Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (28 page)

Bahr
rubbed his forehead, beat his fist against his palm with a loud flat sound.
"I'm doing all I can to push it through."

"Is that enough?"
Englehardt
asked. "You know
111
back you all the way—money, technicians, influence—but it's got to move,
or we're lost."

"I'm
having trouble with DEPCO," Bahr said. "They want to pull me off the
job until they're satisfied that I'm dull, normal and inert. By DEPCO I mean
Adams."

"You
never impressed me as the sort that Adams would be likely to stop,"
Englehardt
said.

Bahr's
jaw clenched savagely and his fist smashed against his palm. "Adams won't
stop me," he said. "Not if I have to break his back with my bare
hands. As long as I still have friends I can count on."

Englehardt
laughed. "I could tell you
something."

"What?"

"A man as ambitious as you are really
has no friends, only victims. If I were you I wouldn't count on anybody helping
me for one minute after I lost complete control. In fact, if I were you, I
might worry about my life, if I had no more DIA to protect it."

It
was Bahr's turn to laugh. "Killing is my game," he said, "and I
always win."

"Well,
I think this is where you're going,"
Englehardt
said as the Volta slowed in front of the DEPCO building. "I
will
see you this afternoon, Julian?"

"You'll see me," Bahr said, and
walked into the building.

Bahr
was smiling when he came into the office. He smiled at Libby, he smiled at Adams,
he smiled at the technicians, and Libby thought he was drunk.

"Sorry I'm late," he said.
"Shall we get started?"

Adams
rose slowly. "This is a routine examination, Mr. Bahr. You realize that.
There's nothing personal in it, but when an individual moves into a job as
important as yours, there are just a few precautions that have to be taken for
the public good."

"Fine, that's all
clear," Bahr said amicably.

"All
we want to do is ask you a few questions, and ask you to give us frank honest
answers.
Now."

"If
you don't mind, I'll call my office and give them this extension," Bahr
said, "in case I have to be reached."

"This
is an unlisted number," Adams said. "We can't have any interruptions
during the test." But Bahr was already at the phone, dialing quickly,
still smiling,
nodding
. He gave the extension number
and hung up.

"I
left orders not to be interrupted until I called back," he said. "So
we won't have to worry about that."

"All right."
Adams frowned. "These questions are just to help us make a few simple
evaluations on your personality, Mr. Bahr. I think it would be best to let the
machine warm up, and let you get adjusted to it. Are you familiar with the
polygraph?"

"Who isn't?" Bahr sat sprawled in
the
surro
-leather chair, let Adams fasten the apparatus
with his thin bony fingers, although he would rather have had Libby do it. And
then he waited through the usual pointless recounting of what they were going
to do, until they thought he was ripe. He watched Libby maneuver into a
position where she could watch the polygraph and still see him to cue in his
suggested reactions. Bahr could feel his palms begin to sweat a little. Why
didn't she throw out the first cue? Christ! She hadn't already sold him down
the river?

She
rubbed her right ear, which was the first trigger, and Bahr could feel the
automatic cue-word come into his mind as Adams began the questioning.

It
was simple at first, so ridiculously simple that he wondered why he had feared
it so long, but then the questions, the questions, the questions began to blur
and he grew tired, felt the weariness creeping up, and the boredom. It was the
boredom that worried him. He'd made three complete runs so far, and obviously
Adams wasn't getting what he wanted because he was already talking about still
another repeat, and

Libby,
in her carefully inhibited way, was looking too pleased for things to be going
too badly, even though Adams was scratching far afield of the normal questions
looking for reactions to snap onto.

Then the hooker came.

"I've
done my best," Adams said, shaking his head, "and I guess there just
isn't any sense to making another run after three confirmations." He began
to loosen the pressure belts, and Bahr gradually tensed, knowing something was
coming.

"I'm
sorry, Mr. Bahr," Adams said sadly. "I really am, and I'd do anything
I could to keep from having to do this. Unfortunately, it's just one of those
things that
has
to be looked out for in a job like
yours. Otherwise, we'd wind up with people who are dangerously unstable,
dangerous to us, and dangerous to themselves." He smiled unhappily.
"Of course sometimes it's just a matter of situation, nothing really
serious wrong with the individual's personality, but under emergency situations
some people just naturally shift into an authoritarian mold. Sometimes pressure
forces people into adopting a personality structure that is . . . well . . .
dangerous to the society and themselves, and in fact they should be grateful,
we should all be grateful that we can detect this sort of thing in time to . .
."

"Hold
it," Bahr said, jerking out of the seat and grabbing Adams by the
shoulder, his big fingers digging into the man's frail body. "You're not
railroading me," he roared.
"You and your damned
hutch of pink-eyed little rabbits.
You couldn't, not even one lousy
sonofabitch
of you in all of DEPCO, do the job I'm doing,
or even get into a job like it; you're not going to . . ."

"Julian!"
The stark urgency in her voice stopped him
for an instant, and Libby tried to say something to Adams, but Bahr was angry
now. The post-trance suggestions were overridden by this new threat, and his
whole body seemed to swell with rage. He shoved Libby roughly aside and seized
Adams with both hands, lifting him off the floor. "You queer! You lousy,
pasty-faced queer, I'll flatten your face out on your own polygraph if you try
to . . ."

"Julian,
stop it!"
Libby's voice hit him again, and then
something, something she said,
hit'"him
like a
pail of ice-water.

He dropped Adams, puzzled at the sudden
change, unable to recall what she had said, just a single word, that left his
spine crawling with horror. He looked at her. She was shaking her head slowly,
motioning him to bend over so she could whisper in his ear.

"He
did that deliberately to trigger you. Your PG was negative all three times; he
had nothing on you until you grabbed him and started to open your
moudi
. Oh, Julian, why did you have to lose your
temper?"

Bahr
stood silent, shaken by this, cursing himself a good deal more profanely than
Libby had for not immediately realizing what was happening. He had promised to
take his cues from her, but the minute there was a real threat—he just couldn't
depend on anybody else.

And
now Adams had what he wanted.
Violence.
Ego identification with power and job.
Animalization
of peers.
All the things Libby had warned him
about,
all spilled out in one stupid burst of rage.

It
wasn't much, not enough in itself to get him permanently downgraded or
anything like that, but it was the chink in the wall, the one justification
Adams needed to have him pulled off the job and taken under observation. Libby
and post-trance suggestion couldn't help him much then, and once he was off the
wall there would be no climbing back up. Not this time.

This
time there would be
recoop
and a labor battalion,
sedation, his daily ration to supplement a fuzzy prefrontal, and all the other
permanent, irreversible precautions to make him safe, stable, and happy.

Adams
got up slowly, shaken, white-faced, but glowing with triumph. "All
right," he said in that saccharine-sweet voice of his.
"All
right.
I think, Mr. Bahr, that that's all we need from you today. . .
."

The
phone rang, loud and insistent. Libby took the receiver.
"For
you, Julian.
Your office.
They say crash
priority."

"What do they
want?"

"They'll
only talk to you personally." Then, into the phone, "Yes, yes, he's
right here. I'll put him on."

Bahr
took the phone. He listened for a moment, and his breathing seemed to stop.
"You're certain of that?" he said harshly.
"The
moon?
All right, get the
report,
and every possible
observer by direct wire to my office. Contact Engle-
hardt
and the Joint Chiefs for conference in my office in sixty minutes. Broadcast a
Condition B on all channels. Then contact the Chief Executive and tell him to
have a joint session assembled in Washington in . . ."—he glanced at his
watch—"two hours."

He
hung up then, and slowly turned to Adams. "All right," he said
savagely, almost gleefully. "Get your injunction, if you can. But you'd
better do it fast, because if you don't have it enforced sixty minutes from
now, it's just going to be too late."

He
stalked from the room, and the door crashed closed behind him.

No
Condition
B blackout could ever have
hidden the catastrophe which blazed like a banner in the sky, not from the
night side where the first report had come from, not even from the day side.
Bahr watched
impatientiy
as the congressmen clumped
in little nervous knots here and there, jamming the aisles and
dooiways
of the House chamber. The call had only been out
for eighty minutes, but they were nearly all here, at least seventy percent,
and the Chief Executive and the Joint Chiefs were expected any moment.

The
session with the Joint Chiefs in New York . . . with Adams of DEPCO conspicuous
by his absence . . . had been stormy; mostly they objected to calling a joint
session of Congress, because Congress had no power to do anything about it
anyway. But Bahr had insisted that only a return to the half-forgotten
formalities and traditions could really drive home to all the people what had
to be done. Congress still nominally represented the people,
eVen
though it had no real function any more, since the
government was run by DEPEX and DEPCO and the other
Vanner-Elling
Bureaus and all the congressmen ever did was to formally OK funds. But now they
must be made to feel useful, to feel that they were making a decision that all
the machines and all Mark
Vanner's
mathematics could
never make.

And
the Joint Chiefs finally had given in because they had to, because they had all
seen the Moon in the sky—Earth's fine old stable yellow moon against the blue
sky, but not a Moon any longer, just a clump of shattered pieces hanging
obediently in orbit like the fragments of a broken plate, slowly falling away
from each other.

An
observatory in Australia had seen the explosion, a sudden flash of incredible
whiteness bursting out in the dark Australian sky, and then, dimly, through the
curtain of debris, a mammoth slow-motion display of
planetoidal
destruction.
Idiot destruction, destruction without point or
reason, but destruction, with terrible implications.

If
the aliens could do that to the Moon . . .

Everyone
on Earth could see it. In the streets there was the wildfire spread of terror.

From
the prop room behind the rostrum, Bahr saw the Chief Executive arrive, wearing
a white, impeccably cut nylon jacket that had a modified military look about
it, very splendid, very dashing. The president, G. Allen White, had taken the
ladies by storm after he deserted the cast of "Heroes of the 801st"
on TV to run for President. He still played the dashing hero, which the women
all approved, except that now there was trouble, real trouble, and danger, real
danger, and he had to struggle to keep the fear from showing on his face. What
face to wear? The face of
concern, that
was it. You
could see his actor's mind working. Serious concern, but confidence . . .