“Oh, fine,” said the colonel again. “There’ll be no power on earth that can’t be spotted and smashed within hours, once we get enough of these things out.”
“No power on earth,” nodded his brother. “You have every reason to be confident.” And no reason to be right, his silent voice added.
The first signs of the war to come were in all the papers. But hardly anyone read them. They were inside, with small headings. The front pages were more exciting that day. They screamed of new international incidents. The tabloids were full of a photo-series of the mobbing of a bearded man called Kronsky. (He was English—Somerset— and spoke the buzzing brogue of his shire. His name had been Polish, three generations before. He was wearing a beard because of scars caused by a severe attack of barber’s itch. These facts were not touched upon.) An Estonian student was wrapped in a U.N. banner and stoned for having sung “Ol’ Man River” at a folk-song recital. An astonishing number of tea-leaf readers were hired overnight by restaurants in which “Beef Stroganoff” suddenly became “Gypsy Goulash.”
The small notices in the papers dealt with the startling discovery, by three experimenters, one in France and two in Canada, of a new noise in Jansky radiation, that faint hiss of jumbled radio frequencies which originates from somewhere an interstellar space. It was a triple blast of sound, each one two and two-fifths seconds in length, with two and two-fifths seconds of silence between the signals. They came in groups, three blasts each, a few fractions of a second under ten minutes apart. The phenomenon continued for seven months, during which time careful measurements showed an appreciable increase in amplitude. Either the signal source was getting stronger, or it was getting nearer, said the pundits.
~ * ~
During these seven months, and for longer, the Simmons brothers lapsed into their usual “got to write to him some time” pattern in regard to each other. Both were busy. The colonel’s life was a continuous round of conferences, research reports, and demonstrations, and the load on the physicist became heavier daily, as the demands of the Board of Strategy, stimulated by its research, its Intelligence Section, and the perilous political situation, reached his laboratories.
The world was arming feverishly. A few historians and philosophers, in their very few objective moments, found time to wonder what the political analysts of the future would have to say about the coming war. The First War was a war of economic attrition; the Second was too, but it was even more an ideological war. This incipient unpleasantness had its source in ideology, but, at the eve of hostilities, the battle of philosophies had been relegated to the plane of philosophy. In practice, each side—or rather, all sides—had streamlined themselves into fighting machines, with each and every part milled to its function, and all control centralized. The necessary process of kindling fire to fight fire had resulted in soviets where the proletariat did not dictate, and in democracies where the people did not rule. Indeed, since the increase of governmental efficiency everywhere had resulted in a new high in production of every kind, the economic and political aspects of the war had been all but negated, and it began to appear as though the war would be fought purely for the sake of fighting a war, and simply because the world was prepared for it.
~ * ~
On December 7th, as if to perpetuate the memory of infamy, the first bomb was dropped.
It was dropped. It wasn’t a self-guided missile. It wasn’t a planted mine. It wasn’t dust or bio, either; it was a blast-bomb, and it was a honey.
They got the ship that dropped it, too. A proximity-fused rocket with an atomic warhead struck it a glancing blow. That happened, spectacularly, over Lake Michigan. The ship, or what was left of it, crashed near Minsk.
It was Dr. Simmons’ urgent suggestion which accounted for the ship. It had not been seen, but it had been spotted by radar on December 6th, when it encircled the Earth twice. It was far inside Roche’s Limit; the conclusion was obvious that it was self-powered. Simmons calculated its orbit, knowing that at that velocity it could not alter its course appreciably in the few hours it took to pass and repass any given point. The proximity rocket was launched on schedule, not on detection. Unfortunately, on its way to its rendezvous with fission, the ship dropped its bomb.
And when that happened, the world drew itself together like . . . like— Ever see a cat lying sleeping, spread out, relaxed, and then some sound, some movement will put that cat on guard? It may not move a muscle, but it isn’t relaxed any more; it isn’t asleep any more. It has changed its pose from a slumber to a crouch, and you can only know that because of the new shape of its eyes. The world did that.
But nobody started throwing bombs.
~ * ~
“Cool down, soldier-boy!”
“Cool down, he says,” fumed the colonel. “This is . . . this—” His words died into a splutter.
“I know, I know,” said Dr. Simmons, trying not to grin. “You figured, and you figured, and you read all sorts of fantastic things and swallowed your incredulity and planned as if these things actually could happen. You worked all practicable statistical possibilities, and a lot more besides. And it has to start like this.”
“Everybody knows Japan is neutral ground, and will stay that way. There’s no point in it!” the colonel all but wailed. “The bomb didn’t even land on a city, or even a depot! Just knocked the top off a mountain in the Makabe country on Honshu. There isn’t a blasted thing there.”
“I’d say there isn’t an unblasted thing there at the moment,” chuckled his brother. “Stop telling me how you feel and let’s have what you know. Was the bomb traced?”
“Of course it was traced! We have recording radar all over. It came from that ship, all right. Muscles, it was a dinky litde thing, that bomb. About like a two hundred fifty pounder. But what a blossom!”
“I heard the news reports on it. Also seismographics. They had trouble picking up the Hiroshima bomb. They didn’t have any with this one. It ran about seven hundred and forty-odd times as powerful.”
“Officially,” said the colonel, “it was well over nine hundred at the source.”
“Well, well,” said Dr. Simmons, in the tone of an orchid fancier noting red spots on a new hybrid. “Disruption, hm-m-m?”
“Disruption, and how,” rejoined the colonel. “Look, Muscles. We’ve got disruption bombs too—you know that. But just as a fission bomb blows away most of its fissionable material before it can be effective, so a disruption bomb blasts off that much more. We have bombs that make the old Baker-Day bomb look like a wet firecracker, sure; but the best we can do is about four hundred per cent. I thought that was plenty; but this thing— Anyhow, Muscles, I just don’t get it. Who threw it? Why? Great day in the morning, man! An egg like that would’ve thrown us into a ground-loop if it had landed on any one of our centers. No power on earth would be that careless. To miss, I mean. We can’t even be sure it wasn’t a wild throw by one of our allies, on the other hand. Nowadays, you know everything, and you know nothing; you know it ahead of time, or you know it too late.”
“My, my,” said Dr. Simmons mildly. “What about the ship?”
“The ship,” repeated the colonel, and his face reddened again. “I just can’t believe that ship. Who built it? Where? We have everything on earth spotted that’s worth spotting. Muscles, that thing was fifteen hundred feet long according to the radar.”
“Anybody photograph it?”
“Apparently not. I mean, lots of radar-directed cameras shot where it was, but it didn’t show, except as a blur.”
“How do you know it was that big, then ? You know what ‘window’ does to radar, for example. I don’t know just how, but that could be camouflage of some sort.”
“That’s what we thought at first. Until we saw the hole in the ground where it hit. That thing was big!”
“Saw it? I understand that the Russians cordoned off the area and threatened mass bombing if anyone came smelling around.”
“A thing called a Spy-Eye,�
� said the colonel, “with a telescopic lens—”
“Oh,” said the physicist. “Well—how much of the ship was left?”
“Not much. It exploded when it hit, of course. Apparently most of it was vaporized over Michigan. The Spy-Eye pix show something being dug up, though.”
“Wish I had a piece of it,” said Dr. Simmons longingly. “A thorough qualitative analysis would very soon show where it came from.”
“We won’t get it,” said the colonel positively. “Not without the Russki’s co-operation anyway.”
“Could that happen?”
“Certainly not! They’re not stupid! They’ll play this thing for all it’s worth. If they can figure out where it came from, they’ll know and we won’t—one up for them in the war of nerves. If they can’t, and the sample’s worthless to them, we can’t know it until we try, and we want to try. So they’ll hold out for some concession or other. Whatever it is will cost us plenty.”
“Leroy,” said the physicist slowly, “have you heard about the so-called ‘signals’ in the Jansky bands?”
“I know what you’re driving at,” snorted the colonel. “The answer is no. But really, no. That’s no ship from outer space. We fixed on those signals months ago, and had even the 200-incher and a whole battery of image orthicons on the indicated direction. The signal strength increased, but nothing could be seen.”
“Uh-huh. And when it arrived, it couldn’t be photographed.”
“It— Oh. Oh-oh!”
“Well, you said yourself that if it had been built anywhere on earth you’d have known it.”
“Your phone,” gasped the colonel. “I’ve got to find out about those Jansky signals.” He rushed to the corner of the room.
~ * ~
“They stopped,” said the doctor. “Yes, Leroy. I’ve been following them all along. They cut out when we shelled the ship.”
“Th-they did?”
“Yup.”
“Well—that takes care of that, doesn’t it? Even if it was something from Outside—”
“Now,” said Dr. Simmons relentlessly, “with that racket off the Jansky bands, it’s possible to hear the new noises.”
“New—”
“Three sets of ‘em. By their amplitude, I’d judge that they’re scheduled to be here in two, three, and five months respectively.” The colonel gasped. “I think,” added Dr. Simmons calmly, “that they’re approaching faster than the first one.”
“That can’t be!” bellowed the colonel. “Haven’t we enough to watch without fighting a Buck Rogers war as well? We just can’t fight our own war and these invaders, too!”
“Come, come,” said Dr. Simmons gently. “Why not take it up with the Board, Leroy? They’re ready for everything. You told me so yourself.”
The colonel glared at him. “This is no time to needle me, Muscles,” he growled. “What do you think’s going to happen?”
The scientist considered. “Well, what do you think would happen if you sent out—say, a plane to investigate an island? The plane circles it a couple of times, and then without warning gets shot down. What would you do?”
“Send a squadron and bomb the—” He fell silent.
“Yes, Leroy.”
“But—they dropped the bomb first!”
“How do you know what they were doing? Put it on other terms; you are walking in the woods and you come to a mound of dry earth. You wonder what it is. You stick a piece of wood into it.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s an ant hill. It would seem to me that an atomic bomb would be an excellent method to get a quick idea of the elemental composition of a strange planet. There’s all kinds of light from the disruption, you know. Screen off what radiation you can expect from your own bomb, and what’s left will give you a pretty fair spectral analysis of the target.”
“But they must have known the planet was inhabited. What right had they to bomb it?”
“Did the bomb do any damage?”
The colonel was silent.
“And yet we shot the ship down. Leroy, you can’t expect them to like it.”
The soldier looked up suddenly, narrowly at his brother. “It was your idea to shoot it down.”
“It was not!” Dr. Simmons snapped. “I was asked how it could be done, and I said how it could be done. That was all. The order was given by some eager lad in your Board, if anyone.” He made an impatient gesture. “That’s beside the point, Leroy. We can come out of our caves in the brave new postwar world and fix the blame to our hearts’ content. Our problem at the moment is what to do when the next contingent arrives. I rather think they’ll be loaded for bear. That was, you say, a big ship, and what it dropped was a small bomb. You can guess what will happen if three ships drop a few whole sticks of bombs like that—say a thousand of them.”
“Three hundred would be enough to make this planet look like the moon,” said the colonel whitely.
“I remember a lecture, long ago,” said Dr. Simmons reminiscently, “by a man named Dr. Szilard. Someone asked him if there was any conceivable defense against the atomic bomb. He laughed and said, ‘Certainly. The Japs discovered it in eight days.’”
“A defense? Oh. They surrendered.”
“That’s right. That stopped the bombs from coming over.”
“How do you surrender to a force you can’t communicate with?”
“Perhaps we can. We can try. But from their point of view we attacked first, and in all probability they’ll hit first and talk later. You would.”
“Yes,” admitted the colonel. “I would. The thing to do, Muscles, is to try to organize some defense.”
“With the world in the state it’s in now? Don’t be silly! There might be a chance if everyone believed, if every nation would co-operate. But if nobody trusts anybody—”
The colonel bolted to the door. “We’ll have to do what we can. So long, Muscles. I’ll keep you posted— What in blazes are you grinning for?”
“Don’t mind me, please,” said Dr. Simmons, half laughing. “It’s nothing.”
“Tell me what your nothing is so I can get to work with a clear mind,” said the colonel irritably.
“Well, it’s just that I’ve been expecting the well-known atomic doom for so very long, that I’ve covered every emotion but one over it. I’ve been afraid, even terrified. I’ve been angry. I’ve been disgusted. And now—it’s funny. It’s funny because of what you’re going through. Of all the things you’ve guessed at, trained for, planned for —it has to come like this. Sitting ducks. An enemy you can’t out-think, outweigh, outsmart, or terrorize. It was always inevitable; now even a soldier can see it.”
“Very funny,” growled the colonel, jamming his hat down. “Out of this world.”
“Hey!” called the physicist. “That was good!”
Laughing, he went to his inner laboratory. The one where no one else ever went.
~ * ~
Their next contact was by telephone. Too much time had passed; at least, Dr. Simmons thought it was too much time. So he called his brother. Having determined to do so, it occurred to him that he did not know exactly how to go about it; so he called the War Department in Washington. It took two minutes and forty seconds to make the contact; but the doctor heard the Washington operator, the Chicago operator, the Denver operator, the Gunnison operator, the Gunnison mobile operator, and an Operations lieutenant passing along something called a crash pri. Dr. Simmons raised his eyebrows at this, and never forgot it.
“Hi, Muscles!”
“Hello, Leroy. Listen. What’s with the salvage situation ? I want to do that analysis.”
“The stinkers!” the colonel said heatedly. “They made a proposition. I turned ‘em down. The Board backed me up.”
“What was the proposition?”
“They wouldn’t send a sample. They said if we had someone who could perform a definitive analysis, to send him to Russia.”
“Aha! Mountain to Mahomet, eh? Why did you refuse?”
“Don’t
be silly! There are maybe a half-dozen men in this country who might be able to make a really exhaustive analysis, and come up with a reliable conclusion. And about five of ‘em we can’t be sure.”
“Send the other one, then.”
“That’s you, egghead. We’re not going to run a risk like that.”
“Why not?”
“They could use you, Muscles.”
“I couldn’t use anything they could give me.”
“That isn’t the point,” the colonel assured him. “But they have ways—”
“Knock off the dramatics, Leroy. This isn’t a grade B movie. And there isn’t time for fooling around. We have maybe six weeks.”
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