Third Planet

III

The Lotus went on toward Planet Five, leaving a world which should have been alive and wasn't, to go to a world which should not exist, but did. On the way there was argument which became embittered. In theory, the discoveries made by a Survey ship became automatically available to all the world. But the discovery of Three in the state it was in would have political results on Earth.

It was—and is—a fact that nobody really believes in death until he sees a dead man. And nobody can believe in the destruction of a planet unless he's seen the corpse or color photographs of it. But that was precisely what the Lotus had to carry back to Earth. The WDA nations would see those pictures and read the facts. They would believe in atomic war and the complete sterilization of a world. The Com nations would not see the pictures. They would continue to believe that the West—the WDA—was decadent and enslaved to tyrannical warmongers, and obviously could not resist the splendid armed forces of the Com association. And they wouldn't really believe there could be more than isolated, crazy resistance to their valiant troops. So they'd back their leaders with enthusiasm, and the Western peoples at most would be merely desperate.

The Lotus arrived at Planet Four—which by the Lauriac laws should have been similar to Mars. It was almost its twin. It had ice-caps of hoarfrost and its atmosphere was thin and barely contaminated by oxygen. A base could be maintained here, of course, provided one had a source of supply. A base here, incidentally, would have much the value of the Com base on Luna.

The Lotus did not find that base. It found no cities or signs of settlement. But it did find a bombcrater, miles across and it seemed miles deep. There was an accumulation of reddish dust at its bottom, trapped from the thin winds that blew over this half-frozen world.

The Lotus went on to Planet Five.

The sun, so far out, was very small and its warmth was barely perceptible. But there was vegetation. The surface temperature was above freezing. The Lauriac Laws had predicted that the central metallic core would be small, and the greater part of its mass should be stony. The radioactives in Earth's thin rocky crust produce a constant flow of heat from the interior to the surface. It is considered that it is enough heat to melt a fraction of an inch of ice in a year. On this planet, with a crust many hundreds instead of mere scores of miles thickness, the internal heat was greater. The world was not frozen, and life existed here. It was a pallid, unnatural sort of life which had developed to live in starlight with a feeble assist from a very bright nearby star which happened to be its sun.

There was a base here, too. Kelley located it when he found a resonant return of certain frequencies from the ground. It was not a reflection, but resonance. And so they found the base.

It had been built by engineers the humans on the Lotus could only admire. There were gigantic doors which could admit the Lotus herself. They were rusted shut and had to be opened with explosives. There were galleries and tunnels and laboratories. There were missile launchers and missile-storage chambers. There was a giant dome housing a telescope men had not even dreamed of equalling. It was not an optical telescope.

Ultimately they found a mortuary, where the members of the garrison were placed when they died. The Lotus was not equipped for the archeological and technological studies the base called for. Its function was to scout out things for especially qualified expeditions to study. And, of course, there was the political situation back on Earth....

On the fourth day after landing, the skipper sent for Nolan. The skipper sweated a little.

"Nolan," he said querulously, "we've found something."

"A bug-eyed monster?" asked Nolan dourly.

"No." The skipper mopped his forehead. "Back yonder, on Three, you took a few looks from twenty million miles and figured out what had happened there. We'd have worked it out eventually, but you saw it at once. You're lucky that way. Now we've found something. It's an—instrument. We're short on time. Come with me and make some guesses."

He led the way, explaining jerkily as he went. The thing was in a room by itself, with its own air system and apparently its own food store. It was inside four successive systems of locked doors—all of them inches-thick stainless steel. It was intended that the last door could be opened from inside. It was evidently the very heart of the armed base on Planet Five. Anything sealed up like that would have to be either incredibly valuable or incredibly dangerous.

Nolan followed through the shattered doors, and presently the skipper made a helpless gesture. There was the discovery. It looked more like an old-fashioned telescope than anything else. It had a brass barrel, and it was very solidly mounted, and there were micro-micro adjustments to point it with almost infinite exactitude. It had been sealed in a completely air-tight environment, and what moisture was present had combined with other metals. It wasn't rusted. There was an eyepiece, placed in an improbable position, and there was a trigger. It wasn't like a gun-trigger, but it couldn't have any other purpose. There was no porthole for it to fire through. The compartment in which it had been sealed was deep underground.

Nolan said uneasily:

"It's a weapon, of course."

"Of course!" said the skipper. He mopped his forehead. "I—I think we should take it home. It might make a difference to WDA. But we don't know what it does! It could be a mistake...."

Nolan walked around it. He saw that it could be aimed in almost any direction. But not quite. There was a direction that stops prevented it from pointing to. Nolan said:

"What's in that direction?"

The skipper jumped. When Nolan asked the question he began to suspect many answers. He said in a stricken voice, "That's where the missiles were launched—and where the others are stored."

Nolan stared at the thing. It looked hateful. It had the savage feel of a frozen snarl.

"The power-pile?"

The skipper nodded. He mopped his face again.

"Right alongside. We figured they wanted to shield the rest of the base from radioactives."

Nolan said carefully:

"It could be that they wanted to shield the radioactives from something in the base. Maybe something that would act on radioactives is involved." He said painfully, "Men can't change the rate of fission except by building up a critical mass. But maybe—possibly bug-eyed monsters could."

The skipper perspired. He'd have worked out the same thing in the long run, but Nolan saw it right away. He went away and got the ship's engineers. They brought an X-ray for finding flaws in metal. They took pictures of the inwards of the brass-barreled instrument in its place. They traced two separate, incomprehensible circuits. But they were separate.

At long last the skipper nodded permission for Nolan to try the eyepiece, to see what it showed with heavy metal and much soil and vegetation atop it. They taped the trigger so it could not be moved. The controls affecting the eyepiece they left free. The skipper almost dripped sweat as Nolan turned on the eyepiece circuit, peering in.

For a long time he saw nothing whatever. Then a tiny disk moved slowly into the eyepiece's field. It was barely larger than a point. Nolan moved one of the eyepiece controls. The disk enlarged. It enlarged again. A tiny red dot appeared in the center of the field of vision. As the disk enlarged, the red dot grew larger and became a tiny red circle.

Nolan fumbled. He shifted the position of the instrument with a micro-control. He moved the faintly glowing disk until it was enclosed in the red circle. He enlarged.... Presently the disk was very large, and the red circle ceased to enlarge. It enclosed only a part of the disk.

Nolan felt cold chills down his spine. He swallowed and asked for the angular relationship of Planet Four to Three. The skipper sent someone to find it out. But Nolan had found Planet Four before the answer came. The first disk was in some fashion a representation of Planet Three—the Earthlike world which was dead. The second was a representation of Four. There was a bright spot near the equator of Four—the equator being located by the flattening of the poles. It would be just about where a gigantic atom-bomb crater still existed.

Nolan drew back and took a deep breath.

"Apparently," he said unsteadily, "this eyepiece detects radioactives, converting something that I can't imagine into visible light after it's passed through a few feet of metal and a good many more of dirt. There's a red ring which makes me think of a gun-sight. And there's a trigger. Skipper, would you send half an ounce or so of ship-fuel out to space in a drone? I think we're going to have to pull this trigger."

The skipper wrung his hands. He went away. And Nolan stood staring at nothing in particular, appalled and sickened by the thoughts that came to him.

Presently the skipper came back and mumbled that a drone was on the way up. Nolan searched for it with the eyepiece. He found it. The sensitivity of the eyepiece was practically beyond belief. What it worked on—what it transmuted and amplified to light—was wholly beyond his imagination.

The drone went four thousand miles out. Nolan absently asked for somebody to be posted out of doors, watching the sky. He got the vivid spark that was the half ounce of ship-fuel in the center of the red luminous ring. He turned his eyes away and pulled the trigger.

There was no sound. There was no vibration. There was no indication in the underground room that anything at all had happened. There was only a violent flare in the eyepiece, from which Nolan had just drawn back.

Someone came shouting from out of doors that there had been an intolerable flash of brilliance in the sky.

A few moments later the word came that the drone control board indicated that the drone had ceased to exist.

The Com Ambassador sighed a little when he saw the expression on the Coordinator's face. Interviews with the titular head of the alliance of all Western nations became increasingly a strain on his politeness. But the Coordinator said grimly:

"I think I can guess what you're here to tell me!"

The Com Ambassador said politely:

"It is painful to—ah—beat around the bush. May I speak plainly?"

"Do," said the Coordinator.

"Our base on the Moon," said the Ambassador with a fine air of frankness, "some time ago reported military preparations on Earth, among the WDA nations. Those preparations could have no purpose other than an unwarned attack upon us. We felt it necessary, then, to take countermeasures of preparation only. We modified the plans for our moon base to have it contain not only the telescopes and such observational equipment, but to have an adequate armament of missiles. It is now so armed."

The Coordinator whitened a little, but he did not look surprised.

"Well?"

"I have to inform you," said the Com Ambassador, "that any military action directed against any Com nation, or its troops, or the Union of Com Republics, will be met by atomic bombardment from the moon as well as—ah—our standard military establishments. This, of course, does not mean war. To the contrary, we hope that it will end the possibility of war. We trust that all causes of tension between our nations will one by one be removed, and that an era of perpetual peace and prosperity will follow."

The Coordinator's lips twisted in an entirely mirthless smile.

"Military action against Com troops," he observed, "means resistance to invasion or occupation, doesn't it?"

"It would be wiser," said the Ambassador carefully, "to protest than to resist. At least, so it seems to me."

The Coordinator of the Western Defense Alliance said:

"Tell me something confidentially, Mr. Ambassador. How long before you expect—no. You wouldn't answer that. Ah! How long do you think it will be before I am shot?"

The Com Ambassador said politely:

"I would hesitate to guess."

The Lotus started back to Earth with the enigmatic weapon fastened firmly in its cargo hold. Great pains had been taken to keep it from being knocked or shocked or battered in its transfer to the ship. Firmly anchored, Nolan had insisted that the stops, which prevented it from being aimed below the horizon or toward the radioactives in the base, be adjusted so it could not be aimed at the Lotus's own engines or fuel-stores. There were no missiles to worry about, of course.

Even this precaution, however, roused doubt and uneasiness, especially among the scientific staff. It was highly probable that when the Lotus reported in from space, the Coms would ask to examine such specimens as she brought back. The request would be expressed as scientific interest, but a refusal would be treated as a concealment of dire designs. There were those on the ship who felt that the weapon should be dismantled and made to seem meaningless, to avoid any chance of a humiliating squabble with the Coms.

The skipper roared at them. It was the only time on the voyage when he displayed anger. But he glared at those who proposed the act of discretion. He drove them out of the cabin in which the suggestion was made. He turned to Nolan, who definitely was not a party to it. His manner changed. He said querulously:

"Nolan, why do you want that thing mounted so it could be used if necessary?"

"That's the way it was mounted on Planet Five. To box it or case it might injure it. To take it apart might mean that it could never be got together in working order again."

"Is that the real reason?" demanded the skipper. "It's a good reason, but is it the real one?"

"No," admitted Nolan. "It isn't."

The skipper fumed to himself.

"We might get home," he said fretfully, "and find things just as we left them. Then there'd be no harm in the mounting. We'd at least try to diddle the Coms and get it ashore without their knowing it was important. We might get home and find that war'd broken out and Earth was dead like the Third Planet back yonder, only not all yet turned to desert. Then the mounting wouldn't matter. Nothing would! Or we could find that the Coms had smashed the West and were all cockahoop about what they'd managed to do in a sneak attack. So it had better stay mounted. I covered everything, didn't I?"

Nolan wasn't feeling any better than anybody else on the Lotus. The jitters that affected everybody but conditioned Coms had been bad when the Lotus went about its business. But when the ship headed for home, nerves got visibly worse. They didn't know what they'd find there. With the third planet of Fanuel Alpha in mind, it was all too easy to believe in disaster.

"There's one thing," said Nolan painfully, "that bothers me. I've been trying to think like a Com top brass. The WDA is a well meaning organization, and it's gained time, no doubt. But aside from the Com missiles, ninety-five per cent of the atomic warheads on Earth are in the hands of just one WDA nation. It happens to be ours. It's been bearing most of the load of defense costs for the West. It's the richest country in the world. There's practically no poverty in it."

"What has poverty to do with a possible war?" demanded the skipper.

"Everything," Nolan said uncomfortably. "The Coms take over a country. They march in. There are rich people and poor people. The Coms start to humiliate and destroy the rich. The poor people hated them. So the Coms are popular long enough to get things going right. But if they tried that in our country—"

"It wouldn't work," said the skipper. "Not for a minute."

"It wouldn't," agreed Nolan. "Most of our people think of themselves as well to do, and the rest can hope to become so. So the Coms would have to try to govern two hundred million indignant and subversive underground resisters. They couldn't hold down such a country. They wouldn't try!"

The skipper blinked.

"If you mean they'd leave our country alone—"

"I don't," said Nolan. "They'd destroy it. They'd have to. So they might as well destroy it out of hand and destroy most of the fighting potential and a lot of resolution in the West. A well handled atomic-missile bombardment and some luck, and they could take over the rest of the world without trouble. I think that's the practical thing for them to do. I think they'll do it if they can."

The skipper grimaced. Then he said, almost ashamedly:

"Maybe we're talking nonsense, Nolan. Maybe we've just got bad cases of nerves. Maybe things have gotten better since we left. We could arrive back home and find nobody even dreaming of war any more!"

"That," said Nolan, "would scare me to death. That would be the time to make a sneak attack!"

Which was pessimism. But nothing else seemed justified. It was not even easy to be hopeful about the value of the fifth-planet weapon to the Western Defensive Alliance. The WDA couldn't use it in a preventive war. Their people wouldn't allow it. The initiative would always remain with the Coms.

The Lotus moved Earthward. She carried a more deadly instrument for war than men had ever dreamed of. But the ship's company daily jittered a little more violently.

The war might have been fought and be over by now. If it had, the Coms would have won it.

The Coordinator for the WDA handed the Com Ambassador his passport.

"I'm sorry you've been recalled," he said heavily, "Because I think I see the meaning of the move."

"I am only called home for conference and instructions," said the Ambassador politely. "I shall miss our friendly chats. We have had a very fine personal relationship, though we have disagreed so often."

The Coordinator absently shifted objects on his desk. He said suddenly:

"Mr. Ambassador, have I ever lied to you?"

The Ambassador raised his eyebrows. Then he smiled.

"Never!" he said pleasantly. "I have marveled!"

The Coordinator took a quick, sharp breath.

"I shall not lie now," he said abruptly. "I hope you will believe me, Mr. Ambassador, when I tell you one of our best-kept military secrets."

The Ambassador blinked and then shrugged politely.

"You always astonish me," he said mildly.

"Your High Command," said the Coordinator grimly, "has decided not to try to take over the nation around us. It is considered impractical. So this nation is to be destroyed, to shatter the backbone of the WDA and make resistance anywhere else unthinkable."

The Ambassador said reproachfully:

"Ah, but you begin to believe your own propaganda!"

"No," said the Coordinator. "I have simply told you the facts you undoubtedly already know. Now I tell you our best-kept military secret. We know that we cannot deal with you. We know that you might be successful in an overwhelming, unwarned attack. We know that if you decide upon war, it will be directed primarily at this nation. So we have set up some very special atomic bombs where it is extremely unlikely that you will find them. They are 'dirty' bombs. They are designed to make the maximum possible amount of radioactive dust—of fallout. Timing mechanisms are set to detonate them. Every day a man goes and sets back the timing mechanism in each place where a bomb is established. On the day that a man fails to do so the bombs will certainly explode."

The Coordinator said almost briskly:

"We calculate that the bombs will make the atmosphere of the whole Earth lethally radioactive. They will raise the background count on Earth to the point where nothing can live: no plant, no animal, no fish in any sea. This will only happen if this nation is destroyed. It will fight if it is attacked, of course, but your chances of substantial success are good. But if you are successful the Earth will die. I may add that the people of the Com nations will die also, to the last individual."

The Ambassador started to his feet.

"But you could not do that!" he protested white-lipped. "You cannot!"

The Coordinator shrugged and shook his head.

"I have not lied to you before, Mr. Ambassador. I do not lie to you now." Then he said formally: "I hope you have a pleasant journey home."