Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer
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Authors: The invaders are Coming
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
ALAN
E.
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.
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°
u
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
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
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 switch 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."