbine.

  There was a shower of hot sparks, and the turbine screamed and shuddered. The metal rod began to heat up as the turbine blades ground down the soft metal. Suddenly the whole Iruck bucked and lurched, throwing him down onto the stretchers; the flywheel dropped below critical stability RPM, and the truck tipped and fell over on one side with a long skidding crash, wrenching the doors open and dumping three corpses out on top of him on the ground.

  There were curses from the cab, and the drivers piled out. "Musta been the gyro. What in hell went wrong with it?"

  "Oh, my God. Look at the stiffs all over the place."

  "Never mind the stiffs, what happened to the gyro? Where's the flashlight?" Together the drivers shoved the corpses and Alexander unceremoniously out of the way and crawled into the truck with the flash. Neither one noticed that one of the corpses had coveralls on.

  There were headlights coming down the road, and Alexander slid hastily into the shadow of the truck as the car roared by. Then he crouched low and ran over to the shoulder of the road. He slithered down into a drainage ditch as two more cars approached, slowed, and stopped.

  He knew he was on Wahanakee Drive, but he didn't know where. There were apartment buildings nearby, and now people were running down the road toward the wrecked truck. In the distance he heard the first faint rising whine of a siren.

  Alexander hurried down the drainage ditch, then climbed up and crossed the highway as the steady trickle of people grew into a crowd and jammed the traffic, their voices rising on the excitement. He walked slowly away, fighting the urge to run, staying out of the way of people who kept hurrying clown to the road, expecting at any moment that the drivers would discover what had happened to their gyro and begin to wonder how four naked corpses had managed to wreck it so completely.

  He was out.

  He found an apartment building with the door wide open, the tenants out on the highway sharing in the excitement. He picked up the lobby phone, dialed a suburban Chicago number. Three long rings, and then a woman's voice said, "Hello?"

  "BJP"

  "Yes. Who is this?" "This is Harvey."

  There was a moment's silence, then a cool, deliberate answer. "Oh . . ."

  "Listen to me, BJ," he said urgently. "This is very important. I'm over on Wahanakee Drive, at the Kingston Apartments. Can you pick me up at the parking lot by the north entrance?"

  "Can't you take a cab over?" The voice was distant, noncommittal.

  "No," he said, "I can't. I'm in trouble."

  "I'll be right over." There was a click, and Alexander put the phone back on the hook. He wiped his prints off it and then walked out of the back exit into the parking lot. He could hear more sirens on the highway, and a police 'copter roared overhead, sliding down toward the wrecked truck. It was only a matter of time, now, he realized, whether BJ got to him before the police did.

  Harvey Alexander knew Chicago, at least suburban Chicago, fairly well, having spent three of his Christmas vacations here during his West Point days, courting his now ex-wife, Betty Jean Wright. From her apartment to this part of Wahanakee Drive was about twenty minutes, he estimated, if the driver was in a hurry. He hoped the police would start searching the buildings before throwing up road blocks. That might give him time enough.

  If they blocked the roads it would be bad, but it seemed more likely that the people at Kelley would mak
e a thorough search inside the hospital before assuming that he had gotten through their foolproof security system.

  He smiled wryly to himself. Amazing how natural it was for a man who developed a security system to assume it was foolproof.

  Still, the Kelley would certainly notify the police and the DIA about him as soon as they heard of the wrecked truck. And he didn't want to get BJ in trouble with the police and DIA, smashed-up marriage or no.

  He remembered another parking lot behind the old Oak Park Country Club. Back in '94, he had been a third-year man at the Point, captain of the chess and judo teams, and lie had very matter-of-factly started to change a flat tire on her father's new Electro two-wheeler which they had borrowed for the dance. He hadn't understood the techniques for capsizing the car by cranking the gyro around, and had tried to topple it with a borrowed jack. After much muttered profanity and sweat he wound up with one end of the car high in the air and began straining to make it fall over on one side so he could get at the wheel. BJ doubled over and screamed with laughter, and the Competition, a physicist from Chicago U., offered carefully baited suggestions in his sarcastic midwestern drawl.

  He didn't remember the exact move and countermove, but somehow BJ had talked the Competition into changing the tire, with accompanying lecture on the scientific method and the principles of gyro mechanics, while they quietly climbed into the Competition's British four-wheeler and drove off. They ran the car out of gas somewhere along Lake Michigan at four AM, and hitched a ride back on a milk truck, coming up the front walk toward the anxious parents and sulking Competition at six-thirty, and squelching all criticism and admonitions by announcing their engagement.

  He graduated from the Point the next year, three months early because of the crash, and he and BJ got married the next day in the barbed-wire-enclosed Church of the Redeemer in New York against the advice of parents, relatives, and their own common sense.

  The crash . . . dirty, stinking, bloody crash . . . that knocked the whole world face first into the dirt, knocked their marriage around, too. He saw BJ twice in the first three years. The second time, when he had the two weeks leave they had planned on for ten months, he was ordered back on active duty the second day and sent to China because of the sudden Yangtze truce. BJ blew up then and told him she was sick of it. He blamed her parents, and told her she was selfish and childish and a lot of other stupid, angry things, and left.

  When he came back from China two and a half years later, she told him she was divorcing him. The Competition, quickly switching his field of work from physics to sociology, along with the more agile of the intelligensia of the country, had fallen into a cushy, high-stability-rating job in DEPCO, the new Department of Economic and Psychological Control that had taken over the shattered government while he was in China. The Competition had been most attentive, and convincing. BJ married him as soon as the divorce papers came through.

  When Alexander saw her some eight years later, on his way through Chicago to Mexico, he learned that the second marriage had folded too. Of course any marriage lasting over five years in those days was a minor miracle, but BJ was bitter and disappointed about it. They got drunk together for old time's sake, but she was all walled off by then, and there was nothing between them any more.

  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

  !>y;<"

  "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 thing."

  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 Üiey 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 lo 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 (he 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."