The Invaders Are Comming!

by Alan Edward Nourse

  “Help you?” A thin, putty-faced man with thick glasses appeared out of the file room in the back.

  “I’m looking for a copy of Alien Invaders.”

  The man lost interest. “Sorry, we don’t retail.”

  “I was thinking of buying in quantity.”

  “Got a retailer’s license and quota?”

  Alexander let his eyes shift to the stack of glossies in the corner. “This was . . . uh . . . for private distribution.”

  “Look, beat it, huh? I got an agreement with the retailers and racks. I don’t sell to private parties . . . and they buy up to quota. I’m happy, they’re happy. Get your copy at a rack; I’m not cuttin’ my throat.” The man plunked down behind a desk and turned to the talktyper.

  Obviously subtle questioning wouldn’t help. Alexander’s ID card was actually ten years out of date, but it looked official when he flashed it under the man’s nose.

  “Lieutenant Alexander, Army CI. I’m checking up on Alien Invaders. I want to know who wrote it, where he lives, what else he’s written. And I want all the copies of the book you have.”

  The man stopped typing in midsentence, staring up in alarm, because Alexander had slouched into the place with the shifty, cautious manner of his Mexican cover identity. Now suddenly he stiffened and barked out his orders in the voice of a very tough and very impatient CI lieutenant.

  The man hardly looked at the card. “I . . . I . . . we don’t have that information here, Lieutenant.”

  “You have it,” Alexander said, stepping past him to the files and yanking the first drawer open.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . Ill look.” The man fell over himself to get to the files. “The filing system is . . . er . . . kind of complicated . . . special . . . with the company . . . .”

  “You use alphabetical chronological,” Alexander said, “or else you’ll have misfiling charges to answer for.”

  “Maybe it’s in the other cabinet. I’ll look in the other cabinet,” the man stammered. It might have been a stall, but the man seemed genuinely scared.

  “You’d better find it if you don’t want to log some poly time,” Alexander said. “We might throw in a few questions about where you get the Playschool contraband over there. That’s you; that’s not Magdisco.” Unregistered contraband and interfering with the Playschool conditioning programs could mean recoop and very probably a new identity in a labor battalion. The man fairly tore into the files while Alexander ransacked his desk, pulled out a much-thumbed copy of Playschool Champ, a standard authorized porno that had been written ten years ago when such things were sensational rather than commonplace everyday fact. The writing, by one of the best BURINF copywriters, had been inspired virtuosity, and the book, widely distributed, had entered into the thinking of the public and paved the way for the family-disassociation theories of the Playschools.

  “There’s nothing here,” the man said, dusty from the files.

  “Let’s have a copy of the book,” Alexander said.

  “They’re all sold out. They’ve been sold out for months.”

  “You’re lying,” Alexander said. “You wouldn’t be out of anything that’s selling that fast.” He saw the man look around wildly, ready to make a break, and he moved in fast, clamping a wristlock on him.

  “I don’t have any. Please! I don’t have any . . .” Alexander jerked his arm, and he twisted and groaned, and then said, “Okay, okay . . . .”

  “Fast,” Alexander said.

  “I was just told not to give any to investigators, that’s all.

  I just had orders,” the man whimpered, pulling a book out from beneath a stack of glossies. The cover was a masterpiece of the art, the tide fairly screaming out Alien Invaders: How Soon? The byline was Diff Rarrel, the imprint Squid Pubs.

  “Listen, you won’t tell anybody I gave it to you, huh? Just say you found it here. I just get orders, that’s all.”

  “Who gave you the orders?” Alexander said, dropping the book in his pocket. The man didn’t answer. “They don’t publish anything like this in Squid. They just do glossies and comics. Who was the source publisher?”

  The man made a break for the door. Alexander thrust out a foot, tripped him, and fell on him hard. He pulled the man’s arm up behind him, and then noticed the small variously aged scars and realized what caused the desperate silence. Whoever was supplying him was also giving the orders.

  Alexander stabbed in the dark. Drug traffic took size and power. Only one publishing house had that kind of power, and the ruthlessness to go with it. “Was it Colossus Books?”

  The man just groaned as his shoulder ligaments began to tear a little more.

  “We can find out under a poly . . . .”

  The fight went out of the man, and he started blubbering. Alexander hacked him sharply across the neck, left him unconscious on the floor and made his way down the narrow steps. It was Colossus that the book came from, the same as Playschool Champ had ten years before.

  At the street level his old Qualchi experience made him cautious; he covered the street quickly with a glance, then walked with a swift, shambling pace toward the man-strip at the corner.

  When he had gone ten paces he knew he was right. All the fumbling at the files had been a stall after all; there was a two-wheeler moving slowly down the street a hundred yards behind him, with two men in it.

  Still sweating from the physical workout upstairs, his heart pounding in his throat, Alexander was pretty sure he could handle two men if they didn’t use stunners. He estimated the distance to the man-strip, and decided that they wouldn’t dare use stunners with all the traffic on the street, so he didn’t rush.

  He felt a little sick; every step took him farther from the law, deeper into violence. He hadn’t physically attacked a man for years, and he had thought that he never would again. But then he realized he was fighting now, fighting for his life, and he felt a wave of elation drive the sickness away. Odd that even with the car following slowly behind him he felt safe, as safe as a man fleeing recoop could feel. But he was also puzzled.

  Were the stalkers DIA men?

  Aliens?

  Who?

  Chapter Ten

  It was a dodging, running game, trying to shake a tail in a crowded city when he didn’t know how many of them there were, nor who they were, nor what they wanted. The alarm had been out for him on open police channels for eighteen hours, he was certain, and on public broadcasts for at least six. But DIA did not normally stalk their prey, particularly in a city where there was a large field office and plenty of local support. They moved fast, struck hard, and disappeared with their quarry.

  Alexander tried to think clearly, to recall some past association with St. Louis that might afford cover at least for a while. It was the desperateness, the hopelessness that probably did it, dredging up from the past all the cunning and energy of his Qualchi days, when he had played the nerve-racking game of dodging and hiding without using any of the standard devices so the Qualchi would not realize that he was outrunning them.

  Bombardment was the technique he had used then. He didn’t know if it was used by DIA or BRINT; he had gotten the idea from some super-slow cloud chamber movies he had watched in his Army training. The idea was simple: to start branching trails so the pursuit would become confused as to whether to stick with him alone or follow the other trails as well.

  He set up a couple of dummy branches first. He stopped in a mylebar dealer’s and bought a raincoat and hat, then into a bookstore, haggled with the book dealer for a while and gave him the book back, but only after tucking the receipt for the raincoat into the book.

  Then he took a whirler up a few blocks, detoured through a mag stand dealing in second-hand mags, into a urinal, then out again when the vendor was busy, ducking quickly around a comer. He ripped open the package with the raincoat and hat, slipped the coat on, pulled the hat low, and walked off at right angles with a couple of late-lunching business men. He stepped into a
movie house, and right out a side exit, raced down the side alley, slipping out of the raincoat and hat and jettisoning them in a trash can. He jerked his jacket off, even though it was a little cool, and mingled with a knot of people on a man-strip, carrying his jacket and faking a conversation with a dumpy housewife.

  The next stop was real, a hotel lobby. He flashed a half-credit note at a very young bellhop.

  “Blonde or brunette?”

  “Information,” Alexander said. The boy stiffened, his hand dropping too quickly into his pocket. Alexander felt a little glow of satisfaction. He could always spot a KM contact. He knew what was in the pocket, too. He let a little more of the half-credit note show. “I want a KM cutout man.”

  The boy’s shifty, cunning eyes looked him over carefully. Alexander sagged into the slouch of his cover identity, his mouth twitching at one side. The bellhop was satisfied. He did not look like a DIA inspector.

  “Shine boy, two blocks down. Tell him you’re from Ronny.” He picked the half-credit note expertly from Alexander’s hand and turned away. As Alexander went out through the door, he saw the bellhop moving toward a phone-booth.

  “Ronny sent you?” the shine boy asked, a sallow, impassive-faced nine-year-old.

  Alexander nodded and showed the corner of a half-credit note.

  “Perv?” the boy asked, then added hastily, “I’m no trade . . . not for any credits . . . .”

  “Information,” Alexander said. “Where can we talk?”

  “Shine, mister?” Then, in a lower tone, “What do you want?”

  “A tape library hook-up. I can’t get at the files in this area. I want somebody to file a probe for me and bring me the report, someone with a local ID card that’s up-to-date and cleared for financial reports.”

  The boy looked suspicious. “That all? Why don’t you try an eagle?”

  “No good. Can’t take a chance on a straight lawyer without an ID.” As he expected, the lie about having no ID cost him a three credit reward on the spot, but it overcame suspicion.

  “All right. I’ll take you to Wah.”

  Wah, it turned out, was an eleven year old girl at the South St. Louis Playschool, traffic monitor for the third grade and a trusty at the school. It didn’t surprise him. Because of the terrific political pressure the organized KidMobs could bring to bear, the teachers and supervisors were always happy to give them the trusty jobs so they could supervise the other youngsters who were not members. The chilling thing was the authority, the sheer, uninhibited power-feeling that this cherubic, plump-cheeked little blonde called Wah exuded, stopping truck traffic with a wave of her grimy hand or a shrill toot, moving the gnome army across the truck strip, cuffing the slow ones. To the others around her, Alexander realized, she must have filled the gaping need for authority and love and protection left vacant by the family disintegration system of the Playschools and unsatisfactorily compensated for by the most thoroughgoing DEPCO theories, and from them she got the terrific violent power that satisfied her furiously uncivilized mind.

  The new crop of Playschool “students” were part of the non-authority experiments that DEPCO had been playing with for the past ten years, a violently group-oriented group of childlings elaborately deprived of civilized restraints. What DEPCO had not foreseen was the manner in which some of them saw through every propaganda trick directed at them, and with the horrifyingly practical cynicism of unmodulated savages built up a hierarchy of KM organization which filled the holes that DEPCO had left unfilled.

  In his BURINF days Alexander had spent a couple of months of depressing research on propaganda effects at the famous Trivettown Playschool, and he knew the toughmindnedness of those KM’s. And he knew that it was a sobering and discouraging opinion in BURINF that DEPCO was building a Frankenstein, of which little chubby-legged, smiling, cold-eyed eleven-year-olds like Wah were the brains.

  “I’m Wah,” she said to him. “How many credits do you have on you?”

  “Enough,” Alexander said.

  “I’ll decide,” Wah said shortly. Alexander felt a stir behind him, and his wallet was lifted. He didn’t move. He still had half his money in his sock, so even if they rolled him he wouldn’t be helpless.

  Wah whistled softly, held a fifty-credit note up to the light to check for counterfeit. “Real,” she concluded. “Marked?”

  “No.”

  She eyed him. Then: “We’ll take a chance. Come on.”

  Alexander nodded, and followed her.

  First branch-point!

  Considering the sectionalization and communications blackout, four hours was an extremely short time to wait for an answer, Alexander decided. It should have been virtually impossible for any information to get from the Washington files to the BURINF center in New York, and then by relay to a legal office in St. Louis, where the eagle turned the photoprint over to the KM cutout.

  And as he stared at the report, Alexander decided that for fifty credits it was dirt cheap.

  It was a corporation statement, list of officers, deposition of primary shares, list of subsidiaries and order of battle of the Colossus Publishing Corporation.

  But Colossus, the report indicated, was itself a subsidiary. Controlling interests in Colossus were owned by Poughkeepsie Research, owned and operated by Harvard University, which, as everyone in BURINF knew, was part of the constellation of Robling Titanium.

  It didn’t make sense. Not the business tie-in—no one associated with the government could really be surprised to loam that any given company, however obscure, might ultimately be traced back to Carl Englehardt and his Robling interests—but the book.

  Why had Colossus published Alien Invaders? How could (hey have published it without risking their multi-million-credit necks to a BURINF check and ultimate prosecution?

  Alexander tore up the photoprint and turned to Wah. “I’ve got to get East,” he said. “How can I get to New York by tomorrow?”

  “Drift,” Wah said. “Hitch a ride with a trucker.”

  “They’re stopping trucks,” he said.

  “That’s right,” another KM confirmed. “It’s the freak hunt. Even the regular lines are getting stopped by DIA.”

  “I’ll cover expenses,” Alexander said.

  “Sorry,” said Wah. “I’d like to take your money, but we have to keep up our standing.” Alexander nodded, noticed uneasily the hard avaricious glint in the eye of a couple of ten-year-old bowmen. One of them was toying with his bow, a small spring-steel crossbow that could fire a five-inch shaft through a man’s body at fifty feet, yet folded up into a pseudo-jackknife.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thanks anyway.” He started down the stairs of the deserted loft the local KM used for a headquarters. Behind him he heard voices suddenly raised, and Wall arguing briefly. He leaped down the remaining stairs, (lien paused to scatter a handful of small credit notes on the floor where the light would hit them. He heard a clatter on the stairs, and burst out on the street, catching the eight-year-old chickie in the chest with his knee. He seized a bicycle and pedaled of furiously, staying in shadows, crouching over the handlebars of the awkwardly small two-wheeler.

  There was a roar of pursuit behind him, giving way to a louder greedy squabble as the pursuers stopped to pick up the scattered credits. After a moment he heard the yelps as the bicycle posse started after him.

  At the man-strip at the end of the street he parked the bike on the loading deck, dropped a token in the gate and hurried through, leaving the bike behind. His guess was right. The KM’s would not pay a token apiece to follow him once they had recovered the bike. But the alarm would be out about a drifter with money.

  He knew he would have to get out of St. Louis by morning.

  Above all, he had to get to New York, to somehow establish a contact with a BRINT agent high enough up to listen to what he had to say, not as a fugitive and possibly an alien-influenced traitor, but as a man who had somehow managed to keep his head and see die way through to the truth.


  The report on Colossus had been the key, jarring the not-quite-fitting pieces down into a compact perfect fit, a quite different pattern than he had considered before, but a pattern that was for the first time unmistakably clear.

  He knew now what had happened at Wildwood. He knew that he could not waste a minute now. He might already be too late.

  Once on the man-strip he began switching strips at the switching centers to see if his previous tail had managed to follow him after he left the temporary protection of the KMs. There was no one following him on the strip itself, but a Hydro was moving doggedly on the roadstrip below. Alexander crouched back out of stunner range, fear creeping up his spine again. They couldn’t be DIA; they would have picked him up long ago. But if they were aliens, why were they stalking him so patiently?

  He dropped off the strip as it passed back through the trucking center. What he needed was an accomplice so his pursuers would have another branch-point to worry about, and so he could get a truck.

  It was the only way. With a truck, and a trucker’s ID he could drive to New York; and plenty of New York long hauls went through at this time of night. But he needed a decoy bait to get a trucker out of a brightly lighted diner and into an alley or motel room.

  He found his prospect in the third diner he checked. It was surprising to find a woman left in one of them; most of the night runs had left already. He walked up behind her, grabbed her by the wrist. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  Her lips twisted into a snarl as she whirled on him. “DEPCO?” she asked, the words sticking hatefully in her throat.

  Alexander shook his head. “A friend.” He tightened his grip on her wrist and started to walk her out. He had not seen his shadow since the last switch on the man-strips, but lie paused warily at the door, then pulled her out into the darkness.