Chapter Nine

It was only a matter of time now, Harvey Alexander realized as he crouched waiting beside the roadstrip, before he would make the inevitable slip that would signal the DIA search units like a waving red flag and bring them down on him. He had known, from the beginning, that BJ would become seriously involved, and he had done his best to talk her out of coming, but she had insisted. Now she had been expended, as he had known she would be. With luck, ingenuity, and full expeditious use of her face and figure she might make her story sell and get away with a fine or warning . . . but that seemed doubtful. At worst, they would hold her for checking, and uproot the connection between them. The ultimate consequences, for BJ, were painfully unpleasant to think about. For him . . .

For him, it was a reprieve, a few more hours to remain free to hunt down the answers that he had to find.

It was not a question of concealment. He knew from experience that he could hide, drop from sight so quickly and effectively that a nationwide concentrated manhunt would not dig him out in years. But such a move would brand him irrevocably as an accomplice in the Wildwood raid, and confirm the charges Bahr had leveled against him.

The alternative was to find out what really had happened at Wildwood and get the information into the hands of authorities who could help him that could not be carried out in concealment. He had to gamble time against exposure.

And the worst of it was that he didn't know what to do.

The trip to Wildwood had been a complete fiasco. BJ had dug up clothes for him and found an old lieutenant's ID card for him from the foot locker of his things she had unaccountably kept. Some amphetamine had routed the last sedative effects from his mind. On the trip down to Wildwood they had listened to the foreign broadcasts on the alien landing in Canada, BJ frowning and shaking her head at the reports, he listening with a puzzling sense of detached curiosity, as though the whole matter, somehow, had no application whatever to him, but was something happening in a different world.

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.

"Yeah, sure, you mean you really haven't read it? It was supposed to be just a story, you know, but now with the Wildwood raid and the Canadian landing, and now the blackout, everybody knows it was the real thing, y'know? This is just the first wave, like it says, testing our defenses and getting hypno control over all the key people, softening us up for for the big wave. Why, they've been catching our teevies for years. Probably even learned how to unscramble our topsec sendouts and everything, just like the book says."

"Does it tell how they're going to invade?"

"Oh, sure, right down to the button; only it doesn't say how long between the first and second waves, y'know. That's wha's got my nymph so scared. Hasn't scared me much, but that's prob'ly because I'm better adjusted, I'm really a pretty well adjusted guy. Went to a good Playschool, you know, and I can get along with everybody and I don't go fightin' back and gettin' all twisted up inside. Even the group-doc at works thinks I'm pretty well adjusted; just the same, though, I wouldn't want any aliens nervin' me into a twitcher-coma, or using me for a food culture incubator, or white-mousing me, or anything."

"Yeah, I know," Alexander said. "You know a place I can get this book?"

"I'd let you have mine, on'y I let my nymph's girlfriend take it to show her daddy. We kinda switch off sometimes, even if it ain't strictly legal until my contract's up, but sometimes even a well-adjusted guy like me gets all tied up and can't loosen up, you know. I ain't scared at all, o'course, but some of the things that the aliens can do can really make you shaky. You don't think that means I'm unstable, do you?"

"No, your group-doc has just been slipping up, not helping relax you and get you back into the swing," Alexander said comfortingly, remembering his BURINF days.

"Yeah, that's what I've been tellin' my nymph, the group-docs oughta know what to tell us about the aliens so we know what we oughta think; it's their fault if we get kinda shaky and get screaming dreams sometimes. But look, Jack, we're gettin' pretty near my place, so if you wanta you can come up and meet my nymph. I ain't got any old-fashioned blocks about her, you know, and any friend of mine is a friend of hers."

"Thanks, some other time." The car had been wheeling through the low, drab buildings of north St. Louis. "Look, what did you say that book was called?"

"Alien Invaders. You can get it anywhere. You sure you don't wanta come up for one round anyway?"

"No thanks," Alexander said, feeling a little sick, not so much with disgust as with pity, "but give her my love."

"All twenty-nine, and same to you."

Alexander stepped onto the curb and waved, and walked quickly toward the man-strip as the Hydro buzzed around the corner.

The town was dead in early-morning stillness, and he headed for the downtown section. The gulf before him had suddenly narrowed, and he thought he saw the first step across.

A pulpie book called Alien Invaders.

It was ingenious, and deadly, and it fitted, Alexander realized as he sipped surro-coffee in a stall in the deserted downtown area, waiting for the city to come alive. He knew that BURINF would never have countenanced a book like that. Actually, it could not have known of its existence, or it would have been nailed before a dozen copies had been circulated. No publisher in the country had dared try to launch a science-fiction or fantasy book since the crash, under the tacit threat of embargoes on paper and typcmetal, and of DEPCO investigation and reassignment of Stability Ratings if that was not enough.

But the channels of distribution were there, created by BURINF, and the psychological Achilles' heel of the society was there, too—the abiding, hysterical, carefully nurtured fear of space and anything associated with space.

Quite abruptly, Alexander could see a pattern. Early, undetected landings . . . contact, perhaps psychological control of key individuals ... a concentrated study of the society and psychology of the inhabitants . . . circulation of a book, fanciful enough in nature until the things it predicted began happening . . . then landings that were less secretive, designed to draw attention to feed the growing fear and panic, in preparation for the final, massive blow.

He dropped his coin in the slot and went out into the cool, gray early-morning ugliness. In his head the syrupy tune-lessness of the coffee-stall vendo music was still recycling, monotonous, deliberately unresolved, always running itself back into the beginning of a phrase. He walked faster, dredged up the theme from Marche Slav to drive the vendo-pop from his mind, blinked a little as the sun hit him through a break between two building cubes.

Near the river front he found a street that looked likely, crowded with bars and porno-mag stalls and drunks sleeping on doorsteps. The first step would be easy: get a copy of the book. At least he thought it would be easy until he tried it; then, quite suddenly, it wasn't so easy after all.

The first stand was completely out, sold out for a week. Another place the vendor started to shake his head, then blinked at Alexander suspiciously and claimed he'd never heard of the book. In a third the last copy had gone the day before, and the distributor wouldn't be back for a week at least. A fourth, fifth and sixth try were equally fruitless.

Back on the street, Alexander looked around him at the sluggish hesitancy with which the city was coming to fife. There was none of the downtown hustle of the early job-rush. People seemed to be moving aimlessly, stopping to gaze in windows, congregating in small groups on the street corners. It was something Alexander had not seen since the early days of the crash, when the people, not yet desperate enough for violence, had walked about stunned, realizing with painful unwillingness that the little familiar formalities of dull, dreary work were suddenly meaningless.

And now, on this morning, he saw and felt the same blunted apathy.

It was wrong, somehow, in the same way the Wildwood raid had been wrong, in the same way a pulp magazine called Alien Invaders was wrong ... all fitting, but not quite fitting. DEPCO, he knew, should be clocking this rumbling volcano; they should be furiously at work draining off the pressure before the action stage was reached, before the explosion came. That was what DEPCO was organized to do, had to do to maintain the stability that had to be maintained.

But there was no evidence of DEPCO activity, and Alexander, seeing the vacuous, frightened faces passing him, felt a growing sense of alarm, as if all the twittering birds and monkeys in this nightmare psycho-structured jungle had suddenly stilled at the soft low cough of a stalking killer.

He found the place he was looking for, taking a spinner across town to the crowded warehouse and trucking terminal. He saw the lettering on the third floor window of a decrepit plasti-brick building of the last century: Magdisco, the local warehouse of the sprawling Magazine Distributing Company. Since hardbound books were practically nonexistent any more, except for collector's items and university archives, all books and magazines were distributed by magazine wholesaling agencies, and Magdisco was the largest, and the one least critical of the material it handled. Alexander crossed the street, assuming his Qualchi slouch, and went up die narrow flight of stairs.

The operation from the warehouse was largely automatic, and the tiny, littered office space was empty. The rest of the place seemed to be crammed to the ceiling with bundles of remainders, nude glossies, and a huge stack of particularly disgusting action sets that were obviously meant for the Playschool contraband circuit. Alexander's eyes searched the piles for the title he was looking for, but there was no evidence of it.

"Help you?" A thin, putty-faced man with thick glasses appeared out of the file room in the back. "I'm looking for a copy of Alien Invaders." The man lost interest. "Sorry, we don't retail." "I was thinking of buying in quantity." "Got a retailer's license and quota?"

Alexander let his eyes shift to the stack of glossies in the corner. "This was . . . uh . . . for private distribution."

"Look, beat it, huh? I got an agreement with the retailers and racks. I don't sell to private parties . . . and they buy up to quota. I'm happy, they're happy. Get your copy at a rack; I'm not cuttin' my throat." The man plunked down behind a desk and turned to the talktyper.

Obviously subtle questioning wouldn't help. Alexander's ID card was actually ten years out of date, but it looked official when he flashed it under the man's nose.

"Lieutenant Alexander, Army CI. I'm checking up on Alien Invaders. I want to know who wrote it, where he lives, what else he's written. And I want all the copies of the book you have."

The man stopped typing in midsentence, staring up in a-larm, because Alexander had slouched into the place with the shifty, cautious manner of his Mexican cover identity. Now suddenly he stiffened and barked out his orders in the voice of a very tough and very impatient CI lieutenant.

The man hardly looked at the card. "I ... I ... we don't have that information here, Lieutenant."

"You have it," Alexander said, stepping past him to the files and yanking the first drawer open.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute ... Ill look." The man fell over himself to get to the files. "The fifing system is . . . er . . . kind of complicated . . . special . . . with the company. . . ."

"You use alphabetical chronological," Alexander said, "or else you'll have misfiling charges to answer for."

"Maybe it's in the other cabinet. I'll look in the other cabinet," the man stammered. It might have been a stall, but the man seemed genuinely scared.

"You'd better find it if you don't want to log some poly time," Alexander said. "We might throw in a few questions about where you get the Playschool contraband over there. That's you; that's not Magdisco." Unregistered contraband and interfering with the Playschool conditioning programs could mean recoop and very probably a new identity in a labor battalion. The man fairly tore into the files while Alexander ransacked his desk, pulled out a much-thumbed copy of Playschool Champ, a standard authorized porno that had been written ten years ago when such things were sensational rather than commonplace everyday fact. The writing, by one of the best BURINF copywriters, had been inspired virtuosity, and the book, widely distributed, had entered into the thinking of the public and paved the way for the family-disassociation theories of the Playschools.

"There's nothing here," the man said, dusty from the files.

"Let's have a copy of the book," Alexander said.

"They're all sold out. They've been sold out for months."

"You're lying," Alexander said. "You wouldn't be out of anything that's selling that fast." He saw the man look around wildly, ready to make a break, and he moved in fast, clamping a wristlock on him.

"I don't have any. Please! I don't have any . . ." Alexander jerked his arm, and he twisted and groaned, and then said, "Okay, okay. . . ."

"Fast," Alexander said.

"I was just told not to give any to investigators, that's all.

I just had orders," the man whimpered, pulling a book out from beneath a stack of glossies. The cover was a masterpiece of the art, the tide fairly screaming out Alien Invaders: How Soon? The byline was Diff Rarrel, the imprint Squid Pubs.

"Listen, you won't tell anybody I gave it to you, huh? Just say you found it here. I just get orders, that's all."

"Who gave you the orders?" Alexander said, dropping the book in his pocket. The man didn't answer. "They don't publish anything like this in Squid. They just do glossies and comics. Who was the source publisher?"

The man made a break for the door. Alexander thrust out a foot, tripped him, and fell on him hard. He pulled the man's arm up behind him, and then noticed the small variously aged scars and realized what caused the desperate silence. Whoever was supplying him was also giving the orders.

Alexander stabbed in the dark. Drug traffic took size and power. Only one pubfishing house had that kind of power, and the ruthlessness to go with it. "Was it Colossus Books?"

The man just groaned as his shoulder ligaments began to tear a little more.

"We can find out under a poly . . ."

The fight went out of the man, and he started blubbering. Alexander hacked him sharply across the neck, left him unconscious on the floor and made his way down the narrow steps. It was Colossus that the book came from, the same as Playschool Champ had ten years before.

At the street level his old Qualchi experience made him cautious; he covered the street quickly with a glance, then walked with a swift, shambling pace toward the man-strip at the corner.

When he had gone ten paces he knew he was right. All the fumbling at the files had been a stall after all; there was a two-wheeler moving slowly down the street a hundred yards behind him, with two men in it.

Still sweating from the physical workout upstairs, his heart pounding in his throat, Alexander was pretty sure he could handle two men if they didn't use stunners. He estimated the distance to the man-strip, and decided that they wouldn't dare use stunners with all the traffic on the street, so he didn't rush.

He felt a little sick; every step took him farther from the law, deeper into violence. He hadn't physically attacked a man for years, and he had thought that he never would a-gain. But then he realized he was fighting now, fighting for his life, and he felt a wave of elation drive the sickness away. Odd that even with the car following slowly behind him he felt safe, as safe as a man fleeing recoop could feel. But he was also puzzled.

Were the stalkers DIA men?

Aliens?

Who?