The doctor took a breath and left the office, leaving Bahr glaring at the wall clock. Fleetingly, he thought of the return trip from Canada. A DIA car had met him at the landing field, whisked him through the downtown Chicago streets with siren at full blast, but even that brief ride had brought him back shockingly to the change that had been taking place since the Wildwood raid.
He had not seen the normal early-morning bustle of people on the streets. Instead, people were gathered on street corners, moving listlessly into the buildings. A huge crowd had gathered to watch the morning newscast, projected on the eight-story screen on the Tribune building, with John John relaying the latest news from BURINF, but it had been an uneasy crowd. A dozen times on the way to the hospital he had heard police sirens wailing.
And at the hospital, the sudden appearance of TV cameras, and a dozen newsmen, all of them talking at once about the European newsbreaks and about an alien landing, asking for confirmation or denial, complaining bitterly about the anemic information BURINF had made available.
He had shouldered his way through them, repeating his “Sorry, boys, nothing now,” until a woman’s voice, quite loud, cut through the babble of voices.
“Isn’t it true, Mr. Bahr, that your appointment as Director of DIA has not been approved, pending a DEPCO check?”
Bahr stopped, found the woman’s face. “Who gave you that information?”
“Just rumors, Mr. Bahr.”
“Well, you can publish that I have assumed John McEwen’s post in DIA, pending appointment of a new director, for reasons of National Security, and you can serve the interests of National Security a great deal by refusing to spread any more nasty rumors than you can help.” He started on, and added, “I don’t know who the new director will be, and right now I don’t care. I’m simply doing a job that has to be done.”
It had sounded all right, he thought now, but it had come too close to the mark. He looked up as Dr. Petri came to the door, nodded to him.
“All right, Mr. Bahr. But I warn you—”
One of Bahr’s aides stopped them in the corridor. “There’s a Mr. Whiting from DEPCO here to see you, Chief.”
Bahr scowled. “Too busy,” he said.
“He has an AA priority. And he says it’s about this alien business.”
“What office of DEPCO?” Bahr said, stopping suddenly.
“Foreign affairs. It’s about those broadcasts.”
Bahr relaxed. It was not Adams’ office. He was not eager to talk to anybody in DEPCO right now, but an AA priority was hard to sidestep. “Ask him to wait. I’ll be up as soon as I can.”
He turned into a small white room. The polygraph operator was ready, and a sterile tray rested on the desk. “All right,” Bahr said to the doctor. “Bring Cullen in.”
Two DIA men led Cullen into the room, a grey-haired man of about sixty with a wrinkled, haggard look, stooped and squinting as if the glaring white walls hurt his eyes. He was leaning heavily on his two escorts, obviously on the verge of nervous collapse. His eyes had the raw, unnatural brightness of amphetamine-induced wakefulness.
Bahr motioned him to the PG seat, held out his wallet with ID card showing. “I’m Julian Bahr, Dr. Cullen. Director DIA. We’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Please,” Cullen said dully. “Let me sleep. I’ve been questioned for days, I can’t think any more.”
“We’ll be as brief as possible,” Bahr pressed him. He nodded, and the technicians strapped one of the Gronklin polygraph receptors around Cullen’s chest.
The old man shook his head feebly. “Let me alone! I can’t answer any more questions.”
“Who’s been asking you questions?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Somebody. My mind is a blank.”
Bahr’s jaw settled grimly. “Your name is James Cullen?”
Cullen did not answer.
“Dr. Cullen, I have some idea of what you’ve been through. If what we think is right, more than forty of your colleagues are going through the same thing right now. Don’t you want to help stop that?”
The old man shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know anything. I’m tired. I don’t remember what happened.”
“We’ll help you remember.”
“Does my family know I’m safe?”
Bahr’s fist clenched at the digression. “They’ll be told. Now just answer yes or no to my questions.” He eased back in his chair and rolled the polygraph paper ahead. “You are a professor of Vanner-Elling principles at the University of Michigan?”
Again Cullen did not answer. Bahr smashed his hand down on the desk, noticing with satisfaction the sudden change of blood pressure at the noise. “I think you’re tired,” he said solicitously. “I think you’d better have a little stimulation.”
“Please . . . .”
“Just a little adrenalin and amphetamine. You’ll feel like a new man.” The technician clamped Cullen’s arm down, deliberately missing the vein twice. In a minute Cullen’s heart was thumping desperately against the chest constrictor, his eyes blinking rapidly. “Have another dose ready in case he begins to doze off,” Bahr said.
Cullen was really quite co-operative after that, and his memory became remarkably clear, at least in places. There were aggravating holes in his story, but the pattern was clear enough.
He had been abducted from his home in Ann Arbor sometime Sunday night. He could not remember how, nor what his captors had looked like. He did recall, vaguely, a long ride somewhere in some sort of vehicle, a strange room, and blindingly bright lights.
And the questions . . . .
“Who was questioning you?”
“I couldn’t see. Just a voice. An odd voice.”
“A human voice?”
“No. Definitely not . . . not what I heard.” The old man hesitated. “It didn’t make sense, but I was sure it was a tik-talker.”
Bahr’s eyebrows went up, and he glanced excitedly at the technician. The electronic tik-talker, which converted punched tape patterns into speech sounds, had first been developed for long-distance speech communication, particularly useful when scrambled signals were necessary. Scrambled voice, bouncing off a fluctuating ionosphere, was likely to emerge from the descrambler as a series of moans, pops and whistles. The tik-talker reduced speech to a burst of seven pulse characters, reassembling and unscrambling them at the receiving end. It was quite reliable, but the speech itself always had the tonal curiosities of electronically sliced language, and was easily identified by anyone who had ever heard it before.
“You’ve heard a tik-talker before?” Bahr asked.
“We’ve used them at the Center. For distant communications and translation purposes.”
“And what were the questions like?”
Here Cullen was very clear. He had been asked hundreds of questions about his work at Michigan, especially with regard to the Vanner-Elling equations and their current application to controlling the psychological and economic stability of the country since the economic collapse of the crash in 1995. He had been asked about the poll-taking functions, the work of the machines in outlining production schedules and anticipating psychological soft-spots in various segments of society.
He had refused to answer questions on one very highly classified project, and was given repeated low-voltage electro-shocks until he passed out. He could not remember being reawakened. His next recollection was wandering in confusion through the downtown Los Angeles streets until the police picked him up for vagrancy.