And Now the News (50 page)

It came at Donato first. “Mr. Donato—”

“Yes,
sir
, Cap'n.”

“You propose a two-piece missile. You seem to forget, as many another has before you, that the Barrier offers no resistance to penetration and therefore needs no complicated hanky-panky to get something inside. In addition, it's unimportant whether or not an object is sensed by the skin and reported to control, or whether it's
picked up a minute or hour later by one of the hunting missiles. You've attacked the whole problem with a view to getting something inside, which isn't a problem, and overlooked what to do inside, which is.”

“Oh, Cap'n, I'm sorry,” said Donato, stricken. He burst into a sharp series of barking coughs. There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” the captain said. “Got it yet, Mr. England?”

“Whuh? Oh,” said the missile expert. “I guess I was off base about the jamming. Suddenly it seems to me that's so obvious, it must have been tried and it doesn't work.”

“Right, it doesn't. That's because the frequency and amplitude of the control pulses make like purest noise—they're genuinely random. So trying to jam them is like trying to jam
F.M.
with an
A.M.
signal. You hit it so seldom, you might as well not try.”

“What do you mean, random? You can't control anything with random noise.”

The captain thumbed over his shoulder at the Luanae Galaxy. “They can. There's a synchronous generator in the missiles that reproduces the
same random noise
, peak by pulse. Once you do that, modulation's no problem. I don't know
how
they do it. They just do. The Luanae can't explain it; the planetoid developed it.”

England put his head down almost to the table. “The same random,” he whispered from the very edge of sanity.

As if anxious to push him the rest of the way, the captain said cheerfully, “Good thinking on that proposal to study the metal content of the missiles. Only there isn't any. They're a hundred percent dielectric synthetics—God knows exactly what. The planetoid can transmute, you know. What little circuitry the missiles have is laid out in fluid-filled pipes, capillary coils, things like that. There seems to be some sort of instantaneous transition from solid to liquid and back. The liquid conductors are solid dielectrics again just as soon as they have passed whatever current they're supposed to pass, and that's done in microseconds.”

“Radar-transparent,” concluded England dolefully.

“For all practical purposes,” agreed the captain. “Well, that seems to be that, gentlemen.”

“Just you tell me one thing,” I said before I could stop myself. “Precisely what in hell are we doing here at all?”

“Precisely what you came to do.” The captain picked up his folders. “Blum, I sense that these four gentlemen might be happier without an audience, even us.”

“Come on, Virginia.”

The captain started out forward and the monkey and the CG headed aft. We all sat where we were.

After a time, England said, “Why didn't he tell me he knew so much about missiles?”

“Did you ask him?” snapped Potter.

That was the question and answer I had been humbly formulating, too. I said, “What did he mean, we are here to do what we came to do?”

“Maybe he wants us to get oriented, is all,” said Donato sheepishly. “Get off theory, you know. Like field work.”

“If he thinks he's jolting my inspiration, he's crazy,” gloomed England. He wiped his wet eyes with the backs of his hands, leaving them still wet. “The jolt, I got all right. The inspiration, I can't find.”

“He should have told us before, right at the start. Maybe by now we'd have a whole new set of figures.” Donato caught my sharp look and immediately said, “Theories, I mean, friend. I didn't mean to say figures.”

Somehow that didn't help.

“Get out of here, Donato,” I said.

“Sure, friend, sure,” he said and got out like always, smiling. He went into his room and closed the door. We could hear him coughing.

“Like a box you have in your room ten years,” Potter was muttering adenoidally, “it all of a sudden goes boing and there's a jumpid-jack.” I was going to ask him what he was talking about and then realized he was talking about the captain. I saw his point. Why
hadn't
he called this meeting weeks ago?

“He must like things to look futile,” I said. “I'm going back to bed.”

“Be, too,” said Potter.

I got up. Potter and England stayed where they were. They were going to talk about me.

I just didn't care.

I dreamed I was walking in a meadow, smelling the sweet fresh odor of snowdrops, when all of a sudden they grew taller and taller, or I grew smaller and smaller, and I saw that instead of stems, the snowdrops were growing on a sequence of equations. I began to read them off, but they got all twisted and jumbled and started to grab at my feet. I fell and grunted and caught hard at the edges of the bunk and was totally awake.

I turned over and looked at the overhead. I felt clear-headed but lethargic. I thought I could still smell the snowdrops.

Then I noticed the whine. It was far away, but persistent. The lights looked funny. They seemed to be flickering slightly, but when you looked straight at them, they were steady. I didn't like it. It made me feel dizzy.

I got up and went out into the corridor. Nobody was around. Then a timid voice said behind me, “Virginia in there?”

I jumped and turned. It was the monkey, cringing against the bulkhead.

“You think I'm
that
bad off?” I answered him in disgust, but as I turned away, he leaned forward and peered into my room anyway.

I went into the mess hall and knocked on the decanter and, when it steamed, poured coffee. Somewhere in the background, I heard a wistful murmur, and then Potter's shocked voice: “In
here?
Monkey, didn't they tell you? I like
girls
.” In a moment, he came shuffling in and headed for the coffee. “What time is it, Palmer?”

I shrugged. I looked at the clock, but it didn't seem to make any sense to me.

“God,” said Potter, and sniffed noisily. “I feel all … disconnected. I got a buzzing in my ears. My eyes—it's sort of flickery.”

I looked at him curiously, wondering what it must be like to be a man who readily relates everything around him to himself. “That isn't your flicker. It's ours. Same with the buzz, though I'd call it a sort of whine.”

He looked very relieved. “You hear it, too. What happened here, anyway?”

I drank some coffee and looked at the clock again. “What's the matter with that clock?” I demanded.

Potter craned to look at it. “Can't be. Can't be.”

Donato came in, his face scrubbed and shining. “Morning, Palmer. Potter. Well, I wondered which one of us would fall first, and I guess I know now, and who'd a' thunk it.” He nodded aft and began coughing.

We looked. The monkey was stepping off one foot and onto the other in front of England's door.

“You ought to mind your own business, Don.”

“Oh, sure,” said Donato agreeably. “Guess you're right at that.”

Just then, England flung his door open, saw Nils Blum crouching there, and recoiled with an odd high squeak.

Immediately he growled, in his deepest bass, “Don't hang around me, monk,” and pushed past the utility man without a backward glance.

We watched, looking past him as he approached. Blum ducked his head inside England's door, withdrew it, took a step toward us and stopped, his jaw working silently, his big wrinkled head held a little askew.

“But hungry, I'm hungry,” England said. “Whatever time is it?”

“Clock's busted.” Potter suddenly laughed. We all looked at him. “Well,” he said, pointing at England, “it's not him, either.”

“You were just saying to Don, he ought to mind his own business,” I snapped. I wonder, I thought to myself, if he knows I cut at him because he twiddles his nose?

“What business? What goes?” England demanded.

“By holy creepin' Kramden,” said Donato to himself. He looked aft at the miserable figure there and forward at the closed door to the wardroom and control. “What do you know.”

“He is a very surprising man,” I said.

“Who? Who? The skipper? What's he done now?” England insisted.

“Virginia seems to be missing,” said Donato.

Hearing her name, Blum ran three steps toward us and then stopped in the mess hall door, looking timidly at our faces, one by one.

“Well,” said England, “rank has its privileges.”

Potter blew sharply through his nostrils, expressing a great deal and disposing of the matter. He glanced at the clock. “What'd you say is wrong with it?”

“Nothing's wrong with it.”

We turned abruptly and faced the captain. There was an oddness about him, a set to his jaw, a certain hard something in his eye that hadn't been there at all before. Or maybe it had, there at the table this morning. (Was that this morning? What the clock said just made no sense at all.) I looked at the captain and past him, through his open door, through the wardroom with his neat bunk at the side, on forward to the control console and observation blister.

There wasn't anybody up there.

From the other doorway, the utility monkey whispered, “Sir …

?”

“Something the matter with the lights, Captain,” Donato said.

“It's all right,” said the captain shortly. He went to the mess hall peeper and switched it on. He dialed for starboard view and stepped back.

We crowded around it. Everything looked about the same out there, the wide vein of jewels straggling across the sky, then the unrelieved black.

“Show you something,” said the captain. He moved the controls and the view zoomed in toward the stars. At close to peak magnification, he switched to the fine tuning and got the cross-hairs where he wanted them. “Know what that is?”

It was a ball, shiny, golden. It was impossible to say how big. Then I heard England gasp.

“I've seen that before. Pictures. That's the Barrier Control—the planetoid!”

“So close?” I asked.

“Just because the Barrier is a sphere,” said the captain, “everyone assumes the control has to be in the center. Well, it isn't. It's right
here at the edge, and heaven help anything that goes in there in a rush, trying to converge on the center!”

“Sir …” came the whisper.

“Now look,” said the captain, winding the zoom handle again. The view backed away from the golden sphere until it was almost lost. Suddenly the screen filled with a flat-topped, streamlined—

“A pod, a ship's pod!” said England.

The captain stepped back a pace and watched the pod with glowing eyes. His hands were pressed tight together and some great suppressed excitement yearned in him to burst free. We looked from him to the peeper.

Under his breath, the captain said, “Git'm! Go git'm!”

“Sir …”

“Shut up, monk.”

“That pod's inside the Barrier!” somebody said. Me, I think.

“Look! Look there!”

It was like a segment of ivory knitting needle. It was turning slowly end over end. It approached the pod slowly, high, passed close by and drifted out of the picture.

“A missile, a big one.”

“My God, what's happened?” gasped Donato.

“The Barrier's down,” said the captain, as if he couldn't hold the words inside any longer. “It's down, you see? It's gone and the missiles are all dead.”

“Sir, oh, Cap'n … I can't find Virginia. Where's Virginia, Cap'n?”

“You're looking at her, Blum. You're looking right at her,” said the captain, his eyes fixed on the screen.

Something hit us, scattered us. For a moment, the mess hall was a swirl of grunts and outraged yells, and then the utility monkey had tumbled us aside and was standing in front of the peeper, one hand on each side of the frame. He seemed a half head taller, all at once, and his one hairy arm, where it passed close by me, had cords on it I hadn't known about before; his head was a lion's head.

Suddenly he barked, “What'd you do? What'd you do?” He was talking to the captain, who kept looking over Blum's shoulder at the picture and was laughing softly. Then the monkey whirled from the
screen, turning as if to turn was to tear something, and he faced the captain and said again, “What'd you do? What'd you do with Virginia?”

The captain stopped laughing altogether and was a captain duty-talking to a utility monkey. “I gave her orders and I put her in that pod and sent her on her way. Any objections, mister?”

Blum's eyes began to protrude—honestly, you could see them press outward. His mouth opened slowly, slowly, and a dribble suddenly scored the corner of the mouth and down the side of the chin; the hands came up, clawed, half-grasping. The nostrils trembled, trembled … and then he screamed so loud, so close to us, it was a like a big dazzling light flashing to blind us.

We reared back from that scream, pawing at it.

Next thing was Blum, crouched over and peering ahead as he ran, trying to go somewhere, not knowing how. He ran crazily to the airlock hatch and hit it with his fists, and turned with his back to it and screamed again. “You send me, you hear? You send me with Virginia, you hear me, Cap'n?”

Donato strolled over toward him and, smiling, said the stupidest thing I ever heard squirted into a violent silence: “Aw, come on, monkey, let's all be chums.”

Blum screamed again and Donato didn't wait to get turned around. He ran straight backward until he hit me, and I caught him and held him up so he didn't fall.

“Captain, sir,” Donato said, squinching his head around as he dangled from my hands, “he won't mind me at all, Captain.”