Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer

by The invaders are Coming

  "No, Julian, I think you're telling the absolute truth." "You don't think I can do it, do you?" Libby did not answer.

  "And you don't want me to try," Bahr said bitterly. "You'd rather have me stick my neck in the yoke like a work horse and just pull, let somebody crack a whip over me . . . pull like all the other workhorses all day long, and at night trot home to my own little pasture and play stud to you. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Well, I don't like taking orders from people who aren't as good as me. I've taken too damned many orders, and now I'm going to give some . . ."

  "Julian, you just won't understand." She turned away, but he jerked her around. The enthusiasm was gone from his face now, and there was anger in its place.

  "You'd like to stop me, wouldn't you?" he said. "Push me back in the rut. Punch some new holes in my Stability Card and dump me back at the bottom of the heap again. That's what you want, isn't it?"

  "It isn't what I want or don't want," Libby said wearily. "If you won't step down now, I can't protect you any more. You'll have a DEPCO man in your office before you can turn around. You'll never know what hit you. They'll find that you're unstable and dangerous for anything but a greencard job. They'll get one look at your Stability profile and downgrade you right into Critical Ward. Then they'll give you recoop and shock-analysis, and if there's anything left you'll spend the rest of your life picking oranges somewhere. That's not what 7 want, Julian. That's the law."

  He looked at her and suddenly laughed. "I don't believe you," he said. "You've been handing me this Stability garbage for five years now. Acting like I'd committed some crime that you were covering up for me. Always trying to make me stop pushing. Why, every time I took a step up the ladder you'd nearly have a fit. As if I couldn't handle the job."

  "It's not that," she said. "It's what you might do in the job. And I've been covering for you, believe me, but I can't do it any longer. If you don't quit this job right now, I can't help you any more."

  He walked around the room, slamming his fist into his palm. "Okay," he said unexpectedly. "Ill quit, then. But not now. Not today. Project Frisco is urgent, and there's nobody else to take over. Ill need time to get it straightened out."

  "How much time? Two days? Three?"

  "God, nol I couldn't get anything done that soon."

  She shook her head. "No good, Julian. I've got to have a definite date. You're up for an automatic DEPCO check right now. You can't get away from it . . . the best I can do is stall them. And if you won't give me a definite date, 111 call them right now."

  "For Christ sake, what do you want me to do?" Bahr burst out. Then he stopped, searched her face. "Libby . . ."

  "I mean it, Julian."

  "You're bluffing," he said. "You won't call them." "I took an oath when I joined DEPCO. I can't leave you in this job."

  "Oath, garbage! You haven't lived up to that thing since the day you signed it. If I get my Stability clearance revoked, it's your neck, too. There goes your career. Think about that."

  "I already have." Libby turned and picked the phone off the desk that used to be his desk, and dialed the DEPCO exchange.

  Bahr watched her make the connection all the way through to Adams' office. Then he hit her with it.

  "You'd better think about Timmy before you make that call," he said.

  Very slowly, Libby put the phone back on the hook, turned to face him. All the fight was gone from her suddenly. She felt weak, and sick. "You couldn't be that rotten," she said. "Not even you."

  "I want this job." He wouldn't look at her face.

  "Julian, you promised."

  "Sure, I promised. Things are different now, that's all. I'm not going to do any parting favors for somebody who's going to sell me down the river."

  "Julian, he's your child, too. I'm entitled to one child, with my job rating. Ill raise him and support him. I won't tie you down or ask for partial support. All I want is your signature and a BHE test. Is that asking a favor?"

  "You can stand a five-point cut in your Stability rating," Bahr said. "I can't. I can't even stand a DEPCO review. Particularly when my therapist has been . . ."

  "I can claim it was part of the therapy," she pleaded. "I'm willing to take the blame."

  "They'll put you under polygraph."

  "I have contacts. Some of my father's friends . . ."

  "Then get me a white card!" Bahr said.

  "I can't do that. Julian . . . he's your son. I don't want to lose him. Do you want him to go through the same thing you did: the Playhome, and Playschool, and Techschool and everything? You don't know what those schools are like now. They didn't experiment with the children when you went. . . ."

  "Those are DEPCO projects," Bahr said. "That's your out-lit running them. Don't you like them?"

  "There's a lot about DEPCO I don't like, but that's neither here nor there. . . ."

  "Then get them changed!"

  "They're all right, most of the time. Most of the kids come through all right, as long as they're not too stubborn or independent. But what if he's like you, Julian? What if he lights back?"

  "Then good for him. I took it, he can."

  Libby pushed away from him, looked at him coldly. "I could name you anyway, and have you dumped as a Stability risk for refusing to accept paternity."

  "And I can get eight men to swear you picked them up and look them to bed without a prostitute's license. Eight men who can keep up the story under polygraph."

  "Julian," she said, "what makes you such a rotten bastard?"

  "You're the psych doc. You ought to know." He looked at her, and suddenly, inexplicably, she was in his arms, and he was crushing her against him, his face in her hair, his hands digging desperately into her shoulders. "Oh, God, Libby, I don't want to fight you. I didn't mean it about Tim. I swear I'll quit this job just as soon as I can get things under control, but it means too much to me right now. It just means too damned much. You've got to go along on my terms for now . . ."

  "I know." She tried to keep the tears back, clinging to him. "But believe me, I'm going to watch you, and if you start to go off the deep end, I'll turn your case over to DEPCO lock, stock and barrel."

  Bahr laughed, the old confidence returning, and he tipped her chin up gently, kissed her. "That's fair enough. You watch me."

  On the desk behind them the intercom crackled. "Julian? Frank. We've got a BRINT man on the wire here."

  "What does he want?" Bahr snapped. "I can't talk to him."

  "I think you'd better," Carmine's voice said. "There's been a landing up in Canada. BRINT won't let us into the area unless you head the team yourself. They want to know right now."

  "Christ!" Bahr said. He pushed Libby away. "Look, Frank, tell them yes. I'll be in the air in three minutes." He snapped the speaker switch to off.

  "Julian . . ."

  "Not now, not now. This is important." He paused at the door, looked back at her. "You stall that DEPCO team," he said. "I don't care how you do it, but stall them. This may be the break we've been waiting for."

  Then he was gone. She walked around the room, trying to smooth her dress, straighten her hair, fix her make-up, cursing him for the things he could do to her, and herself because she couldn't fight him. Two people. A man who could not possibly understand, or give a damn, and a woman who could not help loving him.

  She found the elevator and started down for street level.

  Part II

  THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE

  Chapter Five

  HARVEY ALEXANDER accepted the proffered capsule without a word and popped it into his mouth while the nurse and attendant watched. He took a mouthful of water, tossed his head back and swallowed, coughed a couple of times, and took another swallow of water to stop the coughing.

  The nurse nodded. "That should hold him for another eight hours," she said.

  "He'll be on the list for recoop in the morning," the attendant said. "Doc says around nine."

  Alexander leaned weakly back against the pillow.
His eyes were already beginning to blink. He groaned, rolled his head for a moment, and lay still, his breathing returning to the slow steady respiratory rate of the drugged.

  As the nurse and attendant left, he opened his eyes and turned his head sharply, listening to hear if the door locked from the outside. The solenoid lock did not buzz, and he leaned back with a sigh. Very sloppy, but then they probably counted on the sleeper to keep him immobilized until dawn. He opened his mouth and lifted the not-yet-dis-solved capsule from under his tongue and stuffed it under the pillow.

  They would not be back. He had eight hours.

  During all the dizzy, kaleidoscopic period while he had been recovering from the deep-probe, a single idea had been evolving in his mind—escape. His treatment at the hands of Bahr and his men convinced him that he could not expect their investigation to clear him, even if McEwen would back him to the hilt. The chance of even the legal process of a court-martial seemed remote. He would be recooped, and treated with chemo-shock, and wind up in a fruit-picking

  battalion with a new name, a new identity, and a blacked-out memory.

  He looked out the window of his room. The hospital was surrounded by a ten-foot brick wall, with guards at the gates. He had only a limited view of the building itself. He was undoubtedly in a maximum-security wing that could be reached only by elevator, or by passing guards. It was, surprisingly, a suburban hospital. From the rows of dingy apartment flats spreading out beyond the wall, he guessed it was probably twenty miles or so out of Chicago.

  He thought over the hospitals he knew of in the Chicago suburbs. Only two had psychotic-security facilities: the' George Kelley and the Sister Andrea Farri. The Kelley seemed more likely, especially since the DIA was involved. And if he were in the Kelley . . .

  Five years before, three max-security patients had escaped from the Kelley. They were of course picked up again inside of two hours, but the incident had shaken the administration, and the entire security system had been revamped to make a similar occurrence impossible.

  But Alexander, when he was assigned to the Wildwood Plant, had spent several weeks studying all the major security systems of note in the world: prisons, psychotic wards, A-plants, computing centers, the Kingsley mines, the Chinese and Soviet political camps. He had also spent three months in the Army hospital in Buenos Aires after the Antarctic incident, where as an esteemed guest he had had the run of the place, and had learned a certain amount about hospital customs and routines.

  During his Mexican tour he had worked with a special Army Central Intelligence team that was trying to break up the Qualchi ring of smugglers who were constantly moving Chinese guerillas, weapons, and supplies into the southwestern United States. After six weeks of intensive coaching, and with a cyanide capsule adequately concealed, he was methodically beaten up, flogged, and dumped in a filthy Mexican bastille where three known Qualchi agents had been incarcerated, after much careful maneuvering, for slugging and robbing a couple of American touristas (actually CI agents) who were slumming in Mexicali.

  The whole affair had been so neatly staged that even the Mexican police did not know they had Qualchi agents in their jail; the three agents were completely duped, especially since they were not interrogated, and cursed their ill luck rather than Army CI.

  Alexander was turned over to Mexican authorities when he tried to accuse the Army of sweating him over to make him confess to being a Qualchi agent, instead of merely a petty thief who was broke and hiding out in Mexico. His charges were of course denounced as preposterous by the same Army CI Major who had supervised his mauling. The Mexican police, while they believed his story, were still quite willing to lock him up anyway, because the Army was good for their whorehouses.

  He was soon on confidential terms with the three Qualchi agents, who turned out to be part of an isolated cell and had no real information. They did, however, have certain contacts in Nuevo Laredo, so Alexander, unable to notify the CI people, planned and executed a breakout from the bastille that he had thought beyond his capabilities, taking the three Qualchi men with him, and heading south.

  For the next four months Alexander was on the CI report as a deserter and bug-out (an agent who went over to the enemy camp); they posted substantial rewards for him or liis cyanided body. He turned up one day in Des Moines, Iowa, and furnished an order of battle for the entire Texas-New Mexico-Oklahoma-Kansas Qualchi net, having worked himself up to the rank of Supervisor of Local Theft and staging six still-unsolved supply raids on warehouses in the area for the benefit of guerilla troops.

  With twelve other Qualchi agents he was arrested, interrogated for two days without breaking (before witnesses who were returned to the Qualchi six months later on a prisoner exchange) and then, like three other top Qualchi agents, one of whom turned out to be a BRINT man, he simply vanished. In the ensuing roundup, carried out strategically over a nine-month period, 120 Qualchi agents were captured and interrogated, the un-co-operative ones being turned over to BRINT for unrestricted examination, and over 600 Chinese troops from the tough Mukden school were trapped and committed suicide. The operation was considered to be a major coup, even by BRINT. Consequently, as is customary in intelligence work, all the credit was given to a few CI and DIA figureheads who were military-looking, telegenic, and willing to accept the risk of assassination that accompanied such notoriety. Alexander, like the other CI main links, had his face altered slightly by surgery and was given a new assignment halfway around the world, with his Army records adjusted to cover the five month lapse.

  The only records of the affair were in the central CI files where his name had been replaced by a meaningless cover number. There was no decoration, commendation, record of service, or even mention of his CI experience after that. Most of the CI people who had worked most closely with him did not know his real identity, and the trail of Agent C451933 ended as abruptly as if he had never existed, as was customary in intelligence work.

  But Alexander had never forgotten the experience, particularly the breakout from the bastille, which he had considered a maneuver with overtones of brilliance. As a result of his intimate acquaintance with intelligence operations, he always, in any new assignment, imagined himself in the role of an intelligence agent and/or prisoner, and studied the existing security system for loopholes.

  This was not merely a hobby or diversion; he had no way of knowing when the dead trail of Agent C451933 might be reopened by a chance recognition, or when he might have to worry about getting people into places or getting himself out.

  The fact that he was confined in an American hospital in the outskirts of Chicago, rather than in a Chinese or satellite compound, was slightly irrelevant under the circumstances. There was no question in his mind that his neck at the present moment depended upon his finding out what had actually happened at the Wildwood Plant, and he was satisfied that Bahr's DIA henchmen were at least as dangerous an enemy, to him personally, as a dozen Qualchi knife-men.

  But the Kelley Hospital was a break. He had studied the Kelley system—modeled on the Bronstock system used in the Eastern European "rehabilitation" centers—when he had developed the Wildwood plan. He had found no noticeable weakness in the Kelley system at that time, but then he had been on the outside, not inside.

  And that, he decided, made a very great deal of difference.

  Moving out of his bed, he put his ear to the door. There was no sound in the corridor. He opened the door a crack, ear pressed against the aluminum sill, listening for the telltale vibrations of the alarm gongs used in the Kelley. There was nothing. No ringing, no pounding of feet. Somewhere below, he knew, a master-panel lit up any time a patient's door was opened, but it was nearly dinner time and most of the personnel would be occupied. A blue light might go unnoticed for a while. Even the hall TV scanners were dim, though he knew the slightest alarm would throw the hallways and rooms under surveillance in ten seconds flat.

  Out in the hall he padded across to the men's lavatory and ducked inside
. There were commodes, a urinal, and sinks. He collected all the toilet paper rolls and hand towels he could find and crossed swiftly back into his room again.

  It took only moments to crumple the paper and towels, wrap them in a sheet from the bed, and stuff them under the sponge-plastic mattress. There was a bed-light on the wall; he pulled out the plug, ripped the lamp off the wire, and bent the naked copper ends into a neat pair of lobster claws.

  Finally, he dropped the three metal toilet-paper rollers into a pillow case stripped from the bed. Pulling all his clothes off, he plugged the lamp cord back in the wall socket and touched the lobster-claws together near the nest of torn paper. There was a shower of sparks, and the fuse blew, but he blew gently into the paper nest and was rewarded by a tiny flame.

  The power came back immediately on an emergency circuit. He heard a buzzer down the corridor summon the maintenance men. The smoke was already beginning to pour from the heated sponge mattress, stinking and acrid. Choking, Alexander threw the door into the hall open and peered out as smoke began to billow out.

  As he had expected, there was a tumoff at the end of the corridor, with a civilian guard just settling back to his magazine after the buzz for the blown fuse. Alexander waited until the smoke in the corridor grew thick enough to haze out the nearest TV scanner. Then he screamed, "Fire!" and began running toward the guard, with the pillow-case blackjack held out of sight.

  The guard jerked up in surprise, staring incredulously at the man running at him stark naked down the corridor. Instead of blasting at him with the stunner he was wearing, the guard stood open-mouthed, as Alexander had anticipated, expecting that the last thing a naked man fleeing a fire would do would be to slug him. On the dead run, Alexander swung the pillow case, and the three metal rollers slammed into the guard's head.