PART IV PROJECT TIGER

Chapter Sixteen

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?"

"Because we couldn't risk letting you contact your own Army CI, or DEPCO, until we knew for certain just why Julian Bahr was so fantastically interested in having you caught," MacKenzie said.

"Not caught," Alexander said flatly. "Killed. Or at least, recooped."

"But why? Because of something you knew about the Wildwood raid?" MacKenzie asked.

Alexander started to nod, and then caught himself, and frowned. No, that was not it, not quite, and suddenly he saw it quite clearly. The pieces suddenly fell down into place, the obscure, misshapen pieces he had been trying to fit together since the night when the OD had called him to tell him the Wildwood Plant had been raided and robbed of U-metal.

It made sense, of course, and Alexander looked across at MacKenzie and wondered if the BRINT man would be able to see the sense that it made, or if he were the kind of practical fool who would not be able to understand the linkages between a fragment of nuclear physics, a ghostwritten pulp book and an industrial giant.

"Because of what I knew?" Alexander said. "No, not what I knew. Bahr never cared about what I knew about the Wildwood raid. There was nothing I knew that he could be afraid of. He knew everything that I knew, by the time his men were through with me at the Kelley. And if it had just been a matter of information in my mind that he wanted obliterated, a simple spot-wash procedure could have taken care of it. But Bahr didn't just want my memory out of commission: he wanted my mind out of commission."

MacKenzie nodded. "I can see the distinction, but why? Certainly not any fingering vindictiveness about the Antarctic business. He already had his revenge for that when he got you broken from your BURINF position and dumped into the limbo of an obscure administrative job—very definitely his doing, according to our contacts."

"No, it was more than diat," Alexander said. "Bahr didn't fear anything that I knew. But he did fear what I might be able to figure out, eventually, on the basis of what I knew."

"Ah," MacKenzie said softly. "Now we are approaching it. What might you have been able to figure out?"

"The truth about what happened at Wildwood," Alexander said. "There have been a couple of solid contradictions I've noticed since, but the Wildwood incident was the key to the whole thing."

MacKenzie poured Scotch in a couple of glasses, handed one to Alexander. "Do you mind if I record this?"

"If you expect proof, I don't have it," Alexander said. "All I have is certain things I know are true, and certain conclusions I've been forced to draw from those things. For instance, I know that no U-metal was stolen from Wildwood. I designed the security system there, and I knew a few things about it that Bahr and his DIA men didn't know. By the same token, the alien raiders would not have known those things either. Now, what actually happened at Wildwood? An alarm went off outside the compound, there was an explosion several miles away, and subsequently a shortage of U-metal was discovered inside the plant. The inference was that the radioactives detected outside the compound were the same as those missing inside, and that the theft was accomplished by humanoid aliens, or a human agent, who smuggled the material through the Geiger monitors by means of some kind of shielding."

The BRINT man nodded. "A neutronic shield is the popular rumor, I believe."

"But if such a shield could be made and used, why would the thief have abandoned it as soon as he got outside the plant? There was no jettisoned shielding between the plant and the alarm monitor. There are half a dozen other little holes in that idea, but the biggest hole is the idea of a collapsed neutronic shield. That was the flaw that tipped me off in the beginning."

"Such a thing would be very useful," MacKenzie said. "A shield a few nuclei thick with all the stopping power of a huge block of concrete . . ."

"And even if it were tissue-paper thin, it would still weigh as much as a four foot slab of lead," Harvey Alexander said.

MacKenzie blinked, as though somebody had suddenly flashed a bright light in his eye. Then he was roaring with laughter. "Of course it's obvious," he said. "Once it's pointed out. They'll have a fit back home, for not noticing diat."

"The rest wasn't so obvious," Alexander continued, "but it made sense when you thought it through. Without a shield, no U-metal came through those gates. Therefore, the hot stuff that set off the road monitor was not the U-metal that was later found missing in the plant. So the three missing slugs must have been disposed of inside die plant. If you were looking for it, you could see how easy it would be. There are refuse pipes leading from the plant to the waste dump. If the metal was dumped down those pipes, only a radiation-level check of the dump would ever reveal it. But if that was what happened, then the raid on the Wildwood Plant had to be a forgery. If that raid was something that was deliberately staged—and it must have been—then Project Frisco must have been staged from beginning to end. And that was what Bahr was afraid I would figure out—that die alien invasion has been a hoax from the beginning. There aren't any aliens!"

Alexander turned to MacKenzie then, and set his drink carefully down on the table. "I also think that BRINT knows that is true, and has known it from the start. But I could be wrong, of course."

"Oh, no," MacKenzie said slowly. "You aren't wrong. And you can see why we could not afford to have you place your deductions in the hands of DEPCO." The BRINT man's voice was suddenly tired, and tinged with bitterness. "We've been playing a long gamble, and it seemed as though we were winning, at least at first. We were all very clever, we had all the answers to all the questions, until we came to the really big question, and now we find that we don't have tile one answer that we really have to have." He looked at Alexander. "How to stop Julian Bahr before it is too late to stop him."

"We needed a wedge," MacKenzie said later, "to smash through the wall that DEPCO had built around itself. A balance of power can be maintained only if the two sides of the balance are very nearly equal. On one side we saw the Eastern Bloc, pulling out of the crash with a burgeoning military machine and an aggressive totalitarian government. We were able to hold the Eastern Bloc in check .... barely hold it in check ... by the threat of the Robling missiles. But on the other side, in Federation America, we saw DEPCO grow and expand, entrenching itself more and more firmly as the all-powerful, controlling bureau in the government, following its course of stability at any cost and gradually dragging the whole Western economy to a standstill."

The Scotsman poured another drink. "We could see it happening on all sides: the involutional thinking, the systematic witch-hunting to drive every leadership figure out of his job before he could even taste the bit, the growing emphasis on the internal sciences—psychology and sociology— and the shunning of the physical sciences and technology. Nobody knows where it might have ended if it had gone on undisturbed, but anyone whose head was not buried in the system could see how it entrenched itself more firmly every year. Every frontier, every challenge was systematically being sliced away, every sign of progress curbed, a whole economy slowly grinding to a halt. This was not Vanner's plan; he saw the stability period as a transition, a 'getting back on their feet again' before picking up the gauntlet. It didn't work that way. The cure drove out the disease—the chaos of the crash years—and then became worse than the disease. How soon the society would have disintegrated completely, nobody knows. But it was clear that a frontier had to be established again, before it was too late."

"A space frontier?"

"Anything would have done it," MacKenzie said, "as long as it was a frontier. Some drive was needed to provide a stimulus, a drive that would require a massive national effort to achieve. To allow a war would have meant the certain destruction of Federation America. Only one challenge was big enough, but a drive to space was the one thing, above all things, that DEPCO would block at any cost. The fear and suspicion of spaceships that was engendered by the crash was not a rational fear, but that didn't matter. You know your history of bipartisan politics in the old United States. It took the Republican party thirty years, a major war, a war hero and a decade of unparalleled prosperity to overcome the public reaction to the depression of the '30s. And the crash of '95 made that depression look like a Sunday School picnic."

"So Bahr was your wedge," Alexander said.

"Bahr was our wedge. Carl Englehardt didn't recognize the peril in the same terms we did, but he also wanted the spaceship project re-established. His motives were entirely personal and individual; the important thing was that he thought he knew a way to force a reopening of the project. He knew a young, ambitious man in the DIA, a man who was strong enough and tough enough and ruthless enough to drive a hole through DEPCO's wall of over-regulation and smash it down, given a toehold. Englehardt gave him the toehold, a series of carefully staged incidents which led, by inference, to the conclusion that we were on the eve of an alien invasion."

"Then Englehardt prepared the 'ships' that exploded?" Alexander asked. "What about the Moon?"

"If you remember that Englehardt has been making intercontinental missiles for years, capable of carrying fusion warheads, it isn't hard to see how he could place a half a dozen unmanned drones on the Moon. The difficult part—in which BRINT co-operated—was handling the leaking of information that followed each successive incident. Bahr knew it was a hoax, and it fit into his plans perfectly. Once started, it all followed nicely: the circulation of a pulp scare-book to prepare the public for the panic that would follow; the step-by-step creation of a national peril which could be met and answered only by a drive to build a space fleet. Vanner had proved that the conquest of space would ultimately require a national effort comparable to a full-scale war, but if Federation America were to support it, it had to be an emotional cause, a fear-cause with a leader who could draw the people along and supply the great force needed to burst through thirty years of entrenched anti-space conditioning."

MacKenzie spread his hands. "We needed a man with the drive and strength to leap into the breach and use the crisis. We had to have Bahr, but he moved too fast; he was too successful. He didn't fight DEPCO the way we expected him to; he simply walked around DEPCO and left them standing there. Earlier, we might have been able to control Bahr. Now he is out of control, and in a matter of weeks he will have a continent under his thumb, and a military and technical program straining the nation to its limits. In six months he will want the world, and we won't be able to stop him . . ."

"Can't Englehardt stop him?" Alexander asked. "Surely he has the power."

MacKenzie gave him an odd look. "Englehardt is dead," he said slowly. "Curiously enough, he was shot down on the street an hour after Bahr made his appeal to Congress." The BRINT man shrugged. "The assassination was blamed on DEPCO fanatics who were determined to block the space project, and Englehardt was given a state funeral. Bahr's speech at the funeral was very touching. When it was over, he nationalized Robling holdings by edict, and doubled the pay of every man in the organization."

The two men sat silently for a few moments. "It seems to me," Alexander said, "that the job is only half done. You have to leave Bahr in power until he's carried Project Tiger to a fruitful point."

"And shaken the government apart, and entrenched himself like an iron fist," MacKenzie said. "What do we do when Project Tiger is half-completed and Bahr has made himself invincible?"

"Then we dump him," Alexander said.

MacKenzie was about to make a sharp retort, but he looked at the major's face, and realized that he was serious. "We can't do it by brute force. Do you have an idea?"

"I have an idea," Alexander said. "I think Julian Bahr's great strength can be his weakness. I'll need help. But if I'm right, when the time comes, I'll dump Julian Bahr."

"At the height of his power?" MacKenzie asked.

"Like die tragic hero," said Alexander.