Read Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Online
Authors: The invaders are Coming
"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 huge 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."
"Did you have
a
run-in with Adams?"
"
Englehardt
did. He's the head of
Robling
,
and he believes in doing something instead of patting the public on the fanny
and telling them everything is going to be all right."
Libby looked up at him, and her face was
suddenly white. "What does he propose to do?"
"Build spaceships and
go after them."
"Spaceships!
But, oh, that's ridiculous. Everyone from DEPCO right down to the
Machines will stop it. You mean he actually
proposed
that?"
"He's got backing. The
military and DEPEX are with him."
"They
don't count. DEPCO has the final say on something like that."
"Well,
maybe this time DEPCO won't," Bahr said sharply.
"You
and your damned psych-docs mumbling about symbols and fixations.
I'm
the one who's got to fight the aliens, and they're not going to turn up
for analysis. This is no little guerrilla campaign this time; we may need those
ships to survive. Did you ever think of that? Your therapy and adjustments
aren't worth a damn when it comes to staying alive."
"That's
not the important thing right now," Libby said. "All DEPCO has ever
tried to do was to change a few minor things, like wars and squalor and
neurosis. And that means catching those things at the roots."
"Garbage," Bahr said. "
Englehardt
put his finger on it when he said we had no
place to go, and that is why everybody is afraid. If they had something to do,
they wouldn't be afraid
any more
."
"Do
you
have something to do?" she asked him.
"You
bet your life I have. Run the DIA. Get to the bottom of this alien
business."
"Are you afraid?"
"Certainly not.
I'm too busy to be afraid.
I
. . ."
"But
you dream about elephants."
Bahr's
mouth closed and he was silent. Libby stood up to avoid his eyes. It hit him
where he couldn't fight back, she knew, but somehow the only way she could make
an impression on Bahr was to hurt him. "You don't understand," she
said slowly, "and you've
got
to
understand. There are things that drive people to do things, and they don't
even recognize the reason. They think up all sorts of fantastic cover-lies to
somhow
justify doing things that they just can't help
doing. That's why DEPCO was set up—to spot those drives and do something about
them, dig them out by the roots. That's why I've been trying to help you for
four years now, Julian, because you don't even understand what's happening
inside your own mind; you just keep finding reasons and excuses and urgent
necessities for everything you do, and blaming other people for everything
that's
done to you or everything that blocks you. I've tried
to show you that it's all inside you, in your own mind, but you just say no,
stall DEPCO, get me a white card, I won't let them stop me. . . ." She
broke off helplessly. "You don't even know why you
want
a white card."
"I
certainly do," Bahr said. "I can't get anywhere without a white card
stability rating. A green card is two strikes against me everywhere I
turn."
"And
if you got a white card . . . Suppose you got a white card, and you got
everything you wanted . . . then what?"
"What do you mean,
then what?"
"What would you do if
you had everything you wanted?"
"I'd change things," Bahr said
harshly. "I'd change everything that got in my way."
"But
after you'd done all that . . . after you'd done
everything
you wanted . . . then what would you
want?"
Bahr
stared at her, not comprehending. "That couldn't happen. Everybody gets in
my way, tries to stop me. I could never get everything I want."
Libby
sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. "On that one thing, you're right,
Julian," she said. "You don't know how right you are."
She had hoped that maybe she had reached him
somehow, that possibly some spark of contact or understanding had been struck,
but when he asked her later, "Well, what a-bout Adams?" she knew that
she hadn't reached him at all.
"I'll
try to stall him as long as possible," she said. "I don't think it
will do much good. Adams is suspicious, and he's taking a personal
interest."
"I
hope he does," Bahr said sharply, "because I'm taking a personal
interest in him. What do you know about him?"
"Why?"
"Because
if he's what I think he is, I've got a couple of specialists on my staff
who
can quiet him down for good."
She whirled on him.
"Julian, you wouldn't . . ."
"Look,
you don't seem to understand. Adams or nobody like him is going to put me out
of a job on a Stability check."
"You
think you can blackmail him out of it? It wouldn't do you any good. There are
other people in DEPCO just as big as Adams, and they can't be bought off or
blackmailed. Julian, there's a storm working up in my office. Aliens or no
aliens, I can guarantee that you'll be up against a prelim by tomorrow. And you
won't pass it."
"I passed the other
probes."
"Because I told you the answers
beforehand, question by question.
But I can't do that on a prelim; they use a polygraph."
"They just poke around
the sore spots, don't they? They skip the questions that you don't bounce on,
and just dig in the soft spots?"
She
hesitated. "Yes, they study the prelim awhile before they go into a deep
probe."
"Fine," Bahr
said. "Then you can brief me on it."
"You couldn't use dummy answers under a
poly, they'd bounce all over the place. With your adrenals . . ."
"I can control my
reactions," he said.
"Your
face muscles—maybe. Not your blood pressure and your sweat glands."
"Not even under
hypnosis?"
"Even
then, even with suggested reactions to specific trigger questions, I still
don't know if it would work. You'd have to know the questions."
"You can find out the
questions."
"No," Libby said.
He stared at her.
"What do you
mean,
no?"
"I
mean up until now I could always say I'd
mis
-evaluated
your
pers
scores, or I was emotionally involved and
didn't know it. But deliberate faking on a prelim is a federal offense."
He
sat silent for a minute. Then he spread his hands wide. "Look, I've never
asked you for much. I've always just told you, before, and you did what I told
you. Now I'm asking you, and if asking doesn't do it, by God, I
will
tell you. I've got too much at stake to trip on this thing now. You've
got to get me past this prelim."
"I can't do it," she said. "If
they caught me, I'd be through. I'd never get a professional rating
again."
"I'm
not talking about professional ratings," Bahr said quietly. "I'm
talking about you and me."
"No," Libby said.
"I'll
make a deal with you. You've always wanted to find out about the elephant.
You've always wanted to get me into deep analysis and run me straight through
from scratch. You know even DEPCO can't get me into deep analysis if I block;
I'd have to be willing, co-operative. All right, you get me through this
prelim. As soon as I get this alien thing
THE
INVADERS ARE CQMING
143
and
Englehardt's
project squared away just enough so it doesn't take all my time day and night,
I'll let you start analysis. I won't fight you, I'll co-operate."
She
knew he was lying, and suddenly she didn't care. He didn't know he was lying
now. Right now he thought he meant it, and even though she saw through the mask
with perfect, frightening clarity, she couldn't help herself.
"Will
you take a BHE and sign the paternity papers if I do?"
Bahr nodded.
"If I get past the prelim."
She
leaned back against his shoulder, suddenly infinitely tired,
more
weary
than she had ever been in her life before. "You know, it
would have been so easy," she said. "All this running and fighting;
it would have been so much easier if you had let me start deep analysis two
years ago."
He stiffened against her.
"Easier?"
"You
wouldn't have the elephant, and the sleeplessness, and you wouldn't be boiling
up with hate and beating your fist against the wall in your sleep, and you
wouldn't have this prelim coming up."
"And I wouldn't have
gotten anywhere," Bahr said.