~ * ~
Two weeks before the arrival of the third Outsider—the third of the V, excluding the one which had been shot down—the last of the twenty-seven satellites took up its orbit, and the Earth enjoyed its first easy breath since the beginning of the Attack—for so it was called.
Due to high-efficiency circuits and components, the fuel consumption of the electronic setup in the satellites was very small. They held their orbits without power, except for an occasional automatic correction-kick. They could operate without servicing for years. It was assumed that by the time they needed servicing, astrogation would have developed to the point where they could be refueled—and recharged—by man-carrying ships. If technology did not solve that problem, little harm could be done by the silent, circling machines; when, at long last, they slipped from their arbitrary orbits and spiraled in to crash, so many years would have passed that the question was, momentarily, academic.
And even before the twenty-seventh satellite was launched, factories were retooling for a long dreamt-of project—a Space Station, which would circle the Earth in an orbit close enough to be reached by man-carrying rockets, which would rest and refuel there and take off again for deep Space, without the crushing drag of Earth’s gravity.
The third Outsider took up its position, as Dr. Simmons had prophesied, equidistant from the others with the Earth in the center, rolling nakedly under them. As in the case of the arrivals of the other two, there was no sign of its presence but the increasing sound on the sixty megacycle band. Radar failed utterly to locate it until, suddenly, it was in its position—a third blur against the distant stars, a third indeterminate, fifteen-hundred-foot shape on the radarscopes.
The Board of Strategy was happily, almost gleefully, busy again. Their earlier work within the field of the probability of human works, faded to insignificance against the probabilities inherent in the Attack. There was another major difference, too; they came out in the open. They plastered the world with warnings, cautions, and notices, many of them with no more backing than the vivid imaginings of some early science fiction writer—plus probability. Although logic indicated that the first blows would be in the form of self-guided missiles, thousands of other possibilities were considered. Spy rays, for example; radio hams the world over were asked to keep winding coils, keep searching the spectrum for any unusual frequencies. Telepathic amplifiers, for another example; asylums were circularized for any radical changes in the quality and quantity of insanity and even abnormal conduct. The literary critics were called in to watch for any trends in creative writing which seemed to have any inhuman content. Music was watched the same way, as were the graphic arts. Farmers and fire wardens were urgently counseled to watch for any plant life, particularly predatory or prehensile or drug-bearing plant life, which may develop. Sociologists were dragged from their almost drunken surveys of this remarkable turn of social evolution, and were ordered right back into it again, trying to extrapolate something harmful to come from this functional, logical, unified planet. Only the nationalists found harm, and they were—well, unfashionable.
The bombs came about a month after the third Outsider took up his post.
The whole world watched. Everything stopped. Every television screen pictured radarscopes, and the whip-voiced announcer at Planetary Defense Central in Geneva, which had at long last regained its place as a world center.
The images showed Outsiders A, B, and C in rapid succession. So well synchronized was the action that the three images could have been superimposed, and would have seemed like one picture. Each ship launched two bombs; of each two, one turned lazily toward Earth, and the other hovered.
“Out of range of the satellites,” said the announcer. “We shall have to wait. The satellites will detect the bombs when they are within two hundred miles, and will then launch their interceptors. Our Earth-based rockets are aiming now.”
There was a forty-minute wait. Neighbor called neighbor; illuminated news-banners on the sides of buildings gave the dreaded news. Buses and trains stopped while their passengers and crews flocked to televisors. There was a hushed tension, world-wide.
“Flash! Satellite 24 has released an interceptor. Stand by; perhaps we can get a recording of the scanner . . . one moment please . . . Anything from Monitor 24b yet, Jim? On the air now? Check . . . Ladies and gentlemen, if you can be patient a moment; we are recording pictures of the radarscope at Monitor 24b in Lhasa. It will be only a few . . . here it is now.”
Flickering at first, then clearing, came the Lhasa picture. The monitor station there kept a fix on Satellite 24 from horizon to horizon, as did the satellite’s other two stations in San Francisco and Madrid. The picture showed the familiar lines of the satellite. Abruptly a short, thick tube began to protrude from the hull. When extended about eight feet, it swung over about forty degrees on its ball-and-socket base. From its tip shot a small cylinder; there was a brief flicker of jets. “The interceptor,” said the loud-speakers unnecessarily.
The scene flashed to the Earth-based interceptor station at White Sands. A huge rocket mounted with deceptive slowness, balanced on a towering column of flame, and disappeared into the sky.
Then, bewilderingly, the scene was repeated for Monitor Stations 22c and 25a, as their satellites sensed the bombs coming from Outsiders B and C. White Sands sent two more giant rockets up as fast as they could set the seeking gear.
Then, after an interminable four hours, came the picture which was to stand, forever, as the high-point in newsreel coverage. It was the image picked up from the relaying television camera in the nose of Satellite 24’s little interceptor.
It fixed the image of the Outsider’s bomb, and it would not let go. The bomb, at first only a speck, increased in size alarmingly. It was a perfect cylinder, seen in perspective. There was nothing streamlined about it. It was quite featureless except for a strange indistinction around one end, as if it were not in focus. It was like a small patch of the substance of the Outsiders themselves.
The image grew. It filled the screen—
And then there was nothing.
But cameras all over Europe picked up and relayed the image of that awe-inspiring explosion. Silently a ball of light appeared in the sky, expanding, flickering through the entire spectrum, sending out a wheel of blue and silver rays. It lasted for a full fifteen seconds, growing in size and in brilliance, before it began to fade, and it left a pastel ghost of itself for a minute afterward. Speckles of random radiation cluttered the screens then, and there were no more actual pictures of the action.
The entire earth gave a concerted shout of joy. In dozens of languages and dialects, the fierce, triumphant sound roared skyward. Got one! And the bells and the whistles picked up the cry, frightening sleeping birds, sending crocodiles scuttling off river banks, waking children over the world. It was like a thousand New Year’s Eves, simultaneously.
What happened next, happened quickly.
A White Sands rocket got the second bomb. For some reason there was no atomic explosion. Perhaps the proximity gear failed. Perhaps it was neutralized, though that would seem impossible, since the seeking gear obviously did not fail. It was not as spectacular as the first interception, but it was quite as effective. The purely physical impact as the huge interceptor struck the tiny bomb all but pulverized them both.
The third bomb breezed past its satellite interceptor, its White Sands interceptor, and a second-stratum satellite. It was observed that on getting within range of the seeking-radar of each of these, it became enveloped in the misty, coruscating field which characterized the Outsider ships. Apparently this field completely confused the radar; it was as if the radar detected it but didn’t know what to do with it—”same spot we were in a year ago,” as Dr. Simmons remarked tersely.
The bomb entered the atmosphere—
And burned up like a meteor.
Then it was that the most incredible thing of all happened.
The three hovering bombs—one by
each Outsider—slowly retreated toward the parent vessel, as if being reeled in.
They recalled their bombs.
Thereafter they lay quietly, the three Outsiders. They did not move, they made no move. They gasped their triple pantings, and they filled thousands of photographic plates with their indeterminate muzziness, and that was all.
Four giant rockets out of five, which were sent after the invaders, missed their mark completely. The fifth, which was equipped with an ingenious seeking device based on correlation of its target with an actual photographic transparency of the target, apparently struck Outsider B. There was a splendid atomic display, and again the world went mad with joy.
But when the area could be observed again, Outsider B was still there. And there it stayed. There they all stayed.
A cyclic, stiffly controlled panic afflicted the Earth, as a sense of impending doom was covered by humanity’s classic inability to fix its attention for very long to any one thing; alternated to reactive terror, swung away from terror again because life must go on, because you must eat and he must love and they must make a bet on the World Series. . . .
Seven months passed.
~ * ~
Dr. Simmons plodded into his private office and shut the door. He was tired—much more tired than in the days, earlier that year, when he was working an eighteen-hour day. The more a man does, the more he can do, he reflected wearily, until the optimum is reached; and the optimum is way up yonder, if he cares about what he’s doing. He sat down at his desk and leaned back. And if he cares just as much as ever, but there just isn’t as much to do, he gets tired. He gets very, very tired . . .
He palmed his face, blinked his eyes, sighed and, leaning forward, flipped the annunciator switch. His night secretary said brightly: “Yes, doctor?”
“Don’t let anything or anybody in here for two hours. And take care of that cold.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, doctor; I will.”
A good kid. . . . He rose and went to the washroom which adjoined his office. Stepping into the shower stall, he lifted up the soap dish, which had a concealed hinge, and pressed a stud under it. He counted off four seconds, released the stud, and pulled on the hot water faucet. The back wall of the shower swung toward him. He stepped through into his own private laboratory—the one where no one else ever went.
He kicked the door closed behind him and looked around. I almost wish I could do it all over again. The things that have happened here, the dreams . . .
His thought cut out in a sudden, numbing shock.
“What are you doing here?”
The intruder accepted the question, turned it over, altered it and gave it back. “What have you been doing here?” rasped the colonel.
The physicist sank into an easy-chair and gaped at his brother. His pulse was pounding, and for a moment his cheek twitched. “Just give me a second,” he said wryly. “This is a little like finding someone in your bed.” He took out a handkerchief and touched his dry lips with it. “How did you get in here?”
Leroy Simmons was sitting behind a worktable. He had his hat, with its polished visor, in the crook of his arm, and his buttons were brilliant. He looked as if he were sitting for a particular kind of portrait. The doctor jumped up. “You’ve got to have a drink!” he said emphatically.
The colonel put his hat on the table and leaned forward. The act wrinkled his tunic and showed up his bald spot. “What’s the matter with you, Muscles?”
The doctor shook his head. He doesn’t look like a man of distinction any more, he thought regretfully. “I feel a little better now,” he said. “What brings you here, Leroy?”
“I’ve been watching you for months,” said the colonel. “I’ve had to do it all myself. This is . . . it’s too big.” He looked completely miserable. “I followed you and watched you and checked up on you. I took measurements all around these offices, and located this room. I was in here a dozen times, looking for the gimmick on the door.”
“Oh, yes. Always dropping around to see me when I wasn’t around, and saying you’d wait. My secretary told me.”
“Her!” The syllable was eloquent. “She’s no help. I never saw anyone harder to get information from.”
“It’s an unbeatable combination in a secretary,” he grinned. “Infinite tact, and no facts. She’s not in it, Leroy. No one is.”
“No one but you. I notice you’re not denying anything.”
The doctor sighed. “You haven’t charged me with anything yet. Suppose you tell me what you know, or what you think you know.”
The colonel took a somber-backed little notebook out of his pocket. “I have no associates,” he said grimly, “either. It’s all in here. Some of it is Greek to me, but some I understand—worse luck. I wish I didn’t. You have something to do with the Outsider, don’t you?”
His brother looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded, as if he had asked and answered a question.
“Yes.”
“You know where they come from, what they’re going to do, how they operate—everything about them?”
“That’s right.”
“They have given you—information. They have given you a way to”—he referred to the book, his lips moving as he read; they always had—”expand and concentrate binding energy into a self-sustaining field.”
“No.”
“No? You have all the formulas. You wrote thousands of pages of notes on the subject. Your diary mentions it repeatedly—and as if it was an accomplished fact.”
“It is. I didn’t get it from the Outsiders. They got it from me.”
There was a jolting silence. The colonel turned quite white. “That . . . does . . . it,” he whispered. “I knew you were in contact with the enemy, Muscles. I tried my best to believe that you were simply working them for information, so that we could use it against them. A risky game, and you were playing it alone. After I went through your papers here, I just couldn’t believe it any more. You seemed to be working along with them. And now you tell me that you actually are supplying them with devices we haven’t got!”
The scientist nodded gravely.
The colonel’s hand, under the table, moved to his wrist. He touched a button on the small transmitter there, and pulled a slide over.
Dr. Simmons said, thickly: “Leroy. Would you mind telling me how you got on to this?”
“I’ll tell you, all right. It started with a routine checkup of supplies and equipment into these laboratories, for auditing purposes. No production is run without cost accounting, even by the government. Even by a Planetary one. It was brought to my attention that certain things came in here that apparently never went out. When I went over the reports and saw they were correct, I wrote a memo which cleared you completely, on my authority, and I killed the investigation. I—picked it up myself.”
“Good heavens, why?”
“If I found anything,” the colonel said with difficulty, “I wanted to take care of it myself.”
“Sort of keep the family name sweet and clean?”
“Not that. You’re too clever. You always were. I . . . I’ll tell you something. I was appointed to the Board because of you. I never could have made it otherwise. The Board figured I’d be an intimate link with you; that I could see you any time, when no one else could.”
Of course knew that, thought the doctor. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”
“Oh, cut it out,” said the colonel. “You played me for a sucker all along, and through me, the Board.”
Correct again, the physicist thought. He said: “Nonsense, Leroy. I just withheld information from time to time.”
“You gave us tips,” said the colonel bitterly. “You sent us off on goose chase after goose chase. And we pushed the whole world around the way you wanted us to.”
The boys real sharp tonight, thought Dr. Simmons, and added to himself, He’s such a swell, sincere character. I hate to see him go through all this. “And why does all th
is make you squelch the Board’s investigation and pick it up yourself?”
“I know how slick you are,” said the colonel doggedly. “You just might talk a jury or a court-martial out of shooting you. I don’t see how you could, but I don’t see how you could have done any of this either.” He waved a hand around the secret lab. “You won’t talk your way out of it with me.”
“You’re my judge, then, my jury. My executioner, too?”
Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02] Page 12
