Read Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Online
Authors: The invaders are Coming
Bahr glanced at Libby.
"
Prettyboy
," he said.
"He's cute," Libby said. "No
spine, though."
Behind the Chief Executive, the Joint Chiefs, marching down the aisle
like the Horsemen of die Apocalypse.
The roll call was taken. There was a simple
introduction from the Speaker of the House. "Julian Bahr, Director DIA,
has requested this emergency session to speak to you." Then Bahr was on
the rostrum.
Behind
him, on a vast screen on the wall, images sprang to life. First a night
wirephoto
of the fragmented Moon,
hanging like a cracked and baleful eye above them. A slow dissolve into a
chrome-color montage of panic: long ragged evacuation columns, people jammed
into the streets, frightened, desperately moving out of the city, rioting
crowds at night, brandishing torches, bombed out buildings bursting into flame,
shock troops moving in with machine guns and burps, a man in a white shirt
running screaming and bloody-faced through a gauntlet of jeering men and women.
All hand-picked scenes from the cruel bloody days of the crash, flashing on the
screen,
then
dimming slowly as Bahr's voice rose in
the microphone.
"We
have seen these things before, in a time of terror, and we pledged ourselves
then that these things would never happen again on the face of the Earth. Now,
today, we are threatened with just such panic and horror as we see here.
Whatever the nature of the alien creatures that have come into our skies, it is
very clear what they are attempting to do. We are fighting a war of nerves.
Every move the aliens have made has been calculated to spread panic and terror
among us, to force us to destroy ourselves. We have not returned a single
blow. In spite of every effort, my forces in DIA had no warning of this
attack."
He
paused to let that sink in. "I am going to say some things now which are
triple-A classified. You are being given this information because you must make
a decision for the safety of this country that no machines or equations can
make. No other branch of the government can make these decisions because they are
rightfully yours to make, as agents of our national power, the people."
There was a stir, a rising murmur of warmth,
because Bahr had delivered the statement to every single one of them, and they
felt proud.
"In facing an alien invader, we have
been helpless. Where the aliens are,
what
they
are, how they/communicate, what they intend to do—we do not
know.'This
latest blow is a mockery. We are powerless
to retaliate. Now we are faced with an inescapable choice. We can wait for the
next blow, and the next, and ultimately succumb—
or we can carry the attack to the
aliens!"
There
was no applause, only a long tense silence as the idea sank in. Then:
"There is only one way we can do that, only one weapon that can save
us." He turned and pointed to the wall screen behind him.
On
the screen a gleaming silver image had appeared, the old, almost forgotten
spaceship, the XAR3, beginning its takeoff from the New Mexico desert. The
ancient film showed in colored slow motion the belching of the engines, the
dust cloud. Bahr signaled, and the roar of the massive engines was amplified to
deafening volume, cutting all conversation, all thinking to a standstill, the
fiery white blast of the jets blinding and fascinating. The huge ship rose
slowly, like a tower floating on the searing jet blast, then up, up, die camera
panning upwards, the motors screaming, heat waves and sound waves scorching the
air, rising, and finally vanishing out of sight.
The screen darkened.
"That,"
Bahr said, "could have been the most powerful military weapon in history.
Had it succeeded, it would have been impregnable, irresistible,
omniperceptive
. It failed. If the time had been right,
space would have been conquered in the nineties, but the time was not right,
and we all have bitter memories of that era.
"But
that was thirty years ago, thirty years of control, balance, and evolution.
Because of the vast reaction of the people, and the teachings of a few biased
men who damned Space and science and physical laws to gain power for themselves,
this entire area of our culture had been held taboo, while we turned our
energies inward. We wanted stability, no matter what the cost. All right—now we
can see the cost. But now we must
fight.for
more than
stability; we must fight for survival. And that means we must build that
spaceship again if we hope to survive. A spaceship that will work can be
assembled and launched in three months. Until that day we are defenseless. But
it is within your power to initiate this great military and scientific project
again. This is the time to use your power."
The
cheering rose to a deafening roar as they rose from their seats. Bahr was gone
from the rostrum long before the noise had subsided, and when G. Allen White
was finally able to secure the attention of the Congress, he read a short,
simple request for congressional action. He had not rehearsed the
proclamation, which had been handed to him on a sheet of white paper under the
DIA letterhead, but experienced thespian that he
was,
he delivered it without hesitation, tears in his eyes, straight from the heart.
"I propose that the Chief Executive be granted full authority in this
emergency to establish a project which shall be called Project Tiger, for the
development of a spaceship, and subsequently a space armada, to hunt out and
destroy the alien enemy in his lair, and that this project be placed under the
special supervision of the Joint Chiefs and Julian Bahr, Director DIA, to take
precedence over every other jurisdiction and activity until this emergency is
at an end."
There could be no doubt.
Later, in an anteroom that was crowded with
people, Bahr pulled off his coat, drenched with sweat, and loosened his tightly
strapped
Markheim
. Libby was staring at him,
wide-eyed. When he came into the room there had been a silence, broken by a
rising buzz of excited conversation as the immensity, the swiftness, of the
thing began to dawn. Something that could not have happened had happened: it
was, incredibly, the end of an era.
Reporters
were crowding the room, flashbulbs snapping as statements were distributed.
Carl
Englehardt
was there, shaking Bahr's hand
vigorously, pounding him on the back. Bahr was voluble, laughing, almost
intoxicated. Two of his «^DIA men crossed over to him, congratulated him, and
said something in low voices. Bahr frowned,
Jiis
eyes
searching a-
cross the room.
«'
Near
the doorway he saw a thin-faced man, still wearing his trench coat and overdone
jumptrooper uniform.
"
Kocek
!"
Bahr pulled away from the clump of people
surrounding him, walked to the doorway past
Kocek
,
who fell into step beside him. In the temporary privacy of the hallway, Bahr
turned.
"Carmine broke,"
Kocek
said.
Bahr
nodded, a hard smile crossing his face. "Who was it? Who was backing him?
Who put him up to it?"
"Before
he died, he talked."
Kocek
jerked his head toward
the clamoring, racket-filled room. "It was
Englehardt
,"
he said. "Carl
Englehardt
."
There was
darkness
,
and pain, and then the sudden, startling realization that he could move his
body again.
Tentatively, Harvey Alexander tried it, wiggling a toe, stiffly clasping and
unclasping a hand. It hurt to breathe and when he tried to sit up, there was a
lacerating spasm of pain through his chest. He lay back again, panting and
trembling.
He
could see the room dimly, and it was not the place where he had been. It seemed
to him that there were great gaping holes in his memory. Resting, he closed his
eyes, and tried to piece together the fragments.
There
was a hospital smell, but it was not a hospital room he was in now. There was a
high ceiling, and a heavy oaken door.
Bandages on his head
and chest, stiffness in his right arm, and a slow dripping bottle of
intravenous fluid above his right shoulder.
The
jhe
! There had been a fire, and he had tried to reach the
window. But then what?
It
jolted back memories, a kaleidoscopic blaze of fragments without
time-relationships to draw them together. The metallic voice of his interrogators;
the questions and questions and endless questions, he remembered that; then
darkness, not like the restful seclusion of light here, but almost utter
blackness.
Muffled voices below.
The endless
clack-clack-clack of some kind of machinery . . . traffic sounds outside.
And
then unconnected bits, only partial consciousness, long periods of waiting for
the heavy steps of the questioners outside the door.
The
tight constriction of the respirator, the utter helpless lethargy and paralysis
from the drugs.
He had seen curare in use before.
Puzzles,
things he could not understand. At one point someone had come into the room
from the hall, silently, stealthily, though he had sensed the presence, sensed
the violent distillation of danger. There was the vaguest outline of a large
man with a stunner in his hand . . . then, incredibly, it was gone. Frightened
away? Why?
By what?
And later, the harsh ripping sound
of stunners on the floor below, the screams, the crackle of flames, the heat.
He
had died then, trying to inch along the floor to the window; he
knew
he had died! But then there were other memories, fuzzy, incoherent. Arms
lifting him up from somewhere, carrying him somewhere.
The
flicker of city lights and colored
neons
through a
car window, silent men on either side of him.
More darkness, a room,
muffled voices, pain, unconsciousness again. Once, a hurried consultation with
words that stuck in his memory: ". . . Alive?" "Yes. Deep shock
. . . touch and go
..."
A
woman's presence, dressed in an outlandish hat, with cool-warm hands. And later
a man's voice, distinctly a man's voice saying, "That will be all, Sister.
I'll notify you when I leave . . ."
His
mind caught at it, held it.
A pleasant, modulated voice.
"Sister" was not American slang, not in that voice, yet the woman was
not a nun. The key fell into the lock, a perfect fit, and Alexander opened his
eyes,
saw the fuzzy figure near the bed.
"BRINT?"
he said, his voice coming harshly from his throat, a voice he himself would
never have recognized.
He
didn't recognize the man, either, but he recognized the words when the man
nodded and said, "Yes, of course. If you feel you can talk,
Major
. . ."
But
he didn't feel he could talk, he didn't feel he could do anything but fall back
against the pillow, the relief flooding every cell in his body. He sighed and,
oblivious to the man and the room, he slept, a natural, restful sleep.
Alexander had never seen the man, who called
himself
MacKenzie
, and he had never seen the place
before, a small infirmary room high above the rush of Fifth Avenue traffic. He
was in the BRINT building of the British Embassy Compound in New York. He had
been there for three days, and until eight hours before they had had no very
comfortable assurance that he was not going to expire quietly in bed.
"We
were looking for you almost as soon as our net picked up the story on the
Wildwood raid,"
MacKenzie
told him in his soft
Scottish burr, "and of course Bahr was looking for you too, which made the
problem relatively simple, up to a point. We thought it would simply be a
matter of letting them find you, and then closing in. Then we got back the
information checkthrough from London on your
Qualchi
experience with us and the Army CI, and we began to worry."
MacKenzie
grinned ruefully. "We didn't realize then
that you were to be used as bait in conspiracy from within the DIA to unseat
Bahr. We didn't realize that anybody . . . even Bahr . . . thought you were
that important. And we didn't anticipate that Bahr would make such a fast
personal move to smash the insurrection."
MacKenzie
smiled again. "Which rather caught us out on all bases, you might say.
Fortunately, we had the wit to get you out of there before you were completely
incinerated."
"Yes." Alexander flexed his still
stiff arm. "What I can't quite see is why.
Why all your
interest in me at all?"