“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 this. Don’t forget that I disobeyed an important order, and don’t forget that the admiral said only that I wasn’t under sentence of death. Keep yourself out of it.”
Hands clenched, teeth clamped tightly together, Don Ross watched the guards take away his friend. He knew May was right; there was nothing he could do except get himself into worse trouble than May was in, and make things worse for May.
But he walked almost blindly out of the Admiralty Building. He went out and got promptly drunk, but that didn’t help.
He had the customary two weeks’ leave before reporting back for space duty, and he knew he’d better straighten himself out mentally in that time. He reported to a psychiatrist and let himself be talked out of most of his bitterness and feeling of rebellion.
He went back to his schoolbooks and soaked himself in the necessity for strict and unquestioning obedience to military authority and the necessity of unceasing vigilance for alien races and the necessity of their extermination whenever found.
He won out; he convinced himself how unthinkable it had been for him to believe that Captain May could have been completely pardoned for having disobeyed an order, for whatever reason. He even felt horrified for having himself acquiesced in that disobedience. Technically, of course, he was blameless; May had been in charge of the ship and the decision to return to Earth instead of blasting out into space—and death—had come from May. As a subordinate, Ross had not shared the blame. But now, as a person, he felt conscience-stricken that he had not tried to argue May out of his disobedience.
What would Space Corps be without obedience?
How could he make up for what he now felt to be his dereliction, his delinquency? He watched the telenewscasts avidly during that period and learned that, in various other sectors of space, four more alien ships had been destroyed. With the improved detection instruments all of them had been destroyed on sight; there had been no communication after first contact.
On the tenth day of his leave, he terminated it of his own free will. He returned to the Admiralty Building and asked for an audience with Admiral Sutherland. He was laughed at, of course, but he had expected that. He managed to get a brief verbal message carried through to the admiral. Simply: “I know a plan that may possibly enable us to find the planet of the aliens, at no risk to ourselves.”
That got him in, all right.
He stood at rigid attention before the admiral’s desk. He said, “Sir, the aliens have been trying to contact us. They have been unable because we destroy them on contact before a complete telepathic thought has been put across. If we permit them to communicate, there is a chance that they will give away, accidentally or otherwise, the location of their home planet.”
Admiral Sutherland said drily, “And whether they did or not, they might find out ours by following the ship back.”