Julian had turned and walked away, then, and never looked back. Until now, as he walked through Libby’s empty apartment, staring at the empty drawers, the empty closet, the empty crib.
He drove his fist down on the table, snapping a leg and splintering the top. Pain surged through his wrist, and rage boiled out of control. He moved about the room, half-blind, smashing, kicking, destroying until the rage had burned down to a hard red coal. Then he opened the door and went out into the hall.
Libby had walked out. After all he had done for her, even after what had happened tonight, she had walked out, left him flat, turned her back on him.
But this time he wouldn’t walk away.
This time he wasn’t hungry, frightened, helpless. This time he was in command, and he would see her burn in hell before he was through with her. This time she would suffer, the way he had suffered.
And then, when he was through with her, there was the boy.
He turned to his men, and swiftly, carefully, he began giving his orders.
Chapter Eighteen
Once the wall was broken down, Bahr moved fast, driving ahead with the bulldozer force that meant safety and security and hope to the people who looked to him to lead them.
Even Alexander and MacKenzie had not anticipated the speed with which the man would move. For MacKenzie, there was endless work and a nightmare of administrative detail in the BRINT field offices. For Alexander it meant a growing desperate urgency to develop and crystallize the plan he had seen only in its barest outlines, an urgent necessity to re-evaluate the situation continually, with the everpresent responsibility of picking the right time, the exactly right time, to move.
He spent days on the flat, multi-volume dossier on Julian Bahr from the BRINT top-sec files, the thousands of feet of recording tape, the miles of motion picture film, and the endless succession of documents, memos, notes, affidavits, opinions, history-segments that the BRINT network had so painstakingly accumulated.
And through it all he saw the governmental structure of Federation America tremble, totter and crumble under the driving force of one man and a project called Project Tiger.
The changes were sweeping, and fundamental. With die Robling combine under national—and Bahr’s personal—control, the first moves were swift. At White Sands, for thirty years a ghost town, the shabby, burned out, gutted and abhorred remains of the old XAR project were exhumed. Like a phoenix rising from its own ashes, White Sands became a booming metropolis. The buildings were rebuilt; the country was combed for scientists, engineers, technicians, craftsmen—anyone who had contributed or could contribute, until the newly organized technical schools could pour out their new blood. Blueprints were drawn from dusty files, materials poured South, and the abandoned shell of the final XAR ship disappeared beneath a new scaffold crawling with workmen.
As the progress reports and development plans were read, the research director for the defense section of the old DEPEX rose in protest. “What you are proposing is impossible,” he told Bahr in the hot, crowded conference room one morning. “The economy cannot support it. It would require an effort equivalent to a major war, and even then I could never guarantee success.”
“We are engaged in a major war,” Bahr said, “and there will have to be changes in the economy.”
“But the changes you are talking about aren’t possible without reducing the population to a starvation level.”
“That may not be true,” Bahr said, “and it certainly is immaterial. We have no choice in the matter, and starvation is the least national threat we are facing. Above all, we cannot afford to sentimentalize.” The research director was encouraged to accept a job in another highly non-critical organization, and Bahr named a suitable replacement.
Thereafter, steps were taken to alter the economy to comply with the demands that Project Tiger was already making.
Bahr’s manner of dealing with DEPCO was swift as the stroke of an axe, though far more humane. He did not arrest anybody in DEPCO. He simply cut off their funds, and red-carded every man, woman, and stripling in the DEPCO organization. A few hundred people were picked up for questioning, but there was no purge. Adams’ subsequent suicide was unquestionably a suicide. Bahr did not even forbid the DEPCO people to go to work, or continue their research, but he told them in a firm, quiet voice that the economy was being reorganized to accomplish Project Tiger, and that long-range research programs which would not contribute to the major effect were being temporarily suspended. He promised them that as soon as funds were available, their pay would start again, but he conveyed to them in various subtle ways that there might be some delay.
And through it all, an infiltration of trusted DIA men began into the bureaus, the planning commissions, the offices, and a slow, inexorable tightening of control began, a rerouting of the channels of authority in an upward pyramid which led, ultimately, into the office and the hands of a single man. There were more alien incidents, with the usual publicity and no captures, but the panic and terror which ensued was channeled and held in the rigid program which was to rid the skies of the aliens forever.
It was a pattern as old as time, moving step by step in its dreadful familiarity, and Alexander and MacKenzie watched it. Every real tyrant in history had followed the pattern . . . .Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev . . . they all knew it well.
But to Julian Bahr a far more important war, a private, personal war, was progressing, and he drove his fist into his hand again and again as the coal of rage burned brighter and brighter.
It took the BRINT network and Harvey Alexander almost a week to pick up her trail, but he finally located her, in the filthy third-floor room in a run-down Boston suburban apartment house. He had only the BRINT profile of her to go on, which he had thought was remarkably complete, and it took him three days of surveillance to be sure that he had the right woman.
When he was finally certain that she was not under DIA stake-out, he went up to the third-floor room, and knocked.
She was staggering drunk, and her voice was hoarse and ragged. When she opened the door she had on a dirty bathrobe, with a towel around her hair, and she reeked of gin and cheap perfume. Behind her the room was a mess, clothes strewn around, makeup scattered, the bed disheveled. “You want something?” she said harshly. “I don’t want to stand in this doorway all night.”
Alexander pushed past her into the room and closed the door. She looked at him, and shrugged, and went across to the half-finished drink on the bureau. “Sure, all right, come in,” she said. “Who asked you in here?” Then her eyes opened wider, and she seemed to see him for the first time, and her face was frightened. “DIA?” she asked.
“Make some coffee,” Alexander said. “I want to talk to you.”
“Thanks, I’ll stay drunk.”
He hit her viciously across the face twice, and dragged her by the collar of her bathrobe over to the wash basin. He made her throw up, and wiped her face off with a wet towel. He made some surro-coffee, and she sat bent over drinking it, her eyes closed, tired and defeated and sick. She threw up the second cup; by then she was fairly sober, and her face was dead with exhaustion and fear. “Who are you? What do you want? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
It looked bad, and Alexander shook his head. Her red hair was an unkempt mop, and her mouth sagged open in a stupid, beaten expression. He saw the bruise under one eye, the black-and-blue marks on her neck, and he ground his teeth. “For God sake clean up and get some clothes on,” he said. “You make me sick to look at you.”