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 drilling 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 toughmind-edness 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 die 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 Pough-keepsie 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. ICven 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 lh rough 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 head-'inarters. Behind him he heard voices suddenly raised, and Wah 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 oS 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.
"Two credits," she whispered, "flat rate, if you don't take too long, two credits, you can take your pick. . . ."
"This is something special," he said. He told her what he wanted, then slipped her a ten-credit note.
"But where?"
"There's a motel behind there."
"He might kill me."
"He won't kill anybody, don't worry."
He watched her go back into the diner. Ten minutes later she came out with a heavy-set, stupid-looking man with a trucker's cap on. They walked back to the motel office, then clown the darkened path toward the cabins.
Alexander moved after them silently. He couldn't count on handling a hulking truck driver alone, but there are times when a man is helpless. He hoped the woman would remember the signal, and fought down the intense wave of self-loathing that welled up in him. There was no stopping now, no turning back to order and precision and the proper running of things, no turning back to the warm, easy security of Absolute Stability, the peaceful quiet of not having to think or worry. A week before he would not have dreamed of doing the things he was doing now as a matter of course.
But it was not as a matter of course, not now, he thought. It was a matter of survival.
He heard them inside, heard the woman's voice, low and suggestive, then dropping into a stream of underworld jargon so filthy Alexander was afraid for a moment she would frighten the quarry away. Then it was quiet, with only murmuring sounds, and he waited for the signal.
Silence. It took an instant to register that it was too quiet, suddenly deathly still. He gripped the latch, turned it and burst into the darkened room.
Then he screamed as the fight hit his eyes, glaring, blinding, burning white, searing his retinas, and he clamped his hands over his face . . .
He felt the blow at the back of his head, and then the glare-whiteness dissolved into blackness.
He was in a room without windows, a single door, a single chair, utterly black, although he could feel other presences there, other light breathing quite near him. He could not move his head, and he realized, quite suddenly, that it was clamped into a frame on the chair.
And it was silent, except for the voice that was asking him questions. It had been asking them for a long time, it seemed, and he tried to orient himself, to remember when the questions had started, and what they had been about.
But only now could he focus on the voice, slowly repeating a question, pausing, then another, pausing, a curiously metallic, unmodulated voice like a person talking with laryngitis.
He had heard that voice before, years before in the communications shack in Antarctica, transcribing messages from
Control in Washington, and he remembered now, with a jolt of fear, what the voice was.
It was the characteristic electronic voice of a tik-talker.
Part III THE TIGER PIT
Chapter Eleven
LIBBY ALLISON was kneeling on the floor playing googly-goo with the tow-headed baby in the playpen when Julian Bahr walked in, threw his coat on the bed-couch, and walked a-round a few seconds impatiently while she continued to ignore him. Then his impatience seemed to evaporate, and he sat heavily on the edge of the relaxo, and with a half-groan, half-sigh began to pound his fist into the palm of his left hand.
Libby looked up then. "Trouble?" she asked.
Bahr's only answer was a sudden vicious smack of fist against palm, as if in his mind he had just driven his knuckles into the fragile bone-structure of somebody's face.
"DEPCO?"
"That too."
She put the youngster back in the playpen, and brushed her hair back where his small hands had been pulling at it. "What else?" she said.
He didn't answer for a minute or more. His jaw was knotted in anger, his huge body tense, but there was something else in his face, perhaps just in his eyes, when he looked at her. Then he shook his head helplessly. "The elephant, again."
Libby turned sharply, the baby forgotten, her heart suddenly thumping wildly, her trained psychologist's mind focusing abruptly on an almost simultaneous kaleidoscope of incidents, remarks, mannerisms, and the few desperate grudging revelations that formed in her mind the clinical picture of Julian Bahr.
"Last night," he said angrily. "Actually this morning, just before I woke up." He held out his left hand for her to see. The knuckles were cut and bruised.
"Julian . . ."
"I was hitting the wall. I hurt my hand, I guess that was what woke me up." He sat quiedy for a moment, his breathing shallow and rapid. Holding his hand, she could feel the furious pounding of his pulse, watch the slow tensing of back and shoulder muscles as if he were trying by sheer physical force to throw off an ugly, frightening memory.
Finally he stood up, jammed his hands in his pockets, walked around the room once, then came back and sat down. "All right," he said. "It's the first time in two years. Why did it come back, Libby? I went to sleep all right. I worked until I was ready to collapse, I can always get to sleep then, but I woke up at three in the morning beating my fist on the wall, and all I can remember is the elephant."
"Did it start out the same way? Out in the street?"
"Yes, the same way. The same woman, too. Some man was looking for her, and she had to hide, so I went into the building with her. There was the long hall with doors all up and down, and little rooms opening into it, and the elephant was at the end of the hall."
She nodded wearily. It was the same, detail for detail. "And the elephant picked her up?"
"Just like before—in his trunk. He wasn't hurting her any but he was going to carry her off, and she screamed for me to get a blanket and put it over his eyes so he couldn't see. So I took the blanket and threw it over the elephant's eyes, but it stuck on his tusks and only partly covered his eyes. He started to come down the hall, and I knew he could see me, and I had to run, only I couldn't run fast enough, so I went into one of the little rooms and closed the door. The elephant went right on by, but when he got to the end of the corridor he started back, with people going past him like he wasn't there. There was no way out of the room, and I
couldn't jump, and the elephant began pushing in the door »
He stopped for breath, and straightened his back for a moment. "Then I woke up. I was hitting the wall and I woke up." He sighed again, his breathing deep and labored.
"The woman," Libby said. "Did you know her?"
"No."
"Was she with the elephant when he was chasing you?"
"No," Bahr said. "After I started to run she wasn't there at all." He looked up at her, suffering in his face and eyes. "What does it mean, Libby? Why does it . . . scare me like that? Why does it start coming back now? I haven't had it in two years."
She sat down, shaking her head and holding his hand between hers. "Julian, the last time, I told you . . ."
"But what have I got to be scared of?" he roared, jerking to his feet. "You want to dig and poke and scrape things open in my mind, but those things are all gone now, they aren't ever going to come back again; I won't let them come back!" He collapsed into the seat again, the anger fading as suddenly as it flared. "It's no good, Libby, it's just no good. I can't do it your way."
"It's the only way I can help you. And I want to help you, you know that."
"I know." He leaned back, breathing slower again, more relaxed. "Thank God I can come here sometimes," he said, almost to himself. "Sometimes things start pressing in until it's more than I can stand. Here I can rest."
"How do you feel now?" she asked.
"Better, I guess. Pretty good. God, I'm hungry! Haven't you got something to eat?"
"I'll make some sandwiches and coffee," she said, and went out into the tiny kitchenette.
Bahr paced up and down the room a few times as she put the coffee on the sonic unit. Then she didn't hear him walking any more, and she glanced out to see if he had left.
He was crouched, one knee on the floor beside the playpen, poking his huge finger at the child, who struggled to thrust it aside, and then grabbed onto it with small un-co-ordinated hands. Finally Bahr chuckled and picked up the baby in his hu
ge hands. He began to swing the child up and down, toss him in the air, the pale blue eyes regarding him with wide surprise, and each time Bahr caught him he would whisper a soft "Ahhhhhh . . ."
Then Bahr, the lesser, began to squall, and the big man glanced around the room guiltily, and seeing that no one was looking, lowered the loud one back into the playpen.
"The kid's crying," Bahr said roughly. "Why don't you feed him?"
"I will," Libby said. When he's alone, she thought, when he's alone he's different. He's almost human until he thinks people are looking at him.
Suddenly Bahr was behind her, jabbing his thumb into her ribs, laughing as she jumped. "What's the matter?" he said. "I'm starving, and you let the coffee boil over."
"Just thinking," she said, but there were tears in her eyes.
She waited until he had finished his coffee before she told him about Adams' visit during the afternoon.
"You must have been out of your mind," she said. "I told you DEPCO would be watching that announcement speech. And then you stood up there and shouted to the world that we were being invaded."
Bahr looked at her and grinned. "I hope they got plenty to see. I put it on the line, all right. Somebody had to."
"Oh, you put it on the line, all right. Do you know what you looked like, out there with all those cameras? Like Marc Antony doing 'friends and Romans.' Do you think the people in DEPCO are idiots?"
"The ones I know."
"Julian, you cut your own throat with that speech. DEPCO doesn't have to wait until they interview you. They can slap an injunction on your job on plain suspicion of Instability and schedule you for interview when they have time."
"They aren't going to have die time," Bahr said. "Look . . . they're scared. They can pull that Instability bunk and
jerk men out of their jobs when there's nothing on fire, but not during an emergency."
"They can, and they will," she said.
"How many people did they dump out of jobs during the last Condition B? What about the Southwest during the last Chinese landing down there, when they had the blowups? How many key people did they dump then because they twitched or doodled the wrong way? The answer is not a damned one, and they're not going to pull me out now, because there's nobody to replace me. And if they were going to do it, Adams would already have run it through after the conference yesterday."
Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Page 14
