Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer

by The invaders are Coming

  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 die officer's quarters.

  There were many women there, with hungry pinched faces. Someone was playing a piano, and through the partly opened door he could see Ruth dancing while everybody watched. Her face was flushed, her eyes were sharp and hard with a vision of death and hatred. The men laughed and shouted to her, and she smiled, and sang something in French, and went on with her dance.

  Julian had turned and walked away, then, and never looked back. Until now, as he walked through Libby's empty apartment, staring at the empty drawers, the empty closet, the empty crib.

  He drove his fist down on the table, snapping a leg and splintering the top. Pain surged through his wrist, and rage boiled out of control. He moved about the room, half-blind, smashing, kicking, destroying until the rage had burned down to a hard red coal. Then he opened the door and went out into the hall.

  Libby had walked out. After all he had done for her, even after what had happened tonight, she had walked out, left him flat, turned her back on him.

  But this time he wouldn't walk away.

  This time he wasn't hungry, frightened, helpless. This time he was in command, and he would see her burn in hell before he was through with her. This time she would suffer, the way he had suffered.

  And then, when he was through with her, there was the boy.

  He turned to his men, and swiftly, carefully, he began giving his orders.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ONCE THE WALL was broken down, Bahr moved fast, driving ahead with the bulldozer force that meant safety and security and hope to the people who looked to him to lead them.

  Even Alexander and MacKenzie had not anticipated the speed with which the man would move. For MacKenzie, there was endless work and a nightmare of administrative detail in the BRINT field offices. For Alexander it meant a growing desperate urgency to develop and crystallize the plan he had seen only in its barest outlines, an urgent necessity to re-evaluate the situation continually, with the everpresent responsibility of picking the right time, the exactly right time, to move.

  He spent days on the flat, multi-volume dossier on Julian Bahr from the BRINT top-sec files, the thousands of feet of recording tape, the miles of motion picture film, and the endless succession of documents, memos, notes, affidavits, opinions, history-segments that the BRINT network had so painstakingly accumulated.

  And through it all he saw the governmental structure of Federation America tremble, totter and crumble under the driving force of one man and a project called Project Tiger.

  The changes were sweeping, and fundamental. With die Robling combine under national—and Bahr's personal—control, the first moves were swift. At White Sands, for thirty years a ghost town, the shabby, burned out, gutted and abhorred remains of the old XAR project were exhumed. Like a phoenix rising from its own ashes, White Sands became a booming metropolis. The buildings were rebuilt; the country was combed for scientists, engineers, technicians, craftsmen —anyone who had contributed or could contribute, until the newly organized technical schools could pour out their new blood. Blueprints were drawn from dusty files, materials poured South, and the abandoned shell of the final XAR ship disappeared be
neath a new scaffold crawling with workmen.

  As the progress reports and development plans were read, the research director for the defense section of the old DEPEX rose in protest. "What you are proposing is impossible," he told Bahr in the hot, crowded conference room one morning. "The economy cannot support it. It would require an effort equivalent to a major war, and even then I could never guarantee success."

  "We are engaged in a major war," Bahr said, "and there will have to be changes in the economy."

  "But the changes you are talking about aren't possible without reducing the population to a starvation level."

  "That may not be true," Bahr said, "and it certainly is immaterial. We have no choice in the matter, and starvation is the least national threat we are facing. Above all, we cannot afford to sentimentalize." The research director was encouraged to accept a job in another highly non-critical organization, and Bahr named a suitable replacement.

  Thereafter, steps were taken to alter the economy to comply with the demands that Project Tiger was already making.

  Bahr's manner of dealing with DEPCO was swift as the stroke of an axe, though far more humane. He did not arrest anybody in DEPCO. He simply cut off their funds, and red-carded every man, woman, and stripling in the DEPCO organization. A few hundred people were picked up for questioning, but there was no purge. Adams' subsequent suicide was unquestionably a suicide. Bahr did not even forbid the DEPCO people to go to work, or continue their research, but he told them in a firm, quiet voice that the economy was being reorganized to accomplish Project Tiger, and that long-range research programs which would not contribute to the major effect were being temporarily suspended. He promised them that as soon as funds were available, their pay would start again, but he conveyed to them in various subtle ways that there might be some delay.

  And through it all, an infiltration of trusted DIA men began into the bureaus, the planning commissions, the offices, and a slow, inexorable tightening of control began, a rerouting of the channels of authority in an upward pyramid which led, ultimately, into the office and the hands of a single man. There were more alien incidents, with the usual publicity and no captures, but the panic and terror which ensued was channeled and held in the rigid program which was to rid the skies of the aliens forever.

  It was a pattern as old as time, moving step by step in its dreadful familiarity, and Alexander and MacKenzie watched it. Every real tyrant in history had followed the pattern. . . . Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev . . . they all knew it well.

  But to Julian Bahr a far more important war, a private, personal war, was progressing, and he drove his fist into his hand again and again as die coal of rage burned brighter and brighter.

  It took the BRINT network and Harvey Alexander almost a week to pick up her trail, but he finally located her, in the filthy third-floor room in a run-down Boston suburban apartment house. He had only the BRINT profile of her to go on, which he had thought was remarkably complete, and it took him three days of surveillance to be sure that he had the right woman.

  When he was finally certain that she was not under DIA stakeout, he went up to the third-floor room, and knocked.

  She was staggering drunk, and her voice was hoarse and ragged. When she opened the door she had on a dirty bathrobe, with a towel around her hair, and she reeked of gin and cheap perfume. Behind her the room was a mess, clothes strewn around, makeup scattered, the bed disheveled. "You want something?" she said harshly. "I don't want to stand in this doorway all night."

  Alexander pushed past her into the room and closed the door. She looked at him, and shrugged, and went across to the half-finished drink on the bureau. "Sure, all right, come in," she said. "Who asked you in here?" Then her eyes opened wider, and she seemed to see him for the first time, and her face was frightened. "DIA?" she asked.

  "Make some coffee," Alexander said. "I want to talk to you."

  "Thanks, I'll stay drunk."

  He hit her viciously across the face twice, and dragged her by the collar of her bathrobe over to the wash basin. He made her throw up, and wiped her face off with a wet towel. He made some surro-coffee, and she sat bent over drinking it, her eyes closed, tired and defeated and sick. She threw up the second cup; by then she was fairly sober, and her face was dead with exhaustion and fear. "Who are you? What do you want? Why can't you just leave me a-lone?"

  It looked bad, and Alexander shook his head. Her red hair was an unkempt mop, and her mouth sagged open in a stupid, beaten expression. He saw the bruise under one eye, the black-and-blue marks on her neck, and he ground his teeth. "For God sake clean up and get some clothes on," he said. "You make me sick to look at you."

  She did not protest, but picked up some clothes and headed for the bathroom.

  It was bad, far worse than he had expected. How could a woman go to pieces like that? He paced the floor, lit a cigarette, wondering if he had made a terrible error. He needed her, everything he had planned depended on her, but she would have to be strong, not broken and washed out.

  Clothes and make-up made a change. She seemed a little more alive when she reappeared. He stood up. "All right, my name is Alexander, and I'm not DIA. I'm with Army Intelligence, assigned to BRINT. I want to talk to you, but it's nearly dinner time. I have a car outside. Where do you want to eat?"

  Libby looked at him for a moment, confused and disbelieving, and her face colored. Then she seemed to stand a little straighter, to look more like the attractive, intelligent girl the BRINT dossier had described. "Do you know Boston?" she asked.

  "Chicago, yes.Boston, no."

  "I know a place . . ." She smiled at him. When they reached the car, he opened the door for her, and her eyebrows lifted slightly. "If this is an arrest," she said, "I hope they're all this way."

  It was not an arrest, and it was critical that she be made to understand that. Making friends with her, Alexander decided, had indeed been the right policy. A good meal, a couple of cocktails, some small talk, a little light banter—the rituals of a culture that had twice been eroded out of society, and Libby Allison was a new person. Her self-respect had been knocked apart. He would have to have the details, later, but she was basically a strong person, and Alexander began to feel that just possibly he might still accomplish what he wanted.

  He didn't question her that night, even though he was eager to sound her out. She looked exhausted, and her apartment was still a mess. He said he would be back in the morning, and left her at the door. Before he left the neighborhood, he made certain that the BRINT stakeout understood its job. She was to be there when he came back.

  As he had expected, the morning saw a new person. Drab as it was, the apartment was in order, and she offered him coffee when he came in. They talked, and Alexander told her enough to make it clear that he knew a great deal a-bout her, and about Bahr.

  And then, quite abruptly, the pain and terrible grief came out in a torrent, a storm of emotion that she had been tormenting herself trying to hold in. Alexander listened, and knew for the first time that he was going to win.

  "I knew he would be angry when I left him," she said. "I didn't realize that he would be so violently, vindictively furious. It wasn't just me, it couldn't have been just me; he never cared that much about me. It was something else that he had to make me suffer for.

  "The morning after I left, he canceled DEPCO. People were picked up for questioning, and the files cleaned out. He canceled my clearance and my stability rating, though of course those don't mean much now, unless he wants them to mean something. That first day his men found out where I was staying. When I came back home my car had been stolen and my apartment looted. I took Timmy and found another place. I thought if we could just wait it out for a few days he would forget it, it would blow over."

  She looked up at Alexander, and the fear and grief were still in her eyes. "I was wrong, oh, but I was wrong. The second day they attached my bank account, and I had no money. That afternoon the police came, with a committee of Educ
ation and Conditioning people. They were very regretful, but very firm. I didn't have a job, I didn't have an income, so obviously I could not adequately support a child. They took Tim away. I thought I knew Julian, but I couldn't believe that he'd let his own son go into the Playschool system. He did it just to hurt me. I tried to get in touch with him, but all I got was the run-around. Inside of three days I didn't have enough money to eat with Then Bahr nationalized my apartment building, and I was out. He put in this miserable currency reform, and I didn't have a bond or security that was worth the paper it was written on. Even my life insurance . . . well, you know the hell he's been raising with this economic mobilization

  She broke off, and poured herself a drink.

  "Why did you leave him?" Alexander said.

  "I wish I knew that. I wish I knew, for sure." The girl threw herself down on the sofa, searching his face as if somehow she might find the answer written there. "Mark Vanner wasn't really my uncle, but he brought me up from the time I was a little girl. He was a national figure when Julian Bahr was a scrawny little road-rat smuggling watered-down antibiotics for a living. Mark Vanner held this country together for years on just faith, and respect and decent, honest leadership. Do you think Julian Bahr could have done that?" She spread her hands helplessly. "Vanner was a man, a magnificent man. When he became chief of economic planning there wasn't a factory in operation anywhere in the country. He didn't have money, or a gang of gunmen to back him up. But he talked to people, and he went around to the colleges and defense agencies, and the people volunteered by the hundreds and thousands—the best minds in the country. They came to Washington, knowing that they weren't going to be paid, sincere people who believed in Mark Vanner and believed that his social-economic system •was the only thing that could pull us together again. Harrison, Kronsky, Williams, Otto Lieblitz . . . my mother and father before they were killed . . . those were the kind of people who started DEPCO."