Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “I feel you deserve many congratulations, Mr. Jedd. Purely as a matter of personal interest, might I ask how you came to discover such a remarkable effect?”

  “Indeed you may, Mr. Commissioner. The process was developed by my brother on Mars. He enlisted the courtesy and kindness of a messenger to send me a sample. It was in the form of a compact—a lady’s compact—and when heat treated it separated into a plastic sheet which formed in script the words ‘I remember.’ ”

  Jeremy grinned broadly. “It was some time before I realized that there was anything more to be learned from the sample, for the words covered the rest of it. When I put this—this message into my pocket, I saw the rest of the plastic and, guided by a hint in a rather cryptic verbal message concerning women and plastics, I again treated the sample. I got more script. It read, ‘Density Two.’ Then I knew what he was driving at. I treated it again and got ‘Density Three’ and still again and got”—he smiled—“a length of pipe. After that it was little trouble for me to analyze the plastic and develop the condensing treatment—I beg your pardon. I think somebody had better get Miss Exeter a glass of water.…”

  They met that evening, and perhaps it was by accident. She was standing in the shadow near his apartment building when he came home from the lab,

  “Jerry?”

  “Phyllis! I—I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? That’s what you say when you realize you did a wrong.

  I don’t think you mean that. Isn’t it more of a kind of—pity?”

  He did not deny it. He said, “What can I do for you?”

  “I—I need a job now.”

  He took her hand and drew her into the pale light. Her hand lay in his like something asleep. “I couldn’t give you a job, Phyl.”

  “Yes, I know, I know. I have never been—faithful. Jerry, I haven’t been faithful to myself.”

  “I don’t understand. You’ve always—”

  “Always thought I could take ’em or leave ’em alone. Not so, Jeremy.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that.” He squeezed her hand a little. “Your hands are soft. Maybe that’s part of the trouble, Phyl.”

  “I think I know what you mean. There are jobs for me, but—”

  “—not jobs for your wit or your wits.”

  “I see. I think I can—get there, Jerry.”

  “I know you can. Goodbye, Phyllis.”

  “Goodbye, Jeremy.”

  There is one job which centuries of human progress has not done away with. No one has developed a self-washing window. When one of mankind’s monuments to himself reaches a thousand feet into the air, and its windows must be washed, that washing is a job for a rare type of human. He must be strong, steady, and brave. He must live, away from his job, in ways which do not unfit him for it.

  Jeremy was glad when he heard Phyllis was doing this work. He knew then what he had always guessed—that some day she would “get there.” He knew it in his heart.

  There Is No Defense

  CURSING FORMALITY, BELTER loosened his tunic and slouched back in his chair. He gazed at each of the members of the Joint Solar Military Council in turn, and rasped: “You might as well be comfortable, because, so help me, if I have to chain you to this table from now until the sun freezes, I’ll run off this record over and over again until someone figures an angle. I never heard of anything yet, besides The Death, that couldn’t be whipped one way or another. There’s a weakness somewhere in this thing. It’s got to be on the record. So we’ll just keep at the record until we find it. Keep your eyes peeled and the hair out of your eyes. That goes for you too, Leess.”

  The bottled Jovian shrugged hugely. The infrared sensory organ on its cephalothorax flushed as Belter’s words crackled through the translator. Glowering at the creature, Belter quenched a flash of sympathy. The Jovian was a prisoner in other things besides the bottle which supplied its atmosphere and gravity. Leess represented a disgraced and defeated race, and its position at the conference table was a hollow honor—a courtesy backed by heat and steel and The Death. But Belter’s glower did not change. There was no time, now, to sympathize with those whose fortunes of war were all bad ones.

  Belter turned to the orderly and nodded. A sigh, compounded of worry and weariness, escaped the council as one man. The lights dimmed, and again the record appeared on the only flat wall of the vast chamber.

  First the astronomical data from the Plutonian Dome, showing the first traces of the Invader approaching from the direction of the Lyran Ring—Equations, calculations, a sketch, photographs. These were dated three years back, during the closing phases of the Jovian War. The Plutonian Dome was not serviced at the time, due to the emergency. It was a completely automatic observatory, and its information was not needed during the interplanetary trouble. Therefore it was not equipped with instantaneous transmissions, but neatly reeled up its information until it could be visited after the war. There was a perfectly good military observation base on Outpost, the retrograde moon of Neptune, which was regarded as quite adequate to watch the Solar System area. That is, there had been a base there—

  But, of course the Invader was well into the System before anyone saw the Pluto records, and by that time—

  The wall scene faded into the transcript of the instantaneous message received by Terran HQ, which was rigged to accept any alarm from all of the watch posts.

  The transcript showed the interior of the Neptunian military observatory, and cut in apparently just before the Sigmen heard the alarm. One was sprawled in a chair in front of the finder controls; the other, a rangy lieutenant with the burned skin of his Martian Colonial stock, stiffened, looked up at the blinking “General Alarm” light as the muted, insistent note of the “Stations” bell began to thrum from the screen. The sound transmission was very good; the councilmen could distinctly hear the lieutenant’s sharp intake of breath, and his voice was quite clear as he rapped:

  “Colin! Alarm. Fix!”

  “Fix, sir,” said the enlisted man, his fingers flying over the segmented controls. “It’s deep space, sir,” he reported as he worked. “A Jovian, maybe—flanking us.”

  “I don’t think so. If what’s left of their navy could make any long passes at all, you can bet it would be at Earth. How big is it?”

  “I haven’t got … oh, here it is, sir,” said the e.m. “An object about the size of a Class III-A Heavy.”

  “Ship?”

  “Don’t know, sir. No heat radiation from any kind of jets. And the magnetoscope is zero.”

  “Get a chaser on him.”

  Belter’s hands tightened on the table edge. Every time he saw this part of the record he wanted to get up and yell, “No, you idiot! It’ll walk down your beam!” The chaserscope would follow anything it was trained on, and bring in a magnified image. But it took a mess of traceable vhf to do it.

  Relaxing was a conscious effort. Must be slipping, he thought glumly, wanting to yell at those guys. Those guys are dead.

  In the picture recording, a projection of the chaserscope’s screen was flashed on the observatory screen. Staring fearfully at this shadow picture of a shadow picture, the council saw again the familiar terrible lines of the Invader—squat, unlovely, obviously not designed for atmospheric work; slab-sided, smug behind what must have been foolproof meteor screens, for the ship boldly presented flat side and bottom plates to anything which might be thrown at her.

  “It’s a ship, sir!” said the e.m. unnecessarily. “Seems to be turning on its short axis. Still no drive emanations.”

  “Range!” said the lieutenant into a wall mike. Three lights over it winked on, indicating the batteries were manned and ready for ranging information. The lieutenant, his eyes fixed on the large indicators over the enlisted man’s head, hesitated a moment, then said, “Automatics! Throw your ranging gear to our chaser.”

  The three lights blinked, once each. The battery reporters lit up, showing automatic control as the medium and heavy launching tubes bore roun
d to the stranger.

  The ship was still on the screen, turning slowly. Now a dark patch on her flank could be seen—an open port. There was a puff of escaping gas, and something appeared whirling briefly away from the ship, toward the scanner. They almost saw it clearly—and then it was gone.

  “They threw something at us, sir!”

  “Track it!”

  “Can’t sir!”

  “You saw the beginning of that trajectory! It was coming this way.”

  “Yes sir. But the radar doesn’t register it. I don’t see it on the screen either. Maybe it’s a warper?”

  “Warpers are all theory, Colin. You don’t bend radar impulses around an object and then restore them to their original direction. If this thing is warping at all, it’s warping light. It—”

  And then all but the Jovian closed their eyes as the screen repeated that horror—the bursting inward of the observatory’s bulkhead, the great jagged blade of metal that flicked the lieutenant’s head straight into the transmission camera.

  The scene faded, and the lights went up.

  “Slap in the next re—Hold it!” Belter said. “What’s the matter with Hereford?”

  The Peace delegate was slumped in his chair, his head on his arms, his arms on the table. The Martian Colonial representative touched him, and Hereford raised his seamed, saintly face:

  “Sorry.”

  “You sick?”

  Hereford sat back tiredly. “Sick?” he repeated vaguely. He was not a young man. Next to that of the Jovian, his position was the strangest of all. He represented a group, as did each of the others. But not a planetary group. He represented the amalgamation of all organized pacifistic thought in the System. His chair on the Joint Solar Military Council was a compromise measure, the tentative answer to an apparently unanswerable question—can a people do without the military? Many thought people could. Some thought not. To avoid extremism either way, the head of an unprecedented amalgamation of peace organizations was given a chair on the JSMC. He had the same vote as a planetary representative. “Sick?” he repeated in a whispering baritone. “Yes, I rather think so.” He waved a hand at the blank wall. “Why did the Invader do it? So pointless … so stupid.” He raised puzzled eyes, and Belter felt a new kind of sympathy. Hereford’s hollow-ground intelligence was famous in four worlds. He was crackling, decisive; but now he could only ask the simplest of questions, like a child too tired to be badly frightened.

  “Yeah—why?” asked Belter. “Oh … never mind the rest of the record,” he added suddenly. “I don’t know how the rest of you feel, but at the moment I’m hypnotized by the jet-blasted thing.

  “Why, Hereford wants to know. If we knew that, maybe we could plan something. Defenses, anyway.”

  Somebody murmured: “It’s not a campaign. It’s murder.”

  “That’s it. The Invader reaches out with some sort of a short-range disrupting bomb and wipes out the base on Outpost. Then it wanders into the System, washes out an uninhabited asteroid beacon, drifts down through the shield screening of Titan and kills off half the population with a cyanogen-synthesizing catalyst. It captures three different scanner-scouts, holding them with some sort of a tractor beam, whirling them around like a stone on a string, and letting them go straight at the nearest planet. Earth ships, Martian, Jovian—doesn’t matter. It can outfly and outfight anything we have so far, except—”

  “Except The Death,” whispered Hereford. “Go on, Belter. I knew it was coming to this.”

  “Well, it’s true! And then the cities. If it ever drops a disrupter like that”—he waved at the wall, indicating the portion of the record they had just seen—“on a large city, there wouldn’t be any point in even looking for it, let alone rebuilding it. We can’t communicate with the Invader—if we send out a general signal it ignores us, and if we send out a beam it charges us or sends one of those warping disrupter bombs. We can’t even surrender to it! It just wanders through the System, changing course and speed from moment to moment, and every once in a while taking a crack at something.”

  The Martian member glanced at Hereford, and then away. “I don’t see why we’ve waited so long. I saw Titan, Belter. In another century it’ll be dead as Luna.” He shook his head. “No pre-Peace agreement can stand in the way of the defense of the System no matter how solemn the agreement was. I voted to outlaw The Death, too. I don’t like the idea of it any more than … than Hereford there. But circumstances alter cases. Are we going to sacrifice everything the race has built just for an outdated principle? Are we going to sit smugly behind an idealistic scrap of paper while some secret weapon chops us down bit by bit?”

  “Scrap of paper,” said Hereford. “Son, have you read your ancient history?”

  The translator hissed. Through it, Leess spoke. The flat, unaccented words were the barest framework for the anger which those who knew Jovians could detect by the sudden paling of the creature’s sensory organ. “Leess object phrase secret weapon. Man from Mars suggest Invader Jovian work.”

  “Cool down, Leess,” Belter said, reaching over and firmly putting the Martian back in his seat. “Hey you—watch your language or you’ll go back to the canals to blow the rust off supersoy. Now, Leess; I rather think the delegate from Mars let his emotions get the better of him. No one thinks that the Invader is Jovian. It’s from deep space somewhere. It has a drive far superior to anything we’ve got, and the armament … well, if Jupiter had anything like that, you wouldn’t have lost the war. And then there was Titan. I don’t think Jovians would kill off so many of their own just to camouflage a new secret weapon.”

  The Martian’s eyebrows lifted a trifle. Belter frowned, and the Martian’s face went forcibly blank. The Jovian relaxed.

  Addressing the Council generally, but looking at the Martian, Belter gritted: “The war is over. We’re all Solarians and the Invader is a menace to our System. After we get rid of the Invader we’ll have time to tangle with each other. Not before. Is that clear?”

  “No human trust Jupiter. No man trust Leess,” sulked the Jovian. “Leess no think. Leess no help. Jupiter better off dead than not trusted.”

  Belter threw up his hands in disgust. The sensitivity and stubbornness of the Jovian were well known. “If there’s a clumsy, flat-footed way of doing things, a Martian’ll find it,” he growled. “Here we need every convolution of every brain here. The Jovian has a way of thinking different enough so he might help us crack this thing, and you have to go and run him out on strike.”

  The Martian bit his lips. Belter turned to the Jovian. “Leess, please—come off your high horse. Maybe the Solar System is a little crowded these days, but we all have to live in it. Are you going to cooperate?”

  “No. Martian man no trust Jupiter. Mars die, Jupiter die, Earth die. Good. Nobody not trust Jupiter.” The creature creased inward upon itself, a movement as indicative as the thrusting out of a lower lip.

  “Leess is in this with the rest of us,” said the Martian. “We ought to—”

  “That’ll do!” barked Belter. “You’ve said enough, chum. Concentrate on the Invader and leave Leess alone. He has a vote on this council and by the same token, he has the right to refrain from voting.”

  “Whose side are you on?” flashed the Martian, rising.

  Belter came up with him, but Hereford’s soft, deep voice came between them like a barrier. The Peace delegate said: “He’s on the side of the System. All of us must be. We have no choice. You Martians are fighting men. Do you think you can separate yourselves from the rest of us and stop the Invader?”

  Flushed, the Martian opened his mouth, closed it again, sat down. Hereford looked at Belter, and he sat down, too. The tension in the chamber lessened, but the matter obviously relegated itself to the “For Further Action” files in at least two men’s minds.

  Belter gazed at his fingers until they would be still without effort, and then said quietly: “Well, gentlemen, we’ve tried everything. There is no defense. We’ve lost
ships, and men, and bases. We will lose more. If the Invader can be destroyed, we can be sure of a little time, at least, for preparation.”

  “Preparation?” asked Hereford.

  “Certainly! You don’t think for a minute that that ship isn’t, or won’t soon be, in communication with its own kind? Suppose we can’t destroy it. It will be able to go back where it came from, with the news that there’s a culture here for the taking, with no weapon powerful enough to touch them. You can’t be so naive as to believe that this one ship is the only one they have, or the only one we’ll ever see! Our only course is to wipe out this ship and then prepare for a full-scale invasion. If it doesn’t come before we’re prepared, our only safe course will be to carry the invasion to them, wherever they may be!”

  Hereford shook his head sadly. “The old story.”

  Belter’s fist came down with a crash. “Hereford. I know that Peace Amalgamated is a great cultural stride forward. I know that to de-condition the public on three planets and a hundred colonies from the peaceful way of life is a destructive move. But—can you suggest a way of keeping the peaceful way and saving our System? Can you?”

  “Yes … if … if the Invaders can be persuaded to follow the peaceful way.”

  “When they won’t communicate? When they commit warlike acts for nothing—without plan, without conquest, apparently for the sheer joy of destruction? Hereford—we’re not dealing with anything Solarian. This is some life-form that is so different in its aims and its logic that the only thing we can do is reciprocate. Fire with fire! You talk of your ancient history. Wasn’t fascism conquered when the democratic nations went all but fascist to fight them?”

  “No,” said Hereford firmly. “The fruits of fascism were conquered. Fascism itself was conquered only by democracy.”

  Belter shook his head in puzzlement. “That’s irrelevant. I … think,” he added, because he was an honest man. “To get back to the Invader: we have a weapon with which we can destroy him. We can’t use it now because of Peace Amalgamated; because the Solarian peoples have determined to outlaw it forever. The law is specific: The Death is not to be used for any purposes, under any circumstances. We, the military, can say we want it until our arteries harden, but our chances of getting it are negligible unless we have public support in repealing the law. The Invader has been with us for eighteen months or more, and in spite of his depredations, there is no sign that the public would support repeal. Why?” He stabbed out a stumpy forefinger. “Because they follow you, Hereford. They have completely absorbed your quasi-religious attitude of … what was your phrase?”