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 chilling 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 toughmindnedness 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 the 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 Poughkeepsie 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. Even 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 through 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 headquarters. Behind him he heard voices suddenly raised, and Wall 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 of 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.