“What do you mean, ‘increasingly closer to perfection?’ ” she asked him irritably. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”
He smiled, and in back of the cigar she could see that his obviously false teeth were stained and yellow. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a little leather case, and flipped it open. It contained a picture of him on an ID card that managed the impossible task of making him look worse than he did, and a very fancy embossed metal emblem above it.
“Chief Inspector Jacob Edelman, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said.
She thought to herself that, if people like this were Chief Inspectors, no wonder the crime rate was through the roof. Aloud, she said, “And what did you mean by that remark?”
“Just think it over, Doctor,” he said. “Suppose you invented something—a disease, a chemical, who knows what?—that could in theory wipe out everybody’s memory on a massive scale and make them obedient sheep. Now, the brain’s a pretty complicated place, and you can only do so much on animals, so you start guessing. You hit the wrong centers the first few times out. Then you get lucky—you hit a nice reaction that does exactly what you wanted it to, maybe more. Pick small towns, the easier to observe effects, rate of spread, and the like. I think they hit it early on. Here.”
She was appalled. It was a nightmarish vision beyond her comprehension.
“No one would do such a thing,” she protested. “What you are suggesting is monstrous. Do you have any proof of this wild idea?”
He shrugged. “Only logic, Doctor, for now. Logic and a few other things.” He looked around. “That’s about all I can say about it for now, but we’ll be seeing each other again, in, ah, quieter surroundings.”
Not if I can help it, she told herself. The man gave her the creeps. “Just what department are you Chief Inspector of?” she asked, starting to turn away and attend to her business.
“Counterespionage,” he replied matter-of-factly, and walked off, humming a bit to himself.
“It’s mighty public to be going on with that shit,” Joe Bede said. “Hell, there’ll be scare stories all over the evening papers tonight.”
She stared after the strange little man. “I think he already knows that much,” she muttered. “I think he said that because he really likes scaring people to death.”
But as she tended to her own duties, made up organization charts, dispatched teams to the hospitals, recommended NDCC Dietrick lab teams, and all the other ten million things she had to do, she couldn’t get those two visions from her mind.
The blank zombies being processed, and the strange little man with the ability to construct a nightmare so casually.
FOUR
The air was fresh and clear; the night sky over the eastern California mountains was ablaze with stars, and the night chill quieted the insects so that only the sound of gently rolling wind through the mountains could be heard.
Five men sat atop a ledge looking down into a culvert well off the main road. A small cabin was there, looking toylike and so natural that it was almost invisible but for a glow coming from a window. In reality it was a fairly good-sized cabin of tough hardwood, a mountain retreat that predated the National Forest in which it sat and which could be rented for up to two weeks by arrangement with the Forest Service. A thin trail of white smoke issuing forth from the small pipe chimney was the only sign, other than the flickering lantern glow in the window, that the place was inhabited at all.
One of the men shifted slightly. “Sure glad this is on federal land,” he said casually. “No hassle over jurisdiction.”
One of the others nodded and checked a shotgun. “Give ’em about five more minutes,” he told the others offhandedly. “They been going to sleep pretty early lately. Better if they’re in bed.”
The first man, a large fellow dressed in typical hiker fashion, picked up a walkie-talkie.
“Mountain Man to Tourister,” he said softly. “Tourister bye,” came the response.
“Five minutes,” he informed the unseen others on the opposite side of the culvert. “Check with the blockers for position.” He looked at his watch, touching a little stud so it lit up the time. “I have 2250 hours. Shall we say at 2300 exactly?”
“Good enough,” said the other team leader. “I’m getting pneumonia sitting here anyway.”
“Line of duty,” the other cracked. “A week in the hospital on Uncle.” He turned serious again. “Okay, count off if you’re in position. Tourister.”
“One,” said the other team leader.
“Blocker?”
“Two.” A different voice.
“Salamander?”
“Go—I mean, three,” came a third voice. “Bulldozer?”
“Four.” A dry, deep voice that sounded more bored than tense.
“It is now 2254,” said Mountain Man. “Check and sync. On my signal, go, 2300.”
They waited. The others in the Mountain Man team shifted into position, checking out sniperscopes, tear gas launchers, and the like. The cabin seemed blissfully unaware of all this activity, which suited them just fine.
They waited, peering anxiously at the target. Nobody spoke as the time crept onward to their zero hour.
Mountain Man stared at his watch, waiting for the numerals to change. Suddenly, they did, and tension reached the breaking point.
“Okay, hit ’em with One!” he snapped into the walkie-talkie.
Suddenly a mild, almost unnoticeable rumble far off increased in intensity, the sound of an engine echoing through the mountains as if a horde of giant super-trucks were coming their way.
Tremendous floodlights came on, centered on the cabin, turning night into day for fifty meters in all directions.
A small device atop a rifle in a Mountain Man team member’s hands suddenly issued a loud, echoing report, and a large object was hurled down into the culvert, landing near the cabin.
Mountain Man lifted the walkie-talkie. The device near the cabin was a miniaturized receiver-amplifier.
“You in the cabin,” his voice came back to them from below, hollow, gigantic, almost supernatural in tone. “This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are surrounded. You have thirty seconds to throw out your weapons or we will gas the cabin. There is no escape, and gas may well set the cabin on fire. Throw out your weapons and file out of the cabin—now!”
The light in the cabin window went out, although it was almost impossible to tell it because of the brightness of the strobe lights.
From the window came the sudden sounds of automatic weapons fire, spraying the area around the receiver with a withering fire.
“Looks like a Thompson for sure,” one of the agents said. “Want to burn them?”
Mountain Man shook his head. “Naw, let’s do a little demo work first. Those logs are too thick to hurt anybody.” He turned to a different channel on the walkie-talkie.
“Salamander? Give ’em a steady stream. Don’t aim for the window or door, but pour it on. Thirty seconds. Then Blocker, give a Two directly in the window. Okay? Go!”
The rise to their right erupted in smoke and noise. The cabin was struck by an enormous, deadly hail of bullets at the rate of thirty per second, and wood flew in chips as it continued.
At the thirty second mark a sound like a mortar being launched went off not once but three times, whomp! whomp! whomp!
Computer-guided shells flew directly into the window one after the other and exploded with a flash of light.
“One’s coming out from under the cabin at the back!” came a cry over the walkie-talkie. “Must have a trap-door exit!”
“I’m on ’em,” Salamander assured the other, and fired.