“An alien artifact? You mean another Marauder?" “The descriptions match up. They sent back a picture of it—it’s in silhouette against Mars. The picture matches those we got of the Black Marauder!’’
“What happened?”
“Nothing, really. They couldn’t leave their own orbit to get closer, so they didn’t get close enough to be captured by it. Houston’s sent them word now to steer clear. They’ve got the thing’s orbit calculated; it should be easy enough to avoid.”
“If it stays put,” I said doubtfully.
Instrument analysis was not as helpful as had been hoped—or perhaps it was too helpful.
Energy—all energy had been drained from the decoy tug. We’d had a minimax thermometer aboard—the kind that records the highest and lowest temperature of any given period. It recorded a temperature drop of over 450 degrees below zero. And that’s all it could record.
“I’m amazed it didn’t destroy the tug,” I remarked afterward to Dr. Cramer.
“That’s one of the puzzling things,” he replied. “It did destroy some minor instruments, but most of those we’d put on #2 were recording instruments, designed to record up to the moment they ceased functioning, so that didn’t matter too much. We expected them to stop. Still, I think only the fact that we built the tugs to withstand a temperature range of over 500 degrees saved them. More important is what this reveals.”
“You mean about the way the Marauder drains energy, sir?”
“Yes. It appears to drain all energy, even the subatomic. It drains all radiation emissions, it drains the molecular energy, it—well, it takes everything. It’s like a hungry blanket.”
“Dr. Cramer,” said the commander, coming up behind him, “I wonder if you’d care to go over these figures.” There was something about the commander’s manner; it was too carefully relaxed. He seemed to be under an intense strain.
Dr. Cramer made no effort to hide his own reaction. His jaw dropped, and his face whitened. “1—1 take it there’s no error?" he asked at last. I was momentarily forgotten.
“No error.”
“Well, that makes things a little more imperative, doesn’t it?”
“Sir?” I asked.
“Eh? Oh, Williams.” He wore an abstracted look. He was quite far away. Then he seemed to remember where he was. “Paul,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to forget what you just heard.”
Forget what I’d heard? I’d heard nothing!
“Just what is it I’m to forget, sir?” I asked.
“I see no harm in telling him,” the commander said. “I’m not sure it is wise to keep it a secret.”
“Ummm, yes. I suppose not.”
“Paul,” Commander Davidson said, “this is a printout from our ballistic computer. It has calculated the new orbit of the Marauder for us.” He paused. “By some remarkable stroke of coincidence, the Marauder’s orbit intersects that of the Station. And when we checked our actual positions, we found that unless one or the other of us deviates from our present orbits, our actual paths will intersect in exactly sixteen hours.”
* * *
They made the formal announcement a half hour later, over the Station’s PA system.
There was no panic. We had fifteen and a half hours to think of something. At worst, everyone would suit up and evacuate the Station aboard the tugs. It was hoped there would be no loss of life. But the Station itself might well be irreparably damaged.
No one was certain of the Marauder’s capacity. Could it suck all the energy from the Station as it had the vastly smaller capsules and tugs? Could we gamble on it not having that capacity? We couldn’t.
We didn’t have much choice, really. We would have to figure a way of dealing with the Black Marauder—there was no way we could move the Station in time.
Most groundhogs seem to assume that anything you put into space can subsequently be moved around pretty much to order. This just isn’t so.
The Station was built to maintain a specific orbit. It could be moved, if we had to do it, but no one would guarantee that it wouldn’t destroy the Station if the whole process of relocating didn’t take a matter of weeks.
Look at it this way: you can’t uproot a skyscraper and move it. The whole building is stress-engineered. Tip it two feet in any direction, and if it doesn’t collapse on the spot, it would still knock the plaster off every wall in the building. The Station represented a huge and delicately balanced mass. It had been built while following a specific orbit, with a specific momentum implied in its orbital velocity.
Changing orbits would mean overcoming a vast inertial reluctance. If it wasn’t done pretty much with kid gloves, the whole Station might just come apart at the seams.
To understand our feelings, you must understand that everyone aboard the Station was, in one sense or another, dedicated to it. We were the space people—the people who’d dreamed of space and the new frontier since early childhood. Most of us were nurtured on the science fiction of visionaries like Verne, Clarke, and Heinlein. We found ourselves dedicated to the vision of space exploration and conquest.
The Station was our beachhead. It was our first important outpost in space. It might not last long, as some thought, before giving way to other frontier fortresses, farther out, but it must live out its appointed time. To suffer a setback now might be calamitous—it might set our space program back by decades.
And yet, menacing as the news of the Black Marauder was, it was also thrilling. It confirmed one of mankind’s deepest mingled fears and hopes: We were not alone. There were other intelligences in the universe, others capable of voyaging space. They appeared hostile, but...
“You know," Mary remarked to me as we ate an uneasy meal in the mess hall, “I’ll bet those Marauders are nothing more than machines—and pretty limited machines too.’’
“What do you mean?’’
“Well, do they seem intelligently directed to you?’’
“No, not really.’’
“Look how blind they are. You have to come pretty close to one before it notices you. And then look at what it does. You were there both times. Wasn’t the pattern identical?’’
“It was," I said. “You’re right. It was as though the thing was a machine with a set task. Every time it was triggered, it would go through the same motions, and carry out the same task.”
“That’s exactly what I meant,” she said, and slid another forkful of food into her mouth.
“Hey, kids,” said Bix, dropping down beside us. “Solving the Secrets of the Universe?”
“No, just of the Marauder,” I said. “Mary’s theory is that it’s only a machine.”
“Yes,” Bix nodded. “That makes sense. It doesn’t betray much intelligence or curiosity. It makes no attempt to communicate with us.”
“Exactly what I meant" Mary said vigorously. “It wasn’t designed to.’’
“I wonder what it was designed for," I mused. “Besides the obvious, I mean." I explained to Bix about the Marauder that had been sighted orbiting Mars. “It makes you wonder—is there one orbiting every planet in the system?’*
“Yeah, and why?"
“I think the whole thing hinges on their age," Mary said.
“Their age?’’
“Sure. We know that ours has been up here for over twenty years—but for how much over twenty years? It could’ve been centuries.’*
“That long?" I wondered.
“Why not? Suppose somebody came along, a few hundred years ago, took a look at Earth, and the wars we were fighting, and decided we were a menace to the Organized Universe. They put the Marauder up to keep us from contaminating space.’’
“Swell," said Bix. “Of course we got past it without much difficulty. But how does that explain the one around Mars?*’
“Oh. I hadn’t thought about that.’’
“Martians?" I said brightly.
“Come on," said Bix. “You know what the photos have shown: If Mars ever had any life
on it—intelligent life, I mean—it’s been gone for ages. There’s nothing on that planet but craters and lichens.’’
“So maybe the Marauders are older than we think?" “You know," Mary put in, “that might explain it!’’ “Explain what?*’
“Why they’re so blind. Maybe they’re so old that they’re no longer working properly.’’
“Maybe," I said dubiously.
“Hi there!" Mark Atwood bounced over to us. “You guys figuring out ways to stop the Menace of the Black Marauder?" He spoke as though it was all one big joke. It took me a minute to recall my resolve not to be nasty to people anymore.
Then suddenly light dawned. A piece of memory turned over in my brain, and clicked into place. I spoke excitedly to Mary.
“Hey,” I said, “back before they called me up to Control that time, we were talking, and, and you said something. You said you didn’t think it would be hard to disarm the Marauder!”
Mary smiled, a very smug smile. “So?”
“So, what is it?"
“It’s very simple. There has to be a limit to the amount of energy it can absorb. Overload it." Laughter glinted in her eyes. She had a secret.
“Overload it?” Atwood asked without comprehension. “How?”
“They’ve got all those big nuclear warheads over at the Military end,” Bix said. “Is that what you were thinking of?”
Mary nodded.
“Well, look! We’d better go tell somebody,” I said, starting to push my way to my feet.
Mary grabbed my hand. “It’s O.K. I told my father about it forty minutes ago.”
“You sneak!” I laughed. “You knew all along they’d be doing something.”
“Yes,” she said, “but I hope they don’t destroy the thing. Think of what they could learn from it.”
By now you, of course, are way ahead of me. If you didn’t see the whole thing because you were on the wrong side of the world, you could hardly have missed seeing or hearing about it in the mass media. It was one of the biggest stories of the year.
Mary, Bix, and I wangled an invite from her father to see it all close-up. We got to go out to the observatory.
The observatory is in the south end of the Station, and like the north pole, it is gimbaled in such a way that it does not turn with the Station, and is gravity free. Most of it is a huge clear window—actually about ten separate panes of special glass, with a vacuum and an ionized field between each—and there is a remotely controlled telescope that projects outside the observatory, into open space itself.
The room is a large one, and ordered uniquely. Since there is no up and no down, seats have straps, and are placed wherever they are convenient to specific functions. This may put one seat upside down in relation to another ten feet away. There are handholds everywhere, all painted a bright green. We were specifically warned not to grab anything else but, because we might be upsetting some delicately adjusted instrument. In fact, we were just barely tolerated by the observation staff, and only Dr. Cramer’s presence got us in. We tried to make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible.
Soon after we were in, they passed out goggles. These were, as near as I could tell, absolutely black.
“Can you see anything through these?” I asked Dr. Cramer in a whisper.
“You’ll see as much as you’ll care to,” was his reply.
The Marauder was approaching us from above; its orbit went out in a wide swing. So the observatory was a perfect place to watch from.
But all the main staff would be down at Control, of course, where their monitors would provide as good a picture of what was happening, and with a great deal less danger. It was from Control that the missiles would be launched and triggered, and it was Control’s instruments that would record the results and inform us of our failure or success.
The Military had groused mightily about it all. I hadn’t seen any of that part of it, but Dr. Cramer, talking quietly to us as we waited, told us about it.
At first, the Military had not wanted to admit that it possessed any missiles at all, much less missiles with nuclear warheads. Commander Davidson had all but cracked Meads together before they owned up to having a goodly storehouse full of the deadly things.
Then they had protested that they could not possibly, under any circumstances, allow the use of the missiles without a Presidential order. On this they were obstinate, and perhaps more justified. It was a heavy responsibility.
So Control had contacted Houston Control, by a tight-beam maser, and delicately suggested they get in touch with the President.
The President had been out yachting. It took two hours, while everyone bit his nails, before the Presidential Order was beamed back up to go ahead. It contained the necessary code passwords, and the Military were mollified.
Now, six missiles were readied at the docking port, and another six were being prepared. Each one had a fusion warhead: an H-bomb.
And it was about time.
Chapter 16
They say that the sun paled in the sky, beside the new sun. I don’t know; I couldn’t see them both. In fact, I could barely make out the flare of the hydrogen-reaction through my goggles anyway.
But that wasn’t the first shot.
I felt quite cheated by the goggles. I saw nothing, and it wasn’t until they did the tape replay on the lounge TV that I saw it. So in a sense I’m as much a bystander as you are; my knowledge is equally secondhand.
What happened was that they sent a missile out on a collision course with the Marauder. The warhead was designed to trigger mechanically when it was half a mile away.
We’d all been warned, and our goggles were on. What I saw was a brief lightening of the goggles’ black lenses. That was all. On the TV rerun later, I got a better picture. The missile exploded, exactly as it was supposed to do. They slowed down the tape at that point, and we could see the globe of pure energy, the atomic reaction triggering the hydrogen fusion—the very process that goes on at the sun’s core—expanding out into space.
Then suddenly it was snuffed out.
A black blot remained on the screen—the black silhouette of the Marauder against the stars. It had leapt forward, until it was almost upon the site of the missile’s explosion.
A second missile went out. This one almost triggered too late, and we could see, on the slowed-down replay, how the perfect globe of expanding energy was rapidly devoured by the Marauder. It was frightening.
But the third missile was different.
Again the globe of energy, again the blanket starting to snuff it out. Then a flare that was as bright as the sun.
It was all about eighty miles away. The Station’s magnetic fields were supposedly an adequate shield against the radiation.
But we all underwent close examinations by the medical staff for the next two weeks, and I still get periodic checkups, aimed at making certain I am not suffering more subtle effects of the radiation.
That flare, at least, we could see through our goggles. It looked like a red and setting sun: bright, but not too bright.
“Oh,” Mary cried. “They’ve destroyed it!”
We all thought so, but we were wrong.
Whoever it was—whatever race it was—that put that awesome machine in orbit around our planet is going to make a fearsome adversary for mankind someday. If ever we contact them. There are several schools of thought on that, and the one I subscribe to is that we will never meet them, although we may stumble, someday, across more of their artifacts.
We understand them a little better now. Not a lot better, but a little. And they have, inadvertently, immeasurably -enriched us with their sciences, their techniques. I can’t imagine that anyone among you has failed to feel some impact of the technological fallout of our discovery of the Marauder.
On the screen, after the radiance of the explosion had dissipated into space, we stared in awed astonishment at the surviving Marauder.
It was no longer black, but a kind of silvery golden, its rich a
nd subtle, almost mind twisting curves catching highlights from both the sun and the Earth below.
- It had survived. Its defenses were gone (gone or just subdued?) but it, the Marauder itself, was whole, its surface apparently unharmed.
We’d known by then, of course. By then our men had gone out to the silent craft and forced their entrance, carefully opening (but not wantonly destroying) every circuit they could find aboard the thing. But still we gasped, and again I felt the tingle of confrontation—a confrontation with the mighty Unknown. This was a mightier work than man had ever known.
That’s the story of the Black Marauder, of course. Our scientists are still picking its bones, still unraveling complexities that may take centuries to decipher. Dr. Cramer has had a field day with it.
We know a little more, now, about the Marauder. We know one essential fact that bears out my hunch about the likelihood of our meeting its makers.
We know that the Black Marauder—and presumably its companion orbiting Mars as well—is older than the history of Man.
They found sophisticated hunt and seek circuits, circuits which, if operable, would’ve allowed the Marauder to track down anything rising from or approaching Earth within its line of sight. Those circuits had failed, and they’d done so despite the fact that they were printed in a plasticlike substance with an alloy that should not decompose for millennia. But it had.
They’re hypothesizing that the Black Marauder was originally only one of several satellites set in orbit around our planet to prevent any communication with other planets. In the many long centuries since then, the other marauder satellites have failed, and been lost, only this one still prowling our skies.
Why? Who so feared that space travel might come to Earth, long before the dawn of Man? Did the marauder sentinels exist to guard Earth from outside exploitation, or to contain its inhabitants?
I’m afraid that's a question that will not be answered within my lifetime. The Martian marauder satellite may tell us more; it appears dormant, and with our new discoveries we may be able to block its energy-drain field anyway. But only time will tell.
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