Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Read Free Page B

this time, but now everything was sitting in his lap. He
knew the DIA had no authority in the compound without special orders from
DEPOP, but that was a legal technicality, not a practical consideration.
Obviously Bahr was going to force through an inventory if he had to hold off
the compound guards with stunners. And the chance of Alexander's OD putting up
any resistance to a determined DIA squad was less than epsilon for any epsilon
chosen. Bahr was not going to be stopped.
    "Do
nothing whatever," he said to the OD. "Don't co-operate, don't
interfere. They're exceeding authority."
    "Very well, Major ." The squawker went dead.
    Alexander
leaned back, sweat pouring down his sides. Everything now depended on McEwen
backing him up, even if it were too late to stop the inventory. It would be
Bahr's neck, not his, as long as McEwen stuck to the letter of the law.
    And
that, he thought warmly, he could count on. McEwen had been doing that for
twelve years.
    For
all the ominous reputation of investigations, arrests, and interrogations
carried on by the Department of Internal Affairs, the dreaded civilian
intelligence organization that had grown up in the wake of the corrupted and
long-defunct FBI to serve as watchdog for the new Vanner-Elling Stability government, one single fact had always remained paramount: The DIA
would never exceed the legal limits of its authority. Even Alexander, after
his brief and bitter experience in the Bureau of Information, still believed
this record to be accurate, and not simply a matter of silencing all witnesses
to exceptional cases.
    The
DIA had no need to break laws. Their investigations and interrogations were so
thorough that they could, on sound legal grounds, pick up a man for a misfiled
travel permit, or an unsatisfactory follow-up marital survey, or even for
failing to report a prostitute's serial number correctly, and in a few days of
questioning get him to confess to every crime and misdemeanor he had ever
committed or even imagined he had committed. For the tough cases their legal
lobby would squeeze a new law into the books in the middle of an investigation,
just to fit the case.
    But
this time Alexander knew the law. He knew he was right, but he was a little
surprised at the rapid pounding of his heart and the sudden trickle of sweat
running down his arms. There was something ominous about this sudden appearance
of a swarm of DIA 'copters at the site of an isolated Geiger alert.
    He looked through the haze of headlights and
falling rain at the tall, dark-coated figure standing there, shoulders hunched,
hands deep in his raincoat pockets. Julian Bahr . . .
    The
name was oddly familiar to Alexander. So was the big, thick-set body, the
hunched shoulders, the heavy face, the bark of the man's voice. He knew Bahr
from somewhere, he was sure of that.
    Alexander
ran backward in his mind through his career in BURINF, the huge, energetic
mouthpiece for the Department of Exploitation—super press room, propaganda
mill, advertising agency, motivational research center and public relations
bureau without peer in the world. Faces, names, ideas . . . private
conversations, board meetings, luncheons flooded his memory. He felt a wave of
nostalgia begin to rise smotheringly ,
a pervading sense of desolation at the fall he had taken from there, so abrupt,
so unexplainable.
    He blocked it. Julian Bahr
was not part of BURINF.
    Back
farther, then. Britain, Turkey, Buenos Aires, Australia ... a dozen past assignments shuttled through his mind: the solar
research project he had been in charge of in Mexico; the huge Yangtze dam at
which he had been only a lieutenant, the curious Asian-Western partial truce
that had resulted in the U.S. Army building the world's greatest dam across the
Yangtze to stop the floods and starvation that were driving China into ruthless
expansion in spite of the brilliant economic blockade with which the West had
accelerated her inflation, until the vast continent was almost