Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer by The invaders are Coming Read Free Book Online

permit unexplained incidents to remain
long unexplained. That balance had teetered once, in 1965, and the world still
bore the scars of that brief, bitter war. After the violent economic crash that
had engulfed the world in 1995, a different sort of balance had been forged,
but still the balance was there.
    It
was clear that whatever was behind the occurrences had to be discovered.
Project Frisco, under Julian Bahr's diligent direction, had thrown the entire
striking power of the DIA into a swift, silent search for a pattern behind the
occurrences. And Project Frisco, until now, had failed. '
    For
eleven months they had run up against a blank wall. A thousand leads traced
down, led nowhere. A thousand blind alleys were carefully explored. No clue to
the enemy's intentions, nor even to the enemy's
identity. Only the constantly growing conviction that somewhere in the pattern,
there was an enemy . . .
    And now, Wildwood. For the first time, a chink in the armor, a possible break . . .
    And John McEwen was afraid
to go on.
    "Listen
to me, Mac," Bahr said. "This is the time to move in, not the time to
sit on the fence and worry. We've got something here at last that we can get
our hands on. This major . . ."
    Weakly,
McEwen shook his head. "The DIA has its limits, Julian. An atomic theft .
. . this is out of our hands."
    Bahr's
face hardened for just a moment. Then he swung a chair over toward the
director, smiling and calm, and looked into the older man's tired face.
"Mac, let's get this thing straightened out right now. I don't think
you've thought this Wildwood incident out yet." He sensed the reaction
from Carmine and the others, felt their eyes on his back. "The thing that
happened last night at Wildwood changes the whole nature of Project Frisco. We
can't back out now even if we wanted to. We've got to hang on if it kills
us."
    McEwen shook his head
again. "I ... I don't see . .
."
    "Mac,
whoever stole that U-metal made a mistake last night. A very
bad mistake."
    "Mistake?" said
McEwen.
    "There
was nothing wrong with those exit monitors. They were working fine. You
couldn't get a radium-painted watch dial past them without tripping the alarm,
and they were permanently sealed so they couldn't have been disconnected."
    McEwen
looked up. "Then you think Alexander was telling the truth?"
    "Not
necessarily," Bahr insisted. "But some things have checked out, and
there is one simple fact that we just can't ignore. Whoever took that U-metal
out of the plant had it so effectively shielded that it didn't trigger the exit
monitors."
    McEwen
blinked. "Julian, that doesn't make sense. The very minimum shielding for
that stuff would be a foot-thick slab of lead. Nobody could have carried that out past the guards. They won't even let you
carry out a mechanical pencil."
    "But a man could get a
property pass," Bahr said sofdy .
    "For
a truck-load of U-metal and shielding?"
    "Oh,
no. But maybe for a briefcase."
    "You're not making
sense," McEwen said. "Those slugs . . ."
    Bahr
slammed his fist down on the desk. "Mac, it happened! Can't you begin to see this now? It happened! Of course it doesn't make sense; there's no
earthly way anyone could cram diose slugs and
shielding into a small package and waltz out the gate with them, but that is exactly
the thing that happened; it must have
happened." His eyes were bright on the director's face. "All right,
we have to work with it, find out how it
could have happened. Nothing yet in Project Frisco has made any sense, but now
a pattern is beginning to take shape. Suppose a special shield was used . . .
a very special shield, say, maybe just a monomolecular layer of neutrons packed
in tight like the tiles in a mosaic . . . an invisible skin built into the wall
of a briefcase, completely impermeable to any radiation . . ."
    "There
isn't any such shield," McEwen said flatly. "If the Eastern Bloc were
within five years of something like that BRINT would have told us long ago. And
nobody in this country