Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

Osgood swore and sprang to the control bulkhead. “Get Epsilon! Tell him to cease fire and then report to me! Blast the hub-forted fun of a plistener! I’ll pry him loose from his—”

  Belter grunted and threw his arm over his eyes as the screen blazed. The automatic shields went up, and when he could see again, the screen showed him the Invader. Epsilon wasn’t there at all.

  After the excitement had died down a little, Osgood slumped into a chair. “I wish we’d had a Jovian ship out there instead,” he rasped. “I don’t care what they did to us during the war, or anything else. They could obey orders. When they say they’ll do a thing, you can bet on it. What’s the score on that business of the Jovians’ electing themselves out, anyhow?”

  Belter told him how the Jovian delegate had been insulted at the Council.

  “Those hot-headed, irresponsible Martians!” said the Butcher. “Why in time did that drunken cretin have to fire on the derelict?”

  “What derelict?” Belter asked dryly.

  Osgood stared at him. Belter pointed at the chart. The white spot was slowly swinging toward the green—toward Delta. On the screen, the Invader still gleamed. It was not blasting any more.

  One of the technician’s screens flashed. “Detection reporting, sir.”

  “Report.”

  “Invader’s Type Two drive radiation showing strong, sir.”

  “R-Roger.”

  The screen winked out. Commander Osgood opened his mouth, held it open silently for an unbearably long moment, and then carefully closed it again. Belter bit the in-sides of his cheeks to keep from roaring with hysterical laughter. He knew that the Butcher was trying to swear, and that he had met a situation for which no swearing would be adequate. He had shot his vituperative bolt. Finally, weakly, he said the worst thing he could think of—a thing that until then had been unthinkable.

  He said: “They’re not dead.”

  Belter did not feel like laughing any more. He said: “They went through The Death, and they’re not dead.”

  “There is no defense against The Death,” said the commander authoritatively. Belter nodded.

  One of the screens flashed, and a voice said impersonally: “Mathematics.”

  “Go on,” said the Butcher.

  “The derelict’s course will intersect ours, sir, unless—”

  “Don’t say ‘derelict,’” whispered Osgood. “Say ‘Invader.’” He lay back and, closing his eyes, swabbed his face with a tissue. Then the muscles in his jaw clenched and he rose and stood erect before the control bulkhead, pulling the wrinkles out of his tunic. “Batteries. Train around to the Invader. Tech! Put the batteries on auto. Everything—torpedoes, rays, artillery. Now give me all hands. All hands! Prepare to abandon ship. Delta will engage the enemy on automatics. Life craft to scatter. Take your direction from your launching port and maintain it until you observe some decisive action between Delta and the Invader. Fill up with momentomine and give your craft everything they can take. Over.” He swung to Belter.

  “Councilman! Don’t argue with me. What I want to do is stay here and fight. What I will do is abandon ship with the rest of you. My only reason is so I can have another chance to take a poke at a Martian. Of all the blundering, stupid, childish things for Hoster to do, taking a pot shot at that killer out there was the most—”

  Belter very nearly reminded the commander that Hoster had been instructed to let the “derelict” pass within fifty meters if necessary. He swallowed the comment. It didn’t matter, anyway. Hoster and his crew had been good men, and Epsilon a good ship. All dead now, all smashed, all gone to lengthen the list that had started on Outpost.

  “You know your abandon-ship station, don’t you, Belter? Go to your quarters and haul out that white-livered old pantywaist and take him with you. I’ll join you as soon as everyone else is off the ship. Jump!”

  Belter jumped. Things were happening too fast for him, and he found it almost pleasant to use someone else’s intelligence rather than hunt for his own.

  Hereford was sitting on the edge of his bunk. “What’s the matter, Belter?”

  “Abandon ship!”

  “I know that,” said the older man patiently. “When they have an ‘all hands’ call on one of these ships there’s no mistaking it. I want to know what’s the matter.”

  “We’re under attack. Invader.”

  “Ah.” Hereford was very calm. “It didn’t work.”

  “No,” said Belter. “It didn’t.”

  “I’ll stay here, I think.”

  “You’ll what?”

  Hereford shrugged. “What’s the use? What do you think will happen to the peaceful philosophy when news gets out that there is a defense against The Death? Even if a thousand or a million Invader ships come, nothing will keep us from fighting each other. I’m—tired.”

  “Hereford.” He waited until the old man lifted his head, met his eyes. “Remember that day in the anteroom? Do we have to go through that again?”

  Hereford smiled slowly. “Don’t bother, friend. You are going to have trouble enough after you leave. As for me—well, the most useful thing I can be now is a martyr.”

  Belter went to the bulkhead and pressed into his personal storage. He got his papers and a bottle of viski. “All right,” he said, “let’s have a quick one before I go.” Hereford smiled and accepted. Belter put all the momentomine in Hereford’s drink, so that when they left the ship he, Belter, passed out cold. From what he heard later he missed quite a show. Delta slugged it out with the Invader. She fought until there was nothing but a top turret left, and it kept spitting away at the enemy until a disrupter big enough for half a planet wiped it out. She was a good ship too. The Invader went screaming up into the celestial north again, leaving the terrified Sigma alone. Belter regained consciousness in the life craft along with the commander and Hereford. Hereford looked like an illustration in the Old Testament which Belter had seen when he was a child. It was captioned “And Moses Threw Down and Broke the Two Tablets of Stone.”

  Sigma picked them up. She was a huge old Logistics vessel, twice reconverted—once from the Colonial Trade, once as the negative plant of The Death. She had a main hold in her like a convention hall, and a third of it was still empty in spite of the vast pile plant she carried. Her cargo port was open, and Delta’s life craft were being warped in and stacked inside, along with what wreckage could be salvaged for study.

  The place was a hive. Spacesuited crews floated the boats in, handling them with telescoping rods equipped with a magnetic grapple at each end. One end would be placed on the hull of a boat, the other on the deck or bulkhead or on a stanchion; and then by contracting or expanding the rod by means of its self-contained power unit, the boat would be pushed or pulled to its stack.

  The boats had completed their rendezvous after two days of signaling and careful jetting. All were accounted for but two, which had probably tangled with debris. The escape of so many was largely due to the fact that there was very little wreckage large enough to do any damage after the last explosion.

  Osgood’s boat hovered outside until the last, and by the time it was warped in all the others had unloaded and their crews were inboard, getting refreshment and treatment. By the time the little “Blister” had been racked, the cargo port was sealed and the compartment refilled with air. Sigma’s captain opened the boat’s hatch with his own hands, and Osgood crawled out, followed by a dazed Belter and a sullen Hereford.

  “Your ship, sir,” said the captain of Sigma, formally, in the traditional presentation of a ship and its facilities to a superior.

  “Yeah. I need one at the moment,” said the Butcher wryly. He stretched, looked around. “Get any parts of the Martian?”

  “No, sir,” said the captain. He was a worried-looking, gangly specimen from the Venusian Dome. His name had so many syllables that only the first three were used. They were Holovik. “And little enough from Delta, I’m sorry to say. Wh … what happened?”

  “You saw it
, didn’t you? What do you think?”

  “I’ll say it, if you can’t get it out,” said Osgood bluntly. “He has a defense against The Death. Isn’t that fine?”

  “Yes sir.” The horizontal lines across Captain Holovik’s forehead deepened, and the corners of his mouth turned down. “Fine.”

  “Don’t burst into tears!” snapped the commander. He looked around taking stock of the salvage. “Get all available techs on that scrap. Find out if any of it is radioactive, and if so how much of what type. What’s that?”

  “That” was a thirty-foot tapered cylinder with three short mast antennae projecting at right angles to the long axis, near each rounded end.

  “I don’t know for sure, sir,” said Holovik. “I knew that there were … ah … weapons, new ones. We don’t get information the way we used to during the war—”

  “Stop mumbling, man! If that’s a secret weapon, it isn’t from Delta.”

  Belter put in, “It isn’t from Epsilon either. I went over the specs of everything aboard all of these vessels.”

  “Then where did-Oh!” His “Oh!” was echoed by Belter and two junior officers who had overheard the conversation. It was a most respectful sound. Also respectful was the unconscious retreat all hands took to the inboard bulkhead.

  Hereford, who had not spoken a word for nearly a day, asked: “What’s the matter? What is it?”

  “Don’t know,” breathed Belter, “but I’d like to see it out of here. Way out. It’s the Invader’s.”

  “G-get it out of here. Jump!”

  They piled into the inboard section and sealed the cargo inspection hatch behind them, leaving three spacesuited e.m. and an officer to worry the object tenderly out of the port.

  “You’re a cretin,” Osgood told the captain. “You’re a drooling incompetent. Whatever possessed you to bring in an unidentified object?”

  “I … it was … I don’t know,” stammered Holovik. Belter marveled at the degree of worriment the man’s face could register.

  A junior officer with communication pips spoke up. “That was the object which didn’t register on the detectors until it was within a mile, sir,” he reminded. “I still can’t understand it, commander. Our detectors—all of ‘em—are sensitive to fifty thousand at the very least. I’m ready to swear our equipment was in order, and yet we had no sign of this thing until it was right on top of us.”

  “Somebody in Detection asleep,” growled the Butcher. “Wait, commander,” Belter turned toward the young sigman. “How was this thing bearing?”

  “Right on the ship, sir. An intersection course from down left forrad, as I remember. We deflected it and then brought it about with the short tractors.”

  “It just appeared out of nowhere, eh?” rasped Osgood. “And so you invited it in.”

  “There was a good deal of debris in that sector, commander,” said Holovik faintly. “We were busy … tracers sometimes give resultant indications when they pick up two separated objects simultaneously—”

  “Yeah, and then they indicate something where nothing is. They don’t indicate nothing where there is something. Why, I’ll break you to—”

  “It seems to me,” said Belter, who had been pursuing his own line of reasoning, “that what we have here is mighty similar to what hit Outpost. Remember? They put a tracer on it as they saw it leave the Invader. It blanked out. They got no radiation or radar reflection at all. But it came in and wiped out the base.”

  “The nonexistent, hypothetical ‘warper,’” said Hereford, with a wisp of his old smile.

  Osgood glanced at him coldly. “If you’re trying to tell me that the Invader used a warper to protect himself from The Death, you’re showing your ignorance. The Death is a vibration, not a radiation. It’s a physical effect, not an energy phenomenon.”

  “Blast The Death!” spat Belter. “Don’t you see what we’ve got here? It’s one of their disrupters. Short range—always short range. Don’t you see? It is a warper, and for some reason it can only carry a limited amount of power. The Invader started popping away at Delta, and when she fought back, he let loose with everything he had. This must’ve been one of his disrupters which was launched while Delta was in one piece and arrived after she’d been blasted. Then it went right on seeking, but ran out of fuel before it reached Sigma. That’s why it suddenly appeared to the detectors.”

  “Now, that makes sense,” said the Butcher, looking at Belter as if he were seeing him for the first time. He creased his lower lip sharply with his thumb and forefinger. “Warp camouflage, eh? H-m-m-m. I wonder if we could get a look at that unit. Maybe we could build something like it and get close enough to that devil to do some good.” He turned to the fretful Holovik. “Captain! See if you can get a couple of techs to volunteer to de-fuse that thing. If you can’t get volunteers—”

  “I’ll get them, sir,” said Holovik, for the first time looking a little happier. It made him appear wistful instead of mournful.

  It was easier to count those not volunteering, once the proposition went out over the intercom. In a few minutes Sigma lay off a couple of hundred miles to stand by while a crack squad worked over the drifting bomb. They carried three viewers, and the control bridge of the Death ship was mobbed with experts. Every move was carefully discussed; every possibility was carefully explored before a move was made.

  They did it. It was slow, and suspense reached an agonized pitch; but once it was done and could be reviewed, it was unbelievably simple. The warhead was clamped to the main hull of the bomb. The activators were in the head, controlled simply by a couple of rods. The seeking gear, proximity circuits, power source, drive, and what was apparently the camouflage unit were all packed into the hull.

  A torch was clamped to the warhead, which was cast adrift. The precious hull was towed a few miles with reaction-pistols and picked up by the ship, which then got clear and rayed the virulent little warhead into shocking, flaring extinction.

  In shops and laboratories throughout the System, feverish work was carried on over plans and mock-ups of the alien weapon. One of the first things discovered about it was that the highly theoretical and very popular term “warper” was a misnomer. The camouflage was an ingenious complexity of wiring in concentric “skins” in the hull. Each impinging radiation caused the dielectric constant of the hull to change so that it reradiated that exact frequency, at the same intensity as received, but a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. The heart of the device was what might have been the thousandth generation descended from a TR tube. It hunted so constantly, and triggered radiations with so little lag, that the device could handle several frequencies almost simultaneously.

  What used most of the power was the drive. It involved a magnetic generator and a coil which carried magnetic flux. Induced in this was an extremely intense gravitic field, self-canceling forward and on all sides. The intensified “reverse” gravity pressure was, therefore, at the stern. Maneuvering was accomplished by variations in field strength by inductance-coupling of the mag-flux coils.

  The hull was a totally absorbent black, and the missile was made of an alloy which was transparent to hard radiation.

  All information was pooled, and sub-projects were constantly assigned from Science Center. Etherfac transmission was full of last-minute reports on phases of the problem, interspersed with frequent communiques on the last known position of the Invader. He had indulged in an apparently aimless series of convolutions for several weeks following D-Day, evidently to assess his damage. After that he had maintained a great circular course, parallel in plane to the Solar ecliptic, and the assumption was that he was undergoing repairs and engaging in reconnaissance. Both were certainly indicated, for he must have undergone an incredible strain in that wild curve on D-Day. And as before, he was the symbol of terror. If he struck, where would he strike? If not, he would leave. Then, would he be back? Alone, or with a fleet?

  Belter’s life was a continuous flurry of detail, but he found time to wonde
r about several things. The Jovians, for example. They had been a great help in the duplication of the camouflage device, particularly in their modification of the fission power plant it carried. The Jovian improvement was a disruption motor using boron, an element which appeared nowhere in the original. It gave vastly more range to the Solarian device. And yet—there was something about the Jovian willingness that was not quite in harmony with their established behavior patterns. The slight which Leess had suffered from the Martian was not, after all, a large thing in itself, but the fact that Leess had led his planet into a policy of noncooperation made it large. The sudden reversal of this policy since D-Day was more than puzzling. A hundred times Belter shrugged the question off, grunting “Jovians are funny people,” and a hundred times it returned to him.

  There was another unprecedented worry. The Martian delegate called Belter aside one afternoon and presented it to him. “It’s that Hereford,” the man said, scratching his sunburned neck. “He’s too quiet. I know he lost a mess of ‘face’ over his vote on The Death, but he still has a following. More than I like to think about.”

  “So?”

  “Well, when the big day comes, when we send a formation of the new camouflaged boats out there, what’s to keep him from opening his trap and making trouble for us?”

  “Why should he?”

  “You know what the pacifists are after. If we fitted out a bunch of these new gadgets with disrupters and wiped the Invader out, they’d have no kick. They don’t want that Death-defense to get back to the System. You know that.”

  “Hm-m-m. And how would you handle this on Mars?” The Martian grinned.

  “Why, I reckon Brother Hereford would have a little accident. Enough to keep him quiet, anyhow—maybe for a little while, maybe for—”

  “I thought as much.” Belter let himself burn for a luxurious second before replying. “Forget it. Supposing what you say is true—and I don’t grant that it is—what else can you think of?”

  “Well now, I think it would be a bright idea to send a camouflage force out without consulting the Council. That way, if Hereford is waiting for the psychological moment to blow his mouth off, we’ll get what we’re after before he knows what’s happening. If we can keep the lid on it, that is.”