He found the DEPCO committee waiting patiently, still smiling in a fatherly fashion after being kept waiting four hours on an AA conference priority, still greeting him warmly, still accepting him, still loving him. The leader of the group was a tall, blond-haired man with pale blue eyes, trying to hide the lines of worry on his forehead as Bahr entered the room.
Bahr shook his hand and smiled through his teeth, and then he saw Paul MacKenzie sitting at the side of the room, unconcernedly cleaning his fingernails, hardly looking up when Bahr sat down but taking everything in, spying. Bahr felt his shoulders and neck tighten.
“All right,” Bahr said. “Sorry to hold you up, but I had some important work in progress. Now let’s have it. What do you want?”
The leader of the delegation cleared his throat. “I’m Whiting, Mr. Bahr. We’re really sorry to cut into your time like this; naturally we realize that you’re extremely busy, but to be perfectly frank, Mr. Bahr, we’re alarmed.”
Bahr said a silent prayer for control, and smiled at Whiting. “About what?”
The DEPCO man seemed embarrassed. “About the way the DIA is handling the investigation of these . . .” He hesitated, obviously striving to avoid saying the word. “. . . These incidents that have been occurring.”
“You mean the alien ships that have been landing?” Bahr said.
Whiting winced. “I don’t think you realize the magnitude of what’s happening here, Mr. Bahr. We have just received a machine run of certain samplings taken in Continental United States and other parts of Federation America, plus two field units from Europe. Our prognostic curve . . .” He opened a portfolio and laid a graph in front of Bahr. The DEPCO man’s hands were trembling. “Mr. Bahr, these curves indicate that there is a very fast-growing panic spreading in the country, centered in rumors of alien landings. This morning there was a closely-averted riot in Los Angeles, and another in St. Louis. Our sources indicate that foreign news-listening is up by a factor of ten in the past week.” The DEPCO man spread his hands helplessly. “Naturally, our social-control techniques were devised to handle panic-emergencies, but nothing of this magnitude has ever happened before, not even during the late crash years. If this were to explode into a full-scale panic . . . .”
Bahr scowled. “Why are you coming to me, Mr. Whiting?”
“Because of the leaks, Mr. Bahr, the security leaks. The foreign news nets are getting information and the people are listening to them. Your cover stories from BURINF are simply not selling. And the foreign network implication that you are trying desperately to cover up is just fanning the flame.”
Bahr shrugged impatiently. “We had one really bad break,” he admitted. “That was the ’copter chatter intercepted by the Canadians.” He glared at MacKenzie. “There haven’t been any leaks since then, and there won’t be.”
Whiting frowned. “But, Mr. Bahr, six hours ago Radio Budapest was broadcasting a detailed description of an alien landing in northern British Columbia.”
Bahr slammed his fist on the desk and jerked to his feet, sending the chair crashing against the wall. “What did you say?”
“He said the news is out,” MacKenzie said from the side of die room. “It’s all over the country.”
Bahr swore viciously. “Then there’s a leak somewhere between DIA and BRINT. We’ve kept it so tight that . . .” He broke off, turned to an aide. “Tell them to get ready for a complete news blackout on all frequencies. Tell them to get those foreign nets jammed. Every news story that goes out will have to clear with me personally.”
Whiting of DEPCO sat staring, his face going white. “Mr. Bahr, you can’t do that! A news blackout now would be the last straw!”
Bahr swung on him. “You idiot, don’t you recognize a war when you’re staring one in the face? That’s what we have on our hands—war, deliberate psychological war! Whatever this alien is, we know practically nothing about him, and he knows everything about us. We can’t even guess what his next move might be. He’s landed here, he may have been monitoring our TV-casts and newscasts for years. He’s interrogated our key personnel. Everything he has done has been perfectly geared to touch off a generalized fear reaction.”
“But the people . . . .”
“The horse is already stolen, why try to lock the barn door?” Bahr snapped. “If the only thing the people will believe is the truth, then that’s what we’ll give them. The truth.”
“We can’t give them the truth,” Whiting said in the stifling silence that followed.
“Why can’t we?”
“Because the one thing our society simply cannot face is an alien invasion,” Whiting said. “It will tear our society out by the roots.”
“Why?” Bahr said harshly.
“Because we have absolutely no defense against an alien invasion . . . none whatever . . . and the people know it.”
“Nonsense. We have weapons, we have technology,” Bahr said.
“They won’t do us any good, against an—alien invader,” Whiting said. “Not in the face of fear. We don’t know exactly where that fear is rooted, basically—probably in the pre-crash drive to space—but the fear is just as strong now as it ever was.”
“You mean the fear of space?”
“I mean the fear of spaceships,” Whiting said. “You have no idea how deeply it penetrates. You have no idea how we’ve struggled to sublimate it since the crash.” Whiting sighed, his eyes taking on a dreamy look. “Vanner recognized it, long before the crash; at least he read the symptoms. He even recognized what had to be done: to anchor the Vanner-Elling system, to drive technology from the minds of the masses, especially the future masses. That was the only hope for stability, and we needed stability at any price. A brilliant vision. Vanner was afraid of it because of the repercussions, but Larchmont . . . .”
Suddenly, Bahr tagged him. Whiting . . . of course! The one Libby had told him about that night at the Colony Club, when they both had been a little drunk, and gotten to laughing so hard their sides had hurt. Whiting . . . the last of the pure Eros men left in DEPCO, a protege of the legendary Larchmont who had almost succeeded in converting the educational system of the country into a vast group-analysis instrument during the shaky, formative days of the Vanner-Elling government. Larchmont had not quite succeeded in putting that through, but he had left the imprint of his own occult personality permanently in the psychology of the country, and in the government.
It had been his followers who had shifted the romantic folklore of the country from the old fallacy of the Clean-Cut-Hero-Beautiful-Heroine-In-Love Hollywood standard to the even more horrendous fallacy of the Be-Her-Daddy-Be-His-Little-Nymph concept of the current fictofilms, poptunes and couch confessionals.
And Whiting was a Larchmont man, a psychoanalytical dreamer, a fantasy rambler, kept on by DEPCO in the Foreign Affairs office because he was harmless, and a handy repository for the grasshopper-minded fringes of the psychological world, also harmless because nothing ever happened in Foreign Affairs.
But now something had happened. The foreign nets handling the alien story came under Whiting, and naturally Whiting came to Bahr. But what Whiting had to say was another thing. Bahr relaxed, suddenly feeling warmly exultant, listening now to see how Whiting, who after all did have DEPCO authority, could be used.
“. . . We interpreted the spaceships as phallic symbols,” Whiting was saying eagerly. “At the height of the crash, I here was the tremendous father-hatred and Oedipus feeling toward the ships. The mobs smashed the last one before it was even completed, so we used the father-hatred to persuade I he masses to reject the ideas of the former legal and military governments. And we had the computers. We had to use them because Vanner, after all, was the political rallying point. But the idea of putting them into the caverns was a stroke of genius on Larchmont’s part. The computers meant security and warmth and protection and anti-spaceships, and they were in the caverns . . . a magnificent Oedipus feeling.”