“Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that each plan is as detailed as the M-Day deal. Lord, no. The plans are policies of action, rather than blueprints. They stay within the bounds of statistical probability, though we push those bounds outward as far as possible. I’ve mentioned possible enemies, and possible combatants aside from enemies. There are also plans covering combinations and permutations of alliance. Anything is possible after such precedent, for example, as the situation in the Second War, when our close ally Russia was at peace with our worst enemy.” He laughed. “If that happened in human instead of in international terms, with my closest friend lunching daily with a man who was openly trying to kill me, we’d call it fantastic. Maybe it is,” he said cheerfully, “but it’s most engrossing.”
“You rather enjoy it, don’t you?”
“I have never had such fascinating work in all my life.”
“I didn’t mean strategy, soldier-boy. I meant war.”
“War? I s’pose it is. Now, another thing the Board is doing...wait a minute. Muscles! You’re not still the dewy-eyed idealist you used to be—brotherhood of mankind, and all that, are you?”
“I invented the sonic disruptor, didn’t I?” You probably think that answers your question, he thought bitterly.
“So you did. A very healthy development in you and in the noble art of warfare. Nicest little side arm in history. Busts a man all up inside without breaking the skin. So little mess.”
Healthy! Dr. Simmons stared at his brother, who was looking into his cigarette case. Healthy! And I developed the disruptor to focus ultrasonic vibrations under the skin, to homogenize cancerous tissue. I never dreamed they’d...ah, neither did Nobel. “Go on about the Board,” he said.
“What was I...oh yes. Not only have we planned the obvious things—political situations, international crises, campaigns and alliances, but we are keeping a very close watch on technology. The War Department has, at long last, abandoned the policy of fighting this war with the last war’s weapons. Remember how Hitler astonished the world with the elementary stunt of organizing liaison between his tanks and his dive bombers? Remember the difficulties they had in promoting the bozooka to replace the mortar in jungle warfare? And how the War Department refused to back the Wright Brothers? There’ll be no more of that.”
“You mean we’re preparing to use the latest in everything? Really use it?”
“That’s right. Atomic energy and jet propulsion we know about. Then there’s biological warfare, both disease and crop-hormone techniques. But it doesn’t stop there. As a matter of fact, those things, and other proven developments, account for only a small part of our plans. We have the go-ahead on supplies, weapons, equipment, and techniques which haven’t even been developed yet. Some haven’t even been invented yet!”
Dr. Simmons whistled. “Like what?”
The colonel smiled, rolled his eyes up thoughtfully. “Like impenetrable force-fields, mass-multipliers—that’s a cute hypothesis, Muscles. Increase the effective mass of a substance, and the results could be interesting. Particularly if it were radioactive. Antigravity. Telepath scrambles, which throw interrupting frequencies in and around thought waves, if thoughts are waves...we’ve considered practically every gadget and gimmick in every story and article in every science-fiction magazine published in the last thirty years, and have planned what to do in case it suddenly pops up.”
Ignoring all the utopian, philosophical, sociological stories, of course, thought Dr. Simmons. He said, “So your visit here isn’t purely social?”
“Gosh no. I’m with the observation group which came here to see your Spy-Eye in action. What is it, anyhow? And how did it get the cute soapsuds name?”
Dr. Simmons smiled. “One of the armchair boys in the front office used to work in an advertising agency. The device is a ‘Self-Propelled Information Interceptor’—SPII—which, once it touched that huckster brain, became ‘Spy-Eye.’ As to just what it is, you’ll see that for yourself if you attend the demonstration, which starts as soon as we’ve finished talking.”
“You mean you postponed it until I was through with you?”
“That’s right.” I thought you’d like that, he thought, watching the pleased grin on his brother’s face. “Tell me something, Leroy. All these plans...are we at war?”
“Are we...well, no. You know that.”
“But these preparations. All they lack is a timetable.” He squinted quizzically. “By golly, I believe you have that, too.”
“We have plenty,” the colonel sidestepped, winking.
“Choose sides yet? What’s the line-up?”
“I won’t tell you that. No, I’m not worried about security, it’s just that I might be wrong. Things move so fast these days. I’ll tell you one thing, though. We already have our neutral ground.”
“Oh yes, of course—like Switzerland and Sweden. I’ve always wondered what exact powers kept them neutral.”
“Well, if you’re going to fight a war, you’ve got to have some way to exchange prisoners and have meetings with various interested parties, and so on—”
“Yep. And it used to come in pretty handy for certain manufacturers.”
The colonel eyed him. “Are you sure you’re off that lion-and-lamb kick?”
Dr. Simmons grimaced. “I think the Spy-Eye can answer that adequately.”
The colonel slipped off his perch. “Yes, let’s get to it,” he said eagerly.
They went to the door. “By the way,” said Dr. Simmons, “just what have you picked out for your neutral ground?”
“Japan,” said the colonel.
“Nice of ’em to agree to anything so close to home.”
“Nice of ’em? Don’t be silly! It’s the only way they can be sure it won’t be fortified.”
“Oh,” said his brother. They went out.
The demonstration went off without a hitch, and afterward the six Army observers and the plant technicians repaired to the projection room for Dr. Simmons’ summation.
He talked steadily and tiredly, and his thoughts talked on at the same time. As he reeled off specifications and characteristics, his mind rambled along, sometimes following the spoken thought, sometimes paralleling it, sometimes commenting acidly or humorously, always tiredly. It was a trapped thing, that talking mind, but it was articulate.
“...five-point-eight feet long overall, an aerodynamic streamline, with its largest diameter only two-point-three-seven feet. Slide One, please. As you have seen, it has one propelling and three supporting jets. These three are coupled directly to the same outlet valve, which is controlled by an absolute altimeter. The whole is, of course, gyro-stabilized. It is capable of trans-sonic speeds, but it can very nearly hover, subject only to a small nutation which can probably be designed out.”
It was going to be a mail rocket, commented his thought.
“Its equipment includes the usual self-guiding devices, a coding flight-recorder, and radio receivers tuned to various preselected FM, AM, and radar channels. In regard to radar, should it pick up any radar pulses close enough or strong enough to suggest detection, it changes course and speed radically. Should they persist, the Spy-Eye releases ‘window’—aluminum-foil strips of various lengths—and returns to its starting point by preset and devious course.
“The spy device itself is relatively simple. It uses magnefilm, taking pictures of the source of any desired radio signal. When the signal is received, it locates the beam, aims the camera, and records the audio signal magnetically. Of course, the synchronization between the picture and the audio recording is perfect, because of the magnefilm.”
“Will you explain magnefilm, please, Doctor?”
“Certainly, Captain. It was developed through research into the rather wide variation in dielectric characteristics of the early plastics—the styrenes, ureas, and so on. Molecular arrangement was altered in various plastics until a transparent conductor was developed. It was not very far from that to the production
of a plastic with a remarkably high magnetic density. Once this was made in a transparent, strong, pliable form, it was simple to make photographic film of it. The audio impulses are impressed directly upon the film, as in any magnetic tape system.” And it was invented for 8-mm. movie addicts, so that they could have sound film, added his thought. Now it’s a secret weapon.
“The purpose of the Spy-Eye, of course, is to pick up short-range transmissions—vertically beamed walkie-talkies, line-of-sight FM messages, and the like. Since these are usually well beyond the range of the enemy’s listening posts, they are seldom coded. Therefore, with this device, we have access to a wealth of intelligence that has so far been regarded as unreachable.”
He signaled the projection room. The screen came to life. During the test, the various officers had spoken into the microphones of several AM and FM, transmitters spotted within a quarter-mile. Unerringly, after a few spoken words, the screen showed the sources and their identification numerals, painted on large white signboards.
“In enemy territory,” remarked the doctor dryly, “we shall probably have to do without the boards.” There was polite laughter. “If you will remember, gentleman, the selector was next set to pick up something on the broadcast band.”
The screen, blank, gave an agonized groan. Then a child’s voice said clearly, “What’s the matter, Daddy? Has that old acid indigestion got you down again?” “Owoo,” said the man’s voice. The screen suddenly showed, far below, the tall towers of a transmitting antenna. “Honey child, you’d better go for the doctor. Your old Daddy’s real poorly.” “No need to be,” rejoined the angelic little voice. “I took my ice-cream money and bought you a package of Bubble-Up, the fastest relief known to the mind of a man. It is only ten cents at the nearest drugstore. Here. Take one and drink this glass of water I brought you.” Glug-glug. Clink! “Ah-h! I’m a new man!” “Now Daddy, here’s my report card. I’m sorry. It’s all D’s.” “Ha ha ha! Think nothing of it, honey child. Here—take this dollar. Take five dollars! Take all the other kids down for a treat!”
“Cut!” said Dr. Simmons. “I would consider this conclusive evidence, gentlemen, that the Spy-Eye can spot a target for bombing.”
Amid laughter and applause, the lights came on. The observers pressed forward to shake the physicist’s hand. Colonel Simmons stood by until the rest went to a table, where a technician was explaining the flight-record tapes and the course and radio-band preselector mechanisms.
“Muscles, it’s fine. Just fine! How about duplication? I know there can be no leaks out of here, but do you think they will be able to figure it out quickly enough to get something like it into production?”
Dr. Simmons rubbed his chin. “That’s hard to say. Aside from the fuel and the magnefilm, there’s’ nothing new about the device except for the fact that old components are packed into a new box. The fuel can be duplicated, and magnefilm—well, that’s a logical development.”
“Well,” said the colonel, “it can’t matter too much. I mean, even if they have it already. We can blanket the earth with those things. There needn’t be a single spot on the globe unobserved. The Spy-Eye doesn’t have to detect radio alone, does it?”
“Lord, no! It could be built to seek infrared, or radioactivity, or even sound, though we’d have to tune the jets acoustically for that. The magnefilm’s audio could pick up our own directional beams and get a radio fix on anything we wanted it to take picture of. The camera could be triggered to a time mechanism, or to anything that radiated or vibrated. So could the hunting mechanism.”
“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 “OF 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 in interstellar space. It was a triple blast of sound, each one two and two-fifth 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 sometime” 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 analysis 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 part milled to its function, and alt 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 7, 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 on radar on December 6. when it circled 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 re-pass 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 i
ts pose from a slumber to a crouch, and you know that only 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 little thing, that bomb. About like a two-hundred-fifty-pounder. But what a blossom!”
“I heard the news report 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 dropped 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. On the other hand, we can’t even be sure it wasn’t a wild throw by one of our allies. Nowadays, you know everything, and you know nothing; you know it ahead of time, or you know it too late.”
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