Chapter Four

Libdy Allison, make-up pencil in hand, was trying ineffectually to smoodi her dark red hair and paint her mouth back into shape as the small private elevator shot up from the lobby of the New York DEPEX building to DIA headquarters on the eightieth floor.

Julian was up there, she was certain of that, even though his office front-runner had denied it when she tried to contact him earlier. She should have known there was trouble in the wind when Julian didn't call her when he got back into town last night. She had tried to call him after midnight, and had gotten Frank Carmine instead, pleasantly apologetic but pleasantly firm. No, nothing wrong, just a dozen top-level conferences since he'd gotten back to New York. He'd be in touch with her, she shouldn't worry . . .

But, of course, he hadn't. Instead, there was a visit from Adams that morning in her office at DEPCO. Little, weasel-faced Adams, with his warm professional smile and his cold eyes watching her. Libby shuddered. Everything in her years of psychologist's training screamed out whenever Adams came near her, and she had wished for the thousandth time that somehow somebody in the whole great, sprawling social-and-psychological Stability Control organization that was DEPCO would break down just once and say exactiy what he was thinking in plain unadorned English instead of skirting and backing and filling and muddying up the already muddy waters with psychiatric jargon and fuzzy, suspicious, defensive little ideas.

Not that Adams had mentioned Julian, of course. Not a word about Julian. No request to review her case-work on him, no suggestion that a machine-analysis of her reports on him might be in order . . . nothing as straightforward as that from the DEPCO Director. Instead, a lot of smooth, innocent DEPCO jargon about the threat that an aggressive, unstable, ambitious personality in a position of responsibility presented to the smooth functioning of a Truly Stable Society {she could quote Vanner and Larchmont page and verse); some "thoughts" on her sworn duties as a Department of Control psychotherapist to help identify and weed out such unstable personalities before they could constitute a threat; some very vague and veiled and thoroughly nasty remarks to the effect that fornication and psychotherapy were not precisely synonymous and that the former could not really serve as an adequate substitute for the latter, no matter what the non-professional relationship of the therapist and the patient.

Adams hadn't said a single word about Julian, but it was there; he had been talking about Julian every inch of the way, and he knew it, and she knew it, and he knew that she knew it.

She hadn't slapped his face, but she had wanted to, and he knew that, too. There was no voiced threat when he had left her, only the least tangible of implications, and yet Libby knew beyond any shadow of doubt that something had happened last night, something bad, and that Adams knew about it, and hence DEPCO, and that neither Adams nor DEPCO liked it.

The elevator stopped, and Libby stepped across to the DIA reception desk. "I have an appointment to see Mr. Bahr," she told the girl.

"Do you have a pass?"

"I have an appointment."

"I'm sorry, Miss. Mr. Bahr has canceled all appointments. You'd need a special authorization."

So there was something in the wind ... all that commotion on the Foreign and Eastern news nets about an explosion at Wildwood. "Let me speak to him, then." She picked up the desk phone, started to dial Julian's extension.

"I'm sorry, Miss." The receptionist gave Libby an innocent stare. "Mr. Bahr gave orders not to be interrupted."

Libby reached into her handbag and set her white DEPCO card on the desk under the girl's nose. "If I have to get a force-order to talk to him," she said icily, "Mr. Bahr is going to be very unhappy about it." She was surprised, and then irritated that Bahr had forgotten their appointment. No, not forgotten ... his memory was very good. He had ignored it. A moment later the receptionist answered the switchboard, flushed, and nodded to Libby.

"Hello, Julian? Libby." He answered something, quite abrupt. "But I can't," she protested. "Not over the phone. And it's too hot down there anyway." She pulled the receiver away from her ear and glanced angrily at the ceiling as the invective grated over the wire, quite audible ten feet away. "All right," she said finally. "I know you don't give a damn. On the other hand, I do. We don't just skip appointments . . ." She put in the knife. "It looks very bad on a Stability Report, you know . . ."

A moment later she put the phone down and snapped her handbag shut with finality. She smiled warmly at the receptionist. "He'll see me," she said.

The long, high-ceilinged DIA headquarters was the center of a storm of subdued but feverish activity. There were half a hundred men there as Libby passed through, and a haze of cigarette smoke rose in the room, sucked upward by the ventilators. Telephones buzzed sharply; at some of the desks men were handling two and three calls at a time, speaking in rapid, hushed voices. For all the activity there was an unnatural hush over the place; a bank of teletypes clattered along one wall, and a dozen unit-dispatchers were speaking into sound-dampened microphones.

Everywhere was a flurry of clerks, division heads, scribes, all so feverishly intent on what they were doing that they nearly tripped over her as she came down the corridor.

Across the dispatching room she could see a huge wall map, with red flags mounted for each DIA field unit alerted —the focal point for all the activity—and Libby felt a sudden sick, uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. There was an air of tension here, a sense of suppressed urgency that suddenly recalled to her the confused, puzzling nature of the morning TV-cast she had seen. A powder keg smoldering, with the DIA working full strength to keep it under control, working so silendy and smoothly that no one else sensed it, while the whole country coasted along in its usual indifferent, video-hypnotized, confident, imperturbably stable way.

She had a mental picture, suddenly, of a calm ripple-free ocean surface, with monsters locked in some sort of leviathan death struggle just beneath the surface.

The door to McEwen's office was wide open. Julian Bahr sat at the director's desk, the cone of a dictating machine in one hand. Frank Carmine was nearby. A dozen other people were there, shoving reports under Bahr's nose, leaning over to exchange a word or phrase, nodding sharply and hurrying off. He saw her, and said something almost audible and unpleasant to Carmine, and went back to his dictating. His voice cut sharply across the murmur in the room, incisive, impatient, commanding.

She did not see McEwen, and the sick feeling grew stronger. Here was the center of the sense of urgency and tension that pervaded the place. Bahr's face was tense and angry, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth a hard, confident line as he dictated. With her trained psychologist's eye Libby could see the danger signals like foot-tall handwriting on the wall. The controls, the adjustments she had tried so hard to build into his personality were beginning to snap, one by one.

"Julian, I want to talk to you."

He slammed the microphone down and pulled her to the side of the room. "Damn it, Libby, I can't see you now. Go on down below and I'll be down when I can break away."

"We have an appointment now."

"Yes, I know. In an hour."

"You're lying. You're stalling me, and you know it."

His scowl deepened. "So I'm lying. I told you I'm busy."

"I know you're busy. So am I. That's why I've got to talk to you today. Now."

"Look," he said, "I've got a Condition C problem to handle, and a new job to get under control. I don't have time for your . . . interview."

The deliberate vulgar connotation on the last word made her face flush red, but she refused to be driven off with insults. "All right," she said, "then I'll drop your case right now. I'll have another worker assigned to you tomorrow, if you like. A man, in case you don't want any more . . . interviews . . . with women."

Bahr stared at her, his face heavy with anger. She knew she had struck his Achilles' heel—his savage, almost pathological fear of the DEPCO mind invaders, the one beast in his Twenty-First Century jungle he did not know how to cope with. He glared at her, his hand still clutching her arm. Then he nodded to the anteroom that still had his name on the door, and pushed her roughly inside. He kicked the door shut and turned on her. "All right, what do you want?"

"Julian, what's going on here? Where's Mac?"

Bahr told her. It was like a slap in the face. "We're keeping it out of the newscasts until we have things under better control. Of course we notified the key government people."

"But . . . dead." She shook her head helplessly. Now there was no doubt why Adams had come to her office.

"He's had a bad heart for a long time," Bahr said.

"Particularly since you've been bucking him," Libby said bitterly.

"Look, Lib, you know I'd have gone down on the floor for Mac. When he heard that Project Frisco had been compromised, it was more than he could take."

"And you're the director now," Libby said.

"For the time being, yes. I can't let this Project Frisco sag while DEPCO bickers about a new appointment."

"Oh, it won't sagl Not with Julian Bahr running things." She turned on him viciously. "You should have seen yourself out therel The Commanding General, whipping his whole Army into trembling readiness. They're like a pack of bloodhounds baying for the hunt. You love it, don't you? Blood pressure up, adrenals pumping, ego swelling up like a big purple balloon. . . ."

"That's about enough from you," Bahr said.

"No, it's not quite enough, Julian. Adams was in to see me this morning. You're going to have to resign as director."

"Resign!" The anger fell away from Bahr's face, leaving incredulity in its place. "But I've been working for five year for this job."

"I know that. I've been watching you, and I knew all along it was coming to this. You can't keep the job. DEPCO won't let you."

"They've got to let me," Bahr said flatly. "Nobody else knows what Project Frisco is . . . not even BRINT. They're going out of their minds over there; they don't even know the cover-name for the Project. But since Wildwood, Project Frisco is a Condition C operation. We aren't dealing with Eastern Bloc activity, Lib. It's more than that."

Then he told her about the U-metal, and the exit monitors, and the whole story.

"You mean you think something . . . extraterrestrial . . . was responsible for the raid?"

"For everything. God knows how long it's been going on. The thermite fires, the disappearances . . . Did you know that James Cullen vanished from his home last night? There's no man in the country who knows more about our Stability Control system, and now all of a sudden he's gone. Libby, somebody's got to track this thing down and find out what's happening while there's still time. Nobody else could do it, but I can push it through. I'll do it if I have to run my men into their graves." He stopped suddenly. "You think I'm lying, don't you?"

"No, Julian, I think you're telling the absolute truth." "You don't think I can do it, do you?" Libby did not answer.

"And you don't want me to try," Bahr said bitterly. "You'd rather have me stick my neck in the yoke like a work horse and just pull, let somebody crack a whip over me . . . pull like all the other workhorses all day long, and at night trot home to my own little pasture and play stud to you. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Well, I don't like taking orders from people who aren't as good as me. I've taken too damned many orders, and now I'm going to give some . . ."

"Julian, you just won't understand." She turned away, but he jerked her around. The enthusiasm was gone from his face now, and there was anger in its place.

"You'd like to stop me, wouldn't you?" he said. "Push me back in the rut. Punch some new holes in my Stability Card and dump me back at the bottom of the heap again. That's what you want, isn't it?"

"It isn't what I want or don't want," Libby said wearily. "If you won't step down now, I can't protect you any more. You'll have a DEPCO man in your office before you can turn around. You'll never know what hit you. They'll find that you're unstable and dangerous for anything but a greencard job. They'll get one look at your Stability profile and downgrade you right into Critical Ward. Then they'll give you recoop and shock-analysis, and if there's anything left you'll spend the rest of your life picking oranges somewhere. That's not what 7 want, Julian. That's the law."

He looked at her and suddenly laughed. "I don't believe you," he said. "You've been handing me this Stability garbage for five years now. Acting like I'd committed some crime that you were covering up for me. Always trying to make me stop pushing. Why, every time I took a step up the ladder you'd nearly have a fit. As if I couldn't handle the job."

"It's not that," she said. "It's what you might do in the job. And I've been covering for you, believe me, but I can't do it any longer. If you don't quit this job right now, I can't help you any more."

He walked around the room, slamming his fist into his palm. "Okay," he said unexpectedly. "Ill quit, then. But not now. Not today. Project Frisco is urgent, and there's nobody else to take over. Ill need time to get it straightened out."

"How much time? Two days? Three?"

"God, nol I couldn't get anything done that soon."

She shook her head. "No good, Julian. I've got to have a definite date. You're up for an automatic DEPCO check right now. You can't get away from it . . . the best I can do is stall them. And if you won't give me a definite date, 111 call them right now."

"For Christ sake, what do you want me to do?" Bahr burst out. Then he stopped, searched her face. "Libby . . ."

"I mean it, Julian."

"You're bluffing," he said. "You won't call them." "I took an oath when I joined DEPCO. I can't leave you in this job."

"Oath, garbage! You haven't lived up to that thing since the day you signed it. If I get my Stability clearance revoked, it's your neck, too. There goes your career. Think about that."

"I already have." Libby turned and picked the phone off the desk that used to be his desk, and dialed the DEPCO exchange.

Bahr watched her make the connection all the way through to Adams' office. Then he hit her with it.

"You'd better think about Timmy before you make that call," he said.

Very slowly, Libby put the phone back on the hook, turned to face him. All the fight was gone from her suddenly. She felt weak, and sick. "You couldn't be that rotten," she said. "Not even you."

"I want this job." He wouldn't look at her face.

"Julian, you promised."

"Sure, I promised. Things are different now, that's all. I'm not going to do any parting favors for somebody who's going to sell me down the river."

"Julian, he's your child, too. I'm entitled to one child, with my job rating. Ill raise him and support him. I won't tie you down or ask for partial support. All I want is your signature and a BHE test. Is that asking a favor?"

"You can stand a five-point cut in your Stability rating," Bahr said. "I can't. I can't even stand a DEPCO review. Particularly when my therapist has been . . ."

"I can claim it was part of the therapy," she pleaded. "I'm willing to take the blame."

"They'll put you under polygraph."

"I have contacts. Some of my father's friends . . ."

"Then get me a white card!" Bahr said.

"I can't do that. Julian . . . he's your son. I don't want to lose him. Do you want him to go through the same thing you did: the Playhome, and Playschool, and Techschool and everything? You don't know what those schools are like now. They didn't experiment with the children when you went. . . ."

"Those are DEPCO projects," Bahr said. "That's your out-lit running them. Don't you like them?"

"There's a lot about DEPCO I don't like, but that's neither here nor there. . . ."

"Then get them changed!"

"They're all right, most of the time. Most of the kids come through all right, as long as they're not too stubborn or independent. But what if he's like you, Julian? What if he lights back?"

"Then good for him. I took it, he can."

Libby pushed away from him, looked at him coldly. "I could name you anyway, and have you dumped as a Stability risk for refusing to accept paternity."

"And I can get eight men to swear you picked them up and look them to bed without a prostitute's license. Eight men who can keep up the story under polygraph."

"Julian," she said, "what makes you such a rotten bastard?"

"You're the psych doc. You ought to know." He looked at her, and suddenly, inexplicably, she was in his arms, and he was crushing her against him, his face in her hair, his hands digging desperately into her shoulders. "Oh, God, Libby, I don't want to fight you. I didn't mean it about Tim. I swear I'll quit this job just as soon as I can get things under control, but it means too much to me right now. It just means too damned much. You've got to go along on my terms for now . . ."

"I know." She tried to keep the tears back, clinging to him. "But believe me, I'm going to watch you, and if you start to go off the deep end, I'll turn your case over to DEPCO lock, stock and barrel."

Bahr laughed, the old confidence returning, and he tipped her chin up gently, kissed her. "That's fair enough. You watch me."

On the desk behind them the intercom crackled. "Julian? Frank. We've got a BRINT man on the wire here."

"What does he want?" Bahr snapped. "I can't talk to him."

"I think you'd better," Carmine's voice said. "There's been a landing up in Canada. BRINT won't let us into the area unless you head the team yourself. They want to know right now."

"Christ!" Bahr said. He pushed Libby away. "Look, Frank, tell them yes. I'll be in the air in three minutes." He snapped the speaker switch to off.

"Julian . . ."

"Not now, not now. This is important." He paused at the door, looked back at her. "You stall that DEPCO team," he said. "I don't care how you do it, but stall them. This may be the break we've been waiting for."

Then he was gone. She walked around the room, trying to smooth her dress, straighten her hair, fix her make-up, cursing him for the things he could do to her, and herself because she couldn't fight him. Two people. A man who could not possibly understand, or give a damn, and a woman who could not help loving him.

She found the elevator and started down for street level.