“You mean the fear of space?”
“I mean the fear of spaceships,” Whiting said. “You have no idea how deeply it penetrates. You have no idea how we’ve struggled to sublimate it since the crash.” Whiting sighed, his eyes taking on a dreamy look. “Vanner recognized it, long before the crash; at least he read the symptoms. He even recognized what had to be done: to anchor the Vanner-Elling system, to drive technology from the minds of the masses, especially the future masses. That was the only hope for stability, and we needed stability at any price. A brilliant vision. Vanner was afraid of it because of the repercussions, but Larchmont . . . .”
Suddenly, Bahr tagged him. Whiting . . . of course! The one Libby had told him about that night at the Colony Club, when they both had been a little drunk, and gotten to laughing so hard their sides had hurt. Whiting . . . the last of the pure Eros men left in DEPCO, a protege of the legendary Larchmont who had almost succeeded in converting the educational system of the country into a vast group-analysis instrument during the shaky, formative days of the Vanner-Elling government. Larchmont had not quite succeeded in putting that through, but he had left the imprint of his own occult personality permanently in the psychology of the country, and in the government.
It had been his followers who had shifted the romantic folklore of the country from the old fallacy of the Clean-Cut-Hero-Beautiful-Heroine-In-Love Hollywood standard to the even more horrendous fallacy of the Be-Her-Daddy-Be-His-Little-Nymph concept of the current fictofilms, poptunes and couch confessionals.
And Whiting was a Larchmont man, a psychoanalytical dreamer, a fantasy rambler, kept on by DEPCO in the Foreign Affairs office because he was harmless, and a handy repository for the grasshopper-minded fringes of the psychological world, also harmless because nothing ever happened in Foreign Affairs.
But now something had happened. The foreign nets handling the alien story came under Whiting, and naturally Whiting came to Bahr. But what Whiting had to say was another thing. Bahr relaxed, suddenly feeling warmly exultant, listening now to see how Whiting, who after all did have DEPCO authority, could be used.
“. . . We interpreted the spaceships as phallic symbols,” Whiting was saying eagerly. “At the height of the crash, I here was the tremendous father-hatred and Oedipus feeling toward the ships. The mobs smashed the last one before it was even completed, so we used the father-hatred to persuade I he masses to reject the ideas of the former legal and military governments. And we had the computers. We had to use them because Vanner, after all, was the political rallying point. But the idea of putting them into the caverns was a stroke of genius on Larchmont’s part. The computers meant security and warmth and protection and anti-spaceships, and they were in the caverns . . . a magnificent Oedipus feeling.”
Bahr glanced across at Paul MacKenzie, who was sitting sleepy-eyed and unperturbed through this emotional drenching that Whiting was pouring out. MacKenzie apparently had heard this litany before. He seemed to be the only one in the room, besides Bahr, who was not caught up in the revival-meeting feeling.
“What you mean to say,” Bahr cut Whiting off in mid-sentence, “is that the people now have an enormous guilt-fear of spaceships and, by association, are afraid of aliens. Is that right?”
Whiting seemed stunned by Bahr’s succinct summation of his still unfinished Articles of Faith. “Well . . . well, yes, that is . .
“All right,” said Bahr. “Now listen carefully. We’ll have to give them the truth . . . as we see it, of course. We can use sibling rivalry toward the aliens because of their humanoid form. Of course, we’ll have to declassify that.” He spoke swiftly, powerfully, hoping that he wouldn’t get Libby’s little bedroom lectures on theoretical psychodynamics so badly scrambled that even Whiting in his ecstatic state would choke on them. “Then we’ll play up the non-phallic shape of the alien spaceships, and feature protection and security as coming from a computer-guided defense against the aliens . . . from the caverns, of course.”
He was afraid for a moment that MacKenzie might laugh out loud and spoil the whole thing, but the BRINT man managed to suppress the reaction in a fit of coughing. Whiting was nodding eagerly.
“Brilliant . . . brilliant . . . Larchmont would have liked that idea.”
“Certainly that approach will cut any panic off at the root,” Bahr said gravely. “No need for a Condition B alert. With DEPCO authority—from you—well handle the security by compartmentalizing the country by ethnic areas; we’ll play up the We-group against the Aliens. Of course, we will need a Condition B censorship on newscasts and travel.”
Whiting looked doubtful. “That’s quite a lot to ask for.”
“Don’t worry,” Bahr said. “I’ll see that the Joint Chiefs go along, if you’ll back me.”
“And of course there’ll have to be careful work on the news releases from BURINF,” Whiting said, warming to the idea.
“I’ll take care of that,” Bahr said. “For a news break like this, we won’t want a written release. We’ll need a personal address.”
“Of course!” Whiting agreed. “We have some people who could put it very nicely.”
“No need for that,” Bahr said firmly, completely confident now. “I’ll do the talking myself.”
The broadcast was made at seven o’clock in the evening from the BURINF studios in New York, where Bahr had flown when he finally broke free of Whiting. Since noon, when the Condition B news blackout had fallen, the powerful BURINF TV net had moved into action, co-ordinating trailer broadcasts, reaching every radio, public address microphone and television set in the nation. BURINF had had long and fruitful experience with mass audience control as a major vector force in implementing DEPCO policies; in the seven hours of maximum saturation they were able to guarantee an 80% viewing at announcement-time, with rebroadcast catching an additional 17% by midnight.
The substance of the trailers alone was sufficient to guarantee maximum attention. The blackout was a calculated blow, with a single item of information coming through from all sources: that the director of DIA would discuss minors of an alien invasion of Earth.
“You’ve got to be careful,” Libby told him, checking his TV make-up carefully. “They’ll be watching every gesture, every mannerism.”
“Certainly they will,” Bahr growled. “That’s what I want.”
“I don’t mean the public. I mean DEPCO. Adams was lu lions when he got Whiting’s report. They’re watching you, and I can’t stall them much longer.”
“Of course you can,” Bahr said. “You’re doing fine.”
“When did you sleep last?”
“I don’t need any sleep. I feel great.” He nodded to a technician who signaled from the control window, got up, and walked into the BURINF broadcasting room.
Libby was right: they were watching him. The cameras picked him up as he came through the door, and he could feel the hush of voices in the darkened room and across the nation, waiting, watching him. His mouth tightened in a flat smile he couldn’t control. This was the moment he had been building for. The past doesn’t matter any more, he told himself savagely as he crossed the room. Nothing matters any more except this thing now. It doesn’t matter that they gave you a green card to keep you down, to break you. It doesn’t matter that they court-martialed you out of the Army. All your life they’ve been trying to break you, trying to jam you down into the mold, and all your life you’ve fought back, and now you’re going to win.
He saw himself in the monitor screen as he walked to the microphone in the center of the booth, carrying his coat, his shoulder holster with the gleaming and deadly Markheim stunner showing, flanked by Frank Carmine on his right. Vaguely his ears picked up the commentator chattering the introduction in a hushed voice.
“. . . Julian Bahr, Acting Director DIA, who is going to make a statement to the people of Federation America about the urgent national crisis which has arisen. Mr. Bahr’s assistant is seated now. Mr. Bahr is putting on his coat. He has been wor
king right up to the moment on the solution of the crisis. And now, friends, the Director DIA, Mr. Julian Bahr.”
Silence lay heavily as Bahr waited, looking out at the gray faces in the room, sensing the desperate hush before ninety million TV sets across the country. He saw Adams’ face, tense and grim, watching him, and far to one side, the face of an elderly man with an unruly shock of white hair, watching him.
And then his voice came, heavily resonant, powerful, commanding and yet reassuring. “Friends, there is no longer any question that we are facing a national crisis. We know that alien ships have made a landing on Earth in the first wave of a silent invasion. They are among us now . . . .”
Chapter Eight
Carl Englehardt, lean-faced and impatient, paused for a moment on the exit platform of the New York-Washington jetliner, then spotted the waiting Volta with the official license tags and the dark-suited DIA guards. He hurried down the ramp and skirted the slowly dissipating airport crowd, moving at the quick restless pace that made him look, at a distance, like a man of thirty-five except for his lined face and unruly shock of white hair.
He climbed into the Volta with an impatient nod to the DIA driver, and settled back with a cigarette from his engraved titanium case as the car started up the long ramp to the elevated streets of rebuilt Washington.
He had heard of the urgently-called meeting of the Joint Department Chiefs six hours before Bahr’s sensational announcement broadcast, first from certain sources in BRINT, then through official channels indicating that his presence at the meeting would be desirable, not to say imperative, with full endorsed approval of DEPCO and all the other agencies involved. Now, he relaxed for a moment, chuckling. God, how they hated to call him in! The fact that he was called at all only served to underline their desperation. The very fact of his existence, utterly unassailable and unanswerable to any agency of the government, was repugnant to DEPCO, who in eight years of continuous study and examination, by hand and by Boolean logic computation on the machines, had still been unable to mount a convincing case of monopolism or tax evasion against him. And the simple and inescapable fact that his independent existence was a major factor in the successful function of the Vanner-Elling eco-government which had evolved during and after the crash was even harder to swallow.
To the socially controlled, highly integrated economy of Twenty-First Century Federation America, Carl Englehardt was an enigmatic anachronism. Nobody knew, for certain, die true extent of the industrial constellation he headed. The analysts and doom-harbingers in DEPCO clucked and squawked in protest, propounding theories and citing figures that Englehardt and a stable eco-govemment were mutually exclusive and could not conceivably coexist in the same plane. But they inevitably had to ask Englehardt what his plans were for the next two or three year period when they were setting up the parameters for the annual VE economic prognosis, and they had to admit, however grudgingly, that Englehardt’s vast interlocking holdings were invariably the buffer that absorbed the stresses and strains of the annual VE plan.
Since the earliest days of the VE system, Englehardt had walked the tightrope of that controversy, managing a balance of opposing forces with a finesse that was exceeded only by the legendary skill with which BRINT effected the balance of power in the Eastern turmoil.
And now, faced with a crisis, they were turning to him again. As the car left the overhead road and moved down toward the circle of government buildings, Englehardt considered the circumstances. He knew what they wanted, and he knew, on the other hand, what he was prepared to provide. The meeting would be a violent one. But violence was no stranger to him.
He had weathered violence before, and survived.
Mark Vanner had predicted, almost to the week, the time when the society of the late 1990’s, like a Hegelian pot of water absorbing energy without recognizable change, would suddenly begin to boil. In the case of the old United States economy, it was crumble rather than boil, but the pattern of collapse had followed exactly and disastrously the steps that Vanner had outlined as much as ten years before.
The brilliant sampling and determinants theory for constructing a total sociological-economic-psychological picture of a nation at any given moment in time had been the work of the obscure British economist Peter Elling, but the mathematical extension of the theory into a workable, reliable technique for predicting and controlling the future was the creation of sociologist-mathemetician Mark Vanner. He had tried in vain to convince the shaky, frightened Hartman administration that the wild, exhaustive race with the Eastern bloc to mount permanent, maimed and armed satellite ships in space and manned garrisons on the moon was leading the country to the brink of economic disaster; that unless it were stopped in time, it would inevitably lead to a total collapse of the economy. It had been clear since the early 1960s that a dangerous proportion of the national reserve of money and man-hours was being poured into defense tactics, but the continuing drain of the XAR spaceship project was staggering, multiplying with each succeeding year.
Carl Englehardt had read Vanner’s works, had talked with Vanner, and had seen the fissures in the clay. He was fifty then, chairman of the board of Robling Titanium, and in a small way a strikingly successful man. Robling had been supplying structural titanium to the spaceship project in New Mexico, the project Vanner had denounced so clearly as the economic blight of die century, and he realized that when the abreaction came, the spaceships and everything connected with them would be trampled under.
He also realized that the Eastern bloc would wait, poised and ready, until the American economy had broken at the wheel, and then launch the all-out H-missile attack that would finally and decisively destroy the North American continent as a political or military threat.
What Englehardt did then was still considered by some to be the most colossal act of high treason in the history of Man; by others, a stroke of military and diplomatic genius. It was during the first barely evident economic dehydration of the early weeks of the crash that he made his proposal to the President. By having parts made in European factories, and by having the parts assembled and tested by Ferranti and launched from British installations in Australia, Englehardt was in a position to supply intercontinental ballistic missiles accurate within one mile of ground zero with a maximum range of eight thousand miles. Such missiles had already been built and tested by Robling subsidiaries, and could be delivered to specified launching sites at the rate of ten per day. If prepared and stationed quickly enough, they could forestall the H-missile attack from the East which was almost a day-to-day certainty.
The missiles would be delivered to the American government in exchange for food; there was no money available, with the strangling cost of the still uncompleted satellite ships and, anyway, Englehardt was clearly aware that within a few short months money would no longer buy work.
But there was a single condition. The Robling missiles were not for sale. They were for rent.
There would be no blueprints. The missiles would be manufactured, sealed, and aimed for launching by Robling employees. The design of the guiding mechanism and the propellant would remain the exclusive private domain of Robling Titanium.
The proposal was staggering in its audacity. The Hartman administration was still not convinced that Vanner was right, and chose to bicker. Already the economy was splitting at the seams, the stock market lurching, strikes spreading, food supplies in urban areas becoming scarce, but they would not agree to Englehardt’s terms. There were threats, accusations, appeals to patriotism, but Englehardt had remained adamant. He did not want his designs and his technicians commandeered, his contracts and legal protection invalidated and himself impoverished and cast out by any sudden governmental confiscation of private properties during the impending crisis. He had deep-rooted, almost archaic convictions against socialization and government ownership after the still memorable experiences of the Sixties.
He would not yield. Quite abruptly, he vanished. Before the Hartman administra
tion could reconsider, the horror of a great national economy in its death agonies was sweeping the western hemisphere. In three short days the stock market collapsed and ceased to exist as an instrument of business exchange when the New York Stock Exchange was raided and burned by panic-stricken mobs. The military struggled helplessly to contain the spreading violence in the face of its own mounting toll of insubordination and desertions. Within weeks the value of the dollar had dwindled to nothing; in the overcrowded cities, thieving, blackmarketing and prostitution ran rampant. The embattled government withdrew to the armored sub-basements of the Pentagon to await the inevitable attack of H-missiles from the East.
But the attack from the East never came.
Gradually, the reason why became clear. Ten missiles a day were emerging from the Robling foreign interlock, paid for by the British, and guarded by the British, who had fewer scruples about dealing with private munitions makers than the Hartman administration had had. A series of highly publicized demonstrations had been conducted, proving conclusively that the Robling missiles would do all that Englehardt had promised they would do, and the British published an ultimatum that pulled the teeth of the Eastern bloc: Any H-missile launched, from either the East or the West, would be intercepted and answered by Robling missiles. The British, for the first time in eighty years of tight-rope walking between the Cold War powers, now held the whip hand.
There would be no H-war.
But the rising terror of the crash continued unabated. True to the pattern predicted by Vanner, control measures snapped one by one in the face of the savage tide. Food rotted in midwestem railroad yards, while mobs roamed the streets of the huge urban centers of the East, starving and vicious. Through betrayal and desertion in the FBI and Secret Service, besieging rioters broke through Pentagon defenses; the President and Joint Chiefs were shot without trial or ceremony. In mid-August of 1997 the mobs sacked and burned the XAR atomic spaceship project in New Mexico, smashing into the compound in trucks and killing, injuring and torturing the scientists and technicians there.
The Invaders Are Comming! Page 11
