Thunder and Roses (45 page)

After the matter was settled, and he had slept, he rejoined Hereford. The old man was apparently staring right through the open book on his knee, for his eyes were wide and unmoving. Belter slumped down beside him and expelled an expressive breath. “What a way to make a living!”

Amusement quirked the corners of Hereford’s mouth. “What?”

“Finding tough ways to die,” grinned the chairman. “I’m ready to tell you about this thing, if you want me to.”

Hereford closed his book and put it by.

“It’s the Jovians, first of all,” said Belter, without preliminary. “Those critters think so well, so fast, and so differently that it scares me. It’s tough … no, it’s downright foolish to try to judge their actions on a human basis. However, they pulled one stunt that was so very human that it completely escaped me. If Mars had tried it, I’d have been on to it instantly. It’s taken a long time for it to percolate, since it concerns the Jovians. Do you remember how ready they were to help out after D-Day? Why do you suppose that was?”

“I would judge,” said Hereford thoughtfully, “that they had awakened to their responsibility as members of the System. The Invader had a defense against the ultimate weapon, the emergency was intensified, and they pitched in to help for the common good.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Has it occurred to you at all what would probably happen if Jupiter—and only Jupiter—had a defense against The Death?”

“Why, I don’t think they would—”

Belter broke in roughly. “Never mind what you would like to believe. What would happen?”

“I see what you mean,” said Hereford. His face was white. “We came up from almost certain defeat and won the war when we developed The Death. If Jupiter had a defense, we would be no match for them!”

“That’s way understated,” said Belter.

“But … but they signed a peace treaty! They’re disarming! They won’t break their word!” cried Hereford.

“Of course they won’t! If they get their hands on that defense, they’ll calmly announce the fact, give us time to prepare, even, and then declare war and wipe us out. There’s a great deal of pride involved, of course. I’ll venture to say that they’d even help us arm if we’d let them, to make the struggle equal to begin with. They’re bugs for that kind of fairness. But the whole System knows that machine for machine, unit for unit, Jovian for man, there is no equality. They’re too much for us. It is only our crazy, ingrained ability to manufacture suicidal weapons which gives us the upper hand. The Jovians are too wise to try to conquer a race which insists on introducing murder-machines without any due regard for their future significance. Remember what Leess said when the Martian insulted him? ‘Earth dead, Jupiter dead, Mars dead. Good.’ They know that unless we as a race are let alone, we will certainly find a way to kill off our neighbors, because as a race we don’t care if we get killed in the process.”

Hereford shuddered. “I’d hate to think you were right. It makes Peace Amalgamated look so very useless, for all its billions of members.”

Belter cracked his knuckles. “I’m not trying to tell you that humans are basically rotten, or that they are fated to be what they always have been. Humanity has come very close to extinction at least four times that I know of, through some such kind of mass suicide. But the existence of Peace Amalgamated does indicate that it believes there is a way out, although I can’t help thinking that it’ll be a long haul to get us ‘cured.’ ”

“Thank you,” said Hereford sincerely. “Sometimes I think you might be a more effective peace worker than I can ever hope to be. Tell me—what made you suspect that the Jovians might be after the defense device for themselves?”

“A very recent development. You must know that the one thing which makes our use of the camouflage unit practicable is the new power plant. With it we can run up to the Invader and get inside his detectors, starting from far out of his range. Now, that was a Jovian design. They built it, ergo they had it first.

“In other words, between the time of its invention and the time they turned it over to us, they had the edge on us. That being the case, there would be only one reason why, in their supreme self-confidence, they would turn it over to us; namely, they didn’t need that edge any more!”

“It fits,” said Hereford sorrowfully.

“Good. Now, knowing Jovians—and learning more every day, by the way—I conclude that they gave us the drive, not because they had something better, but because it had already served its purpose for them. I am convinced that Jovian camouflage boats are on the way to the Invader now—and perhaps they have even … but I’d rather not think about that.” He spread his arms, dropped them. “Hence our little jaunt. We’ve got to get there first. If we’re not first, we have to do what we can when we get there.”

The boat, lightless, undriven, drifted toward the Invader. At this arc of the chosen ellipse, its velocity was low, and suspense was as ubiquitous a thing as the susurrus of the camouflage unit which whispered away back aft. Hereford and Belter found themselves talking in whispers too, as if their tense voices could carry through those insulated bulkheads, across the dim void to the mysterious crew of the metal murderer which hung before them.

“We’re well inside his meteor deflectors,” gritted Belter. “I don’t know what to think. Are we really going to be able to get to him, or is he playing with us?”

“He doesn’t play,” said Hereford grimly. “You will excuse the layman’s question, but I don’t understand how there can be a possibility of his having no detector for just this kind of approach. Since
he uses bombs camouflaged the way we are, he must have some defense against them.”

“His defense seems to be in the range of his deflectors,” answered the chairman. “Those bombs were hunters. That is, they followed the target wherever it moved. The defense would be to stall off the bomb by maneuvering until it ran out of fuel, like the one we picked up. Then his meteor-repellers would take care of it.”

“It was obviously the most effective weapon in his arsenal,” said Hereford hopefully.

“As far as we know,” said Belter from the other end of the emotional spectrum. Then, “I can’t stand this. I’m going to try a little drive. I feel as if we’d been hanging here since nuclear power was discovered.”

Hereford tensed, then nodded in the dark. The boat was hardly the last word in comfort. The two men could lie prone, or get up to a cramped all-four position. Sitting was possible if the cheekbones were kept between the knees and the occipital bones tight against the overhead. They had been in that prison for more days than they cared to recall.

Belter palmed the drive control and moved it forward. There was no additional sound from the power unit, but the slight accelerative surge was distinctly felt.

“I’m going to circle him. No point being too careful. If he hasn’t taken a crack at us by this time, I don’t think he’s going to.” He took the steering lever in his other hand and the boat’s nose pulled “up” in relation to the Invader’s keel-plane. There was no fear of momentum-damage; the controls would not respond to anything greater than a 5-G turn without a special adjustment.

Within four hours the craft was “over” the alien. The ugly, blind-looking shape, portless and jetless, was infuriating. It went its way completely unheeding, completely confident. Belter had a mad flashback to a childish romance. She hadn’t been a very pretty girl, but to have her near him drove him nearly insane. It was because of her perfect poise, her mask. He did not want her. He wanted only to break that calm, to smash his way into the citadel of her
savoir faire
. He had felt like that, and she was not evil. This ship, now—it was
completely so. There was something unalive, implacable, inescapable about this great murderous vessel.

Something clutched his arm. He started violently, bumped his head on the overhead, his hand closing on the velocity control. The craft checked itself and he bumped his head again on the forward port. He swore more violently than Hereford’s grip on his arm called for, and said in irritation: “What?”

“A—hole. A hatch or something. Look.”

It was a black shadow on the curve of the gray-shadowed hull. “Yes … yes. Shall we—” Belter swallowed and tried again. “Shall we walk into his parlor?”

“Yes. Ah … Belter—”

“Hm-m-m?”

“Before we do—you might as well tell me. Why did you want me to come?”

“Because you’re a fighting man.”

“That’s an odd joke.”

“It is not. You have had to fight every inch of the way, Hereford.”

“Perhaps so. But don’t tell me you brought me along for the potential use of my mislaid pugnacities.”

“Not
for
them, friend. Because of them. You want the Invader destroyed, for the good of the System. I want it saved, for the good of the System, as I see it. You could achieve your end in one of two ways. You could do it through Peace Amalgamated, back at Central. It would only need a few words to obstruct this whole program.
Or
, you could achieve it yourself, here. I brought you to keep you from speaking to Peace Amalgamated. I think having you here where I can watch you is less of a risk to the procurement of the Death defense.”

“You’re a calculating devil,” said Hereford, his voice registering something between anger and admiration. “And suppose I try to destroy the ship—given, of course, the chance?”

“I’d kill you first,” said Belter with utter sincerity.

“Has it occurred to you that I might try the same thing, with the same amount of conviction?”

“It has,” Belter replied promptly. “Only you wouldn’t do it. You
could not be driven to killing. Hereford, you pick the oddest times to indulge in dialectics.”

“Not at all,” said Hereford good-humoredly. “One likes to know where one stands.”

Belter gave himself over to his controls. In the back of his mind was a whirling ball of panic. Suppose the power plant should fail, for example. Or suppose the Invader should send out a questing beam of a frequency which the camouflage unit could not handle. How about the meteor deflector? Would they be crushed if the ship located them and hurled them away with a repeller? He thought with sudden horror of the close-set wiring in the boat. Shorts do happen, and sometimes oxidation and vibration play strange tricks with wiring.
Do something
, his inner voice shouted.
Right or wrong, do something
.

They drifted up to the great silver hull, and the hole seemed to open hungrily to them as they neared it. Belter all but stopped the craft in relation to the ship, and nosed it forward with a view to entering the hatch without touching the sides.

“In the visirecord, didn’t the camouflage disrupter at Outpost show up for a moment on the screen as it left the ship?” Hereford whispered.

“Yeah. So what? Oh! You mean the cam unit was shut off until the bomb was clear of the ship. You have something there, Hereford. Maybe we’d better shut it off before we go in. I can see where it would act like something less than camouflage, enclosed in a metal chamber and reradiating all the stray stuff in there plus the reflections of its own output.” He put his hand out to the camouflage control. “But I’m going to wait until we’re practically inside. I don’t relish the idea of being flung off like a meteorite.”

Handling the controls with infinite care, touching them briefly and swiftly with his fingertips, Belter tooled the boat through the hatch. He switched off the camouflage effect and had the boat fully inboard of the Invader before he realized he was biting his tongue.

Surprisingly, the chamber they entered was illuminated. The light was dim, shadowless, and a sickly green. The overhead and bulkheads themselves, or a coating on them, accounted for the light.
There was a large rack on the forward partition containing row on row of the disruption bombs, minus their warheads. Above each ended a monorail device which ran to a track ending in a solid-looking square door—obviously the storage space for the warheads. Another hoist and monorail system connected the hulls themselves with the open hatch. This trackage, and the fact that the chamber was otherwise untenanted, indicated that the bomb assembly, fuse setting, and dispatching were completely automatic.

“Camouflage again,” gritted Belter. “This boat is enough like those bombs to fit sort of cozily in one of those racks. In this crazy light no one would notice it.”

“This light is probably not crazy to those on board,” said Hereford.

“We’ll worry about that later. Slip into your suit.”

From the after locker they drew the light pressure suits around themselves and secured them. Belter demonstrated the few controls—oxygen, humidity, temperature, magnetism, and gravity, to be quite sure the old man was familiar with them all. “And this is the radio. I think it will be safe to use the receivers. But don’t transmit unless it’s absolutely necessary. If we stick close together we can talk by conduction—touching our helmets.”

It was the work of only a few minutes to grapple the weightless craft into the rack. It was a fair fit. When they had finished, Belter reached in and took out two blasters. He secured the escape hatch and turned to Hereford, handing him one of the guns. Hereford took it, but leaned forward to touch his transparent helmet to Belter’s. His voice came through hollowly but clearly.

“What’s this for?”

“Morale,” said Belter briefly. “You don’t have to use it. If we’re watched, ‘Two armed men’ sounds better than ‘Two men, one armed.’ ”

They groped to the inboard partition and followed it cautiously aft. The touch of the metal under his gloves brought a shocking realization to Belter of where he actually was, and for a moment his knees threatened to give way. Deep inside him, his objective self watched, shaking its figment of a head in amazement. Because he had secured a lifeboat equipped for the job, he had come. Because
he had gotten inside the Invader’s screens, he had approached the ship itself. Because he was close enough and a hatch was open, he had come in.
Just the way I got into the Army, and the way I got into politics
, he grinned.

They found a ladder. It led upward through a diamond-shaped opening in the overhead. The rungs were welded to the bulkhead. They were too narrow and too close together. There were dragging scuffmarks on each side, about eighteen or twenty centimeters on each side of the rungs. What manner of creature ambulated on its centerline, dragging its sides?