The Perfect Host (9 page)

“They’ll box us,” said Colonel Simmons. “There won’t be any circling this time. They’ll take up equidistant positions around the planet, out of our range, and they’ll fire at will.”

“I think you’re right,” said his brother. “Well, that gives us two kinds of defense. They’re both puny, but it’ll be the best we can do. One’s technological, of course. I don’t know exactly which direction would be the best to take. We can build ships ourselves, and attack them in space. We can try to develop some kind of shield against their bombs, or whatever else they use against us. And we can try to build seeking torpedoes of some sort that’ll go out and get ’em—bearing in mind that we might be out there ourselves sometime soon, and we don’t want to fall prey to our own weapons.”

“What’s the other defense?”

“Sociological. In the first place, we must decentralize to a degree heretofore impossible. In the second place, we must pool our brains and our physical resources. No nation can afford to foot the bill of this kind of production; no nation can afford to take the chance of by-passing some foreign brain which might help the whole world. Leroy, stop puckering up like that! You look as if you’re going to cry. I know what’s bothering you. This looks like the end of professional militarism. Well, it is, in the national sense. But you have a bigger enemy than ever before, and one more worthy of the best efforts of humanity. You and your Board have been doing what seemed to be really large thinking. It wasn’t, because its field was too small and too detailed. But now you have something worth fighting. Now your plans can be planetary—galactic—cosmic, if you like. Don’t hanker after the past, soldier-boy. That attitude’s about the only way there is to stay small.”

“That’s quite a speech,” said the colonel. “I … wish I could argue with it. If I admit you’re right, I can only admit that there is no solution at all. I don’t believe the world will ever realize the necessity for cooperation until it’s too late.”

“Maybe it will. Maybe. I remember once talking to an old soldier who had been in the First War. In his toolshed he had a little trench shovel about eighteen inches long—a very flimsy piece of equipment it was. I remarked on it, and asked him what earthly good it was to a soldier. He laughed and said that when a green squad was deployed near no man’s land and ordered to dig in, they gabbled and griped and scratched and stewed over the job. And when the first enemy bullets came whining over, they took their little shovels and they just
melted
into the ground.” He chuckled. “Maybe it’ll be like that. Who knows? Anyway, do what you can, Leroy.”

“You have the strangest sense of humor,” growled the colonel, and left.

They came.

The first was just a shape against the stars. It could be heard like a monster’s breath in a dark place:
wsh-h-h-t wsh-h-h-t wsh-h-h-t
on the sixty-megacycle band, where before nothing had been heard but the meaningless hiss of the Jansky noise. But it could not be seen. Not really. It was just a shape. A blur. It did not reflect radar impulses very well; the response was indeterminate, but indicated that it was about the size and shape of the mysterious bomber which had dealt the first terrifying, harmless blow.

The world went crazy, but it was a directed madness. With the appearance of the Outsider, all talk of the advisability of defense ceased. There could be no discussion of priorities.

A Curie Institute scientist announced light-metal fission. A Hungarian broke his own security regulations with the announcement of an artificial element of heretofore unthinkable density which could be cast into fission chambers, making possible the long-awaited pint-sized atomic engine. A Russian scientist got what seemed to be a toehold on antigravity and set up a yell which resulted in a conclave of big brains in Denver—men from all over the world. He was wrong, but a valuable precedent was set. A World Trade Organization was established, with control of raw materials and manufactured goods and their routes and schedules. Its control was so complete that tariffs were suspended
in toto
—the regulation read “for the duration”—
and, since it is efficient to give a square deal, a square deal was given in such a clear-cut fashion that objectors were profiteers by definition. Russian ores began appearing in British smelters, and Saar coal was loaded into the Bessemers of Birmingham. Most important of all, a true International Police Force came into being with hardly a labor pain. Its members were free to go everywhere, and their duty was to stop anything which got in the way of planetary production. Individual injustice, faulty diet, poor housing, underpaying, and such items fell immediately into this category, and were dealt with quickly and with great authority.

Propaganda unified itself and came to a focus in the hourly bulletins about the Outsiders. Every radio station on Earth included that dread triple hiss in its station breaks.

And the Outsider stayed just where it was, just lay there, breathing, waiting for its two cohorts.

“It’s makeshift,” said Dr. Simmons, “but it might do. It just might do.”

The colonel stepped past him and looked at the cradle, on which rested a tubby, forty-foot object like a miniature submarine.

“A satellite, you said?”

“Uh-huh. Loaded to the gills with direction-finders and small atomic rockets. It’ll keep a continuous fix on the Outsider during its transit, and relay information to monitor stations on Earth. If one of the ships fires a torpedo, it will be detected and reported immediately and the satellite will launch an interceptor rocket. If the bomb or torpedo dodges, the interceptor will follow it. In the meantime, big interceptors can be on their way from Earth. If a torpedo comes close to the satellite, the satellite will dodge. If it comes too close, the satellite will explode violently enough to take the torp with it. We plan to set out three layers of these things, nine in each stratum, twenty-seven in all, so spaced as to keep a constant scanning in every direction.”

“Satellites, hm-m-m? Muscles, if we can do this, why can’t we go right out there and get the ships themselves?”

The physicist ticked the reasons off on his fingers. “First, because if they bracket us, as in every likelihood they will, they’d be foolish to come any closer than the one that’s already here, and he’s out of
any range we can handle just now. We can assume that his ships, if not his bombs, will be prepared against our proximity devices. We’ll try, of course, but I wouldn’t be too hopeful. Second, we still haven’t a fuel efficient enough to allow for escape velocity maneuvers without a deadly acceleration, so our chances of sending manned rockets up for combat are nil at the moment.”

The colonel looked admiringly at the satellite and the crowd of technicians which swarmed around it. “I knew we’d come up with something.”

His brother gave him a quizzical glance. “I don’t know if you fully realize just how big a ‘we’ that is you just used. The casing of that satellite is Swedish steel. The drive is a German scientist’s adaptation of the Hungarian baby fission engine. The radio circuits are American, except for the scanning relay, which is Russian. And those technicians—I’ve never seen such a bunch. Davis, Li San, Abdallah, Schechter, O’Shaughnessy—he comes from Bolivia, by the way, and speaks only Spanish—Yokamatsu, Willet, Van Cleve. All of these men, all these designs and materials, and all the money that make up these satellites, have been found and assembled from all over the earth in only the last few weeks. There were miracles of production during the Second War, Leroy, but nothing to match this.”

The colonel shook his head dazedly. “I never thought I’d see it happen.”

“You’ll see more surprising things than this before we’re done,” said the scientist happily. “Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

That was the week the second Outsider arrived. It took up a position in the celestial south, not quite opposing its fellow, and it lay quietly, breathing. If there was converse between them, it was not detectable by any known receiver. It was the same apparent size and had the same puzzling effect on radar and photographic plates as its predecessors.

In Pakistan, an unfueled airplane took off from a back-country airstrip, flew to twenty thousand feet, and came in for a landing. The projector which was trained on it had no effect on the approaching aircraft in the moment it took the plane to disappear behind a
hillock and reappear on the other side. There was a consequent momentary power loss, and the plane lost too much altitude and had to make another pass. The wind direction dictated a climbing turn to the north, and the beam from the projector briefly touched the antenna of an amateur radio operator called Ben Ali Ra. Ben Ali Ra’s rig exploded with great enthusiasm, filling the inside of his shack with spots and specks of fused metal, ceramic, and glass. Fortunately for him—and for the world—he was in the adjoining room at the time, and suffered only a deep burn in his thigh, which was struck by a flying fragment of a coil-form.

This was the first practical emergence of broadcast power.

Ben Ali was aware of the nature of the experiments at the nearby field, having eavesdropped by radio on some field conversations. He was also aware of certain aims and attitudes held by the local authority. Defying these, he left the area that night, on foot, knowing that he would be killed if captured, knowing that in any event his personal property would be confiscated, and in great pain because of his wound. His story is told elsewhere; however, he reached Benares and retained consciousness long enough to warn the International Police.

The issue was not that broadcast power was a menace; it had a long way to go before it could be used without shouting its presence through every loudspeaker within miles. The thing that brought the I.P. down in force on this isolated, all but autonomous speck on the map was the charge that the inventors intended to keep their development to themselves. The attachment of the device and all related papers by the Planetary Defense Organization was a milestone of legal precedent, and brought a new definition of “eminent domain.” Thereafter no delays were caused by the necessity of application to local governments for the release of defense information; the I.P. investigated, confiscated, and turned the devices in question over to the Planetary Defense Organization, acting directly and paying fairly all parties involved. So another important step was taken toward the erasure of national lines.

Two weeks before the arrival of the third Outsider—excluding the one which had been shot down—the last of the twenty-seven satellites
took up its orbit, and the world enjoyed its first easy breath since the beginning of the Attack, as it was called.

Because of high-efficiency circuits and components, the fuel consumption of the electronic set-up in the satellites was very small. They held their orbits without power, except for an occasional automatic correction-kick. They could operate without servicing for years. It was assumed that by the time they needed servicing, astrogation would have developed to the point where they could be refueled—and recharged—by man-carrying ships. If technology did not solve the problem, little harm could be done by the silent, circling machines; when, at long last, they slipped from their arbitrary orbits and spiraled in to crash, so many years would have passed that the question was, momently, academic.

And even before the twenty-seventh satellite was launched, factories were retooling for a long dreamed of project, a space station which would circle the Earth in an orbit close enough to be reached by man-carrying rockets, which would rest and refuel there and take off again for deep space without the crushing drag of Earth’s gravity.

The third Outsider took up its position, as Dr. Simmons had prophesied, equidistant from the others with Earth in the center, rolling nakedly under them. As in the case of the arrivals of the other two, there was no sign of its presence but the increasing sound on the sixty-megacycle band. Radar failed utterly to locate it until, suddenly, it was in its position—a third blur against the distant stars, a third indeterminate, fifteen-hundred-foot shape on the radarscopes.

The Board of Strategy was happily, almost gleefully, busy again. Their earlier work within the field of the probability of human works faded to insignificance against the probabilities inherent in the Attack. There was another major difference, too: they came out in the open. They plastered the world with warnings, cautions, and notices, many of them with no more backing than vivid imaginings of some early science-fiction writer—plus probability. Although logic indicated that the first blows would be in the form of self-guided missiles, thousands of other possibilities were considered. Spy rays, for example; radio hams the world over were asked to keep winding coils, keep searching the spectrum for any unusual frequencies. Telepathic
amplifiers, for another example; asylums were circularized for any radical changes in the quality and quantity of insanity and even abnormal conduct. The literary critics were called in to watch for any trends in creative writing which seemed to have an inhuman content. Music was watched the same way, as were the graphic arts. Farmers and fire wardens were urgently counseled to watch for any plant life, particularly predatory or prehensile or drug-bearing plant life, which might develop. Sociologists were dragged from their almost drunken surveys of this remarkable turn of social evolution, and were ordered right back into it again, to try to extrapolate something harmful to come from this functional, logical, unified planet. But only the nationalists found harm, and they were—well, unfashionable.

The bombs came about a month after the third Outsider took up his post.

The whole world watched. Everything stopped. Every television screen pictured radarscopes and the whip-voiced announcer at Planetary Defense Central in Geneva, which had at long last regained its place as a world center.

The images showed Outsiders A, B, and C in rapid succession. So well synchronized was the action that the three images could have been superimposed, and would have seemed like one picture. Each ship launched two bombs; of each two, one turned lazily toward Earth and the other hovered.