The Lost Perception (6 page)

Oregson stiffened. Had Helen actually become involved with
something like that?
Now, more so than ever, he wanted to return to Pennsylvania.

Radcliff brought his fist down on the lectern. “But now we know how to fight them! Our main strategy shall be to deprive them wholly of the secrecy which allows them to circulate in the rural areas and recruit unsuspecting persons for the human-Valorian cells that will be used to destroy us.”

He stared profoundly out over his audience. “Tomorrow, gentlemen, the entire world shall know all of the details that you are learning now. Hereafter, we will not be alone in the fight.”

Again, his voice moderated. “I said
one
of our Valorians escaped from the compound. That left us with two. One is here with us today—properly sedated so as to be no threat.”

He signaled into the wings and the curtains parted abruptly on a Valorian trussed in a chair, chin lolling on his chest.

Radcliff tugged the alien’s head erect “Where are you from?”

“The Valorian System,” came the delayed, sluggish response.

“How can you pose as a human?”

“Remote observation. Intensive training. Surgery.”

“What are the Screamies?”

“A plague found in another system.”

“Did you bring it here?”

After much hesitation: “Yes.”

“Can you cure it?”

“There is no cure. It will run its course and wear itself out”

“Are the Valorians immune?”

“Yes.”

“How can they persuade humans to help them?”

“Through hypnotic compulsion.”

“Why are the Valorians here?”

“Earth’s system and order will collapse under the plague. Then we will strip your world of its resources.”

Radcliff walked around behind the chair. And Gregson, alarmed, watched him draw a laser pistol from inside bis coat.

The single
zip
sounded harshly in the hall as the beam burned into the Valorian’s head and he slumped forward.

Radcliff grimly faced the assembly. “This was
meant
to be a grisly demonstration. The point I’ve tried to get across is that there is no latitude for human sentiment in dealing with the aliens. Only a dead one is harmless.”

Gregson’s arm was seized in a frantic grip and he turned to see Wellford shuddering beside him. The Englishman’s eyes were glazed with terror and his lips were working frenziedly but soundlessly.

Finally the first serrate scream erupted from his throat as he clamped his hands over his eyes.

Then he filled the auditorium with anguished cries.

Gregson administered the injection and the hypodermic siren’s strident tones lamented Wellford’s purchase of the Screamie package.

Spawned by the
Nina’s
aborted expedition, the aliens-among-us fixation had gained the force of a nearly paralyzing obsession following 1995’s Nuclear Exchange. For months, a dazed world had been resigned to the expectation that what had been only rumored and suppressed would inevitably be acknowledged as true.

Yet, no one was quite prepared for the impact of the press conference that Tuesday in the old U.N. General Assembly Chamber.

Before the battery of trivision cameras were arrayed the Security Bureau hierarchy—headed by Director Radcliff, the commandant of the International Guard and officers-in-charge of the bureau’s Communications and Space Divisions.

Gregson and Eric Friedmann, the special agent from Bavaria, were seated at a table on the right while on the left, bound and gagged, was the human conspirator Wellford had overpowered on Forty-Third Street.

Radcliff made his sober introductory presentation much along the same lines he had followed at the London briefing. At one point, both Gregson and Friedmann were required to elaborate on the accounts he had given of their experiences.

Then the prisoner’s gag was ordered removed.

The man swore for some time and surged against his bonds. Then he shouted, “You damned fools! Don’t you see what they’re doing? They want to put you in chains! The Valorians can’t hypnotize anybody! They…”

Motioning for the gag to be replaced, Radcliff faced the press with his head bowed.

“This is what we are up against. A force that can turn us into insensate robots. Destroy our will to resist. Synthesize in each of us a distorted sense of loyalty. Reduce us to unthinking servitude.”

When he showed the film clip on his questioning of the Valorian at the London briefing, it brought Gregson’s thoughts painfully back to the appalling sight of Wellford going Screamie and being rushed to London’s Central Isolation Institute in Hyde Park.

Then, dismayed, he recalled that the attack had been predicted by the same woman who had prophesied his own final seizure at Forsythe’s farm day after tomorrow.

The
zip
of Radcliff’s laser pistol in the film ended Gregson’s preoccupation and he was surprised to see that the director had shown the slaying. But then he realized it had been intended as a battle cry—an exhortation that would bring all human sentiment to a fighting pitch and set the tone of attack.

Even before the press conference’s question and answer period was over, reports on initial reaction were already flowing into the Security Bureau’s Communications Division.

A Buenos Aires woman, turning Screamer as she watched the expose on a trivision set in the window of an International Guard post, was ignored by the crowd about her. Instead, the frightened Argentineans directed their wrath on a slight, olive-complexioned man with little hair who futilely shouted that he wasn’t a Valorian.

In Monroe County, Pennsylvania, house-to-house and farm-to-farm searches were organized spontaneously. Some of the vigilantes thought it might help matters if they burned out the forests and fields in their wake.

In Osaka, a horde of confused Japanese, depending on a faulty translingual pickup device for their interpretation of the tricast, assumed they were being told not that the Screamies were
caused
by the Valorians, but that the Screamers
were
Valorians.

Consequently, they burned their Central Isolation Institute to the ground.

Most encouraging of all the early reports, Gregson realized when he learned about it later, was the development in Belleau Wood near Paris. There, two haggard and bruised men staggered into a National Police post and surrendered to the International Guard detail.

They had been cell members, they explained, but now wanted to be quarantined. Even before the tricast had ended, there had been a fight. One man had been killed. Two others, refusing to believe the tricast, had fled with their Valorian leader.

After the press conference ended, Radcliff insisted to Gregson that he was not concerned over the incident of misdirected human indignation. Perhaps, he admitted, the initial reaction had been too extreme. But at least it showed no lack of righteous belligerence.

Tuesday’s expos£ had one unanticipated result in Manhattan. Thousands crowded East Avenue and the shores of the river, determined that the headquarters which was directing the counteroffensive against the Valorians would not again come under assault by an enemy cell.

This development, of course, simplified Gregson’s newly assigned duties as officer-in-charge of the Secretariat Building’s defenses. And he found tune both on that Tuesday and Wednesday to place comviewer calls through to Helen. He wasn’t surprised that on each occasion she appeared somewhat reluctant to let the matter of the press conference enter their conversation.

And, solicitous of the concern that threaded her normally attractive features, he did not push her. For he couldn’t know the exact circumstances that would trigger the conditioned reflex which would transform her into a raving defender of the aliens.

Wednesday afternoon Radcliff left for Montreal, where a special detail of Guardsmen, operating on leads provided by local Canadians, had smashed a cell and broad-beamed two Valorians.

Before leaving, he smiled and told Gregson, “We appear to have them on the run finally. Thanks to you, we know where to look. You’ve earned a vacation. Delegate your authority to a subordinate. Report in occasionally, but don’t come back until you’ve had a good rest”

It was under these circumstances that Gregson, late that Thanksgiving Eve, verticaled down to the farm’s bull’s-eye and found Bill waiting in the tractor-utility truck. Driving wind, sweeping out of the northwest, tunneled through the TLTFs open cab and Forsythe zippered up his jacket, staring blindly toward the landing target.

“Greg? That
is
you, isn’t it?” he called out uncertainly as he gripped the steering wheel.

Assuring him it was, Gregson approached and said, “Move over. I’ll take us back to the house. Helen drive the TUT out here for you?”

“Figured that’s about what you’d say. No, she didn’t Maybe I’ll never get a license. But they can’t stop me from chauffeuring myself around my own farm. Hop in.”

Dubious, Gregson climbed into the right-hand side of the cab and studied the other’s face. There were both pride and determination in those features, capped by a profusion of grizzled hair which whipped about in defiance of the cold wind that assaulted it. Forsythe, set upon doing most of the things he had done before the accident, was apparently ready to make no concessions to his blindness.

He backed around, then drove off, obviously unconcerned over the fact that he had no apparent way of knowing when to turn.

“Valorians, eh?” he mused aloud. “Figured all along there was something to your brother’s reports from the
Nina.
Guess almost everybody did. But who’d ever think of looking in places like this?”

“I suppose that’s the way the aliens reasoned it out too.”

Forsythe’s arm shot up in the air outside the cab. As the TUT moved forward, his hand, closing in at an obtuse angle, intercepted a cable strung from one pole to another. So
that,
Gregson saw, was how he did it. If he drifted off course, he merely maneuvered until his fingers touched wire again.

“Should’ve been around last night,” Forsythe went on. “Formed a motorcade in Stroudsburg; drove over here, and burned down Wilson’s Lodge and all the woods around it”

Gregson watched the TUT approach the post on which its guidance cable was anchored and wondered how collision would be averted. Then he saw the knot in the wire just as the other’s upraised hand encountered it.

They veered sharply to the right, skirting the barn, and bore ahead until Forsythe’s groping fingers located another cable, stretched out toward the house.

“How’s Helen?” Gregson asked.

“Don’t know. Too quiet. And nervous. Maybe she’s afraid of this Valorian stuff. Heard her up walking around last night ’til after dawn.”

Ten yards from the back door, he reached another knot in the wire and eased on the brakes. “Well?”

But Gregson was wondering whether his mere mentioning of the knowledge that she had had something to do with the Wilson Lodge cell, together with his identity as a Security Bureau agent, would be enough to throw Helen into
a,
violent fit of conditioned behavior.

“Well?” Forsythe repeated, proudly fondling the wheel.

“Good job,” Gregson said, but without enthusiasm. “You must have been practicing a long time.”

Forsythe went to bed early after supper, while Gregson stoked the open hearth fire in the living room and settled down before it with a brandy. In the kitchen, Helen busied herself with preliminary preparations for the next day’s Thanksgiving meal.

He was there but a few minutes, however, when she appeared in the doorway, her eyes casting about indecisively. She came and sat beside him on the divan and the fire’s reflections, playing upon her gossamer flaxen hair, crowned her head with a crimson halo.

Gregson rose, placed his brandy on the table and unobtrusively opened his self-injection kit in case she would need precipitate quietening. He couldn’t delay the confrontation any longer.

As he hesitated, though, she stared into the flames and said, “Greg—about that cell at the hunting lodge. I… You didn’t get all the cell members in that raid.”

He waited, hopeful that she would remain rational as long as it didn’t appear he was trying to force information out of her.

“There was someone else—hidden in the attic. He was supposed to be on lookout while Kavorba slept. He…”

“Kavorba?”

“Kavorba was the Valorian leader of the cell. The man in the attic remained hidden when the Guardsmen attacked. Later—just before he left Pennsylvania—he said Kavorba mentioned me in front of you. And I knew you must have realized I was—a member of that cell too.”

Suddenly she was crying into her hands and Gregson knew now there would be no need for the hypodermic. He made her drink the brandy and she told him how she had been contacted by the cell more than a month earlier, how Enos Cromley and the Valorian had played upon her fears as a means of using her to get through to Gregson.

Cromley had passed Forsythe’s place frequently and had stopped often to talk with her in the fields or out in the yard. At first, she was amused by the man’s aliens-among-us obsession. She had even laughed when he warned her that the Security Bureau was the only force preventing the Valorians from helping Earth and that Gregson was in danger because he worked for the bureau.

“I didn’t know then,” she explained, still trembling, “that they regarded me as a means, of reaching you. I suppose they wanted to get their hands on someone from the bureau.”

“Where did you meet the Valorian?”

Helen had been walking in the woods behind the farm when she encountered Cromley and Kavorba. They tried to pierce her shield of amused incredulity and convince her that the latter was an alien.

“He was
so
persuasive. Most of what he said didn’t make sense. But he was so sincere—and so tired and helpless and troubled.”

“What were some of the things he told you?” “That they wanted to save Earth.” The salvation gimmick again. “From the Screamies?” She nodded. “But more so from the Security Bureau—before the bureau could destroy them, and us too.” “And you believed him?”

“Oh, Greg! I didn’t know, until yesterday’s tricast, how they operated; that they could confuse and persuade, make you believe things that aren’t true. At one point Kavorba even told me the Screamies weren’t a disease at all, but another means of perception.” “A… what?”

“A sixth sense. A new way of seeing things. He said the Screamies were something we’d all go through eventually.” “It didn’t occur to you that he might be lying?” She shook her head in a gesture of self-derision. “He
showed
me. He said he was… hyperperceptive, but that he couldn’t use the faculty very well here. He told me what I was thinking. He said that if I scratched the ground where I was standing I would find a root, forking twice within six inches. But I didn’t know he could make me see things that aren’t there.”

She began sobbing once more and he poured her another snifter of brandy, then held her close against him until she quieted.

“You say they wanted to reach
me?”

“Yes. They said they needed bureau personnel with them.”

“And you agreed to deliver me?”

“More for your own good than for theirs. You see, they had convinced me that they were going to destroy the bureau. And always their actions were for the same, unvarying purpose—to save the world.”

“So you arranged to get me over here.”

Again, she nodded. “Uncle Bill’s accident in the shower was the first opportunity I had.”

“You
knew
he hadn’t gone Screamie?”

“That’s right. Between shouts of pain, his oaths were too coherent for that. So I put in that frantic call over the com-viewer. Kavorba planned to contact you the day after you arrived. But it never occurred to me that you might already know about the cell.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder and frowned up at his pensive silence.

“So,” he said, “you pretended you were suddenly interested in marrying me.”

“Oh no. They didn’t make me think
that.
I decided it weeks before. But when they told me about the danger you were in, I was all the more determined to make you quit.”

She stared into the embers of the dying fire. “And then—last Friday—when you let me believe there was someone else—I didn’t know what to do. Besides that, you seemed so dedicated to the bureau that I knew you would never leave it.”

“There wasn’t, isn’t anybody else,” he said, firming his grip on her shoulder.

“I know that now. The tricast explained everything—how I was tricked and deluded into a sense of loyalty to the Valorians, how important your work is, how you’ll have to keep on with it until all the cells are destroyed.”