Alexander relaxed slowly. "Not me. I been away." He saw now what the trouble was. Book and magazine publishing, like TV and radio, had been under BURINF control since the early post-crash days, and here especially BURINF had used the double standard circulation techniques with incredible success to carry DEPCO control propaganda to the huge urban populations. Standard publishing channels were controlled and censored; their print orders and outlets carefully designated by VE equation analysis and machine computation. The vast quantity of "live" psych-control material went out through underworld channels. This included porno-mags, feelie-tapes, all the vile and violent entertainment and expression sops that could be counted upon to satiate all levels at their own levels. The BURINF-created myth of the book-snoopers provided the necessary stimulus of salacious-ness and illegality to insure that the material would be widely circulated hand to hand, and above all, read. But a book about alien invaders . . .
"You say it's been out for six months?" he said to the driver.
"Yeah, sure, you mean you really haven't read it? It was supposed to be just a story, you know, but now with the Wildwood raid and the Canadian landing, and now the blackout, everybody knows it was the real thing, y'know? This is just the first wave, like it says, testing our defenses and getting hypno control over all the key people, softening us up for for the big wave. Why, they've been catching our teevies for years. Probably even learned how to unscramble our topsec sendouts and everything, just like the book says."
"Does it tell how they're going to invade?"
"Oh, sure, right down to the button; only it doesn't say how long between the first and second waves, y'know. That's wha's got my nymph so scared. Hasn't scared me much, but that's prob'ly because I'm better adjusted, I'm really a pretty well adjusted guy. Went to a good Playschool, you know, and I can get along with everybody and I don't go fightin' back and gettin' all twisted up inside. Even the group-doc at works thinks I'm pretty well adjusted; just the same, though, I wouldn't want any aliens nervin' me into a twitcher-coma, or using me for a food culture incubator, or white-mousing me, or anything."
"Yeah, I know," Alexander said. "You know a place I can get this book?"
"I'd let you have mine, on'y I let my nymph's girlfriend take it to show her daddy. We kinda switch off sometimes, even if it ain't strictly legal until my contract's up, but sometimes even a well-adjusted guy like me gets all tied up and can't loosen up, you know. I ain't scared at all, o'course, but some of the things that the aliens can do can really make you shaky. You don't think that means I'm unstable, do you?"
"No, your group-doc has just been slipping up, not helping relax you and get you back into the swing," Alexander said comfortingly, remembering his BURINF days.
"Yeah, that's what I've been tellin' my nymph, the group-docs oughta know what to tell us about the aliens so we know what we oughta think; it's their fault if we get kinda shaky and get screaming dreams sometimes. But look, Jack, we're gettin' pretty near my place, so if you wanta you can come up and meet my nymph. I ain't got any old-fashioned blocks about her, you know, and any friend of mine is a friend of hers."
"Thanks, some other time." The car had been wheeling through the low, drab buildings of north St. Louis. "Look, what did you say that book was called?"
"Alien Invaders. You can get it anywhere. You sure you don't wanta come up for one round anyway?"
"No thanks," Alexander said, feeling a little sick, not so much with disgust as with pity, "but give her my love."
"All twenty-nine, and same to you."
Alexander stepped onto the curb and waved, and walked quickly toward the man-strip as the Hydro buzzed around the corner.
The town was dead in early-morning stillness, and he headed for the downtown section. The gulf before him had suddenly narrowed, and he thought he saw the first step across.
A pulpie book called Alien Invaders.
It was ingenious, and deadly, and it fitted, Alexander realized as he sipped surro-coffee in a stall in the deserted downtown area, waiting for the city to come alive. He knew that BURINF would never have countenanced a book like that. Actually, it could not have known of its existence, or it would have been nailed before a dozen copies had been circulated. No publisher in the country had dared try to launch a science-fiction or fantasy book since the crash, under the tacit threat of embargoes on paper and typcmetal, and of DEPCO investigation and reassignment of Stability Ratings if that was not enough.
But the channels of distribution were there, created by BURINF, and the psychological Achilles' heel of the society was there, too—the abiding, hysterical, carefully nurtured fear of space and anything associated with space.
Quite abruptly, Alexander could see a pattern. Early, undetected landings . . . contact, perhaps psychological control of key individuals ... a concentrated study of the society and psychology of the inhabitants . . . circulation of a book, fanciful enough in nature until the things it predicted began happening . . . then landings that were less secretive, designed to draw attention to feed the growing fear and panic, in preparation for the final, massive blow.
He dropped his coin in the slot and went out into the cool, gray early-morning ugliness. In his head the syrupy tune-lessness of the coffee-stall vendo music was still recycling, monotonous, deliberately unresolved, always running itself back into the beginning of a phrase. He walked faster, dredged up the theme from Marche Slav to drive the vendo-pop from his mind, blinked a little as the sun hit him through a break between two building cubes.
Near the river front he found a street that looked likely, crowded with bars and porno-mag stalls and drunks sleeping on doorsteps. The first step would be easy: get a copy of the book. At least he thought it would be easy until he tried it; then, quite suddenly, it wasn't so easy after all.
The first stand was completely out, sold out for a week. Another place the vendor started to shake his head, then blinked at Alexander suspiciously and claimed he'd never heard of the book. In a third the last copy had gone the day before, and the distributor wouldn't be back for a week at least. A fourth, fifth and sixth try were equally fruitless.
Back on the street, Alexander looked around him at the sluggish hesitancy with which the city was coming to fife. There was none of the downtown hustle of the early job-rush. People seemed to be moving aimlessly, stopping to gaze in windows, congregating in small groups on the street corners. It was something Alexander had not seen since the early days of the crash, when the people, not yet desperate enough for violence, had walked about stunned, realizing with painful unwillingness that the little familiar formalities of dull, dreary work were suddenly meaningless.
And now, on this morning, he saw and felt the same blunted apathy.
It was wrong, somehow, in the same way the Wildwood raid had been wrong, in the same way a pulp magazine called Alien Invaders was wrong ... all fitting, but not quite fitting. DEPCO, he knew, should be clocking this rumbling volcano; they should be furiously at work draining off the pressure before the action stage was reached, before the explosion came. That was what DEPCO was organized to do, had to do to maintain the stability that had to be maintained.
But there was no evidence of DEPCO activity, and Alexander, seeing the vacuous, frightened faces passing him, felt a growing sense of alarm, as if all the twittering birds and monkeys in this nightmare psycho-structured jungle had suddenly stilled at the soft low cough of a stalking killer.
He found the place he was looking for, taking a spinner across town to the crowded warehouse and trucking terminal. He saw the lettering on the third floor window of a decrepit plasti-brick building of the last century: Magdisco, the local warehouse of the sprawling Magazine Distributing Company. Since hardbound books were practically nonexistent any more, except for collector's items and university archives, all books and magazines were distributed by magazine wholesaling agencies, and Magdisco was the largest, and the one least critical of the material it handled. Alexander crossed the street, assuming his Q
ualchi slouch, and went up die narrow flight of stairs.
The operation from the warehouse was largely automatic, and the tiny, littered office space was empty. The rest of the place seemed to be crammed to the ceiling with bundles of remainders, nude glossies, and a huge stack of particularly disgusting action sets that were obviously meant for the Playschool contraband circuit. Alexander's eyes searched the piles for the title he was looking for, but there was no evidence of it.
"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 a-larm, 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 fifing 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 pubfishing 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 a-gain. 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 DlA 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 quick
ly a-round 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."
Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Page 13
