Bright Segment (16 page)

Gravity, on a guess, is about one-sixth Earth. The atmosphere’s hot. Seems to be light gases. I cracked my oxy relief valve and struck a spark on it with the back of my glove, and that was pretty spectacular. Hydrogen for sure. Something else that gives an orange cast to the flame. You figure it. I wish I knew as much as Reger. Though I wouldn’t use it like he’s doing
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The compartment I’m in is altogether bare. There’s a transparent oval port on one bulkhead. No frame; looks just as if the hull material was made transparent just there. Looking in at an angle I can see she’s double-hulled, and there’s some sort of optical trickery that makes it possible to see almost directly forward and aft, although I’d say the outside of the port was flush with the skin. I can’t tell you a thing about the drive. I barely saw them before they had us boxed, and then all hell broke loose. I did get a look while we were adrift, though, and some of the ships were maneuvering. It isn’t jets; that’s for sure. They can take off like a bullet and stop as if they’d hit a wall. They have some way of canceling inertia. Or most of it. Riding inside is pretty rough, but coming to a dead stop in two seconds from a thousand k.p.h. or better should butter you all over the walls instead of just slamming you into the bulkhead like it does. They can’t operate in an atmosphere without wings, and they don’t have wings. Yet
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I counted twenty-six ships—sixteen big ones, cruisers I guess you’d call them; two-fifty to three hundred meters long, perfect cylinders. And ten small ones, oblate spheres, thirty meters or so in diameter. Destroyers, maybe. Fast as hell, even compared to the big ones. I think my count’s accurate, and you needn’t expect any more than that. But that’s plenty, with what they can do
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When they brought us in first they slung me in here and nothing happened that I knew about, for sixteen hours. Then that first bug came in through a sort of pucker in the wall that got transparent and spread out and let him through and then bing! the wall was solid again. I guess I was pretty paralyzed for a while, looking it over and then wondering which way it was going to jump. Then I saw what
it was carrying on one side, the skirt-thing curled up like a sort of shelf. It was Minelli’s leg lying there. That tattoo, you know, the girl holding the space-ship. I could see the top end of the femur, where it’s supposed to fit into the hip-joint. That leg wasn’t cut off. The joint had been torn apart
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I guess I went a little crazy. I had my antenna-wrench off the belt-rack and was throwing it almost before I knew what I was doing. I missed. Didn’t allow for the gravity, I guess. It went high. The bug sort of humped itself and next thing I knew I couldn’t move. I could, inside the space-suit, but the suit was like a single iron casting
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The bug slid over to me and hitched up a little—that’s when I saw all those little legs—and got everything off my belt—torch, stillson, antenna-reel, everything that would move. It didn’t touch my tanks—I guess it knew already about the tanks. From Reger, busy-boy Reger. It took the whole bundle over to the outer bulkhead and all of a sudden there was a square hole there. It dropped my stuff in and the hole went away, and out through the port I could see my stuff flash away from the ship, going like hell. So that’s how I found out about the disposal chute
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The bug slid away to the other wall and I was going to give it a shot from my heel-jets, but somehow I had sense enough not to. I didn’t know what damage they’d do, and I might be able to use ’em later. If anyone’s hearing this, I did
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About three weeks later I had another visit from one of ’em, but I charged it as soon as it was inside. It slid away through the air and then froze me again. I guess after that they gave me up as a bad job
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They don’t feed me, and my converters are pretty low. I’ve rationed my air and water all I could, but it’s past conversion now, without a complete recharge, and I’m not likely to get that. I was hungry, like I never knew hunger could be, after my emergency rations were gone, but I don’t feel that any more. Just weak
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This whole time, the ships have been busy. We’re in the Belt, I’d guess, without instruments, around 270-20-95. Check those coordinates and hunt a spiral from that center—I’m pretty sure we’re near that position. Put infra-red on it; even if they’ve gone by then, there should be residual heat in these rocks out here. They’ve leeched
onto a big one and it’s practically gone now. They make long fast passes back and forth like a metal-planer. I can’t see a ray or beam or anything, but the surface flows molten as the ships pass. Mining. I guess they filter the slag some way and distill the metals out. I wouldn’t know. I’m a navigator. All I can think of is those ships making passes like that over the Golden Gate and Budapest and LaCrosse, Wisconsin
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I found out how to work the disposal chute. Just lean against it. It’s an air-lock with some sort of heavy coils around it, inside, I guess to project refuse away from the ship so it won’t orbit. They must’ve known I was fooling with it but nobody stopped me. They knew I couldn’t get anywhere. Even if they knew about my heel-jets, they probably knew I couldn’t get far enough with them to make no never mind
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Well, six hours ago a sort of dark spot began to show on the inboard bulkhead. It swelled up until it was a knob about the size of your two fists, shiny black, with some kind of distortion field around it so it was muzzy around the edges. For a while I couldn’t figure it at all. I touched it and then took hold of it, and I realized it was vibrating around five hundred cycles, filling my suit with the note. I got my helmet onto it right away
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The note went on and then changed pitch some and finally spread out into a noise like a forty-cycle carrier, and something started modulating it, and next thing it was saying my name, flat and raspy, no inflection. An artificial voice, for sure. “Wain,” it said, clearing itself up as it went along “Wain, Wain.”

So I kept my head tight against it and yelled, “Wain here.”

It was quiet for a while, just the carrier, and then the voice came in again. I won’t bother you with exactly what it sounded like. The language was rugged but clear, like “Wain we no have planet you have planet we take you help.”

There was a lot of yelling back and forth until I got the picture. And what I want to tell you most is this: once in a while when I listened real carefully I heard another voice, murmuring away. Reger—that I’ll swear. It was as if this voder, or voice machine, was being run by one of the bugs and Reger was telling it what to say but they
wouldn’t trust him to talk directly to me
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Anyway, the bugs had a planet and something had happened to it, I don’t know what; but Earth was as close as anything they’d seen to what they want. They figure to land and establish a base and set up machinery to take over. They had spores that would grow in our sea-water and get rid of most of the oxygen, I guess by combining it with all the elements in the ocean that could take it. Meanwhile, they’d convert rocks to put whatever else they needed into the atmosphere
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So damn cold-blooded … it wasn’t us they were after. You clear a patch of wood, you’re not trying especially to dispossess the squirrels and the termites. That just happens while you work
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For a while I hoped we could maybe do something, but item by item they knocked that out of my head. Reger’d told ’em everything. You look up that guy’s record. He knows atomics and ship design and chemistry and about every damn thing, and it’s all theirs. You know that field, or whatever, that they paralyzed my suit with; it’s an application of the inertia-control their ships have. You know, if you throw an A-bomb at that field, the bomb won’t hit and it won’t fire? You couldn’t even throw rocks at it—they’d have no inertia at contact. They know we have no space fleet, only a half-dozen exploring scouts, and the moon-shuttle
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We’re done, that’s all
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So I asked what’s the proposition, and they said they could use me. They didn’t really need me, but they could use me. They said I could have anything I wanted on Earth, and all the slaves I could put to work. Slaves. I heard Reger give ’em the word. I’d have thirty, forty years of that before they all died off. I’d work under Reger. He was directing the landing for them. Designing wings for them to come in on, too—that’s what the mining was for, the wings. They’ll put the base down in a desert somewhere, and first thing anyone knows the oxygen will start to go. And even if you do see ’em come in, you won’t be able to touch ’em
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Maybe I shouldn’t even try to warn you. Maybe it’ll be better if you never know what hit you …

Reger, he … he’s … ah, stick to facts, Wain. Something makes
him hate Earth enough to … I don’t see even a coward doing a thing like this just to save his skin. He has to have some other reason
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The bump on the wall said, “Reger says work with him, you can trust.”

Yeah, I can trust. I told them what to do with their proposition and shove Reger along after it
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Now this is what I am going to do. Try, anyhow. My suit’s the only one with a tape recorder, and it’s internal. Could be that Reger doesn’t even know about it. What I’m going to do is wait until this ship starts paring away at the asteroid. It gets up quite a hell of a speed at each pass, more than you’d think, because of the inertialess field. At the sunward end of one pass, I’ll go out the chute. I’ll have the ship’s speed plus the throw-out coils in the chute
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I’ll gyro around to head for the sun. I’ve wired the heel-jet starter to my oxy supply. When the oxy stops flowing the jets’ll cut in. I hope by then I’ll be far enough away so they won’t detect me, or won’t bother with me. That’s something I won’t live to know about
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And I’ve wired the fuel gauge to my distress squealer. When the fuel’s all gone the squealer’ll cut in. There ought to be scouts out searching for my ship; maybe one will scoop me in
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We’re positioning over the rock now
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Maybe I won’t get through the chute. Maybe they’ll powder me before I get clear. Maybe they’ll pick up my jets when they cut in. Maybe they’ll hear the squealer when the jets are gone. So many maybes
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Don’t anybody call me a hero for doing this. I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it to Reger. That bastard Reger …

Jerry Wain here, over and out
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The Major lifted his head from the report. Maybe one day he would be able to read it without his eyes stinging like this.

He lifted the flimsies away to uncover his own transcript. Coldly it listed the pertinent facts of his interview with the traitor’s wife. He read them through again slowly, right through the last paragraph, which said:

SUMMATION: It is indicated that the subject is a brilliant but
twisted individual, and that early influences as noted, plus his mode of life, have induced a morbid fear of himself and a deep distrust of every human being, including his wife. His extrapolative ability plus his vivid imagination seem to have created a certainty in him that he had been betrayed, or that he certainly would be. His actions as reported by Wain are apparently motivated by vengeance—a vengeance against all humanity including even himself
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The talker hissed, and a voice said, “Major, the Colonel would like your report on the Reger interview.”

“Roger.” He caught it up, held it, then slid it into his autowriter and rapidly tapped out:

The undersigned wishes to stress the partial nature of the above report, based as it is on the statement of a man under serious strain. Further evidence might conceivably alter the conclusions as stated
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He signed it and added his rank and section, rolled it, canned it and slapped it into the pneumatic tube.

“Now what the hell did I do that for?” he asked himself. He knew what the answer was. He rose and went to the mirror in the corner by the water-cooler, and peered into it. He shook his head in disgust.

When the ships were sighted, Wain’s recording came out of the files and went straight to the wire services. One of the columnists said later that the ensuing roar from Earth all but moved the Moon out of its orbit. Suddenly, there was no such thing as a secret weapon anywhere. Suddenly, there was—for the time being—nothing that could be called a nation. There was only the thunder of panic, fear, and fury, and in each of these, the name of Reger, rolling in the hollows of the Himalayas, blasting through the wide streets of Buenos Aires and the alleys of London. They feared the alien, but they hated Reger.

Without Wain’s recording, the alien might have slipped close, or even landed, before the world was alerted. Without it, a general alarm certainly would have awaited some sort of identification. But Earth was as ready as three billion fierce, fearing, furious humans could make it in the brief time they had.

The ships came single file, faster than any man-made object had ever traveled. They were exactly what Wain had described—sixteen large cylinders, ten small spheres. They were in six flights, one behind the other, each but one composed of both types, and the other an ominous line of five of the heavies.

They bore straight in for Earth, their single file presenting the smallest possible profile to Earth radar. (Reger knew radar.) When every known law of spatial ballistics dictated that with that course, at that velocity, they must plunge straight into the planet, they decelerated and swung to take up an orbit—rather, a powered course—around the planet, just out of rocket interceptor range (which Reger knew).

And now their wings could be seen. Telefax and television, newspapers and government agencies researched their contours in minutes. They were familiar enough—a gull-wing design which one aeronautical engineer described as having “every characteristic that could be built into a wing.” Each wing, from root to tip, had its own reverse dihedral. Each was sharply tapered, and sharply swept back. Even the little spherical destroyers had them, along with a boom to support the butterfly tail. There was one Earth design almost exactly like it—an extremely stable large-plane airfoil for sub-sonic use. The designer: Wolf Reger.