Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (30 page)

"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."