He had died then, trying to inch along the floor to the window; he knew he had died! But then there were other memories, fuzzy, incoherent. Arms lifting him up from somewhere, carrying him somewhere. The flicker of city lights and colored neons through a car window, silent men on either side of him. More darkness, a room, muffled voices, pain, unconsciousness again. Once, a hurried consultation with words that stuck in his memory: “. . . Alive?” “Yes. Deep shock . . . touch and go . . .” A woman’s presence, dressed in an outlandish hat, with cool-warm hands. And later a man’s voice, distinctly a man’s voice saying, “That will be all, Sister. I’ll notify you when I leave . . . .”
His mind caught at it, held it. A pleasant, modulated voice. “Sister” was not American slang, not in that voice, yet the woman was not a nun. The key fell into the lock, a perfect fit, and Alexander opened his eyes, saw the fuzzy figure near the bed.
“BRINT?” he said, his voice coming harshly from his throat, a voice he himself would never have recognized.
He didn’t recognize the man, either, but he recognized the words when the man nodded and said, “Yes, of course. If you feel you can talk, Major . . . .”
But he didn’t feel he could talk, he didn’t feel he could do anything but fall back against the pillow, the relief flooding every cell in his body. He sighed and, oblivious to the man and the room, he slept, a natural, restful sleep.
Alexander had never seen the man, who called himself MacKenzie, and he had never seen the place before, a small infirmary room high above the rush of Fifth Avenue traffic. He was in the BRINT building of the British Embassy Compound in New York. He had been there for three days, and until eight hours before they had had no very comfortable assurance that he was not going to expire quietly in bed.
“We were looking for you almost as soon as our net picked up the story on the Wildwood raid,” MacKenzie told him in his soft Scottish burr, “and of course Bahr was looking for you too, which made the problem relatively simple, up to a point. We thought it would simply be a matter of letting them find you, and then closing in. Then we got back the information check-through from London on your Qualchi experience with us and the Army CI, and we began to worry.” MacKenzie grinned ruefully. “We didn’t realize then that you were to be used as bait in conspiracy from within the DIA to unseat Bahr. We didn’t realize that anybody . . . even Bahr . . . thought you were that important. And we didn’t anticipate that Bahr would make such a fast personal move to smash the insurrection.” MacKenzie smiled again. “Which rather caught us out on all bases, you might say. Fortunately, we had the wit to get you out of there before you were completely incinerated.”
“Yes.” Alexander flexed his still stiff arm. “What I can’t quite see is why. Why all your interest in me at all?”
“Because we couldn’t risk letting you contact your own Army CI, or DEPCO, until we knew for certain just why Julian Bahr was so fantastically interested in having you caught,” MacKenzie said.
“Not caught,” Alexander said flatly. “Killed. Or at least, recooped.”
“But why? Because of something you knew about the Wildwood raid?” MacKenzie asked.
Alexander started to nod, and then caught himself, and frowned. No, that was not it, not quite, and suddenly he saw it quite clearly. The pieces suddenly fell down into place, the obscure, misshapen pieces he had been trying to fit together since the night when the OD had called him to tell him the Wildwood Plant had been raided and robbed of U-metal.
It made sense, of course, and Alexander looked across at MacKenzie and wondered if the BRINT man would be able to see the sense that it made, or if he were the kind of practical fool who would not be able to understand the linkages between a fragment of nuclear physics, a ghostwritten pulp book and an industrial giant.
“Because of what I knew?” Alexander said. “No, not what I knew. Bahr never cared about what I knew about the Wildwood raid. There was nothing I knew that he could be afraid of. He knew everything that I knew, by the time his men were through with me at the Kelley. And if it had just been a matter of information in my mind that he wanted obliterated, a simple spot-wash procedure could have taken care of it. But Bahr didn’t just want my memory out of commission: he wanted my mind out of commission.”
MacKenzie nodded. “I can see the distinction, but why? Certainly not any lingering vindictiveness about the Antarctic business. He already had his revenge for that when he got you broken from your BURINF position and dumped into the limbo of an obscure administrative job—very definitely his doing, according to our contacts.”
“No, it was more than that,” Alexander said. “Bahr didn’t fear anything that I knew. But he did fear what I might be able to figure out, eventually, on the basis of what I knew.”
“Ah,” MacKenzie said softly. “Now we are approaching it. What might you have been able to figure out?”
“The truth about what happened at Wildwood,” Alexander said. “There have been a couple of solid contradictions I’ve noticed since, but the Wildwood incident was the key to the whole thing.”
MacKenzie poured Scotch in a couple of glasses, handed one to Alexander. “Do you mind if I record this?”
“If you expect proof, I don’t have it,” Alexander said. “All I have is certain things I know are true, and certain conclusions I’ve been forced to draw from those things. For instance, I know that no U-metal was stolen from Wildwood. I designed the security system there, and I knew a few things about it that Bahr and his DIA men didn’t know. By the same token, the alien raiders would not have known those things either. Now, what actually happened at Wildwood? An alarm went off outside the compound, there was an explosion several miles away, and subsequently a shortage of U-metal was discovered inside the plant. The inference was that the radioactives detected outside the compound were the same as those missing inside, and that the theft was accomplished by humanoid aliens, or a human agent, who smuggled the material through the Geiger monitors by means of some kind of shielding.”
The BRINT man nodded. “A neutronic shield is the popular rumor, I believe.”
“But if such a shield could be made and used, why would the thief have abandoned it as soon as he got outside the plant? There was no jettisoned shielding between the plant and the alarm monitor. There are half a dozen other little holes in that idea, but the biggest hole is the idea of a collapsed neutronic shield. That was the flaw that tipped me off in the beginning.”
“Such a thing would be very useful,” MacKenzie said. “A shield a few nuclei thick with all the stopping power of a huge block of concrete . . . .”
“And even if it were tissue-paper thin, it would still weigh as much as a four foot slab of lead,” Harvey Alexander said.
MacKenzie blinked, as though somebody had suddenly flashed a bright light in his eye. Then he was roaring with laughter. “Of course it’s obvious,” he said. “Once it’s pointed out. They’ll have a fit back home, for not noticing that.”
“The rest wasn’t so obvious,” Alexander continued, “but it made sense when you thought it through. Without a shield, no U-metal came through those gates. Therefore, the hot stuff that set off the road monitor was not the U-metal that was later found missing in the plant. So the three missing slugs must have been disposed of inside die plant. If you were looking for it, you could see how easy it would be. There are refuse pipes leading from the plant to the waste dump. If the metal was dumped down those pipes, only a radiation-level check of the dump would ever reveal it. But if that was what happened, then the raid on the Wildwood Plant had to be a forgery. If that raid was something that was deliberately staged—and it must have been—then Project Frisco must have been staged from beginning to end. And that was what Bahr was afraid I would figure out—that die alien invasion has been a hoax from the beginning. There aren’t any aliens!”