Bright Segment (17 page)

The space scouts roared up to challenge them, heavy with armament and anger. They sent a cloud of missiles ahead of them. There was H.E. and atomics, solid-shot and a whole spectrum of random-frequency radio, just in case.

The radio waves affected the aliens precisely as much—as little—as the fusion warheads. Telescopic lenses watched the missiles race to their targets and simply stop there, to slide around the shining hulls and hang until, one by one, they were brought aboard.

And then the little scouts tried to ram, and were deflected like angling guppies from the sides of an aquarium, to go screaming off into space and a laborious turn.

For three days the enemy circled outside the atmosphere, holding their formation, absorbing or ignoring everything Earth could throw at them.

The Major telephoned Reger’s wife to ask if she had removed her name from her mailbox and doorbell. She said indignantly that she had not, would not, and need not. The Major sighed and sent a squad down late that night to arrest her. She was furious. Yet she conceded his point fairly the next morning when she saw the newspaper photographs of her apartment. Even the window-frames were gone. The mob had chopped right through the floor in places, had even heaved the bathtub twelve floors down to the street. “You should know as much about people as you think you know about Wolf Reger,” he said.

“You should know as much about Wolf as you do about people,” she countered. There was, with her composure, a light he had not seen before. He said, suddenly, “You know something.”

“I do?”

“You act as if you’d had a special delivery letter from that—from your husband.”

“You’re quite right.”

“What?”

She laughed. It was the first time he had heard her laugh, and something with hands, ever so deep within him, wrung them.

“I shouldn’t tease you, Major. If I promise to tell you when it’s time, will you promise not to ask me now?”

“My job is to find out every little detail that can possibly bear on the situation,” he said stiffly.

“Even if it didn’t add one bit to your understanding?”

“You can’t judge that.”

“I certainly can.”

He shook his head. “It’s our job to decide. I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me whatever it is.”

Her gaiety slipped away inside her, and a new kind of brightness shone in her eyes. “Well, I won’t.”

He began to speak, then stopped. He need make no experiments to discover that this extraordinary woman could not be bribed, coerced, or even surprised. He said gently, “Very well. I won’t ask. And you’ll tell me as soon as you can?”

“The very second.”

He kept her in his office. She seemed not to mind. He let her read all the invasion reports as they came in, and he watched every flicker of expression in her face. “When are you going to admit that enough facts are in to show that there’s no hero in this story, no one beating out flames?”

“Never. Have you ever been married, Major?”

Sourly, he thought,
Have you?
“No,” he said.

“You’ve loved someone, though?”

He wondered how she kept her features so controlled under stress. He would like to learn that trick. He said, “Yes.”

“Well, then. You only need a few facts about the one you love. Just enough to put point the way.”

“Three points on a graph to give you a curve, so you can know its characteristics and extend it. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s one of the things I mean.”

“They call that extrapolation. Your boy’s specialty.”

“I like that,” she said softly. “I like that very much.” She detached her eyes from him, from the room, and smiled at what she saw.
“God!”
he exploded.

“Major!”

“You’re going to get clobbered,” he said hoarsely. “You’re going to get such a kick in the teeth … and there isn’t a thing in the world I can do about it.”

“Poor Major,” she said, looking at him as if he were a memory.

There was a click, and electronic noise filled the room. The talker barked, “Enemy spiralling in. Stand by for trajectory.”

“Now you’ll see.” They realized that they had spoken in unison, but it was the wrong time to exchange a smile.

“Arizona!” said the speaker, and “Stand by.”

“Stand by hell,” growled the Major. “We’ll get the fine points by radio. Come on.”

“You’ll take me?”

“Wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”

They ran to the elevators, shot to the roof. A helicopter whisked them to the field, and a jet took them in and tore up and out to the lowering sun.

An unbroken cordon can be thrown about a hundred square miles in less than an hour and a half. This is true, because it was done immediately after the alien fleet touched Earth. Once the landing site was determined, the roads writhed with traffic, the desert crawled with men and machines, the air shook with aircraft, blossomed with parachutes. The ring had not quite closed when the formation came down almost exactly in the predicted center. No longer a single file, the formation was nearly spherical. It arrived on Earth with two thunders—one, the terrible crack as the cloven air smashed back to heal itself, and rebounded and smashed again; the other, a shaking of the Earth itself.

And the cordon stopped, flattened, lay still as a stain while the furious globe built itself in the desert, flung its coat of many colors about itself, mounted the sky and donned its roiling plumes.

And there were no devils there in the desert, but hell itself.

They saw it from the jet, because they were keeping close radio contact with the landing, and straining their eyes into the sunset for a glimpse of the fleet. Their pilot said he saw them, coming in at an impossible speed. The Major missed them as they blinked by, but he did see their wings, like a flurry of paper over a windy corner, drifting brokenly down. And then the fireball fought the sun and, for a while, defeated it, until it became a leaning ghost in a broad, torn hat.

It seemed a long, long time after that when the Major, his palms tight to his eyes, whispered, “You knew that would happen.”

“No I didn’t,” she whispered back, cathedral-awed. “I knew something would happen.”

“Reger did this?”

“Of course.” She stirred, glanced at the tower of smoke, and shuddered. “Can you see yet?”

He tried. “Some …”

“Here,” she said. “I promised you. My special-delivery letter.”

He took it. “I’ve seen this. The picture of the fleet.”

Exactly as she had once before, she murmured, “Poor Major.” She took the print from him, turned it over, deftly slipped his gold pencil from under the pocket-flap of his tunic. “First there was a
cruiser, and a cruiser, and a cruiser,” she said, and drew a short line for each, one after the other, “and a destroyer and a destroyer.” For each of these she made a black disk. “Then the second flight: destroyer, cruiser, destroyer.” And so she charted the entire formation. He stared at the marks until she laughed at him. “Captain!”

“Yes ma’am,” answered the pilot.

“Would you read this to the Major, please?”

She handed it forward. The Major said, “What do you mean, read it?” but she shushed him.

The pilot glanced at it and handed it back. “It says eighty-eight, thirty, W R.”

“No, no—say the codes too.”

“Oh—sorry.” He glanced at it again. “It says ‘Love and kisses. That’s all I have for you. W R.’ ”

“Give me that,” snapped the Major. “By God, it’s Morse!”

“He hung it up there for three whole days and you couldn’t read it.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“How would you have read it before
that
happened?”

He followed her gesture and saw the great hot cloud. “You’re right,” he breathed. “You’re so right. He did that just for you?”

“For you. For everyone. It must have been the only thing he could do to let us know what he was doing. They wouldn’t let him radio. They wouldn’t even let him talk to Wain.”

“Yet they let him deploy their ships.”

“I guess because he made the wings for them; they thought he would know best how to use them.”

“The wings tore off.” To the pilot he said, “Isn’t that what happened, Captain?”

“It sure is,” said the young man. “And no wonder, the way they flashed in. I’ve seen that happen before. You can fly under the speed of sound or over it, but you better not stay just
at
it. Looked to me as if they hung on the barrier all the way in.”

“All flown from one set of controls … probably an automatic pilot, with the course and speed all set up.” He looked at the woman. “Reger set it up.” Suddenly he shook his head impatiently. “Oh
no!
”
They wouldn’t have let him get away with it.”

“Why not?” she said. “Everything else he told them was true.”

“Yes, but they’d have known about the barrier. Captain, just what is the speed of sound up in the stratosphere?”

“Depends, sir. At sea level it’s around three-forty meters per second. Up at thirty kilometers or so it’s around three hundred, depending on the temperature.”

“The density.”

“No sir. Most people think that, but it isn’t so. The higher the temperature, the higher the speed of sound. Anyway, the ‘sound barrier’ they talk about is just a convenient term. It happens that shock waves form around a ship anywhere from eighty-five percent to one-hundred-fifteen percent of the speed of sound, because some airflow around it is supersonic and some still subsonic, and you get real weird flow patterns. Some of the buffeting’s from that, but most of it’s from shock waves, like the ones from the nose hitting the wing tips, or wing shock waves hitting the tail.”

“I see. Captain, could you set up a flight-plan which would keep an aircraft at the buffeting stage from the top of the atmosphere down to the bottom?”

“Imagine I could, sir. Though you wouldn’t get much buffeting above 35 kilometers or so. No matter what the sonic speed, the air’s too thin for shock wave formation.”

“Tell you what. You work out a plan like that. Then radio Radar at Prescott and get the dope on Reger’s approach.”

“Yes, sir.” The young man went to work at his chart table.

“It’s so
hard
for you,” Mrs. Reger said.

“What is?”

“You won’t believe it until your little graph’s all plotted, with every fact and figure in place. Me, I
know
. I’ve known all along. It’s so easy.”

“Hating is easy too,” said the Major. “You’ve probably never done much of that. But
un
hating’s a pretty involved process. There’s no way of doing it but to learn the facts. The truth.”

They were five minutes away from the mushroom when the Captain finished his calculations. “That’s it, sir, that’s what happened.
It couldn’t have been an accident. All the way down, under power, those ships stayed within four percent of sonic speed, and tore themselves to pieces. And here’s something else. Radar says that from 32 kilometers on down they showed a different pip. As if they’d shut off that inertia field of theirs.”

“They’d have to, or they wouldn’t have any kind of supporting airflow over the wings! You can’t use an airfoil if the air can’t touch it! I guess for some reason their inertia field can’t be used near a strong gravitic field.”

“And Reger planned that approach, that way?”

“Looks like it. From thirty kilometers to the ground, at that speed … it was all over in fifteen seconds.”

“Reger,” muttered the pilot. He went back to the controls and switched off the automatics. “One of the radar pix showed Reger’s space-suit, Major,” he said. “Looks like he bailed out the same as Wain did—through the disposal chute.”

“He’s alive!”

“Depends.” The young man looked up at the Major. “You think that mob down there is going to wait while we compute velocities for ’em?”

“That’s a military setup, Captain. They’ll do what they’re told.”

“About
Reger
, sir?

He turned his attention to the controls, and the Major went thoughtfully back to his seat. As they whistled down to the airstrip behind the cordon, he suddenly thumped his knee. “Light gases, high temperature—of
course
those bugs never heard of a shock wave at what we call sonic speed! You see? You see?”

“No,” she said. He understood that she did not need to see. She knew.

Maybe, he thought, the female of the species extrapolates without realizing it, and intuitive faith is nothing more than high-velocity computation.

He kept the thought to himself.

The Major walked quietly through the mob, listening. There were soldiers and Air Force men, security officers and civilians. Behind
him, the cordon, tightening, reducing the strip between themselves and the radioactive area. In the cordon, a human getaway: FBI, CIA, G-2, screening those inside. The Major listened.

“He’s got to be inside somewhere.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get the—”

“Hey George, tell you what. We get our hands on him, let’s keep our mouth shut. Army gets him, it’s a trial and all kind of foofaraw. This bunch gets him, they’ll tear him to pieces right
now
.”

“So?”

“Too quick. You and me, one or two other guys from around here—”

“I hear you.”

From somewhere back of the cordon, a tremendous huffing and puffing, and a casual, enormous voice, “Mike hot, Lieutenant,” and then the Psycho Warfare officer: “All right, Reger. We know you didn’t mean it. No one here will hurt you. You’ll get fair treatment all down the line. We understand why you did it. You’ll be safe. We’ll take care of you. Just step right up.” And an interruption and a “Oh, sorry, Sir,” and clearly through the amplifier, “You don’t coddle a son of a bitch like that while I’m around.” Then, harshly, “Reger, step the hell up here and take your medicine. You got it coming to you and you’re going to get it sooner or later.”

The Major heard part of a suggestion about an operation with a blunt nailfile, and walked away from it into “You nail one loop of gut to a tree, see, and walk him around until—”

The space-suit hung grotesquely by its neck against a shattered barn wall. A scraggly man in filthy coveralls stood by a pile of rocks and chunks of four-by-four. “Just three for a dime, gents, and the ladies free. Step right up and clobber the son. Limber up for the real thing. I thank you sir: Hit him hard.” A corporal hefted a round stone and let fly. It hit the space-suit in the groin and the crowd roared. The scraggly man chittered, “One on the house, one on the house!” and handed over another stone.