The Perfect Host (7 page)

“Will you explain magnefilm, please, Doctor?”

“Certainly, Captain. It was developed through research into the rather wide variation in dielectric characteristics of the early plastics—the styrenes, ureas, and so on. Molecular arrangement was altered in various plastics until a transparent conductor was developed. It was not very far from that to the production of a plastic with a remarkably high magnetic density. Once this was made in a transparent, strong, pliable form, it was simple to make photographic film of it. The audio impulses are impressed directly upon the film, as in any magnetic tape system.”
And it was invented for 8-mm. movie addicts, so that they could have sound film
, added his thought.
Now it’s a secret weapon
.

“The purpose of the Spy-Eye, of course, is to pick up short-range transmissions—vertically beamed walkie-talkies, line-of-sight FM messages, and the like. Since these are usually well beyond the range of the enemy’s listening posts, they are seldom coded. Therefore, with this device, we have access to a wealth of intelligence that has so far been regarded as unreachable.”

He signaled the projection room. The screen came to life. During the test, the various officers had spoken into the microphones of several AM and FM transmitters spotted within a quarter-mile. Unerringly, after a few spoken words, the screen showed the sources and their identification numerals, painted on large white signboards.

“In enemy territory,” remarked the doctor dryly, “we shall probably have to do without the boards.” There was polite laughter. “If you will remember, gentlemen, the selector was next set to pick up something on the broadcast band.”

The screen, blank, gave an agonized groan. Then a child’s voice said clearly, “What’s the matter, Daddy? Has that old acid indigestion got you down again?” “Owoo,” said the man’s voice. The screen suddenly showed, far below, the tall towers of a transmitting antenna. “Honey child, you’d better go for the doctor. Your old Daddy’s real poorly.” “No need to be,” rejoined the angelic little voice. “I took my ice-cream money and bought you a package of Bubble-Up, the fastest relief known to the mind of a man. It is only ten cents at the nearest drugstore. Here. Take one and drink this glass of water I brought you.”
Glug-glug. Clink!
“Ah-h! I’m a new man!” “Now Daddy, here’s my report card. I’m sorry. It’s all D’s.” “Ha ha ha! Think nothing of it honey child. Here—take this dollar. Take five dollars! Take all the other kids down for a treat!”

“Cut!” said Dr. Simmons. “I would consider this conclusive evidence, gentlemen, that the Spy-Eye can spot a target for bombing.”

Amid laughter and applause, the lights came on. The observers pressed forward to shake the physicist’s hand. Colonel Simmons stood by until the rest went to a table, where a technician was explaining the flight-record tapes and the course and radio-band preselector mechanisms.

“Muscles, it’s fine. Just fine! How about duplication? I know
there can be no leaks out of here, but do you think
they
will be able to figure it out quickly enough to get something like it into production?”

Dr. Simmons rubbed his chin. “That’s hard to say. Aside from the fuel and magnefilm, there’s nothing new about the device except for the fact that old components are packed into a new box. The fuel can be duplicated, and magnefilm—well, that’s a logical development.”

“Well,” said the colonel, “it can’t matter too much. I mean, even if they have it already. We can blanket the earth with those things. There needn’t be a single spot on the globe unobserved. The Spy-Eye doesn’t have to detect radio alone, does it?”

“Lord, no! It could be built to seek infrared, or radioactivity, or even sound, though we’d have to tune the jets acoustically for that. The magnefilm’s audio could pick our own directional beams and get a radio fix on anything we wanted it to take pictures of. The camera could be triggered to a time mechanism, or to anything that radiated or vibrated. So could the hunting mechanism.”

“Oh, fine,” said the colonel again. “There’ll be no power on earth that can’t be spotted and smashed within hours, once we get enough of these things out.”

“No power on earth,” nodded his brother. “You have every reason to be confident.”
And no reason to be right
, his silent voice added.

The first signs of the war to come were in all the papers. But hardly anyone read them. They were inside, with small headings. The front pages were more exciting that day. They screamed of new international incidents. The tabloids were full of a photo-series of the mobbing of a bearded man called Koronsky. (He was English—Somerset—and spoke the buzzing brogue of his shire. His name had been Polish, three generations before. He was wearing a beard because of scars caused by a severe attack of barber’s itch. These facts were not touched upon.) An Estonian student was wrapped in a U.N. banner and stoned for having sung “Ol’ Man River” at a folk-song recital. An astonishing number of tea-leaf readers were hired overnight by restaurants in which beef Stroganoff suddenly became gypsy goulash.

The small notices in the papers dealt with the startling discovery by three experimenters, one in France and two in Canada, of a new noise in Jansky radiation, that faint hiss of jumbled radio frequencies which originates from somewhere in interstellar space. It was a triple blast of sound, each one two and two-fifth seconds in length, with two and two-fifths seconds of silence between the signals. They came in groups, three blasts each, a few fractions of a second under ten minutes apart. The phenomenon continued for seven months, during which time careful measurements showed an appreciable increase in amplitude. Either the signal source was getting stronger, or it was getting nearer, said the pundits.

During these seven months, and for longer, the Simmons brothers lapsed into their usual “got to write to him sometime” pattern in regard to each other. Both were busy. The colonel’s life was a continuous round of conferences, research reports, and demonstrations, and the load on the physicist became heavier daily, as the demands of the Board of Strategy, stimulated by its research, its intelligence section, and the perilous political situation, reached his laboratories.

The world was arming feverishly. A few historians and philosophers, in their very few objective moments, found time to wonder what the political analysis of the future would have to say about the coming war. The First War was a war of economic attrition; the Second was too, but it was even more an ideological war. This incipient unpleasantness had its source in ideology, but, at the eve of hostilities, the battle of philosophies had been relegated to the plane of philosophy. In practice, each side—or rather,
all sides
—had streamlined themselves into fighting machines, with each part milled to its function, and all control centralized. The necessary process of kindling fire to fight fire had resulted in soviets where the proletariat did not dictate, and in democracies where the people did not rule. Indeed, since the increase of governmental efficiency everywhere had resulted in a new high in production of every kind, the economic and political aspects of the war had been all but negated, and it began to appear as though the war would be fought purely for the sake of fighting a war, and simply because the world was prepared for it.

On December 7, as if to perpetuate the memory of infamy, the first bomb was dropped.

It was
dropped
. It wasn’t a self-guided missile. It wasn’t a planted mine. It wasn’t dust or bio, either; it was a blast-bomb, and it was a honey.

They got the ship that dropped it, too. A proximity-fused rocket with an atomic warhead struck it a glancing blow. That happened, spectacularly, over Lake Michigan. The ship, or what was left of it, crashed near Minsk.

It was Dr. Simmons’ urgent suggestion which accounted for the ship. It had not been seen, but it had been spotted on radar on December 6, when it circled the earth twice. It was far inside Roche’s Limit; the conclusion was obvious that it was self-powered. Simmons calculated its orbit, knowing that at that velocity it could not alter its course appreciably in the few hours it took to pass and repass any given point. The proximity rocket was launched on schedule, not on detection. Unfortunately, on its way to its rendezvous with fission, the ship dropped its bomb.

And when that happened, the world drew itself together like—like—Ever see a cat lying sleeping, spread out, relaxed and then some sound, some movement will put that cat on guard? It may not move a muscle, but it also isn’t relaxed any more; it isn’t asleep anymore. It has changed its pose from a slumber to a crouch, and you know that only because of the new shape of its eyes. The world did that.

But nobody started throwing bombs.

“Cool down, soldier-boy.”

“Cool down, he says,” fumed the colonel. “This is … this …” His words died into a splutter.

“I know, I know,” said Dr. Simmons, trying not to grin. “You figured, and you figured, and you read all sorts of fantastic things and swallowed your incredulity and planned as if these things actually could happen. You worked all practicable statistical possibilities, and a lot more besides. And it has to start like this.”

“Everybody
knows
Japan is neutral ground, and will stay that way. There’s no
point
in it!” the colonel all but wailed. “The bomb didn’t even land on a city, or even a depot! Just knocked off the top of a mountain in Makabe country on Honshu. There isn’t a blasted thing there.”

“I’d say there isn’t an unblasted thing there at the moment,” chuckled his brother. “Stop telling me how you feel and let’s have what you know. Was the bomb traced?”

“Of course it was traced! We have recording radar all over. It came from that ship, all right. Muscles, it was a dinky little thing, that bomb. About like a two-hundred-fifty-pounder. But what a blossom.

“I heard the news report on it. Also seismographics. They had trouble picking up the Hiroshima bomb. They didn’t have any with this one. It ran about seven hundred and forty-odd times as powerful.

“Officially,” said the colonel, “it was well over nine hundred at the source.”

“Well, well,” said Dr. Simmons, in the tone of an orchid fancier noting red spots on a new hybrid. “Disruption, hm-m-m?”

“Disruption, and how,” rejoined the colonel. “Look, Muscles. We’ve got disruption bombs, too—you know that. But just as a fission bomb blows away most of its fissionable material before it can be effective, so a disruption bomb blasts off that much more. We have bombs that make the old Baker-Day bomb look like a wet firecracker, sure; but the best we can do is about four hundred per cent. I thought that was plenty; but this thing—Anyhow, Muscles, I just don’t get it. Who dropped it? Why? Great day in the morning, man! An egg like that would’ve thrown us into a ground-loop if it had landed on any one of our centers. No power on earth would be that careless. To miss, I mean. On the other hand, we can’t even be sure it wasn’t a wild throw by one of our allies. Nowadays, you know everything, and you know nothing; you know it ahead of time, or you know it too late.”

“My, my,” said Dr. Simmons mildly. “What about the ship?”

“The ship,” repeated the colonel, and his face reddened again. “I
just can’t believe that ship. Who built it? Where? We have everything on earth spotted that’s worth spotting. Muscles, that thing was fifteen hundred feet long according to the radar.”

“Anybody photograph it?”

“Apparently not. I mean, lots of radar-directed cameras shot where it was, but it didn’t show, except as a blur.”

“How do you know it was that big, then? You know what ‘window’ does to radar, for example. I don’t know just how, but that could be camouflage of some sort.”

“That’s what we thought at first. Until we saw the hole in the ground where it hit. That thing was
big!
”

“Saw it? I understand the Russians cordoned off the area and threatened mass bombing if anyone came smelling around.”

“A thing called a Spy-Eye,” said the colonel, “with a telescopic lens—”

“Oh,” said the physicist. “Well—how much of the ship was left?”

“Not much. It exploded when it hit, of course. Apparently most of it was vaporized over Michigan. The Spy-Eye pix show something being dug up, though.”

“Wish I had a piece of it,” said Dr. Simmons longingly. “A thorough quantitative analysis would very soon show where it came from.”

“We won’t get it,” said the colonel positively. “Not without the Russkis’ cooperation anyway.”

“Could that happen?”

“Certainly not! They’re not stupid! They’ll play this thing for all it’s worth. If they can figure out where it came from, they’ll know and we won’t—one up for them in the war of nerves. If they can’t, and the sample’s worthless to them, we can’t know it until we try, and we want to try. So they’ll hold out for some concession or other. Whatever it is will cost us plenty.”

“Leroy,” said the physicist slowly, “have you heard about the so-called signals in the Jansky bands?”

“I know what you’re driving at,” snorted the colonel. “The answer is no. But really,
no
. That’s no ship from outer space. We fixed on
these signals months ago, and had even the 200-incher and a whole battery of image orthicons on the indicated direction. The signal strength increased, but nothing could be seen.”