Alexander turned to MacKenzie then, and set his drink carefully down on the table. “I also think that BRINT knows that is true, and has known it from the start. But I could be wrong, of course.”
“Oh, no,” MacKenzie said slowly. “You aren’t wrong. And you can see why we could not afford to have you place your deductions in the hands of DEPCO.” The BRINT man’s voice was suddenly tired, and tinged with bitterness. “We’ve been playing a long gamble, and it seemed as though we were winning, at least at first. We were all very clever, we had all the answers to all the questions, until we came to the really big question, and now we find that we don’t have tile one answer that we really have to have.” He looked at Alexander. “How to stop Julian Bahr before it is too late to stop him.”
“We needed a wedge,” MacKenzie said later, “to smash through the wall that DEPCO had built around itself. A balance of power can be maintained only if the two sides of the balance are very nearly equal. On one side we saw the Eastern Bloc, pulling out of the crash with a burgeoning military machine and an aggressive totalitarian government. We were able to hold the Eastern Bloc in check . . . .barely hold it in check . . . by the threat of the Robling missiles. But on the other side, in Federation America, we saw DEPCO grow and expand, entrenching itself more and more firmly as the all-powerful, controlling bureau in the government, following its course of stability at any cost and gradually dragging the whole Western economy to a standstill.”
The Scotsman poured another drink. “We could see it happening on all sides: the involutional thinking, the systematic witch-hunting to drive every leadership figure out of his job before he could even taste the bit, the growing emphasis on the internal sciences—psychology and sociology— and the shunning of the physical sciences and technology. Nobody knows where it might have ended if it had gone on undisturbed, but anyone whose head was not buried in the system could see how it entrenched itself more firmly every year. Every frontier, every challenge was systematically being sliced away, every sign of progress curbed, a whole economy slowly grinding to a halt. This was not Vanner’s plan; he saw the stability period as a transition, a ‘getting back on their feet again’ before picking up the gauntlet. It didn’t work that way. The cure drove out the disease—the chaos of the crash years—and then became worse than the disease. How soon the society would have disintegrated completely, nobody knows. But it was clear that a frontier had to be established again, before it was too late.”
“A space frontier?”
“Anything would have done it,” MacKenzie said, “as long as it was a frontier. Some drive was needed to provide a stimulus, a drive that would require a massive national effort to achieve. To allow a war would have meant the certain destruction of Federation America. Only one challenge was big enough, but a drive to space was the one thing, above all things, that DEPCO would block at any cost. The fear and suspicion of spaceships that was engendered by the crash was not a rational fear, but that didn’t matter. You know your history of bipartisan politics in the old United States. It took the Republican party thirty years, a major war, a war hero and a decade of unparalleled prosperity to overcome the public reaction to the depression of the ’30s. And the crash of ’95 made that depression look like a Sunday School picnic.”
“So Bahr was your wedge,” Alexander said.
“Bahr was our wedge. Carl Englehardt didn’t recognize the peril in the same terms we did, but he also wanted the spaceship project re-established. His motives were entirely personal and individual; the important thing was that he thought he knew a way to force a reopening of the project. He knew a young, ambitious man in the DIA, a man who was strong enough and tough enough and ruthless enough to drive a hole through DEPCO’s wall of over-regulation and smash it down, given a toehold. Englehardt gave him the toe-hold, a series of carefully staged incidents which led, by inference, to the conclusion that we were on the eve of an alien invasion.”
“Then Englehardt prepared the ‘ships’ that exploded?” Alexander asked. “What about the Moon?”
“If you remember that Englehardt has been making intercontinental missiles for years, capable of carrying fusion warheads, it isn’t hard to see how he could place a half a dozen unmanned drones on the Moon. The difficult part—in which BRINT co-operated—was handling the leaking of information that followed each successive incident. Bahr knew it was a hoax, and it fit into his plans perfectly. Once started, it all followed nicely: the circulation of a pulp scare-book to prepare the public for the panic that would follow; the step-by-step creation of a national peril which could be met and answered only by a drive to build a space fleet. Vanner had proved that the conquest of space would ultimately require a national effort comparable to a full-scale war, but if Federation America were to support it, it had to be an emotional cause, a fear-cause with a leader who could draw the people along and supply the great force needed to burst through thirty years of entrenched anti-space conditioning.”
MacKenzie spread his hands. “We needed a man with the drive and strength to leap into the breach and use the crisis. We had to have Bahr, but he moved too fast; he was too successful. He didn’t fight DEPCO the way we expected him to; he simply walked around DEPCO and left them standing there. Earlier, we might have been able to control Bahr. Now he is out of control, and in a matter of weeks he will have a continent under his thumb, and a military and technical program straining the nation to its limits. In six months he will want the world, and we won’t be able to stop him . . . .”
“Can’t Englehardt stop him?” Alexander asked. “Surely he has the power.”
MacKenzie gave him an odd look. “Englehardt is dead,” he said slowly. “Curiously enough, he was shot down on the street an hour after Bahr made his appeal to Congress.” The BRINT man shrugged. “The assassination was blamed on DEPCO fanatics who were determined to block the space project, and Englehardt was given a state funeral. Bahr’s speech at the funeral was very touching. When it was over, he nationalized Robling holdings by edict, and doubled the pay of every man in the organization.”
The two men sat silently for a few moments. “It seems to me,” Alexander said, “that the job is only half done. You have to leave Bahr in power until he’s carried Project Tiger to a fruitful point.”
“And shaken the government apart, and entrenched himself like an iron fist,” MacKenzie said. “What do we do when Project Tiger is half-completed and Bahr has made himself invincible?”
“Then we dump him,” Alexander said.
MacKenzie was about to make a sharp retort, but he looked at the major’s face, and realized that he was serious. “We can’t do it by brute force. Do you have an idea?”
“I have an idea,” Alexander said. “I think Julian Bahr’s great strength can be his weakness. I’ll need help. But if I’m right, when the time comes, I’ll dump Julian Bahr.”
“At the height of his power?” MacKenzie asked.
“Like die tragic hero,” said Alexander.