He stopped for breath, and straightened his back for a moment. “Then I woke up. I was hitting the wall and I woke up.” He sighed again, his breathing deep and labored.
“The woman,” Libby said. “Did you know her?”
“No.”
“Was she with the elephant when he was chasing you?”
“No,” Bahr said. “After I started to run she wasn’t there at all.” He looked up at her, suffering in his face and eyes. “What does it mean, Libby? Why does it . . . scare me like that? Why does it start coming back now? I haven’t had it in two years.”
She sat down, shaking her head and holding his hand between hers. “Julian, the last time, I told you . . . .”
“But what have I got to be scared of?” he roared, jerking to his feet. “You want to dig and poke and scrape things open in my mind, but those things are all gone now, they aren’t ever going to come back again; I won’t let them come back!” He collapsed into the seat again, the anger fading as suddenly as it flared. “It’s no good, Libby, it’s just no good. I can’t do it your way.”
“It’s the only way I can help you. And I want to help you, you know that.”
“I know.” He leaned back, breathing slower again, more relaxed. “Thank God I can come here sometimes,” he said, almost to himself. “Sometimes things start pressing in until it’s more than I can stand. Here I can rest.”
“How do you feel now?” she asked.
“Better, I guess. Pretty good. God, I’m hungry! Haven’t you got something to eat?”
“I’ll make some sandwiches and coffee,” she said, and went out into the tiny kitchenette.
Bahr paced up and down the room a few times as she put the coffee on the sonic unit. Then she didn’t hear him walking any more, and she glanced out to see if he had left.
He was crouched, one knee on the floor beside the playpen, poking his huge finger at the child, who struggled to thrust it aside, and then grabbed onto it with small un-co-ordinated hands. Finally Bahr chuckled and picked up the baby in his huge hands. He began to swing the child up and down, toss him in the air, the pale blue eyes regarding him with wide surprise, and each time Bahr caught him he would whisper a soft “Ahhhhhh . . . .”
Then Bahr, the lesser, began to squall, and the big man glanced around the room guiltily, and seeing that no one was looking, lowered the loud one back into the playpen.
“The kid’s crying,” Bahr said roughly. “Why don’t you feed him?”
“I will,” Libby said. When he’s alone, she thought, when he’s alone he’s different. He’s almost human until he thinks people are looking at him.
Suddenly Bahr was behind her, jabbing his thumb into her ribs, laughing as she jumped. “What’s the matter?” he said. “I’m starving, and you let the coffee boil over.”
“Just thinking,” she said, but there were tears in her eyes.
She waited until he had finished his coffee before she told him about Adams’ visit during the afternoon.
“You must have been out of your mind,” she said. “I told you DEPCO would be watching that announcement speech. And then you stood up there and shouted to the world that we were being invaded.”
Bahr looked at her and grinned. “I hope they got plenty to see. I put it on the line, all right. Somebody had to.”
“Oh, you put it on the line, all right. Do you know what you looked like, out there with all those cameras? Like Marc Antony doing ‘friends and Romans.’ Do you think the people in DEPCO are idiots?”
“The ones I know.”
“Julian, you cut your own throat with that speech. DEPCO doesn’t have to wait until they interview you. They can slap an injunction on your job on plain suspicion of Instability and schedule you for interview when they have time.”
“They aren’t going to have die time,” Bahr said. “Look . . . they’re scared. They can pull that Instability bunk and jerk men out of their jobs when there’s nothing on fire, but not during an emergency.”
“They can, and they will,” she said.
“How many people did they dump out of jobs during the last Condition B? What about the Southwest during the last Chinese landing down there, when they had the blowups? How many key people did they dump then because they twitched or doodled the wrong way? The answer is not a damned one, and they’re not going to pull me out now, because there’s nobody to replace me. And if they were going to do it, Adams would already have run it through after the conference yesterday.”
“Did you have a run-in with Adams?”
“Englehardt did. He’s the head of Robling, and he believes in doing something instead of patting the public on the fanny and telling them everything is going to be all right.”
Libby looked up at him, and her face was suddenly white. “What does he propose to do?”
“Build spaceships and go after them.”
“Spaceships! But, oh, that’s ridiculous. Everyone from DEPCO right down to the Machines will stop it. You mean he actually proposed that?”
“He’s got backing. The military and DEPEX are with him.”
“They don’t count. DEPCO has the final say on something like that.”
“Well, maybe this time DEPCO won’t,” Bahr said sharply. “You and your damned psych-docs mumbling about symbols and fixations. I’m the one who’s got to fight the aliens, and they’re not going to turn up for analysis. This is no little guerrilla campaign this time; we may need those ships to survive. Did you ever think of that? Your therapy and adjustments aren’t worth a damn when it comes to staying alive.”
“That’s not the important thing right now,” Libby said. “All DEPCO has ever tried to do was to change a few minor things, like wars and squalor and neurosis. And that means catching those things at the roots.”
“Garbage,” Bahr said. “Englehardt put his finger on it when he said we had no place to go, and that is why everybody is afraid. If they had something to do, they wouldn’t be afraid any more.”
“Do you have something to do?” she asked him.
“You bet your life I have. Run the DIA. Get to the bottom of this alien business.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Certainly not. I’m too busy to be afraid. I . . .”
“But you dream about elephants.”
Bahr’s mouth closed and he was silent. Libby stood up to avoid his eyes. It hit him where he couldn’t fight back, she knew, but somehow the only way she could make an impression on Bahr was to hurt him. “You don’t understand,” she said slowly, “and you’ve got to understand. There are things that drive people to do things, and they don’t even recognize the reason. They think up all sorts of fantastic cover-lies to somehow justify doing things that they just can’t help doing. That’s why DEPCO was set up—to spot those drives and do something about them, dig them out by the roots. That’s why I’ve been trying to help you for four years now, Julian, because you don’t even understand what’s happening inside your own mind; you just keep finding reasons and excuses and urgent necessities for everything you do, and blaming other people for everything that’s done to you or everything that blocks you. I’ve tried to show you that it’s all inside you, in your own mind, but you just say no, stall DEPCO, get me a white card, I won’t let them stop me . . . .” She broke off helplessly. “You don’t even know why you want a white card.”