Third Planet

IV

The Lotus came out of the usual sequence of arrival-hops no more than six light-seconds from Earth. A million miles, more or less; perhaps four times the distance of the Moon. Nolan examined the planet's sunlit face and said steadily:

"Nothing's happened yet."

There was almost agonized relief. Only the skipper did not seem to relax. He went stolidly to the control-room and got out the scrambler card that matched just one other scrambler card in the world. He put it in the communicator. To speak to Earth by scrambler would be an offense. It would be protested by the Coms. They would insist that a survey ship should have nothing secret to report and that anything secret must be inimical to the Com Association of Nations.

The skipper formally reported in, in the clear, and then insisted on completing his report by scrambler. He did complete it, over the agitated protest of the ground. Then there was silence. He mopped his forehead.

"Nolan, better get down to the eyepiece. The Coms could send something up to blast us. I'll get the detectors out. You be ready! You're sure you can handle things?"

"This is a little bit late to raise the question," said Nolan. "I think I can do it, though."

He went down into the hold. He turned on the eyepiece. He saw the distinct, luminous disk which was Earth in the not-at-all-believable field of the impossible instrument. He saw points—not dots—of extremely vivid light. Obviously the size of a radioactive object did not determine the brightness of its report to the weapon from Planet Five of Fanuel Alpha. Something else controlled the brilliance.

He saw the groupings of many dimensionless points of light. There were the patterns which meant the silos holding the monster atomic missiles of the West. He could distinguish them from the much more concentrated firing-points of the Com nations. The oceans had few or no bright points at all. There were only so many atomic-powered ocean-going vessels. Nolan could tell well enough which were the Western accumulations of radioactives for defense purposes, and which were the Com stores of warheads.

His throat went dry as he realized the power in his hands. Neither he or anyone else could make one blade of grass grow, but he could turn the third planet of this sun into a desert and a dreariness like the third planet of another sun far, far away.

The skipper came into the hold. He locked the entrance door behind him.

"I got to the Coordinator," he said in a shaking voice. "I started enough trouble by reporting by scrambler. He talked to me. I showed him pictures. He's telling the Coms most of what I reported, saying that if they like they can try to blast us. If they try, and don't succeed, we can try to figure out what to do next."

The Com premiership was in some ways the equivalent of the office of Coordinator of the Western Defense Alliance. But the men who held the two posts were quite unlike and the amount of authority they could exercise was vastly different. The Com premier read, again, the newly arrived message from the Coordinator. The high officials he'd sent for came streaming into the room. Most of them had flimsies of the message in their hands. The Premier beamed at them.

"You have the news," he said humorously. "The WDA Coordinator first threatened to make all Earth's air radioactive if we attacked the—ah—leading member of the WDA and destroyed it. He has evidently decided that this threat is not strong enough. So he assures us that a Western survey ship has come back from an exploring voyage with a cargo of artifacts from a non-human civilization. Among the artifacts there is what he says is the absolute weapon. He says that the skipper who has brought it back claims that it can end the tension between the WDA and us—by ending us!" The Premier chuckled. "He invites us to verify the skipper's claim by attempting to blast the survey ship, whose coordinates of position he gives us. I think he has made a rather substantial error of judgment."

His eyes twinkled as he looked from one to another of the high officials he had summoned.

"We accepted the invitation," said the Premier. "Naturally! General?"

He looked at a tall general officer with twin silver rockets in his lapels. The general said proudly:

"Yes, Excellency! Our space-radar located an object at the survey ship's stated position. We sent six rockets with atomic warheads at it. We used satellite-placing rockets for maximum acceleration. They are well on their way now. Of course they can be disarmed or destroyed as well as maneuvered to intercept this survey ship if it attempts to flee. They will reach the target area in just under three hours."

The Premier nodded, very humorously.

"Since we accepted their invitation, naturally the Western staff concludes that we are disturbed. That we will wait to see what our rockets learn. It would be interesting, but our scientists tell me that the alleged weapon is impossible. Utterly impossible! So it is merely a trick.... And we will not wait for our rockets to arrive. We might be late for our dinners, and we would not like that!"

The high officials made sounds of amusement.

"So we put our own ending to the comedy," said the Premier blandly. "The circuits are joined?" He asked the question of a craggy-faced service-of-supply colonel. The colonel managed to nod, and was stricken numb by the importance of the gesture.

"Then," said the Premier humorously, "we will destroy our enemy."

He waddled across the room. He put a pudgy forefinger on a button. He pushed it.

Even here, deep underground, there were roaring sounds as rockets took off for the west. All over the Com nations, carefully distributed rocket-firing sites received signals from the one pushbutton. They sent bellowing monsters up into the sky.

Three Com rockets reached their targets, and Nolan never quite forgave himself for it. They were murderous. They wiped out cities. But that was all. The rest of the rockets went off prematurely. A spread of half a hundred, crossing the North Pole, detonated just out of atmosphere. Others went off over the Atlantic. Not a few made temporary suns above the Pacific. Nolan brought moving specks within the thin red circle of his instrument, and pulled the trigger. The points flamed momentarily and left patches of luminosity behind them. And that was that.

But they continued to rise. On Earth they made noises like dragons. There was panic from their starting points. Those first out had not reached their targets! So the Com launching-sites flung more and more missiles skyward. One of them reached a city of the West. A second. A third.

The only possible answer was to blast them as they rose. Then to blast them before they rose. Nolan's task became the terribly necessary one of preventing radioactives from moving away from Com territory and into WDA nations—specifically one WDA nation. He did not think of the consequences of his actions except in terms of preventing excessively bright mathematical points of light from getting to the areas where there were so many fewer points of similar light which did not move at all. He tried to stop only those that moved.

But three got by him, and he could do nothing but detonate all the radioactives in Com territory. He had to! When that was done, there were six warheads coming up from Earth. He detonated them. There were massed warheads moving toward Earth from the Moon. It seemed that they practically tore space apart that they went off together. Then the moon base began to fire rockets, hysterically, at the Lotus, and it was necessary to detonate the radioactives in the moon base.

It had been estimated that an atomic war might be over in three hours. But prophecies are usually underestimates. Between the first and last explosions on Earth, in space and on the moon—there was a truly gigantic crater where the Com base had been—some thirty-seven minutes elapsed. Then the war was over.

There were some survivors in Com territory, of course. But they couldn't retaliate for the destruction of their nations. Their own bombs had done the destruction. They couldn't even gloat that the rest of Earth shared their catastrophe. It didn't. Most of the bombs exploded high, and over ocean. No less than three-fifths of all fallout landed in the sea and sank immediately. For the rest, the background count on Earth nowhere went above 4.9, and people could be protected against that.

The survey ship Lotus came gingerly down to ground. There was no longer any reason for tension. Its crew reported in and scattered to the various places they called home. They were very glad to be back. In the course of time they were all suitably bemedalled and admired and told that their names would live forever. Of course, it was not true.

Nolan didn't pay much attention to this. He left the Survey. He went to live in a small town. He married a small-town girl. And he never, never, never took any one of the excursions so many WDA people took to see the result of atomic explosions in Com territory, when their attempt to murder one Western nation backfired. Nolan had caused that backfiring. He very passionately did not want to see its results.

He'd seen all he wanted of that sort of thing on the third planet of a sol-type sun, some light-centuries from Earth.