Thunder and Roses (42 page)

If he had said “Half finished,” he would have lost the play. Hereford came slowly back, saying ruefully: “I know you, Belter. I know there’s a reason for this. But it better be good.”

Belter stood where he had been, leaning against the desk, and he folded his arms. “Hereford,” he said, “one more simple question. The Peace movement recognizes no need for violence in any form, and no conceivable exception to that idea.” It sounded like a recording of the same words, said a few minutes before, except for his carefully controlled breathing.

Hereford touched his bruised mouth. “Yes.”

“Then,” Belter grinned, “why did you hit me?”

“Why? Why did you hit
me?
”

“I didn’t ask you that. Please keep it simple. Why did you hit me?”

“It was … I don’t know. It happened. It was the only way to make you stop.”

Belter grinned. Hereford stumbled on. “I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to make some parallel between the Invader and your attack on me. But you attacked me unexpectedly, apparently without reason—”

Belter grinned more widely.

Hereford was frankly floundering now. “But I … I had to strike you, or I … I—”

“Hereford,” said Belter gently, “shall we go back now, and vote before that eye of yours blackens?”

The three Death ships, each with its cover of destroyer escorts, slipped into the Asteroid Belt.
Delta
, the keying unit, was flanked on each side by the opposed twins
Epsilon
and
Sigma
, which maintained a rough thousand-mile separation from the key. Behind them, on Earth, they had left a froth of controversy. Editorial comment on the air and in print, both on facsimile and the distributed press, was pulling
and hauling on the age-old question of the actions of duly elected administrators. We are the people. We choose these men to represent us. What must we do when their actions run contrary to our interest?

And—do they run contrary? How much change can there be in a man’s attitude, and in the man himself, between the time he is elected and the time he votes on a vital measure? Can we hark back to our original judgment of the man and trust his action as we trusted him at election time?

And again—the old bugaboo of security. When a legislative body makes a decision on a military matter, there must be news restrictions. The Death was the supreme weapon. Despite the will of the majority, there were still those who wanted it for their own purposes; people who felt it had not been used enough in the war; others who felt it should be kept assembled and ready, as the teeth in a dictatorial peace. As of old, the mass of the people had to curb its speech, and sometimes its thought, to protect itself against the megalomaniac minorities.

But there was one man who suffered. Elsewhere was anger and intellectual discourse, ethical delvings and even fear. But in one man, supremely, existed the struggle between ethics and expediency. Hereford alone had the power to undo his own work. His following would believe and accept when he asked them to make this exception. Having made it, they would follow no more, and there was no place for him on Earth.

His speech had been simple, delivered without a single flickering of his torture on the fine old face. Once the thing was done, he left Earth in a way foreign to everything he had ever believed, or spoken, or recommended. He, the leader of Peace Amalgamated, who regarded with insistent disfavor the very existence of weapons, left Earth with Belter, and shared the officer’s quarters of a warship. Not only was it a warship, but it was the keying unit
Delta
, under the command of “Butcher” Osgood, trigger man of The Death.

For months they tracked the Invader, using their own instruments and information relayed to them by various outposts. Under no circumstances did they use tracers. One observation post and seven
warships had been crushed because of that. The Invader’s reaction to a tight beam was instant and terrible. Therefore, they were limited to light reflection—what there was of it, even from the bold, bright flanks of the marauder—and the detection of the four types of drive radiations used by the ship at different accelerations.

The body of descriptive matter on the invader increased, and there were certain irrefutable conclusions. The crew of the Invader were colloidal life, like all known life, and would be subject to The Death. This was deduced by the fact that the ship was enclosed, pressurized, and contained an atmosphere of some sort, which precluded the theoretically suggested “energy” and “crystalline” life-forms. The random nature of the enemy’s vicious and casual attacks caused more controversy than almost any other factor; but as time went on, it became obvious that what the ship was doing was calling forth any attack of which the System might be capable. It had been bombed, rayed, and attempts had been made to ram. It was impervious. How long would it stay? When would its commanders conclude that they had seen the worst and, laughing, go back into the depths to bring reinforcements? And was there anything—anything at all—besides The Death that could reach the Invader, or stop him, or destroy him, or even let him know fear?

Right up until D-day—Death-day—the billions who had followed Hereford hoped that some alternative could be found, so that at least their earlier resolutions would be followed in letter if not in spirit. Many of them worked like slaves to this end, and that was the greatest anomaly of all, for all the forces of Peace were engaged in devising deadly methods and engines for use as alternative to The Death. They failed. Of course they failed.

There came a day when they had to strike. The Invader had all but vanished into the celestial north, only to come hurtling back in a great curve which would pass through the plane of the ecliptic just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. The Invader’s trajectory was predictable despite his almost unbelievable maneuverability—even for him there were limits of checking and turning, which was another fact indicating colloidal life. There was no way of knowing whether he was coming back to harass the planets, or whether he was making one
last observation before swinging through the System and away from Sol, back to the unknown hell which had spawned him. But whether it was attack or withdrawal he had to be smashed. There might never be another chance.

The three Death ships moved out from the Belt, where they had lain quiet amongst the other masses floating in that great ring of detritus. Still keeping their formation, they blasted away with crushing acceleration, their crews dopey with
momentomine
. Their courses were set to intersect that of the Invader, or close enough to bring them well within range of The Death—twelve to twenty thousand miles. Delicate, beamless scanners checked the enemy’s course moment by moment, making automatic corrections and maintaining the formation of the three ships.

Delta
was Earth-manned,
Epsilon
a Martian ship, and
Sigma
belonged to the Colonials. Originally, the plan had been to scatter Colonials through the three ships, and use a Jovian craft. But Leess, as the Jovian representative, had vetoed any Jovian participation, an action which had brought about a violent reawakening of antipathies toward the major planet. Public feeling was so loaded against the use of The Death that the responsibility must be shared. Jupiter’s stubborn and suicidal refusal to share it was inflexible; the Jovian solidarity was as thorough as ever.

Four days out, the master controls dropped the acceleration to 1G, and the air conditioners blasted out enough superoxygen to counteract the acceleration drug. Personnel came to full life again, and the command gathered on the bridge of
Delta
. Hereford was there too, standing well back, his face misleadingly calm, his eyes flicking from the forward screen to the tactical chart, from Belter’s absorbed face to the undershot countenance of Commander Osgood.

Osgood looked over his shoulder at the Peace leader. His voice was gravel in a wire sieve as he said: “I still don’t like that guy hanging around here. You sure he won’t be better off in his quarters?”

“We’ve been over that,” said Belter tiredly. “Commander, maybe I’m out of order, but would it be too much trouble for you to speak directly to him once in a while?”

“I am satisfied,” smiled Hereford. “I quite understand his attitude.
I have little to say to him, and much to say about him, which is essentially his position as far as I am concerned. It is no more remarkable that he is unfamiliar with politeness than that I should be ignorant of spatial ballistics.”

Belter grinned. “O.K., O.K.—don’t mind me, I’m just a poor military man trying to make peace. I’ll shut up and let you and the Butcher have your inimical
status quo
.”

“I’ll need a little quiet here for a while, if it’s all the same to you, Councilman,” said Osgood. He was watching the tactical chart. The red spot representing
Epsilon
was at the far right, the blur of
Sigma
at the left, and down at the bottom was
Delta
’s green spark. A golden bar in the center of the chart showed the area on the ecliptical plane at which the Invader could be expected to pass through, and just above it was a white spot showing the Invader himself.

Osgood touched a toggle which added a diagram to the chart—a positioning diagram showing the placement of the three Death ships in relation to the target.
Sigma
and
Epsilon
were exactly in the centers of their white positioning circles;
Delta
was at the lower edge of the third circle. Osgood made a slight adjustment in the drive circuit.

“Positioning is everything,” Belter explained to Hereford. “The Death field is a resultant—a violent node of vibrations centering on the contiguous focal points of the opposed fields from
Sigma
and
Epsilon
. The beam from
Delta
—that’s us—kicks it off. There’s an enormous stress set up at that focal point, and our beam tears into it. The vibration changes frequency at random and with violence. It has been said that the fabric of space itself vibrates. That’s learned nonsense. But fluids do, and gases, of course, and colloids worst of all.”

“What would happen if the positions were not taken exactly?”

“Nothing. The two focal points of the concentrated fields from
Epsilon
and
Sigma
would not coincide, and
Delta
’s beam would be useless. And it
might
have the unhappy result of calling the Invader down on us. Not right away—he’s going too fast at right angles to our course—but I’m not crazy about the idea of being hunted down by that executioner.”

Hereford listened gravely, watching Osgood, watching the chart. “Just how great is the danger of The Death’s spreading like ripples in a pool—out in every direction from the node?”

“Very little, the way it’s set up. The node moves outward away from our three ships—again a resultant, strictly according to the parallelogram of force. How long it lasts, how intense it gets, how far it will go—we never know. It changes with what it encounters. Mass intensifies it and slows it down. Energy of almost any kind accelerates and gradually seems to dissipate it. And it varies for other reasons we don’t understand yet. Setting it up is a very complicated business, as you have seen. We don’t dare kick it off in such a way that it might encounter any of the planets, if it should happen to last long enough. We have to clear space between us and Outside of all shipping.”

Hereford shook his head slowly. “The final separation between death and destruction,” he mused. “In ancient times, armies met on battlefields and used death alone to determine the winner. Then, gradually, destruction became the most important factor—how much of the enemy’s material could you destroy? And then, with the Atomic Wars, and the Dust, death alone became the end of combat again. Now it has come full circle, and we have found a way to kill, to punish and torture, to dissolve, slowly and insistently, colloidal cells, and still leave machines unharmed. This surpasses the barbarism of jellied gasoline. It takes longer, and—”

“It’s complete,” Belter finished.

“Stations!”

Osgood’s voice sliced raggedly through the quiet bridge. The screen-studded bulkhead beside him winked and flickered with acknowledgments, as tacticians, technicians, astrogators, ballistics men, and crewmen reported in. All three ships were represented, and a master screen collected and summarized the information, automatically framing the laggards’ screen with luminous red. There was little of the red showing, and in seconds it disappeared. Osgood stepped back, glanced at the master screen and then at the chart. On it, the ship symbols were centered in their tactical circles.

The commander turned away and for the first time in these weary
months he spoke directly to Hereford: “Would you like the honor of triggering?”

Hereford’s nostrils dilated, but his voice was controlled. He put his hands behind his back. “Thank you, no.”

“I thought not,” said the Butcher, and there was a world of insult in his scraping voice.

Before him was a triangular housing from which projected three small levers with round grips. One was red, one blue. The third was set between and in front of the others, and was green. He pulled the two nearest him. Immediately a red line appeared on the chart, running from
Epsilon
’s symbol to the golden patch, and a blue line raced out from
Sigma
to meet it. Just above the gold hovered the white spot representing the Invader. Osgood watched it narrowly as it dipped toward the gold and the junction of the red and blue lines. He rested his hand on the green lever, made one last check of the screens, and snatched it back. Obediently, a thin, bright green line appeared on the chart. A purple haze clouded the gold.

“That’s it!” breathed Belter. “The purple, there—The Death!”

Hereford, shaking, leaned back against the bulkhead. He folded his arms, holding tightly to his elbows, obviously trying to get a grip on much more.

“Scan him!” spat Osgood. “This I’ve got to see!”

Belter leapt forward. “Commander! You don’t … you
can’t
beam him! Remember what happened at Outpost?”