Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Maybe I shouldn’t even try to warn you. Maybe it’ll be better if you never know what hit you …

  Reger, he … he’s … ah, stick to facts, Wain. Something makes him hate Earth enough to … I don’t see even a coward doing a thing like this just to save his skin. He has to have some other reason.

  The bump on the wall said, “Reger says work with him, you can trust.”

  Yeah, I can trust. I told them what to do with their proposition and shove Reger along after it.

  Now this is what I am going to do. Try, anyhow. My suit’s the only one with a tape recorder, and it’s internal. Could be that Reger doesn’t even know about it. What I’m going to do is wait until this ship starts paring away at the asteroid. It gets up quite a hell of a speed at each pass, more than you’d think, because of the inertialess field. At the sunward end of one pass, I’ll go out the chute. I’ll have the ship’s speed plus the throw-out coils in the chute.

  I’ll gyro around to head for the sun. I’ve wired the heel-jet starter to my oxy supply. When the oxy stops flowing the jets’ll cut in. I hope by then I’ll be far enough away so they won’t detect me, or won’t bother with me. That’s something I won’t live to know about.

  And I’ve wired the fuel gauge to my distress squealer. When the fuel’s all gone the squealer’ll cut in. There ought to be scouts out searching for my ship; maybe one will scoop me in.

  We’re positioning over the rock now.

  Maybe I won’t get through the chute. Maybe they’ll powder me before I get clear. Maybe they’ll pick up my jets when they cut in. Maybe they’ll hear the squealer when the jets are gone. So many maybes.

  Don’t anybody call me a hero for doing this. I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it to Reger. That bastard Reger …

  Jerry Wain here, over and out.

  The Major lifted his head from the report. Maybe one day he would be able to read it without his eyes stinging like this.

  He lifted the flimsies away to uncover his own transcript. Coldly it listed the pertinent facts of his interview with the traitor’s wife. He read them through again slowly, right through the last paragraph, which said:

  SUMMATION: It is indicated that the subject is a brilliant but twisted individual, and that early influences as noted, plus his mode of life, have induced a morbid fear of himself and a deep distrust of every human being, including his wife. His extrapolative ability plus his vivid imagination seem to have created a certainty in him that he had been betrayed, or that he certainly would be. His actions as reported by Wain are apparently motivated by vengeance—a vengeance against all humanity including even himself.

  The talker hissed, and a voice said, “Major, the Colonel would like your report on the Reger interview.”

  “Roger.” He caught it up, held it, then slid it into his autowriter and rapidly tapped out:

  The undersigned wishes to stress the partial nature of the above report, based as it is on the statement of a man under serious strain. Further evidence might conceivably alter the conclusions as stated.

  He signed it and added his rank and section, rolled it, canned it and slapped it into the pneumatic tube.

  “Now what the hell did I do that for?” he asked himself. He knew what the answer was. He rose and went to the mirror in the corner by the water-cooler, and peered into it. He shook his head in disgust.

  When the ships were sighted, Wain’s recording came out of the files and went straight to the wire services. One of the columnists said later that the ensuing roar from Earth all but moved the Moon out of its orbit. Suddenly, there was no such thing as a secret weapon anywhere. Suddenly, there was—for the time being—nothing that could be called a nation. There was only the thunder of panic, fear, and fury, and in each of these, the name of Reger, rolling in the hollows of the Himalayas, blasting through the wide streets of Buenos Aires and the alleys of London. They feared the alien, but they hated Reger.

  Without Wain’s recording, the alien might have slipped close, or even landed, before the world was alerted. Without it, a general alarm certainly would have awaited some sort of identification. But Earth was as ready as three billion fierce, fearing, furious humans could make it in the brief time they had.

  The ships came single file, faster than any man-made object had ever traveled. They were exactly what Wain had described—sixteen large cylinders, ten small spheres. They were in six flights, one behind the other, each but one composed of both types, and the other an ominous line of five of the heavies.

  They bore straight in for Earth, their single file presenting the smallest possible profile to Earth radar. (Reger knew radar.) When every known law of spatial ballistics dictated that with that course, at that velocity, they must plunge straight into the planet, they decelerated and swung to take up an orbit—rather, a powered course—around the planet, just out of rocket interceptor range (which Reger knew).

  And now their wings could be seen. Telefax and television, newspapers and government agencies researched their contours in minutes. They were familiar enough—a gull-wing design which one aeronautical engineer described as having “every characteristic that could be built into a wing.” Each wing, from root to tip, had its own reverse dihedral. Each was sharply tapered, and sharply swept back. Even the little spherical destroyers had them, along with a boom to support the butterfly tail. There was one Earth design almost exactly like it—an extremely stable large-plane airfoil for sub-sonic use. The designer: Wolf Reger.

  The space scouts roared up to challenge them, heavy with armament and anger. They sent a cloud of missiles ahead of them. There was H.E. and atomics, solid-shot and a whole spectrum of random-frequency radio, just in case.

  The radio waves affected the aliens precisely as much—as little—as the fusion warheads. Telescopic lenses watched the missiles race to their targets and simply stop there, to slide around the shining hulls and hang until, one by one, they were brought aboard.

  And then the little scouts tried to ram, and were deflected like angling guppies from the sides of an aquarium, to go screaming off into space and a laborious turn.

  For three days the enemy circled outside the atmosphere, holding their formation, absorbing or ignoring everything Earth could throw at them.

  The Major telephoned Reger’s wife to ask if she had removed her name from her mailbox and doorbell. She said indignantly that she had not, would not, and need not. The Major sighed and sent a squad down late that night to arrest her. She was furious. Yet she conceded his point fairly the next morning when she saw the newspaper photographs of her apartment. Even the window-frames were gone. The mob had chopped right through the floor in places, had even heaved the bathtub twelve floors down to the street. “You should know as much about people as you think you know about Wolf Reger,” he said.

  “You should know as much about Wolf as you do about people,” she countered. There was, with her composure, a light he had not seen before. He said, suddenly, “You know something.”

  “I do?”

  “You act as if you’d had a special delivery letter from that—from your husband.”

  “You’re quite right.”

  “What?”

  She laughed. It was the first time he had heard her laugh, and something with hands, ever so deep within him, wrung them.

  “I shouldn’t tease you, Major. If I promise to tell you when it’s time, will you promise not to ask me now?”

  “My job is to find out every little detail that can possibly bear on the situation,” he said stiffly.

  “Even if it didn’t add one bit to your understanding?”

  “You can’t judge that.”

  “I certainly can.”

  He shook his head. “It’s our job to decide. I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me whatever it is.”

  Her gaiety slipped away inside her, and a new kind of brightness shone in her eyes. “Well, I won’t.”

  He began to speak, then stopped. He need make no experiments to discover that
this extraordinary woman could not be bribed, coerced, or even surprised. He said gently, “Very well. I won’t ask. And you’ll tell me as soon as you can?”

  “The very second.”

  He kept her in his office. She seemed not to mind. He let her read all the invasion reports as they came in, and he watched every flicker of expression in her face. “When are you going to admit that enough facts are in to show that there’s no hero in this story, no one beating out flames?”

  “Never. Have you ever been married, Major?”

  Sourly, he thought, Have you? “No,” he said.

  “You’ve loved someone, though?”

  He wondered how she kept her features so controlled under stress. He would like to learn that trick. He said, “Yes.”

  “Well, then. You only need a few facts about the one you love. Just enough to put point the way.”

  “Three points on a graph to give you a curve, so you can know its characteristics and extend it. Is that what you mean?”

  “That’s one of the things I mean.”

  “They call that extrapolation. Your boy’s specialty.”

  “I like that,” she said softly. “I like that very much.” She detached her eyes from him, from the room, and smiled at what she saw. “God!” he exploded.

  “Major!”

  “You’re going to get clobbered,” he said hoarsely. “You’re going to get such a kick in the teeth … and there isn’t a thing in the world I can do about it.”

  “Poor Major,” she said, looking at him as if he were a memory.

  There was a click, and electronic noise filled the room. The talker barked, “Enemy spiralling in. Stand by for trajectory.”

  “Now you’ll see.” They realized that they had spoken in unison, but it was the wrong time to exchange a smile.

  “Arizona!” said the speaker, and “Stand by.”

  “Stand by hell,” growled the Major. “We’ll get the fine points by radio. Come on.”

  “You’ll take me?”

  “Wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”

  They ran to the elevators, shot to the roof. A helicopter whisked them to the field, and a jet took them in and tore up and out to the lowering sun.

  An unbroken cordon can be thrown about a hundred square miles in less than an hour and a half. This is true, because it was done immediately after the alien fleet touched Earth. Once the landing site was determined, the roads writhed with traffic, the desert crawled with men and machines, the air shook with aircraft, blossomed with parachutes. The ring had not quite closed when the formation came down almost exactly in the predicted center. No longer a single file, the formation was nearly spherical. It arrived on Earth with two thunders—one, the terrible crack as the cloven air smashed back to heal itself, and rebounded and smashed again; the other, a shaking of the Earth itself.

  And the cordon stopped, flattened, lay still as a stain while the furious globe built itself in the desert, flung its coat of many colors about itself, mounted the sky and donned its roiling plumes.

  And there were no devils there in the desert, but hell itself.

  They saw it from the jet, because they were keeping close radio contact with the landing, and straining their eyes into the sunset for a glimpse of the fleet. Their pilot said he saw them, coming in at an impossible speed. The Major missed them as they blinked by, but he did see their wings, like a flurry of paper over a windy corner, drifting brokenly down. And then the fireball fought the sun and, for a while, defeated it, until it became a leaning ghost in a broad, torn hat.

  It seemed a long, long time after that when the Major, his palms tight to his eyes, whispered, “You knew that would happen.”

  “No I didn’t,” she whispered back, cathedral-awed. “I knew something would happen.”

  “Reger did this?”

  “Of course.” She stirred, glanced at the tower of smoke, and shuddered. “Can you see yet?”

  He tried. “Some …”

  “Here,” she said. “I promised you. My special-delivery letter.”

  He took it. “I’ve seen this. The picture of the fleet.”

  Exactly as she had once before, she murmured, “Poor Major.” She took the print from him, turned it over, deftly slipped his gold pencil from under the pocket-flap of his tunic. “First there was a cruiser, and a cruiser, and a cruiser,” she said, and drew a short line for each, one after the other, “and a destroyer and a destroyer.” For each of these she made a black disk. “Then the second flight: destroyer, cruiser, destroyer.” And so she charted the entire formation. He stared at the marks until she laughed at him. “Captain!”

  “Yes ma’am,” answered the pilot.

  “Would you read this to the Major, please?”

  She handed it forward. The Major said, “What do you mean, read it?” but she shushed him.

  The pilot glanced at it and handed it back. “It says eighty-eight, thirty, W R.”

  “No, no—say the codes too.”

  “Oh—sorry.” He glanced at it again. “It says ‘Love and kisses. That’s all I have for you. W R.’ ”

  “Give me that,” snapped the Major. “By God, it’s Morse!”

  “He hung it up there for three whole days and you couldn’t read it.”

  “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

  “How would you have read it before that happened?”

  He followed her gesture and saw the great hot cloud. “You’re right,” he breathed. “You’re so right. He did that just for you?”

  “For you. For everyone. It must have been the only thing he could do to let us know what he was doing. They wouldn’t let him radio. They wouldn’t even let him talk to Wain.”

  “Yet they let him deploy their ships.”

  “I guess because he made the wings for them; they thought he would know best how to use them.”

  “The wings tore off.” To the pilot he said, “Isn’t that what happened, Captain?”

  “It sure is,” said the young man. “And no wonder, the way they flashed in. I’ve seen that happen before. You can fly under the speed of sound or over it, but you better not stay just at it. Looked to me as if they hung on the barrier all the way in.”

  “All flown from one set of controls … probably an automatic pilot, with the course and speed all set up.” He looked at the woman. “Reger set it up.” Suddenly he shook his head impatiently. “Oh no!” They wouldn’t have let him get away with it.”

  “Why not?” she said. “Everything else he told them was true.”

  “Yes, but they’d have known about the barrier. Captain, just what is the speed of sound up in the stratosphere?”

  “Depends, sir. At sea level it’s around three-forty meters per second. Up at thirty kilometers or so it’s around three hundred, depending on the temperature.”

  “The density.”

  “No sir. Most people think that, but it isn’t so. The higher the temperature, the higher the speed of sound. Anyway, the ‘sound barrier’ they talk about is just a convenient term. It happens that shock waves form around a ship anywhere from eighty-five percent to one-hundred-fifteen percent of the speed of sound, because some airflow around it is supersonic and some still subsonic, and you get real weird flow patterns. Some of the buffeting’s from that, but most of it’s from shock waves, like the ones from the nose hitting the wing tips, or wing shock waves hitting the tail.”

  “I see. Captain, could you set up a flight-plan which would keep an aircraft at the buffeting stage from the top of the atmosphere down to the bottom?”

  “Imagine I could, sir. Though you wouldn’t get much buffeting above 35 kilometers or so. No matter what the sonic speed, the air’s too thin for shock wave formation.”

  “Tell you what. You work out a plan like that. Then radio Radar at Prescott and get the dope on Reger’s approach.”

  “Yes, sir.” The young man went to work at his chart table.

  “It’s so hard for you,” Mrs. Reger said.

  “
What is?”

  “You won’t believe it until your little graph’s all plotted, with every fact and figure in place. Me, I know. I’ve known all along. It’s so easy.”

  “Hating is easy too,” said the Major. “You’ve probably never done much of that. But unhating’s a pretty involved process. There’s no way of doing it but to learn the facts. The truth.”

  They were five minutes away from the mushroom when the Captain finished his calculations. “That’s it, sir, that’s what happened. It couldn’t have been an accident. All the way down, under power, those ships stayed within four percent of sonic speed, and tore themselves to pieces. And here’s something else. Radar says that from 32 kilometers on down they showed a different pip. As if they’d shut off that inertia field of theirs.”

  “They’d have to, or they wouldn’t have any kind of supporting airflow over the wings! You can’t use an airfoil if the air can’t touch it! I guess for some reason their inertia field can’t be used near a strong gravitic field.”

  “And Reger planned that approach, that way?”

  “Looks like it. From thirty kilometers to the ground, at that speed … it was all over in fifteen seconds.”

  “Reger,” muttered the pilot. He went back to the controls and switched off the automatics. “One of the radar pix showed Reger’s space-suit, Major,” he said. “Looks like he bailed out the same as Wain did—through the disposal chute.”

  “He’s alive!”

  “Depends.” The young man looked up at the Major. “You think that mob down there is going to wait while we compute velocities for ’em?”

  “That’s a military setup, Captain. They’ll do what they’re told.”

  “About Reger, sir?

  He turned his attention to the controls, and the Major went thoughtfully back to his seat. As they whistled down to the airstrip behind the cordon, he suddenly thumped his knee. “Light gases, high temperature—of course those bugs never heard of a shock wave at what we call sonic speed! You see? You see?”