"But surely the polygraph records. . . ."
"May mean nothing at all. I realize that we've never found Occidentals who could beat our polygraph system, under suitable drug treatment. Unfortunately, the results are inconclusive with Orientals, who have a different notion of truth, and particularly with yogis, who can control their sympathetic system."
Cullen was sitting up now, his face red with anger. "Mr. Bahr, we have certain legal rights."
"As of now, Dr. Cullen, you have no legal rights," Bahr said sharply. "Until proven otherwise, we are forced to assume that your abductors were alien creatures who are engaged in the first steps in an invasion. You men have been in contact with those aliens . . . the only ones who have been in contact with them. From the manner in which you were abducted, it seems obvious that the aliens are able to penetrate our cities without detection, either in disguise as humans, or by using and controlling humans. All right, you add it up. If your abductors have techniques of mind control I hat we don't know about, you men may be dangerous pawns. We can't take the risk that you're not."
He paused for it to sink in. "Now, if you have that straight, we'll get on. You will be released in the custody oE Mr. Yost." He indicated the hard-faced man with the crew-cut. "You will be responsible to Mr. Yost for everything you do or say. You will answer no questions and make no statements. If I find a single quote, admission, or good guess in any of the TV-casts, Mr. Yost will be in charge of improving your understanding of security."
Yost led them away to the recovery room. Bahr had seen the spark of grudging admiration in Yost's eyes, and he smiled in satisfaction. Yost was a former 801st lieutenant who had been in a Texas penitentiary for rape, assault, and a dozen other crimes of violence before he had volunteered. In Texas he had been a prison bully; in the 801st he found his calling, and had toughened his guerrilla platoon, and subsequently his DIA field unit, into a sharp, violently dangerous force. Yost believed in only one thing—power—and to him Bahr was power. He was afraid of Bahr, and hated him, but he was willing to obey him to the point of death. Bahr knew this, and depended on it. He recognized the advantages of a subordinate whom everybody feared and hated, who would do his dirty work for him.
And he was quite sure that by the time the repatriates were released, they would have transferred their hate and fear permanently from him to Yost.
He pushed back his chair and went upstairs to where the committee from DEPCO was waiting.
The Department of Control, the sprawling, multi-faceted, interlocking bureau which held the ultimate, final and definitive executive power of the Vanner-Elling Stability Government in its hands, was a love organization.
It had taken Julian Bahr several years and hundreds of contacts with DEPCO men at all levels of importance, from top-level executive sessions with the Joint Chiefs right down to the most casual contacts at cocktail parties, to realize the fundamental truth of that fact and, realizing it, to fully comprehend its implications. Libby Allison had denied it vigorously, and just as vigorously (if unconsciously) proved it
in armed battles and bed-talk with Julian. He had heard it from the lips of high DEPCO officials who had no idea what they were admitting, and he had heard it from other DEPCO men who recognized it for what it was and still admitted it.
DEPCO was a love organization. Everything they did had love overtones. Inevitably, it clouded their judgment. Equally inevitably, it entrenched them with incredible firmness in the position of power they had held since Mark Vanner had set up his equation-control on a government-wide basis after the crash. It was exceedingly difficult to attack love as an institution and get very far with the attack.
To Julian Bahr the whole concept was difficult to comprehend, and utterly impossible to understand. Bahr instinctively preferred hate and fear to love, but now he knew that he had to have wholehearted, unquestioning co-operation from DEPCO. Therefore, he had to love them. While his elevator rose the six stories to the conference room where the DEPCO committee had been waiting for him, Bahr tried valiantly to think of a single reason to love the organization which was doing everything within its power to wreck his life.
He couldn't find a reason.
Love was necessary at times, of course, sometimes even pleasant, refreshing, comforting. Sometimes he thought he really did love Libby, and suffered violent pangs of guilt at the way he always seemed impelled to fight her, to try to dominate her. He wished he didn't have to depend on her faking his Stability Rating, because if she had just been a good-looking girl maybe he could talk to her frankly the way he once had talked to certain prostitutes before the custom of installing tape recorders in hotel rooms and houses.
But Libby was still a therapist who worked for DEPCO, and there were some things you couldn't tell your analyst even when she was sleeping with you.
He found the DEPCO committee waiting patiently, still smiling in a fatherly fashion after being kept waiting four hours on an AA conference priority, still greeting him warmly, still accepting him, still loving him. The leader of the group was a tall, blond-haired man with pale blue eyes, trying to hide the lines of worry on his forehead as Bahr entered the room.
Bahr shook his hand and smiled through his teeth, and then he saw Paul MacKenzie sitting at the side of the room, unconcernedly cleaning his fingernails, hardly looking up when Bahr sat down but taking everything in, spying. Bahr felt his shoulders and neck tighten.
"All right," Bahr said. "Sorry to hold you up, but I had some important work in progress. Now let's have it. What do you want?"
The leader of the delegation cleared his throat. "I'm Whiting, Mr. Bahr. We're really sorry to cut into your time like this; naturally we realize that you're extremely busy, but to be perfectly frank, Mr. Bahr, we're alarmed."
Bahr said a silent prayer for control, and smiled at Whiting. "About what?"
The DEPCO man seemed embarrassed. "About the way the DIA is handling the investigation of these . . ." He hesitated, obviously striving to avoid saying the word. ". . . These incidents that have been occurring."
"You mean the alien ships that have been landing?" Bahr said.
Whiting winced. "I don't think you realize the magnitude of what's happening here, Mr. Bahr. We have just received a machine run of certain samplings taken in Continental United States and other parts of Federation America, plus two field units from Europe. Our prognostic curve . . ." He opened a portfolio and laid a graph in front of Bahr. The DEPCO man's hands were trembling. "Mr. Bahr, these curves indicate that there is a very fast-growing panic spreading in the country, centered in rumors of alien landings. This morning there was a closely-averted riot in Los Angeles, and another in St. Louis. Our sources indicate that foreign news-listening is up by a factor of ten in the past week." The DEPCO man spread his hands helplessly. "Naturally, our social-control techniques were devised to handle panicemergencies, but nothing of this magnitude has ever happened before, not even during the late crash years. If this were to explode into a full-scale panic . . ."
Bahr scowled. "Why are you corning to me, Mr. Whiting?"
"Because of the leaks, Mr. Bahr, the security leaks. The foreign news nets are getting information and the people are listening to them. Your cover stories from BURINF are simply not selling. And the foreign network implication that you are trying desperately to cover up is just farming the flame."
Bahr shrugged impatiently. "We had one really bad break," he admitted. "That was the 'copter chatter intercepted by the Canadians." He glared at MacKenzie. "There haven't been any leaks since then, and there won't be."
Whiting frowned. "But, Mr. Bahr, six hours ago Radio Budapest was broadcasting a detailed description of an alien landing in northern British Columbia."
Bahr slammed his fist on the desk and jerked to his feet, sending the chair crashing against the wall. "What did you say?"
"He said the news is out," MacKenzie said from the side of die room. "It's all over the country."
Bahr swore viciously. "Then there's
a leak somewhere between DIA and BRINT. We've kept it so tight that . . ." He broke off, turned to an aide. "Tell them to get ready for a complete news blackout on all frequencies. Tell them to get those foreign nets jammed. Every news story that goes out will have to clear with me personally."
Whiting of DEPCO sat staring, his face going white. "Mr. Bahr, you can't do that! A news blackout now would be the last straw!"
Bahr swung on him. "You idiot, don't you recognize a war when you're staring one in the face? That's what we have on our hands—war, deliberate psychological war! Whatever this alien is, we know practically nothing about him, and he knows everything about us. We can't even guess what I lis next move might be. He's landed here, he may have been monitoring our TV-casts and newscasts for years. He's interrogated our key personnel. Everything he has done has been perfecdy geared to touch off a generalized fear reaction."
"But the people . . ."
"The horse is already stolen, why try to lock the barn door?" Bahr snapped. "If the only thing the people will believe is the truth, then that's what well give them. The truth."
"We can't give them the truth," Whiting said in the stifling silence that followed. "Why can't we?"
"Because the one thing our society simply cannot face is an alien invasion," Whiting said. "It will tear our society out by the roots."
"Why?" Bahr said harshly.
"Because we have absolutely no defense against an alien invasion . . . none whatever . . . and the people know it."
"Nonsense. We have weapons, we have technology," Bahr said.
"They won't do us any good, against an-alien invader," Whiting said. "Not in the face of fear. We don't know exactly where that fear is rooted, basically—probably in the pre-crash drive to space—but the fear is just as strong now as it ever was."
"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-Ilero-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, there 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 the 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 feel-ing.
Bahr glanced across at Paul MacKenzie, who was sitting sleepy-eyed and unperturbed through this emotional drenching that Whiting was pouring out. MacKenzie apparendy 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 midsentence, "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 . . ."
"AH 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 human-oid 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 Mens. 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 rebroad-cast 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 wha
t I want."
"I don't mean the public. I mean DEPCO. Adams was furious 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 working 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.
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