Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (20 page)

"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?

It was a dodging
, running game, trying to shake a tail in a
crowded city when he didn't know how many of them there were, nor who they
were, nor what they wanted. The alarm had been out for him on open police
channels for eighteen hours, he was certain, and on public broadcasts for at
least six. But DIA did not normally stalk their prey, particularly in a city
where there was a large field office and plenty of local support. They moved
fast, struck hard, and disappeared with their quarry.

Alexander
tried to think clearly, to recall some past association with St. Louis that
might afford cover at least for a while. It was the desperateness, the
hopelessness that probably did it, dredging up from the past all the cunning
and energy of his
Qualchi
days, when he had played the
nerve-racking game of dodging and hiding without using any of the standard
devices so the
Qualchi
would not realize that he was
outrunning them.

Bombardment
was the technique he had used then. He didn't know if it was used by
DlA
or BRINT; he had gotten the idea from some super-slow
cloud chamber movies he had watched in his Army training. The idea was simple:
to start branching trails so the pursuit would become confused as to whether to
stick with him alone or follow the other trails as well.

He
set up
a
couple of dummy branches first. He stopped in
a
mylebar
dealer's and bought a raincoat and hat,
then into a bookstore, haggled with the book dealer for a while and gave him
the book back, but only after tucking the receipt for the raincoat into the
book.

Then
he took a
whirler
up a few blocks, detoured through
a
mag
stand dealing in second-hand
mags
, into
a
urinal,
then out again when the vendor was busy, ducking quickly a-round a comer. He
ripped open the package with the raincoat and hat, slipped the coat on, pulled
the hat low, and walked off at right angles with a couple of late-lunching business
men. He stepped into a movie house, and right out a side exit, raced down the
side alley, slipping out of the raincoat and hat and jettisoning them in
a
trash can. He jerked his jacket off, even though it was a little cool,
and mingled with a knot of people on a man-strip, carrying his jacket and
faking a conversation with
a
dumpy
housewife.

The
next stop was real,
a
hotel lobby. He flashed
a
half-credit note at
a
very
young bellhop.

"Blonde
or brunette?"

"Information,"
Alexander said. The boy
stiffened,
his hand dropping
too quickly into his pocket. Alexander felt a little glow of satisfaction. He
could always spot a KM contact. He knew what was in the pocket, too. He let a
little more of the half-credit note show. "I want a KM cutout man."

The
boy's shifty, cunning eyes looked him over carefully. Alexander sagged into the
slouch of his cover identity, his mouth twitching at one side. The bellhop was
satisfied. He did not look like a DIA inspector.

"Shine
boy, two blocks down. Tell him you're from Ronny." He picked the
half-credit note expertly from Alexander's hand and turned away. As Alexander
went out through the door, he saw the bellhop moving toward a phone-booth.

"Ronny sent you?" the shine boy
asked, a sallow, impassive-faced nine-year-old.

Alexander
nodded and showed the corner of a half-credit note.

"
Perv
?" the boy asked,
then
added hastily, "I'm no trade . . . not for any credits . . ."

"Information,"
Alexander said. "Where can we talk?"

"Shine,
mister?" Then, in a lower tone, "What do you want?"

"A
tape library hook-up. I can't get at the files in this area. I want somebody to
file a probe for me and bring me the report, someone with a local ID card
that's up-to-date and cleared for financial reports."

The
boy looked suspicious.
"That all?
Why don't you
try an eagle?"

"No
good.
Can't take a chance on a straight lawyer without an
ID."
As he expected, the lie about having no ID cost him a three
credit reward on the spot, but it overcame suspicion.

"All
right.
I'll take you to
Wah
."

Wah
, it turned out, was an eleven year old girl
at the South St. Louis Playschool, traffic monitor for the third grade and a
trusty at the school. It didn't surprise him. Because of the terrific
political pressure the organized
KidMobs
could bring
to bear, the teachers and supervisors were always happy to give them the
trusty jobs so they could supervise the other youngsters who were not members.
The drilling thing was the authority, the sheer, uninhibited power-feeling that
this cherubic, plump-cheeked little blonde called
Wah
exuded, stopping truck traffic with a wave of her grimy hand or a shrill toot,
moving the gnome army across the truck strip, cuffing the slow ones. To the
others around her, Alexander realized, she must have filled the gaping need for
authority and love and protection left vacant by the family disintegration
system of the Playschools and unsatisfactorily compensated for by the most
thoroughgoing DEPCO theories, and from them she got the terrific violent power
that satisfied her furiously uncivilized mind.

The
new crop of Playschool "students" were part of the non-authority experiments
that DEPCO had been playing with for the past ten years, a violently
group-oriented group of
childlings
elaborately
deprived of civilized restraints. What DEPCO had not foreseen was the manner in
which some of them saw through every propaganda trick directed at them, and
with the horrifyingly practical cynicism of
unmodulated
savages built up a hierarchy of KM organization which filled the holes that
DEPCO had left unfilled.

In
his BURINF days Alexander had spent a couple of months of depressing research
on propaganda effects at the famous
Trivettown
Playschool, and he knew the
toughmind-edness
of those
KM's. And he knew that it was a sobering and discouraging opinion in BURINF
that DEPCO was building a Frankenstein, of which little chubby-legged, smiling,
cold-eyed eleven-year-olds like
Wah
were the brains.

"I'm
Wah
," she said to him. "How many credits do
you have on you?"

"Enough,"
Alexander said.

"I'll
decide,"
Wah
said shortly. Alexander felt a stir
behind him, and his wallet was lifted. He didn't move. He still had half his
money in his sock, so even if they rolled him he wouldn't be helpless.

Wah
whistled softly, held a fifty-credit note up
to the light to check for counterfeit. "Real," she concluded.
"Marked?"

"No."

She
eyed him. Then: "We'll take a chance. Come on." Alexander nodded, and
followed her. First branch-point!

Considering the
sectionalization
and communications blackout, four hours was an extremely short time to wait
for an answer, Alexander decided. It should have been virtually impossible for
any information to get from the Washington files to the BURINF center in New
York, and then by relay to a legal office in St. Louis, where the eagle turned
die
photoprint
over to the KM cutout.

And as he stared at the report, Alexander
decided that for fifty credits it was dirt cheap.

It
was a corporation statement, list of officers, deposition of primary shares,
list of subsidiaries and order of battle of the Colossus Publishing
Corporation.

But
Colossus, the report indicated, was itself a subsidiary. Controlling interests
in Colossus were owned by
Pough-keepsie
Research,
owned and operated by Harvard University, which, as everyone in BURINF knew,
was part of the constellation of
Robling
Titanium.

It didn't make sense. Not the business tie-in—no
one associated with the government could really be surprised to loam that any
given company, however obscure, might ultimately be traced back to Carl
Englehardt
and his
Robling
interests—but the book.

Why had Colossus published
Alien Invaders? How
could (hey have published it without risking
their multi-million-credit necks to a BURINF check and ultimate prosecution?

Alexander
tore up the
photoprint
and turned to
Wah
. "I've got to get
East
,"
he said. "How can I get to New York by tomorrow?"

"Drift,"
Wah
said. "Hitch a ride with a trucker." "They're stopping
trucks," he said.