The Fourth Murray Leinster Read online

  Crawford said deliberately:

  “We three have had a preview of what Earth will be like before too long! I wonder if it would do any good on Earth to show them what we’ve found?”

  “It’s being argued on the ship,” said Nolan. “Some say we’d better suppress the whole business.”

  Crawford considered.

  “The Coms aren’t a very believing people,” he said slowly. “But our people are. If we report this, our people will believe it. But the Coms can tell their people it is lies. Our people will want peace more than ever if they see what a war will mean. But the big-shot Coms will just take that as a reason to demand some more concessions, and more, and more. Like demanding to build a base on the moon….”

  “I’m going to bed,” said Nolan. He added ironically, “I hope you have pleasant dreams!”

  * * * *

  He did go to bed, but he slept very badly. The others slept no better. All three of them were up before sunrise. They saw it. And to Nolan the coming of the light seemed somehow like an eager arrival of the new day, anxious to see if some tiny thread of green somewhere lifted proudly from brown earth to greet it. But none ever did. Or would.

  “We should be through by noon,” said Nolan.

  They set out in the jeep. They abandoned the camp. They would abandon the jeep, too, presently, when they went up the ship that waited in orbit.

  They headed west, and Kelley took over the microwave set that sent a wide-fanning beacon skyward. The Lotus was in orbit now. Every ninety minutes she was overhead. She’d completed the mapping of the planet. Every square foot of its surface had been photographed from aloft.

  They drove. The ungainly inflated bags which took the place of wheels rolled unweariedly, at first over dew-wetted dust and then over the minor gullies which, so near the ice-cap, were not yet gorges. They went on for twenty miles, and the abomination of desolation was all about them.

  “We shouldn’t tell about this back home,” said Kelley abruptly. “If the Com people saw it, they’d know that no—” his tone was ironic—”national aspiration justified the risk of this. But they wouldn’t see it. And our people might look at it and decide that anything was better than this. But it isn’t.”

  Nolan said nothing. He didn’t believe that the discovery of this dead planet could be kept a secret for very long.

  The mountains drew back to northward and the desert took their place. The Lotus went by overhead, unseen. But it gave a message to Kelley.

  “We’re on course,” he reported. “The ship just said so. Ten miles more.”

  * * * *

  In ten miles they came upon a city, or what had been one. It was partly buried in the omnipresent dust. That is, they saw part of a city’s remnants showing in the mile wide trough between dunes hundreds of feet high. There were other remnants between two other dunes, and still more in yet other troughs beyond. Structures of stone had existed, and portions of them remained. They had cast shadows the Lotus had discovered from aloft. The stone remains were abraded by the dust-carrying winds of a hundred centuries. Their roofs had been crushed when monster dunes formed over them. They had been reexposed to the sunshine when winds moved the dunes away. There was no metal left. No glass. No artifacts. They had been buried tens or hundreds of times, and uncovered as many. There was nothing left but skeletons of stone which cast angular shadows, though their fragments were rounded by centuries of patient wind erosion.

  It had been a very great city, but Nolan made the only observation that could tell anything about its occupants.

  “The builders of this city,” he said tonelessly, “used doors about the same size we do.”

  And that was all they could find out. Presently:

  “New York will be like this eventually,” said Crawford. “And Chicago. And everywhere else.”

  Kelley spoke suddenly into the microwave transmitter. He said sharply to the ship, invisibly overhead:

  “Yes! Send down the drone! We’ve had it!”

  * * * *

  The Council-member from Brazil made an impassioned speech in the supposedly secret meeting of the Western Defense Alliance. He pointed out with bitter factuality that no past yielding to Com demands had gained anything. Further yielding would be suicidal. He made a fierce demand that the WDA present a united front against this fresh diplomatic pressure. That it refuse, flatly and firmly and with finality, to make a single concession on a single point. It was a good speech. It was an excellent speech. It and others like it should have been made a long time before. The Coordinator of the Western Defensive Alliance nodded at its end.

  “I agree,” he said, “with every word the representative from Brazil has spoken. I think we all agree. The practical thing to do, of course, is to send a combined expeditionary force to maintain the independence of Sierra Leone. This force should be formed of contingents from every Western Defense Alliance nation, and it should have orders to prevent the entry of Com troops into Sierra Leone territory. I do not think that anything less will prevent the extinction of another member nation of the Western Defense Alliance. Will any Council member propose such action for a vote?”

  There was a pause. Then babblings. It would mean war! It would mean atomic war! Tens or hundreds of millions of human beings would die over a matter affecting less than two hundred thousand! It was ridiculous! Public opinion—

  The Council meeting ended with no vote upon the matter. Without even a proposal on which a vote could be taken.

  Two days later, Com troops from one of the African Com nations moved in and occupied Sierra Leone. A great many of its citizens were shot, some for opposing the new state of affairs, but some seemingly just on general principles.

  III

  The Lotus went on toward Planet Five, leaving a world which should have been alive and wasn’t, to go to a world which should not exist, but did. On the way there was argument which became embittered. In theory, the discoveries made by a Survey ship became automatically available to all the world. But the discovery of Three in the state it was in would have political results on Earth.

  It was—and is—a fact that nobody really believes in death until he sees a dead man. And nobody can believe in the destruction of a planet unless he’s seen the corpse or color photographs of it. But that was precisely what the Lotus had to carry back to Earth. The WDA nations would see those pictures and read the facts. They would believe in atomic war and the complete sterilization of a world. The Com nations would not see the pictures. They would continue to believe that the West—the WDA—was decadent and enslaved to tyrannical warmongers, and obviously could not resist the splendid armed forces of the Com association. And they wouldn’t really believe there could be more than isolated, crazy resistance to their valiant troops. So they’d back their leaders with enthusiasm, and the Western peoples at most would be merely desperate.

  The Lotus arrived at Planet Four—which by the Lauriac laws should have been similar to Mars. It was almost its twin. It had ice-caps of hoarfrost and its atmosphere was thin and barely contaminated by oxygen. A base could be maintained here, of course, provided one had a source of supply. A base here, incidentally, would have much the value of the Com base on Luna.

  The Lotus did not find that base. It found no cities or signs of settlement. But it did find a bombcrater, miles across and it seemed miles deep. There was an accumulation of reddish dust at its bottom, trapped from the thin winds that blew over this half-frozen world.

  The Lotus went on to Planet Five.

  The sun, so far out, was very small and its warmth was barely perceptible. But there was vegetation. The surface temperature was above freezing. The Lauriac Laws had predicted that the central metallic core would be small, and the greater part of its mass should be stony. The radioactives in Earth’s thin rocky crust produce a constant flow of heat from the interior to the surface. It is considered that it is enough heat to melt a fraction of an inch of ice in a year. On this planet, with a crust many hundreds instead
of mere scores of miles thickness, the internal heat was greater. The world was not frozen, and life existed here. It was a pallid, unnatural sort of life which had developed to live in starlight with a feeble assist from a very bright nearby star which happened to be its sun.

  There was a base here, too. Kelley located it when he found a resonant return of certain frequencies from the ground. It was not a reflection, but resonance. And so they found the base.

  It had been built by engineers the humans on the Lotus could only admire. There were gigantic doors which could admit the Lotus herself. They were rusted shut and had to be opened with explosives. There were galleries and tunnels and laboratories. There were missile launchers and missile-storage chambers. There was a giant dome housing a telescope men had not even dreamed of equalling. It was not an optical telescope.

  Ultimately they found a mortuary, where the members of the garrison were placed when they died. The Lotus was not equipped for the archeological and technological studies the base called for. Its function was to scout out things for especially qualified expeditions to study. And, of course, there was the political situation back on Earth….

  * * * *

  On the fourth day after landing, the skipper sent for Nolan. The skipper sweated a little.

  “Nolan,” he said querulously, “we’ve found something.”

  “A bug-eyed monster?” asked Nolan dourly.

  “No.” The skipper mopped his forehead. “Back yonder, on Three, you took a few looks from twenty million miles and figured out what had happened there. We’d have worked it out eventually, but you saw it at once. You’re lucky that way. Now we’ve found something. It’s an—instrument. We’re short on time. Come with me and make some guesses.”

  He led the way, explaining jerkily as he went. The thing was in a room by itself, with its own air system and apparently its own food store. It was inside four successive systems of locked doors—all of them inches-thick stainless steel. It was intended that the last door could be opened from inside. It was evidently the very heart of the armed base on Planet Five. Anything sealed up like that would have to be either incredibly valuable or incredibly dangerous.

  Nolan followed through the shattered doors, and presently the skipper made a helpless gesture. There was the discovery. It looked more like an old-fashioned telescope than anything else. It had a brass barrel, and it was very solidly mounted, and there were micro-micro adjustments to point it with almost infinite exactitude. It had been sealed in a completely air-tight environment, and what moisture was present had combined with other metals. It wasn’t rusted. There was an eyepiece, placed in an improbable position, and there was a trigger. It wasn’t like a gun-trigger, but it couldn’t have any other purpose. There was no porthole for it to fire through. The compartment in which it had been sealed was deep underground.

  Nolan said uneasily:

  “It’s a weapon, of course.”

  “Of course!” said the skipper. He mopped his forehead. “I—I think we should take it home. It might make a difference to WDA. But we don’t know what it does! It could be a mistake….”

  Nolan walked around it. He saw that it could be aimed in almost any direction. But not quite. There was a direction that stops prevented it from pointing to. Nolan said:

  “What’s in that direction?”

  The skipper jumped. When Nolan asked the question he began to suspect many answers. He said in a stricken voice, “That’s where the missiles were launched—and where the others are stored.”

  Nolan stared at the thing. It looked hateful. It had the savage feel of a frozen snarl.

  “The power-pile?”

  The skipper nodded. He mopped his face again.

  “Right alongside. We figured they wanted to shield the rest of the base from radioactives.”

  Nolan said carefully:

  “It could be that they wanted to shield the radioactives from something in the base. Maybe something that would act on radioactives is involved.” He said painfully, “Men can’t change the rate of fission except by building up a critical mass. But maybe—possibly bug-eyed monsters could.”

  The skipper perspired. He’d have worked out the same thing in the long run, but Nolan saw it right away. He went away and got the ship’s engineers. They brought an X-ray for finding flaws in metal. They took pictures of the inwards of the brass-barreled instrument in its place. They traced two separate, incomprehensible circuits. But they were separate.

  * * * *

  At long last the skipper nodded permission for Nolan to try the eyepiece, to see what it showed with heavy metal and much soil and vegetation atop it. They taped the trigger so it could not be moved. The controls affecting the eyepiece they left free. The skipper almost dripped sweat as Nolan turned on the eyepiece circuit, peering in.

  For a long time he saw nothing whatever. Then a tiny disk moved slowly into the eyepiece’s field. It was barely larger than a point. Nolan moved one of the eyepiece controls. The disk enlarged. It enlarged again. A tiny red dot appeared in the center of the field of vision. As the disk enlarged, the red dot grew larger and became a tiny red circle.

  Nolan fumbled. He shifted the position of the instrument with a micro-control. He moved the faintly glowing disk until it was enclosed in the red circle. He enlarged…. Presently the disk was very large, and the red circle ceased to enlarge. It enclosed only a part of the disk.

  Nolan felt cold chills down his spine. He swallowed and asked for the angular relationship of Planet Four to Three. The skipper sent someone to find it out. But Nolan had found Planet Four before the answer came. The first disk was in some fashion a representation of Planet Three—the Earthlike world which was dead. The second was a representation of Four. There was a bright spot near the equator of Four—the equator being located by the flattening of the poles. It would be just about where a gigantic atom-bomb crater still existed.

  Nolan drew back and took a deep breath.

  “Apparently,” he said unsteadily, “this eyepiece detects radioactives, converting something that I can’t imagine into visible light after it’s passed through a few feet of metal and a good many more of dirt. There’s a red ring which makes me think of a gun-sight. And there’s a trigger. Skipper, would you send half an ounce or so of ship-fuel out to space in a drone? I think we’re going to have to pull this trigger.”

  The skipper wrung his hands. He went away. And Nolan stood staring at nothing in particular, appalled and sickened by the thoughts that came to him.

  Presently the skipper came back and mumbled that a drone was on the way up. Nolan searched for it with the eyepiece. He found it. The sensitivity of the eyepiece was practically beyond belief. What it worked on—what it transmuted and amplified to light—was wholly beyond his imagination.

  The drone went four thousand miles out. Nolan absently asked for somebody to be posted out of doors, watching the sky. He got the vivid spark that was the half ounce of ship-fuel in the center of the red luminous ring. He turned his eyes away and pulled the trigger.

  There was no sound. There was no vibration. There was no indication in the underground room that anything at all had happened. There was only a violent flare in the eyepiece, from which Nolan had just drawn back.

  * * * *

  Someone came shouting from out of doors that there had been an intolerable flash of brilliance in the sky.

  A few moments later the word came that the drone control board indicated that the drone had ceased to exist.

  * * * *

  The Com Ambassador sighed a little when he saw the expression on the Coordinator’s face. Interviews with the titular head of the alliance of all Western nations became increasingly a strain on his politeness. But the Coordinator said grimly:

  “I think I can guess what you’re here to tell me!”

  The Com Ambassador said politely:

  “It is painful to—ah—beat around the bush. May I speak plainly?”

  “Do,” said the Coordinator.
r />   “Our base on the Moon,” said the Ambassador with a fine air of frankness, “some time ago reported military preparations on Earth, among the WDA nations. Those preparations could have no purpose other than an unwarned attack upon us. We felt it necessary, then, to take countermeasures of preparation only. We modified the plans for our moon base to have it contain not only the telescopes and such observational equipment, but to have an adequate armament of missiles. It is now so armed.”

  The Coordinator whitened a little, but he did not look surprised.

  “Well?”

  “I have to inform you,” said the Com Ambassador, “that any military action directed against any Com nation, or its troops, or the Union of Com Republics, will be met by atomic bombardment from the moon as well as—ah—our standard military establishments. This, of course, does not mean war. To the contrary, we hope that it will end the possibility of war. We trust that all causes of tension between our nations will one by one be removed, and that an era of perpetual peace and prosperity will follow.”

  The Coordinator’s lips twisted in an entirely mirthless smile.

  “Military action against Com troops,” he observed, “means resistance to invasion or occupation, doesn’t it?”

  “It would be wiser,” said the Ambassador carefully, “to protest than to resist. At least, so it seems to me.”

  The Coordinator of the Western Defense Alliance said:

  “Tell me something confidentially, Mr. Ambassador. How long before you expect—no. You wouldn’t answer that. Ah! How long do you think it will be before I am shot?”

  The Com Ambassador said politely:

  “I would hesitate to guess.”

  * * * *

  The Lotus started back to Earth with the enigmatic weapon fastened firmly in its cargo hold. Great pains had been taken to keep it from being knocked or shocked or battered in its transfer to the ship. Firmly anchored, Nolan had insisted that the stops, which prevented it from being aimed below the horizon or toward the radioactives in the base, be adjusted so it could not be aimed at the Lotus’s own engines or fuel-stores. There were no missiles to worry about, of course.