Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (24 page)

In
the first few days at Riley, Bahr moved mechanically at the furious bellowing
of the non-
coms
, still too stunned to realize what
was happening to him. Then
came
the initiation, die
inevitable judgment of his fellows—could he take it?

A
framed-up infraction, which Bahr knew was a frame, and a kangaroo court of
second-year supervisors in a locked barracks squad room.

"Ten belts," the second-year
"judge" said. "If the prisoner flinches he will be restrained
and the sentence doubled. Assume the position." The mocking, overbearing
authority drove the blood from Bahr's face and made his fists clench, but he
had made up his mind that they were not going to break him, and he bent over,
mute and burning with anger. The belts were delivered with a flat paddle longer
than a baseball bat and swung with two hands so it struck like a mule-kick and
left welts and black-and-blue marks for a week.

He
took nine blows impassively. Then
a
voice
was raised. "The prisoner flinched.
Any witnesses?"

"Yes,
I saw it. The prisoner moved evasively." There was
a
clamoring of assent in the excited circle of men. Bahr mentally
estimated twenty more blows. "The prisoner will be restrained.
Rope.
Double him over the railing and tie . . ."

Bahr
straightened up, turned slowly. "Nobody ties me up," he said.

"No?
You'll get twenty more for
insubordina—"
But the new threat was too late. Bahr grabbed the paddle out of the
executioner's hand and swung it sidewise against the fish-sergeant's head with
a loud
thunk
, knocking him sprawling and unconscious
to the floor.

In
the stunned silence Bahr leaned on the paddle and looked into the circle of
shocked white faces.

"Next?"

They
tried. For two weeks, gangs of upperclassmen tried to gang up on him, beat him
up,
break
him. But when they crept into his barracks
at night they found him gone, and returned to discover their own bedding soaked
and knotted with far more imagination than they could achieve. One day five of
them cornered him, beat him up and broke his nose; one by one they suffered
return engagements and were beaten and mauled with systematic ferocity. The
dispensary medics became experts at setting broken noses.

The
silent cure, ostracism, fell flat because to his own classmen, in spite of
indoctrination lectures, Bahr was a hero. In a grimly silent mess-hall Bahr
could tell
a
dirty joke and the whole first year class
would laugh on cue.

Halfway through the first year, the training
officers at

Riley
consulted the BRINT people who were responsible for the 801st.

"He's
a misfit," they explained. "He has too much drive, too much
intelligence. We can't see why DEPEX sent him here in the first place."

"But
a natural leader, you say," the BRINT contact man said.

"Highest
morale a first-year group ever had. But a maverick is dangerous if he can't be
controlled. Question is, should we weed him out now, or keep him and hope he
falls in fine?"

The BRINT man thought it over. "Your
field maneuvers are coming up, am I right? Which is your weakest platoon,
poorest in training and discipline?"

"Third, Baker
Company."

"Put this Bahr chap in
charge of it during maneuvers."

The
Riley people didn't like it. "They're fourth-year men.
They
11 never take orders from a first-year man. The platoon will fall apart the
first day out."

"Let's
try it anyway," the BRINT man said with a note of finality. "We'll
prepare his orders."

Baker
Three was still legendary at Riley years after the maneuvers of '02. Bahr's
mission was given to him by BRINT, and by the time he reported to their field
unit in Ontario three weeks later with sixty percent of his platoon still
intact and
uncaptured
, and with four prisoners, the
Army, the police and the DIA were weary of the fruitless search and were
posting imposing rewards for any of his troops who would turn themselves in.

BRINT
spent a week interrogating Bahr, his troops and prisoners, on the tactics,
techniques and devices they had used to avoid capture, then swore them to
absolute secrecy on the methods; but enough fragments had crept out so that
when Bahr and his men got back to Riley it was almost a victory parade.

The
next three years were almost anticlimactic. Bahr was a
made
man. All work, play and friendship groups led to him. But while he built his
little encysted empire in power relationships at Riley, getting ready for
a
hitch in the 801st, the same psych-testing machinery that had misplaced
him before had been growing, spreading and self-fertilizing. The powerful DEPCO
had begun to emerge in the government as the great peg-placer. They were
feared, admired, hated, worshipped, but unquestioningly recognized except at
Riley and
a
few other similar sociological eddies.

Bahr's
first contact with DEPCO came when he applied for Commissioned Officer's
School, and he ran headlong into
a
stone
wall.

After
two days of testing, with polygraph,
Brontok
symbols
and
Vargian
analysis, Bahr returned to Riley baffled
and angry by the continual procession of impassive young men and women who
didn't seem to listen to
what
he
said, but only to
how
he said it.

DEPCO's
report to Riley was uncompromising. Bahr had too much drive to fit into a
leadership position in a government that was fighting, at all costs, for
stability. He was too ambitious for the new Army of administration and
logistics that DEPCO was planning. What the Army needed was administrators, not
executives. The decisions were to be made elsewhere, many of them by
computors
working against the VE equations.

Riley
went to bat for him, but DEPCO was immovable. Bahr did not go to Commissioned
Officer's School.

He
swallowed the first blow, even though he realized intuitively that he had gone
as far as he could go as a non-com in his first two years at Riley, and was not
satisfied to stop there. The second blow was even more unexpected. Revised
placement tests, again sifted through the DEPCO filters, pulled him from
guerrilla-training status. He had blundered unknowingly in the tests; he had
tried too hard and done too well, and particularly scored unusually high in
electronics and mathematics aptitude sections. The DEPCO sorter, looking for
candidates in these priority scientific fields, dropped his card in the hopper,
and he, of all Riley graduates, was assigned to Communications Command and
sent to Antarctica.

His
appeal was immediate, vehement, and futile. Even BRINT, which had been
following his career at Riley with interest, was unsuccessful in its
subtie
efforts to alter the assignment. With the new
upgrading of the social sciences resulting from the
Vanner-Elling
innovations, and the
witchhunts
against physical
scientists and technical people during the crash years, there was an urgent
demand for any talent available. And with the signing of the Yangtze
semi-truce, guerrilla activities were unpopular. Communications priority was
high.

Bahr's
tenure in Antarctica, terminating with his court-martial from the Army at
twenty-nine, had seemed to him like the first
spadeful
of dirt dumped back into the grave he had been digging himself out of all his
life. He had taken his new civilian greencard assignment as a maintenance man
and wire-jockey in the DEPOP computer center with apathetic resignation,
burying old memories and
bitternesses
under a pile of
empty whiskey bottles and long moody silences. Maybe Libby Allison might have
broken through the apathy eventually, but even she had almost given up when the
past, like the proverbial penny, turned up in the form of Frank Carmine.

Carmine
had been a year ahead of Bahr at Riley, and with many other veterans of the
801st, had wound up in DIA after his ten-year tour. McEwen, founder and
director of DIA, was looking for a man to keep his field units co-
ordinated
and working under pressure; he advertised his
desires to some of the new people, hoping they might know somebody from the
801st or BRINT who could fill the bill. There were a few reticent suggestions; then
one of the veterans of Baker Three said wistfully, "What we really need is
a man like Julie Bahr to light a fire under this outfit!"

Carmine
was assigned the task of locating and approaching Bahr. Bahr knew little about
DIA, but the appeal of the old camaraderie, and the opportunities for control
and power rang a bell. With the reorganization of the field units that he
demanded, and his political jockeying to get his friends into key positions,
Bahr soon began to exert much more power under McEwen than the organizational
charts credited him.

McEwen
recognized the man's voracious ambition quite early; he realized that Bahr was,
eventually, after his job. Soon McEwen could not sleep, his eyes became sunken
and bloodshot, his mind wandered, he complained bitterly to his underlings
about anything and everything except Julian Bahr. He took vacations, came in to
work late, overslept, muddled and whined, and retreated further and further
into himself, with the inevitable result that he was forced, irresistibly, to
depend more and more on Bahr to keep his organization running. McEwen feared
him, but he did not stop him.

And
if Bahr ever realized that it was he who was forcing the change in McEwen, he
never showed it. He worked with people, with groups, with scattered
individuals. As his power increased, imperceptibly, he found people who were
eager, willing,
desperate
to help him, people who
wanted his friendship, who sought his influence, who surrendered their
confidences to him, and moved in to his side in loyalty that bordered on blind
devotion. In a world of unstable personal relationships and obviously cardboard
leader figures—senators, congressmen, and especially chief executives who were
put in office chiefly on the basis of appeal, good looks, friendliness and the
knack of projecting "sincerity" through the TVs—the segment who
wanted someone powerful and confident to identify with gravitated their
affections, fixations, and complexes on men like Bahr.

The
true extent of his personal contacts probably was not known even to Bahr.
People who said they hated him, or ridiculed him, or distrusted him, went out
of their way consciously or unconsciously to help him. Rumor was that he had
contacts, friends and informants in the fringe-underworld, in BURINF, in
BRINT, even in the KMs, and that within DIA itself he had a private power-group
of former Riley men who held their grim loyalty to him above
dieir
contracts, oaths, or national obligations.

Of all these
dependables
the most loyal, the most devoted, the most unswerving of legmen was Frank
Carmine.

Which
was why, when Bahr found a discontinuity in his space-plan, coming unexplained
and unheralded from a source that would have seemed least suspect, he did not
surround himself with other DIA subordinates who were close to him.

It
was not by accident that he had not been notified of Harvey Alexander's
capture.
And if Carmine could defect . . .

He
moved alone, slit-eyed,
dje
Volta speeding through
the vague shallow fogginess of the Jersey flatlands, his mind unraveling
threads of contacts, relationships, and attitudes, probing for a motive,
preparing himself to inflict the necessary, just, inevitable punishment upon
the errant who stood in his way.

The first stop was a southwestern Newark
suburb near the Newark
Jetfield
. Bahr drove into a
shabby housing development, parked near the lobby of the main building,
hurried inside to the elevator.

The
building was silent, the halls dimmed down,
the
carpet
quiet to his footsteps. He picked a door, checked the number, and rang.
Inside, some stirring sounds and a muffled answer.
A moment
later the door opened into a black room, and a brooding, questioning silence
yawned at him.

"Julie?"