A Way Home

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “What’s the other defense?”

  “Sociological. In the first place, we must decentralize to a degree heretofore impossible. In the second place, we must pool our brains and our physical resources. No nation can afford to foot the bill of this kind of production; no nation can afford to take the chance of by passing some foreign brain which might help the whole world. Leroy, stop puckering up like that! You look as if you’re going to cry. I know what’s bothering you. This looks like the end of professional militarism. Well, it is, in the national sense. But you have a bigger enemy than ever before, and one more worthy of the best efforts of humanity. You and your Board have been doing what seemed to be really large thinking. It wasn’t, because its field was too small and too detailed. But now you have something worth fighting. Now your plans can be planetary—galactic—cosmic, if you like. Don’t hanker after the past, soldier-boy. That attitude’s about the only way there is to stay small.”

  “That’s quite a speech,” said the colonel. “I...wish I could argue with it. If I admit you’re right, I can only admit that there is no solution at all. I don’t believe the world will ever realize the necessity for cooperation until it’s too late.”

  “Maybe it will. Maybe. I remember once talking to an old soldier who had been in the First War. In his toolshed he had a little trench shovel about eighteen inches long—a very flimsy piece of equipment it was. I remarked on it, and asked him what earthly good it was to a soldier. He laughed and said that when a green squad was deployed near no man’s land and ordered to dig in, they gabbled and griped and scratched and stewed over the job. And when the first enemy bullets came whining over, they took their little shovels and they just melted into the ground.” He chuckled. “Maybe it’ll be like that. Who knows? Anyway, do what you can, Leroy.”

  “You have the strangest sense of humor,” growled the colonel, and left.

  They came.

  The first was just a shape against the stars. It could be heard like a monster’s breath in a dark place: wsh-h-h-t wsh-h-h-t wsh-h-ht on the sixty-megacycle band, where before nothing had been heard but the meaningless hiss of the Jansky noise. But it could not be seen. Not really. It was just a shape. A blur. It did not reflect radar impulses very well; the response was indeterminate, but indicated that it was about the size and shape of the mysterious bomber which had dealt the first terrifying, harmless blow.

  The world went crazy, but it was a directive madness. With the appearance of the Outsider, all talk of the advisability of defense ceased. There could be no discussion of priorities.

  A Curie Institute scientist announced light-metal fission. A Hungarian broke his own security regulations with the announcement of an artificial element of heretofore unthinkable density which could be cast into fission chambers, making possible the long-awaited pint-sized atomic engine. A Russian scientist got what seemed to be a toehold on antigravity and set up a yell which resulted in a conclave of big brains in Denver—men from all over the world. He was wrong, but a valuable precedent was set. A World Trade Organization was established, with control of raw materials and manufactured goods and their routes and schedules. Its control was so complete that tariffs were suspended in toto—the regulation read “for the duration”—and, since it is efficient to give a square deal, a square deal was given in such a clear-cut fashion that objectors were profiteers by definition. Russian ores began appearing in British smelters, and Saar coal was loaded into the Bessemers of Birmingham. Most important of all, a true International Police Force came into being with hardly a labor pain. Its members were free to go everywhere, and their duty was to stop anything which got in the way of planetary production. Individual injustice, faulty diet, poor housing, underpaying, and such items fell immediately into this category, and were dealt with quickly and with great authority.

  Propaganda unified itself and came to a focus in the hourly bulletins about the Outsiders. Every radio station on Earth included that dread triple hiss in its station breaks.

  And the Outsider just stayed where it was, just lay there breathing, waiting for its two cohorts.

  “It’s makeshift,” said Dr. Simmons, “but it might do. It just might do.”

  The colonel stepped past him and looked at the cradle, on which rested a tubby, forty-foot object like a miniature submarine.

  “A satellite, you said?”

  “Uh-huh. Loaded to the gills with direction-finders and small atomic rockets. It’ll keep a continuous fix on the Outsider during its transit, and relay the information to monitor stations on Earth. If one of the ships fires a torpedo, it will be detected and reported immediately and the satellite will launch an interceptor rocket. If the bomb or torpedo dodges, the interceptor will follow it. In the meantime, big interceptors can be on their way from Earth. If a torpedo comes close to the satellite, the satellite will dodge. If it comes too close, the satellite will explode violently enough to take the torp with it. We plan to set out three layers of these things, nine in each stratum, twenty-seven in all, so spaced as to keep a constant scanning in every direction.”

  “Satellites, hm-m-m? Muscles, if we can do this, why can’t we go right out there and get the ships themselves?”

  The physicist ticked the reasons off on his fingers. “First, because if they bracket us, as in every likelihood they will, they’d be foolish to come any closer than the one that’s already here, and he’s out of any range we can handle just now. We can assume that his ships, if not his bombs, will be prepared against our proximity devices. We’ll try, of course, but I wouldn’t be too hopeful. Second, we still haven’t a fuel efficient enough to allow for escape velocity maneuvers without a deadly acceleration, so our chances of sending manned rockets up for combat are nil at the moment.”

  The colonel looked admiringly at the satellite and the crowd of technicians which swarmed around it. “I knew we’d come up with something.”

  His brother gave him a quizzical glance. “I don’t know if you fully realize just how big a ‘we’ that is you just used. The casing of that satellite is Swedish steel. The drive is a German scientist’s adaptation of the Hungarian baby fission engine. The radio circuits are American, except for the scanning relay, which is Russian. And those technicians—I’ve never seen such a bunch. Davis, Li San, Abdallah, Schechter, O’Shaugnessy—he comes from Bolivia, by the way, and speaks only Spanish—Yokamatsu, Willet. Van Cleve. All of these men, all these designs and materials, and all the money that make up these satellites, have been found and assembled from all over the earth in only the last few weeks. There were miracles of production during the Second War, Leroy, but nothing to match this.”

  The colonel shook his head dazedly. “I never thought I’d see it happen.”

  “You’ll see more surprising things than this before we’re done,” said the scientist happily. “Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

  That was the week the second Outsider arrived. It took up a position in the celestial south, not quite opposing its fellow, and it lay quiet, breathing. If there was converse between them, it was not detectable by any known receiver. It was the same apparent size and had the same puzzling effect on radar and photographic plates as its predecessors.

  In Pakistan, an unfueled airplane took off from a back-country airstrip, flew to twenty thousand feet, and came in for a landing. The projector which was trained on it had no effect on the approaching aircraft in the moment it took the plane to disappear behind a hillock and reappear on the other Side. There was a consequent momentary power loss, and the plane lost too much altitude and had to make another pass. The wind direction dictated a climbing turn to the north, and the beam from the projector briefly touched the antenna of an amateur radio operator called Ben Ali Ra. Ben Ali Ra’s rig exploded with great enthusiasm, filling the inside of his shack with spots and specks of fused metal, ceramic, and glass. Fortunately for him—and for the world—he was in the adjoining room at the time, and suffered only a deep burn in his thigh, which was struck by a flyi
ng fragment of a coil-form.

  This was the first practical emergence of broadcast power.

  Ben Ali was aware of the nature of the experiments at the nearby field, having eavesdropped by radio on some field conversations. He was also aware of certain aims and attitudes held by the local authority. Defying these, he left the area that night, on foot, knowing that he would be killed if captured, knowing that in any event his personal property would be confiscated, and in great pain because of his wound. His story is told elsewhere; however, he reached Benares and retained consciousness long enough to warn the International Police.

  The issue was not that broadcast power was a menace; it had a long way to go before it could be used without shouting its presence through every loudspeaker within miles. The thing that brought the I. P. down in force on this isolated, all but autonomous speck on the map was the charge that the inventors intended to keep their development to themselves. The attachment of the device and all related papers by the Planetary Defense Organization was a milestone of legal precedent, and brought a new definition of “eminent domain.” Thereafter no delays were caused by the necessity of application to local governments for the release of defense information; the I. P. investigated, confiscated, and turned the devices in question over to the Planetary Defense Organization, acting directly and paying fairly all parties involved. So another important step was taken toward the erasure of national lines.

  Two weeks before the arrival of the third Outsider—excluding the one which had been shot down—the last of the twenty-seven satellites took up its orbit, and the world enjoyed its first easy breath since the beginning of the Attack, as it was called.

  Because of high-efficiency circuits and components, the fuel consumption of the electronic set-up in the satellites was very small. They held their orbits without power, except for an occasional automatic correction-kick. They could operate without servicing for years. It was assumed that by the time they needed servicing, astrogation would have developed to the point where they could be refueled—and recharged—by man-carrying ships. If technology did not solve that problem, little harm could be done by the silent, circling machines; when, at long Last, they slipped from their arbitrary orbits and spiraled in to crash, so many years would have passed that the question was, momently, academic.

  And even before the twenty-seventh satellite was launched, factories were retooling for a long dreamed of project, a space station which would circle Earth in an orbit close enough to be reached by man-carrying rockets, which would rest and refuel there and take off again for deep space without the crushing drag of Earth’s gravity.

  The third Outsider took up its positions, as Dr. Simmons had prophesied, equidistant from the others with Earth in the center, rolling nakedly under them. As in the case of the arrivals of the other two, there was no sign of its presence but the increasing sound on the sixty-megacycle band. Radar failed utterly to locate it until, suddenly, it was in its position—a third blur against the distant stars, a third indeterminate, fifteen-hundred-foot shape on the radarscopes.

  The Board of Strategy was happily, almost gleefully, busy again. Their earlier work within the field of the probability of human works faded to insignificance against the probabilities inherent in the Attack. There was another major difference, too: they came out in the open. They plastered the world with warnings, cautions, and notices, many of them with no more backing than vivid imaginings of some early science-fiction writer—plus probability! Although logic indicated that the first blows would be in the form of self-guided missiles, thousands of other possibilities were considered. Spy rays, for example; radio hams the world over were asked to keep winding coils, keep searching the spectrum for any unusual frequencies. Telepathic amplifiers, for another example; asylums were circularized for any radical changes in the quality and quantity of insanity and even abnormal conduct. The literary critics were called in to watch for any trends in creative writing which seemed to have an inhuman content. Music was watched the same way, as were the graphic arts. Farmers and fire wardens were urgently counseled to watch for any plant life, particularly predatory or prehensile or drug-bearing plant life, which might develop. Sociologists were dragged from their almost drunken surveys of this remarkable turn of social evolution, and were ordered right back into it again, to try to extrapolate something harmful to come from this functional, logical, unified planet. But only the nationalists found harm, and they were—well, unfashionable.

  The bombs came about a month after the third Outsider took up his post.

  The whole world watched. Everything stopped. Every television screen pictured radarscopes and the whip-voiced announcer at Planetary Defense Central in Geneva, which had at long last regained its place as a world center.

  The images showed Outsiders A, B, and C in rapid succession. So well synchronized was the action that the three images could have been superimposed, and would have seemed like one picture. Each ship launched two bombs; of each two, one turned lazily toward Earth and the other hovered.

  “Out of range of the satellites,” said the announcer. “We shall have to wait. The satellites will detect the bombs when they are within two hundred miles, and will then launch their interceptors. Our Earth-based rockets are aiming now.”

  There was a forty-minute wait. Neighbor called neighbor; illuminated news banners on the sides of buildings gave the dreaded news. Buses and trains stopped while their passengers and crews flocked to televisors. There was a hushed tension, worldwide.

  “Flash! Satellite 24 has released an interceptor. Stand by; perhaps we can get a recording of the scanner...one moment please...Anything from Monitor 24b yet, Jim? On the air now? Check...Ladies and gentlemen, if you can be patient a moment—we are recording pictures of the radarscope at Monitod 24b in Lhasa. It will be only a few...here it is now.”

  Flickering at first, then clearing, came the Lhasa picture. The monitor station there kept a fix on Satellite 24 from horizon to horizon, as did the satellite’s other two stations in San Francisco and Madrid. The picture showed the familiar lines of the satellite. Abruptly a short, thick tube began to protrude from the hull. When extended about eight feet, it swung over about forty degrees on its ball-and-socket base. From its tip shot a small cylinder; there was a brief flicker of jets. “The interceptor.” said the loudspeakers unnecessarily.

  The scene flashed to the Earth-based interceptor station at White Sands. A huge rocket mounted with deceptive slowness, balanced on a towering column of flame, and disappeared into the sky.

  Then, bewilderingly, the scene was repeated for Monitor Stations 22c and 25a, as their satellites sensed the bombs coming from Outsiders B and C. White Sands sent two more giant rockets up as fast as they could set the seeking gear.

  Then, after an interminable four hours, came the picture which was to stand forever as the high point in newsreel coverage. It was the image picked up from the relaying television camera in the nose of Satellite 24’s little interceptor.

  It fixed the image of the Outsider’s bomb, and it would not let go. The bomb, at first only a speck, increased in size alarmingly. It was a, perfect cylinder, seen in perspective. There was nothing streamlined about it. It was quite featureless except for a strange indistinction around one end, as if it were not in focus. It was like a small patch of the substance of the Outsiders themselves.

  The image grew. It filled the screen—

  And then there was nothing.

  But cameras all over Europe picked up and relayed the image of that awe-inspiring explosion. Silently a ball of light appeared in the sky, expanding, flickering through the entire spectrum, sending out a wheel of blue and silver rays. It lasted for a full fifteen seconds, growing in size and in brilliance, before it began to fade, and it left a pastel ghost of itself for a minute afterward. Speckles of random radiation cluttered the screens then, and there were no more actual pictures of the action.

  The entire world gave a concerted shout of joy. In dozens of languages an
d dialects, the fierce, triumphant sound roared skyward. Got one! And the bells and the whistles picked up the cry, frightening sleeping birds, sending crocodiles scuttling off river banks, waking children all over the world. It was like a thousand New Year’s Eves, simultaneously.

  What happened next happened quickly.

  A White Sands rocket got the second bomb. For some reason there was no atomic explosion. Perhaps the proximity gear failed. Perhaps it was neutralized, though that would seem impossible, since the seeking gear obviously did not fail. It was not as spectacular as the first interception, but it was quite as effective. The purely physical impact as the huge interceptor struck the tiny bomb all but pulverized them both.

  The third bomb breezed past its satellite interceptor, its White Sands interceptor, and a second-stratum satellite. It was observed that on getting within range of the seeking radar of each of these it became enveloped in the misty, coruscating field which characterized the Outsider ships. Apparently this field completely confused the radar; it was as if the radar detected it but didn’t know what to do with it—“same spot we were in a year ago.” as Dr. Simmons remarked tersely.

  The bomb entered the atmosphere—and burned up like a meteor.

  Then it was that the most incredible thing of all happened. The three hovering bombs—one beside each Outsider—slowly retreated toward the parents vessels, as if being reeled in.

  They recalled their bombs.

  Thereafter they lay quietly, the three Outsiders. They did not move, they made no move. They gasped their triple pantings, and they filled thousands of photographic plates with their indeterminate muzziness, and that was all.

  Four giant rockets out of the five sent after the invaders missed their mark completely. The fifth, which was equipped with an ingenious seeking device based on correlation of its target with an actual photographic transparency of the target, apparently struck Outsider B. There was a splendid atomic display, and again the world went mad with joy.