The Invaders Are Comming!

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Quickly MacKenzie swung his light at the food locker. The door had been burned open, making a very smooth, slightly discolored cut. Food containers were scattered all over, some empty, some merely opened and discarded.

  “Christ, what a stink,” Bahr said, swinging the flashlight beam back and forth across the ground.

  “Hold it.” MacKenzie added his beam, and they looked at a small, reeking puddle of something greenish and disgusting.

  “Somebody heaved,” Bahr said.

  “Yes, I was about to say so myself. Apparently couldn’t stand the Bako stew. Can’t blame him, really . . . .”

  “Where in hell are the two men?” Bahr said. “Their camp’s been rifled, and not a sign of them.” He swung the light around at the trees and the ground. “Which way is the lake?”

  “About that direction, I’d say.” MacKenzie started through the trees. “There’s a path. Better leave your man behind, Bahr. We don’t want any more footprints than necessary until we get a look.”

  Bahr waved at Carmine to stay back, and followed the BRINT man, who was threading his way through the alders. Ahead was a glint of sunset light from the lake. They moved silently, Bahr holding the burp poised in his right hand, finger on the trigger, MacKenzie searching ahead with his flash.

  “Hold on.”

  They stopped. Something gleamed up ahead on the path. They moved closer, and Bahr turned his light on too. “A camera. Movie camera. Why would somebody leave a camera lying out here?”

  “Dropped, I’d say. Seems to have bounced from . . .” MacKenzie moved the flashlight beam carefully, slowly along the ground down the path toward the lake.

  “Christ!” Bahr said. The flashlight beam had stopped. In the small circle of light was a man’s hand, palm down, fingers clawed stiffly, four furrows gouged into the soft dirt by the final desperate death agony.

  I think we’ve found the strike area,” MacKenzie said.

  Above the trees balloon flares hung, blindingly white, cutting the brush and pines into incredible patterns of light and shadow. Below on the ground flashbulbs popped, and small busy teams of men moved actively about, looking, measuring, probing, photographing, collecting, working silently or talking in hushed voices, but all very desperately urgent.

  Across the clearing, the film from the camera was being processed in the portable lab carried by one of the DIA ’copters. Bahr and MacKenzie stood over the body as the blanket was lowered into place. There was a large dripping hole through the man’s chest, and a stinking, grisly stain on the ground, as if the fleshy contents of the thorax had been melted out en masse, leaving the bare bones of the cavity.

  The body was sprawled facing away from the lake, hands outstretched, the face frozen in an expression of unimaginable horror.

  “Bernstein,” MacKenzie said. “The camera suggests that.”

  Bahr grunted. “We’ll know in a minute. A man is checking his prints and dental.” The big man paused, looking back at the lake. “He was running away from something, that’s sure. Must have hit him in the back.”

  “With what?” MacKenzie said.

  “Some sort of dum-dum.”

  “Looks more like a chemical agent to me.”

  “Well, what difference does it make?” Bahr said irritably, annoyed by the BRINT man’s quiet, infuriatingly reasonable contradictions. “We’ll have a lab check, of course.”

  “You might,” MacKenzie suggested, “try Oredos Vegas at the Puerto Rican Cancer Research Center. He’s been doing work with proteolytic enzymes . . . top man in the field.”

  Bahr turned to Carmine. “Have the machine section at DEPEX run a cross-index on protein solvents, and that man’s work,” he said. “If he’s done anything, it’ll be in the files.”

  “I doubt it,” said MacKenzie. “Your files may fall behind the researcher a bit. Vegas doesn’t publish work in progress.”

  “Then how do you know about him?”

  “We have an alert contact in the Research Center,” MacKenzie said amiably. Bahr scowled, repressing a sudden violent urge to take the little Scotsman by the throat and choke him. As usual, BRINT’s eclectic view of intelligence put them a jump ahead. “All right, if we can’t solve the problem ourselves, we’ll fly him up to our lab and put him to work on the case,” Bahr said.

  MacKenzie laughed cheerfully at this. Bahr turned and started toward the small group of men on the lakeshore, Carmine at his side, with the BRINT man following.

  Carmine checked a notebook. “We’ve got one field unit working the brush, and a group checking the camp area. There are some footprints down there on the lakeshore, but they aren’t distinct. Must have been raining.”

  “Anything from the roadblocks?”

  Carmine’s sneer said what he thought of BRINT roadblocks. “But we’ve found their two-wheeler. Smashed up in the trees a hundred yards back toward the road.”

  Bahr nodded. “This is beginning to add up,” he said to MacKenzie. “The ship landed somewhere near here, somebody entered the camp, killed Bernstein and tried to make a meal of the camp stores, then attempted to use the car to get out to the highway.”

  “Is that your analysis, from what you see?” MacKenzie broke in.

  “You see anything wrong with it?” Bahr snapped.

  “Just one thing. Where’s Russel? The other man.”

  “Find him,” Bahr said to Carmine. “Or his body. And tell them to get moving on that film.”

  They moved across the clearing through the huddles of DIA men, flashlights swinging unnecessarily because of the brilliant flare lights. As they walked, Bahr smouldered, wondering just what in hell MacKenzie was doing there in the first place getting in the way, wondering how he could be doing any investigating, since he didn’t seem to have a shred of equipment with him. He didn’t photograph or measure anything, didn’t pick up specimens; in fact, the BRINT man just seemed to be wandering about in his shapeless tweed overcoat with his hands in his pockets, watching, as if he were really amazed at the strange and inexplicable activities of the DIA men.

  Difference in methods, MacKenzie had said. Crimes investigated by BRINT were deliberate, logical distributions of motive and violence, and therefore soluble by introspective analysis of first principles, whereas crimes investigated by DIA were characteristic and unconscious behavior of deviants (criminals) and were therefore soluble by measurement and sorting. (Laughter from BRINT, mocking laughter.)

  For a brief, glorious moment Bahr had a mental picture of MacKenzie reduced to mouse-size and strapped down on a mouse board, his chest opened wide by a huge scalpel incision, and Bahr, with magnifying glass and probe, was lifting the BRINT man’s heart out with the probe and carefully counting the squoosh-squoosh contractions to find out what made him tick. The heart removed, he dropped the body in a tank of alcohol. The image recurred, cyclically, synchronized with Bahr’s steps, so that every time his right foot hit the heart came out, and every time the left foot hit, plunk, into the tank.

  By the time they reached the wrecked car Bahr had personally destroyed BRINT, mouse-man by mouse-man.

  There was no body of Russel at or near the wrecked car. No footprints along the rest of the path to the road, nor any sign of disturbance in the surrounding brush. The brush was a thicket of tightly-grown alder and vine maple; it would take a man ten minutes to get through ten feet of it.

  “The man didn’t just vanish,” Bahr snarled.

  “We’ve got ’copters working the brush with flares,” Carmine said. “They haven’t turned up anything.”

  “But this is impossible. Whatever killed Bernstein wouldn’t let his partner just run off. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It seems to me,” MacKenzie said slowly, “that it’s pretty obvious what happened. If I had your resources at hand, I’d send for an aqua-lung team.”

  Bahr turned to stare at him. “You think the ship landed in the lake?”

  “What better place for concealment? And why do you assume that the aliens in t
he ship would immediately take off across the countryside? Seems to me they’d need information first—about the country, routes, places of concealment—from somebody acquainted with the area. Like Russel, for instance.”

  Bahr scratched his jaw. “They’ve been picking up men all over the country . . . we’re sure of it.” He turned to Carmine. “How fast could you get Van Golfer up here? With a complete outfit?”

  Carmine calculated rapidly. “Maybe three hours.”

  “Get him,” Bahr said. “This time there won’t be any Wildwood tricks. If that ship is in there I’ll get it out if I have to dam and drain the lake to do it.”

  Several hundred feet of birdlife flickered by on the screen, good, bad, occasionally out of focus. Then suddenly there was a switch to a sky shot, without a filter, and nearly into the sun. Bahr squinted at the brightness, and slapped mosquitos in the little field-projection tent.

  “Must have seen the ship,” Bahr said. MacKenzie grunted as die next sequence came on. It was much darker, taken across the lake . . . something slanting down toward the water, a splash as a flat, discus-like object scaled like a rock, hit a second time and sank. The camera followed the bounce, then showed a long stretch of film as the lake settled and the waves damped down.

  “Too far from the camera to see much,” Bahr said. “We’ll have some blown-up stills.”

  “The lighting was very bad,” MacKenzie said.

  Something small and indistinct popped out of the lake like a cork, fell back and floated. The camera followed it, a barely visible dot, as it approached from the middle of the lake. The dot left a small wake, approached within a few yards of shore, directly under the camera, then began to rise out of the water.

  It was quite clear, in spite of the slight tremor of the camera. A bulbous, gleaming helmet two feet in diameter, and below the helmet a dripping pressure suit, a bisymmetrical body, completely humanoid except for grotesquely long thin legs. It slogged out of die water, easily ten feet tall, and moved toward the camera.

  Abruptly, the film stopped.

  MacKenzie scowled at the screen as the lights came on. “That’s part of your answer,” he said. “It landed in the lake.”

  “Get those lung men down there,” Bahr said. “I want two ’copters overhead with cables down, ready to pull them out fast. And, Carmine!”

  “Yes, Chief?”

  “I want a report on the slop back of the tent and the stuff from Bernstein’s chest.”

  “I’ll check,” Carmine said. “And they’re holding an urgent for you at the radio.”

  Bahr found the radio ’copter and took the yellow message sheet. It was signed by the New York DEPEX chief.

  BAHR DIRECTOR DIA STOP REFERENCE PROJECT FRISCO STOP JAMES CULLEN AND ARNOLD BECK REPORTED MISSING SUNDAY PM FROM UNIV MICH FOUND WANDERING IN DAZED CONDITION CENTRAL LOS ANGELES BY POLICE 2200 HOURS STOP TOTAL FORTY THREE OTHERS MISSING SIMILAR CONDITIONS STOP BELIEVE IMPORTANT STOP PLEASE ADVISE

  Bahr suddenly grinned at Carmine and handed him the slip. “Some of our missing people are turning up. Frank, I want you to take over here. Don’t miss a thing. Keep MacKenzie with you if he insists, but have those men find that ship if it’s the last thing you do. I want to know why they’re here, and what they’ve done to this man Russel.” He paused. “I’m going to see what they’ve done to Cullen and Beck . . . .”

  The radioman looked up from the headset. “Another urgent, Chief. Personal from Abrams in Chicago.”

  The message was just three words long, and Bahr swore when he saw it.

  “What is it?” Carmine asked.

  “Alexander,” Bahr said hoarsely. “Our nice, innocent, bumbling Major Alexander. He’s broken out of the Kelley.”

  Carmine blinked at him. “Chief, if he gets through to DEPCO . .

  “He won’t.” Bahr scribbled a quick message with Project Frisco priority and handed it to the radioman. “Abrams knows his stuff. Or he’d better.”

  MacKenzie came up the path with a smocked, balding DIA technician. “We were right about Bernstein. It was a proteolytic enzyme of some sort.” The technician pointed to a small ulcerous area on the back of his hand. “Still active as hell.”

  “And the slop?”

  “Nothing there. The food wasn’t chewed at all, just decomposed by acids and spewed out.”

  Bahr nodded. “All right, keep at it. And call down a ’copter. I have to go to Chicago. Carmine! Nail that ship.”

  He was actually looking right at the lake when the blast came—a sudden burst of light and a column of water shooting into the air, followed immediately by the shock wave which hit them as a muffled crash. The light went out, and the trees rocked and squeaked as the sudden wind passed through them. Bahr stared, then broke at a dead run for the water’s edge, MacKenzie at his side.

  “Those poor bastards,” somebody said.

  “Poor devils didn’t have a chance,” MacKenzie muttered. Still Bahr said nothing. For a long moment his stubborn, determined face had sagged, drained of color, the heavy jaw hanging slack as if he could not breath. Then he turned away, his head still shaking.

  “It’s too late to do anything now,” MacKenzie said.

  “Again,” Bahr said slowly. “They did it again!” With an effort, he caught control again, and his jaw shut and clenched. His eyes met MacKenzie’s, and the two men looked at each other, the hostility strangely absent from Bahr’s eyes. For an instant MacKenzie had the fleeting feeling that if he could say exactly the right thing, things between him and Bahr would be permanently different, but no idea came, and then the moment had passed. Bahr’s face was hard and remote as he turned back to Frank Carmine.

  “Get some medical up here. Do what you can, and then join me in Chicago. Be ready to bring MacKenzie down when he wants to go.”

  Carmine nodded and went about organizing the DIA activities while Bahr, still sobered to an almost passive point, climbed into the ’copter and sat brooding and silent while die rotor whined up to speed and lifted off the ground.

  The last thing he saw in the glare of the floodlights was Paul MacKenzie, standing back out of the way and watching him, and he wondered, vaguely, at the look of puzzlement and concern on the BRINT man’s troubled face.

  Chapter Seven

  “You can’t question these poor devils now,” Dr. Petri said. “They’re exhausted. They’re just recovering from shock. The only reason they’re not under heavy sedation right now is because your men told me . . . .”

  “I know, I know,” Bahr said impatiently. “It’s too bad, but they’ve got to be questioned.”

  “You’ll get much farther with them if you’ll let them sleep for eight hours.” The doctor flicked a 3-V switch. “Look at them.”

  Bahr glanced at the 3-V image of the Critical Ward. The men were there, not two, but seven—including the eminent James Cullen of the University of Michigan, one of the leading socio-economists in the country, and, it was said, one of the ten men in the world who fully understood the social, economic, and psychological implications of the Vanner-Elling equations. They were sprawled in R-chairs, glassy-eyed and haggard, trying to relax and sleep in the face of the sustaining drugs they had been given. They did not look like the leading scientists of a nation. They looked like living dead men.

  “We can’t wait,” Bahr said. “If we let them sleep, they won’t come out of it for days, and we’ve got to know what happened to them.”

  “Mr. Bahr, you don’t understand the strain . . . .”

  Bahr pulled himself to his feet. “You take care of the bodies, Doctor. I’ll make the decisions about what we do with them. I’ll want each of them in a separate room, and I’ll want somebody with me who can keep them awake. Is that clear? I mean wide awake.”

  The doctor took a breath and left the office, leaving Bahr glaring at the wall clock. Fleetingly, he thought of the return trip from Canada. A DIA car had met him at the landing field, whisked him through the downtown Chicago streets with siren at full blast, b
ut even that brief ride had brought him back shockingly to the change that had been taking place since the Wildwood raid.

  He had not seen the normal early-morning bustle of people on the streets. Instead, people were gathered on street corners, moving listlessly into the buildings. A huge crowd had gathered to watch the morning newscast, projected on the eight-story screen on the Tribune building, with John John relaying the latest news from BURINF, but it had been an uneasy crowd. A dozen times on the way to the hospital he had heard police sirens wailing.

  And at the hospital, the sudden appearance of TV cameras, and a dozen newsmen, all of them talking at once about the European newsbreaks and about an alien landing, asking for confirmation or denial, complaining bitterly about the anemic information BURINF had made available.

  He had shouldered his way through them, repeating his “Sorry, boys, nothing now,” until a woman’s voice, quite loud, cut through the babble of voices.

  “Isn’t it true, Mr. Bahr, that your appointment as Director of DIA has not been approved, pending a DEPCO check?”

  Bahr stopped, found the woman’s face. “Who gave you that information?”

  “Just rumors, Mr. Bahr.”

  “Well, you can publish that I have assumed John McEwen’s post in DIA, pending appointment of a new director, for reasons of National Security, and you can serve the interests of National Security a great deal by refusing to spread any more nasty rumors than you can help.” He started on, and added, “I don’t know who the new director will be, and right now I don’t care. I’m simply doing a job that has to be done.”

  It had sounded all right, he thought now, but it had come too close to the mark. He looked up as Dr. Petri came to the door, nodded to him.