He had given her a cover story: she had heard about the Wildwood incident and come down to see if her ex-husband had been hurt in the blast, since she had not heard anything from him. It might conceivably hold up, since he had been quartered in apartments nearby. They could hold her for not having a travel pass for more than 200 miles radius of Chicago, but maybe she could sell them that she was too excited and confused to remember. As long as they didn’t put her under the polygraph, her story might hold up.
Until they grilled Powers, and then it would fall apart like cotton candy.
He shivered.
His hand touched something in his pocket, and he drew it out—money. Simple, practical, typical of BJ. She knew he had none, that he wouldn’t ask her for it, that he needed it. Stupid, he thought with a sudden pang of bitterness, when people got married and split up and still felt that way about each other, and yet had to be all wrapped up in the inhibitions and conventions that kept BJ from saying, “I’m sorry we couldn’t work it out, I was selfish, and I still love you, and I’d try it over again but I’m too bitter now, and still I feel guilty about it just the same and want to make it up to you somehow.” Instead, she had just stubbornly driven him down here, given him money, and set herself up to give him the time he needed to break from his first bad blunder.
She had already paid for the ruined fragments of their life together. Even the tightest control couldn’t make them forget what life had been before the crash—all the unscientific group pressures and outmoded mores, the things that would always be right and wrong to them, and speakable and unspeakable. Of course, now the new educational programs were gradually removing that alleged stewpot of all emotional woes—the family—from existence in society. For the new generations that was fine, maybe, but for those like himself and BJ there was only the bitter hopelessness of trying to exist in the present and think in the past, as all exiled castes do.
The road crossed a secondary highway strip, and he turned toward the south. St. Louis was forty miles away.
Half an hour later headlights sprang up behind him that were too yellowed and dim to be police, so Alexander took a chance and stepped out beside the roadstrip to thumb. The old rattletrap Hydro slowed and stopped, and Alexander ran down the strip to climb in, slamming the door behind him. The driver was a worker, his yellow Wildwood plant badge still exposed. He was a man of thirty or thirty-five.
He looked Alexander over as he started the car again. “In a fight?” he asked.
Alexander carefully slipped into the speech pattern of his cover identity in the Mexican incident. “Uh? No, no’ me. Spill. Took ’turn t’fast. Zip. In ’a ditch.” He looked at the driver. “Gemme to St. Louis, huh?”
“Yeah, sure.” The driver accepted his story without a frown. He was overheavy, with a flat moon face, and he was a talker. Already he had started talking about car wrecks and how his Hydro could only take a corner so fast any more, and he was too involved in his own bubblings to do any analytical thinking about why a man should be hitchhiking at two in the morning.
Alexander sank back in the seat, allowing the man to ramble without paying too much attention. He was worried about what was happening to BJ, and he was worried about the gulf that seemed to stretch before him. He could get to St. Louis, yes, but then what? From there, what could he do? As the car buzzed through the flat countryside, he probed at the problem against the background of the driver’s chattering until a word jerked him up sharply and set his heart hammering in his throat.
Alien.
“How’s that?” he asked, trying to recall how the driver had begun his longwinded surrogate sentence.
“Like I said, the aliens,” the driver said. “I was tellin’ my nymph last night, ‘a way I figger it the second wave will be comin’ in any day now, like it said in the book, and maybe there’d be riots in town an’ all, but she said maybe people wouldn’t get too scared, I mean, knowin’ what was comin’ next, you know, ’cause they told her plenty of times in Tech School how it was not knowin’ what was comin’ that made all the riots so bad back in the crash days. So I told her not to worry, ’cause if it looked like they were comin’ to Wildwood again I’d stay home and take care of her an t’ hell with work.”
“Oh,” Alexander said, still not comprehending.
“ ’Course she gets scared kinda easy that way, you know. Maybe they’ll wanna use her for a breeder unit or something, like they do with cows, you know—sort of like an incubator, it says in the book. She’s afraid if they do anything like that to her she won’t be able to, you know, sex it up any more. She’s kinda hot, yTcnow, and we still got four months contract to run before we switch off.”
“Breeder units,” Alexander said slowly.
“Yeah, the aliens. You know. You seen the book, huh?”
“Y’ got me runnin’,” Alexander said. “What book?”
“The alien invasion book, o’course.” The man looked at him in surprise. “Ain’t you seen it yet?”
Alexander shook his head numbly. “Don’t read much . . . .”
“You’re fixated, Jack. You’re really repressed. That pulpie’s been goin’ the rounds for six months; everybody’s seen it. What a lover-cover! Say, you ain’t a book-snooper?”
Alexander relaxed slowly. “Not me. I been away.” He saw now what the trouble was. Book and magazine publishing, like TV and radio, had been under BURINF control since the early post-crash days, and here especially BURINF had used the double standard circulation techniques with incredible success to carry DEPCO control propaganda to the huge urban populations. Standard publishing channels were controlled and censored; their print orders and outlets carefully designated by VE equation analysis and machine computation. The vast quantity of “live” psych-control material went out through underworld channels. This included porno-mags, feelie-tapes, all the vile and violent entertainment and expression sops that could be counted upon to satiate all levels at their own levels. The BURINF-created myth of the book-snoopers provided the necessary stimulus of salaciousness and illegality to insure that the material would be widely circulated hand to hand, and above all, read. But a book about alien invaders . . . .
“You say it’s been out for six months?” he said to the driver.
“Yeah, sure, you mean you really haven’t read it? It was supposed to be just a story, you know, but now with the Wildwood raid and the Canadian landing, and now the blackout, everybody knows it was the real thing, y’lcnow? This is just the first wave, like it says, testing our defenses and getting hypno control over all the key people, softening us up for for the big wave. Why, they’ve been catching our teevies for years. Probably even learned how to unscramble our topsec sendouts and everything, just like the book says.”
“Does it tell how they’re going to invade?”
“Oh, sure, right down to the button; only it doesn’t say how long between the first and second waves, y’know. That’s wha’s got my nymph so scared. Hasn’t scared me much, but that’s prob’ly because I’m better adjusted, I’m really a pretty well adjusted guy. Went to a good Playschool, you know, and I can get along with everybody and I don’t go fightin’ back and gettin’ all twisted up inside. Even the group-doc at works thinks I’m pretty well adjusted; just the same, though, I wouldn’t want any aliens nervin’ me into a twitcher-coma, or using me for a food culture incubator, or white-mousing me, or anything.”