two weeks.”
“That will be all, then, for right now,” the civilian said. He nodded at Walt and Julia. “The colonel is waiting to take you back to your hotel.”
“You’re not to talk to anyone about this,” one of the generals said.
*
Thursday. They came for Walt and Julia at nine o’clock. The hotel was aswarm with the military.
“Security measures,” the colonel explained as they waited for the elevator. “If any information about this leaks out, the whole country will be thrown into a panic.”
Julia nodded.
“We’ve evacuated the civilians to another hotel,” the colonel said.
Two guards with rifles stood at the street doorway.
“It’s going to be a hard day for you both,” the colonel said once they were in the car. “You’re scheduled to meet representatives of some foreign countries at ten o’clock. And after that, we’ll spend the rest of the day picking both your brains as clean as we know how.”
“That’s the way it’s got to be,” Julia said. “I understand.”
It was after midnight when she returned to her hotel. Surprisingly, she was able to sleep until dawn. She arose and showered in the first sunlight and dressed and ordered breakfast. The sergeant on duty at the desk downstairs went out himself to get it for her.
At nine (this was Friday morning) she and Walt were back in the Pentagon. Walt’s face was puffy, his eyes were red. “I’m tired,” he murmured as an officer hurried him toward a meeting with the Ordnance Section. For a moment Julia considered restoring his mutant bridge. But she was not completely certain that she could trust him; even the tiniest doubt was an excuse not to—since there was no overwhelming advantage to be gained from having two mutants instead of one in the Pentagon.
A few minutes later, Julia was ushered into the office of one of the very high ranking general officers. He rose to greet her, and then returned to his desk. Julia sat down across from him and he pushed stacks of reports to one side until he located his cigarette box.
Julia took a cigarette.
“Julia? I may call you that?”
“Please do.”
He bent across the desk to light her cigarette. He pushed an ash tray toward her.
“I expect you’d like to know what we’ve done so far?”
“Very much.”
“I’m preparing a report for the President. I hope to have it for him by noon.” He glanced at his watch. “I want to verify with you everything that goes into it.”
*
The smoke made Julia dizzy. She cleared her brain. It was a relief to hear someone else talking for a change.
“ . . . we’re preparing an atomic rocket to intercept their space station,” he said. “I understand from this report that your mutant powers aren’t infinite. It says in here somewhere that it would be impossible to stop by, by teleportation you call it, don’t you? an object as large as a rocket?”
“It’s mostly a question of inertia. There’s a mass-speed-time ratio involved. The greater the first two, the more time required to divert the missile from its path. The mass-speed must be sufficient to create a greater diversion period than exists between the time of detection and the time of impact.”
“You would say that the rocket could get through?”
“If the same rule holds for the aliens as for us, I don’t think they would have time to teleport it away.”
“That’s what I wanted.”
“Just a minute, though. How long will it take you to complete it?”
“Give us another week,” the general said. “That’s one of the things I wanted to see you about. It will take Doctor Norvel longer than that to plot the orbit of the station. I want you to plot that orbit for us—”
“I’m sorry, General. This is in your reports somewhere, too. I can’t. Not until Doctor Norvel can locate it. It’s too far out for me to locate. I’d have to have an, an anchor on that end—something I could contact—before I could center on it. And I don’t have. I can’t even feel it, if you see what I mean. There’s, nothing to get ahold of. If I could . . . I could just teleport an atom bomb there, and we wouldn’t need to worry with the rocket at all.” She snubbed out her cigarette.
“Couldn’t you get a fix on this frequency that controls your mutant powers and locate the space station that way?”
“Neither Dr. Norvel nor I could detect it with the available equipment: we tried. There’s no way of knowing what equipment’s required. It’s probable the frequency is displaced from normal space; if it is, we can’t even tell the increment of displacement. It’s just a hopeless task.”
“Well, it will take us two weeks or more, then . . . .” He crossed out something on the paper before him.
“Suppose they attack before that?”
“I’m coming to that possibility . . . . I see you say here that mutants can be destroyed by bomb concussions because they can’t displace sufficiently far without teleporting. What do you mean there?”
“It’s complicated. If the bomb has too much inertia to be teleported off target, they have to remove themselves from the blast area. And they can’t remove themselves far enough—not in space, but in relation to space; so they’d have to teleport, and that would be fatal.”
“Ummm. Bullets?”
“They could displace themselves far enough to avoid a bullet.”
The general wrote something down. “How large an explosion would suffice?”
“I believe Dr. Norvel has those figures. I didn’t stay long enough to see the results of her computations. She figured it out. They rushed me off somewhere else.”
“I’ll have to ask her . . . . Now. I’m counting on there being five hundred saucer ships in the first wave. With luck, our Air Force will get a few of them. You say—ah, yes, right here: ‘If hit in the air, the pilots cannot displace out of the ship because they would be killed by the fall to Earth.’ That’s correct, isn’t it?”
Julia nodded. “Yes.”
“But I expect we’ll have to destroy the majority of them after they land; luck only goes so far.”
“If they scatter all over the planet?” Julia asked.
“We have bombers alerted.”
“Suppose they land in a city? You’d have to bomb immediately. You’d have to destroy the whole area before they could escape. You wouldn’t have any time to evacuate the population.
