Department Of Defense - Follow-On Evaluation of the Defense Protective Service: Report No. Ip02004e001

THERE IS NO DEFENSE

by Theodore Sturgeon

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Copyright 1948 by The Conde Nast Publications

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-25-02 [v1.0 ]

C ursing formality, Belter 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 ran 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 honora 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, maybeflanking 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 Invadersquat, 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 axis. 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 seenan 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 clearlyand 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 horrorthe 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 questioncan 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 ... 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.