Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He told her, with terror in his eyes, of their marriage, and he begged her pardon for it. It was as if a harsh word from her would destroy him. And she smiled and thanked him. He went silently away and sat down at the piano, though he did not play it again while she was there.

  She convalesced very quickly after that. She tried her very best to understand him. She succeeded in making him talk about himself, and was careful not to help him, ever, nor to work with him at anything. He never touched her. She divined that he never should, until he was quite ready, and so she never forced the issue. She fell completely in love with him.

  At the time, the Starscout was in the ways, and they were running final tests on it. Reger was forced to spend more and more time out at the gantry area. Sometimes he would work fifty or sixty consecutive hours, and though she hated to see him stumble home, drawn and tired, she looked forward to these times. For in his deepest sleep, she could tiptoe into his room and sit near and watch his face, study it with the stiffness of control gone, find in it the terrified eight-year-old with blood spouting from his wrist, watching a playmate with a cut throat. She could isolate the poet, the painter, in him, speaking and creating and expressing only in music, for words and shapes could not be trusted. She loved him. She could wait. Those who love love, and those who love themselves, cannot wait. Those who love another can and do. So she watched him silently and tiptoed out when he stirred.

  His extrapolations never ceased, and he was aware before she was that, not being a Wolf Reger, her needs were different from his. He suggested that she walk in the sun when he was away. He told her where the commissary was, and left money for shopping. She did as he expected her to do.

  Then he didn’t come back from the gantry area any more, and when the fifty or sixty hours got to be seventy and eighty, she made up her mind to find him. She knew quite a few people at the Base by that time. She walked in, stopping at the post office on the way. The divorce papers were waiting for her there.

  The Major dropped his pencil.

  “You didn’t know about that.”

  “Not yet. We’d have found out anyway.” He stooped, groping for the pencil, and cracked his head noisily on the coffee table. He demanded, “Why? Why did he divorce you?”

  “He didn’t. He filed suit. It has to be put on the court calendar and then heard, and then adjudicated, and then there’s a ninety-day wait … you know. I went to a dance.”

  “A—oh.” He understood that this was in answer to his question. “He divorced you because you went to a dance?”

  “No!… well, yes.” She closed her eyes. “I used to go to the Base movie once in a while when Wolf was working. I went down there and there was a dance going on instead. I sat with one of the women from the commissary and watched, and after a while her husband asked me to dance. I did. I knew Wolf would have let me if he’d been there—not that he ever would.

  “And I happened to glance through the door as we danced past, and Wolf was standing just outside. His face …”

  She rose and went to the mantel. She put out her hand very slowly, watching it move, and trailed the tips of her fingers along the polished wood. “All twisted. All …

  “As soon as the music stopped,” she whispered, “I ran out to him. He was still there.”

  The Major thought, Don’t break, for God’s sake don’t. Not while I’m here.

  “Extrapolation,” she said. “Everything he saw, he computed and projected. I was dancing. I suppose I was smiling. Wolf never learned to dance, Major. Can you imagine how important that can be to a man who can do anything?

  “When I got outside he was just the same as always, quiet and controlled. What he was going through inside, I hate to think. We walked home and the only thing that was said was when I told him I was sorry. He looked at me with such astonishment that I didn’t dare say anything else. Two days later he left.”

  “On the Starscout. Didn’t you know he was a crewmember?”

  “No. I found out later. Wolf had so many skills that he was nine-tenths of a crew all by himself. They’d wanted him for the longest time, but he’d always refused. I guess because he couldn’t bear sharing space with someone.”

  “He did, with you.”

  “Did he?”

  The Major did not answer. She said, “That was going to end. He was sure of that. It could end any time. But space flight’s something else again.”

  “Why did he divorce you?”

  She seemed to shake herself awake. “Have I been talking out loud?” she asked.

  “What? Yes!”

  “Then I’ve told you.”

  “Perhaps you have,” he conceded. He poised his pencil.

  “What are you going to write?” When he would not answer, she said, “Not telling the truth any more, Major?”

  “Not now,” he said firmly.

  For the second time she gave him that searching inspection, really seeing him. “I wonder what you’re thinking,” she murmured.

  He wrote, closed the book and rose. “Thank you very much for cooperating like this,” he said stiffly.

  She nodded. He picked up his hat and went to the door. He opened it, hesitated, closed it again. “Mrs. Reger—”

  She waited, unbelievably still—her body, her mouth.

  “In your own words—why did he file suit?”

  She almost smiled. “You think my words are better than what you wrote?” Then, soberly, “He saw me dancing and it hurt him. He was shocked to the core. He hadn’t known it would hurt. He hadn’t realized until then that he loved me. He couldn’t face that—he was afraid we might be close. And one day he’d lose his temper, and I’d be dead. So he went out into space.”

  “Because he loved you.”

  “Because he loved me enough,” she said quietly.

  He looked away from her because he must, and saw the report still lying on the coffee table. “I’d better take this along.”

  “Oh yes, do.” She picked it up, handed it to him. “It’s the same thing as that story I told you—about the man knocking me down.”

  “Man—oh. Yes, that one. What was that about?”

  “It really happened,” she said. “He knocked me down and beat me, right in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, and everything I said about it is true.”

  “Bastard,” growled the Major, and then blushed like a girl. “I’m sorry.”

  She did smile, this time. “There was a loading-dock there, in front of a warehouse. A piece of machinery in a crate got loose and slid down a chute toward the street. It hit a drum of gasoline and struck a spark. The first thing I knew, I was all over flames. That man knocked me down and beat them out with his bare hands. He saved my life.”

  Slowly, his jaw dropped. She said, “It makes a difference, when you know all the facts, doesn’t it? Even when the first facts you got are all true?” She rapped the TOP SECRET stamp with her fingernails. “I said this was all a lie. Well, maybe it’s all true. But if it is, it’s like the first part of that little story. You need the rest of it. I don’t. You don’t know Wolf Reger. I do. Goodbye, Major.”

  He sat in his office at Headquarters and slowly pounded the fresh copy of his transcribed notes. I have to send them the way they are, he thought, and but I can’t. I can’t.

  He swore violently and got up. He went to the water-cooler, punched out a paper cup, filled it, and hurled it into the wastebasket. All I have is facts. She has faith.

  The world was full of women, and a perfectly normal percentage of them were capable of knocking him for a loop. He wasn’t immune. But surely he was old enough and wise enough by now not to let it interfere with facts. Especially in this case. If the world knew what was in that TOP SECRET report, the world would know how to feel about Wolf Reger. And then Reger’s wife would be one against three and a quarter billion. How could a man in his right mind worry about a choice, with odds like that?

  He cursed again and snatched up his briefcase, unlocked it, and took out the sec
ret report. He slammed it down on top of his transcript. One more look. One more look at the facts.

  He read:

  This is the fourth time I’ve erased this tape and now I got no time for officialese if I’m going to get it all on here. A tape designed for hull-inspection reports in space wasn’t designed for a description of a planetary invasion. But that’s what it’s got to be. So, for the record, this is Jerry Wain, Starscout navigator, captive on one of the cruisers that’s going to invade Earth. First contact with extra-terrestrials. Supposed to be a great moment in human history. Likely to be one of the last moments, too.

  The Starscout’s gone and Minelli, Joe Cook, and the Captain are dead. That leaves me and that bastard Reger. The aliens had us bracketed before we knew it, out past Jupiter. They cut up the ’scout with some sort of field or something that powdered the hull in lines as broad as your hand. No heat, no impact. Just fine powder, and she fell apart. Joe never got to a suit. The Captain went forward, to stay with the ship I guess, and couldn’t have lived long after they sliced the dome off the control room. The three of us got clear and they took us in. They cut Minelli up to see what his guts looked like. I haven’t seen Reger, but he’s alive, all right. Reger, he can take care of himself.

  I’ve only seen two of the aliens, or maybe I saw one of ’em twice. If you can imagine a horseshoe crab made out of blue airfoam, a wide skirt all the way around it, the whole works about four and a half meters across, that’s close. I’m not a biologist, so I guess I can’t be much help on the details. That skirt sort of undulates front to back when it moves. I’d say it swims through the air—hop and glide, hop and glide. It can crawl too. First I thought it slid along like a snail, but once I saw a whole mess of little legs, some with pincers on them. I don’t know how many. Too many, anyhow. No eyes that I could spot, although it must have ’em; it’s light in here, grayish, like on a snowfield on an overcast day. It comes from the bulkhead. Floor, too—everywhere.

  Gravity, on a guess, is about one-sixth Earth. The atmosphere’s hot. Seems to be light gases. I cracked my oxy relief valve and struck a spark on it with the back of my glove, and that was pretty spectacular. Hydrogen for sure. Something else that gives an orange cast to the flame. You figure it. I wish I knew as much as Reger. Though I wouldn’t use it like he’s doing.

  The compartment I’m in is altogether bare. There’s a transparent oval port on one bulkhead. No frame; looks just as if the hull material was made transparent just there. Looking in at an angle I can see she’s double-hulled, and there’s some sort of optical trickery that makes it possible to see almost directly forward and aft, although I’d say the outside of the port was flush with the skin. I can’t tell you a thing about the drive. I barely saw them before they had us boxed, and then all hell broke loose. I did get a look while we were adrift, though, and some of the ships were maneuvering. It isn’t jets; that’s for sure. They can take off like a bullet and stop as if they’d hit a wall. They have some way of canceling inertia. Or most of it. Riding inside is pretty rough, but coming to a dead stop in two seconds from a thousand k.p.h. or better should butter you all over the walls instead of just slamming you into the bulkhead like it does. They can’t operate in an atmosphere without wings, and they don’t have wings. Yet.

  I counted twenty-six ships—sixteen big ones, cruisers I guess you’d call them; two-fifty to three hundred meters long, perfect cylinders. And ten small ones, oblate spheres, thirty meters or so in diameter. Destroyers, maybe. Fast as hell, even compared to the big ones. I think my count’s accurate, and you needn’t expect any more than that. But that’s plenty, with what they can do.

  When they brought us in first they slung me in here and nothing happened that I knew about, for sixteen hours. Then that first bug came in through a sort of pucker in the wall that got transparent and spread out and let him through and then bing! the wall was solid again. I guess I was pretty paralyzed for a while, looking it over and then wondering which way it was going to jump. Then I saw what it was carrying on one side, the skirt-thing curled up like a sort of shelf. It was Minelli’s leg lying there. That tattoo, you know, the girl holding the space-ship. I could see the top end of the femur, where it’s supposed to fit into the hip-joint. That leg wasn’t cut off. The joint had been torn apart.

  I guess I went a little crazy. I had my antenna-wrench off the belt-rack and was throwing it almost before I knew what I was doing. I missed. Didn’t allow for the gravity, I guess. It went high. The bug sort of humped itself and next thing I knew I couldn’t move. I could, inside the space-suit, but the suit was like a single iron casting.

  The bug slid over to me and hitched up a little—that’s when I saw all those little legs—and got everything off my belt—torch, stillson, antenna-reel, everything that would move. It didn’t touch my tanks—I guess it knew already about the tanks. From Reger, busy-boy Reger. It took the whole bundle over to the outer bulkhead and all of a sudden there was a square hole there. It dropped my stuff in and the hole went away, and out through the port I could see my stuff flash away from the ship, going like hell. So that’s how I found out about the disposal chute.

  The bug slid away to the other wall and I was going to give it a shot from my heel-jets, but somehow I had sense enough not to. I didn’t know what damage they’d do, and I might be able to use ’em later. If anyone’s hearing this, I did.

  About three weeks later I had another visit from one of ’em, but I charged it as soon as it was inside. It slid away through the air and then froze me again. I guess after that they gave me up as a bad job.

  They don’t feed me, and my converters are pretty low. I’ve rationed my air and water all I could, but it’s past conversion now, without a complete recharge, and I’m not likely to get that. I was hungry, like I never knew hunger could be, after my emergency rations were gone, but I don’t feel that any more. Just weak.

  This whole time, the ships have been busy. We’re in the Belt, I’d guess, without instruments, around 270-20-95. Check those coordinates and hunt a spiral from that center—I’m pretty sure we’re near that position. Put infra-red on it; even if they’ve gone by then, there should be residual heat in these rocks out here. They’ve leeched onto a big one and it’s practically gone now. They make long fast passes back and forth like a metal-planer. I can’t see a ray or beam or anything, but the surface flows molten as the ships pass. Mining. I guess they filter the slag some way and distill the metals out. I wouldn’t know. I’m a navigator. All I can think of is those ships making passes like that over the Golden Gate and Budapest and LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

  I found out how to work the disposal chute. Just lean against it. It’s an air-lock with some sort of heavy coils around it, inside, I guess to project refuse away from the ship so it won’t orbit. They must’ve known I was fooling with it but nobody stopped me. They knew I couldn’t get anywhere. Even if they knew about my heel-jets, they probably knew I couldn’t get far enough with them to make no never mind.

  Well, six hours ago a sort of dark spot began to show on the inboard bulkhead. It swelled up until it was a knob about the size of your two fists, shiny black, with some kind of distortion field around it so it was muzzy around the edges. For a while I couldn’t figure it at all. I touched it and then took hold of it, and I realized it was vibrating around five hundred cycles, filling my suit with the note. I got my helmet onto it right away.

  The note went on and then changed pitch some and finally spread out into a noise like a forty-cycle carrier, and something started modulating it, and next thing it was saying my name, flat and raspy, no inflection. An artificial voice, for sure. “Wain,” it said, clearing itself up as it went along “Wain, Wain.”

  So I kept my head tight against it and yelled, “Wain here.”

  It was quiet for a while, just the carrier, and then the voice came in again. I won’t bother you with exactly what it sounded like. The language was rugged but clear, like “Wain we no have planet you have planet we take
you help.”

  There was a lot of yelling back and forth until I got the picture. And what I want to tell you most is this: once in a while when I listened real carefully I heard another voice, murmuring away. Reger—that I’ll swear. It was as if this voder, or voice machine, was being run by one of the bugs and Reger was telling it what to say but they wouldn’t trust him to talk directly to me.

  Anyway, the bugs had a planet and something had happened to it, I don’t know what; but Earth was as close as anything they’d seen to what they want. They figure to land and establish a base and set up machinery to take over. They had spores that would grow in our sea-water and get rid of most of the oxygen, I guess by combining it with all the elements in the ocean that could take it. Meanwhile, they’d convert rocks to put whatever else they needed into the atmosphere.

  So damn cold-blooded … it wasn’t us they were after. You clear a patch of wood, you’re not trying especially to dispossess the squirrels and the termites. That just happens while you work.

  For a while I hoped we could maybe do something, but item by item they knocked that out of my head. Reger’d told ’em everything. You look up that guy’s record. He knows atomics and ship design and chemistry and about every damn thing, and it’s all theirs. You know that field, or whatever, that they paralyzed my suit with; it’s an application of the inertia-control their ships have. You know, if you throw an A-bomb at that field, the bomb won’t hit and it won’t fire? You couldn’t even throw rocks at it—they’d have no inertia at contact. They know we have no space fleet, only a half-dozen exploring scouts, and the moon-shuttle.

  We’re done, that’s all.

  So I asked what’s the proposition, and they said they could use me. They didn’t really need me, but they could use me. They said I could have anything I wanted on Earth, and all the slaves I could put to work. Slaves. I heard Reger give ’em the word. I’d have thirty, forty years of that before they all died off. I’d work under Reger. He was directing the landing for them. Designing wings for them to come in on, too—that’s what the mining was for, the wings. They’ll put the base down in a desert somewhere, and first thing anyone knows the oxygen will start to go. And even if you do see ’em come in, you won’t be able to touch ’em.