Strangers

Halbourgs' home to determine if Emmy had acquired unusual powers subsequent to her own miraculous recovery. What he found there beggared description, and he immediately isolated the entire Halbourg family from the press and public before their secret was discovered.
        Now all five Halbourgs were in an FBI safe-house, under the watchful eyes of six agents who'd been informed only that the family was as much to be feared as protected and that no agent was to be alone with any member of the family at any time. If the Halbourgs made threatening or unusual moves, they would all be killed instantly.
        "But I think it's all pointless now," Polnichev said on the phone from Chicago. "I think we've lost control of it. ' It's spread, and we've no hope of containing it again. So we might as well call an end to the cover-up, go public."
        "Are you mad?" Leland demanded.
        "If it's come to the point where we have to kill people, lots of people, like the Halbourgs and the Tolks and all the witnesses there in Nevada, in order just to keep the story contained, then the cost of containment has gotten too damn high."
        Leland Falkirk was furious. "You've lost sight of what's at stake here. My God, man, we're no longer merely trying to keep the news from the public. That's almost immaterial now. Now, we're trying to protect our entire species from obliteration. If we go public, and if then we decide to use violence to contain the infection, every goddamn politician and bleeding-heart will be second-guessing us, interfering, and before you know it, we'll have lost the war!"
        "But I think what's being proven here is that the danger isn't that great," Polnichev said. "Sure, I've told the men guarding the Halbourgs to regard them as a threat, but I don't really believe they're a danger to us. That little Emmy… she's a darling, not a monster. I don't know how the power got in Cronin or how he conveyed it to the girl, but I'm almost willing to bet my life that the power is the only thing inside the child. The only thing inside any of them. If you could meet Emmy and watch her, Colonel! She's a delight. All evidence points to the fact that we should regard what's happening as the greatest event in the history of mankind."
        "Of course," Leland said coldly, "that's what an enemy like this would want us to believe. If we can be convinced that accommodation and surrender are a great blessing, we'll be conquered without a fight."
        "But Colonel, if Cronin and Corvaisis and Tolk and Emmy have been infected, if they're no longer human, or at least no longer like you and me, they wouldn't advertise by performing miraculous cures and feats of telekinesis. They'd keep their amazing abilities secret in order to spread their infection to more people without detection."
        Leland was unmoved by that argument. "We don't know exactly how this thing works. Maybe a person, once infected, surrenders control to the parasite, becomes a slave. Or to answer the point you've just made, maybe the relationship between the host and parasite is benign, mutually supportive - and maybe the host doesn't even know the parasite is inside him, which would explain why the Halbourg girl and the others don't know where their power comes from. But in either case, that person is no longer strictly human. And in my estimation, Polnichev, that person can no longer be trusted. Not an inch. Now, for God's sake, you've got to take the entire Tolk family into custody, too. Isolate them at once."
        "As I told you, Colonel, journalists surround the Tolk house. If I go in there with agents and take the Tolks into custody in front of a score of reporters, our cover-up is blown. And although I no longer believe in the cover-up, I'm not going to sabotage it. I know my duty."
        "You've at least got agents watching the house?"
        "Yes."
        "What about the Mendozas? If Tolk infected the boy the way Cronin apparently infected him…"
        "We're watching the Mendozas," Polnichey said. "Again, we can't make a bold move because of the reporters."
        The other problem was Father Stefan Wycazik. The priest had been to the Mendozas' apartment and then to the Halbourg house before Foster Polnichev had known what was going on at either location. Later, an FBI agent had seen Wycazik at barricades near the Sharkle house in Evanston, at the very moment when Sharkle had detonated his bomb. But no one knew