Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer by The invaders are Coming Page A

with his warm
professional smile and his cold eyes watching her. Libby shuddered.
Everything in her years of psychologist's training screamed out whenever Adams
came near her, and she had wished for the thousandth time that somehow somebody
in the whole great, sprawling social-and-psychological Stability Control
organization that was DEPCO would break down just once and say exactiy what he was thinking in plain unadorned English
instead of skirting and backing and filling and muddying up the already muddy
waters with psychiatric jargon and fuzzy, suspicious, defensive little ideas.
    Not
that Adams had mentioned Julian, of course. Not a word about Julian. No request
to review her case-work on him, no suggestion that a machine-analysis of her
reports on him might be in order . . . nothing as straightforward as that from
the DEPCO Director. Instead, a lot of smooth, innocent DEPCO jargon about the
threat that an aggressive, unstable, ambitious personality in a position of
responsibility presented to the smooth functioning of a Truly Stable Society
{she could quote Vanner and Larchmont page and
verse); some "thoughts" on her sworn duties as a Department of
Control psychotherapist to help identify and weed out such unstable
personalities before they could constitute a threat; some very vague and veiled
and thoroughly nasty remarks to the effect that fornication and psychotherapy
were not precisely synonymous and that the former could not really serve as an
adequate substitute for the latter, no matter what the non-professional
relationship of the therapist and the patient.
    Adams
hadn't said a single word about Julian, but it was there; he had been talking
about Julian every inch of the way, and he knew it, and she knew it, and he
knew that she knew it.
    She
hadn't slapped his face, but she had wanted to, and he knew that, too. There
was no voiced threat when he had left her, only the least tangible of
implications, and yet Libby knew beyond any shadow of doubt that something had
happened last night, something bad, and that Adams knew about it, and hence
DEPCO, and that neither Adams nor DEPCO liked it.
    The
elevator stopped, and Libby stepped across to the DIA reception desk. "I
have an appointment to see Mr. Bahr," she told the girl.
    "Do you have a
pass?"
    "I have an appointment."
    "I'm sorry, Miss. Mr. Bahr has canceled all appointments.
You'd need a special authorization."
    So
there was something in the wind ... all that commotion on the Foreign and Eastern news nets
about an explosion at Wildwood. "Let me speak to him, then." She
picked up the desk phone, started to dial Julian's extension.
    "I'm
sorry, Miss." The receptionist gave Libby an innocent stare. "Mr.
Bahr gave orders not to be interrupted."
    Libby
reached into her handbag and set her white DEPCO card on the desk under the
girl's nose. "If I have to get a force-order to talk to him," she
said icily, "Mr. Bahr is going to be very unhappy about it." She was
surprised, and then irritated that Bahr had forgotten their appointment. No,
not forgotten ... his memory was very
good. He had ignored it. A moment later the receptionist answered the
switchboard, flushed, and nodded to Libby.
    "Hello,
Julian? Libby." He answered something, quite abrupt. "But I
can't," she protested. "Not over the phone. And it's too hot down
there anyway." She pulled the receiver away from her ear and glanced
angrily at the ceiling as the invective grated over the wire, quite audible ten
feet away. "All right," she said finally. "I know you don't give
a damn. On the other hand, I do. We don't just skip appointments . . ." She
put in the knife. "It looks very bad on a Stability Report, you know . .
."
    A
moment later she put the phone down and snapped her handbag shut with finality.
She smiled warmly at the receptionist. "He'll see me," she said.
    The long, high-ceilinged DIA headquarters was
the center of a storm of subdued but feverish activity. There were half a
hundred men there as Libby