Bahr looked at him, then turned to Englehardt. “How soon can you give us figures?”
“Three days,” said Englehardt.
“That’s too long,” Bahr said. “Make it two. Because by then we need to know whether spaceships can be built or not, and how soon.”
“I’ll stop you, Bahr,” Adams grated. “I’ll stop you and Englehardt both.”
Englehardt laughed.
Chapter Nine
It was only a matter of time now, Harvey Alexander realized as he crouched waiting beside the roadstrip, before he would make the inevitable slip that would signal the DIA search units like a waving red flag and bring them down on him. He had known, from the beginning, that BJ would become seriously involved, and he had done his best to talk her out of coming, but she had insisted. Now she had been expended, as he had known she would be. With luck, ingenuity, and full expeditious use of her face and figure she might make her story sell and get away with a fine or warning . . . but that seemed doubtful. At worst, they would hold her for checking, and uproot the connection between them. The ultimate consequences, for BJ, were painfully unpleasant to think about. For him . . . .
For him, it was a reprieve, a few more hours to remain free to hunt down the answers that he had to find.
It was not a question of concealment. He knew from experience that he could hide, drop from sight so quickly and effectively that a nationwide concentrated manhunt would not dig him out in years. But such a move would brand him irrevocably as an accomplice in the Wildwood raid, and confirm the charges Bahr had leveled against him.
The alternative was to find out what really had happened at Wildwood and get the information into the hands of authorities who could help him that could not be carried out in concealment. He had to gamble time against exposure.
And the worst of it was that he didn’t know what to do.
The trip to Wildwood had been a complete fiasco. BJ had dug up clothes for him and found an old lieutenant’s ID card for him from the foot locker of his things she had unaccountably kept. Some amphetamine had routed the last sedative effects from his mind. On the trip down to Wildwood they had listened to the foreign broadcasts on the alien landing in Canada, BJ frowning and shaking her head at the reports, he listening with a puzzling sense of detached curiosity, as though the whole matter, somehow, had no application whatever to him, but was something happening in a different world.
The reason was easy to see now. Clearly something had happened at Wildwood that he, for all his security and personal handling, had not known about. He had racked his brain for a memory of anything extraordinary or peculiar that had happened there in the preceding few weeks, anything that might have hooked in his mind and been pushed aside for want of explanation or significance, but he found nothing. If aliens had worked from within the plant, they had done so with consummate skill.
It had taken two hours in BJ’s Volta to reach the vicinity of the Wildwood plant. They ran into the first roadblock fifteen miles north of the plant, and slid into a series of side-roads that kept them away from the main highway strips. Alexander directed her as they moved through two sleepy towns and across a river to the pillbox apartment buildings used by the civilian engineers who ran the plant.
“Are you sure you can trust this man?” BJ had asked him. “Are you sure he won’t just turn you in?”
“No. I’m not sure who I can trust. We were friendly, used to play chess together, that was all. But Powers might have something I can use, and I’ve got to take the chance. Take this right.”
They wove through the winding roads of the apartment development. Alexander motioned her to stop, peered out at the neatly-kept lawns, yellow under the streetlamps. “I’ll go from here. You go back to the road, and wait outside the entrance. Give me an hour. If I’m not back then, you get back to Chicago as fast as you can.”
“I’ll wait for you,” she said.
“You do what I tell you,” he said sharply. “If a police car blocked the entrance to this place, you’d never get out. I’ll be all right.”
He waited until the red tail light of the Volta had disappeared around the circle toward the entrance gate, and then moved across the lawn and into the building. The buildings were familiar; he had been quartered in a similar development farther down the river, and he remembered Bob Powers’ door combination. He let himself into the building without signaling, took the stairs by the elevator, and stopped before the door marked 301.
The door opened a crack when he knocked. He saw Powers’ lace, puzzled-angry at first, then startled in recognition. “Alexander! Good lord, what are you doing here?”
“Let me in. I’ve got to talk to you.”
The man hesitated for just a moment. Then he unlatched the chain, held the door open as Alexander stepped into the flat. “Look, do you want to get me blitzed?” Powers’ voice was a harsh whisper. “They’re looking for you, they’ve got a red alarm out.”
“Nobody followed me,” Alexander said. “This will only lake a couple of minutes, you—”
He broke off as the man shook his head violently, jerking a thumb at the TV set in the comer. Alexander bit his lip. Of course they would have all Wildwood personnel on audio-control. He jerked open the door, pulled the engineer out into the hall. “You were on duty in the power pile before the raid,” he said desperately. “You must have seen something, noticed something out of the ordinary.”
“No, there was nothing.”
“Think! There must have been something.”
“Look, Harvey, they grilled me for hours. There was nothing.”
“I don’t mean anything obvious,” Alexander said. “I mean somebody behaving strangely, anything . . . .”
The engineer was almost beside himself. “Look, they’re liable to be here any minute. I tell you, there was nothing. Everything was running according to plan. They . . . they think you were the one. Didn’t you hear the broadcast?”
“What broadcast?”
“The DIA director. There’s a general Condition B on communications, travel permits canceled . . . .”
Alexander swore. That meant BJ would be cut off from Chicago where she belonged, and that she would inevitably be picked up. “And he said I was implicated in the raid?”
“He didn’t mention your name, but some scientists have been picked up under alien control.”
He knew then that he couldn’t rejoin BJ. If the bug monitor had been alert, DIA cars would already be moving in on the apartment development. He nodded to Powers and started down the corridor toward the fire escape stairs. It was an outside stairwell, and he saw the two DIA cars moving toward the building from the central circle.
He cursed, crouched close to the wall, and moved as silently as he could. A spotlight broke into the darkness from one of the cars, roamed the grounds, while the other started bumping across the lawn to cover the rear.
Then the spotlight caught something, and moved back to the row of hedge along the adjacent building. Suddenly BJ’s Volta broke from the cover of the hedge, did a pirouette on the slippery grass and spun down the road toward the entrance, doing ninety from a dead stop in five seconds. The DIA siren screamed, and both cars broke into pursuit.
From the stairwell Alexander saw them skid on the circle as the little Volta in the lead met spotlights from the gate head-on, crashed through the hastily-arranged road-block, and accelerated on the main road strip.
Alexander reached ground, and ran, keeping in the shadow of buildings as much as possible, then darting down the hill that separated the apartment houses from the fringe of woods along a secondary road. He stopped at the road, catching his breath in great gasps, and then ran, dropping down in the ditch whenever oncoming lights flickered into view.