They were noseless; breathing was done through the mouth. The teeth were widely spaced, and the lips could not close over them, thus allowing the Enlissa to breathe, even when unconscious. The eyes were a solid black. It was impossible to tell, from a superficial inspection, where the deeply-pigmented surface of the eyeball ended and the dead black of the lens opening began. They were somewhat larger than human eyes, but they were set in front of the skull, allowing stereoscopic vision.
Their protective covering might have been called hair, by stretching the definition somewhat. By an equal amount of stretching, it could have been called fingernails or scales. It would have taken an awful lot of stretching to call it feathers.
The "hair" consisted of ribbons of thin chitinlike material. The ribbons weren't much thicker than human hair, but they were nearly a sixteenth of an inch in width, and ranged in color from a glossy black to a royal blue, depending on the individual.
The feet were splayed, almost radial; the hands were four-digited—double thumbed and double fingered.
The clothing they wore, though radically cut, was analogous to the styles worn by human beings.
Roysland waited until the aliens were herded out of the ship. They had to be prodded like beasts, since there was no way to talk to them. No exchange of language had ever been achieved; but, like their human counterparts, the mindjammed Enlissa seemed to be perfectly willing to obey any exterior commands.
"What?" said Roysland. He had been so engrossed in his own thoughts that he had only dimly realized that Kiffer Samm was talking to him.
"I said that we'll have to check on them, too, after we see what this weapon is all about."
Roysland folded his hands and rubbed his thumbs together. "Maybe before."
"Huh?"
"Never mind," Roysland said. "Here come the last of them. We want to get all the samples out of their supplies that we can, and we've already been promised first look at those projectors the Enlissa have on board the ship. Come on; let's take a look."
The Enlissa ship wasn't organized too differently from the human version. On the surface, things looked odd; but the laws of the universe function the same way in all places, so the internal workings of the ship were essentially similar.
The Special Weapons men went through the ship with the men of the Inspection Division, photographing, tracing circuits, analyzing, checking differences, and organizing similarities.
Roysland and Kiffer spent most of their time with the big, complex projectors that were cradled in the hull blisters.
When Kiffer first saw them, he turned to Roysland and tried to keep from looking bewildered. "They're subelectronic projectors of some kind. Butwhatkind?"
"That's what we've got to find out," Roysland told him. "We'll have to find out what they do on a physical level first. From there, we'll go on to the physiological level; then we may—justmay—be able to go on to the psychological effects."
Kiffer Samm looked up at the great frame of his superior, and grinned sardonically. "O.K. Now we've got the effect and the weapon that causes it. Can we correlate the two?"
Roysland shrugged his broad shoulders. "Sure we can. But how long will it take us?"
The laws of the universe may not differ from place to place, but the methods of using them do; and the particular laws that may be discovered in one place aren't necessarily the same ones that are discovered in another. No two human beings think alike; two different evolutionary branches of intelligence, stemming from totally different beginnings, certainly can't be expected to reason similarly. The amazing thing about the Enlissa was not the ways in which they differed from humanity, but the ways in which they were similar.
So it wasn't to be wondered at that the Special Weapons technicians couldn't figure out for the life of them what the projectors from the Enlissa ship did, or why they worked. If they had been the type of men to be stymied by seemingly-unbreakable barriers, they would have gone off their collective rockers in the first three weeks.
One by one, Roysland Dwyn called in the best analysts from every sector of the human-controlled galaxy. And slowly the information began to build up.
The first firing test of the enemy weapon was conducted on Syndor, the outermost and smaller of the two satellites of Kandoris VI. Roysland had the thing taken to the subnucleonics lab there because he felt that there was no need to subject the population of Kandoris to any danger from the backwash—if any. And only God knew how much territory the effective field might cover.
The Special Weapons group had dismantled one of the projectors from the ship and loaded it carefully on the X-69, along with the Enlissa-built generator that powered it.
On Syndor, Roysland watched the unloading. He stood on the broad, airless stretch of the landing field and watched the grapples lower the big, tubular weapon to the deck of the field. The blue-white glare of the distant sun splashed off the metallic sides of the ship, forcing Roysland to narrow his eyes, in spite of the heavy polarized filter in the helmet of his spacesuit.
The thing floated down under the control of the grapple beams until it was only a few feet from the surface.
Roysland heard the voice of the crew leader bellow in his earphones. "O.K., watch it! Get the truck underneath that thing before you drop it any more!"
A sturdy six-wheeled truck was moved in under the projector. The grapple operator turned a rheostat, and the projector sank another six inches, to rest on the truck.
"O.K.!" yelled the crew leader. "Haul her away!"
The truck trundled off in the direction of the Llordis Mountains.
Kiffer's voice came through Roysland's phones. "Let's go, Roysland; I'm right behind you."
Roysland turned around. Kiffer Samm was sitting in the driver's seat of a small jeep.
As he climbed in, Roysland said, "I felt the vibration as you pulled up, but I didn't pay any attention to it. Coming up behind a guy like that is real sneaky."
Kiffer's chuckle coincided with the slight vibration of the jeep as it started moving after the six-wheeler.
The testing area was some miles from the permanent labs. Roysland wanted to test the weapon by firing at Kandoris herself. The huge blue-white sun could certainly take anything directed at her.
It took the better part of three days to set up the site for the test, and during most of that time, Roysland Dwyn was in a spacesuit. The construction engineers had rigged up a plastic shell for dormitories and other inside necessities, but the work had to be done in the vacuum of space. By the time the set-up had been completed, Roysland felt exhausted in every muscle of his huge body. On the "afternoon" of the third day, he peeled off his oversize spacesuit and lay back on his cot. It was much too short for him, and his feet stuck out over the edge; but he was too tired to worry about that.
Kiffer was sitting on his own bunk, massaging his neck to get the kinks out. "The thing that bothers me," he said, "is the eternal sunlight. That blasted star won't go down for another seventy days."
Roysland nodded, but it was obvious that his mind was elsewhere.
"Suppose there is a backwash from this thing," Roysland said at last. "That would account for a lot of things. We've been wondering why the Enlissa ships didn't loot our own vessels after they used the mindjammer."
"Certainly," Kiffer said. "It's obvious. Their own weapon backfired on them, and left the Enlissa ship incapable of doing any looting. I figured that out a long time ago."
"Oh, did you?" asked Roysland smoothly. "Then did you figure out why the Enlissa didn't test the thing before they used it?"
Kiffer shrugged. "Who knows? What do I know about alien psychology?"
"You don't have to know anything about psychology of any kind; all you have to know is a common, ordinary law of species survival. Any race that takes a weapon into battle without testing it thoroughly, doesn't survive very long."
Kiffer ran the tips of his fingers across his lower lips. "True; but maybe they were suicide squads—or maybe they have a hospital ship following them to pick them up and cure them. After all, Bilford has this cure of his working pretty well now; if the Enlissa invented this thing, they probably know how to counter its effects.
"Besides, you didn't think we'd tested theaJguns thoroughly. And we're still surviving."
Roysland turned to look at Kiffer, and his face was definitely sneering. "Kiffer, there are times when your thinking has all the clarity and lucidness of a hunk of obsidian.
"There's a difference between the lack of testing of theaJgun and the Enlissa's not thoroughly testing the mindjammer. There's a difference between looking for something you could logically expect and not finding something that you don't even suspect the existence of."
Kiffer nodded. "Sure; I see what you mean. But that simply means that they don't have any way of shielding the effect—so they have a hospital ship trailing them."
Roysland lay back again and closed his eyes. "Obsidian," he said. Then, after a moment, "One: Why do they sacrifice a crew—even if it's only for a short time? Two: Why don't they use such an efficient weapon against ships that blast them out of the sky? Three: Why do they come in at a ship without firing anything at all?
"Until your hypothesis answers all of those questions—and a lot more besides—it isn't worth a damn."
Kiffer chewed at his upper lip and then looked at his wrist watch. "If you're going to test that thing in an hour, you'd better call Eckisster now."
Roysland sighed deeply. "O.K.; I'll call Old Nasty. Give me a minute to brace myself."
He didn't take the minute; he didn't really need it. He walked over to the solidiphone and punched in the code numbers. Three seconds later, General Director Eckisster was sitting in the middle of the room.
"You're ready, eh? All right; go ahead," he said. "Find out what you can—if anything. I have no further instructions—just don't get yourself killed while you're working."
The heavy space boot that came from Roysland's hand sailed through the image just as it was dissolving. Eckisster had cut off without waiting for Roysland's answer.
"One of these days," Kiffer said, "you're going to be in his office, and you'll forget it isn't a solidograph image and let go with a boot, or something, and knock the boss' teeth in."
Roysland shook his head emphatically as he walked over to pick up the boot. "Nope. If he's actually there in person, I'm going to have a poisoned needle to jab into him. I'll show him how to needle people!"
The Enlissa weapon was fired at Kandoris at 30:00 hours. Spaceships posted along the long line of fire between the satellite of Kandoris VI and the sun itself had sent out instrument-filled drones in the path of the beam to check the beam frequency. The time required for the subetheric wave to travel the eight hundred million miles from the planetary orbit to primary was too short to be measured. As far as the recording instruments were concerned, the beam was instantaneous.
The projector itself was fired by remote control; there were no personnel within three miles of the Enlissa projector when it went off.
The resultant recordings were run through the differential analyzers, and the final graphs were delivered to Kiffer Samm.
After four hours of working with the data, Kiffer made his report to Roysland.
"It's an odd wave length," he said. "Actually, it's a harmonic of three different basic frequencies. Look here: the thing is definitely frequency modulated, but it's a comparatively simple thing." He ran his finger along the primary recordings. "The thing wouldn't really have to be run through the differentials; it could be figured out with a slipdisk.
"The thing that makes it different is the extremely short wave length. The longest of the three has a wave length of eighty thousand kilometers, and the shortest is forty-two thousand kilometers. In a subetheric beam, that's the equivalent of hard X-rays—damned high frequency."
Roysland looked at the recordings carefully. "Is there any reason why this particular wave length should have any effect on the human brain?"
Kiffer looked at the graphs for a long time. When he finally looked up, he said: "I don't know for sure; mind if I call Bilford?"
Roysland shook his great head. "Go ahead; I don't mind."
When Bilford's image flickered into existence, Roysland kept his mouth shut while Kiffer showed the psychometrist the recordings of the energy from the Enlissa projector.
Bilford listened and looked and frowned. "The recordings actually don't make sense to me," he admitted. "I'm a psychometrist, not a subelectronocist.
"If you could translate those recordings from subetheric to their electromagnetic equivalents, I might be able to make something out of it."
The conversion didn't take long; all Kiffer had to do was run the stuff through the analyzer and punch in a correction factor.
Bilford stared at the corrected graphs and compared them with tracings of his own.
"I don't see any correlation," he said at last. "This may take a bit of work. There may be multiple harmonics of the basic stuff involved, of course; but frankly I can't see that the subetherics have anything in common with the electromagnetics as far as this area is concerned."
For the first time, Roysland spoke. "Try a combination-permutation synthesis. See what you get—O.K.?"
Bilford nodded in agreement. "I'll try it—all the different wave lengths involved, plus the subetheric velocity factor. If I come up with anything, I'll let you know."
"Good enough," said Roysland.
The solidiphone image of General Director Eckisster stood in the center of the room. He looked around and then focused his gaze on Roysland Dwyn. "Listen here, Roysland," he said belligerently, "why haven't you done anything? What's the situation now?"
Roysland looked at the general director and put on his nastiest grin. "You've got the report; we haven't done anything. We've fired the Enlissa projector six times. There is only a residual backwash that is harmless. You could fire the thing in your living room if you wanted to. Meanwhile, we want to know what the effect of the beam is."
"And why, may I ask," said Eckisster, "can't you determine so simple a thing as that? This request is utter and absolute nonsense!" He slapped at the papers he held in his hand.
"I knew you'd like that," Roysland said. "I thought maybe you could suggest something else. I can't."
"As I understand it," Eckisster said testily, "you want a human volunteer to test the Enlissa mindjammer on."
"That's right," Roysland said. "So far, all we've proven is that the backwash from the projector has no effect on humans or animals; but we don't know what happens to a man who's hit by the beam itself."
"Oh? We don't? I rather assumed that the fleet hospital's psychiatric wards were full of men who have been hit by the beam."
"An unjustified assumption," Roysland snapped. "At least, so far, it's unprovable. The point is: Do I or don't I have your permission to ask for a volunteer?"
"Why can't you use test animals?" Eckisster asked.
"If you'd bother to read the reports I send you, you'd know. Wehaveused 'em. The beam didn't touch 'em. We sprayed one group for half an hour; and as far as anyone can tell, we might just as well have been shining a flashlight on them."
"Of course," Eckisster said. "The mindjammer causes a feedback loop in the prefrontal lobes. What do you expect it to do to animals with no prefrontal lobe?"
"My point exactly," Roysland agreed. He knew perfectly well that Eckisster had read the report completely and thoroughly. His pretended ignorance and snide remarks were just a mechanism he used for purposes of his own.
"The question is," Roysland repeated, "do I have your permission to ask for a volunteer?"
"I checked with Bilford," the general director said. "He's getting the microwave technique worked out fairly well now; he says he can bring a man around in twenty-five to thirty days." He stopped and looked at Roysland closely. "Go ahead and ask for volunteers."
"Thanks," said Roysland.
Eckisster nodded as he dissolved.
Roysland reached over and punched a button. "Where's Kiffer?" he asked.
"Eating at the mess hall, right now," said a voice.
"That's what I thought. Will you have him come here, to my place, as soon as he gets through? Say, in half an hour?"
"I'll tell him."
"Fine." Roysland lifted his finger and turned to the typer on his desk. He wasn't used to the makeshift office, and he found himself wishing he was back on Kandoris VI, in his own office.
He shrugged and began running his fingers over the typer. It took him only a few minutes to put down what he wanted to say. When he finished, he pulled the sheet from the printer tank and put it on his desk, in plain sight. At the top, he scrawled: "To Kiffer Samm." His own signature went at the bottom.
Then he put on his spacesuit and headed out, toward the outside air lock.
Half an hour later, Kiffer Samm was reading the note. He had stepped into Roysland's office and seen that it was empty. Assuming that his superior would be right back, he had sat down to wait. Then he'd seen the note.
He was halfway through it before it became perfectly clear what Roysland was doing.
"... So you may have to take over for the next twenty-five to thirty days. Naturally, I couldn't ask anyone else to take the risk.
"I think it may be a good idea if Bilford starts experimenting with subetherics in an effort to snap the rest of the boys out of this feedback loop thing. Maybe he can do it in less time.
"By the time you read this and get in a spacesuit and get out to the firing area, I will have finished the test; don't let me die of starvation, chum."
Kiffer punched at the communicator button, yelled orders into it, and grabbed a spacesuit out of the locker. By the time he reached the outer air lock, a jeep was waiting for him.
When the second jeep pulled up, Kiffer said: "You men stop at the gun emplacement and take a look at the weapon. We'll go on to the target tower and pick up Roysland."
The men nodded their agreement, and the two vehicles started rolling.
Theoretically, it was "evening," but the great, blue-white blaze of Kandoris still hung in the eternally black sky. The jeep went by the gun emplacement where the Enlissa weapon had been set up for testing. Kiffer noticed that the snout of the ugly-looking tube was aimed at the squat steel tower where the animal subjects had been exposed to its radiations.
"There he is!" said the jeep's driver, pointing.
Kiffer could see a spacesuited figure on the target tower. He twisted the dial on his chest and said to the men in the second jeep: "Check that projector! Make sure it isn't in operation!"
"It's not," said one of the men. "He had a timer connected to the firing mechanism. He got a ten-second burst from it, according to the timer reading."
"Thanks. We'll pick him up, then."
The jeep swerved toward the tower and pulled up underneath it in a swirl of dust that settled slowly and evenly in the low gravity of the airless satellite. Kiffer jumped out of the jeep, grabbed the rungs of the ladder, and lifted himself to the platform at the top of the twenty-foot tower.
He stuck his head up over the edge and saw Roysland. The man was sitting on a small chair with his back to the ladder. Surrounding him were the various recording instruments that had been rigged up on the platform for testing the animals and the effects of the beam on them.
Kiffer climbed on up and twisted his helmet phone control to Roysland's frequency. As he put his hand on Roysland's shoulder, he said: "Stand up, Roysland."
Roysland jerked around. "What? Oh. Hi, Kiffer; I saw you coming in the jeep." He paused then, and though Kiffer couldn't see very well through the heavy darkness of the helmet's glare-filtering polarization, he could have sworn that Roysland was grinning. He would have been right.
"Oh, I get it," Roysland said. "You were expecting to find me sitting up here with a feedback lobotomy. Frankly, so was I, a half hour or so ago, but I'd almost forgotten it."
Kiffer took a deep breath, let it out, and said a few choice, pungent words. "... Who would scare a guy like that," he ended.
"Sorry," Roysland said, still grinning. "But take a look at these readings. I think you'll—"
"Wait a minute!" Kiffer interrupted. "I'm not interested in meter readings right now! What happened or didn't happen to you?"
"Is he all right?"
"What's going on up there?"
"Need any help?"
The voices came almost simultaneously to Kiffer's phones. He could see the second jeep tearing up dust between the gun emplacement and the target tower.
"He's O.K.," Kiffer snapped. "Big false alarm! I think we ought to have an explanation."
The answering burst of catcalling and jeers made Roysland wince. "O.K., fellers! O.K.! Please accept my abject and snivelling apologies."
"Explain yourself," Kiffer said in a monarchial tone. "You were supposed to be out here testing this thing on yourself; you wrote a very heart-rending note to that effect. I don't blame you for getting cold feet, but you could at least have notified us."
"I didn't get cold feet," Roysland said. "Look at the cerebrograph reading and compare it with the firing record."
Kiffer looked and then said: "Then youdidtake it! But according to this, all it did was cause a very faintpetit malconvulsion. You probably didn't even notice it."
"I didn't," Roysland said. "I don't know what that projector is supposed to do, but it sure isn't a mindjammer!"
Kiffer looked again at the records. "Maybe you weren't far enough away from the projector," he said doubtfully. "Maybe the distance—"
"Impossible," said Roysland. "The beam doesn't disperse appreciably over a distance of half a light-year; you know that. And the wave form is exactly the same.
"No, I'm afraid we've just run up against another blind alley."
Kiffer shook his head slowly. "I don't believe it," he said. "The Enlissa didn't have their ship armed with this thing for nothing. We must have connected it up wrong, somehow."
"Maybe," Roysland said. "But it doesn't work as is. Let's get these records into the jeep; I want to see what we're getting here, anyway."
They took the recordings out of the instruments and dropped them to the three men who were waiting by the jeeps parked underneath the tower.
A few minutes later, they were heading back toward the dome.
Four days later, Roysland was back on Kandoris VI, ensconced firmly in his office. Kiffer Samm stayed on Syndor, still working on the Enlissa projector.
The first thing Roysland did was to call another staff meeting. He also included Bilford and Commander Allerdyce.
He outlined briefly the data they had so far on the Enlissa mindjammer, then asked for comments.
Bilford grabbed the floor first. "I did the correlation you wanted, and I came up with some answers, but they're not the right ones as far as I can tell.
"As far as the backwash on theaJgun is concerned, I think you can rule that out. After converting to electromagnetic equivalents, I find that the frequency of the backwash is much too low to have any effect on the brain. That is, assuming that subetherics have any effect on the mind at all—and, of course, assuming that there is any analogy at all between the function of subetheric vibrations and electromagnetic vibrations. After all, analogue reasoning has its limitations, too, just as logical reasoning does.
"The captured Enlissa projector is another problem. Unlike theaJ's backwash, it isn't a noise; it's a definite, although complex, tone. I say complex because—and again my reasoning is analogical—because the frequency is not a pure sine wave, but a combination. It's analogous to the difference between the vibration of a tuning fork sounding middle C and, say, a violin sounding the same note.
"Even so, I think we can say that the captured projector isnotthe mindjammer; the frequency is much too high. It's on the order of hard X-rays. If the analogy holds, the subetheric beam should be capable of disrupting certain molecules, but it most certainly couldn't have the mindjamming effect on the human brain."
He sat down and rubbed his hands together nervously.
Commander Allerdyce stood up. Normally, the fleet commander did not kowtow to anyone, but his automatic respect for the big man in the chair at the head of the table came to the fore. As a matter of fact, the commander didn't think of it as kowtowing; he merely acknowledged the superior abilities of the man he was facing.
"All I've got is statistics, Roysland. I wouldn't have noticed it without your hint, but we've worked out a new strategy that has reduced casualties by better than sixty per cent." He reached down and picked up a pile of report sheets.
"It stacks up this way: About thirty per cent of the Enlissa ships that attack have the habit of coming in without firing anything. What the reason is, I don't know, but they do it. Therefore, we have a good chance of getting the enemy with torpedoes alone if he doesn't fire first.
"A ship equipped withaJprojectors has about a seventy per cent chance of winning. The other thirty-odd per cent of the time, they're mindjammed.
"The chances of a conventionally armed ship coming through is better than sixty-two per cent.
"But here's the gimmick: In taking the action of the Enlissa fleet into account, we can reduce the casualties tremendously. About thirty-two per cent of them come in without firing. By taking that into account, we can increase our own chances of survival tremendously."
Roysland nodded. "Good; I'd like to see the statistics on that. Would you mind sending over the full report?"
"Not at all," said Commander Allerdyce. He sat down.
Taddibol stood. "I think I can speak for Vanisson, Mardis, and myself. According to the evidence we have, the Enlissa are capable of picking out a ship withaJgunsbeforethey fire. We think that there must be some residual emanation from theaJthat is detectable by the enemy. No other hypothesis fits the facts."
Vanisson was standing before Taddibol had finished. "I'd like to make it clear that, although I agree with Taddibol Vlys, the evidence is still a necessary part of the hypothesis. We've—"
The emergency buzzer sounded, and everyone at the table turned to look at Roysland as he swore roundly and jabbed the stud. General Director Eckisster had barely begun to solidify before Roysland said: "Can't I have any peace? Must you continually and forever be looking over my shoulder?"
"No," said Eckisster calmly. "Yes. If that answers your questions, may I say something? I'm sorry I had to interrupt a staff meeting, but I felt that this would be the perfect time to inject this bit of data.
"As I see it, you weren't satisfied with human volunteers for the Enlissa weapon; you asked that two of the aliens also be subjected to the beam from their own gun."
"That's right," Roysland said. "According to Bilford, two of them have been rendered sane by the treatment of the microwave frequencies. I didn't think you'd reject using the Enlissa captives on humanitarian grounds."
"I didn't," Eckisster said. "Your man, Kiffer, claimed that further information could be gained by subjecting the alien brains of the enemy to the radiation from their own projector. Since the psychological department has now discovered a method of bringing back the functional ability of the brain after exposure to the mindjammer effect, I didn't think it would be harmful to allow two of the aliens to be subjected to it again. Unfortunately, they died."
"Theywhat?" Bilford shouted the question.
"Died, Bilford,died," Eckisster said. "They are both as dead as the surface of Syndor."
"Good God!" Bilford said. "Perhaps a second exposure—" Suddenly he jammed a finger down on his cutoff, and his image vanished from the conference room.
"What was the reason for that?" Eckisster wanted to know.
"He's just released the first batch of men from the hospital for active duty," said Fleet Commander Allerdyce. "If that thingisthe mindjammer, and those men are exposed again—Excuse me." His own finger touched the cutoff, and his image flickered out.
Eckisster looked at Roysland. "Well, sir?"
Roysland shook his head. "I didn't expect that," he said. "I honestly didn't expect that."
"I know you didn't," Eckisster said softly. "I know you didn't. But look at it this way: It's data. And we need data."
"I know," Roysland said. "It's not that. Excuse me; I've got to think." He slammed his hand down, and the whole group collapsed into nothingness.
"What?" asked Commander Allerdyce.
"I said," Roysland repeated, "that I think I have the answer to something that was brought up in the meeting last night. And I want you to give me permission to take the X-69 into enemy territory."
"I will," Allerdyce said, "if you'll give me a good reason for going."
"All I want is a sample of alien animal life. I think I know what's going on, but I'm not sure."
Allerdyce shook his head. "We can't do it. We don't know where the enemy bases are, any more than the Enlissa know where our own planets are. We keep our subetheric devices shielded, and so do they. If we didn't, this would have ceased to be a spatial war long ago—you know that."
"I know," Roysland admitted; "but we have prisoners; members of the enemy's armed forces. We can get our information from them."
Allerdyce was still shaking his head. "How? They've been treated mentally against probing. They won't tell us where their home planets are, any more than our own men would—orcould—tell them."
Roysland, in turn, shook his head. "That's not what I'm looking for. I'm not a military man; I'm a scientist—at least I think I am. I'm not looking for military bases; I'm looking for a planet where the Enlissa have planted their flora and fauna. That's what we do with a planet, isn't it? Seed it long before we colonize. If they've done as much colonization as we have—and their war potential shows that they must have—then they'll have a lot of planets that aren't inhabited by the Enlissa themselves, but will have been seeded by Enlissa-type life.
"At least one of the crewmen from that ship will know where such a planet is located. And I'm willing to bet that he won't be conditioned against telling us."
"Why not?" Allerdyce asked.
"For the same reason you haven't thought of it," Roysland said, grinning. "The Colonization Service and the Fleet Command are two different branches. Unless the aliens think differently than we do, their organization is about the same. And every bit of evidence shows that their reasoning is similar.
"There's no reason to protect an unpopulated planet, is there? Besides, the military don't inspect colonization records. Why should they? And what would it matter if the enemy took over an unpopulated planet? After all, we have as much chance of taking over one of theirs."
Allerdyce thought it over before answering. Finally, he said: "I'll check with Bilford. If he thinks we can get that much information out of an alien, I'll O.K. the trip. I'll have to insist, of course, that the X-69 be fully armed and subject to military orders."
"Naturally," Roysland agreed. "Just let me make the trip; that's all."
"I'll see what I can do," said Allerdyce. "Meanwhile, I'm going to call Colonization Service."
Roysland smiled to himself as he cut the connection.
Three days after that, the X-69 lifted again for space. On board her, locked securely in the brig, was the first officer of the captured Enlissa vessel.
No one had yet determined the nature of the Enlissa language, but Bilford had worked out a method of getting yes-no answers out of him, and had, by the process of elimination, arrived at a star system that contained a planet which had been seeded by the aliens. And all Roysland wanted was a sample of the Enlissa animals.
There's an old saying which goes: "Some people have all the luck." It has echoed down the corridors of human history and human thought for a thousand centuries, in one form or another. It is usually assumed to be the complaint of the unsuccessful against those whose success is greater—but it is to be noted that it is not specified whether the luck is good or bad.
With the same reservations, one might assume that Roysland Dwyn was lucky. On the fourth day out, the alarm buzzers sang their warning through the corridors of the X-69.
As the crew scrambled for battle stations, Roysland headed up the stairway toward the control bridge. Captain Dobrin and the fire control officer were huddled over the spotterscope, conversing in low tones. Roysland walked over behind them, but he kept his mouth shut. In a situation like this, he was only a civilian; it wasn't his business to say anything now. He studied the instruments, instead.
Somewhere out near the limits of the detector's range had come the faint trace of a moving ship. And the identity comparator showed it to be an Enlissa vessel.
"She must have picked us up, too," said the captain. "We'll know in a few minutes."
They watched quietly, tensely, waiting for the Enlissa ship to change course. If it didn't, a battleship would normally change the geodesic of its own flight and follow to engage the Enlissa ship. But not the X-69; she was looking for planets, not ships.
They didn't have to wait long. A few minutes later, a trace appeared in the same octant of the scope where the earlier trace had vanished.
"Same ship, all right," said the FCO. "It would take them that long to turn around. They're going to try to come in for a kill."
"Signal Final Alert," said the captain.
As the buzzer sizzled out its message, Roysland flexed his muscles in a subconscious desire for action.
Captain Dobrin seemed to realize for the first time that Roysland was in the control room. His face was hard and tightly drawn, and only very slightly showed the strain that was beneath.
"We're going to operate according to the new tactics," he said. "We'll use the torpedoes first and theaJguns last. We'll use screenbusters and files."
Roysland nodded. "You're in command here, captain. I know nothing of spatial strategy."
The prime officer turned back to the FCO. "Check maximum volume and englobe. It'll be expensive, but we can't afford to take chances now."
"Yes, sir," said the fire control officer.
Roysland watched the instruments closely as the FCO gave his orders. The first job was to feed into the calculators the exact course and velocity of the enemy ship. Then they waited until the calculators gave the most probable volume of space that the ship would occupy after the screenbuster torpedoes were sent.
Take a solution to the Brownian Movement problem; add everything that is known about spatial strategy; stir well with the enemy's probable interpretation of the signals from the torpedoes—and hope like hell.
The first ingredient is relatively easy to determine, the second very much less so, and the third is almost pure intuition.
Figures began to pop up on the screen. The FCO watched them, unmoving, his face a rigid mask. Then suddenly, he began to punch data into the torpedo-firing robots.
Roysland narrowed his eyes as he watched. TheaJprojectors didn't require that much computation. If theaJ's were fired now, the Enlissa ship wouldn't have a chance to fire. And yet, statistics showed that—
Why?
The FCO's masklike face began to acquire a sheen of perspiration in the glowing lights of the control room as he watched the screen and punched methodically at the fire control board. It was work that no robot could do; it required the shrewdness, intuition, and foresightedness that is a peculiar quality of the human mind.
Without warning, the FCO jabbed violently at the white stud that stood at the edge of his panel. He jerked his finger off, and his hand seemed to freeze for a second. He had done the irrevocable; he had fired every torpedo in the ship.
The X-69 now possessed no armament except theaJguns.
The first volley of screenbusters left the ship and slammed suddenly into the ultravelocity that only an unmanned torpedo is capable of. Even an antiacceleration field isn't one hundred per cent perfect. In no-space drive, a ship can accelerate at the spatial equivalent of better than a hundred thousand gravities without hurting the crew. But the tremendous acceleration of a war torpedo would crush any human body to a monomolecular film.
The torpedoes had to be small; only a very small no-space generator could achieve such velocities in so short a time. But their small capacity was capable of carrying enough subnuclear explosive to smash through the energy screens of the enemy ship.
They could not, however, breach the vodium hull itself or kill personnel within. That was where the "flies" came in. Their job was to smash through the breach in the energy screen, open the hull, and destroy life within.
The only trouble was that the enemy could detect the torpedoes. If the Enlissa could act fast enough, they might be able to avoid them. The hope of the human ship was that the englobement would be too much for the robot computers of the Enlissa.
The first wave of torpedoes left the X-69, spearing in the general direction of the Enlissa vessel. For a fraction of a second, they maintained their original course. Then they became erratic—purposely so. They flashed on and off in the detector screens as their no-space generators cut in and out, and they switched courses with dizzying rapidity. They had been on their way only for hundredths of a second when the second volley let go. Then the third blasted out. The whole thing was over before an eyelid could flicker.
Roysland glanced at the chronometer; the whole operation had taken slightly over ninety seconds.
The silence lasted only for a moment. One of the observers called out: "Torpedo at twelve thirty-seven!"
The data had already been picked up by the robot pilot, and the X-69 shifted course. Roysland could feel the slightly sickish feeling in his stomach under the heavy acceleration as the angular acceleration of the ship changed.
There was nothing to do now but wait. It was up to the robot defenses and the screens to make sure that no enemy torpedo hit the X-69.
The ship lurched again.
Because of their tremendous acceleration, a war torpedo couldn't possibly be a homing type weapon; it moved too fast. Before even a subelectronic relay could operate, the target would be well out of range. The X-69 was in the position of a man ducking thrown stones; the only fatal move would be an inaccurate judgment.
Again the floor jerked beneath them as another enemy torpedo sizzled through the place where the ship might have been.
"Explosion at fifteen-sixty!" shouted two observers at once.
The FCO's face suddenly broke into a grin. "We did it," he said softly.
Then the intercom flickered on. An excited Space Marine said: "Captain Dobrin! There's something funny going on down here; that Enlissa officer we've got in the brig just dropped dead!"
It was at that instant that Roysland Dwyn found his answer. The pieces of the whole jigsaw puzzle fell into place and made a beautiful picture. And he realized that the Enlissa, too, had changed their battle tactics.
And that was when the explosion hit.
Four torpedoes had come in on the X-69 at once, and the robot had been a fraction of a second too late in computing the trajectories all at once and figuring a safe path.
The screenbuster's detonation jarred the whole ship violently. Then there were two thumps as a pair of flies came into the hole through the screen and blasted the interior of the cruiser.
Roysland wasn't sure what had happened; the whole control room had suddenly seemed to turn upside down. When he picked himself up from one wall—which had now become "down"—his nose was bleeding, and his right arm was dead to the shoulder. Broken clavicle.
He shook his head groggily and looked around. Captain Dobrin was slumped against a corner of the wall. The FCO was sprawled across the side of his control board. The various observers were tumbled around the room like so many rag dolls shaken up in a shoe box.
Gradually, the gravity righted itself, and Roysland rolled to the floor. He pulled himself up by one arm and ran toward the control panel. He had barely time to act.
Fortunately, most of the observers were reasonably aware of their surroundings. Those who could move were back at their control boards by the time Roysland reached the fire control board.
A second blast hit the ship, but Roysland was prepared for it this time; his fingers gripped the hand-holds and strained as the gravity shifted beneath his feet.