Thunder and Roses (44 page)

“Your ship, sir,” said the captain of
Sigma
, formally, in the traditional presentation of a ship and its facilities to a superior.

“Yeah. I need one at the moment,” said the Butcher wryly. He stretched, looked around. “Get any parts of the Martian?”

“No, sir,” said the captain. He was a worried-looking, gangly specimen from the Venusian Dome. His name had so many syllables that only the first three were used. They were Holovik. “And little enough from
Delta
, I’m sorry to say. Wh … what happened?”

“You saw it, didn’t you? What do you think?

“I’ll say it, if you can’t get it out,” said Osgood bluntly. “He has a defense against The Death. Isn’t that fine?”

“Yes sir.” The horizontal lines across Captain Holovik’s forehead deepened, and the corners of his mouth turned down. “Fine.”

“Don’t burst into tears!” snapped the commander. He looked around taking stock of the salvage. “Get all available techs on that
scrap. Find out if any of it is radioactive, and if so how much of what type. What’s that?”

“That” was a thirty-foot tapered cylinder with three short mast antennae projecting at right angles to the long axis, near each rounded end.

“I don’t know for sure, sir,” said Holovik. “I knew that there were … ah … weapons, new ones. We don’t get information the way we used to during the war—”

“Stop mumbling, man! If that’s a secret weapon, it isn’t from
Delta
.”

Belter put in, “It isn’t from
Epsilon
either. I went over the specs of everything aboard all of these vessels.”

“Then where did—Oh!” His “Oh!” was echoed by Belter and two junior officers who had overheard the conversation. It was a most respectful sound. Also respectful was the unconscious retreat all hands took to the inboard bulkhead.

Hereford, who had not spoken a word for nearly a day, asked: “What’s the matter? What is it?”

“Don’t know,” breathed Belter. “but I’d like to see it out of here. Way out. It’s the Invader’s.”

“G—get it out of here.
Jump!
”

They piled into the inboard section and sealed the cargo inspection hatch behind them, leaving three spacesuited e.m. and an officer to worry the object tenderly out of the port.

“You’re a cretin,” Osgood told the captain. “You’re a drooling incompetent. Whatever possessed you to bring in an unidentified object?”

“I … it was … I don’t know,” stammered Holovik. Belter marveled at the degree of worriment the man’s face could register.

A junior officer with communication pips spoke up. “That was the object which didn’t register on the detectors until it was within a mile, sir,” he reminded. “I still can’t understand it, commander. Our detectors—all of ’em—are sensitive to fifty thousand at the very least. I’m ready to swear our equipment was in order, and yet we had no sign of this thing until it was right on top of us.”

“Somebody in Detection asleep,” growled the Butcher.

“Wait, commander,” Belter turned toward the young sigman.

“How was this thing bearing?”

“Right on the ship, sir. An intersection course from down left forrad, as I remember. We deflected it and then brought it about with the short tractors.”

“It just appeared out of nowhere, eh?” rasped Osgood. “And so you invited it in.”

“There was a good deal of debris in that sector, commander,” said Holovik faintly. “We were busy … tracers sometimes give resultant indications when they pick up two separated objects simultaneously—”

“Yeah, and then they indicate something where nothing is. They
don’t
indicate nothing where there is something. Why, I’ll break you to—”

“It seems to me,” said Belter, who had been pursuing his own line of reasoning, “that what we have here is mighty similar to what hit Outpost. Remember? They put a tracer on it as they saw it leave the Invader. It blanked out. They got no radiation or radar reflection at all. But it came in and wiped out the base.”

“The nonexistent, hypothetical ‘warper,’ said Hereford, with a wisp of his old smile.

Osgood glanced at him coldly. “If you’re trying to tell me that the Invader used a warper to protect himself from The Death, you’re showing your ignorance. The Death is a vibration,
not
a radiation. It’s a physical effect, not an energy phenomenon.”

“Blast The Death!” spat Belter. “Don’t you see what we’ve got here? It’s one of their disrupters. Short range—always short range. Don’t you see? It
is
a warper, and for some reason it can only carry a limited amount of power. The Invader started popping away at
Delta
, and when she fought back, he let loose with everything he had. This must’ve been one of his disrupters which was launched while
Delta
was in one piece and arrived after she’d been blasted. Then it went right on seeking, but ran out of fuel before it reached
Sigma
. That’s why it suddenly appeared to the detectors.”

“Now, that makes sense,” said the Butcher, looking at Belter as if he were seeing him for the first time. He creased his lower lip
sharply with his thumb and forefinger. “Warp camouflage, eh? H-m-m-m. I wonder if we could get a look at that unit Maybe we could build something like it and get close enough to that devil to do some good.” He turned to the fretful Holovik. “Captain! See if you can get a couple of techs to volunteer to de-fuse that thing. If you can’t get volunteers—”

“I’ll get them, sir,” said Holovik, for the first time looking a little happier. It made him appear wistful instead of mournful.

It was easier to count those not volunteering, once the proposition went out over the intercom. In a few minutes
Sigma
lay off a couple of hundred miles to stand by while a crack squad worked over the drifting bomb. They carried three viewers, and the control bridge of the Death ship was mobbed with experts. Every move was carefully discussed; every possibility was carefully explored before a move was made.

They did it. It was slow, and suspense reached an agonized pitch; but once it was done and could be reviewed, it was unbelievably simple. The warhead was clamped to the main hull of the bomb. The activators were in the head, controlled simply by a couple of rods. The seeking gear, proximity circuits, power source, drive, and what was apparently the camouflage unit were all packed into the hull.

A torch was clamped to the warhead, which was cast adrift. The precious hull was towed a few miles with reaction-pistols and picked up by the ship, which then got clear and rayed the virulent little warhead into shocking, flaring extinction.

In shops and laboratories throughout the System, feverish work was carried on over plans and mock-ups of the alien weapon. One of the first things discovered about it was that the highly theoretical and very popular term “warper” was a misnomer. The camouflage was an ingenious complexity of wiring in concentric “skins” in the hull. Each impinging radiation caused the dielectric constant of the hull to change so that it reradiated that exact frequency, at the same intensity as received, but a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. The heart of the device was what might have been the thousandth
generation descended from a TR tube. It hunted so constantly, and triggered radiations with so little lag, that the device could handle several frequencies almost simultaneously.

What used most of the power was the drive. It involved a magnetic generator and a coil which carried magnetic flux. Induced in this was an extremely intense gravitic field, self-canceling forward and on all sides. The intensified “reverse” gravity pressure was, therefore, at the stern. Maneuvering was accomplished by variations in field strength by inductance-coupling of the mag-flux coils.

The hull was a totally absorbent black, and the missile was made of an alloy which was transparent to hard radiation.

All information was pooled, and sub-projects were constantly assigned from Science Center. Etherfac transmission was full of lastminute reports on phases of the problem, interspersed with frequent communiqués on the last known position of the Invader. He had indulged in an apparently aimless series of convolutions for several weeks following D-Day, evidently to assess his damage. After that he had maintained a great circular course, parallel in plane to the solar ecliptic, and the assumption was that he was undergoing repairs and engaging in reconnaissance. Both were certainly indicated, for he must have undergone an incredible strain in that wild curve on D-Day. And as before, he was the symbol of terror. If he struck, where would he strike? If not, he would leave. Then, would he be back? Alone, or with a fleet?

Belter’s life was a continuous flurry of detail, but he found time to wonder about several things. The Jovians, for example. They had been a great help in the duplication of the camouflage device, particularly in their modification of the fission power plant it carried. The Jovian improvement was a disruption motor using boron, an element which appeared nowhere in the original. It gave vastly more range to the Solarian device. And yet—there was something about the Jovian willingness that was not quite in harmony with their established behavior patterns. The slight which Leess had suffered from the Martian was not, after all, a large thing in itself, but the fact that Leess had led his planet into a policy of noncooperation made it large. The sudden reversal of this policy since D-Day was more than
puzzling. A hundred times Belter shrugged the question off, grunting “Jovians are funny people,” and a hundred times it returned to him.

There was another unprecedented worry. The Martian delegate called Belter aside one afternoon and presented it to him. “It’s that Hereford,” the man said, scratching his sunburned neck. “He’s too quiet. I know he lost a mess of ‘face’ over his vote on The Death, but he still has a following. More than I like to think about.”

“So?”

“Well, when the big day comes, when we send a formation of the new camouflaged boats out there, what’s to keep him from opening his trap and making trouble for us?”

“Why should he?”

“You know what the pacifists are after. If we fitted out a bunch of these new gadgets with disrupters and wiped the Invader out, they’d have no kick. They don’t want that Death-defense to get back to the System. You know that.”

“Hm-m-m. And how would you handle this on Mars?”

The Martian grinned. “Why, I reckon Brother Hereford would have a little accident. Enough to keep him quiet, anyhow—maybe for a little while, maybe for—”

“I thought as much.” Belter let himself burn for a luxurious second before replying. “Forget it. Supposing what you say is true—and I don’t grant that it is—what else can you think of?”

“Well now, I think it would be a bright idea to send a camouflage force out without consulting the Council. That way, if Hereford is waiting for the psychological moment to blow his mouth off, we’ll get what we’re after before he knows what’s happening.
If
we can keep the lid on it, that is.”

Belter shook his head. “Sorry, friend. No can do. We can stretch a point of security and take a military action without informing the people, but there’s no loophole in the charter which will let any of us take military action without the knowledge of the Council. Sorry. Anyway, thanks for the tip.

This, like the Jovian matter, was a thing he shrugged off and forgot—five or six times a day. He knew the case-hardened character
which lived behind Hereford’s dignified mien, and he respected it for what it was and for what it could do.

There was a solution to these problems. He laughed when it occurred to him, smiled when it recurred; but he frowned when he realized that he had already decided. He must have, for he found himself slipping Addison’s report into a private drawer of his desk. Addison was the Tech in charge of the local camouflage project. It was top secret and had been delivered, sealed, by an orderly. It invited him to inspect a two-place craft which had been finished and tested, fueled and equipped. The report should have gone to the Agenda.

He called Hereford, and when they were alone he asked, without preliminary: “Are you interested in heading off a war?”

“A rhetorical question, certainly.”

“Nope. Question two. Have you anything special to do the next few weeks?”

“Why I—nothing out of the ordinary,” said Hereford, sadly. Since his historic “Exception” speech, he had had little enough to do.

“Well, clear your social calendar, then. No, I’m not kidding. This is hot. How soon can you be ready for a little trip?”

Hereford studied him. “In about thirty minutes. I can tell by the way you act that you’d want it that soon.”

“You’re psychic. Right here, then, in thirty minutes.”

Within two hours they were in space, aboard a swift scoutship. Behind him Belter left a bewildered deputy-chairman with a brief authorization in his hands, and an equally astonished Master-Tech, both of whom were sworn to silence. In the scoutship were a swornin crew and the black hulk of the camouflaged lifeboat.

For the first two days out he left Hereford to twiddle his thumbs in the cramped recreation room of the ship, while he closeted himself with the skipper to work out an approach course. It took him half of the first day to convince the young man that he was in his right mind and that he wanted to board the Invader—two facts that had been regarded, during the past three years, as mutual incompatibilities.

The approach was plotted to permit the boat to overtake the Invader using a minimum of power. The little craft was to be launched
from the scout at high speed on a course which would put it in an elliptical orbit in respect to the sun. This ellipse was at right angles to the plane of the circular course the Invader had been maintaining for the past few weeks. The ellipse intersected this circle in two places, and the launching time was set to synchronize these points of intersection with the predicted position of the Invader on its own course. The big
if
, naturally, was whether or not the Invader would maintain course and speed. He might. He had, twice before, once for nine months and once for over a year. If Belter watched his tables, and spent enough time with his tetrant and calculex, it would require only an occasional nudge of power to follow his course, or to correct it for any variations of the Invader’s predicted position.