A Way Home

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “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 w-as 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 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 Russkis’ cooperation 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 these 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 on,” 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’re 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 post-war 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 Japanese 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 cooperate. 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 outthink, 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. After he had determined to call his brother, 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.”

  There was a silence. Then, “only six weeks?”

  “That’s right,” said the doctor positively. “Tell you what. Make arrangements to get me to Minsk right away, and let me get on that analysis. At worst we can find out what the ship was made of, and get an idea of how advanced those people are. At the very best, we might find a defense. Tell the Russians that my work will be open and aboveboard. They can put on as many observers as they want to, and I will share my findings completely with them.”

  “You can’t do that! That’s just what we want to avoid!”

  It was the physicist’s turn to fall silent. How do you like that! He thought. The Board is clinging to some faint hope that the invaders will do their dirty work for them. They think that we’ll find a defense and no one else will. He said finally, speaking slowly and carefully as if to a child, “Leroy, listen. I’m just as anxious as you are to do something about this matter. I think I can do something. But either I do it my way, or I don’t do it at all. Is that quite dear? Perhaps I’m more resigned than you are. Perhaps I think we deserve this...are you there?”

  “Yes.” The doctor knew his brother had paused to lick his lips nervously. “You really think you can get something of value out of the analysis?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “I’ll check with the Board. Muscles—”

  “Yes, Leroy.”

  “Don’t go mystic on us, hah?”

  “Go see the Board,” said Dr. Simmons, and hung up.

  He went to Russia.

  The colonel met him on his return, two weeks later, at a West Coast field. The unarmed long-range jet fighter and its bristling escort, which had accompanied it from Eniwetok, skimmed to the landing strip. The colonel had a two-place coupe sport plane waiting. Dr. Simmons, inordinately cheerful, refused a meal and said he wanted to take off right away for his laboratories. The colonel wanted him to appear before the Board for a report, but he smiled and shook his head, and the colonel knew that smile better than to argue.

  When they reached traveling altitude, and the colonel had throttled down to stay under the sonic barrier, and they had the susurrus of driving jets to accompany them rather than the roar of climbing jets to compete, they talked.

  “How was it, Muscles?”

  “I had a ball. It was fine.”

  The colonel shot a look at him. He disapproves, thought the doctor. War is grim and business-like, and for anyone to enjoy the business of war seems to him a sacrilege.

  “It looked pretty touchy at first. They all acted as if I had an A-bomb in my watch pocket. Then I ran into Iggy.”

  “Iggy?”

  “Yup. I could recite his whole name if I tried hard, but it’s a jaw-breaker. We used to drink forbidden sherry together in the dorm at the University of Virginia when I was a kid in school. We thrashed out all the truths of the cosmos together. He was a swell guy. I remember once when Iggy decided that the rule forbidding women in the dorm was unreasonable. He rigged up a—”

  “What happened in Minsk?” asked the colonel coldly.

  “Oh. Minsk. Well, Iggy’s come a long way since college. He specialized in aerodynamics, and then got tired of it. For years he’d been fooling around with nuclear physics as a hobby, and during the Second War he got real high up in the field. Naturally he was called in when this ship nosed in at Minsk.”

  “Why naturally?”

  “Well, the fragment retained much of its shape. That’s aerodynamics. And it was hot—really hot. That’s nuclear physics. He was a big help. According to his extrapolations, by the way, your radar was right. If that was a part of the hull, as it probably was, and if it was a more or less continuous curve, then the ship must’ve been all of fifteen hundred feet long, with a four-hundred-foot cross-section at max. Quite a piece of business.”

  “I can’t say I’m happy to hear about it. Go on.”

  “Well, the high brass there apparently expected me to smell the fragment, taste it, and come up with a trade name. There was a lot of pressure to keep me away from testing equipment, if any. That’s where Iggy came in. He apologized for my carelessness in not bringing my betatron and some distillation apparatus. They saw the point, and got me to a laboratory. They have some nice stuff.” He shook his head appreciatively.

  Eagerly the colonel asked: “Anything we haven’t got? Can we duplicate any of it? Where is this place? Did you see any defenses?”

  “They have lots of stuff,” said the doctor shortly. “Do you want me to finish? You do? All right. Well, we volatilized pieces of it, and we distilled it. We subjected it to reagents and reducers and stress analyses and crystallographic tests. We put it in magnetic fields and we tested its resistance and conductivity. We got plenty of figures on it.” He laughed. Again the colonel looked impatiently at him.

  “Well, what is the stuff?”

  “There is no name for it, yet. Iggy wants to call it nichevite—in other words, ‘never mind.’ Leroy, it looks like dural, only it’s harder and it’s tougher. But it oxidizes very easily. It’s metallic, but it has such a low conductivity that it makes like porcelain. It has heavy-isotope aluminum in it, and light copper, and it isn’t an alloy. It’s a compound. It’s a blasted chemical compound, very stable, made of nothing but elements with a positive valence. It’s stronger than any steel, and can withstand temperatures so high that you can forget about them. The atomic blast broke it; it didn’t fuse it. We volatilized it only by powdering it and oxidizing it in an electric furnace, and then subtracting the oxygen from our calculations. That got us near enough to where we wanted to go. One thing is certain: no place on Earth you ever heard about was the source of that stuff. Iggy has sworn to his bunch that the material is of extra-solar origin. They’re propagandizing it in Russia now. A good thing, too. The Russians were all ready to call the whole thing a Yankee trick.”

  “I’ve heard some of those broadcasts,” said the colonel. “I was hoping we could keep that information to ourselves.”

  “Don’t be childish,” said the physicist, in as abrupt a tone as he ever used. “We’re not out on maneuvers, sonny. Time and time again one person or another has told the world to wake up to reality. This once the world will wake up or else. You won’t be able to keep it asleep any more. It’s gone too far.”

  The threat from outside finally broke in the papers, but only after long and worried conferences in governmental and military headquarters all over the wor
ld. The simple fact that the world would work together or face extinction made, at first, as much impression as it ever had—very little. It was not enough to overcome man’s distrust of himself. Not at first.

  But the diehards yielded, gradually and with misgivings, and acquainted the people with the menace that faced them. There was little dangerous panic—controls were too tight to allow for it—but after the first thrill of excitement there came a unanimous demand for a plan of action which was too powerful to ignore.

  Bulletins were posted hourly on the amplitude of the Jansky signals. As Dr. Simmons had pointed out, there were three sets of them, and it became increasingly evident that the three sources were in V formation, and coming fast—much faster than the first one had.

  “They’ll box us,” said Colonel Simmons. “There won’t be any circling this time. They’ll take up equidistant positions around the planet, out of our range, and they’ll fire at will.”

  “I think you’re right,” said his brother. “Well, that gives us two kinds of defense. They’re both puny, but it’ll be the best we can do. One’s technological, of course. I don’t know exactly which direction would be the best to take. We can build ships ourselves, and attack them in space. We can try to develop some kind of shield against their bombs, or whatever else they use against us. And we can try to build seeking torpedoes of some sort that’ll go out and get ’em—bearing in mind that we might be out there ourselves sometime soon, and we don’t want to fall prey to our own weapons.”