Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (12 page)

"I
don't suppose you know their names," Bahr said, unable to keep the sarcasm
from his voice.

"Stanley
Bemstein
, age forty-two, height medium, slender
physique, married, two children,"
MacKenzie
said
as though running off a tape. "He's the cameraman. The other chap is
Anthony
Russel
, formerly
Russano
,
age thirty-three, tall, over six feet, also slender physique,
dark
hair, unmarried.
Both men from New
York City."
He paused, smiling at Bahr. "We have launching
facilities in this region, you know. We could hardly let someone into the area
without a checkthrough."

"What
I can't see," Bahr said, "is why an alien craft should pick this
region to land in
in
the first place."

"Rather
obvious, don't you think? If they hoped to land undetected, that is. They very
nearly succeeded." He peered at the map. "The photographer's camp
should be on this lake, East side. The Highway passes within a mile of shore.
Why don't you have your units drop down and try to spot the camp?"

Bahr picked up the speaker mike and pressed
the button. The lake was visible in the late evening light, a small,
kidney-shaped body of water, almost indistinguishable from the belt of swamp,
underbrush, fallen timber and alder growth.
Over the lake,
two of the 'copters dropped down almost to tree height and began moving slowly
along the lake shore.

Ten
minutes later the speaker blared. "There's a tent in the clearing down
there, Chief. Shall we land?"

"Ask
them to hold off a bit,"
MacKenzie
said quickly.
"I'd like to have a look myself before we take any action."

"Hold it," Bahr said into the
speaker. "We'll be right over."
The 'copter swung
down.
In the fading light a spotlight glared, picked up a small clearing
on the lakeshore, and the canvas roof of a tent on the edge of an alder
thicket.

"No
fire,"
MacKenzie
said slowly. "Tent looks
odd, too. Shall we land and have a look?"

Bahr
gave the order to the pilot, and picked up a burp gun from the floor, jammed a
clip expertly into place.
The 'copter settled quickly in the
high ragged grass of the clearing, its spotlight still focused on the patch of
canvas.
Another 'copter landed beside them, and Frank Carmine jumped
down.

When the whine of the engines died, there was
dead silence. Not a breath of air stirred. The lake was like glass. Bahr and
MacKenzie
started across the clearing, with Carmine close
behind. Both DIA men carried burp guns.
MacKenzie
carried a flashlight and his pipe. They walked cautiously over toward the tent.

"I thought that looked odd,"
MacKenzie
said, stopping. The tent was ripped and shredded,
hanging like a ragged washing on a line. One corner of it was entirely cut
away, with chunks of canvas lying scorched and partly charred on the ground.

"Jesus,"
Bahr said. "It looks like somebody cut through the back of the tent with a
blowtorch."

"Watch
your foot,"
MacKenzie
said sharply. He aimed his
Hash on the ground a few inches from Bahr's toe. There was a twelve ounce can
of
Bako
condensed stew, the top part of the can
missing. Together they knelt over the can. It looked as though the top had been
burned off, the metal rim curled and blistered. A few shreds of
stewmeat
and bouillon jelly clung to die bottom of the can.

Quickly
MacKenzie
swung his light at the food locker. The
door had been burned open, making a very smooth, slightly discolored cut. Food
containers were scattered all over, some empty, some merely opened and
discarded.

"Christ,
what a stink," Bahr said, swinging the flashlight beam back and forth
across the ground.

"Hold
it."
MacKenzie
added his beam, and they looked
at a small, reeking puddle of something greenish and disgusting.

"Somebody heaved," Bahr said.

"Yes,
I was about to say so myself. Apparently couldn't stand the
Bako
stew. Can't blame him, really . . ."

"Where
in hell are the two men?" Bahr said. "Their camp's been rifled, and
not a sign of them." He swung the light around at the trees and the
ground. "Which way is the lake?"

"About that direction, I'd say."
MacKenzie
started through the trees. "There's a path.
Better leave your man behind, Bahr. We don't want any more footprints than
necessary until we get a look."

Bahr
waved at Carmine to stay back, and followed the BRINT man, who was threading
his way through the alders. Ahead was a glint of sunset light from the lake.
They moved silently, Bahr holding the burp poised in his right hand, finger on
the trigger,
MacKenzie
searching ahead with his
flash.

"Hold on."

They
stopped. Something gleamed up ahead on the path. They moved closer, and Bahr
turned his light on too.
"A camera.
Movie camera.
Why would somebody leave a camera lying out
here?"

"Dropped, I'd say. Seems to have bounced
from . . ."
MacKenzie
moved the flashlight beam
carefully, slowly along the ground down the path toward the lake.

"Christ!"
Bahr said. The flashlight beam had stopped. In the small circle of fight was a
man's hand, palm down, fingers clawed stiffly, four furrows gouged into the
soft dirt by the final desperate death agony.

I think we've found the strike area,"
MacKenzie
said.

Above
the trees balloon flares hung, blindingly white, cutting the brush and pines
into incredible patterns of fight and shadow. Below on the ground flashbulbs
popped, and small busy teams of men moved actively about, looking, measuring,
probing, photographing, collecting, working silently or talking in hushed
voices, but all very desperately urgent.

Across the clearing, the film from the camera
was being processed in the portable lab carried by one of the DIA 'copters.
Bahr and
MacKenzie
stood over the body as the blanket
was lowered into place. There was a large dripping hole through the man's
chest, and a stinking, grisly stain on the ground, as if the fleshy contents of
the thorax had been melted out en masse, leaving the bare bones of the cavity.

The
body was sprawled facing away from the lake, hands outstretched, the face
frozen in an expression of unimaginable horror.

"Bernstein,"
MacKenzie
said. "The camera suggests that."

Bahr
grunted. "We'll know in a minute. A man is checking his prints and
dental." The big man paused, looking back at the lake. "He was
running away from something, that's sure.
Must have hit him
in the back."

"With
what?"
MacKenzie
said.

"Some sort of
dum-dum."

"Looks more like a
chemical agent to me."

"Well,
what difference does it make?" Bahr said irritably, annoyed by the BRINT
man's quiet, infuriatingly reasonable contradictions. "We'll have a lab
check, of course."

"You
might,"
MacKenzie
suggested, "try
Oredos
Vegas at the Puerto Rican Cancer Research Center.
He's been doing work with
proteolytic
enzymes . . .
top man in the field."

Bahr
turned to Carmine. "Have the machine section at DEPEX run a cross-index on
protein solvents, and that man's work," he said. "If he's done
anything, it'll be in the files."

"I
doubt it," said
MacKenzie
. "Your files may
fall behind the researcher a bit. Vegas
doesn't
publish work in progress."

"Then how do you know about him?"

"We
have an alert contact in the Research Center,"
MacKenzie
said amiably. Bahr scowled, repressing a sudden violent urge to take the little
Scotsman by the throat and choke him. As usual, BRINT's eclectic view of
intelligence put them a jump ahead. "All right, if we can't solve the
problem ourselves, we'll fly him up to our lab and put him to work on the
case," Bahr said.

MacKenzie
laughed cheerfully at this. Bahr turned and
started toward the small group of men on the lakeshore, Carmine at his side,
with the BRINT man following.

Carmine
checked a notebook. "We've got one field unit working the brush, and a
group checking the camp area. There are some footprints down there on the
lakeshore, but they aren't distinct.
Must have been
raining."

"Anything
from the roadblocks?"

Carmine's
sneer said what he thought of BRINT roadblocks. "But we've found their
two-wheeler. Smashed up in the trees a hundred yards back toward the
road."

Bahr
nodded. "This is beginning to add up," he said to
MacKenzie
.
"The ship landed somewhere near here, somebody entered the camp, killed
Bernstein and tried to make a meal of the camp stores, then attempted to use
the car to get out to the highway."

"Is
that your analysis, from what you see?"
MacKenzie
broke in.

"You see anything
wrong with it?" Bahr snapped.

"Just
one thing.
Where's
Russel
?
The other
man."

"Find
him," Bahr said to Carmine.
"Or his body.
And tell them to get moving on that film."

They
moved across the clearing through the huddles of DIA men, flashlights swinging
unnecessarily because of the brilliant flare lights. As they walked, Bahr
smouldered
, wondering just what in hell
MacKenzie
was doing there in the first place getting in the
way, wondering how he could be doing any investigating, since he didn't seem to
have a shred of equipment with him. He didn't photograph or measure anything,
didn't pick up specimens; in fact, the BRINT man just seemed to be wandering
about in his shapeless tweed overcoat with his hands in his pockets, watching,
as if he were really amazed at the strange and inexplicable activities of the
DIA men.

Difference
in methods,
MacKenzie
had said. Crimes investigated
by BRINT were deliberate, logical distributions of motive and violence, and
therefore soluble by introspective analysis of first principles, whereas
crimes investigated by DIA were characteristic and unconscious behavior of
deviants (criminals) and were therefore soluble by measurement and sorting.
(Laughter from BRINT, mocking laughter.)

For
a brief, glorious moment Bahr had a mental picture of
MacKenzie
reduced to mouse-size and strapped down on a mouse board, his chest opened wide
by a huge scalpel incision, and Bahr, with magnifying glass and probe, was
lifting the BRINT man's heart out with the probe and carefully counting the
squoosh-squoosh
contractions to find out what made him
tick. The heart removed, he dropped the body in a tank of alcohol. The image
recurred, cyclically, synchronized with Bahr's steps, so that every time his right
foot hit the heart came out, and every time the left foot hit, plunk, into the
tank.

By the time they reached the wrecked car Bahr
had personally destroyed BRINT, mouse-man by mouse-man.

There
was no body of
Russel
at or near the wrecked car. No
footprints along the rest of the path to the road, nor any sign of disturbance
in the surrounding brush. The brush was a thicket of tightly-grown alder and
vine maple; it would take a man ten minutes to get through ten feet of it.

"The man didn't just vanish," Bahr
snarled.

"We've
got 'copters working the brush with flares," Carmine said. "They
haven't turned up anything."

"But this is impossible. Whatever killed
Bernstein wouldn't let his partner just run off. It doesn't make sense."

"It
seems to me,"
MacKenzie
said slowly, "that
it's pretty obvious what happened. If I had your resources at hand, I'd send
for an aqua-lung team."

Bahr
turned to stare at him. "You think the ship landed
in
the lake?"