Three to Conquer

18. The Onslaught

The attack came four days afterward, by which time the delay had given some the secret belief that nothing would ever happen.

At midday a large, official-looking car slid. Up to the gates barring the main entrance. Its driver was attired as a sergeant of military police, and its sole passenger was a grey-haired, autocratic man in the uniform of a four-star general. The sergeant showed the sentry an imposing pass, stamped, signed and ornamented with a large seal. The sentry scanned it slowly, making no attempt to open the gates. He smelled eucalyptus.

"Hurry up!" urged the sergeant authoritatively, while the general gazed forth with an air of stern reproof.

Though made nervous by the presence of high rank, the sentry took his time. He had been well-trained these last few days and understood that the gates were barred to God himself, unless a bell in a nearby hut clanged permission to enter.

The bell did not sound. In the hut, back of the fence, a watching agent pressed a stud. And in a building a quarter of a mile away a buzzer drew Harper's attention to the gate. He heard the whirr, ceased conversation with Rausch, listened, pressed another stud. A shrill peep sounded from the hut and an alarm siren started wailing over the main building.

Startled, the sentry dropped the pass, levelled his gun at the sergeant. Four agents leaped from the hut, weapons in hands. A dozen more appeared in the roadway behind the car.

Once more, the possessed displayed their inhuman contempt for bullets and sudden death. Without the slightest change of expression, the sergeant let the car charge forward. The sentry fired two seconds before the hood struck his chest. The car hit the gate squarely in the middle and exploded.

The gate, the entire front of the hut, the car, its occupants, the sentry and six agents flew to pieces. Four more agents lay mauled and dead. Six groaned by the fence, injured but alive.

Two heavily loaded cars screamed along the road and rocked through the gap. The wounded agents fired into them as they "passed, without visible result.

Neither vehicle got more than twenty yards beyond the wrecked gateway, despite the lunatic speed with which they had arrived. The alarm has sounded too promptly, the preparations for it were too.good, the drill too well-organized.

The leading car found its route blocked by an eighty-ton tank which lumbered forward spewing fire from three loopholes, riddling the target at the rate of two thousand bullets per minute. Shedding glass, metal splinters and blood, it slewed onto grass and overturned. Nothing stirred within it.

Its follower halted just inside the fence, disgorged eight men who spread fanwise and raced inward at an angle outside the arc of fire. Ignoring them, the tank busily wrecked their machine.

Something farther back gave a low, dull whoomp-whoomp and spurts of heavy vapor sprang from the ground one jump ahead of the invading eight. It did not halt them or give them pause. They pelted headlong through the curtain of mist, made another twenty yards, collapsed one by one.

A pair of them dropped clutching grenades in hands that lost grip as vapor compelled their minds to swirl into unconsciousness. Released plungers walloped detonators, there came two brief eruptions of turf, dirt and flesh.

Masked men picked up the remaining six as the tank crunched forward on noisy caterpillars and filled the torn gateway. Shots and shouts sounded far away at the other side of the area, where six men had picked off two patrolling guards, climbed the fence and been trapped. It was a foolhardy tactic, depending for success in sufficient diversion at the front gate.

Five minutes after the battle had ended, a convoy of armored cars toured the countryside for fifty miles around, Harper being a passenger in the first one. It was two hours before he picked up the only trace.

'There!" he said, pointing to an abandoned farmhouse.

They kept him out of reach while they made the attack. It produced three corpses and two badly wounded captives.

No more were findable before dawn when the search became complete. Harper- arrived back red-eyed, tousle-haired and fed up.

"Gould was in that first car," Norris informed him.

"Dead?"

"All of them, nine in number. That tank made a job of it." He shrugged, added, "Now we've the task of discovering the identities of all those involved, including those whose bodies got scattered around. After that, we must trace all their contacts and bring them in for clearance by you. I can see this lasting my lifetime."

Leeming entered the room. He was pale and drawn from lack of sleep. He said to Harper, "I'd like you to come take a look."

Leading the other through a series of corridors in which an armed guard stood at every corner, he reached a row of strongly barred cells, pointed into one.

"What can you tell me?" he asked in strained and anxious tones.

Harper looked. Inside, clad only in socks and pants, Riley sat aimlessly on the edge of a bed. His eyes were lackluster, but his beefy face held an expression of childish amusement.

"Well?" pressed Leeming. "Is the virus conquered?"

"Yes." He voiced it without triumph, and the other heard it without joy.

"You can say positively that it is no longer active within his system?"

"Yes."

Leeming hesitated, spoke solemnly. "I gave him what you said he feared the most. We had to try it. We just can't wait for a vaccine. First things come first — and humanity comes before the individual. So I called Gottlieb and Mathers of the Bacteriological Warfare Station and we tried it."

Harper made no remark.

"It has proved a cure," Leeming went on, "Physically there are no ill effects. He shows no symptoms of meningitis from that viewpoint. Nevertheless, he has paid a price. I know it, but I want your confirmation." He looked at Harper as if hoping for the "one chance in a thousand that he would be pronounced wrong. "What is the price?"

"Imbecility," said Harper.

"I hate to hear you say it." Leeming stood silently awhile and tasted the bitter ashes of victory, then said with faint hope, "There's another one in the next cell, A fellow named Moore."

Harper went to the next cell, gazed in and declared, "The same." Then something inside him gave way and he growled, "They're better off dead. Do you hear me? They have minds like porridge, all messed up to hell, and they're better off dead."

"They are dead," said Leeming, on the defensive. "They were dead when first brought to me. I cannot restore a human spirit already lost; I cannot recall an expelled soul. Science has its limits. When it gets that far, it will have ceased to be science. The best we can manage is to defend the community by destroying a source of infection. And that we have achieved."

"I know, I know. Don't think I'm blaming you, or anyone else." He parted Leeming's shoulder by way of comfort. "And don't reproach yourself, either. It's my illogical habit to regret the dirtier facts of life, even when they're unalterable."

"Everything that can be done will be done," assured Leeming, perking up slightly. 'We're treating all of them in the same way because at least it's swift and sure. After that, some of the country's best mental specialists will take them over. That's right out of my field but I wouldn't say they're beyond help. Maybe others can restore them to normalcy."

"Never," asserted Harper. "A battlefield is a torn and sterile area pock-marked with craters, Uttered with rubble and stinking of decomposition. That's what their brains are like."

He walked away, twitching fingers as he went.

It was two years before the last echoes of combat died away. That was when they called upon him to inspect and pass judgment on a small group of frightened people finally run down in faraway places. These were the only remaining contacts with any of the possessed. None proved subject to other-world mastery.

During that long time Harper had looked over more than eight thousand suspects, many of them shipped back from overseas by co-operation of warned and wary governments. In the first week he had discovered four men who were not men, and in the second week one woman who was not a woman. After that, there had been no more. The world had cleared itself of mental sepsis.

The missing space-vessel had been discovered lying in a hundred fathoms beyond Puget Sound, and salvage outfits were still toiling to rise it piecemeal. Scientists were busily devising positive means of protection for a second Venusian expedition and seeking an effective weapon with which to free the Wends — an agile, intelligent, lemur-like creature that could speak.

"Vat silvin, Wend?"

The Lunar Development Company had won its suit and the powers-that-be had received a legalistic rap across the knuckles. A reward of five thousand dollars had been used to start a fund for the dependents of spacemen, and already the total sum had passed the million mark. From Harper's viewpoint, these were by far the two most pleasing items to date.

But no heavy hand bashed open his door, nobody brushed his papers aside to make seating room on his desk, nobody claimed some of his time for an exchange of insults. Riley was away in a big house in the country, helping with the gardening, doing petty chores, smiling at chirping sparrows, being gently led to his bedroom when sleepy time came. Like all the others, a little child. He would never be any different. Never, never, never.

So far as Harper personally was concerned, the aftereffects of the fracas would remain with him all his fife. Not only in memory, but also in immediate circumstances.

For instance, business had grown as he expanded into ancillary products. Forty men now worked in the plant. One of them, Weiss, was not only a highly skilled instrument maker but also a government stooge. Conway's eye. He could blind it by firing the man — only to be watched by another. There was no way of getting rid of constant observation.

His mail was watched. There were many times when he suspected a tap on his telephone fine. Whenever he made a swift move by car or plane, he was followed. Norris or Rausch called once a month for an idle chat, designed to remind him that the memory of authority is long and unforgiving.

Yes, they feared him — but feared other things more.

Another thirty months crawled by, making four and a half years in all. Then the miracle happened. It was unbelievable. But it was true.

He was about to take his car from a parking lot when he caught a brief flicker of alien thought. It struck him like a physical blow. The direction and range were sensed automatically: from the south, about four miles away. A distance far beyond his normal receptivity.

With sweating hand on the car's door, he stood and listened again, seeking it directively. There it came. It was not alien; it had only seemed to be so because new and strange, like nothing previously encountered. It had power and clarity as different from other thought-streams as champagne differs from water.

He probed at it and immediately it came back with shock equal to his own. Getting into his car, he sat there shakily. His mind fizzed with excitement and there were butterflies in his stomach while he remained staring through the windshield and apparently daydreaming. Finally, he drove to a large restaurant, ordered dinner.

She had a table to herself, at the opposite end of the room. A strawberry blonde, small, plump, in her middle thirties. Her face was pleasantly freckled and she had a tiptilted nose. At no time did she glance his way; neither did he pay any attention to her when he departed.

After that they met frequently, without ever coming near each other or exchanging one vocal word. Sometimes he ate in one place while she sipped coffee in another half a mile away. Other times he mused absently in the office while she became thoughtful in a distant store. They took in the same show, he in one part of the theatre and she in another, and neither saw much of the performance.

They were waiting, waiting for circumstances to change with enough naturalness and inevitability to fool the watchers. The opportunity was coming; they both knew that. Moira was wearing a diamond ring.

In due course, Moira departed with congratulations and a wedding gift. Twenty girls answered the call for her successor. Harper interviewed 'them all, according each one the same courtesy, putting the same questions, displaying no visible favoritism one way or the other.

He chose Frances, a strawberry blonde with a plump figure and pert nose.

Ten days later Norris arrived on his periodic visit, looked over the newcomer, favored her with a pleasant smile, mentally defined her as nice and nothing more. He started the chitchat while Harper listened and gazed dreamily at a point behind the other's back.

"For the fiftieth time, will you marry me?"

"For the fiftieth time, yes. But you must be patient. We'll fall into it gradually."

"So this fellow showed the manager a bunch of documents certifying him to be a bank examiner from head office," droned Norris. "The manager fell for it, and—" He paused, added in louder tones, "Hey! Are you paying attention?"

"Of course. Carry on. I can hardly wait for the climax."

"I don't want to be patient. I don't want to be gradual. I want to fall into it fast."

"You know better than that. We must be careful."

"I want children just like us."

"Wait!"

She slipped paper into her typewriter, adjusted it, pink-faced and smiling,

"That was his downfall," finished Norris, completely innocent of the byplay. "So he tied himself up for life."

"Don't we all?" said Harper, hiding his bliss.