“Look again.”
Don Ross couldn’t look again because he’d been looking all along, but he suddenly saw what May had meant. It was almost a Rochester, but not quite. There was something alien about it. Something? It was alien; it was an alien imitation of a Rochester. And his hands were racing for the firing button almost before the full impact of that hit him.
Finger at the button, he looked at the dials on the Picar ranger and the Monoid. They stood at zero.
He swore. “He’s jamming us, Cap. We can’t figure out how far he is, or his size and mass!”
Captain May nodded slowly, his face pale.
Inside Don Ross’s head, a thought said, “Compose yourselves, men. We are not enemies.”
Ross turned and stared at May. May said, “Yes, I got it. Telepathy.”
Ross swore again. If they were telepathic—
“Fire, Don. Visual.”
Ross pressed the button. The screen was filled with a flare of energy, but when the energy subsided, there was no wreckage of a spaceship…
Admiral Sutherland turned his back to the star chart on the wall and regarded them sourly from under his thick eyebrows. He said, “I am not interested in rehashing your formal report, May. You’ve both been under the psychograph; we’ve extracted from your minds every minute of the encounter. Our logicians have analyzed it. You are here for discipline. Captain May, you know the penalty for disobedience.”
May said stiffly, “Yes, sir.”
“It is?”
“Death, sir.”
“And what order did you disobey?”
“General Order Thirteen-Ninety, Section Twelve, Quad-A priority. Any terrestrial ship, military or otherwise, is ordered to destroy immediately, on sight, any alien ship encountered. If it fails to do so, it must blast off toward outer space, in a direction not exactly opposite that of Earth, and continue until fuel is exhausted.”
“And the reason for that, Captain? I ask merely to see if you know. It is not, of course, important or even relevant whether or not you understand the reason for any ruling.”
“Yes, sir. So there is no possibility of the alien ship following the sighting ship back to Sol and so learning the location of Earth.”
“Yet you disobeyed that ruling, Captain. You were not certain that you had destroyed the alien. What have you to say for yourself?”
“We did not think it necessary, sir. The alien ship did not seem hostile. Besides, sir, they must already know our base; they addressed us as ‘men.’”
“Nonsense! The telepathic message was broadcast from an alien mind, but was received by yours. Your minds automatically translated the message into your own terminology. He did not necessarily know your point of origin or that you were humans.”
Lieutenant Ross had no business speaking, but he asked, “Then, sir, it is not believed that they were friendly?”
The admiral snorted. “Where did you take your training, Lieutenant? You seem to have missed the most basic premise of our defense plans, the reason we’ve been patrolling space for four hundred years, on the lookout for alien life. Any alien is an enemy. Even though he were friendly today, how could we know that he would be friendly next year or a century from now? And a potential enemy is an enemy. The more quickly he is destroyed the more secure Earth will be.”
“Look at the military history of the world! It proves that, if it proves nothing else. Look at Rome! To be safe she couldn’t afford powerful neighbors. Alexander the Great! Napoleon!”
“Sir,” said Captain May. “Am I under the penalty of death?”
“Yes.”
“Then I may as well speak. Where is Rome now? Alexander’s empire or Napoleon’s? Nazi Germany? Tyrannosaurus rex?”
“Who?”
“Man’s predecessor, the toughest of the dinosaurs. His name means ‘king of the tyrant lizards.’ He thought every other creature was his enemy, too. And where is he now?”
“Is that all you have to say, Captain?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I shall overlook it. Fallacious, sentimental reasoning. You are not under sentence of death, Captain. I merely said so to see what you would say, how far you would go. You are not being shown mercy because of any humanitarian nonsense. A truly ameliorating circumstance has been found.”
“May I ask what, sir?”
“The alien was destroyed. Our technicians and logicians have worked that out. Your Picar and Monoid were working properly. The only reason that they did not register was that the alien ship was too small. They will detect a meteor weighing as little as five pounds. The alien ship was smaller than that.”
“Smaller than—?”
“Certainly. You were thinking of alien life in terms of your own size. There is no reason why it should be. It could be even submicroscopic, too small to be visible. The alien ship must have contacted you deliberately, at a distance of only a few feet. And your fire, at that distance, destroyed it utterly. That is why you saw no charred hulk as evidence that it was destroyed.”
He smiled. “My congratulations, Lieutenant Ross, on your gunnery. In the future, of course, visual firing will be unnecessary. The detectors and estimators on ships of all classes are being modified immediately to detect and indicate objects of even minute sizes.”
Ross said, “Thank you, sir. But don’t you think that the fact that the ship we saw, regardless of size, was an imitation of one of our Rochester Class ships is proof that the aliens already know much more of us than we do of them, including, probably, the location of our home planet? And that—even if they are hostile—the tiny size of their craft is what prevents them from blasting us from the system?”
“Possibly. Either both of those things are true, or neither. Obviously, aside from their telepathic ability, they are quite inferior to us technically—or they would not imitate our design in spaceships. And they must have read the minds of some of our engineers in order to duplicate that design. However, granting that is true, they may still not know the location of Sol. Space coordinates would be extremely difficult to translate, and the name Sol would mean nothing to them. Even its approximate description would fit thousands of other stars. At any rate, it is up to us to find and exterminate them before they find us. Every ship in space is now alerted to watch for them, and is being equipped with special instruments to detect small objects. A state of war exists. Or perhaps it is redundant to say that; a state of war always exists with aliens.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That is all, gentlemen. You may go.”
Outside in the corridor two armed guards waited. One of them stepped to each side of Captain May.
May said quickly, “Don’t say anything, Don. I expected
