“I certainly do,” Bahr said. “I can’t get anywhere without a white card stability rating. A green card is two strikes against me everywhere I turn.”
“And if you got a white card . . . Suppose you got a white card, and you got everything you wanted . . . then what?”
“What do you mean, then what?”
“What would you do if you had everything you wanted?”
“I’d change things,” Bahr said harshly. “I’d change everything that got in my way.”
“But after you’d done all that . . . after you’d done everything you wanted . . . then what would you want?”
Bahr stared at her, not comprehending. “That couldn’t happen. Everybody gets in my way, tries to stop me. I could never get everything I want.”
Libby sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. “On that one thing, you’re right, Julian,” she said. “You don’t know how right you are.”
She had hoped that maybe she had reached him somehow, that possibly some spark of contact or understanding had been struck, but when he asked her later, “Well, what about Adams?” she knew that she hadn’t reached him at all.
“I’ll try to stall him as long as possible,” she said. “I don’t think it will do much good. Adams is suspicious, and he’s taking a personal interest.”
“I hope he does,” Bahr said sharply, “because I’m taking a personal interest in him. What do you know about him?”
“Why?”
“Because if he’s what I think he is, I’ve got a couple of specialists on my staff who can quiet him down for good.”
She whirled on him. “Julian, you wouldn’t . . . .”
“Look, you don’t seem to understand. Adams or nobody like him is going to put me out of a job on a Stability check.”
“You think you can blackmail him out of it? It wouldn’t do you any good. There are other people in DEPCO just as big as Adams, and they can’t be bought off or blackmailed. Julian, there’s a storm working up in my office. Aliens or no aliens, I can guarantee that you’ll be up against a prelim by tomorrow. And you won’t pass it.”
“I passed the other probes.”
“Because I told you the answers beforehand, question by question. But I can’t do that on a prelim; they use a polygraph.”
“They just poke around the sore spots, don’t they? They skip the questions that you don’t bounce on, and just dig in the soft spots?”
She hesitated. “Yes, they study the prelim awhile before they go into a deep probe.”
“Fine,” Bahr said. “Then you can brief me on it.”
“You couldn’t use dummy answers under a poly, they’d bounce all over the place. With your adrenals . . . .”
“I can control my reactions,” he said.
“Your face muscles—maybe. Not your blood pressure and your sweat glands.”
“Not even under hypnosis?”
“Even then, even with suggested reactions to specific trigger questions, I still don’t know if it would work. You’d have to know the questions.”
“You can find out the questions.”
“No,” Libby said.
He stared at her. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean up until now I could always say I’d mis-evaluated your pers scores, or I was emotionally involved and didn’t know it. But deliberate faking on a prelim is a federal offense.”
He sat silent for a minute. Then he spread his hands wide. “Look, I’ve never asked you for much. I’ve always just told you, before, and you did what I told you. Now I’m asking you, and if asking doesn’t do it, by God, I will tell you. I’ve got too much at stake to trip on this thing now. You’ve got to get me past this prelim.”
“I can’t do it,” she said. “If they caught me, I’d be through. I’d never get a professional rating again.”
“I’m not talking about professional ratings,” Bahr said quietly. “I’m talking about you and me.”
“No,” Libby said.
“I’ll make a deal with you. You’ve always wanted to find out about the elephant. You’ve always wanted to get me into deep analysis and run me straight through from scratch. You know even DEPCO can’t get me into deep analysis if I block; I’d have to be willing, co-operative. All right, you get me through this prelim. As soon as I get this alien thing and Englehardt’s project squared away just enough so it doesn’t take all my time day and night, I’ll let you start analysis. I won’t fight you, I’ll co-operate.”
She knew he was lying, and suddenly she didn’t care. He didn’t know he was lying now. Right now he thought he meant it, and even though she saw through the mask with perfect, frightening clarity, she couldn’t help herself.
“Will you take a BHE and sign the paternity papers if I do?”
Bahr nodded. “If I get past the prelim.”
She leaned back against his shoulder, suddenly infinitely tired, more weary than she had ever been in her life before. “You know, it would have been so easy,” she said. “All this running and fighting; it would have been so much easier if you had let me start deep analysis two years ago.”
He stiffened against her. “Easier?”
“You wouldn’t have the elephant, and the sleeplessness, and you wouldn’t be boiling up with hate and beating your fist against the wall in your sleep, and you wouldn’t have this prelim coming up.”
“And I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere,” Bahr said.
Chapter Twelve
From: BRINT USNXY
To: BRINT HQX LONDON
Priority: IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
Distribution: HQX-K7 ONLY
Dear Roger:
I’m using our private channel for this letter because I am becoming more certain every hour that our normal channels are under constant DIA surveillance, and I clearly cannot route my personal opinion of the situation over here through Julian Bahr’s hands if I have any hope of keeping my Scotch neck in one piece and serving any useful purpose in the future.
As you might guess, Arthur and his people in the NY office are rather at a loss, with the city walled off by the recent communications edict. I am relying on the usual private channels to keep in touch with my groups, and particularly with Carl Englehardt. So far every report in my hands indicates that the pot of water is heating at a far greater rate of speed than we had originally assumed would be the case.
Arthur persists in adhering to our original immediate and long-range plans, ignoring the almost incredible pattern that has been emerging in the past weeks, and he feels that we must try to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. He has sent (against my outcries of warning) a note to Bahr suggesting a meeting which could be nothing more than a ceremony of agreement.
I oppose this.
“Normal” in Federation America is at best a relative term; I am certain now that if Bahr proceeds unchecked, he will in a matter of weeks have initiated an irreversible reaction, and that “normality” in the present sense of the word will never be seen again. If we could predict, even in the broadest terms, where this reaction would end, I would be enthusiastically in favor of riding it out. Unfortunately, I don’t think that Bahr himself knows where it will end, and this alone makes his position intolerably dangerous.
We have assumed from the start that DEPCO, with all its systematic precautions to keep emotionally unstable personalities out of key spots, would have automatically harnessed a man like Bahr very early in the game. This has not happened. His emergence confirms what I have been telling you for several years: that the DEPCO system has been in a spiraling decay since the death of Larchmont, and that something new is certain to emerge.