And Now the News

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Tenable?” I gasped. “Why, you—nincompoop!” That’s the first time in my entire life I ever called anyone that, but as I looked at him, blushing and grinning and wanting to do right, there just wasn’t another applicable term. “What makes you think—”

  “Mr. England?” said the skipper, much louder than I have ever heard him speak before.

  I confess I was startled. Before I could quite recover myself, England answered.

  “In the area of mis,” he said in a whispery voice which at that point failed him. He swallowed with all his might and then made a weak, flickery smile. “In the field of missiles, my chief concern is, first, a series of tests to determine the exact nature of the internal control pulses in the hunting missiles, the frequency and wave height of the command pulses in the guided missiles, with a view to jamming or redirecting them. Second, I plan to lob some solids through the Barrier at low velocities in order to study the metallurgical content of the missiles, with a view to the design of sensor-dodging equipment, and possibly some type of repulsion field, designed to force the missiles into a near miss.”

  “Very succinct,” said the captain, and I wondered how he knew what was succinct or not about a specialty. “Now that we’ve got the swing of this little discussion, perhaps, Mr. Palmer, you would like to reconsider and join it.”

  “Perhaps I would at that,” I said, stopping to think it over.

  After all, a little sense ought to be added to this exhibition of maundering incompetence, if only for balance.

  “Then if you must know,” I said, “the only tenable method of approaching the problem lies in the area of explosive stress. No one but myself seems to have noticed the almost perfectly spherical shape of the Barrier. A sphere in any flexing material is a certain indication of some dynamic tension, a container and the contained in equilibrium, with the analog of some fluid differential like the air inside and outside an inflated balloon. You don’t follow me.”

  “Go on,” said the captain, holding his head as if he was listening.

  “Why, all it will take is a toroidal mass equipped with a subspace generator and an alternator. If this is placed upon the Barrier margin and caused to vibrate into and out of the subspace state, there will be a portion of the Barrier—that which is surrounded by the toroid—which will be included in the vibration. The effect then is in causing a circular section of the Barrier to be in nonexistence for part of the time. It is my conclusion that this small breach will cause the Barrier to collapse like that toy balloon I mentioned. Q.E.D. Lieutenant.” I leaned back.

  “Captain,” said the captain tiredly. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “I regret to inform you, Mr. Palmer, that you are completely wrong. Blum!” he bellowed suddenly. “Coffee out here!”

  “Hah!” came the monkey’s voice. It was as near as he ever let himself get to aye-aye, sir.

  He must have had the tray ready before the skipper called, because he came out with it loaded and steaming. He set it down in the middle of the table and retired to a corner. At the side of my eye, I saw the CG sidle out of the “cage” and go to stand silently beside him.

  But I wasn’t in a mood for anything but this preposterous allegation from the captain. I got to my feet so I could look down at him.

  “Did I understand you to say,” I ground out, cold as Neptune, “that in your opinion I am wrong?”

  “Quite wrong. The Barrier is a position, an infinite locus, not a material substance, and is therefore not subject to the laws and treatments of matter per se.”

  I have been known to splutter when I am angry, unless I try not to. I found myself trying very hard not to.

  “I have reduced every observation on that surface known to Man,” I informed him, “to mathematical symbology, and from it have written a consecutive sequence of occasions which proves beyond doubt that the surface is as I say and will act as I say. You seem to forget that this is on the record, Admiral, and this may mean you are making a permanent rather than a temporary fool of yourself.”

  I sat down, feeling better.

  “Captain,” said the captain wearily.

  He turned and took a paper from the stack of folders which I noticed for the first time lay there. He flashed it; at first glance, it looked like a page of figures over which a child superimposed a crude and scratchy picture of a Christmas tree in red.

  He said, “Equation number 132, four pi sigma over theta plus the square root of four pi sigma quantity squared.” I could not help noticing that, as he reeled it off, he was waving the paper, not reading from it.

  I said, “I recognize the equation. Well?”

  “Well nothing,” snapped the captain. “Unwell, I’d call it. Heh.” He slid the sheet over to me. “If you will observe, to be consistent with the preceding series, the integer sigma is not whole but factorial, in view of which an increasing error is introduced wherein—but see for yourself.”

  I looked. What resembled a crude picture of a Christmas tree was the correction, in red, of the symbol he had mentioned, and the scrawled figures of three corrected factors in the next equation and seven in the third following, until the red marks became a whole line.

  I said, “Might I ask who has had the effrontery to scribble all over these calculations?”

  “Oh, I did,” said the captain. “I thought it might be a good idea to rework the whole series, just in case, and I’m glad I did. You ought to be, too.”

  I looked again at the sheet and swallowed sand. A man has to major for a considerable time in some highly creative math to be able to do what had been done here. A thing or two came to my lips, but I would not say them, because they were for my figures and against his, yet it could not be denied that his were right.

  To save something out of this, I growled at him, “I think, sir, you owe me an explanation as to why you have chosen publicly to humiliate me.”

  “I didn’t humiliate you. Those figures humiliated you, and they’re your figures,” he said, and shrugged.

  I glanced at Potter and England. They were grinning broadly. I looked up suddenly and caught the CG’s flat gray stare.

  “They’re your figures,” she murmured, and anyone hearing her would swear she knew for certain that I had copied them from somebody else’s work. There was such a flame of insistence burning up in me that they were so my figures that I could barely contain it. But contain it I did; they were not figures I was anxious to claim at the moment.

  I was very confused. I slumped down in my chair.

  “You’re next, Mr. Potter. I’m sorry to have to inform you that although, in theory, the Barrier does yield under the stress of a magnetic field such as you describe, it would take a generator somewhat larger than this ship to supply it; the affected area would be just about what you said—a square centimeter; and, finally, it wouldn’t be a hole in the Barrier, but what you might call a replacement patch. In other words, the affected area will, when surrounded by the so-called Barrier skin, act precisely like part of that skin in all respects.”

  Potter put his hobby finger out for inspection and was so distressed he forgot to look at it. “Are … are you sure?”

  “That’s what happened the last seven times it was tried.”

  Potter made a wordless sound, a sort of moan, or sigh. I did not feel like grinning at him as he had at me. England did not grin, either, because I think he realized what was coming. He just sat there wondering how it would come.

  It came at Donato first. “Mr. Donato—”

  “Yes, sir, Cap’n.”

  “You propose a two-piece missile. You seem to forget, as many another has before you, that the Barrier offers no resistance to penetration and therefore needs no complicated hanky-panky to get something inside. In addition, it’s unimportant whether or not an object is sensed by the skin and reported to control, or whether it’s picked up a minute or hour later by one of the hunting missiles. You’ve attacked the whole problem with a view to getting something inside, which isn’t a p
roblem, and overlooked what to do inside, which is.”

  “Oh, Cap’n, I’m sorry,” said Donato, stricken. He burst into a sharp series of barking coughs. There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” the captain said. “Got it yet, Mr. England?”

  “Whuh? Oh,” said the missile expert. “I guess I was off base about the jamming. Suddenly it seems to me that’s so obvious, it must have been tried and it doesn’t work.”

  “Right, it doesn’t. That’s because the frequency and amplitude of the control pulses make like purest noise—they’re genuinely random. So trying to jam them is like trying to jam F.M. with an A.M. signal. You hit it so seldom, you might as well not try.”

  “What do you mean, random? You can’t control anything with random noise.”

  The captain thumbed over his shoulder at the Luanae Galaxy. “They can. There’s a synchronous generator in the missiles that reproduces the same random noise, peak by pulse. Once you do that, modulation’s no problem. I don’t know how they do it. They just do. The Luanae can’t explain it; the planetoid developed it.”

  England put his head down almost to the table. “The same random,” he whispered from the very edge of sanity.

  As if anxious to push him the rest of the way, the captain said cheerfully, “Good thinking on that proposal to study the metal content of the missiles. Only there isn’t any. They’re a hundred percent dielectric synthetics—God knows exactly what. The planetoid can transmute, you know. What little circuitry the missiles have is laid out in fluid-filled pipes, capillary coils, things like that. There seems to be some sort of instantaneous transition from solid to liquid and back. The liquid conductors are solid dielectrics again just as soon as they have passed whatever current they’re supposed to pass, and that’s done in microseconds.”

  “Radar-transparent,” concluded England dolefully.

  “For all practical purposes,” agreed the captain. “Well, that seems to be that, gentlemen.”

  “Just you tell me one thing,” I said before I could stop myself. “Precisely what in hell are we doing here at all?”

  “Precisely what you came to do.” The captain picked up his folders. “Blum, I sense that these four gentlemen might be happier without an audience, even us.”

  “Come on, Virginia.”

  The captain started out forward and the monkey and the CG headed aft. We all sat where we were.

  After a time, England said, “Why didn’t he tell me he knew so much about missiles?”

  “Did you ask him?” snapped Potter.

  That was the question and answer I had been humbly formulating, too. I said, “What did he mean, we are here to do what we came to do?”

  “Maybe he wants us to get oriented, is all,” said Donato sheepishly. “Get off theory, you know. Like field work.”

  “If he thinks he’s jolting my inspiration, he’s crazy,” gloomed England. He wiped his wet eyes with the backs of his hands, leaving them still wet. “The jolt, I got all right. The inspiration, I can’t find.”

  “He should have told us before, right at the start. Maybe by now we’d have a whole new set of figures.” Donato caught my sharp look and immediately said, “Theories, I mean, friend. I didn’t mean to say figures.”

  Somehow that didn’t help.

  “Get out of here, Donato,” I said.

  “Sure, friend, sure,” he said and got out like always, smiling. He went into his room and closed the door. We could hear him coughing.

  “Like a box you have in your room ten years,” Potter was muttering adenoidally, “it all of a sudden goes boing and there’s a jumpid-jack.” I was going to ask him what he was talking about and then realized he was talking about the captain. I saw his point. Why hadn’t he called this meeting weeks ago?

  “He must like things to look futile,” I said. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Be, too,” said Potter.

  I got up. Potter and England stayed where they were. They were going to talk about me.

  I just didn’t care.

  I dreamed I was walking in a meadow, smelling the sweet fresh odor of snowdrops, when all of a sudden they grew taller and taller, or I grew smaller and smaller, and I saw that instead of stems, the snowdrops were growing on a sequence of equations. I began to read them off, but they got all twisted and jumbled and started to grab at my feet. I fell and grunted and caught hard at the edges of the bunk and was totally awake.

  I turned over and looked at the overhead. I felt clear-headed but lethargic. I thought I could still smell the snowdrops.

  Then I noticed the whine. It was far away, but persistent. The lights looked funny. They seemed to be flickering slightly, but when you looked straight at them, they were steady. I didn’t like it. It made me feel dizzy.

  I got up and went out into the corridor. Nobody was around. Then a timid voice said behind me, “Virginia in there?”

  I jumped and turned. It was the monkey, cringing against the bulkhead.

  “You think I’m that bad off?” I answered him in disgust, but as I turned away, he leaned forward and peered into my room anyway.

  I went into the mess hall and knocked on the decanter and, when it steamed, poured coffee. Somewhere in the background, I heard a wistful murmur, and then Potter’s shocked voice: “In here? Monkey, didn’t they tell you? I like girls.” In a moment, he came shuffling in and headed for the coffee. “What time is it, Palmer?”

  I shrugged. I looked at the clock, but it didn’t seem to make any sense to me.

  “God,” said Potter, and sniffed noisily. “I feel all … disconnected. I got a buzzing in my ears. My eyes—it’s sort of flickery.”

  I looked at him curiously, wondering what it must be like to be a man who readily relates everything around him to himself. “That isn’t your flicker. It’s ours. Same with the buzz, though I’d call it a sort of whine.”

  He looked very relieved. “You hear it, too. What happened here, anyway?”

  I drank some coffee and looked at the clock again. “What’s the matter with that clock?” I demanded.

  Potter craned to look at it. “Can’t be. Can’t be.”

  Donato came in, his face scrubbed and shining. “Morning, Palmer. Potter. Well, I wondered which one of us would fall first, and I guess I know now, and who’d a’ thunk it.” He nodded aft and began coughing.

  We looked. The monkey was stepping off one foot and onto the other in front of England’s door.

  “You ought to mind your own business, Don.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Donato agreeably. “Guess you’re right at that.”

  Just then, England flung his door open, saw Nils Blum crouching there, and recoiled with an odd high squeak.

  Immediately he growled, in his deepest bass, “Don’t hang around me, monk,” and pushed past the utility man without a backward glance.

  We watched, looking past him as he approached. Blum ducked his head inside England’s door, withdrew it, took a step toward us and stopped, his jaw working silently, his big wrinkled head held a little askew.

  “But hungry, I’m hungry,” England said. “Whatever time is it?”

  “Clock’s busted.” Potter suddenly laughed. We all looked at him. “Well,” he said, pointing at England, “it’s not him, either.”

  “You were just saying to Don, he ought to mind his own business,” I snapped. I wonder, I thought to myself, if he knows I cut at him because he twiddles his nose?

  “What business? What goes?” England demanded.

  “By holy creepin’ Kramden,” said Donato to himself. He looked aft at the miserable figure there and forward at the closed door to the wardroom and control. “What do you know.”

  “He is a very surprising man,” I said.

  “Who? Who? The skipper? What’s he done now?” England insisted.

  “Virginia seems to be missing,” said Donato.

  Hearing her name, Blum ran three steps toward us
and then stopped in the mess hall door, looking timidly at our faces, one by one.

  “Well,” said England, “rank has its privileges.”

  Potter blew sharply through his nostrils, expressing a great deal and disposing of the matter. He glanced at the clock. “What’d you say is wrong with it?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it.”

  We turned abruptly and faced the captain. There was an oddness about him, a set to his jaw, a certain hard something in his eye that hadn’t been there at all before. Or maybe it had, there at the table this morning. (Was that this morning? What the clock said just made no sense at all.) I looked at the captain and past him, through his open door, through the wardroom with his neat bunk at the side, on forward to the control console and observation blister.

  There wasn’t anybody up there.

  From the other doorway, the utility monkey whispered, “Sir …

  ?”

  “Something the matter with the lights, Captain,” Donato said.

  “It’s all right,” said the captain shortly. He went to the mess hall peeper and switched it on. He dialed for starboard view and stepped back.

  We crowded around it. Everything looked about the same out there, the wide vein of jewels straggling across the sky, then the unrelieved black.

  “Show you something,” said the captain. He moved the controls and the view zoomed in toward the stars. At close to peak magnification, he switched to the fine tuning and got the cross-hairs where he wanted them. “Know what that is?”

  It was a ball, shiny, golden. It was impossible to say how big. Then I heard England gasp.

  “I’ve seen that before. Pictures. That’s the Barrier Control—the planetoid!”

  “So close?” I asked.