Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer

by The invaders are Coming

  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-government 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 1960's 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 administration 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 we
eks 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 tightrope 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.

  As the wave of anti-space violence rose, physicists fled for their lives. Atomic motor plants, titanium factories, astronautic research centers, even universities and libraries were crushed and bumed by hungry mobs, finding only technology and the drive to space to blame for the chaos that had descended in the country. Four prominent engineers were beaten to death on the University of Iowa campus. John Hannibal, editor of Outstanding Science-Fiction magazine, and a major driving force in the "space in our time" philosophy of the past decade, was burned alive in his Manhattan office, where he had barricaded himself behind crates of out-of-date science-fiction magazines. . . .

  In northern Europe, where Englehardt had been sequestered and guarded by British Intelligence, a kidnapping attempt was forestalled within hours of its completion. Englehardt was well aware that he owed his fife to the BRINT team which had uprooted the conspiracy; characteristically, no mention was ever made of it, although it was rumored in later years that Englehardt had personally paid for the famous BRINT building in New York

  But when Mark Vanner organized his provisional government in New York and began to weld together a pattern of order around a nationwide application of the VE equations, Englehardt came out of hiding. For two decades he had continued to pour his immense wealth and resources back into the Americas, by means of a vast system of interlocking holding companies, reopening factories during the reconstruction period and building up the network of small industries that made him the phenomenon and power that he was.

  No one seemed to know what Carl Englehardt was really after: not power, because he had turned down all offers and opportunities for political succession; not money, of which he had a surfeit; not glory, which he avoided like the plague. Because he was not directly or formally in any government function, the DEPCO analysts could not get at him to poke through his mind and background to find out what made him tick. There were rumors that he had watched his only son tortured and murdered by the mob during the sacking of the XAR project, but even though they spent plenty of time and effort trying to pick up the threads of his past, DEPCO had been unable to confirm such rumors. The crash had destroyed so many records, and killed and scattered so many people that the job seemed hopeless.

  And still, in critical times, they needed him. Now the DIA Volta let him off at the official entrance to the DEPEX building. Englehardt walked quickly down the hall, cleared his identification with the guards, and went on toward the conference room in the administrative wing. They had called him now because they needed him, in spite of themselves.

  But they were not going to like the proposal he had to make.

  "Our problem," said Timmins, Director of the Department of Population, "is one of defense measures. That's why we asked you to come here today, Mr. Englehardt ... to bring you up-to-date on what information we have on the alien threat, and to get your views on certain problems that Mr. Bahr has . . . er . . . brought to a head."

  Englehardt nodded, looking at the men in the room. Adams of DEPCO was there, cold-faced and angry. Bahr drummed his fingers impatiently on the table top. There was a General of the Army that Englehardt had met casually. Half a dozen other bureaus were represented. Englehardt looked back at Timmins' blond, boyish face. "I would think," he said, "diat your defense measures would depend heavily on the nature of the enemy you were fighting."

  "That's what I've been trying to tell them," Bahr exploded. "We simply don't have enough information. We have no hint . . . not even a suggestion ... of their plans. There is a very strong suspicion, however, that they can control the actions of certain humans, at least to a limited degree."

  Englehardt frowned. "Do you have proof of that?"

  "Not yet," Bahr said. "Unfortunately the man who might have given us the answer has escaped our custody. I'm referring to Major Harvey Alexander, the security officer at Wildwood."

  "That is neither here nor there, right now," Adams broke in. The DEPCO chief spoke rapidly and nervously, keeping his long narrow fingers very precisely before him on the table. "An even more acute problem is the public reaction to Mr. Bahr's television fiasco. Unless we can convince the public that everything is under control . . . that the aliens cannot harm them . . . we may be dealing with a major panic."

  "In other words," Englehardt said, "you are proposing to fight malaria by distributing citronella to the natives."

  Adams frowned. "I don't think I understand you."

  "You're facing an unknown enemy with short-range planning and countermeasures," Englehardt said. "Which inevitably puts you a step behind him. To destroy malaria, Mr. Adams, we spray the swamps, kill the disease at its source. It seems to me that our only defense here is a powerful attack, or the ability to make one."

  "But what are we going to attack? Our biggest enemy right now is not an alien invader; it's fear. We have to deal with that before we can even think of defense or attack."

  "Then harness it," Englehardt said. "Forget about trying to control or sublimate it—use it! That's what Vanner did. He put fear and panic to work for him. He made the people rebuild and start a new society."

  Adams sighed. "I don't think you understand the basis of this fear reaction. Unfortunately, this is not an attack from the Eastern bloc. This is an attack from space."

  "I don't care what it is," Englehardt said angrily. "How can you expect to fool people into security when you don't have any program, any plans, any ideas at all about what to do? You launch a good overall program, something concrete and solid, and your public reaction problem will take care of itself."

  "A program like that would upset the stability of the nation in a week," Adams said. "We can't take that risk. We in DEPCO have made the public, Mr. Englehardt. We have been fighting to maintain controlled stability because stability is the only safe, sensible, logical way to keep our economy and sociology balanced. Vanner and his ideas were necessary, of course, in their time; he changed the direction of society. Now it is our function to keep it running in that same direction."

  "Have you ever heard of the Wywy bird, Mr. Adams?" Englehardt asked. He was referring to the ancient and vulgar joke about the bird that flew in ever-decreasing spirals until it flew up its own derrière. Bahr and a couple of the military men laughed. Adams blinked and reddened. "I really can't see . . ." he began hody.

  "I think we're getting into personal
ities," Timmins said quickly from across the room. "You've made some strong statements about our having no plan of attack ready, Mr. Englehardt. If you think we should not try to keep the Vanner-Elling system in normal operation and devote our efforts to keeping the public in a good state of mental health, then what should we do?"

  "Let's put it this way," Englehardt said. "Mr. Bahr, when the Chinese landed their guerrilla army in South America two years ago, what was the first thing you looked for?"

  "Their supply routes," Bahr said. "They weren't a true guerrilla army; the civilian population would not willingly support them, so we knew they had to have outside channels of supply."

  "ExacÜy," Englehardt said. "Now, why shouldn't the same apply to an invasion force of aliens? Assuming that the alien maneuvers so far have been preliminary junkets, we can expect them to mount larger maneuvers in the future. But for that they will have to have supply routes. Now, where would they stockpile their supplies?"

  There was an uneasy stir in the room. Adams was suddenly sitting upright, very alert. Timmins cleared his throat nervously. "Mr. Englehardt . . ."

  "Somewhere off the planet," Bahr answered the question. "Probably in orbit."

  Adams turned sharply to Englehardt. "Just what are you proposing? That we develop a radar system to pick up some sort of ... of space warehouse? Some missile artillery which could intercept them when they try to land personnel or supplies?"

  "You mean anti-aircraft?" Englehardt said angrily. "Never! All the defensive maneuvers in the world won't stop them. Look, what is the one biggest advantage that the aliens have over us? Invulnerability! They can get to us any time they want to—witness the Wildwood mess—but we can't get to them because they come from space!"

  "But we can't build spaceships!" Adams exploded.

  "Why can't we? We were on the verge of it in the Nineties. We had all the technology and engineering we needed; it was just a matter of time."