All we know is what they did to Titan. We’re trying to defend ourselves against an imponderable, and our defenses are crumbling.” Vanaman closed the tape cans and tossed them into the return file with an air of finality. “Do you know what Provost called this war?”
Done Kendall nodded. “He told me. An Idiot War.”
“And he was right. Their war, not ours. What do they want? We don’t know. On their choice of battlefield, in their kind of warfare, they’re whipping us, and we don’t even know how. If we had even a glimpse of what they were trying to do, we might be able to fight them. Without that, we’re helpless.”
She heard what he was saying, and she realized that it was almost true, and yet something stuck in her mind, a flicker of an idea? “I wonder,” she said. “Maybe we don’t know what the Enemy is trying to do here—but there’s one possibility that nobody seems to have considered.”
Vanaman looked up slowly. “Possibility?”
“That they don’t know what they’re trying to do, either,” Dorie Kendall said.
It was a possibility, even Vanaman grudgingly admitted that. But as she went down to Isolation Section to examine John Provost, Dorie Kendall knew that it made no sense, no more nor less than anything else that the Enemy had done since they had come six months before into Earth’s solar system.
They had come silent as death, unheralded: four great ships moving as one, slipping in from the depths of space beyond Pluto. How long they had been lurking there, unobserved but observing, no one could say. They moved in slowly, like shadows crossing a valley, with all space to conceal them, intruders in the enormous silence.
An observation post on tiny Miranda of Uranus spotted them first, suddenly and incredibly present where no ships ought to be, in a formation that no Earth ships ever would assume. Instrument readings were confirmed, questioned, reconfirmed. The sighting was relayed to the supply colony on Callisto, and thence to Earth.
Return orders were swift: keep silence, observe, triangulate and track, compute course and speed, make no attempt at contact. But return orders were too late. The observation post on Miranda had ceased, abruptly, to exist.
Alerted patrol ships searched in vain, until the four strange ships revealed themselves in orbit around Saturn. Deliberately? No one knew. Their engines were silent; they drifted like huge encapsulated spores, joining the other silent moons around the sixth planet. They orbited for months. Titan Colony watched them, Ganymede watched them, Callisto watched them.
Nothing happened.
On Earth there were councils, debate, uncertainty; speculation, caution, fear. Wait for diem to make contact. Give them time. Wait and see. But the four great ships made no move. They gave no sign of life. Nothing.
Signals were dispatched, with no response. Earth prepared against an attack—a ridiculous move. Who could predict the nature of any attack that might come? Still, Earthmen had always been poor at waiting. Curiosity battled caution and won, hands down. What were these ships? Where did they come from? Hostile or friendly? Why had they come here?
Above all, what did they want?
No answers came from the four great ships. Nothing.
Finally an Earth ship went up from Titan Colony, moving out toward the orbit of the intruders. The crew of the contact ship knew their danger. They had a single order: make contact. Use any means, accept any risk, but make contact. Approach with caution, with care, gently, without alarming. But make contact. At any cost.
They approached the intruders, and were torn from space in one instantaneous flash of white light. Simultaneously, Titan Colony flared like an interplanetary beacon and flickered out, a smoking crater three hundred miles wide and seventy miles deep.
Then, incredibly, the four great ships broke from orbit and fled deep beneath the methane and ammonia clouds of Saturn’s surface. Earth reeled from the blow, and waited, paralyzed, for the next—and nothing happened. No signal, no sign, nothing.
But now the intruders were the Enemy. The war had begun, if it was a war; but it was not a war that Earthmen knew how to fight A war of contradiction and wild illogic. A war fought in a ridiculous microcosm where Earthmen could not fight, with weapons that Earthmen did not comprehend.
An Idiot War . . . .
Dorie went to see John Provost just eight hours after the Enemy had struck through the Turner girl. As she followed the tall, narrow-shouldered doctor into the isolation cubicles of Medical Section, he stopped and turned to face her. “I don’t think this is wise at all.”
“Maybe not” the girl said. “But I have no choice. Provost was closer to the Enemy than anyone else here. There’s no other place to start.”
“What do you think you’re going to learn?” Dr. Coindreau asked.
“I don’t know. Only Provost knows exactly what happened in that Relief room.”
“We know what happened,” the doctor protested. “The Relief room was monitored. Provost had come close to his breakpoint when Control jerked his Analogue back from the surface. The pressure on the men under batde conditions is almost intolerable. They all approach breakpoint, and induced regression in the Relief room is the fastest, safest way to unwind them, as long as we don’t let them curl up into a ball.”
“You mean it was the fastest and safest way,” Dorie corrected him.
The doctor shrugged. “They hit Provost at his weakest point. The Turner girl couldn’t have done worse with a carving knife. I still don’t see what you’re going to learn from Provost.”
“At least I can see what they’ve done to him.” She looked at the doctor. “I don’t see how my seeing him can hurt him.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about him.” The doctor opened the door. At the nursing desk a corpsman was punching chart-cards. “How’s he doing?” the doctor asked.
“Same as before.” Then the corpsman saw the girl. “Doc, you aren’t taking her in there, are you?”
“That’s what she wants.”
“You know he’s not exactly sold on girls, right now.”
“I’ll risk it,” Dorie said sharply.
Inside the cubicle they found Provost lying on his back on a bunk. The pale blue aura of a tangle-field hovered over him, providing gentle but effective restraint.
Provost was singing.
The words drifted across the room. Dorie suddenly caught them and felt her cheeks turn red.
“Hello, John,” the doctor said. “How are you feeling?”
Provost stopped singing. “Fine. Yourself?”
“This is Miss Kendall. She’s going to help take care of you.”
“Well, now, that’s just fine.” Provost turned his face toward Dorie. No sign of recognition; his eyes were flat, like a snake’s eyes. Impersonal—and deadly. “Why don’t you leave us alone to talk, Doc? And turn this tangle-field off. Just for a minute.”
She shivered at the tone. Dr. Coindreau said, “John, do you know where you are?”
“In a tangle-field.”
“Do you know where?”
Provost ignored the question, stared fixedly at the girl. She had never seen such a malignant stare.
“Do you know what happened to you?” the doctor tried again.
His eyes didn’t waver, but he frowned. “Memory’s a little sticky. But ten seconds out of this tangle-field would help, I bet.” She saw his hand clench on the coverlet until the knuckles whitened.
The doctor sighed. “Listen to me, John. You were on the surface. Something happened down there. What—”