Chapter Three

It was a bueak,- to Julian Bahr there was no question of that, it was the break he had been waiting for since the very beginning of it eleven months before, and now, at last when there was something for him to grab hold of, John McEwen had decided to put on the brakes. It was at that moment that Julian Bahr made the decision he had known all along was coming: John McEwen was through.

"I don't like it," McEwen was saying now, deliberately avoiding Bahr's eyes as the big man paced the DIA teletype room. "I don't like any part of it. I've been liking it less and less, and this thing puts the lid on it. Julian, I've given you a free hand; I've backed you right from the start of this thing, but I can't do it any more. We're out of our depth. We're dealing with something we can't handle by ourselves . . ." His voice quavered and he spread his hands helplessly.

Bahr smashed his fist into the palm of his hand, trying to choke down the anger and impatience. He liked McEwen. In the early days of his DIA work he had liked him thoroughly, and felt a powerful obligation to this fatherly, impeccably honest older man who had salvaged him from the drunken, thwarted existence he had sunk into after his court-martial from the Army.

But McEwen had changed. Since the beginning of Project Frisco, Bahr had watched him crumbling, bit by bit, until it seemed incredible that this sick-looking creature could be the same man that he had known before.

Bahr remembered the morning five years before »when Libby had come to get him at his dingy third-story flat over the New Jersey waterfront. She had taken in the stacks of filthy dishes in the sink and the half-empty whiskey bottles on the floor at a glance, and with one disgusted shake of her head, started packing a bag for him. She got him sober with coffee and thiamin, and made him shower and shave. "Quickly," she had urged. "We're driving to Washington."

Then she told him why.

"McEwen!" He sat bolt upright on the bed, staring at her. He had heard about the DIA . . . plenty and enough to make him stiffen with alarm. "What does he want with me?"

"He has a spot open. You've been recommended. An old friend of yours said you could fill it." "I don't have any old friends."

"You'd be surprised. And even if you didn't, you've got a new one, whether you like it or not." She had stared at him, pleading. "Julian, won't you trust me this much? What are you going to do, just rot here? You've got to give this a chance."

He had driven the girl's sleek imported Sonata onto the Washington Speedway, pushing it up to 300 and flashing past the trucks and casual traffic. Libby had been tense at first; finally she relaxed and leaned her head against his shoulder. An hour later they rolled into McEwen's parking channel. The very distinguished-looking DIA Director was there to greet them; and then, inside, grinning at the surprised and baffled look on his face, he saw Frank Carmine. . . .

There were others there, half a dozen of his closest friends from Fort Riley, veterans of the 801st and now high up in DIA. With McEwen, Bahr was stiff and reserved; then Libby got the director out of the room for a moment and he and Carmine began to pummel each other. The rest of the 801st boys joined in, and they were laughing and singing and more than a little drunk by the time Libby's high heels came click-clicking down the hall at them.

Later, they had talked, and Bahr liked the way McEwen looked at him when he talked, and said what he meant without a lot of double-edged words. Gradually Bahr's violent bitterness toward everything disciplined and governmental began to soften, and he would talk. "I've got a green card," he said. "They gave me that after the court-martial. They told me I was dangerously unstable, and you know what that means these days when it comes to finding work."

"I know," McEwen had said. "Do you think that you're unstable?"

"I'm like a rock," Bahr said flatly.

"All right, then I don't think we need to worry about your official Stability Rating too much. With a little pressure on DEPCO from this end, we can swing it. Anyway, you've got an inside track with your therapist." He smiled at Libby.

"I can handle the details at DEPCO," she had said. "If you'll co-operate a little."

"Hell, I'll co-operate," Bahr said.

They had shaken hands on it, and when he had Libby a safe distance away in the parking lot, Bahr had grabbed her and hugged her until she gasped. They drove back to New Jersey slowly, and he felt that the past was falling sharply away, the future bright before him.

After that, his rise in DIA had been no accident. With his bottomless energy, his genius for organizing, and his ability to command the fierce loyalty of the men around him, Bahr had forged the DIA into a rock of efficiency such as McEwen had only dreamed of. When Project Frisco arose, McEwen had dropped it in Bahr's lap.

Something out of the ordinary had been going on. There was nothing tangible: a dozen tiny little incidents that nobody could explain, completely unrelated to each other, except that they did not fit any reasonable pattern of normal occurrence.

They had been nebulous things, at first: the theft of a commercial codebook reported from a San Francisco office; scattered unexplained radar pickups fanning across the midwest over six months time, without identification of target; the hijacking of a thermite truck on the New York-Chicago Expressway, followed a week later by six simultaneous thermite fires in a pattern over a hundred mile area, photographed by chance by a passing jet liner; the disappearance, under questionable circumstances, of several dozen men in key scientific and government posts . . .

No pattern, no relevance to the occurrences, but something was going on. The presence of any imponderable in the delicate social and economic machinery of the country under the Vanner-Elling eco-government was not tolerable. The balance of power between the Federation Americas in the West and the Sino-Soviet bloc in the East was far too treacherous to permit unexplained incidents to remain long unexplained. That balance had teetered once, in 1965, and the world still bore the scars of that brief, bitter war. After the violent economic crash that had engulfed the world in 1995, a different sort of balance had been forged, but still the balance was there.

It was clear that whatever was behind the occurrences had to be discovered. Project Frisco, under Julian Bahr's diligent direction, had thrown the entire striking power of the DIA into a swift, silent search for a pattern behind the occurrences. And Project Frisco, until now, had failed. '

For eleven months they had run up against a blank wall. A thousand leads traced down, led nowhere. A thousand blind alleys were carefully explored. No clue to the enemy's intentions, nor even to the enemy's identity. Only the constantly growing conviction that somewhere in the pattern, there was an enemy . . .

And now, Wildwood. For the first time, a chink in the armor, a possible break . . .

And John McEwen was afraid to go on.

"Listen to me, Mac," Bahr said. "This is the time to move in, not the time to sit on the fence and worry. We've got something here at last that we can get our hands on. This major . . ."

Weakly, McEwen shook his head. "The DIA has its limits, Julian. An atomic theft . . . this is out of our hands."

Bahr's face hardened for just a moment. Then he swung a chair over toward the director, smiling and calm, and looked into the older man's tired face. "Mac, let's get this thing straightened out right now. I don't think you've thought this Wildwood incident out yet." He sensed the reaction from Carmine and the others, felt their eyes on his back. "The thing that happened last night at Wildwood changes the whole nature of Project Frisco. We can't back out now even if we wanted to. We've got to hang on if it kills us."

McEwen shook his head again. "I ... I don't see . . ."

"Mac, whoever stole that U-metal made a mistake last night. A very bad mistake."

"Mistake?" said McEwen.

"There was nothing wrong with those exit monitors. They were working fine. You couldn't get a radium-painted watch dial past them without tripping the alarm, and they were permanently sealed so they couldn't have been disconnected."

McEwen looked up. "Then you think Alexander was telling the truth?"

"Not necessarily," Bahr insisted. "But some things have checked out, and there is one simple fact that we just can't ignore. Whoever took that U-metal out of the plant had it so effectively shielded that it didn't trigger the exit monitors."

McEwen blinked. "Julian, that doesn't make sense. The very minimum shielding for that stuff would be a foot-thick slab of lead. Nobody could have carried that out past the guards. They won't even let you carry out a mechanical pencil."

"But a man could get a property pass," Bahr said sofdy.

"For a truck-load of U-metal and shielding?"

"Oh, no. But maybe for a briefcase."

"You're not making sense," McEwen said. "Those slugs . . ."

Bahr slammed his fist down on the desk. "Mac, it happened! Can't you begin to see this now? It happened! Of course it doesn't make sense; there's no earthly way anyone could cram diose slugs and shielding into a small package and waltz out the gate with them, but that is exactly the thing that happened; it must have happened." His eyes were bright on the director's face. "All right, we have to work with it, find out how it could have happened. Nothing yet in Project Frisco has made any sense, but now a pattern is beginning to take shape. Suppose a special shield was used . . . a very special shield, say, maybe just a monomolecular layer of neutrons packed in tight like the tiles in a mosaic . . . an invisible skin built into the wall of a briefcase, completely impermeable to any radiation . . ."

"There isn't any such shield," McEwen said flatly. "If the Eastern Bloc were within five years of something like that BRINT would have told us long ago. And nobody in this country is working in nuclear physics. They don't even dare talk about things like that any more for fear DEPCO will be down their throats."

"What you are saying," Bahr said quietly, "is that there is nothing known to Earth science that could be used as a shield like that."

"Of course not. Nobody—" McEwen broke off, staring at him. Across the room the teletype had stopped, leaving a sudden void of silence in the room. Early morning traffic sounds came up from the street, muffled, a world away. "What do you mean?" McEwen said hoarsely after a long moment. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that we've been trying so hard to pin all these occurrences down to the Eastern Bloc that we've ignored what was staring us in the face," Bahr said. "Nothing has fit together in any way we could see, but these things have been purposeful, just the same. Those thermite fires: all six burned in front of searchlight reflectors and beamed straight up. The high-frequency signals we've been trying to pin down—not messages, not traffic or Morse characters, just signals."

Bahr stood up, his huge body filling the room. "What have we been looking for, Mac? A Chinese guerilla unit? A Russki intelligence team? Maybe even a BRINT unit checking our reaction speed? We've been looking for something we could recognize and classify, something we know. And we haven't found it. But nothing that we know could have gotten those slugs out of the Wildwood Plant."

For a long moment there was silence. McEwen's face was grey. "Julian, if there were a remote possibility . . ."

"I saw that explosion last night, Mac. I saw the thing before it exploded. And I know the panic it would start off if even a hint of it ever got out. That's why we have to sit on this so tight that nobody even hears about the Wildwood raid until we know for sure what we're dealing with. That U-metal would be worthless to any human agent, but to an Alien intelligence team, it might be a different story. We can't guess what they might have wanted it for. Their idea of intelligence might be as different from ours as ... as DIA from BRINT."

Slowly, almost feebly, McEwen fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a white box and took out a capsule. Bahr filled a paper cup at the cooler as McEwen, with hands visibly shaking, stuck the capsule in his mouth. He swallowed it after a couple of tries, and coughed weakly. "What do you think we should do, Julian?"

"First, sew up last night's incident tieht. That means