Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (18 page)

The
reason was easy to see now. Clearly something had happened at Wildwood that he,
for all his security and personal handling, had not known about. He had racked
his brain for a memory of anything extraordinary or peculiar that had happened
there in the preceding few weeks, anything that might have hooked in his mind
and been pushed aside for want of explanation or significance, but he found
nothing. If aliens had worked from within the plant, they had done so with
consummate skill.

It
had taken two hours in BJ's Volta to reach the vicinity of the Wildwood plant.
They ran into the first roadblock fifteen miles north of the plant, and slid
into a series of side-roads that kept them away from the main highway strips.
Alexander directed her as they moved through two sleepy towns and across a
river to the pillbox apartment buildings used by the civilian engineers who
ran the plant.

"Are
you sure you can trust this man?" BJ had asked him. "Are you sure he
won't just turn you in?"

"No. I'm not sure who I can trust. We
were friendly, used to play chess together, that was all. But Powers might have
something I can use, and I've got to take the chance. Take this right."

They
wove through the winding roads of the apartment development. Alexander motioned
her to stop, peered out at the neatly-kept lawns, yellow under the streetlamps.
"I'll go from here. You go back to the road, and wait outside the
entrance. Give me an hour. If I'm not back then, you get back to Chicago as fast
as you can."

"I'll wait for you," she said.

"You
do what I tell you," he said sharply. "If a police car blocked the
entrance to this place, you'd never get out. I'll be all right."

He
waited until the red tail light of the Volta had disappeared around the circle
toward the entrance gate, and then moved across the lawn and into the building.
The buildings were familiar; he had been quartered in a similar development
farther down the river, and he remembered Bob Powers' door combination. He let
himself into the building without signaling, took the stairs by the elevator,
and stopped before the door marked 301.

The
door opened a crack when he knocked. He saw Powers' lace, puzzled-angry at
first, then startled in recognition. "Alexander! Good lord, what are you
doing here?"

"Let me in. I've got to talk to
you."

The
man hesitated for just a moment. Then he unlatched the chain, held the door
open as Alexander stepped into the Hat. "Look, do you want to get me
blitzed?" Powers' voice was a harsh whisper. "They're looking for
you,
they've got a red alarm out."

"Nobody
followed me," Alexander said. "
This will
only lake a couple of minutes, you—"

He
broke off as the man shook his head violently, jerking a thumb at the TV set in
the comer. Alexander bit his lip. Of course they would have all Wildwood
personnel on audio-control. He jerked open the door, pulled the engineer out
into the hall. "You were on duty in the power pile before the raid,"
he said desperately. "You must have seen something, noticed something out
of the ordinary."

"No, there was
nothing."

"Think! There must
have been something."

"Look,
Harvey, they grilled me for hours. There was nothing."

"I don't mean anything obvious,"
Alexander said. "I mean somebody behaving strangely, anything . . ."

The
engineer was almost beside himself. "Look, they're liable to be here any
minute. I tell you, there was nothing. Everything was running according to
plan. They . . . they think you were the one. Didn't you hear the
broadcast?"

"What broadcast?"

"The DIA director.
There's a general Condition B on communications, travel permits
canceled . . ."

Alexander
swore. That meant BJ would be cut off from Chicago where she belonged, and that
she would inevitably be picked up. "And he said I was implicated in the
raid?"

"He
didn't mention your name, but some scientists have been picked up under alien
control."

He
knew then that he couldn't rejoin BJ. If the bug monitor had been alert, DIA
cars would already be moving in on the apartment development. He nodded to
Powers and started down the corridor toward the fire escape stairs. It was an
outside stairwell, and he saw the two DIA cars moving toward the building from
the central circle.

He
cursed, crouched close to the wall, and moved as silently as he could. A
spotlight broke into the darkness from one of the cars, roamed the grounds,
while the other started bumping across the lawn to cover the rear.

Then the spotlight caught something, and
moved back to the row of hedge along the adjacent building. Suddenly BJ's Volta
broke from the cover of the hedge, did a pirouette on the slippery grass and
spun down the road toward the entrance, doing ninety from a dead stop in five
seconds. The DIA siren screamed, and both cars broke into pursuit.

From
the stairwell Alexander saw them skid on the circle as the little Volta in the
lead met spotlights from the gate head-on, crashed through the hastily-arranged
roadblock, and accelerated on the main road strip.

Alexander
reached ground, and ran, keeping in the shadow of buildings as much as
possible,
then
darting down the hill that separated
the apartment houses from the fringe of woods along a secondary road. He stopped
at the road, catching his breath in great gasps, and then ran, dropping down in
the ditch whenever oncoming lights flickered into view.

He
had given her a cover story: she had heard about the Wildwood incident and come
down to see if her ex-husband bad been hurt in the blast, since she had not
heard anything from him. It might conceivably hold up, since he had been
quartered in apartments nearby. They could hold her for not having a travel
pass for more than 200 miles radius of Chicago, but maybe she could sell them
that she was too excited and confused to remember. As long as they didn't put
her under the polygraph, her story might hold up.

Until
they grilled Powers, and then it would fall apart like cotton candy.

He shivered.

His hand touched something in his pocket, and
he drew it out—money.
Simple, practical, typical of BJ.
She knew he had
none, that
he wouldn't ask her for it,
that he needed it. Stupid, he thought with a sudden pang of bitterness, when
people got married and split up and still felt that way about each other, and
yet had to be all wrapped up in the inhibitions and conventions that kept BJ
from saying, "I'm sorry we couldn't work it out, I was selfish, and I
still love you, and I'd try it over again but I'm too bitter now, and still I
feel guilty about it just the same and want to make it up to you somehow."
Instead, she had just stubbornly driven him down here, given him money, and set
herself up to give him the time he needed to break from his first bad blunder.

She
had already paid for the ruined fragments of their life together. Even the
tightest control couldn't make them forget what life had been before the
crash—all the unscientific group pressures and outmoded mores, the things that
would always be right and wrong to them, and speakable and unspeakable. Of
course, now the new educational programs were gradually removing that alleged
stewpot of all emotional woes—the family—from existence in society. For the new
generations that was fine, maybe, but for those like himself and BJ there was
only the bitter hopelessness of trying to exist in the present and think in the
past, as all exiled castes do.

The
road crossed a secondary highway strip, and he turned toward the south. St.
Louis was forty miles away.

Half an hour later headlights sprang up
behind him that were too yellowed and dim to be police, so Alexander took a
chance and stepped out beside the
roadstrip
to thumb.
The old rattletrap Hydro slowed and
stopped,
and
Alexander ran down the strip to climb in, slamming the door behind him. The
driver was a worker, his yellow Wildwood plant badge still exposed. He was a
man of thirty or thirty-five.

He
looked Alexander over as he started the car again. "In a fight?" he
asked.

Alexander
carefully slipped into the speech pattern of his cover identity in the Mexican
incident.
"Uh?
No, no' me.
Spill.
Took 'turn
t'fast
.
Zip.
In 'a ditch."
He looked at the driver.
"
Gemme
to St. Louis, huh?"

"Yeah, sure."
The driver accepted his story without a frown. He was
overheavy
, with a flat moon face, and he was a talker.
Already he had started talking about car wrecks and how his Hydro could only
take a corner so fast any more, and he was too involved in his own
bubblings
to do any analytical thinking about why a man
should be hitchhiking at two in the morning.

Alexander
sank back in the seat, allowing the man to ramble without paying too much
attention. He was worried about what was happening to BJ, and he was worried
about the gulf that seemed to stretch before him. He could get to St. Louis,
yes, but then what? From there, what could he do? As the car buzzed through the
flat countryside, he probed at the problem against the background of the
driver's chattering until a word jerked him up sharply and set his heart
hammering in his throat. Alien.

"How's
that?" he asked, trying to recall how the driver had begun his longwinded
surrogate sentence.

"Like
I said, the aliens," the driver said. "I was
tellin
'
my nymph last night, 'a way I
figger
it the second
wave will be
comin
' in any day now, like it said in
the book, and maybe there'd be riots in town an' all, but she said maybe people
wouldn't get too scared, I mean,
knowin
' what was
comin
' next, you know, 'cause they told her plenty of times
in Tech School how it was not
knowin
' what was
comin
' that made all the riots so bad back in the crash
days. So I told her not to worry, 'cause if it looked like they were
comin
' to Wildwood again I'd stay home and take care of her
an t' hell with work."

"Oh,"
Alexander said, still not comprehending.
" 'Course
she gets scared
kinda
easy that way, you know. Maybe
they'll
wanna
use her for a breeder unit or
something, like they do with cows, you know—sort of like an incubator, it says
in the book. She's afraid if they do anything like that to her she won't be
able to, you know, sex it up any more. She's
kinda
hot,
yTcnow
, and we still got four months contract
to run before we switch off."

"Breeder
units," Alexander said slowly.
"Yeah, the aliens.
You know.
You seen
the book, huh?" "Y' got
me
runnin
'," Alexander said. "What
book?"
"The alien invasion book,
o'course
."
The man looked at him in surprise.
"
Ain't
you seen it yet?"

Alexander
shook his head numbly. "Don't read much . . ." "You're fixated,
Jack. You're really repressed. That
pulpie's
been
goin
' the rounds for six months; everybody's seen it. What
a lover-cover! Say, you
ain't
a book-snooper?"

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.