Chapter Ten

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.

"That's right," another KM confirmed. "It's the freak hunt. ICven the regular lines are getting stopped by DIA."

"I'll cover expenses," Alexander said.

"Sorry," said Wah. "I'd like to take your money, but we have to keep up our standing." Alexander nodded, noticed uneasily the hard avaricious glint in the eye of a couple of ten-year-old bowmen. One of them was toying with his bow, a small spring-steel crossbow that could fire a five-inch shaft lh rough a man's body at fifty feet, yet folded up into a pseudo-jackknife.

"Okay," he said. "Thanks anyway." He started down the stairs of the deserted loft the local KM used for a head-'inarters. Behind him he heard voices suddenly raised, and Wah arguing briefly. He leaped down the remaining stairs, (lien paused to scatter a handful of small credit notes on the floor where the light would hit them. He heard a clatter on the stairs, and burst out on the street, catching the eight-year-old chickie in the chest with his knee. He seized a bicycle and pedaled oS furiously, staying in shadows, crouching over the handlebars of the awkwardly small two-wheeler.

There was a roar of pursuit behind him, giving way to a louder greedy squabble as the pursuers stopped to pick up the scattered credits. After a moment he heard the yelps as the bicycle posse started after him.

At the man-strip at the end of the street he parked the bike on the loading deck, dropped a token in the gate and hurried through, leaving the bike behind. His guess was right. The KM's would not pay a token apiece to follow him once they had recovered the bike. But the alarm would be out about a drifter with money.

He knew he would have to get out of St. Louis by morning.

Above all, he had to get to New York, to somehow establish a contact with a BRINT agent high enough up to listen to what he had to say, not as a fugitive and possibly an alien-influenced traitor, but as a man who had somehow managed to keep his head and see die way through to the truth.

The report on Colossus had been the key, jarring the not-quite-fitting pieces down into a compact perfect fit, a quite different pattern than he had considered before, but a pattern that was for the first time unmistakably clear.

He knew now what had happened at Wildwood. He knew that he could not waste a minute now. He might already be too late.

Once on the man-strip he began switching strips at the switching centers to see if his previous tail had managed to follow him after he left the temporary protection of the KMs. There was no one following him on the strip itself, but a Hydro was moving doggedly on the roadstrip below. Alexander crouched back out of stunner range, fear creeping up his spine again. They couldn't be DIA; they would have picked him up long ago. But if they were aliens, why were they stalking him so patiently?

He dropped off the strip as it passed back through the trucking center. What he needed was an accomplice so his pursuers would have another branch-point to worry about, and so he could get a truck.

It was the only way. With a truck, and a trucker's ID he could drive to New York; and plenty of New York long hauls went through at this time of night. But he needed a decoy bait to get a trucker out of a brightly lighted diner and into an alley or motel room.

He found his prospect in the third diner he checked. It was surprising to find a woman left in one of them; most of the night runs had left already. He walked up behind her, grabbed her by the wrist. "Let's take a walk," he said.

Her lips twisted into a snarl as she whirled on him. "DEPCO?" she asked, the words sticking hatefully in her throat.

Alexander shook his head. "A friend." He tightened his grip on her wrist and started to walk her out. He had not seen his shadow since the last switch on the man-strips, but lie paused warily at the door, then pulled her out into the darkness.

"Two credits," she whispered, "flat rate, if you don't take too long, two credits, you can take your pick. . . ."

"This is something special," he said. He told her what he wanted, then slipped her a ten-credit note.

"But where?"

"There's a motel behind there."

"He might kill me."

"He won't kill anybody, don't worry."

He watched her go back into the diner. Ten minutes later she came out with a heavy-set, stupid-looking man with a trucker's cap on. They walked back to the motel office, then clown the darkened path toward the cabins.

Alexander moved after them silently. He couldn't count on handling a hulking truck driver alone, but there are times when a man is helpless. He hoped the woman would remember the signal, and fought down the intense wave of self-loathing that welled up in him. There was no stopping now, no turning back to order and precision and the proper running of things, no turning back to the warm, easy security of Absolute Stability, the peaceful quiet of not having to think or worry. A week before he would not have dreamed of doing the things he was doing now as a matter of course.

But it was not as a matter of course, not now, he thought. It was a matter of survival.

He heard them inside, heard the woman's voice, low and suggestive, then dropping into a stream of underworld jargon so filthy Alexander was afraid for a moment she would frighten the quarry away. Then it was quiet, with only murmuring sounds, and he waited for the signal.

Silence. It took an instant to register that it was too quiet, suddenly deathly still. He gripped the latch, turned it and burst into the darkened room.

Then he screamed as the fight hit his eyes, glaring, blinding, burning white, searing his retinas, and he clamped his hands over his face . . .

He felt the blow at the back of his head, and then the glare-whiteness dissolved into blackness.

He was in a room without windows, a single door, a single chair, utterly black, although he could feel other presences there, other light breathing quite near him. He could not move his head, and he realized, quite suddenly, that it was clamped into a frame on the chair.

And it was silent, except for the voice that was asking him questions. It had been asking them for a long time, it seemed, and he tried to orient himself, to remember when the questions had started, and what they had been about.

But only now could he focus on the voice, slowly repeating a question, pausing, then another, pausing, a curiously metallic, unmodulated voice like a person talking with laryngitis.

He had heard that voice before, years before in the communications shack in Antarctica, transcribing messages from

Control in Washington, and he remembered now, with a jolt of fear, what the voice was.

It was the characteristic electronic voice of a tik-talker.

Part III THE TIGER PIT