The Invaders Are Coming!
by Alan E. Nourse and J. A. Meyer
Cover
Front
Major Harvey Alexander, Director Wildwood Atomic Power Plant—that was his title. But impressive as it sounded, the major knew it was nothing more than governmental putting-out-to-pasture. A former top-ranking Army Intelligence officer isn’t placed in charge of an antique power pile in the middle of nowhere unless someone with a great deal of influence wants him out of the way!
And when three bars of U-metal were smuggled out of the plant—carried right past the exit monitors in an obvious frame-up—then Alexander knew for sure that his unknown enemy was ready for the final step. And in Federated America, where the Department of Psychological Control ruled unquestioned, that final step was the mind-pick!
The major had to work fast now. He had to find out who was trying to destroy him, and why . . . or face the rest of his life as a mindless idiot in a forced labor battalion!
Back
For a century America had been a securely isolated power without crisis, turmoil— or progress. Then suddenly super-security measures were shattered by the theft of fissionable metal from an atomic power plant. When it leaked out that the thieves had been invaders from outer space—alien monsters—chaos reigned.
The crisis called for a leader and the ruthless security chief, Julian Bahr, seized the helm, only to find everything he did strangely thwarted.
Was there an alien “Fifth Column” in his own organization?
Were the aliens already in control of the night skies?
Were his growing nightmares a new form of secret weapon?
Not until the last gripping page will you know the amazing secret that threatened America with total disaster. And by then you will have read one of the most outstanding, vividly exciting science-fiction novels ever written.
About the Author
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 Coming!
Copyright Page
The Invaders Are Coming!
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, “you wanted 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 softly, and only the slightest burr betrayed his 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.”