Chapter 2

Those in the know in Washington, D.C., upon seeing Brent Taber rush to a taxi or dodge a pedestrian on Pennsylvania Avenue, could well say, “There walks power.” But there were few indeed who possessed enough knowledge of the Washington inner structure to be able to make this observation.

Brent looked more like a coal heaver than a public servant with a well-oiled escalator into the White House. He appeared more able to direct a gang of dock workers than to jockey a delicate issue through the bloody jungle of national politics. Many of the people who accepted this deception did so at their peril and were not around any more. To others not so foolish, Brent Taber symbolized a completely necessary facet of a working democracy--secret government. This necessity sprang from the realization that even an open society must maintain areas of privacy or it is doomed.

Such was the man, and such was his mission of the moment--an issue of the utmost secrecy. So hush-hush, in fact, was this mission that when Brent Taber arrived at his office that morning and found Senator Crane pacing his reception-room carpet, his heavy eyebrows gathered and he began mentally checking his “tight ship” for a leak.

Senator Crane was the exact opposite of Brent, in that he looked to be exactly what he was; a figure rigidly type-cast to the role of a blustering, tactless servant of the people. Which, in Crane’s case, meant that he was a servant of Crane’s career and any faction of his supporters that could further it. Still, the Senator could not be called dishonest. He was merely a flexible rationalizer. He sincerely believed that what was good for Crane was good for the “folks back home.”

And just now, he felt that a knowledge of what the hell was going on in Brent Taber’s orbit was probably not good for anybody and had better be aired.

As Brent entered, Crane came right to the point. “Goddamn it, Taber, just what in blazes is going on around here?”

Brent’s thick lips hardly moved, a characteristic that Crane found infuriating because that was the way shady characters talked into Senatorial investigation microphones and it looked pretty bad. But Brent’s words came quite clear: “Routine business, Senator--an honest effort to get a day’s work done.”

“You mean to tell me the meeting that’s been set up here is routine?”

Brent shrugged. “Meetings are meetings, Senator.”

Crane ticked it off on his fat fingers. “Pender of the Army, Bright of the Navy, Jones of the Air Force, Hagen of the FBI, Wilson from Treasury--they all trooped through here into your private conference room.” He pointed pompously at his own chest. “But Crane of the Senate--”

“You forgot Birch of the State Department,” Brent cut in. “Or hasn’t he arrived yet?”

“--Crane of the Senate is barred! Now just what in the hell--?”

There are times for tact and times for bluntness, and this was a time, Brent decided, for the latter. “What goes on here, Senator,” he said, “is none of your business. Otherwise, you would have been invited.”

Crane’s face darkened and Brent thought pleasantly of a brain hemorrhage blowing the top of his fat head off. But this was too much to hope for.

“Brent,” Crane exploded, “I’ll get you! So help me, I’ll get you! Just who the hell do you think you are--demeaning the dignity of the United States Senate? Just who are you to say what the people should or should not know?”

“Decisions of that nature are made upstairs, Senator. I don’t presume to possess the judgment needed in such matters.”

“You’re an arrogant bureaucrat! Your kind comes and goes because when you get too goddamned arrogant the people rise up in their wrath and knock you off.”

Marcia Holly, Brent’s secretary, was studiously transcribing some notes and Brent turned his scowl on her because, damn it, she was laughing like hell at the whole thing. And, by God, a secretary didn’t have the right to laugh at a United States Senator, even with her eyes, no matter how much a congenital idiot he was.

“I’m sorry, Senator,” Brent said. “If you have a complaint, please take it up with my superiors. Just now I--”

“Your superiors? And who the devil are they? Who can find them? Where do they have offices? Go around trying to find your superiors and nobody ever heard of you.”

Brent half smiled as he felt a sneaking admiration for Crane. The son-of-a-bitch had a disarming quality of honesty. If he planned to knife you, he drove straight in, the knife held high.

“One of the disadvantages of being a negative personality, Senator,” Brent murmured.

“Sure! You’re about as negative as a charging grizzly,” Crane snorted and headed for the door as though his air had been cut off.

After his bulk had vanished into the corridor, Brent turned a scowl on Marcia Holly. “And what are you snickering about.”

She raised large blue, innocent eyes. “Me? I? Oh, golly. I just found a cute little Freudian slip in these notes and--”

“Shut up. Are they all here?”

“Birch of the State Department sent regrets. A duty call on the Tasmanian Embassy or something.”

“Okay--and next week he’ll be screaming to high heaven about being left out.”

Marcia’s laughing eyes agreed. “Ain’t it the truth?” she marveled.

Brent strode past her and expertly mussed her sleek hairdo in a quick gesture. As he entered his private conference room, he turned and grinned at her silent fury.

Inside, they were all waiting for him, seated around a teakwood table. The wall-to-wall carpeting was wine-red. The chairs were deep and upholstered. And the men who sat in them were distinguished only by their surroundings and their uniforms. Their metal and their worth were hidden inside.

Brent moved to the end of the table and scanned them moodily. “Okay, gentlemen. I’ll talk. Then if you have any questions--shoot them.” He took a deep breath and began:

“We are faced with a situation that must be kept top secret for two reasons: First, it may be the first move in an attempt to subjugate or destroy our planet; two, it is so utterly ridiculous on its face that a public announcement would be greeted by hoots of laughter from pole to pole.” Brent’s ugly scowl deepened at what he seemed to feel was an injustice. “Even the Eskimos would get a yack out of it.”

The group waited, withholding judgment, evidently waiting to see whether or not it was a laughing matter. They were conceding nothing. Brent studied them for a moment and then went on.

“Last week, in Denver, early in the morning,” he said, “a man was found dead on a residential-section street. There was no apparent cause of death. A routine autopsy revealed some peculiar things about the man’s insides. For one thing, he had two hearts--”

Jones of the Air Force, a dignified, gray-haired man, paused in firing his cigar and gave the impression he was lighting his way through the darkness. Bright of the Navy, a thin man with a huge Adam’s apple, allowed it to bob three times in deference to the startling nature of Brent’s statement. Pender of the Army raised one eyebrow and let it fall. To a keen observer, Hagen of the FBI would have revealed prior knowledge by reacting not at all.

His mind was on the kid. He was thinking, Christ! With all the damned miracle drugs and characters orbiting the earth in crazy capsules, they still haven’t figured out a way to keep a six-year-old from getting a cold. He remembered the kid waving from the window yesterday morning--when he’d been ordered East to attend this clambake--standing there beside Miriam, waving good-bye and barking like a sea lion. What the hell was wrong with doctors? Why didn’t they get with it on a stupidly simple thing like the common cold?

“ ... two hearts and--” Brent reached to the left and pulled down a chart on a window shade-type rack that stood beside his chair, “--a rather interesting arrangement of the internal organs.” He pointed with a thick finger. “You’ll notice that the liver is exceptionally small, while the kidneys are large enough to service a horse. You’ll note also that while the man had testicles, there is no prostrate gland.”

The group waited in a kind of guarded abeyance that could be easily sensed. Their silence gave the impression that they were asking: Is somebody kidding us?

But there was certainly no lightness in Brent’s manner. His arm dropped and he scowled at the far end of the table as he said, “Now, the blood. There was something strange about the blood--”

The door from Marcia Holly’s reception room-office opened and she came in silently, followed by a white-coated waiter who set a tray on the table. The coffeepot on the tray was silver; the cups, fine china; the napkins, linen.

“--something very strange about the blood in that it conformed to all necessary specifications and yet it had a synthetic quality about it...”

Goose pimples formed on Hagen’s neck and walked gently down his spine. Nothing was missing in this setup--synthetic blood, two hearts, oversize kidneys. Hagen got a quick mental flash of a barker outside a circus sideshow: He walks like a man. He talks like a man. But for a thin dime, folks, you can see--

It was something to think and wonder about. And back in Chicago, he’d had lots of company. Everybody in the office that night had wondered, and you could see the vague uneasiness in their eyes as the creature sat, acting like a human being and, at the same time, like nothing from this world. You could see a vague revulsion in the people surrounding the creature. There was also uncertainty, and this from men who were required by their profession to be fairly certain about most things.

“The blood,” Jones of the Air Force said. “Could it have been a--well, a new kind of plasma?”

“Hardly. You see, the variation was almost theoretical, if you can understand the term as I’m using it. Drawn from an ordinary human being, it would not have been questioned. It was just that in the light of other oddities in his man, it didn’t seem right, somehow.”

“Pretty vague,” Bright of the Army said.

“This I’ll grant you.” Brent said. “Anybody for coffee?”

Nobody was for coffee so Marcia and the waiter retired and Brent said, “Vague, I’ll grant you. But let’s get on with it. Two days later, a man, in every way identical, was found lying in the street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was alive, but in a dying condition, and he succumbed on the way to the hospital. Cause of death, as in the first place, undeterminable. But the medics think it was some malfunctioning of the lungs.

“All in all, gentlemen, eight identical specimens have been picked up in various American cities. Five are dead, two more are now in a comatose condition, at last report, and may very well be dead at this time. One is still alive and relatively healthy...”

Alive and relatively healthy. The son-of-a-bitch! Hagen felt an odd senseless rage against the creature they’d picked up in a Chicago bar.

Ordinarily it would have been a simple bull-pen, night-court case--a loud-mouth drunk refusing to pay for a drink. But much of his talk, anent enemy invasion, internal destruction, and civilian chaos, had been a little too rough for the other barflies to swallow, and complaints had been made. Later, when Bureau men went around trying to get something tangible in the way of evidence, they found themselves dealing in frustration. The complainants had left without giving their names. The barkeep really hadn’t heard anything. The actual charges had gone up in smoke. But by that time, Washington was very much interested. The man was questioned and it was the damnedest thing Hagen had ever gone through...

“By identical,” Jones of the Air Force said, “you of course mean--”