Lester Del Rey

“ There's no air beyond. Alien ship!"
He jumped through the seal. His hands swept up the tube that was to be a weapon, and his eyes darted to the screen. The pip was bigger now, and at maximum brightness. The Alien ship must be only tens of thousands of miles above, braking down to attack with deadly precision.
Less than a hundred feet away, the two humans waited, at the mercy of any energy that might spill from his weapon! He would have to score with a perfect piece of marksmanship, with all the radiation directed in a straight line. ”

“ Norden stared at him despairfully. "It's like tracing a single drop of water in the ocean—or looking for a trace of life that can be detected for millions of miles when you're in the middle of hordes of living creatures. I've been working on that already. And the only reason we could detect and screen the lizard signals was because they were unique.
"Hardwick was right about that, too. You have to look for life forces where they're scarce. I need isolation from people, animals—even from germs and viruses, probably."
Pat gestured to a map on the wall. ”

“ Miles put his fork down and faced the group, but his eyes were on Norden. His words had the ring of an often-delivered but still vital lecture. "Damn it, we can't afford hatred. Maybe the mobs need it to keep them going. But we have serious things to do that take sound judgment. Why not hate disease germs or any other natural enemy?"
His voice hardened. "They don't kill for the pure love of evil. They're intelligent beings, doing what they believe has to be done. ”

“ In the glare of the overhead lights, he could see a figure running desperately for the edge of a further Quonset—running in the airlessness of the exposed surface without a spacesuit!
More lights snapped on, and a guard in a suit came around the corner, throwing up a rifle. There was a tiny spurt of flame from the weapon, and the running man pitched forward. The guard started toward him just as a few men began to dart out of the huts in hastily-donned spacesuits. ”

“ Bitterness was heavier than anything else.
"That's fine for someone who won't hate an enemy—though you're quick enough to employ hate when it's useful." He looked at Miles steadily. "What about the rest of the world? Will they welcome a bomb-carrying robot monster as a friend?" Bill Norden wanted to know.
Miles put his hands on Norden's shoulders, while Pat went back into the workroom. "Sit down on the desk, Bill," he urged. "The only people who know are the two of us, and Jim—the psychologist who predicted exactly how you'd react from the beginning. ”

“ He had no intention of acting as a super-brain, however well equipped he might be. With the emergency over, the human race could discover enough by itself.
Miles and his daughter would be busy with the long and difficult job of trying to re-settle the planets that the Aliens had despoiled. But all three of them would be ready when the first ship capable of reaching the stars had been built.
Norden drew himself up.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, I guess I want to be on it. I helped teach the Aliens enough about human beings as enemies. Now I'd like to teach them about us as friends." ”

“ If you pass, you'll go across the chamber to the cleared rooms beyond.
"Any man resisting or proven non-human will be shot at once. The Alien last night looked human, but he didn't breathe oxygen, so his internal structure must be different. However, if anyone wants to declare that he's an Alien, he'll be treated as a prisoner of war instead of a spy."
Nobody made such a declaration, and Miles nodded to the guards who had filed in, while fear-ridden faces were still staring at their neighbors. Norden wondered how long a confessed Alien would last before the men tore him to bits. ”

“ Send out a hundred ships near each other, and the Aliens can't handle them all at once. If we're lucky, and spot the first torpedoes, we can trace them back and a few ships may survive long enough to send visual, pattern-seeking atomic torpedoes toward the Alien ship.
"But we can't get closer than a few hundred thousand miles with any life aboard a ship, because the radiation—or whatever it is they use—is fatal so long as they can detect us. You can see why Command rushed through all the screen suits they could, and struck this morning. ”

“ Miles said slowly. "The poor devils! Until some darned fool from Earth goes there one day to try to make peace with them, they're going to live every hour of their lives in the horrible certainty that we can wipe them out whenever we choose—and that the best their race could do was a total failure. They'll probably have sunk back to being scared, unhappy savages before we reach them."
Norden thought of the charts that had been shown him while he lay in the communicating position. ”

“ Bill, did you ever see a little boy fighting a bigger one, wading in, crying, whimpering, but so mad he couldn't stop—couldn't even see where he was hitting? That's hate-fighting. And it's senseless, because the other side may be just as right. Professional fighters don't really hate—they simply do everything they can to win, coldly and scientifically. ”

“ He paused, but Norden could think of nothing to say. He looked at Pat for confirmation, and she nodded. "We set the whole thing up for you, Bill. But we found we were wrong. The Aliens had done too good a job on you for their own good. They made you too human—so human that you had to begin thinking our way. After that business with Armsworth, we stopped worrying."
"But you came out here ..." he began.
"Not to spy on you, Bill," Miles told him. "Earth's evacuating the Moon, now that you found us weapons to handle the Aliens. We're needed to supervise things back at the factories. ”

“ But the machine couldn't tell him what section of the Hardwick spectrum involved life. The field used by the lizards to locate each other lay well up in it, in a band relationship somewhat analogous to the X-rays of the normal spectrum. But if that failed, there was no clue to what might work.
In any new field, one fresh fact could open up tremendous stores of knowledge—but there would always be even greater ones awaiting discovery.
He put in a call to the library for more material on Janiekowski's work with the lizards, and was told that they'd have to secure a tape from Earth. ”

“ Then he relaxed as the doctor and psychiatrist picked up their equipment and went out with advice he hardly heard. Armsworth lingered, and Norden searched about in his mind for what seemed to be a safe question.
"How long until we reach Mars, general?" he asked.
"We don't!" Armstrong's voice was suddenly thick and bitter. "We've abandoned Mars. The Aliens have moved inward. We—oh, hell, we'll reach our new laboratory on the Moon base in about four days! And you'd better start praying that shield works, or my value to you won't be worth salvaging." ”

“ In anything like an even battle, men were certain to win. But they soon discovered it wasn't an even battle.
The Aliens had some means of detecting human ships accurately at distances of millions of miles, and blasting them with self-guided torpedoes, while remaining undetected themselves. And behind the torpedoes would come the dark globular ships to spray the wreckage with some force that left every cell utterly lifeless.
Hardwick had been a quasi-scientist, mixed up with certain weird cults, who maintained a private laboratory on an asteroid near Jupiter's orbit. ”

“ Since the beginning of life on Earth and Mars, no radio-active half-life had been natural. Probably the rate of decay had varied slightly with each century, as the amount of life changed.
He fed her a list of calculations, and waited while the machine ground out its answers. Pat came back to the screen while it worked on automatically.
"They're bombing the base now," she reported dully. "We've been able to miss being hit by keeping a cover of volunteers up to attract the seeking units before they reach us. And the Aliens are within three million miles. We can't hold out much longer." ”

“ The Aliens also radiated in the same spectrum—but at such an incredibly high frequency that no atomic nucleus was small enough to be affected by the radiation.
As Norden watched, the central pip suddenly began to grow brighter, holding its position in a way that indicated a straight descent toward his detector! Terror struck at his nerves.
Obviously the Aliens had detectors for every frequency, and his detector was just crude enough to radiate a faint trace of its own. He'd been located, and the exterminating force was on the way. ”

“ This expedition of theirs would be a major job for any trace, and they're going at it just as we would—if we had to exterminate the boll weevil.
"Emotions haven't a thing to do with it. We're in a battle for raw survival, and we haven't the time to indulge our animal emotions. It's a scientific problem that has to be solved for our lives—like a plague."
Norden added another intangible to the puzzle—either Miles was setting a trap for him, or it was hard to understand how he'd gotten the five stars on his insignia. An enemy was an enemy! ”

“ There was no shield possible for any object bigger than about twice the size of the cage they had used. There could never be any way to protect a man from the Aliens.
It was to be a death watch he kept, apparently. And Pat must have known it when she saw the formulae, since she had picked up sufficient basic knowledge to read it.
He stood staring up at the space above him, letting the hate harden inside him, while he pictured the base in the hands of the invaders! Humans were beyond saving, according to the figures he had now. ”

“ Norden could almost hear again the amazed voice of General Dawes when he asked for a mere five pounds—a quantity nearly impossible to secure.
Pat's face confirmed his suspicions. Earth couldn't have made five hundred pounds so rapidly.
They found the guards already waiting to take them to where Miles was, and followed them down to the entrance of the explosion testing chamber. Miles was smiling and chatting with a man who appeared to be a perfectly normal rocket pilot, and who seemed bored until he saw Norden. He consulted a picture on some kind of tape recording and stepped forward. ”

“ Surprisingly, the tests indicated that remote-controlled ships which had been completely sterilized went undetected, while ships carrying rats or other life were blasted. Norden, as the expert on all strange radiation, had been sent to work with Hardwick in attempting to devise a screen for the hypothetical life radiation.
He never learned whether Hardwick was a wild genius, or an even wilder lunatic. While he was wearing Hardwick's improvised shield during one of the attempts to test it, the Aliens had landed and broken in. ”

“ Norden," the speaker said. His eyes flicked to the screen where a human skeleton showed dimly.
Crazy, he told himself. Hagridden with fears no sane human mind could have endured and retained its sanity. No wonder the psychologists had been uncertain about him. Unbalanced—but human!
Pat smiled weakly at him as he entered the room beyond, to join the ranks of the elect. Then they watched as their group passed successfully, to give place to a number of rocket men from the freight gang. ”

“ Oh, I'm Armsworth."
Norden felt the chill touch his mind again. He'd expected a doctor, and had been bracing himself for one. But the psychiatrist.... He forced calmness into his voice. "I could eat a horse!"
"You probably will," Armsworth told him with quick, automatic humor. "This is the Space Service!"
The little cabin to which Armsworth took him was crowded alarmingly. There were the two men waiting for him, with their specialized equipment. In addition, there was the forbidding bulk of a large recording machine ready to take down every word he uttered. ”

“ And that could only mean that Hardwick's shield had never worked. He stopped short, and then reconsidered. The difficulty he had forcing his mind to think about tests for the lizards still spelled a taboo in his mind—and that indicated there might be a shield. It left him exactly where he was, except for the problem of what the Aliens wanted. If he could solve that, and defeat it....
Nothing they tried gave any positive result, though Pat thought that the variation in the female activity had been slightly more than normal when they'd tried the potassium salt solution around the males. ”

“ With his rank, it would be easy enough for him to get in. Also, the man stood there with none of the fear he should have shown on being discovered, and Norden felt the sick confirmation of his being a pawn for the Aliens.
But the fact itself gave him some chance. He lifted his arm to the switch, and then dropped it. "The guards would suspect something if I cut it off now," he admitted candidly. "Any suggestions?"
"I could kill the lizards, let you discover me, and chase me out to explode," Armsworth said thoughtfully, without any emotional color to the suggestion. He shook his head. ”

“ Janiekowski had dissected countless sand lizards, and the pictures were included in the reel of tape from Earth. He studied them, digging into what the calculator had supplied about radiation, and its behavior in the third spectrum. He found, as he had expected, that a tiny bit of radio-active material lay at the base of the microscopic receptor in the female, and that a similar mechanism was to be found in the organ which the male used to generate the force. ”

“ He couldn't have been so different from other men before the ordeal on Hardwick's asteroid. That ruined steak had cost a small fortune to transport from Earth, and the man would lose valuable time while waiting for another to be cooked. And yet, Norden could see that somehow it had been effective therapy, had relieved an almost intolerable tension. ”