Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (8 page)

Libdy
Allison
, make-up pencil in
hand, was trying ineffectually to
smoodi
her dark
red hair and paint her mouth back into shape as the small private elevator shot
up from the lobby of the New York DEPEX building to
DIA
headquarters on the eightieth
floor.

Julian
was up there, she was certain of that, even though his office front-runner had
denied it when she tried to contact him earlier. She should have known there
was trouble in the wind when Julian didn't call her when he got back into town
last night. She had tried to call him after midnight, and had gotten Frank
Carmine instead, pleasantly apologetic but pleasantly firm.
No,
nothing wrong, just a dozen top-level conferences since he'd gotten back to New
York.
He'd be in touch with her, she shouldn't worry . . .

But,
of course, he hadn't. Instead, there was a visit from Adams that morning in her
office at DEPCO.
Little, weasel-faced Adams, with his warm
professional smile and his cold eyes watching her.
Libby shuddered.
Everything in her years of psychologist's training screamed out whenever Adams
came near her, and she had wished for the thousandth time that somehow somebody
in the whole great, sprawling social-and-psychological Stability Control
organization that was DEPCO would break down just once and say
exactiy
what he was thinking in plain unadorned English
instead of skirting and backing and filling and muddying up the already muddy
waters with psychiatric jargon and fuzzy, suspicious, defensive little ideas.

Not
that Adams had mentioned Julian, of course. Not a word about Julian. No request
to review her case-work on him, no suggestion that a machine-analysis of her
reports on him might be in order . . . nothing as straightforward as that from
the DEPCO Director. Instead, a lot of smooth, innocent DEPCO jargon about the
threat that an aggressive, unstable, ambitious personality in a position of
responsibility presented to the smooth functioning of a Truly Stable Society
{she could quote
Vanner
and Larchmont page and
verse); some "thoughts" on her sworn duties as a Department of
Control psychotherapist to help identify and weed out such unstable
personalities before they could constitute a threat; some very vague and veiled
and thoroughly nasty remarks to the effect that fornication and psychotherapy
were not precisely synonymous and that the former could not really serve as an
adequate substitute for the latter, no matter what the non-professional
relationship of the therapist and the patient.

Adams
hadn't said a single word about Julian, but it was there; he had been talking
about Julian every inch of the way, and he knew it, and she knew it, and he
knew that she knew it.

She
hadn't slapped his face, but she had wanted to, and he knew that, too. There
was no voiced threat when he had left her, only the least tangible of
implications, and yet Libby knew beyond any shadow of doubt that something had
happened last night, something bad, and that Adams knew about it, and hence
DEPCO, and that neither Adams nor DEPCO liked it.

The
elevator stopped, and Libby stepped across to the DIA reception desk. "I
have an appointment to see Mr. Bahr," she told the girl.

"Do you have a
pass?"

"I have an appointment."

"I'm
sorry,
Miss. Mr. Bahr has canceled all appointments.
You'd need a special authorization."

So
there
was
something in the wind
...
all that commotion on the Foreign and Eastern news nets
about an explosion at Wildwood. "Let me speak to him, then." She
picked up the desk phone, started to dial Julian's extension.

"I'm
sorry, Miss." The receptionist gave Libby an innocent stare. "Mr.
Bahr gave orders not to be interrupted."

Libby
reached into her handbag and set her white DEPCO card on the desk under the
girl's nose. "If I have to get a force-order to talk to him," she
said icily, "Mr. Bahr is going to be very unhappy about it." She was
surprised, and then irritated that Bahr had forgotten their appointment. No,
not forgotten
...
his memory was very
good. He had ignored it. A moment later the receptionist answered the
switchboard, flushed, and nodded to Libby.

"Hello,
Julian? Libby." He answered something, quite abrupt. "But I
can't," she protested. "Not over the phone. And it's too hot down
there anyway." She pulled the receiver away from her ear and glanced
angrily at the ceiling as the invective grated over the wire, quite audible ten
feet away. "All right," she said finally. "I know you don't give
a damn. On the other hand, I do. We don't just skip appointments . . ." She
put in the knife. "It looks very bad on a Stability Report, you know . .
."

A
moment later she put the phone down and snapped her handbag shut with finality.
She smiled warmly at the receptionist. "He'll see me," she said.

The long, high-ceilinged DIA headquarters was
the center of a storm of subdued but feverish activity. There were half a
hundred men there as Libby passed through, and a haze of cigarette smoke rose
in the room, sucked upward by the ventilators. Telephones buzzed sharply; at
some of the desks men were handling two and three calls at a time, speaking in
rapid, hushed voices. For all the activity there was an unnatural hush over
the place; a bank of teletypes clattered along one wall, and a dozen
unit-dispatchers were speaking into sound-dampened microphones.

Everywhere
was a flurry of clerks, division heads, scribes, all so feverishly intent on
what they were doing that they nearly tripped over her as she came down the
corridor.

Across
the dispatching room she could see a huge wall map, with red flags mounted for
each DIA field unit alerted —the focal point for all the activity—and Libby
felt a sudden sick, uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. There was an air
of tension here, a sense of suppressed urgency that suddenly recalled to her
the confused, puzzling nature of the morning TV-cast she had seen.
A powder keg smoldering, with the DIA working full strength to keep
it under control, working so
silendy
and smoothly
that no one else sensed it, while the whole country coasted along in its usual
indifferent, video-hypnotized, confident, imperturbably stable way.

She
had a mental picture, suddenly, of a calm ripple-free ocean surface, with
monsters locked in some sort of leviathan death struggle just beneath the
surface.

The
door to McEwen's office was wide open. Julian Bahr sat at the director's desk,
the cone of a dictating machine in one hand. Frank Carmine was nearby. A dozen
other people were there, shoving reports under Bahr's nose, leaning over to
exchange a word or phrase, nodding sharply and hurrying off. He saw her, and
said something almost audible and unpleasant to Carmine, and went back to his
dictating. His voice cut sharply across the murmur in the room, incisive, impatient,
commanding
.

She did not see McEwen, and the sick feeling
grew stronger. Here was the center of the sense of urgency and tension that
pervaded the place. Bahr's face was tense and angry, his eyes bloodshot, his
mouth a hard, confident line as he dictated. With her trained psychologist's
eye Libby could see the danger signals like foot-tall handwriting on the wall.
The controls, the adjustments she had tried so hard to build into his
personality were beginning to snap, one by one.

"Julian, I want to
talk to you."

He slammed the microphone
down and pulled her to the side of the room. "Damn it, Libby, I can't see
you now. Go on down below and I'll be down when I can break away."

"We have an
appointment now."

"Yes, I know.
In an hour."

"You're lying. You're
stalling me, and you know it."

His scowl deepened.
"So I'm lying. I told you I'm busy."

"I
know you're busy. So am I. That's why I've got to talk to you today.
Now."

"Look,"
he said, "I've got a Condition C problem to handle, and a new job to get
under control. I don't have time for
your
. . .
interview."

The
deliberate vulgar connotation on the last word made her face flush red, but she
refused to be driven off with insults. "All right," she said,
"then I'll drop your case right now. I'll have another worker assigned to
you tomorrow, if you like.
A man, in case you don't want any
more . . . interviews . . . with women."

Bahr
stared at her, his face heavy with anger. She knew she had struck his Achilles'
heel—his savage, almost pathological fear of the DEPCO mind invaders, the one
beast in his Twenty-First Century jungle he did not know how to cope with. He
glared at her, his hand still clutching her arm. Then he nodded to the anteroom
that still had his name on the door, and pushed her roughly inside. He kicked
the door shut and turned on her. "All right, what do you want?"

"Julian, what's going on here? Where's
Mac?"

Bahr
told her. It was like a slap in the face. "We're keeping it out of the
newscasts until we have things under better control. Of course we notified the
key government people."

"But
. . .
dead."
She shook her head helplessly. Now there was
no doubt why Adams had come to her office.

"He's had a bad heart for a long
time," Bahr said.

"Particularly
since you've been bucking him," Libby said bitterly.

"Look,
Lib, you know I'd have gone down on the floor for Mac. When he heard that
Project Frisco had been compromised, it was more than he could take."

"And you're the
director now," Libby said.

"For the time being, yes.
I can't let this Project Frisco sag while
DEPCO bickers about a new appointment."

"Oh,
it won't
sagl
Not with Julian Bahr running
things." She turned on him viciously. "You should have seen yourself
out
therel
The Commanding General, whipping his whole
Army into trembling readiness. They're like a pack of bloodhounds baying for
the hunt. You love it, don't you? Blood pressure up, adrenals pumping, ego
swelling up like a big purple balloon. . . ."

"That's about enough
from you," Bahr said.

"No,
it's not quite enough, Julian. Adams was in to see me this morning. You're
going to have to resign as director."

"Resign!"
The anger fell away from Bahr's face, leaving incredulity in its place.
"But I've been working for five year for this job."

"I
know that. I've been watching you, and I knew all along it was coming to this.
You can't keep the job. DEPCO won't let you."

"They've
got to let me," Bahr said flatly. "Nobody else knows what Project
Frisco is . . . not even BRINT. They're going out of their minds over there;
they don't even know the cover-name for the Project. But since Wildwood,
Project Frisco is a Condition C operation. We aren't dealing with Eastern Bloc
activity, Lib. It's more than that."

Then
he told her about the U-metal, and the exit monitors, and the whole story.

"You
mean you think something . . . extraterrestrial . . . was responsible for the
raid?"

"For everything.
God knows how long it's been going on. The
thermite
fires, the disappearances . . . Did you know that James Cullen vanished from
his home last night? There's no man in the country who knows more about our
Stability Control system, and now all of a sudden he's gone. Libby, somebody's
got to track this thing down and find out what's happening while there's still
time. Nobody else could do it, but I can push it through. I'll do it if I have
to run my men into their graves." He stopped suddenly. "You think I'm
lying, don't you?"

"No,
Julian, I think you're telling the absolute truth." "You don't think
I can do it, do you?" Libby did not answer.

"And
you don't want me to try," Bahr said bitterly. "You'd rather have me
stick my neck in the yoke like a work horse and just pull, let somebody crack a
whip over me . . . pull like all the other workhorses all day long, and at
night trot home to my own little pasture and play stud to you. You'd like that,
wouldn't you? Well, I don't like taking orders from people who aren't as good
as me. I've taken too damned many orders, and now I'm going to
give
some . . ."