The Project Gutenberg eBook of Needler, by Randall Garrett
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Title: Needler
Author: Randall Garrett
Illustrator: Emsh
Release Date: April 29, 2023 [eBook #70668]
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEEDLER ***
NEEDLER
BY RANDALL GARRETT
Illustrated by Emsh
"The principal difficulty in the case ... lay in the
fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital
was over-laid and hidden by what was irrelevant."
--Sherlock Holmes
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction June 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They just didn't give a damn. The first load of survivors brought back
after the Battle of Leymon's Star had been short-circuited somewhere,
and they didn't give two hoots whether they lived or died.
The same thing happened to the crew of the GSS _Bedevin_ after the
skirmish in the Great Rift. The _Bedevin_ was found drifting along, out
of control, after having demolished an enemy vessel with a blast of the
new _aJ_ guns.
It was a case of "the operation was a success, but the doctor died." Or
might as well have.
The crewmen of the fighting ships were in a state of semicatatonia.
The alien ships were burned and blasted out of space, with the
exception of those which turned tail and ran. The survivors in the
human ships were picked up and taken to Kandoris VI, the Galactic Main
Base of the Interstellar Fleet.
Fleet Commander Allerdyce hospitalized the men and turned the problem
over to the Civilian Research Corps. General Director Eckisster frowned
over the whole mess, fired out assignments right and left, and dumped
the bulk of the responsibility into the lap of Roysland Dwyn, chief of
the Special Weapons Group.
Dwyn immediately asked for a specimen from the Fleet Hospital
Psychiatric Ward.
Bilford, the chief psychometrist, brought one of the crew members from
the _Bedevin_ into the office of the head of Special Weapons four days
after the survivors had been picked up.
Roysland Dwyn glanced up from the work at his desk when Bilford
entered. Behind the huge plastic block of the desk, he looked no
larger than the average man. It was only when he stood that it became
apparent that Roysland Dwyn was two sizes larger than the average man,
regardless of where you measured.
Bilford walked on into the office. "You wanted to see Captain Gisser,
Roysland?"
Roysland nodded his massive head. "Bring him in; I want to get the
whole picture on this business."
Bilford nodded and turned back toward the door. His eyes looked sad and
pitying, and he ran a lean, nervous hand through his bushy gray hair as
he called out: "All right, Captain Gisser--come in here."
* * * * *
As Captain Gisser strolled in from the outer office, Roysland watched
him carefully.
Gisser was tall and graceful, in the near-perfect physical trim of a
fighting man. He moved with military precision, but without the stiff
rigidity of formal marching. He took one step through the door--and
stopped.
Roysland narrowed his gray eyes and looked at the captain's face.
The expression on it was definitely not the sleepy, glazed look of
the hypnotic catatonic. After a moment, Roysland decided it could be
described as a sort of apathetic introspection.
"How long will he stand like that?" he asked Bilford.
Bilford spread his hands. "Until someone tells him to move or he
collapses from lack of food or sheer fatigue."
"Have him sit down over there." Roysland pointed. "No use making the
poor guy stand up."
"Go over to that chair and sit down," Bilford told the captain. Gisser
did as he was told.
Bilford pulled up another chair and sat down. "Why'd you want to see
him?" he asked. "I mean, do you have anything in mind?"
Roysland shook his head. "Nothing specific; I'm just trying to see
every angle of this. The Enlissa have a new weapon; we've got to do
something to counteract it. So far, we don't know anything about it
except that it bollixes up the brain--and that isn't very useful. It's
like trying to deduce the existence of a pistol from the holes in the
target."
"Worse," Bilford said gloomily; "we don't even have a hole to analyze."
"Yes, we do. A psychic hole." Roysland gestured toward the silent
captain. "Are they all like that?"
"Essentially, yes," Bilford said.
"Can he hear what I'm saying? I mean, can he understand me?"
"That's a hard question to answer. I should say that the understanding
was of a very low level. Here, I'll show you what I mean." He turned
and looked directly at the seated spaceman.
"Captain Gisser, how old are you?" he asked in a firm, clear voice.
There was no answer.
"Gisser, when were you born?"
Still no answer.
"Gisser, _tell us_ when you were born."
"Twelve, Eight, Seven sixty-four," Gisser said promptly.
Bilford looked back at Roysland. "He won't do anything on his own;
there's absolutely no conscious volition. He has to be told what to do.
"Just asking him a question isn't enough; you have to insist on the
answer. That's what I meant by saying that his understanding is on
a very low level. He can't even deduce the presence of an unspoken
command."
Roysland frowned and started to say something, but he was interrupted
by a flicker of light on his desk panel.
He looked at Bilford. "The boss," he said dryly. Then he pressed a stud.
* * * * *
Light flickered in the air and coalesced into the seated figure of a
portly, smiling, middle-aged man. The image wavered a little, then
settled into an illusion of material solidity.
General Director Eckisster smiled and said: "Are we getting anywhere,
gentlemen?"
"We're just getting started," Roysland said.
Eckisster nodded. "I see." His eyes lit on the captain, who was still
sitting in the same position he had taken when he was ordered into the
chair. "Is this one of the _Bedevin_'s men?"
It was Bilford who answered. "Yes, sir. Captain Gisser, Prime Officer."
"And you haven't found out anything about him yet? Don't you know
what's wrong with these men?" Eckisster's voice was bland on the
surface, but there was a biting hardness underneath.
"We know what's wrong with them, sir," Bilford said stiffly; "we just
don't know what caused it."
"According to the electroencephaloscope readings, the electrical
activity of the prefrontal lobes is exhibiting a loop-feedback pattern.
It's going around in circles without getting anywhere. As far as
the nerve impulses are concerned, these men have been effectively
lobotomized--almost completely so."
"I see." Eckisster looked at the captain again. "Captain, stand up."
The captain stood. "Sit down." The officer sat. Eckisster rubbed a
plump finger over his chin. "That's according to the report, at least.
Would he kill himself if I asked him to?"
"Not if you _asked_ him to," Bilford said coldly. "He might if you
_told_ him to. Do you want me to try it?"
"Don't be ridiculous!" the general director snapped. He looked at
Roysland, who had been sitting quietly, waiting for Eckisster to
finish. "Roysland, do you have any idea of the nature of this weapon?"
"None, sir," Roysland said quietly. "Neither I nor the psychologists
have any idea what could do this to the human brain."
"Oh, no?" Eckisster's plump face smiled. "Haven't I heard something
about microwaves at high intensity?"
Roysland nodded. "Sure. I know what you mean. But I was talking about
doing it over a range of seven hundred million miles.
"We know that it can be done, but we don't know how the enemy did
it. Look at it this way: If we'd found every one of these men with
his skull bashed in, we could say that it had been done with a club.
But that still wouldn't explain how it was done from better than a
light-hour away."
"Besides," Bilford chipped in, "high intensity microwaves don't have
that effect. They affect the brain, sure--but not that way."
Eckisster nodded and folded his hands placidly. "I understand. Well,
gentlemen, I--" He stopped suddenly and looked to one side, out of the
range of his pickup. A voice said: "This facsimile just came in on the
ultrabeam, sir."
A hand materialized out of nowhere, holding a fac sheet; Eckisster took
it, unfolded it, and read it. His eyes opened a trifle wider, and he
looked up at Roysland.
"Roysland, they've used it again. The _Killiver_ was picked up this
side of the Noir Nebula, near Poulderr. They found her because of the
automatic signals. Every man aboard was just like Captain Whatsisname,
there. They're bringing the ship here, to Kandoris." He paused and
looked at both men in turn. "If this keeps up," he said, "they'll have
us whipped. It's your job to keep them from doing that. Now, you've got
several trails to follow. Follow them, and get some answers; that's
all."
His hand touched the arm rest of his chair, and abruptly the image
dissolved into transparent air.
Bilford looked at Roysland. "I don't like the way he keeps needling
people," he said. "It gets under my skin."
Roysland stood up. "He thinks that's the best way to get things done.
Maybe it is; I really don't know. I do agree with him in one respect:
we _have_ to do something--what, I don't know, but something.
"We've been fighting the Enlissa for eighteen years. Up until last
year, when we invented the _aJ_ gun, there hadn't been an improvement
on either side; they were winning because they had more ships.
"Then we get the _aJ_ gun functioning, and use it against them; and
when we do, it turns out that they have an even better weapon. I know
what they mean when they say war is hell."
He stopped and looked at the captain. "Well, let's get on with it; I
want to ask him a few questions."
* * * * *
Eighteen years of fighting hadn't seriously damaged either side,
insofar as actual loss of life was concerned. Men in ships had been
killed, of course, but no civilian had yet lost his life as a direct
result of the Enlissa-Human war. The Enlissa hadn't gotten in close
enough to occupied planets--yet.
But, until a year ago, it had seemed inevitable that they would. The
screen of ships that ranged around the periphery of the human-inhabited
section of the galaxy was getting thinner all the time. The Enlissa
had more ships, and, rather than make a direct attack, they seemed to
prefer to punch at the screen, weakening it steadily.
But the Enlissa had underestimated human ingenuity. Both sides had been
relying on the ultralight torpedoes to knock each other out of the sky,
and humanity had realized that they had to have something better. So
they had come up with the _aJ_ projector. If matter can be projected
through the no-space of ultralight velocities, why not energy?
The result was as devastating a heat beam as any dreamer could
logically expect; all the energy of a nuclear reaction focused along a
narrow locus of no-space toward the enemy ship. Even a shielded hull
gives under bombardment like that.
It looked as though the war was won. That is, it did until ships came
back with mindless crews.
The _Killiver_ was sitting in its launching cradle at the far side of
the ten-mile-square Grand Port of Kandoris. Roysland didn't bother to
take the tubeway; he flashed his credentials and commandeered a surface
jeep. Bilford had already taken charge of the crew, but Roysland wasn't
worried about _them_; he wanted a look at the ship.
The _Killiver_ was swarming with inspectors and special government
investigators. Roysland jumped out of the jeep as it slowed near the
giant sphere of the ship, and strode toward the ring of guards that
surrounded the globe.
One of the guards looked up at Roysland's huge frame and said: "May I
see your pass, sir?"
Roysland pulled out his pass and handed it to the guard.
The guard barely glanced at it; then he shook his head. "I'm sorry,
sir; this is a general pass. You'll have to get one of the special
passes for this ship. The Inspection Division has--"
"Where the devil do I get a pass?" Roysland snapped.
"You'll have to apply at Inspection," the guard said. "In person," he
added.
Roysland shook his hand. "I'm not going twelve miles back to
Administration. Who's in charge here?"
"Inspector Gowlan, sir."
"Call him; tell him Roysland Dwyn wants to see him."
The guard hesitated for a moment, then spoke softly into the
communicator on his wrist. The speaker in his ear buzzed a reply.
"He'll be right out," said the guard.
A moment later, a dark-haired, average-sized man in a chief inspector's
uniform fell through the drop chute from the ship and crossed the open
space toward Roysland. "Roysland Dwyn?" he said, holding out his hand.
"You're Special Weapons, aren't you? I'm Gowlan."
Roysland nodded and gripped the proffered hand in his own great paw.
"Glad to know you. I want to get on that ship."
The inspector shook his head. "'Fraid not ... not without a special
pass. We've got to make damage estimates."
"That ship is equipped with _aJ_ projectors," Roysland said. "My gang
designed and built them from the ground up; I know more about them
than you do. I want to see them--and the rest of the ship. I haven't
got time to go gallivanting all over this base getting signatures on a
blasted pass."
The inspector started to say something, but Roysland cut him off. "You
can check with Eckisster, if you want; but hurry it up."
Gowlan looked up into Roysland's eyes, hesitated, then spoke into his
wrist phone.
Less than two minutes later, Roysland was inside the ship.
* * * * *
The _Killiver_ was in almost perfect shape. The _aJ_ guns appeared to
be in perfect operating condition, and the meters showed that three
of them had tracked and fired at something that had passed the upper
starboard quadrant of the vessel.
Roysland checked the recordings, then looked up at Gowlan, who had
elected to follow him. "Any sign of the ship they were firing at?"
Gowlan shrugged. "The Space-fleet men didn't find anything. If the
_Killiver_ holed it, they would still probably be light-years away from
where the ship was found."
"What made them skitter off like that?"
Gowlan looked at him. "I don't get it. What do you mean?"
Roysland waved his hand to indicate their surroundings. The corridors
and rooms of the great ship were swarming with inspectors, who were
photographing and checking every square centimeter of the ship.
"What happened? Why have we got this ship?" Roysland asked.
Gowlan thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. "I see what you're
getting at. Let's see--
"The _Killiver_ is cruising in ultradrive. They pick up a blip on the
detector; it's an enemy ship. They're too far away to torpedo, but
they're well within range of the _aJ_ projectors. That gets us up to
the moment of firing." He stopped and his frown deepened. "Wait a
second; that doesn't make sense."
Roysland raised an eyebrow. "What doesn't?"
"Well, look here: The gunners would have had to be awake when the
_aJ's_ were fired. All right; that means they tracked the Enlissa ship,
then cut in the automatics to fire the _aJ's_. They must have missed,
because the Enlissa used the mindjammer _after_ the _aJ's_ were fired.
"But if that's so, then why didn't the Enlissa ship capture the
_Killiver_?"
It was a good point. Roysland frowned and turned the thing over in his
mind. A spaceship is expensive--hellishly expensive; the cost of a
fleet of seagoing battleships is nothing in comparison. So you don't
waste ships, even the enemy's. The whole object of a space battle
is to destroy the enemy crew without destroying the ship. Even a
badly-damaged interstellar vessel is worth saving.
The _Killiver_ was in excellent condition. If the Enlissa ship were
still in good shape after the battle, why hadn't they taken the
_Killiver_?
"The only thing I can figure," Gowlan said, "is that the Enlissa ship
fired their mindjammer just after the _aJ's_ were fired--almost at the
same time, you might say." He grinned. "Sure. That's what must have
happened."
Roysland nodded. "It looks like the only explanation," he agreed. "That
is, except for one thing."
"What's that?" Gowlan wanted to know.
"Why has the same coincidence occurred in three different battles, in
widely separated parts of the galaxy?"
Gowlan's face lost its self-satisfied look. "Yeah," he said softly.
"Yeah. Why?"
"Kick that around a while," Roysland said, grinning. "If you come up
with anything, let me know."
* * * * *
Roysland Dwyn spent the next two days sitting in his office with his
feet on his desk, leaning back in a chair that creaked ominously with
his weight. The only interruptions were for food and sleep--except when
one of his staff called in with new data, which was rare.
He got one call from Milford. The microwave business that the general
director suggested had shown some promise of snapping the stricken
crews out of their apathy. Some of the men were improving rapidly,
and others more slowly; but all of them were showing some positive
response to the treatment.
On the afternoon of the second day, he got a call from Eckisster. The
old man didn't look particularly jovial. His image solidified with a
scowl on it. "What have you got on this microwave business?" he snapped.
Roysland lifted his big boots off the desk and leaned forward
leisurely. "Nothing."
"You'd better get something fast," the general director said. "They're
attacking shipping now, and they're well within the periphery."
Roysland jerked erect. "_What? What happened?_"
Eckisster's lower lip curled. "Don't use that tone of voice on me,
Roysland. I don't like it. I want you to find out a few things. What's
happening? Why do they attack this way and do nothing? What sort of
gadget do they have? Is there any defense against it? Can we make it?
Can we--"
His voice trailed off. Roysland had stood up and walked around his desk
until he was less than a yard from the image of the general director.
He knew full well that his own image in the director's office was doing
the same thing. And in spite of the fact that Eckisster knew the image
was harmless, Roysland's impressive mass quieted him.
When he spoke, Roysland's voice was low. "Now you listen to me,
Eckisster. You want me to solve this problem. O.K. I want to figure
it out as much as you do, but I can't do a thing without data. I have
to know what has happened, and I have to know exactly how it happened.
So don't come busting in on me with a lot of vague hints when I'm
thinking. I don't have to put up with that sort of stuff; either give
me the data on what happened, or go yak at someone else while I figure
this out without any help from you."
Eckisster looked up at the bulk of bone and muscle that towered
over him. "Don't get excited, Roysland," he said. "I'll forgive your
impertinence: it's just that I'm so worried, myself."
"O.K. You're excused, too. Now, what's this about shipping being
attacked?"
Eckisster glanced to one side and reached for something outside the
pickup field. The end of his arm vanished and reappeared holding a
sheaf of papers. "Of course, a copy of this will be sent to your office
right away, but I can give you the essentials now.
"Two unarmed cargo vessels left Belixa III a week ago, bound for Niadel
V. They were escorted by a light cruiser of the _Sidneg_ class. They
were picked up, off course, after they had passed the Niadel sun;
nobody on board had even bothered to eat for four days.
"They probably wouldn't have been found at all if they'd been ordinary
merchant vessels, but the local government on Niadel V was looking for
them; there'd been an epidemic of some sort there, and these ships were
on an emergency run with antibiotics of some kind."
Roysland stepped back and sat on the edge of his desk. "Got all three
of them?"
"All three of them," said Eckisster emphatically. "Now, I'll send this
report over to you immediately. We'll have to get some action. If the
Enlissa can get in this close, they may decide to attack Kandoris
itself! Your job is Special Weapons. Find a screen of some sort that
will protect us from this--whatever it is."
"Call it a mindjammer," Roysland said. "One of the inspectors used that
word, and I kind of like it."
"You like it." Eckisster's voice was cutting. "I don't like anything
that does _that_ to a human brain. Get busy and find some way to beat
it."
Roysland started to explain that he liked the word--not the object--but
the general director's image was already dissolving. Roysland stepped
back behind his desk and dialed a number. A few seconds later,
Bilford's image materialized. The nervous little man looked more
nervous than ever.
* * * * *
"What is it, Roysland? More trouble? I hope not. I've had Eckisster on
my neck all morning."
"I know; I just got him off mine. But I wanted to ask you something. Is
there any correlation between the frequencies that help those men and
the frequency of the feedback circuit in their prefrontal lobes?"
Bilford frowned in thought. "I don't know; I'd never thought of it from
that angle. They don't have any obvious correlation, I can tell you
that. I'll check on it, though. I'll run it through the differential
analyzer."
Roysland nodded. "Try that. Let me know if you get anything."
He cut Bilford off and dialed another number. The image that appeared
this time was wearing the uniform of a fleet commander.
"Commander Allerdyce, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?"
"Go ahead, Roysland. What is it? I hope you're not going to needle me
the way your boss does. I'd have tossed him out of my office, except
that you can't grab a solidiphone image. Best I could do was shut him
off, which was very unsatisfactory." The commander grinned wryly at
the thought.
A big grin spread itself across Roysland's blocky face. "I know how you
feel. No, commander, I just wanted to ask a couple of questions, as I
said.
"You're familiar with the details of the Enlissa attack on that medical
supply convoy?"
The fleet commander nodded.
"Well," Roysland continued, "what would happen if you were in command
of the cruiser and you found a trace on the scope that indicated an
Enlissa ship?"
"The orders cover that," said the commander. "The cruiser cuts in with
the _aJ_ guns before the Enlissa ship gets within torpedo range."
"And this always works?"
The commander shrugged. "It always has so far, the _aJ's_ knock them
out of space before they can get close enough to launch screenbuster
torpedoes accurately. But this new gadget they've got evidently has as
great a range as the _aJ_ projectors."
"Or greater," Roysland added.
"Yeah," said Allerdyce softly, "or greater."
"Is there any other possibility?" Roysland wanted to know.
The commander nodded. "One--if the Enlissa were lucky, that is. If the
enemy ship could have approached the convoy by coming in directly from
a star, the subetheric radiation from the sun behind them would blank
out their own radiation, and they could get in pretty close before they
registered on a screen.
"But in order to do that, they'd have to know the convoy's course and
lie in wait for it. If they actually did use a star to hide themselves,
it was probably pure luck on their part that they happened to be in the
right place at the right time."
Roysland nodded slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought. "I wonder--" he
said finally. "Would you do me a favor, commander? Would you check and
see if that cruiser actually fired towards a sun? That might give us
some information."
"I'll check," Allerdyce said. "It'll be on the recorders. I'll let you
know what I come up with."
"Fine," said Roysland. "I'll see you later." He cut off, and his image
disintegrated.
Roysland looked at the dark, blurred reflection of his face in the
black plastic of his desk for a moment, then grinned. "All right,
buster," he said to the face in the desk, "you're stuck for a while,
anyway. Time to call in some help."
He touched a switch plate on his desk panel and said: "Call a meeting
of the Special Weapons Staff at my home at twenty-nine hundred hours."
He touched another plate and said: "As soon as the report from the
general director comes in, have it transferred to my home."
And another: "Send all data to date on the enemy's latest weapon to my
home. Code it _Mindjammer_."
Then he got up, shut off his desk, and went out. An early meal was on
the agenda, it seemed.
Blackpool's Restaurant was, as usual, well populated, but not
over-crowded. Roysland managed to find a table in the rear, where he
sat down and ordered a tall glass of fruit juice. He liked Blackpool's;
its old-fashioned, almost primitive atmosphere was impressive without
being phony. The waiters--remote-control humanoids guided by the vast
robot brain in the basement--were dressed in the fluffy, bright,
fluorescent clothing of a style that had been worn two centuries
before, when Blackpool's had been built. The uniforms had never changed.
Roysland consulted the menu, told the waiter what he wanted, and went
back to his fruit juice.
"Roysland? Mind if I pull in?"
Roysland looked up at the short, round-faced, smiling man standing by
the table. "Not at all Osteban; sit down." Roysland didn't particularly
want to talk to him then, but it wouldn't do to offend the Galactic
News Service. Roysland waved the man to a seat and asked him if he
wanted a drink.
Osteban eyed his host's drink. "What are you drinking? Want to let
me taste it?" He took the glass, sipped at it, and made a wry face.
"F'revvinsake! Mind if I have something with life in it?"
Roysland said he didn't, and Osteban ordered something more potent.
When the waiter brought it, he took a healthy swallow and then said:
"Mind if I ask a question?"
"Ask to your heart's content," Roysland said. "You will, anyway. But I
don't guarantee any answers."
"Did you ever?" He took another swallow of liquid. "What's in this
rumor that the Enlissa have invented a gadget that drives people crazy?"
"I haven't heard any such rumor," Roysland said. It was a perfectly
true statement, if a trifle incomplete.
"Did I ask if you'd heard it?" Osteban countered.
"Tell me something, Osteban," Roysland said seriously. "Did you ever
use a declarative sentence in your life?"
"What do you mean? Let's quit the kidding, shall we? Didn't you
understand my question--or are you playing dumb?" Osteban grinned as he
said it, making it totally inoffensive.
Roysland flipped a coin, mentally. It came down tails, and Osteban
lost. "I can't speak officially, of course," Roysland said, "I'll just
have to be a 'reliable anonymous source.' But I can tell you this: We
don't know what the Enlissa may or may not have; but we haven't lost
any ships because of any insanity rays, or what have you."
"Is that a fact?" Osteban thought for a moment. "I guess it is or you
wouldn't say it, would you?"
They drank in silence for a few moments, then Osteban said: "All right,
tell me something else, will you? These new _aJ_ projectors have been
on active duty for half a year or so, haven't they? They're supposed
to be hot stuff, right? Then why is it that they haven't destroyed
any enemy ships? Why is it that all the communiques always say: 'The
Enlissa ship was finally destroyed by ultralight torpedoes.'"
Roysland frowned. "I didn't know that was the case. However, I think
I can hazard a guess. An _aJ_ projector requires the installation of
a big no-space generator, similar to the one that drives the ship.
They're expensive when they get that big, and only a few of the larger
battleships have been equipped with them.
"Now, actually, what are the odds that any particular ship will make
shooting contact with the enemy? Very small. The probable reason that
no enemy ships have been destroyed by _aJ_ projectors is that no _aJ_
ships have come in contact with the enemy."
"Do you think that's it?" The reporter grinned and took a final sip
from his glass, draining it. "Well, I guess I can't get a story out of
you, can I? O.K., then; will I see you around?"
"Sure," said Roysland. "Take it easy."
But the reporter had ruined his dinner. What was there about the
casualty statistics that was unusual? Was there any more information in
that area? He'd have to check and see.
* * * * *
The executive staff of Special Weapons assembled in Roysland Dwyn's
study via solidiphone at 2900 that evening. There were five of them
at the table. Kiffer, Mardis, Taddibol, and Vanisson were actually
thousands of parsecs away, on four widely scattered bases of the fleet.
Roysland Dwyn, himself, was the fifth man.
"I'm going to make this short and sweet," Roysland said. "I don't want
much discussion until you've all had a chance to mull over the data in
your minds for a while."
He spent fifteen minutes telling them what he'd picked up so far. When
he was finished, Vanisson asked: "Have you tried running this through a
computer?"
Roysland shook his head. "It can't be done. We don't have enough
symbolizable data. Only the human mind can take incomplete data
and come up with the right answer; we're going to have to do this
ourselves. We'll have to probe into what we have and see if we come up
with anything."
"I've got a question," Mardis said. "Why does the enemy only pick on
_aJ_ ships?"
Roysland nodded. "And why do they invariably fire _immediately_ after
the _aJ_ projectors fire?"
Kiffer said: "Could it be some kind of subetheric vibration that does
the trick?"
"You're the subelectronics man," Roysland said. "What do you think?"
Kiffer shrugged. "Subetherics are dangerous; near a projector, they can
foul up electrical currents, provided the currents aren't too strong.
They can knock a man out, or even kill him; but I never heard of any
effect like this."
"What would it take to get an effect like this?" Roysland asked.
"Figure it from that angle."
Taddibol looked excited. "Could it be that the enemy doesn't even have
such a weapon?"
They all looked at him. Roysland was grinning. "Maybe you've got the
same hunch I have," Roysland said. "Let's hear it."
"We know: one, it only happens on _aJ_ ships; two, it happens at
the instant of firing. Could it be some sort of backlash from the
projectors that's doing it?"
Roysland, still grinning, looked at the subelectronics man. "How about
it, Kiffer?"
Kiffer shook his head. "I doubt it. There's a backwash, of course,
as there is to any kind of no-space generator. But it's almost
indetectable, even with subelectronic instruments. There's certainly
not enough to hurt anyone. Besides, the emission would be from the
exciter in the gun, and it would hit the men in one direction; that
might slow their neural currents up a little for a fraction of a
second, but it wouldn't do anything like what we have here, even if it
were strong enough."
All the time he had been talking, Mardis had been nodding his head in
agreement. When Kiffer finished, Mardis said: "And besides that, we've
tested the things, remember? We fired those projectors under every
condition we could think of, and we didn't get any feedback lobotomies."
Taddibol nodded. "That's right. We mounted four projectors on the
X-69, and melted asteroids for six months before we released the weapon
to the fleet."
"Anybody got any more questions?" Roysland asked.
There were none.
* * * * *
"All right, I have some I want you to think over. First: Is this really
an enemy weapon? Second: If so, how is it generated and projected at
_aJ_ ships? Third: If it isn't an enemy weapon, what is it? Fourth:
Regardless of what it is, _where_ is it generated? Fifth: If we--"
He didn't finish. The solidiphone signal was blinking. He activated the
instrument, and Eckisster coalesced into the room, his chubby face dewy
with perspiration.
"Ah!" he said. "I'm glad to find you at home. I'm glad to see you're
working on this thing at last. Why didn't you call in your staff two
days ago? Maybe they can figure something out, even if you can't; this
thing has suddenly become dangerous."
Roysland looked dangerous, so the general director patted the air
with a hand. "I've got the stuff for you right here, Roysland, so
don't give me any of your lip. In the first place, there was a convoy
attack yesterday out near the periphery. It turned out to be one of
the biggest battles of the war so far. The enemy lost five ships to
fire from _aJ_ projectors, and four to torpedoes. We lost two ships
to torpedo fire and six ships to the ... what did you call it? ...
mindjammer.
"Fortunately, we had them out-numbered and were able to recover the
crews and ships we'd lost to the mindjammer.
"But it doesn't look good. If they start using that weapon on a big
scale, we'll be sunk. If they ever hit a planet with it--Well, you can
imagine what it would be like to take care of a city full of morons."
Eckisster paused, squinted his eyes at Roysland, and jabbed at him with
a finger. "Now, I've got an idea," he said. "We've got to develop some
sort of screen that will take care of the mindjamming effect. You ought
to be pretty good at defensive screening by now; until you worked out
the _aJ_ projector, Special Weapons has been strictly on the defensive
side."
Vanisson said: "Naturally, sir. It's easier to prevent something from
getting to you than to figure out a way of getting to the other guy.
Arms theory shows--"
Eckisster glowered at the man. "Theory, hogwash! I want a defense
against the mindjammer, and I want it yesterday! Get busy!"
Roysland was leaning back in his chair with his arms folded over his
chest. When Eckisster had completed his outburst, Roysland said,
calmly: "Are you quite through, sir?"
"I am," said the general director. "I doubt if you mudheads can come up
with anything before we are all reduced to gibbering idiots, but God
knows I've done my best."
"You _are_ finished then?" Roysland's voice was still calm. Then, quite
suddenly, it became savage. "Then leave us alone, so we can think!
Good-by!" He snapped off his receiver switch, and Eckisster's image
vanished before the director had a chance to say anything.
Roysland smiled gently. "And now, gentlemen, let's get down to work."
* * * * *
Two days later, the X-69--the fast, experimental ship of Special
Weapons--dropped down to the Grand Port of Kandoris. A score of heavy
trucks, loaded with equipment, waited for the cargo ports to open; and
big, lumbering sections of construction framework were being moved in
toward it.
The man who floated down the drop chute from the equatorial air lock
was Kiffer Samm. A ground taxi was waiting for him, and it started to
move even before Kiffer closed the door.
Within minutes, he was in Roysland Dwyn's office. He pulled up a chair,
sat down, and said: "Well, I'm here."
"An astute observation," said Roysland. "Who knows to what depths of
scientific thought you may reach with such cosmos-shaking revelations
as that?"
"A mere nothing," said Kiffer; "I might add that the X-69 is here, too.
How long will it take to get the stuff mounted on her?"
"A couple of hours. I made sure that Allerdyce would have the
necessary equipment ready when you landed. We'll take off as soon as
she's loaded."
Kiffer frowned at Roysland, then looked down at his fingernails. "You
don't need to go along."
"Why not?"
Kiffer kept looking at his nails for a full five seconds. Then he
looked up and said: "Look, Roysland, suppose what you suspect _is_
true. Suppose that it isn't an enemy weapon, but a backfire from the
_aJ_ guns. If so, then we'll be mindjammed when we test out the fleet's
weapons. And we can't afford to have you in that condition."
"I know it," said Roysland, "but there's no other way I can get the
data. Besides, Bilford is having some success with using microwaves
on the patients; there's reason to believe that the condition is
temporary."
Kiffer shrugged and spread his hands. "O.K.; if that's your orders--"
He let his voice trail off. Then: "But I still don't like it. Look at
it from my viewpoint; if I'm knocked out, I can depend on you to figure
out a way to bring me out of it. But if you're out, too, what's to
become of me?"
Roysland laughed. "That's the best reason you could have given. Thanks.
But I'm still going."
* * * * *
It took just a little more than two hours for the Space-fleet ordnance
crews to replace the _aJ_ projectors on the X-69. Roysland's theory
was simple. Although the _aJ_ guns might be responsible for the
mindjamming effect, it was obvious that they didn't cause it every
time. It was possible that there were slight differences in the
backwash of radiation--slight differences caused by variations in the
projectors themselves. The weapons of the _Bedevin_ and the _Killiver_
went into the turrets of the X-69; if there were any basis for the
theory, at least two of those guns would be responsible for the
mindjamming effect.
The X-69 left Kandoris VI at 0500 hours, aimed herself for the vast
void of the Lesser Rift, and cut in her no-space generators. The drive
slammed her abruptly up past the velocity of light and into multiples
thereof.
Roysland had a cabin to himself near the upper deck at the nose of the
ship, just beneath the control bridge. With Kiffer's aid, he set up
recording instruments at various points throughout the ship, started
them, and promptly forgot them. He was aboard as a human observer; the
instruments had their own job to do.
Roysland pushed his muscular bulk up the stair to the control bridge.
Above him rose the hard, transparent dome of the ship's nose. He stood
for a moment, watching the stars move slowly by. Then he walked over
to where Kiffer and the ship's officers were standing, near the main
control area.
"Captain Dobrin," he said, "we've got our instruments set up; we'd like
to find some targets to test-fire at." He paused for a moment and
looked at the officer. "You know what we're up against, don't you?"
Captain Dobrin was a lean, graying, grim-faced man who looked as though
the last time he had smiled was in his mother's arms. "I know what our
chances are; slightly worse than those of a fighting ship engaging the
enemy, as I figure it. Besides, I figure that if you're willing to risk
your neck--or your mind--I'll take the same chances with the ship." He
stopped and looked at the screen, then looked straight up, pointing his
finger through the transparent dome of the nose. "We'll head toward
that star, there; it's a triple sun, and there's usually plenty of
debris floating around in the vicinity of a system like that."
Roysland watched as the ship approached the triple star system.
At first it was only a bright point of light. Then, gradually, it
separated into two lights, one several times as bright as the other.
Finally, the brighter of the two separated into two parts. The three
suns stood at the points of an elongated isosceles triangle.
As they neared the trio, the captain ordered the no-space generator
cut, and the ship dropped out of drive. Instead of having a velocity
measured in light-hours per second, the ship dropped suddenly to miles
per second.
"Electromagnetic detectors on," said the Fire Control Officer.
A ship traveling above the velocity of light cannot detect a material
body unless there is subetheric radiation coming from the detected
body. A star, naturally, can be detected. At those velocities, a star's
subetheric radiation can be seen as ordinary light. But there is no
way to detect a nonradiating body; in order to fire at a target, it's
necessary to cut out the drive and use ordinary detectors to find a
nonradiating body such as a meteorite.
"Target at forty million miles," said an observer.
"Track and fire," said the fire control officer.
The robot-controlled _aJ_ projectors swiveled in their mounts, found
the mass of nickel-iron that was their target, and hummed softly. Then
they clicked.
That was all. Roysland neither saw nor felt anything unusual.
Three and a half minutes later, tardy light brought the news that the
meteorite had flared in an actinic blaze of incandescent gas.
"Dead hit," said the observer.
Captain Dobrin looked at Roysland with a silent question.
Roysland nodded. "Go ahead. Let's pick out a few more; let's burn
asteroids for a while."
* * * * *
They blasted eighteen planetoids into flaming gas in the next three
hours. Roysland Dwyn and Kiffer Samm checked their instrument
recordings and ran them through the differential analyzer after each
firing.
"There's backwash, of course," said Kiffer. He pointed at a line
that wavered up and down near the bottom of the graph. "That's the
background--stellar noise from the subelectronic radiation of the
nearby stars. Now"--he moved his finger along the graph--"this is the
harmonic set up by the backwash at the instant of firing of the _aJ_
projectors.
"It looks pretty high on the graph, but that's because the subnuclear
reactions inside a star are so slight that they don't generate much
background noise. Actually, the backwash from the _aJ_'s couldn't
possibly be called dangerous."
Roysland frowned; his heavy, dark brows pulled down, wrinkling his
massive forehead. "Well, they obviously didn't do anything to us. At
least, if they did, I haven't noticed it."
Kiffer shrugged. "Nothing harmful, anyway. Now, here's some comparison
charts I have; the test runs on _aJ_ guns that have been installed in
other ships. The wave form is identical; these guns don't react any
differently than any other. As far as I can see, there's no reason for
these guns to have knocked out the crews of those ships."
Roysland rubbed a finger across his chin and stared at the ceiling.
That chin-rubbing gesture was significant to Kiffer; he knew Roysland
well enough to know that the big man was thinking. Kiffer kept his
mouth shut and waited.
Finally, Roysland snapped his fingers. "Look," he said sharply, "why
aren't these things tested the way they're used?"
Kiffer looked puzzled. "The way they're used?" He paused a moment.
"Oh, I see what you mean. Why aren't they test-fired while the ship is
in no-space drive? That's easy. They have to be connected up to the
trackers, and the trackers can't fire at indetectable objects. And you
can't detect a meteorite in no-space drive.
"Of course, I suppose we could send out some torpedoes and try to hit
them, but that would be sort of wasteful."
"Then the guns aren't tested in no-space, huh?" Roysland said grinning.
"Then somebody's been falsifying reports to my office."
Kiffer grinned back. "Sure," he said, "they're tested, but without the
robot trackers; I don't see what difference that would make, though."
"Let's not jump to any conclusions. Those things fire in sequence when
they're tracking--one right after another, in battery. And they're
timed so close together that they might as well be going off all at
once. Or, the time lag may have something to do with it, short as it
is. Suppose we fire them in no-space drive, just as if it were battle
conditions."
"At what?" Kiffer wanted to know. "The robot can't track unless it has
a target."
"We've got targets," Roysland said quietly. "Millions of 'em."
"The Torpedoes? But--wait a minute! Millions?" Kiffer slapped his palm
against his forehead. "Why didn't I think of it before? The stars, of
course!"
"Right," said Roysland. "They radiate in the subetherics. But no one
ever thought of firing at them before, because there's no way of
telling whether you hit it or not; a star could soak up all the energy
of the whole Galactic Fleet without noticing it. But we don't care
whether we _hit_ the target or not; all we want is a target to _fire_
at."
"I'll reset the recorders," Kiffer said. "Let's see what happens."
"I'm going up to the bridge," Roysland said. "Set those gimmicks going;
we want a record, even if this knocks us silly."
* * * * *
Up on the bridge, Roysland explained what he wanted done to Captain
Dobrin.
"It can't hurt anything," Dobrin said. "We'll take a pot shot at the
dwarf out there. They give a fairly small, bright target."
The ship plunged into the no-space of ultradrive as the generators were
cut in, and she began to move toward a point just to one side of the
dimmest of the three stars.
"Target at three fifty-two million," said the observer.
"Track and fire," said the FCO.
Roysland held his breath as the projectors moved, hummed, and clicked
again. And nothing happened.
Roysland let his breath out slowly.
"Was that O.K.?" the fire control officer asked. "We can't tell whether
we hit or not."
"I doubt if you could miss even a white dwarf star at this range,"
Roysland said. "But you're right, of course; there's no way of being
_absolutely_ positive." He turned back to the captain. "Let's play
around with this for a while. Make a few passes, back and forth at that
star and let's see what we get on the recorders."
What they got didn't look like much.
"Here's the background noise," Kiffer said, pointing at the graph.
"This time, it's almost a perfect sine wave; it's the backwash from
the drive generators. Here's the harmonic generated when the _aJ_'s go
off. And here"--he pulled a strip from the differential analyzer--"are
the components. This one is the container phase for the energy envelope
that holds the raw violence of the beam itself. And this is the carrier
wave phase."
Roysland looked at the graphs and shook his head slowly. "And it all
looks perfectly harmless."
"_Looks_, hell!" said Kiffer. "It _is_ harmless. Believe me, Roysland,
it is definitely not the backwash from the _aJ_ guns that's causing the
mindjammer effect. We'll have to look somewhere else."
"I guess you're right," Roysland agreed reluctantly. "If it isn't
here--" His voice trailed off. He was right back where he started,
and he didn't have anything to go on. Finally, he reached over to the
intercom and punched for the bridge. "O.K., captain," he said, "let's
turn the thing around and go home!"
Two weeks after the X-69 landed at Grand Base, Roysland still was
stewing around, trying to make sense out of all the data he had.
Report from Bilford Vell, Chief Psychometrist: "The patients seem to be
responding fairly well under the microwave treatment. It seems to act
very similarly to the electro-shock treatments reputedly used centuries
ago for certain types of insanity, although without the deleterious
effects. The feedback loop in the prefrontal lobes is partially
canceled out when the frequencies of the cerebral activities are the
same as, and ninety degrees out of phase with, the microwaves beamed at
the head.
"Naturally, this means that a series of treatments is necessary, since
the cerebral frequencies are unpredictable and variable, and since the
currents in the feedback loop are composed of a number of different
frequencies."
_Fine_, thought Roysland. _There's some hope, at least. We know what
can cure it, but what can cause it?_
Report from Allerdyce Blyt, CinC, Galactic Fleet: "I don't know what
you can make out of this, but maybe you can get together with Bilford
and figure out what it means. If you ask me, I think the Enlissa have
gone nuts. Is it possible there's a backwash from their mindjammer?
"Anyway, here's what's happened.
"During a minor skirmish near the Alavard Cluster, two Enlissa ships
came in on attack geodesics toward the GSS _Viwil_. The _Viwil_ is
not equipped with _aJ_ projectors, so they had to rely on conventional
torpedoes. Since the odds were two to one, they had little hope of
surviving, but they had hopes of inflicting some damage on the enemy.
So they waited until the Enlissa ships were well within range, and
fired.
"The Enlissa ships took no evasive action, and the torpedoes destroyed
both ships. There was no need for the _Viwil_ to use evasive action,
since the enemy ships _did not fire a single torpedo_!
"There have been other instances of similar action.
"In other small skirmishes, the _aJ_ guns have proven their
effectiveness; they've shot up Enlissa ships before they were in
torpedo range. Oddly enough, no human ship equipped with _aJ's_ has
ever been hit by a torpedo."
Roysland went back and reread one of the sentences. "Is it possible
there's a backwash from their mindjammer?"
_It's possible, sure. Until we know what the mindjammer_ is, _we'll
have to admit that anything's possible_.
Report from Kiffer Samm: "I've done the checking you suggested.
There is a definite effect on the brain, but it isn't permanent, nor
noticeable. The backwash of the _aJ_ guns causes a slight retardation
of nerve impulses. But it isn't enough to cause any reaction--either
mental or physiological. It doesn't last enough, in the first place;
and it isn't powerful enough, in the second. I don't know what would
happen if a person were subjected to such a field over a long period
of time, but the situation corrects itself so rapidly that there is no
danger of cumulative effects.
"Besides, some of the men affected have never been exposed to the
backwash from _aJ_ fire before, while others have been exposed a good
many times. If the thing were cumulative, we would have men being
knocked out here and there, at random, as the accumulation built
up--and it just ain't so.
"The only parallel I can make--as far as long-range effects are
concerned--are the effects of the backwash from the drive itself. And
that isn't bad at all. Statistically speaking, the crews of spaceships
are more alert, and have more interest in their surroundings, _after_
long periods of service than they have before exposure. Even so, that
is probably due to military work and periodic psychological checkups,
rather than to any effect of the field.
"Do you have any other ideas?"
Roysland looked sourly at the report. _Ideas? Sure; I've got all kinds
of ideas. I wish I had an answer._
* * * * *
Report from General Director Eckisster--delivered via solidiphone:
"Roysland, you're going to have to start moving, here!" The director
shifted his heavy bulk in his chair and glowered at Roysland Dwyn.
"As far as I can tell, you haven't done a blasted thing! Of all the
meaningless reports I ever read, these are the epitome of nonsense."
He waved a chubby hand at a pile of papers in his lap. "As I understand
it, you've been looking for some sort of effect emanating from our own
weapons instead of from the enemy's.
"Now, to me, that's as silly as a man with a sword trying to explain
away the stab wound in his belly by claiming that something happened
during the fight and the hilt stabbed him. Or a man with a bullet wound
trying to claim it was caused by the recoil of his blunderbuss!"
Roysland tapped his fingers softly on the top of his huge black desk
until Eckisster was through, then he said: "It's the only hypothesis
that fits the facts. I'll admit that we haven't been able to prove
anything yet, but I'm convinced that--"
He was interrupted by the chiming of the solidiphone. He cut in a
second circuit, and Fleet Commander Allerdyce coalesced in the air next
to Eckisster. He glanced at the general director.
"Good afternoon, Eckisster." Then he looked back at Roysland. "I've got
your weapon for you. Forty hours ago, Squadron 8477 met the enemy near
St. Jairus' Cluster. We won the battle by a small margin, but that's
neither here nor there. The important thing right now is what the
hospital and salvage ships found when they came in after the battle.
All the data isn't in yet, but as near as we can tell so far, a freak
accident occurred.
"One of our ships was surprised by an Enlissa ship that came in out of
a nearby sun; the enemy ship actually snapped by at less than a hundred
miles. A lucky shot hit the drive generators of the enemy ship, and it
stopped almost dead in space.
"They managed to get the crew of our own ship with their mindjammer,
but something happened aboard the enemy ship, too. Evidently the weapon
does have a backwash; the enemy crew was mindjammed, too!"
Roysland and Eckisster both started to say something, but the commander
raised his hand. "Wait a second! The point I'm getting at is this:
The Enlissa ship was recovered intact; the mindjammer projectors are
aboard! I've sent an emergency order to the squadron commander in that
sector; the Enlissa ship will be here tomorrow morning. We'll hold it
sealed until you and your crew can investigate. The inspectors will
have to go in with you, of course, but you'll be in charge of the
weapons themselves."
He stopped and speared Eckisster with a frosty look. "I trust that
meets with your approval, Eckisster?"
The general director was beaming seraphically. "It does, commander;
indeed it does. Thank you. Thank you, so much."
Allerdyce glowered. "I'll be available in a couple of hours. Right now,
I've got to get some work done." He cut the circuit.
Eckisster turned his beaming visage from the dissolving image of
Allerdyce to the blocky figure of Roysland.
"May I suggest that you try investigating what few facts the fleet may
have turned up? Who knows--you may find them profitable, eh? Or perhaps
you're too busy trying to figure out how the _aJ_ guns work to have any
time for the enemy's mindjammer?
"However that may be, I'll leave you to your work, bumblehead."
Roysland shot to his feet. "Good! Maybe I could get some work done,
myself, if you weren't around needling me!" He reached out to snap off
the solidiphone switch, but Eckisster, still smiling benevolently,
was already fading. Roysland got the impression that his smile,
Cheshirelike, still lingered after he had gone.
* * * * *
The crew of the Enlissa ship were the first live aliens ever seen by
human beings. Their corpses had been dissected by the thousands, but
the living organism had never been investigated before.
"This gives us a jump on them," one of the biologists said. "As far as
we know, no living human has ever been caught by the Enlissa."
Roysland, who was watching the aliens being herded out of the captured
ship, turned his head to look at the biologist. "They don't know we've
got this ship, either," he said.
The biologist blinked, then nodded. "Yeah. I see what you mean."
They were standing on the broad spread of plastalloy that covered the
great landing field of Grand Base, standing in the shadow of the huge
alien ship. The Psych men were pushing the Enlissa out of the ship,
through the path formed by the Inspection Corps men and Roysland's own
Special Weapons Group of the Research Division. The Psych men simply
pushed them into the drop chutes from the ship. Other Psych men kept
them moving toward the trucks that were taking them away.
The Enlissa weren't quite as tall, on the average, as a human
being. The skeletal structure was a little heavier, and the section
corresponding to the human rib cage was a series of armor plates that
completely enclosed the viscera. The pale blue-violet of their skins
came from the cobalt-protein complex that carried the oxygen through
their blood, performing the same function that hemoglobin does in the
human animal.
They were noseless; breathing was done through the mouth. The teeth
were widely spaced, and the lips could not close over them, thus
allowing the Enlissa to breathe, even when unconscious. The eyes were a
solid black. It was impossible to tell, from a superficial inspection,
where the deeply-pigmented surface of the eyeball ended and the dead
black of the lens opening began. They were somewhat larger than human
eyes, but they were set in front of the skull, allowing stereoscopic
vision.
Their protective covering might have been called hair, by stretching
the definition somewhat. By an equal amount of stretching, it could
have been called fingernails or scales. It would have taken an awful
lot of stretching to call it feathers.
The "hair" consisted of ribbons of thin chitinlike material. The
ribbons weren't much thicker than human hair, but they were nearly a
sixteenth of an inch in width, and ranged in color from a glossy black
to a royal blue, depending on the individual.
The feet were splayed, almost radial; the hands were
four-digited--double thumbed and double fingered.
The clothing they wore, though radically cut, was analogous to the
styles worn by human beings.
Roysland waited until the aliens were herded out of the ship. They had
to be prodded like beasts, since there was no way to talk to them. No
exchange of language had ever been achieved; but, like their human
counterparts, the mindjammed Enlissa seemed to be perfectly willing to
obey any exterior commands.
"What?" said Roysland. He had been so engrossed in his own thoughts
that he had only dimly realized that Kiffer Samm was talking to him.
"I said that we'll have to check on them, too, after we see what this
weapon is all about."
Roysland folded his hands and rubbed his thumbs together. "Maybe
before."
"Huh?"
"Never mind," Roysland said. "Here come the last of them. We want
to get all the samples out of their supplies that we can, and we've
already been promised first look at those projectors the Enlissa have
on board the ship. Come on; let's take a look."
The Enlissa ship wasn't organized too differently from the human
version. On the surface, things looked odd; but the laws of the
universe function the same way in all places, so the internal workings
of the ship were essentially similar.
The Special Weapons men went through the ship with the men of the
Inspection Division, photographing, tracing circuits, analyzing,
checking differences, and organizing similarities.
Roysland and Kiffer spent most of their time with the big, complex
projectors that were cradled in the hull blisters.
When Kiffer first saw them, he turned to Roysland and tried to keep
from looking bewildered. "They're subelectronic projectors of some
kind. But _what_ kind?"
"That's what we've got to find out," Roysland told him. "We'll have to
find out what they do on a physical level first. From there, we'll go
on to the physiological level; then we may--just _may_--be able to go
on to the psychological effects."
Kiffer Samm looked up at the great frame of his superior, and grinned
sardonically. "O.K. Now we've got the effect and the weapon that causes
it. Can we correlate the two?"
Roysland shrugged his broad shoulders. "Sure we can. But how long will
it take us?"
* * * * *
The laws of the universe may not differ from place to place, but
the methods of using them do; and the particular laws that may be
discovered in one place aren't necessarily the same ones that are
discovered in another. No two human beings think alike; two different
evolutionary branches of intelligence, stemming from totally different
beginnings, certainly can't be expected to reason similarly. The
amazing thing about the Enlissa was not the ways in which they differed
from humanity, but the ways in which they were similar.
So it wasn't to be wondered at that the Special Weapons technicians
couldn't figure out for the life of them what the projectors from the
Enlissa ship did, or why they worked. If they had been the type of men
to be stymied by seemingly-unbreakable barriers, they would have gone
off their collective rockers in the first three weeks.
One by one, Roysland Dwyn called in the best analysts from every sector
of the human-controlled galaxy. And slowly the information began to
build up.
The first firing test of the enemy weapon was conducted on Syndor, the
outermost and smaller of the two satellites of Kandoris VI. Roysland
had the thing taken to the subnucleonics lab there because he felt that
there was no need to subject the population of Kandoris to any danger
from the backwash--if any. And only God knew how much territory the
effective field might cover.
The Special Weapons group had dismantled one of the projectors from the
ship and loaded it carefully on the X-69, along with the Enlissa-built
generator that powered it.
On Syndor, Roysland watched the unloading. He stood on the broad,
airless stretch of the landing field and watched the grapples lower the
big, tubular weapon to the deck of the field. The blue-white glare of
the distant sun splashed off the metallic sides of the ship, forcing
Roysland to narrow his eyes, in spite of the heavy polarized filter in
the helmet of his spacesuit.
The thing floated down under the control of the grapple beams until it
was only a few feet from the surface.
Roysland heard the voice of the crew leader bellow in his earphones.
"O.K., watch it! Get the truck underneath that thing before you drop
it any more!"
A sturdy six-wheeled truck was moved in under the projector. The
grapple operator turned a rheostat, and the projector sank another six
inches, to rest on the truck.
"O.K.!" yelled the crew leader. "Haul her away!"
The truck trundled off in the direction of the Llordis Mountains.
Kiffer's voice came through Roysland's phones. "Let's go, Roysland; I'm
right behind you."
Roysland turned around. Kiffer Samm was sitting in the driver's seat of
a small jeep.
As he climbed in, Roysland said, "I felt the vibration as you pulled
up, but I didn't pay any attention to it. Coming up behind a guy like
that is real sneaky."
Kiffer's chuckle coincided with the slight vibration of the jeep as it
started moving after the six-wheeler.
* * * * *
The testing area was some miles from the permanent labs. Roysland
wanted to test the weapon by firing at Kandoris herself. The huge
blue-white sun could certainly take anything directed at her.
It took the better part of three days to set up the site for the test,
and during most of that time, Roysland Dwyn was in a spacesuit. The
construction engineers had rigged up a plastic shell for dormitories
and other inside necessities, but the work had to be done in the vacuum
of space. By the time the set-up had been completed, Roysland felt
exhausted in every muscle of his huge body. On the "afternoon" of the
third day, he peeled off his oversize spacesuit and lay back on his
cot. It was much too short for him, and his feet stuck out over the
edge; but he was too tired to worry about that.
Kiffer was sitting on his own bunk, massaging his neck to get the kinks
out. "The thing that bothers me," he said, "is the eternal sunlight.
That blasted star won't go down for another seventy days."
Roysland nodded, but it was obvious that his mind was elsewhere.
"Suppose there is a backwash from this thing," Roysland said at last.
"That would account for a lot of things. We've been wondering why
the Enlissa ships didn't loot our own vessels after they used the
mindjammer."
"Certainly," Kiffer said. "It's obvious. Their own weapon backfired
on them, and left the Enlissa ship incapable of doing any looting. I
figured that out a long time ago."
"Oh, did you?" asked Roysland smoothly. "Then did you figure out why
the Enlissa didn't test the thing before they used it?"
Kiffer shrugged. "Who knows? What do I know about alien psychology?"
"You don't have to know anything about psychology of any kind; all you
have to know is a common, ordinary law of species survival. Any race
that takes a weapon into battle without testing it thoroughly, doesn't
survive very long."
Kiffer ran the tips of his fingers across his lower lips. "True; but
maybe they were suicide squads--or maybe they have a hospital ship
following them to pick them up and cure them. After all, Bilford has
this cure of his working pretty well now; if the Enlissa invented this
thing, they probably know how to counter its effects.
"Besides, you didn't think we'd tested the _aJ_ guns thoroughly. And
we're still surviving."
Roysland turned to look at Kiffer, and his face was definitely
sneering. "Kiffer, there are times when your thinking has all the
clarity and lucidness of a hunk of obsidian.
"There's a difference between the lack of testing of the _aJ_ gun
and the Enlissa's not thoroughly testing the mindjammer. There's a
difference between looking for something you could logically expect and
not finding something that you don't even suspect the existence of."
Kiffer nodded. "Sure; I see what you mean. But that simply means
that they don't have any way of shielding the effect--so they have a
hospital ship trailing them."
Roysland lay back again and closed his eyes. "Obsidian," he said. Then,
after a moment, "One: Why do they sacrifice a crew--even if it's only
for a short time? Two: Why don't they use such an efficient weapon
against ships that blast them out of the sky? Three: Why do they come
in at a ship without firing anything at all?
"Until your hypothesis answers all of those questions--and a lot more
besides--it isn't worth a damn."
Kiffer chewed at his upper lip and then looked at his wrist watch. "If
you're going to test that thing in an hour, you'd better call Eckisster
now."
Roysland sighed deeply. "O.K.; I'll call Old Nasty. Give me a minute to
brace myself."
He didn't take the minute; he didn't really need it. He walked over to
the solidiphone and punched in the code numbers. Three seconds later,
General Director Eckisster was sitting in the middle of the room.
"You're ready, eh? All right; go ahead," he said. "Find out what you
can--if anything. I have no further instructions--just don't get
yourself killed while you're working."
The heavy space boot that came from Roysland's hand sailed through the
image just as it was dissolving. Eckisster had cut off without waiting
for Roysland's answer.
"One of these days," Kiffer said, "you're going to be in his office,
and you'll forget it isn't a solidograph image and let go with a boot,
or something, and knock the boss' teeth in."
Roysland shook his head emphatically as he walked over to pick up the
boot. "Nope. If he's actually there in person, I'm going to have a
poisoned needle to jab into him. I'll show him how to needle people!"
* * * * *
The Enlissa weapon was fired at Kandoris at 30:00 hours. Spaceships
posted along the long line of fire between the satellite of Kandoris
VI and the sun itself had sent out instrument-filled drones in the
path of the beam to check the beam frequency. The time required for
the subetheric wave to travel the eight hundred million miles from the
planetary orbit to primary was too short to be measured. As far as the
recording instruments were concerned, the beam was instantaneous.
The projector itself was fired by remote control; there were no
personnel within three miles of the Enlissa projector when it went off.
The resultant recordings were run through the differential analyzers,
and the final graphs were delivered to Kiffer Samm.
After four hours of working with the data, Kiffer made his report to
Roysland.
"It's an odd wave length," he said. "Actually, it's a harmonic of
three different basic frequencies. Look here: the thing is definitely
frequency modulated, but it's a comparatively simple thing." He ran his
finger along the primary recordings. "The thing wouldn't really have
to be run through the differentials; it could be figured out with a
slipdisk.
"The thing that makes it different is the extremely short wave
length. The longest of the three has a wave length of eighty thousand
kilometers, and the shortest is forty-two thousand kilometers. In a
subetheric beam, that's the equivalent of hard X-rays--damned high
frequency."
Roysland looked at the recordings carefully. "Is there any reason why
this particular wave length should have any effect on the human brain?"
Kiffer looked at the graphs for a long time. When he finally looked up,
he said: "I don't know for sure; mind if I call Bilford?"
Roysland shook his great head. "Go ahead; I don't mind."
When Bilford's image flickered into existence, Roysland kept his mouth
shut while Kiffer showed the psychometrist the recordings of the energy
from the Enlissa projector.
Bilford listened and looked and frowned. "The recordings actually
don't make sense to me," he admitted. "I'm a psychometrist, not a
subelectronocist.
"If you could translate those recordings from subetheric to their
electromagnetic equivalents, I might be able to make something out of
it."
The conversion didn't take long; all Kiffer had to do was run the stuff
through the analyzer and punch in a correction factor.
Bilford stared at the corrected graphs and compared them with tracings
of his own.
"I don't see any correlation," he said at last. "This may take a bit of
work. There may be multiple harmonics of the basic stuff involved, of
course; but frankly I can't see that the subetherics have anything in
common with the electromagnetics as far as this area is concerned."
For the first time, Roysland spoke. "Try a combination-permutation
synthesis. See what you get--O.K.?"
Bilford nodded in agreement. "I'll try it--all the different wave
lengths involved, plus the subetheric velocity factor. If I come up
with anything, I'll let you know."
"Good enough," said Roysland.
* * * * *
The solidiphone image of General Director Eckisster stood in the center
of the room. He looked around and then focused his gaze on Roysland
Dwyn. "Listen here, Roysland," he said belligerently, "why haven't you
done anything? What's the situation now?"
Roysland looked at the general director and put on his nastiest grin.
"You've got the report; we haven't done anything. We've fired the
Enlissa projector six times. There is only a residual backwash that is
harmless. You could fire the thing in your living room if you wanted
to. Meanwhile, we want to know what the effect of the beam is."
"And why, may I ask," said Eckisster, "can't you determine so simple a
thing as that? This request is utter and absolute nonsense!" He slapped
at the papers he held in his hand.
"I knew you'd like that," Roysland said. "I thought maybe you could
suggest something else. I can't."
"As I understand it," Eckisster said testily, "you want a human
volunteer to test the Enlissa mindjammer on."
"That's right," Roysland said. "So far, all we've proven is that the
backwash from the projector has no effect on humans or animals; but we
don't know what happens to a man who's hit by the beam itself."
"Oh? We don't? I rather assumed that the fleet hospital's psychiatric
wards were full of men who have been hit by the beam."
"An unjustified assumption," Roysland snapped. "At least, so far, it's
unprovable. The point is: Do I or don't I have your permission to ask
for a volunteer?"
"Why can't you use test animals?" Eckisster asked.
"If you'd bother to read the reports I send you, you'd know. We _have_
used 'em. The beam didn't touch 'em. We sprayed one group for half an
hour; and as far as anyone can tell, we might just as well have been
shining a flashlight on them."
"Of course," Eckisster said. "The mindjammer causes a feedback loop in
the prefrontal lobes. What do you expect it to do to animals with no
prefrontal lobe?"
"My point exactly," Roysland agreed. He knew perfectly well that
Eckisster had read the report completely and thoroughly. His pretended
ignorance and snide remarks were just a mechanism he used for purposes
of his own.
"The question is," Roysland repeated, "do I have your permission to ask
for a volunteer?"
"I checked with Bilford," the general director said. "He's getting the
microwave technique worked out fairly well now; he says he can bring
a man around in twenty-five to thirty days." He stopped and looked at
Roysland closely. "Go ahead and ask for volunteers."
"Thanks," said Roysland.
Eckisster nodded as he dissolved.
Roysland reached over and punched a button. "Where's Kiffer?" he asked.
"Eating at the mess hall, right now," said a voice.
"That's what I thought. Will you have him come here, to my place, as
soon as he gets through? Say, in half an hour?"
"I'll tell him."
"Fine." Roysland lifted his finger and turned to the typer on his desk.
He wasn't used to the makeshift office, and he found himself wishing he
was back on Kandoris VI, in his own office.
He shrugged and began running his fingers over the typer. It took him
only a few minutes to put down what he wanted to say. When he finished,
he pulled the sheet from the printer tank and put it on his desk,
in plain sight. At the top, he scrawled: "To Kiffer Samm." His own
signature went at the bottom.
Then he put on his spacesuit and headed out, toward the outside air
lock.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, Kiffer Samm was reading the note. He had stepped
into Roysland's office and seen that it was empty. Assuming that his
superior would be right back, he had sat down to wait. Then he'd seen
the note.
He was halfway through it before it became perfectly clear what
Roysland was doing.
"... So you may have to take over for the next twenty-five to thirty
days. Naturally, I couldn't ask anyone else to take the risk.
"I think it may be a good idea if Bilford starts experimenting with
subetherics in an effort to snap the rest of the boys out of this
feedback loop thing. Maybe he can do it in less time.
"By the time you read this and get in a spacesuit and get out to
the firing area, I will have finished the test; don't let me die of
starvation, chum."
Kiffer punched at the communicator button, yelled orders into it, and
grabbed a spacesuit out of the locker. By the time he reached the outer
air lock, a jeep was waiting for him.
When the second jeep pulled up, Kiffer said: "You men stop at the gun
emplacement and take a look at the weapon. We'll go on to the target
tower and pick up Roysland."
The men nodded their agreement, and the two vehicles started rolling.
Theoretically, it was "evening," but the great, blue-white blaze of
Kandoris still hung in the eternally black sky. The jeep went by the
gun emplacement where the Enlissa weapon had been set up for testing.
Kiffer noticed that the snout of the ugly-looking tube was aimed at the
squat steel tower where the animal subjects had been exposed to its
radiations.
"There he is!" said the jeep's driver, pointing.
Kiffer could see a spacesuited figure on the target tower. He twisted
the dial on his chest and said to the men in the second jeep: "Check
that projector! Make sure it isn't in operation!"
"It's not," said one of the men. "He had a timer connected to the
firing mechanism. He got a ten-second burst from it, according to the
timer reading."
"Thanks. We'll pick him up, then."
* * * * *
The jeep swerved toward the tower and pulled up underneath it in a
swirl of dust that settled slowly and evenly in the low gravity of the
airless satellite. Kiffer jumped out of the jeep, grabbed the rungs
of the ladder, and lifted himself to the platform at the top of the
twenty-foot tower.
He stuck his head up over the edge and saw Roysland. The man was
sitting on a small chair with his back to the ladder. Surrounding him
were the various recording instruments that had been rigged up on the
platform for testing the animals and the effects of the beam on them.
Kiffer climbed on up and twisted his helmet phone control to Roysland's
frequency. As he put his hand on Roysland's shoulder, he said: "Stand
up, Roysland."
Roysland jerked around. "What? Oh. Hi, Kiffer; I saw you coming in the
jeep." He paused then, and though Kiffer couldn't see very well through
the heavy darkness of the helmet's glare-filtering polarization, he
could have sworn that Roysland was grinning. He would have been right.
"Oh, I get it," Roysland said. "You were expecting to find me sitting
up here with a feedback lobotomy. Frankly, so was I, a half hour or so
ago, but I'd almost forgotten it."
Kiffer took a deep breath, let it out, and said a few choice, pungent
words. "... Who would scare a guy like that," he ended.
"Sorry," Roysland said, still grinning. "But take a look at these
readings. I think you'll--"
"Wait a minute!" Kiffer interrupted. "I'm not interested in meter
readings right now! What happened or didn't happen to you?"
"_Is he all right?_"
"_What's going on up there?_"
"_Need any help?_"
The voices came almost simultaneously to Kiffer's phones. He could see
the second jeep tearing up dust between the gun emplacement and the
target tower.
"He's O.K.," Kiffer snapped. "Big false alarm! I think we ought to have
an explanation."
The answering burst of catcalling and jeers made Roysland wince. "O.K.,
fellers! O.K.! Please accept my abject and snivelling apologies."
"Explain yourself," Kiffer said in a monarchial tone. "You were
supposed to be out here testing this thing on yourself; you wrote a
very heart-rending note to that effect. I don't blame you for getting
cold feet, but you could at least have notified us."
"I didn't get cold feet," Roysland said. "Look at the cerebrograph
reading and compare it with the firing record."
Kiffer looked and then said: "Then you _did_ take it! But according to
this, all it did was cause a very faint _petit mal_ convulsion. You
probably didn't even notice it."
"I didn't," Roysland said. "I don't know what that projector is
supposed to do, but it sure isn't a mindjammer!"
Kiffer looked again at the records. "Maybe you weren't far enough away
from the projector," he said doubtfully. "Maybe the distance--"
"Impossible," said Roysland. "The beam doesn't disperse appreciably
over a distance of half a light-year; you know that. And the wave form
is exactly the same.
"No, I'm afraid we've just run up against another blind alley."
Kiffer shook his head slowly. "I don't believe it," he said. "The
Enlissa didn't have their ship armed with this thing for nothing. We
must have connected it up wrong, somehow."
"Maybe," Roysland said. "But it doesn't work as is. Let's get these
records into the jeep; I want to see what we're getting here, anyway."
They took the recordings out of the instruments and dropped them to
the three men who were waiting by the jeeps parked underneath the tower.
A few minutes later, they were heading back toward the dome.
* * * * *
Four days later, Roysland was back on Kandoris VI, ensconced firmly in
his office. Kiffer Samm stayed on Syndor, still working on the Enlissa
projector.
The first thing Roysland did was to call another staff meeting. He also
included Bilford and Commander Allerdyce.
He outlined briefly the data they had so far on the Enlissa mindjammer,
then asked for comments.
Bilford grabbed the floor first. "I did the correlation you wanted, and
I came up with some answers, but they're not the right ones as far as I
can tell.
"As far as the backwash on the _aJ_ gun is concerned, I think you can
rule that out. After converting to electromagnetic equivalents, I find
that the frequency of the backwash is much too low to have any effect
on the brain. That is, assuming that subetherics have any effect on
the mind at all--and, of course, assuming that there is any analogy at
all between the function of subetheric vibrations and electromagnetic
vibrations. After all, analogue reasoning has its limitations, too,
just as logical reasoning does.
"The captured Enlissa projector is another problem. Unlike the _aJ_'s
backwash, it isn't a noise; it's a definite, although complex, tone. I
say complex because--and again my reasoning is analogical--because the
frequency is not a pure sine wave, but a combination. It's analogous to
the difference between the vibration of a tuning fork sounding middle C
and, say, a violin sounding the same note.
"Even so, I think we can say that the captured projector is _not_ the
mindjammer; the frequency is much too high. It's on the order of hard
X-rays. If the analogy holds, the subetheric beam should be capable of
disrupting certain molecules, but it most certainly couldn't have the
mindjamming effect on the human brain."
He sat down and rubbed his hands together nervously.
Commander Allerdyce stood up. Normally, the fleet commander did not
kowtow to anyone, but his automatic respect for the big man in the
chair at the head of the table came to the fore. As a matter of fact,
the commander didn't think of it as kowtowing; he merely acknowledged
the superior abilities of the man he was facing.
"All I've got is statistics, Roysland. I wouldn't have noticed it
without your hint, but we've worked out a new strategy that has reduced
casualties by better than sixty per cent." He reached down and picked
up a pile of report sheets.
"It stacks up this way: About thirty per cent of the Enlissa ships that
attack have the habit of coming in without firing anything. What the
reason is, I don't know, but they do it. Therefore, we have a good
chance of getting the enemy with torpedoes alone if he doesn't fire
first.
"A ship equipped with _aJ_ projectors has about a seventy per cent
chance of winning. The other thirty-odd per cent of the time, they're
mindjammed.
"The chances of a conventionally armed ship coming through is better
than sixty-two per cent.
"But here's the gimmick: In taking the action of the Enlissa fleet into
account, we can reduce the casualties tremendously. About thirty-two
per cent of them come in without firing. By taking that into account,
we can increase our own chances of survival tremendously."
Roysland nodded. "Good; I'd like to see the statistics on that. Would
you mind sending over the full report?"
"Not at all," said Commander Allerdyce. He sat down.
Taddibol stood. "I think I can speak for Vanisson, Mardis, and myself.
According to the evidence we have, the Enlissa are capable of picking
out a ship with _aJ_ guns _before_ they fire. We think that there must
be some residual emanation from the _aJ_ that is detectable by the
enemy. No other hypothesis fits the facts."
Vanisson was standing before Taddibol had finished. "I'd like to make
it clear that, although I agree with Taddibol Vlys, the evidence is
still a necessary part of the hypothesis. We've--"
The emergency buzzer sounded, and everyone at the table turned to look
at Roysland as he swore roundly and jabbed the stud. General Director
Eckisster had barely begun to solidify before Roysland said: "Can't I
have any peace? Must you continually and forever be looking over my
shoulder?"
"No," said Eckisster calmly. "Yes. If that answers your questions, may
I say something? I'm sorry I had to interrupt a staff meeting, but I
felt that this would be the perfect time to inject this bit of data.
"As I see it, you weren't satisfied with human volunteers for the
Enlissa weapon; you asked that two of the aliens also be subjected to
the beam from their own gun."
"That's right," Roysland said. "According to Bilford, two of them have
been rendered sane by the treatment of the microwave frequencies. I
didn't think you'd reject using the Enlissa captives on humanitarian
grounds."
"I didn't," Eckisster said. "Your man, Kiffer, claimed that further
information could be gained by subjecting the alien brains of the enemy
to the radiation from their own projector. Since the psychological
department has now discovered a method of bringing back the functional
ability of the brain after exposure to the mindjammer effect, I didn't
think it would be harmful to allow two of the aliens to be subjected to
it again. Unfortunately, they died."
"They _what_?" Bilford shouted the question.
"Died, Bilford, _died_," Eckisster said. "They are both as dead as the
surface of Syndor."
"Good God!" Bilford said. "Perhaps a second exposure--" Suddenly he
jammed a finger down on his cutoff, and his image vanished from the
conference room.
"What was the reason for that?" Eckisster wanted to know.
"He's just released the first batch of men from the hospital for
active duty," said Fleet Commander Allerdyce. "If that thing _is_ the
mindjammer, and those men are exposed again--Excuse me." His own finger
touched the cutoff, and his image flickered out.
Eckisster looked at Roysland. "Well, sir?"
Roysland shook his head. "I didn't expect that," he said. "I honestly
didn't expect that."
"I know you didn't," Eckisster said softly. "I know you didn't. But
look at it this way: It's data. And we need data."
"I know," Roysland said. "It's not that. Excuse me; I've got to
think." He slammed his hand down, and the whole group collapsed into
nothingness.
* * * * *
"_What?_" asked Commander Allerdyce.
"I said," Roysland repeated, "that I think I have the answer to
something that was brought up in the meeting last night. And I want
you to give me permission to take the X-69 into enemy territory."
"I will," Allerdyce said, "if you'll give me a good reason for going."
"All I want is a sample of alien animal life. I think I know what's
going on, but I'm not sure."
Allerdyce shook his head. "We can't do it. We don't know where the
enemy bases are, any more than the Enlissa know where our own planets
are. We keep our subetheric devices shielded, and so do they. If we
didn't, this would have ceased to be a spatial war long ago--you know
that."
"I know," Roysland admitted; "but we have prisoners; members of the
enemy's armed forces. We can get our information from them."
Allerdyce was still shaking his head. "How? They've been treated
mentally against probing. They won't tell us where their home planets
are, any more than our own men would--or _could_--tell them."
Roysland, in turn, shook his head. "That's not what I'm looking for.
I'm not a military man; I'm a scientist--at least I think I am. I'm not
looking for military bases; I'm looking for a planet where the Enlissa
have planted their flora and fauna. That's what we do with a planet,
isn't it? Seed it long before we colonize. If they've done as much
colonization as we have--and their war potential shows that they must
have--then they'll have a lot of planets that aren't inhabited by the
Enlissa themselves, but will have been seeded by Enlissa-type life.
"At least one of the crewmen from that ship will know where such a
planet is located. And I'm willing to bet that he won't be conditioned
against telling us."
"Why not?" Allerdyce asked.
"For the same reason you haven't thought of it," Roysland said,
grinning. "The Colonization Service and the Fleet Command are two
different branches. Unless the aliens think differently than we do,
their organization is about the same. And every bit of evidence shows
that their reasoning is similar.
"There's no reason to protect an unpopulated planet, is there? Besides,
the military don't inspect colonization records. Why should they? And
what would it matter if the enemy took over an unpopulated planet?
After all, we have as much chance of taking over one of theirs."
Allerdyce thought it over before answering. Finally, he said: "I'll
check with Bilford. If he thinks we can get that much information out
of an alien, I'll O.K. the trip. I'll have to insist, of course, that
the X-69 be fully armed and subject to military orders."
"Naturally," Roysland agreed. "Just let me make the trip; that's all."
"I'll see what I can do," said Allerdyce. "Meanwhile, I'm going to call
Colonization Service."
Roysland smiled to himself as he cut the connection.
* * * * *
Three days after that, the X-69 lifted again for space. On board her,
locked securely in the brig, was the first officer of the captured
Enlissa vessel.
No one had yet determined the nature of the Enlissa language, but
Bilford had worked out a method of getting yes-no answers out of him,
and had, by the process of elimination, arrived at a star system
that contained a planet which had been seeded by the aliens. And all
Roysland wanted was a sample of the Enlissa animals.
There's an old saying which goes: "Some people have all the luck." It
has echoed down the corridors of human history and human thought for a
thousand centuries, in one form or another. It is usually assumed to
be the complaint of the unsuccessful against those whose success is
greater--but it is to be noted that it is not specified whether the
luck is good or bad.
With the same reservations, one might assume that Roysland Dwyn was
lucky. On the fourth day out, the alarm buzzers sang their warning
through the corridors of the X-69.
As the crew scrambled for battle stations, Roysland headed up the
stairway toward the control bridge. Captain Dobrin and the fire control
officer were huddled over the spotterscope, conversing in low tones.
Roysland walked over behind them, but he kept his mouth shut. In a
situation like this, he was only a civilian; it wasn't his business to
say anything now. He studied the instruments, instead.
Somewhere out near the limits of the detector's range had come the
faint trace of a moving ship. And the identity comparator showed it to
be an Enlissa vessel.
"She must have picked us up, too," said the captain. "We'll know in a
few minutes."
They watched quietly, tensely, waiting for the Enlissa ship to change
course. If it didn't, a battleship would normally change the geodesic
of its own flight and follow to engage the Enlissa ship. But not the
X-69; she was looking for planets, not ships.
They didn't have to wait long. A few minutes later, a trace appeared in
the same octant of the scope where the earlier trace had vanished.
"Same ship, all right," said the FCO. "It would take them that long to
turn around. They're going to try to come in for a kill."
"Signal Final Alert," said the captain.
As the buzzer sizzled out its message, Roysland flexed his muscles in a
subconscious desire for action.
Captain Dobrin seemed to realize for the first time that Roysland was
in the control room. His face was hard and tightly drawn, and only very
slightly showed the strain that was beneath.
"We're going to operate according to the new tactics," he said. "We'll
use the torpedoes first and the _aJ_ guns last. We'll use screenbusters
and files."
Roysland nodded. "You're in command here, captain. I know nothing of
spatial strategy."
The prime officer turned back to the FCO. "Check maximum volume and
englobe. It'll be expensive, but we can't afford to take chances now."
"Yes, sir," said the fire control officer.
Roysland watched the instruments closely as the FCO gave his orders.
The first job was to feed into the calculators the exact course and
velocity of the enemy ship. Then they waited until the calculators gave
the most probable volume of space that the ship would occupy after the
screenbuster torpedoes were sent.
Take a solution to the Brownian Movement problem; add everything that
is known about spatial strategy; stir well with the enemy's probable
interpretation of the signals from the torpedoes--and hope like hell.
The first ingredient is relatively easy to determine, the second very
much less so, and the third is almost pure intuition.
Figures began to pop up on the screen. The FCO watched them, unmoving,
his face a rigid mask. Then suddenly, he began to punch data into the
torpedo-firing robots.
Roysland narrowed his eyes as he watched. The _aJ_ projectors didn't
require that much computation. If the _aJ_'s were fired now, the
Enlissa ship wouldn't have a chance to fire. And yet, statistics showed
that--
_Why?_
The FCO's masklike face began to acquire a sheen of perspiration in the
glowing lights of the control room as he watched the screen and punched
methodically at the fire control board. It was work that no robot
could do; it required the shrewdness, intuition, and foresightedness
that is a peculiar quality of the human mind.
Without warning, the FCO jabbed violently at the white stud that stood
at the edge of his panel. He jerked his finger off, and his hand seemed
to freeze for a second. He had done the irrevocable; he had fired every
torpedo in the ship.
The X-69 now possessed no armament except the _aJ_ guns.
* * * * *
The first volley of screenbusters left the ship and slammed suddenly
into the ultravelocity that only an unmanned torpedo is capable of.
Even an antiacceleration field isn't one hundred per cent perfect. In
no-space drive, a ship can accelerate at the spatial equivalent of
better than a hundred thousand gravities without hurting the crew. But
the tremendous acceleration of a war torpedo would crush any human body
to a monomolecular film.
The torpedoes had to be small; only a very small no-space generator
could achieve such velocities in so short a time. But their small
capacity was capable of carrying enough subnuclear explosive to smash
through the energy screens of the enemy ship.
They could not, however, breach the vodium hull itself or kill
personnel within. That was where the "flies" came in. Their job was
to smash through the breach in the energy screen, open the hull, and
destroy life within.
The only trouble was that the enemy could detect the torpedoes. If the
Enlissa could act fast enough, they might be able to avoid them. The
hope of the human ship was that the englobement would be too much for
the robot computers of the Enlissa.
The first wave of torpedoes left the X-69, spearing in the general
direction of the Enlissa vessel. For a fraction of a second, they
maintained their original course. Then they became erratic--purposely
so. They flashed on and off in the detector screens as their no-space
generators cut in and out, and they switched courses with dizzying
rapidity. They had been on their way only for hundredths of a second
when the second volley let go. Then the third blasted out. The whole
thing was over before an eyelid could flicker.
Roysland glanced at the chronometer; the whole operation had taken
slightly over ninety seconds.
The silence lasted only for a moment. One of the observers called out:
"Torpedo at twelve thirty-seven!"
The data had already been picked up by the robot pilot, and the X-69
shifted course. Roysland could feel the slightly sickish feeling in his
stomach under the heavy acceleration as the angular acceleration of the
ship changed.
There was nothing to do now but wait. It was up to the robot defenses
and the screens to make sure that no enemy torpedo hit the X-69.
The ship lurched again.
Because of their tremendous acceleration, a war torpedo couldn't
possibly be a homing type weapon; it moved too fast. Before even a
subelectronic relay could operate, the target would be well out of
range. The X-69 was in the position of a man ducking thrown stones; the
only fatal move would be an inaccurate judgment.
* * * * *
Again the floor jerked beneath them as another enemy torpedo sizzled
through the place where the ship might have been.
"_Explosion at fifteen-sixty!_" shouted two observers at once.
The FCO's face suddenly broke into a grin. "We did it," he said softly.
Then the intercom flickered on. An excited Space Marine said: "Captain
Dobrin! There's something funny going on down here; that Enlissa
officer we've got in the brig just dropped dead!"
It was at that instant that Roysland Dwyn found his answer. The pieces
of the whole jigsaw puzzle fell into place and made a beautiful
picture. And he realized that the Enlissa, too, had changed their
battle tactics.
And that was when the explosion hit.
Four torpedoes had come in on the X-69 at once, and the robot had been
a fraction of a second too late in computing the trajectories all at
once and figuring a safe path.
The screenbuster's detonation jarred the whole ship violently. Then
there were two thumps as a pair of flies came into the hole through
the screen and blasted the interior of the cruiser.
Roysland wasn't sure what had happened; the whole control room had
suddenly seemed to turn upside down. When he picked himself up from one
wall--which had now become "down"--his nose was bleeding, and his right
arm was dead to the shoulder. Broken clavicle.
He shook his head groggily and looked around. Captain Dobrin was
slumped against a corner of the wall. The FCO was sprawled across the
side of his control board. The various observers were tumbled around
the room like so many rag dolls shaken up in a shoe box.
Gradually, the gravity righted itself, and Roysland rolled to the
floor. He pulled himself up by one arm and ran toward the control
panel. He had barely time to act.
Fortunately, most of the observers were reasonably aware of their
surroundings. Those who could move were back at their control boards by
the time Roysland reached the fire control board.
A second blast hit the ship, but Roysland was prepared for it this
time; his fingers gripped the hand-holds and strained as the gravity
shifted beneath his feet.
The X-69 couldn't stand another one like that. The Enlissa ship had
computed better than they had thought.
"_aJ_ projectors!" Roysland shouted. "Prepare to track and fire!"
The only way to save the ship now was to shoot down every torpedo
before it hit.
"All guns tracking, sir," said one of the observers.
"Set and ready!" Roysland said. "Fire automatically!" He punched a
button.
The _aJ_ projectors moved in their mounts, each one seeking out a
different missile. They would go on seeking until the--
Then the first one fired, and Roysland's mind went blank, as did
everyone else's aboard the X-69.
* * * * *
For a long time, Roysland Dwyn watched a play. He was a disinterested
spectator, who had not one iota of interest in what was going on. He
was much, much, _much_ too busy with his own thoughts to be interested
with such trivia as his bodily reactions and his exterior environment.
In the first place, he had solved the problem. And such a fascinating
problem! The broad ramifications of the whole concept were appalling in
their immensity and scope!
Some people came into the control room after a long while and asked
him some questions. He answered them politely, but without paying any
attention whatsoever to what they were saying.
_After all, what could possibly be so utterly absorbing as my own
problems? Who could be more important than I?_
The people asked him to walk to somewhere, and he did; but he didn't
have the slightest notion where he was going, nor why, nor how. And he
really didn't care. They put him in a bed and fed him soup and stuck
needles in his arm and several other utterly meaningless things, but it
made no difference.
_Introspection. Know thyself. And then get going around and around and
around on the ever deepening spiral-helix that goes lower and lower as
it closes in on itself. Self-analysis. What are my motivations? Why do
I want to know what my motivations are? Why am I analyzing myself? Why
do I want to know why I am analyzing myself?_
_What do I know about the motivations for desiring to know about the
reasons for analyzing myself? Why do I feel that the motivations_--
After a long period of being left alone, he was in a place that was
different from where he had been before, but it wasn't any different
than the place where--
A sudden blazing shock crossed Roysland's mind. With the awful
brilliant clarity of a man seeing suddenly into a darkened room when
the lights have been lit unexpectedly, Roysland snapped agonizingly
back to awareness.
Only for a fraction of a second did he realize what had happened. Then
his mind blacked out under the shock.
When he came out of it again, a nurse was standing by his bedside. She
smiled at him when he opened his eyes, and said: "How do you feel, sir?"
He thought for a moment, taking inventory of exactly how he did feel.
Then he smiled. "I feel fine. What happened?"
The girl touched a relay plate. "The psychometrist will be in right
away, sir. He'll explain things to you." She gave him another flash of
white teeth and stepped out of the room.
Less than a minute later, the door opened, and the psychometrist came
in. It was Bilford.
"Well, well," Roysland said. "I get special treatment; the chief cheese
is in to see me."
Bilford grinned, ran a hand through his hair and nodded. His thin face
seemed to almost sparkle from within. "Yup. You're important. I knew
you'd want to see someone as soon as you came to."
Roysland propped himself up in bed. "How right you are. The boys have
solved the Secret of the Mysterious Weapon, I see. Have they actually
made a usable weapon out of it?"
Bilford lifted his eyebrows. "What makes you think they've figured it
out?"
Roysland's massive face broke into a grin. "Simple. I'm back among the
living again. If I'm right--and I think I am--you undid this feedback
in the prefrontal lobes with an effect similar to the one that caused
it. Q.E.D.: You know what caused it."
Bilford nodded. "Good reasoning. And accurate. I guess your brain isn't
as burned out as it might be. I guess you can see visitors now."
"Who?" Roysland asked.
Bilford stood up and headed for the door. "Four Special Weapons staff
members and a Fleet Commander. They've been waiting to see you for
three days, and I told them you'd be out from under this morning."
Then he stopped at the door and looked bland. "Of course, if you don't
_want_ to see them--"
"Get them in here!" bellowed Roysland.
* * * * *
All Bilford had to do was open the door. Five men came into the room
as though the hall were full of poison gas. After a minute or so of
inquiring after Roysland's health and expressing their sympathy for his
plight, they settled down to business.
"I figured there was something screwy in that story you gave me,"
Allerdyce said. "Going to hunt for animals, indeed!"
Bilford grinned. "I didn't think he was, either. It was brilliant to
have those recorders in the Enlissa officer's cell. And the other stuff
came through perfectly."
Roysland shook his head. "You misunderstand me. I most certainly did
intend to get animal specimens. I figured the answer was involved with
the aliens themselves, but I didn't know what the gimmick was.
"Now I know that it was the interaction of the _aJ_'s backwash and the
enemy's beam that caused the mindjammer effect. The enemy's weapon
was intended as a death ray, but for some reason, it doesn't work on
humans."
"That's right," said Taddibol. "The enemy projector was designed to
disintegrate the molecule of a particular enzyme that is necessary to
Enlissa life. It does the job beautifully, too. When the beam hits an
Enlissa, the enzyme disintegrates, oxidation can no longer take place
in the tissues, and presto! the Enlissa dies. But our own system is so
different that the beam doesn't even effect us."
"The answer's been right in front of our eyes for a long time,"
Kiffer said. "The backwash from the _aJ_'s has too long a wave length
to be effective, and the Enlissa's death ray is too short. But the
complex harmonic of the two is just right. It creates a momentary
field that causes the loop-feedback to start in the prefrontal lobes.
From what we can gather, the effect is one of intense, overpowering
curiosity--inwardly directed."
"Statistically," Allerdyce cut in, "it accounts for the peculiar
behavior of the enemy ships, too. If we assume that a little over
twenty-five per cent of their ships are equipped with what they think
is a death ray, you'll get the right figures. About the same number of
our ships are equipped with _aJ_ projectors.
"When a death-ray ship comes in on an _aJ_ ship, the _aJ_ guns cut it
down and the crew is mindjammed. But if a death-ray ship comes in on
one of our conventionally armed ships, they're blasted out of the sky
because they figure that everyone aboard the ship is dead and they
don't bother to fire any torpedoes. Our own torpedoes come as a pretty
rude surprise. So the enemy has lost one hundred per cent of their
death-ray equipped vessels in every engagement!"
Roysland nodded. "We couldn't see it because we weren't looking for it.
I suspected at first that it had something to do with the _aJ_'s; the
statistics suggested that. But when every test showed that it couldn't
possibly be our own projectors, and when this Enlissa projector came
along, I made the mistake of dropping the previous line of approach.
Keep that in mind, boys; you can forget old _theories_, but you can't
forget old _data_.
"By the way, commander, did you figure out how we happened to get the
Enlissa ship?"
"Sure," said Allerdyce. "When they came in so close, they were caught
by the field that was generated. The thing has an effective englobement
volume with a radius of about six hundred miles. We don't know what the
effect is near the outside, of course, but we're working on it."
* * * * *
"You know," Roysland said, "mankind has known for centuries the old
dictum that 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,' but we
sometimes forget how it works in practice. We still tend to look from
cause to effect and from effect to cause.
"But in this case, there were two 'causes' of the mindjammer field, and
three 'effects' from the two 'causes.' And that's simplifying a great
deal. We still haven't dug into what else we can get from subetheric
harmonics phenomena."
Roysland looked at Bilford. "How did you do this quick-cure stunt?"
Bilford shrugged. "Simple. I fiddled around until I got a subetheric
harmonic that corresponded to the frequencies of the microwaves I was
using. Works fine."
Kiffer chimed in again with: "With the stuff we got from your
instruments on the X-69 I think we can build the weapon we've been so
afraid of."
"Won't the Enlissa be able to analyze it?" Bilford asked,
interestedly. "After all, _we_ figured it out."
"Not the same thing," said Kiffer. "They don't have _aJ_ projectors
yet. They can't accidentally generate the field."
"Besides," Commander Allerdyce said grimly, "we won't leave them any
evidence. If the weapon works, we'll beam 'em down, board 'em, and end
up with prisoners and a perfectly good ship. The Enlissa will never
know what happened to them."
Roysland was about to say something when the door flew open and a heavy
body propelled its way inside.
It was General Director Eckisster, and he was very obviously seething
mad. He glanced around the room and his eyes lit on Bilford.
"May I ask, sir," he thundered, "why I have been kept from seeing
Roysland Dwyn for two weeks? And why these men are allowed to see him
now?" He didn't wait for an answer, but turned toward Roysland. "As
for you, sir, I am filing a reprimand--officially. You had no business
using the X-69 as military vessel during time of war without my
permission. You might have been killed, and I need you!"
Roysland started to answer, but Commander Allerdyce was one jump ahead
of him. He smiled serenely at Eckisster and said: "My dear director,
don't you think such an action would be just a bit confusing? Captain
Dobrin recommended that Roysland Dwyn be given the Golden Cluster
for bravery in action above and beyond the call of duty. I added my
recommendation and sent it on to the Regent's office. The Regent
himself has given his approval. Surely, a reprimand now would be a bit
unseemly."
Eckisster glowered. "My dear commander," he said, "it so happens that
Roysland Dwyn is the mainstay of my directorate. It also happens to be
a fact that I have a perfect right to threaten to do any damned thing I
want to. It keeps him mad at me, so he works like a beaver to show me
up. I threaten, cajole, intimidate, scream, and ask silly questions. It
works. If you won't tell me how to run my directorate, I won't tell you
how to run your spacefleet. At least not very often. Fair enough?"
Again, he did not pause for an answer, but looked back at Roysland.
"And you, you get out of that bed as soon as this twitch doctor lets
you. You have a gun to build. A mindjammer. Get busy. I'll expect you
in my office later. Good-by." He turned and stamped out.
Allerdyce stared at the closed door for a moment, then turned and
grinned. "I guess I got told."
"You did," said Bilford, "and you're going to get told again. All of
you. Clear out. The patient has had enough excitement for today. Scram."
* * * * *
It took the five men several more minutes to leave, but Bilford was
finally alone with Roysland.
"Did you know that about Eckisster?" Bilford asked. "That he needles
people with a purpose in mind?"
"Sure," said Roysland. "I've known it for years. I don't say that
it works the way he thinks it does, but at least it keeps the job
exciting. I think everybody needs a little needling now and then."
Bilford nodded. "I know you agree with him. You're a bigger needler
than he is, any day."
"Me?" Roysland looked surprised.
"Yes, you. Eckisster's needling is effective in a limited way, but
yours is not only effective, but efficient. You ask the kind of
questions that make people think instead of the kind that make people
mad. Where Eckisster jabs in all directions and people jump, you use
your needle with the deftness and precision of a physician using a
hypodermic. Eckisster doesn't know what he wants and he doesn't know
how to get it. And he wants somebody else to do it for him, whatever it
is. On the other hand, you know what you want and how to get it without
making everybody hate you, and you'll do the job yourself, if necessary.
"You gave your staff men, Commander Allerdyce, even me, credit for
finding out what the mindjammer effect was. But the credit belongs to
you. If it weren't for your incessant needling, your ability to arouse
interest in seemingly dull facts, your sometimes radical theories, and
your propensity for asking searching questions, I doubt if we'd have
our answer yet.
"The core of this problem wasn't just the fact that several phenomena
combined to give the mindjammer; that was a purely physical effect. The
big problem was to get human beings to take their individual fields
of thought, work with them in relation to other fields of thought,
and come up with useful information that could be fitted together to
explain the whole.
"Eckisster's type of needling might make a man _work_ harder, it
might even make him _think_ harder--but it won't make him think in a
different way or look at data from a new angle. Even when your theories
are wrong, you use them in such a way that they uncover the data which
proves them wrong. And then you're perfectly willing to drop them and
work out a new hypothesis and get people to try to destroy or confirm
it." He stood up and smoothed a palm over his gray hair.
"And now, if you'll excuse me," he said, "I have some more things to
work on. I have a hunch that these subelectronic polar harmonics can
do a lot more to the human brain than just knock it silly. When you
feel better, I'll tell you all about it." He turned and walked out the
door.
Roysland lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling. Me, a needler?
he thought, ME?
THE END
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