Thunder and Roses (40 page)

What followed was the same as the previous showing, with one noticeable exception; the pipe came out in a twenty-foot length. Again the room buzzed. This time Jeremy held up his hand. “The greater length of the pipe is an advantage over these other methods, but not the greatest,” he said calmly. He threw the heater-control over again—

Without loading in another rod!

A twenty-foot length of pipe joined its predecessor.

Again he pulled the control, and again. Each time a twenty-foot pipe was produced, until six of them lay side by side on the floor. The air above them shimmered very slightly. They were uniform and perfect.

“Mr. Commissioner, I ask that space for shipment of pipe to Mars be allotted to my company because the stowage is as compact as any product on the market, because I can ship approximately nine point three times as much pipe per cube unit as my nearest competitor, and because I can deliver pipe per unit length at eleven per cent cheaper than anyone else on earth! And that in spite of the apparently prohibitively low bid of Miss Exeter’s most altruistic firm. Thank you, gentlemen.”

“Just a minute, young man!” said the Commissioner. “You have a most remarkable process. I—ah—hear comments to the effect that the pipe was concealed in the machine. Can you give some layman’s explanation of this extraordinary effect?”

Jeremy smiled as he glanced at the machine in front of him.

“Certainly, sir. My company, you may remember, secured a portion of the space allotted to pipe shipments during your last session, by devising the present method of nesting the smaller diameters of pipe inside the larger ones—a method which was not patentable, which my competitors were slow to discover, but quick to copy.

“In the present case, I very much fear that they have repeated
their lack of—if I may say it—logical thoroughness. You see, my pipe is still nested, one inside the other, six taking the space of one, and the whole compressed into the rods you see here.”

“You nest pipe of the same diameter?” said the Commissioner incredulously; and that odd, mad, detached part of Jeremy’s mind noticed hilariously that the oldster’s bright eyes blinked with repressed anger.

“Yes sir, I do, in effect. But it is a question of density. The inner pipe is a condensed plastic—a patented process, by the way. This plastic, while undergoing the “memorizing” phenomenon so beautifully explained by Miss Exeter, restores its original density as well as its original form. The inner pipe, then, is simply condensed more than the one which surrounds it, and so on until the six are nested. Then the whole is compressed, molded into rods of precisely the dimensions of those admirably compact ones produced by General Export.

“Now, when heat treated, the outer pipe returns to its original form and is automatically ejected from the machine. It has, of course, pre-heated the next pipe, which pre-heats the one after. It takes, actually, far less heat per unit length to restore my pipe than it does to restore the pipe of—ah—any of my competitors. A small advantage, however, and merely hair-splitting under the circumstances.”

“I feel you deserve many congratulations, Mr. Jedd. Purely as a matter of personal interest, might I ask how you came to discover such a remarkable effect?”

“Indeed you may, Mr. Commissioner. The process was developed by my brother on Mars. He enlisted the courtesy and kindness of a messenger to send me a sample. It was in the form of a compact—a lady’s compact—and when heat treated it separated into a plastic sheet which formed in script the words ‘I remember.’ ”

Jeremy grinned broadly. “It was some time before I realized that there was anything more to be learned from the sample, for the words covered the rest of it. When I put this—this message into my pocket, I saw the rest of the plastic and, guided by a hint in a rather cryptic verbal message concerning women and plastics, I again treated the sample. I got more script. It read, ‘Density Two.’ Then I knew what he was driving at. I treated it again and got ‘Density Three’ and still
again and got”—he smiled—“a length of pipe. After that it was little trouble for me to analyze the plastic and develop the condensing treatment—I beg your pardon. I think somebody had better get Miss Exeter a glass of water.…”

They met that evening, and perhaps it was by accident. She was standing in the shadow near his apartment building when he came home from the lab,

“Jerry?”

“Phyllis! I—I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? That’s what you say when you realize you did a wrong.

I don’t think you mean that. Isn’t it more of a kind of—pity?”

He did not deny it. He said, “What can I do for you?”

“I—I need a job now.”

He took her hand and drew her into the pale light. Her hand lay in his like something asleep. “I couldn’t give you a job, Phyl.”

“Yes, I know, I know. I have never been—faithful. Jerry, I haven’t been faithful to myself.”

“I don’t understand. You’ve always—”

“Always thought I could take ’em or leave ’em alone. Not so, Jeremy.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, that.” He squeezed her hand a little. “Your hands are soft. Maybe that’s part of the trouble, Phyl.”

“I think I know what you mean. There are jobs for me, but—”

“—not jobs for your wit or your wits.”

“I see. I think I can—get there, Jerry.”

“I know you can. Goodbye, Phyllis.”

“Goodbye, Jeremy.”

There is one job which centuries of human progress has not done away with. No one has developed a self-washing window. When one of mankind’s monuments to himself reaches a thousand feet into the air, and its windows must be washed, that washing is a job for a rare type of human. He must be strong, steady, and brave. He must live, away from his job, in ways which do not unfit him for it.

Jeremy was glad when he heard Phyllis was doing this work. He knew then what he had always guessed—that some day she would “get there.” He knew it in his heart.

C
URSING FORMALITY
, B
ELTER
loosened his tunic and slouched back in his chair. He gazed at each of the members of the Joint Solar Military Council in turn, and rasped: “You might as well be comfortable, because, so help me, if I have to chain you to this table from now until the sun freezes, I’ll run off this record over and over again until someone figures an angle. I never heard of anything yet, besides The Death, that couldn’t be whipped one way or another. There’s a weakness somewhere in this thing. It’s got to be on the record. So we’ll just keep at the record until we find it. Keep your eyes peeled and the hair out of your eyes. That goes for you too, Leess.”

The bottled Jovian shrugged hugely. The infrared sensory organ on its cephalothorax flushed as Belter’s words crackled through the translator. Glowering at the creature, Belter quenched a flash of sympathy. The Jovian was a prisoner in other things besides the bottle which supplied its atmosphere and gravity. Leess represented a disgraced and defeated race, and its position at the conference table was a hollow honor—a courtesy backed by heat and steel and The Death. But Belter’s glower did not change. There was no time, now, to sympathize with those whose fortunes of war were all bad ones.

Belter turned to the orderly and nodded. A sigh, compounded of worry and weariness, escaped the council as one man. The lights dimmed, and again the record appeared on the only flat wall of the vast chamber.

First the astronomical data from the Plutonian Dome, showing the first traces of the Invader approaching from the direction of the Lyran Ring—Equations, calculations, a sketch, photographs. These were dated three years back, during the closing phases of the Jovian War. The Plutonian Dome was not serviced at the time, due to the emergency. It was a completely automatic observatory, and its
information was not needed during the interplanetary trouble. Therefore it was not equipped with instantaneous transmissions, but neatly reeled up its information until it could be visited after the war. There was a perfectly good military observation base on Outpost, the retrograde moon of Neptune, which was regarded as quite adequate to watch the Solar System area. That is, there
had
been a base there—

But, of course the Invader was well into the System before anyone saw the Pluto records, and by that time—

The wall scene faded into the transcript of the instantaneous message received by Terran HQ, which was rigged to accept any alarm from all of the watch posts.

The transcript showed the interior of the Neptunian military observatory, and cut in apparently just before the Sigmen heard the alarm. One was sprawled in a chair in front of the finder controls; the other, a rangy lieutenant with the burned skin of his Martian Colonial stock, stiffened, looked up at the blinking “General Alarm” light as the muted, insistent note of the “Stations” bell began to thrum from the screen. The sound transmission was very good; the councilmen could distinctly hear the lieutenant’s sharp intake of breath, and his voice was quite clear as he rapped:

“Colin! Alarm. Fix!”

“Fix, sir,” said the enlisted man, his fingers flying over the segmented controls. “It’s deep space, sir,” he reported as he worked. “A Jovian, maybe—flanking us.”

“I don’t think so. If what’s left of their navy could make any long passes at all, you can bet it would be at Earth. How big is it?”

“I haven’t got … oh, here it is, sir,” said the e.m. “An object about the size of a Class III-A Heavy.”

“Ship?”

“Don’t know, sir. No heat radiation from any kind of jets. And the magnetoscope is zero.”

“Get a chaser on him.”

Belter’s hands tightened on the table edge. Every time he saw this part of the record he wanted to get up and yell,
“No, you idiot! It’ll walk down your beam!”
The chaserscope would follow anything
it was trained on, and bring in a magnified image. But it took a mess of traceable vhf to do it.

Relaxing was a conscious effort.
Must be slipping
, he thought glumly,
wanting to yell at those guys. Those guys are dead
.

In the picture recording, a projection of the chaserscope’s screen was flashed on the observatory screen. Staring fearfully at this shadow picture of a shadow picture, the council saw again the familiar terrible lines of the Invader—squat, unlovely, obviously not designed for atmospheric work; slab-sided, smug behind what must have been foolproof meteor screens, for the ship boldly presented flat side and bottom plates to anything which might be thrown at her.

“It’s a ship, sir!” said the e.m. unnecessarily. “Seems to be turning on its short axi
s
. Still no drive emanations.”

“Range!” said the lieutenant into a wall mike. Three lights over it winked on, indicating the batteries were manned and ready for ranging information. The lieutenant, his eyes fixed on the large indicators over the enlisted man’s head, hesitated a moment, then said, “Automatics! Throw your ranging gear to our chaser.”

The three lights blinked, once each. The battery reporters lit up, showing automatic control as the medium and heavy launching tubes bore round to the stranger.

The ship was still on the screen, turning slowly. Now a dark patch on her flank could be seen—an open port. There was a puff of escaping gas, and
something
appeared whirling briefly away from the ship, toward the scanner. They almost saw it clearly—and then it was gone.

“They threw something at us, sir!”

“Track it!”

“Can’t sir!”

“You saw the beginning of that trajectory! It was coming this way.”

“Yes sir. But the radar doesn’t register it. I don’t see it on the screen either. Maybe it’s a warper?”

“Warpers are all theory, Colin. You don’t bend radar impulses around an object and then restore them to their original direction. If this thing is warping at all, it’s warping light. It—”

And then all but the Jovian closed their eyes as the screen repeated that horror—the bursting inward of the observatory’s bulkhead, the great jagged blade of metal that flicked the lieutenant’s head straight into the transmission camera.

The scene faded, and the lights went up.

“Slap in the next re—Hold it!” Belter said. “What’s the matter with Hereford?”

The Peace delegate was slumped in his chair, his head on his arms, his arms on the table. The Martian Colonial representative touched him, and Hereford raised his seamed, saintly face:

“Sorry.”

“You sick?”

Hereford sat back tiredly. “Sick?” he repeated vaguely. He was not a young man. Next to that of the Jovian, his position was the strangest of all. He represented a group, as did each of the others. But not a planetary group. He represented the amalgamation of all organized pacifistic thought in the System. His chair on the Joint Solar Military Council was a compromise measure, the tentative answer to an apparently unanswerable question—can a people do without the military? Many thought people could. Some thought not. To avoid extremism either way, the head of an unprecedented amalgamation of peace organizations was given a chair on the JSMC. He had the same vote as a planetary representative. “Sick?” he repeated in a whispering baritone. “Yes, I rather think so.” He waved a hand at the blank wall. “Why did the Invader do it? So pointless … so stupid.” He raised puzzled eyes, and Belter felt a new kind of sympathy. Hereford’s hollow-ground intelligence was famous in four worlds. He was crackling, decisive; but now he could only ask the simplest of questions, like a child too tired to be badly frightened.

“Yeah—why?” asked Belter. “Oh … never mind the rest of the record,” he added suddenly. “I don’t know how the rest of you feel, but at the moment I’m hypnotized by the jet-blasted thing.

“
Why
, Hereford wants to know. If we knew that, maybe we could plan something. Defenses, anyway.”

Somebody murmured: “It’s not a campaign. It’s murder.”

“That’s it. The Invader reaches out with some sort of a short-range
disrupting bomb and wipes out the base on Outpost. Then it wanders into the System, washes out an uninhabited asteroid beacon, drifts down through the shield screening of Titan and kills off half the population with a cyanogen-synthesizing catalyst. It captures three different scanner-scouts, holding them with some sort of a tractor beam, whirling them around like a stone on a string, and letting them go straight at the nearest planet. Earth ships, Martian, Jovian—doesn’t matter. It can outfly and outfight anything we have so far, except—”