Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Read online

  ALAN E. NOURSE gives the year of his birth as 1928 and the place as Des Moines, Iowa. After graduating from Rutgers in 1951, he began his writing career while studying at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School for the M.D. he received in 1955. In that period he rapidly made a name for himself among the science-fiction readers. Over half a hundred of his stories have been featured and a number of them reprinted in anthologies. Since receiving his doctorate he has taken a leave from the practice of medicine to devote full time to his writing.

  He has had several novels published in book form, mainly juveniles, of which Junior Intern (Harper's) is an instance. Ace Books have previously published his A Man Obsessed (D-96), and now, in collaboration with J.A. Meyer, his latest work, The Invaders Are ComingI

  The Invaders Are Coming!

  by

  ALANE.NOURSE and J. A.MEYER

  ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  Copyright ©, 1959, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved

  Printed in U.S.A.

  PROLOGUE

  SOMEWHERE in the empty miles of New Mexico desert a spaceship was standing.

  Not many people remembered that it was still there. To the West it was shielded by the sprawling, treeless humps of the Organ Mountains; to the East lay the scorched sand and twisted mesquite of the desert. A road lay somewhere to the South, but hardly anyone passed there any more; and the few that did were not thinking about spaceships. If they knew what was standing in the valley behind the mountains, they didn't care. They didn't want to know about it.

  The ship had been sitting there for decades. Day by day the wind piled sand against the half-welded superstructure. The seams were splitting, and the hull-plates sagged and twisted in the wind. Below the ship, the fire-gutted buildings stood forlornly, their doors flapping on rusty hinges.

  There had been violence here; now there was only desolation and decay. Twice a day the silence was shattered by the whine of engines as cargo missiles passed through the sky, bound for the great cities of the Southern Continent. Occasionally, bands of Qualchi raiders met in the ruined buildings on their way north to Oklahoma and Kansas, but this happened rarely, and only in the shadow of darkness.

  But these things did not affect the ship. It stood unfinished and decaying in the desert, hated and untouched and slowly dying.

  That was what the people thought.

  Peter Elling had never seen the ship. He had died long before its time. There had been no spaceship in his calculations, no dream of space. Peter Elling had seen that fragment of the future that is revealed to idiots and geniuses, but it was only a fragment. In his dogged British fashion he had worked at his desk and blackboard and said, "This is what men could do," before his light had flickered out. There were no spaceships then.

  Mark Vanner lived to see the first fruits of Elling's work. He saw the first XAR rocket rise from the New Mexico desert and split apart at the seams thirty miles above the Gulf of Mexico. He saw the second and the third go the way of the first as the time of accounting grew closer. He had begged, and pleaded, and fought to stop them, but no one would listen to him . . .

  Later, they listened. After the crash that he had foreseen, more horrible and crippling than any war, they had listened to Mark Vanner because they had to. He showed them the way out of the chaos of those days, and they left the ship standing in the desert, a plague spot.

  But in the world that Vanner built, there were no spaceships.

  The helicopter had landed on a sandy hillock near the ship, and they had been walking slowly through the wreckage for two hours ... a tall man with flowing white hair, and a smaller, younger man.

  "All right," the white-haired man said at last, "y°uwanted to see it. Now you see it."

  The younger man nodded and brushed sandy hair back from his forehead. "This was the fifth XAR ship, am I right? I hadn't realized it was so nearly finished." He spoke sofdy, and only the slightest burr betrayed Iris Highland origin.

  "Another month would have seen it aloft," the white-haired man said. "It was that close." He took a cigarette from a bright titanium case and stooped to light it against the wind. "Now, of course, it would take longer, but that doesn't matter. I'm going to raise this ship."

  The sandy-haired man looked at him. "Do you realize what you're going to have to fight in order to do it?"

  "I realize. It will take time. But I'll do it."

  "It will take more than time," the Scotsman said slowly. "People hate this ship. They fear it. They hate it for what it did to them before, and for what it could do again. You won't be able to change that by yourself."

  "There is a man who can do it," said the white-haired man. "His name is Julian Bahr."

  "It will take more than just one man," the Scotsman said.

  "You don't know this man. Hell do it. He doesn't know it yet, but he will."

  "And when the time comes, will you be able to stop him?"

  "I don't know," said the white-haired man. "That's the flaw, of course. I just don't know."

  The Scotsman regarded his companion closely. "You know that we can't guarantee you any help at all," he said. "Officially, BRINT knows nothing of what you're planning to do."

  "But you'll help, just the same. Just give me time. I'll need more of that than anything else."

  "I know," said the Scotsman. "That's what we're afraid of. Because there isn't much time left, any more."

  Later, the helicopter engines coughed, and the craft slid back into the air, hovered for a moment, and then headed East, leaving the dying ship in a swirl of dust.

  The two men understood each other, at least up to a point. They both wanted the same thing, even though their reasons were a world apart. Consequently, they would help each other.

  Only the Scotsman knew that it was the eleventh hour.

  Part I PROJECT FRISCO

  Chapter One

  THE ALARM went off at ten minutes to midnight. Loud, clattering, urgent, splitting the drowsy silence of the power plant guardroom, it jarred the two corporals into stunned wakefulness.

  "What the hell!" They jumped to their feet, jaws slack, as the screaming bell hammered in their ears. In the corner of the small drab room the chopper was spitting patterns of triangular holes into the alarm tape, its own clack-clack-clack lost in the steady, deafening ringing of the alarm bell.

  Across the hall the duty sergeant burst out of the John, still stuffing his shirt into his green cotton pants. "Geiger alert!" he yelled at the still-immobilized corporals. "For Christ sake, don't just stand there, call the OD1 Switch on the floods and the radar sweep . . ."

  The sergeant snapped on the squawk-box to the plant security police barracks and turned up the volume. Behind him the corporals were frantically pulling emergency switches, flooding the whole rain-soaked power plant compound with powerful but invisible infra-red.

  "This is Hutch in F-Building," the sergeant growled into the squawk-box. "Geiger alert. Get all your flying squads up. Burp guns, ground trucks and squooshers ready. Got that?"

  "What happened? Where?" the voice came back.

  "How do I know where? Somewhere in Sector Five . . ." The sergeant checked the alarm tape. "About five miles north of the gate. Sent the ground trucks out on Road 423 and get them out there fast!"

  He flicked the selector to the inside guard barracks, all security-cleared troops assigned to patrol the inside of the Wildwood Slow-Neutron Power Plant. "All patrols," the sergeant barked. "Geiger alert outside the compound. Start Plan B as of now . . . stunners and infrascopes. The floods are on. Freeze the compound and check IDs on everyone inside the fence. Got that? That means yourselves, too."

  He let the s
witch go and turned to the map. The gong had stopped ringing, the chopper had stopped feeding tape. Out in the plant the dull, steady hum of the slow-neutron separation units continued unbroken. The compound outside, cross-flooded by infras, was still black to the sergeant's eyes, but he could make out faint running shapes circling between the wire mesh fences in the slow, drizzling rain.

  "On my watchl" he exploded to the corporals standing nervously by. He went to the wall map and jammed in a red flag at the site of the buried alarm station five miles north of the plant, the place where the alarm had originated. "Eighteen years those Geigers have been sitting out there, and the first time hot stuff goes through them has to be on my watch . . ."

  The OD burst into the guardroom, his jacket still unbuttoned, sleep heavy in his eyes. He was carrying a stunner in active position in his hand. "What happened?"

  "Geiger alert, sir." The sergeant pointed to the red flag on the map. "Outside the compound. And would you please put that stunner back in the holster, sir?"

  The OD stared open-mouthed at the map, then at his hand, then at the sergeant, then at his hand again, and put the stunner back in his holster.

  "It's still on active, sir."

  The OD swallowed and flicked the safety on. "I don't understand," he said. "What happened?"

  "Some hot stuff . . . radioactives . . . went past that alarm unit out on the north road, and the alarm went off."

  "Outside the compound? But how did it get out there?"

  "I don't know, sir. It got out, somehow, only none of the gate units picked it up."

  Bewilderment deepened on the OD's face. "You mean somebody stole some U-metal out of this place? But that's ridiculous. Who'd want to do that?"

  "I don't know, sir." The sergeant shifted uncomfortably. "We'll probably have an investigation to find out."

  The OD cursed and ran through the alarm tape swiftly. "Wait till I get my hands on those goddamn gate guards. Did you order the patrols out?"

  "Yes, sir. The minute the alarm came in." Somewhere in the distance he heard the gyros on the ground trucks whining into high gear. "Christ! They didn't even have the gyros running."

  "How's that?" the OD asked.

  "I said the gyros are running now, sir," the sergeant covered up hastily. It would be somebody's neck if they found out that the patrol squads had to wait for gyros to get revved up. But what could they expect after eighteen years of nothing happening in a godforsaken boiler factory like this? "Did you notify the major?"

  The sergeant rubbed his chin. "I thought you'd better do that, sir. He's not going to like it, sir."

  With a groan the OD spun the telephone dial, listened to it buzz as the clock hand hit midnight. The sergeant was dead right about that one—the major was not going to like it.

  North of the plant, the leading ground truck churned slowly up the single 18-inch asphalt wheel strip, its headlights picking out the trees and tangled brush edging the road. Rain beat down unmercifully out of the blackness. Somewhere a-head was the automatic alarm station that had sounded the Geiger alert, a buried monitor triggered to pick up any hard radiation that passed within thirty yards of it.

  "Light up ahead," the driver said suddenly, slamming the brake. The ground truck skidded to a halt, almost jumping the strip. Stabilizing gyros jerked against the buffer springs to keep the two-wheeled truck from tipping.

  "Put the beam on them," the corporal said, cranking his burp gun and letting the safety lid snap open. "It may be what we're after." He stuck his head out of the cab, shouting back at the trucks behind, "Squooshers . . . Ready!"

  "Hold it," the driver said. "They're signaling back. It's a DIA field unit."

  The corporal blinked. "DIA? What in hell are they doing out here?" He stuck his head out again. "Hold it . . . Hold it . . . DIA Unit."

  As the buzzing of the squooshers subsided, the corporal stumbled out of the truck, shielded himself against the rain, and started ahead toward the light. "What's a DIA unit doing here?" somebody mumbled behind him. "Those guys hit faster than strychnine. It's only been ten minutes since the alarm went off."

  "Fifteen," said the corporal, feeling a tightness in his throat as he approached the two men holding hand flashes on them.

  "Army?" a voice asked.

  "That's right. 923rd Security Police, Wildwood Power Plant, Corporal Bams." He held his badge forward in the flashlight beam.

  "All right, Barns. Put those burp guns back on safety," the voice said. Barns knew better than to argue with DIA men, or even to ask for counter-identification. He didn't want any damned investigation made on him. He didn't want anything to do with the DIA.

  From the third truck back a lieutenant came stamping up in the mud. "Barns, why are we stopped? I didn't give any orders to stop here."

  "All right, Lieutenant, knock it off," the DIA man said.

  "Who in the hell are you?"

  "Carmine, DIA." The man pulled a badge out of his civilian raincoat pocket, flashed it briefly.

  "Oh," the lieutenant said, much quieter. Barns grinned.

  Someone came out of the darkness, a big man in a belted black raincoat and plasticovered hat. He had enormous shoulders and a heavy, powerful body, yet he had come down the road without a sound, like a tiger coming down to a watering place. "That Security?"

  "That's right, Mr. Bahr," Carmine answered. The man called Bahr moved forward between the two DIA men and squinted at the lieutenant.

  "You're Axtell, attached to the Wildwood Plant, right?" It was not a question, but a direct statement of fact, as if he were challenging Axtell to dare to be anyone else. "All right, I'm Julian Bahr . . . DIA. We picked up an alarm on our atomic net and got a field unit in here. Was that signal inbound or outbound?"

  It caught Axtell unprepared. "I . . . don't know, sir."

  "Then well assume it was outbound. U-metal theft," Bahr said. "Whoever it was can't have gotten far yet in this brush, and we know he's not on the road. I want you to deploy your men in a large circle around the strike point. Send your trucks out in a pincers and drop a man off every quarter mile with an eye-beam. Stick to open country, grass and roads, and use the eye-beams for a fence. I don't want anything larger than a chipmunk to get out of the strike area. Now movel"

  Lieutenant Axtell saluted, rather uselessly, since Bahr was a civilian and did not return it, then hurried back down the road to the trucks and began shouting. Tires squealed, men pushed and cursed, gyros screamed as the trucks broke away from the road strip and started rolling in both directions out across the soggy, rain-swept fields.

  Down the road a siren whined, and the trucks stopped moving. A winking red turret light was dodging swiftly up the road between the half-evacuated trucks. Then the car, a sleek, mud-spattered Volta 400 one-wheeler, ground screaming to a halt a few yards from Bahr and the other DIA men. A short, lean, raincoated officer with major's leaves on his shoulders was the only one in the car. He jumped out into the mud.

  "Axtell!" he screamed.

  Axtell bellowed from down the road, started running through the mud. The major turned on the DIA men, a flashlight sweeping across their faces, picking up their civilian clothes. "What are you doing here?"

  Axtell stumbled to a halt, saluted. "Lieutenant Axtell reporting, sir."

  The major swung around to him. "What's the matter with the road? Is there a tree down?" "No, sir."

  "Then why are you pulling the trucks off into the mud? You're not at strike point yet. Have you spotted something out there?"

  "Sir . . . these DIA men told me . .

  The major looked from the lieutenant to the DIA men and back. His face was gray and heavily lined, but his eyes were bright with anger. "DIA? What's the Department of Internal Affairs doing on a military security problem?"

  "We picked up the alarm on our atomic net," Bahr said, moving forward. "We've been waiting here for over ten minutes," he added pointedly. "I directed your man here to circle the strike area and fence it in."

  "On whose aut
hority?" Alexander asked.

  "Atomic Security Act of 2005," Bahr said. "That was an outgoing signal from your road monitor. That means a theft of U-metal from your plant until proven otherwise."

  "You haven't been called in on the problem," the major said.

  Bahr snorted. "You were a little too late to call us in. We've already got road blocks mounted. We had a 'copter unit in the air at the time of the alarm. We stationed it immediately." He hunched his shoulders forward, with a glance at Carmine. "You can take it from me that there's no vehicle between here and the road block. Whoever broke U-metal out of that plant has taken to the woods by now."

  "Then I'll send a unit in after them," the major snapped.

  "In this downpour?" Bahr said. "You're fifteen minutes late lor that. The only chance now is a circling move." Bahr slarted to move off down the road.

  "Let's just get something straight here," the major said. "I'm Major Alexander, 923rd Security. These are my troops, my territory, and my problem. I don't want a lot of Washing-Ion Intelligence men nosing around this power plant."

  Bahr suddenly looked at him very hard. "My name is H.ihr," he said. "Assistant Director, DIA." He flashed his badge, then moved forward a step to look at Alexander coldly. "And I'd like to know what sort of a security system you're running that lets hot-stuff get five miles outside your compound before it's picked up by monitors. I'm also curious lo know why you're trying so hard to delay an organized search."

  Alexander felt a sudden knotting in his stomach. DIA meant investigation, and nowadays investigation could mean a full scale DEPCO psych-probe, months of interrogation, •lability downgrading. . . . ruin. And DIA could play the sluggish arrival of his security troops into anything they wanted. . . .

  "I'm not trying to delay anything," he insisted. "I am trying to carry out a security plan. Unless you want to make this a straight DIA project."

  "I'm making it a joint maneuver," Bahr said shortly. "My organization and your personnel. Ill have more DIA units here in fifteen minutes. In the meantime I don't want anybody or anything to get out of that strike area."