Bombs awry
Date: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Inventors -- Fiction; Weapons -- Fiction; War games -- Fiction

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Title: Bombs awry

Author: George O. Smith

Illustrator: Alex Schomburg

Release date: February 27, 2023 [eBook #70160]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Standard Magazines, Inc, 1952

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOMBS AWRY ***

BOMBS AWRY

A Novelet by
GEORGE O. SMITH

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories June 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I

There were some new faces among the crew that crowded around him as he came up the runway into the air-lock, and the Vanguard rang with greeting: "Hi, Pete," or "Glad to see you again, Commander Ellsworth," depending upon how well they knew him. Peter felt a bit of nostalgia—but only briefly. The Vanguard had been both a comfortable and interesting berth; but in every man's life there were crossroads, and some of them demanded that he give up one course, however pleasant, in favor of something more promising.

And some of them, like this one, took a man just across a tall fence, and let him brush occasionally against his former existence.

"How're things going?" he asked.

Toby Reed grinned. "Fine. We've still got a fine gang, Peter. We're stopping 'em all cold. We'll stop yours cold, too."

Peter felt a mild flash of professional hostility. He was no longer one of them. He had no right to the "Commander" title any more. He was "Ex-Commander" by proper title, if he owned any title at all. He was on the Other Side. And the gang that once would have turned the Vanguard inside out for Peter Ellsworth were now going to turn it inside out to prove that they were smarter than Peter Ellsworth.

"Think you have anything?" asked Harry Lockwood.

Peter nodded. "Think I'd be handing it over to this gang of thieves if I didn't?"

He felt that this was the course to take. He must be as confident as they were. They were a smart outfit, and Peter was only one man; yet Peter knew all the tricks himself, and he doubted that they had invented many new ones. So unless someone had come up with about as new a technique as could be, Peter would win. He had all the old bets covered.

Actually, Peter had been covering them for years. There's a lot of free time in a job like Peter's former command—time to watch and think and plan and set down ideas. For seven years Peter Ellsworth had been in command of the Vanguard, and in that time he had seen a good many self-guided missiles launched in the ultimate test against the Vanguard's highly-specialized countermeasures crew. He had watched them all fail. He had taken careful note of the reasons. He had worked with the crew against them—

What better training than this for a man who wanted to build one?

Down in the torpedo-hold were three shining metal cigars. Peter Ellsworth's pets. His babies. Sunk into them were all of his hopes, all his meager finances, and all the money that everybody who was Peter's friend had been able to scrape up. He could not fail.

He waved to his former crew and went aloft to the pilot's bridge to see the present commander.

"I'm Peter Ellsworth."

Commander Hogarth eyed him with interest. "You trained me a fine gang," he said warmly.

"They were a willing bunch."

Hogarth smiled. "You're hoping, but it's no go," he said cryptically.

"H'm?"

"Ellsworth, no matter how neutral a man is he can't help being human first. In some situations like this a man could count upon human nature to help him out. Not this time, Peter. Not this time. That gang below would like to have you back. The only way to get you back is to ruin your chances. They'll work hard at it. As for me, I could use an Exec. Forester wants to transfer back to the heavies."

Peter shook his head. "I'm hocked up to the eyebrows," he said. "If I fail this test, I'll be ruined. At an Executive Officer's pay it would take me about two hundred and eighteen years of service to pay it back. That's without eating."

"But you ought to know you can't win."

Peter shook his head again. "This time the Vanguard loses and I win a nice fat contract. I know what a self-guided missile has to do."

Commander Hogarth chuckled. "And we'll find out how to wreck both your hopes and your missile, Peter. Then you'll be back busting others instead of building 'em. Why, even Ordnance hasn't come up with a good one."

Peter nodded. "I know. But there's faulty reasoning in the theory that Ordnance is the only outfit that knows anything about ordnance. That's why I went into private venture. More real freedom of thought. I've had it and I've used it, and now I'm here on the other side of the game to prove it."

Hogarth started to reply, but Pilot Henderson snapped the squawk-box key and announced: "Batten down! Takeoff in five minutes!"

Way down below in the bowels of the Vanguard the field-generators began to build up. There was no more time for gab. Everybody buttoned down for takeoff, and the Vanguard speared the clouds on its needle-nose and went up and up into the black space between the planets.

Out in the vast empty lot of the Solar System that laid beyond the orbit of Saturn the Vanguard lay in wait for its war-game enemy. In one sense it was like a game of solitaire. There were actually two crews aboard the Vanguard, kept separate from one another during the trials. The first was a skeleton crew trained to handle the missiles, to check them out, finally to launch them against the 'enemy'. The second crew was the countermeasures crew who would take over the operation of the Vanguard against the attack.

Every possible weapon would be used against the missile, every gadget, every device, every brain.

If the Vanguard's crew succeeded there would be a space-borne skyburst of flame that expended itself harmlessly. If the crew failed—and they had never been known to fail—then the Countermeasures Department lost three million dollars worth of guided drone. Not the crews. They were safe in the Vanguard. Just the drone. The guided spacecraft, the "enemy" spacecraft, which would be coupled to every single motion that the Vanguard went through from hatch-openings to main-battery fire to space maneuverings. From the drone would come back the sighting-plate information for presentation on the crew's plates, so that visible and audible information created the illusion that they, themselves, were fending off a self-guided missile loaded with a fission-flash warhead.

So perfect was the illusion that, in every such test, the crew swore and sweated it out. It was the best operation that could be devised; even better than using a live crew directly against the deadly things, for someday the crew might fail.

Today, Peter hoped.

The squawk-box honked tinnily and Henderson said: "Drone at fifteen kilos."

Commander Hogarth said: "Torpedo crew make ready and fire!"

There was a slight lurch as Peter Ellsworth's first pet whooshed out of the torpedo tube. He saw it streak away to be gone almost instantly. It was a tiny spot on the radar, curving outward in a veritable crawl towards the spot fifteen thousand miles across space.

"Henderson, take over!" ordered Hogarth.

There was a lurch as Henderson thrust home a master toggle—the lurch of Drone and Mother aligning together. From this moment on, the two were near-identical. Turn for turn, trick for trick, weapon for weapon. Acceleration for acceleration and direction for direction they were one ship. Only in the matter of distance: fifteen thousand miles but closing rapidly, and in the matter of velocity: the Vanguard was loafing along while the Drone came up out of Sol's inner system at a terrific velocity, were the two ships un-like.

They were chained together with a single, non-radiating communication band of the Z-wave, multi-modulated in both directions so that attack upon the Drone seemed to be attack against the Mother, and riposte by the Mother turned out to be riposte against the missile from the Drone.

There was an electric-sounding sizzle from below; far across space where the invisible Drone must be, there was a faint flowering of violet as the primary beams lashed out. Someone below was testing the main-battery.

Aboard the Vanguard were two factions. One of them (The Crew) hoped to see the missile blossom in the emptiness like a futile flower. The other (Peter Ellsworth) hoped that the crew would see their sighting-plates flare before their eyes in the searing blast that meant their destruction-in-simulation, and their defeat in reality.

It was a perfect set-up. The missile was as good as the best brains could make it. The defense was as fine as could be collected together from the men in the Space forces. Nothing could go wrong.

But it did.

II

It was no failure of man or machine. It was a coincidence so impossibly improbable that only the Divine Intervention of a Deity who was tired of His paper-work could be used as an explanation.

Chuckling in some mysterious Godlike humor, He picked up a meteorite that had been serving as a paperweight on His desk to hold down a sheaf of supplications and prayers. He wound up magnificently, having watched some of His minions playing in the Heavenly Series.

He pitched a clean strike.

The meteorite drilled the Drone right through the middle of Capricorn. The Drone exploded in a puff of flame that flashed in the sighting-plates in the Vanguard only briefly before they blacked out.

Commander Hogarth employed a series of robust verbs and adverbs and nouns in a long sentence that ended with its subject: "—ing meteorite!"

Then he asked Henderson: "How long before we can get another Drone out here?"

"About two hours. I'll have to compute. But—"

"Okay. Tell the crew to take a break. Get the galley to run up some coffee-and. Give the whole outfit a Green Alert. We'll pick it up later. Ellsworth, how's about some grub?"

"Okay by me."

"Can you get control of that gizmo of yours and hold it until the next Drone comes up?"

Peter Ellsworth followed Commander Hogarth towards the ladder, saying with a sly grin: "Nope. If I could control it, your countermeasures gang could louse it, remember?"

"That's true. Well—" Hogarth stopped short, staring at Peter's face, which had suddenly fallen into an expression of almost ludicrous dismay.

Peter gasped, "Holy jumping catfish!" and grabbed Hogarth by the arm: "We'd better get the hell away from here—fast!"

"Why?"

Peter started for the squawk-box. Hogarth got in his way. "You're not commander of this crate now, Peter. I'll have to give any orders after you tell me why."

"There won't be time!"

"We'll make time. Now what's cooking?"

"The missile! It has crude memory circuits, that recall the conditions of the selected target for about two hours after the initial exposure ... they were put there in case a de-tracking maneuver should cause the torpedo to lose its quarry! They'll search for a target that fits the specifications contained in the memory banks and—"

"But—"

"Normally the missile would find the target and smash it. But now the target's gone ... and the missile is still running around loose, looking for a ship of X description! And from what I know of the Countermeasures Operation, each Drone is practically identical with the Mother ship—"

Hogarth's face went white. He leaped past Ellsworth and started up the ladder. "Henderson!" he bawled. "Get mov—"

The din that cut Hogarth off was as clamorous as an air-raid siren running in an empty ballroom. Sound racketed from bulkhead and deck as the amplifiers ran full-throttle. The siren ceased abruptly long enough for the stentorian cry:

"Battle Stations!"

Plate, girder and structure groaned as the Vanguard leaped up at a full three-gravities and lurched. The Lanson generators in the emergency hold whined high to cancel the gravity-apparent. Bulkhead hatches slapped shut; tactic-lamps winked on; oil breakers plunged home or came out as the normal load of the ship was switched from cruising-power to battle-demands.

Two spacemen came up through the hatch, which flipped open just long enough to let them through and then slammed closed again. One of them went on up to the pilot's bridge. The other tackled a wire-sealed locker with a heavy pair of cutters and came out with three spacesuits. He hurled two of them at the commander and Peter Ellsworth and started climbing into the third himself.

From the squawk-box came the cries:

"After Station Secure!"

"After Battery Alert!"

"Mid Battery Alert!"

"Communications Alert!"

"Foreturret Alert!"

"Radar and Countermeasures Section Alert!"

"Battlepower Stations Alert!"

"Report," came Henderson's voice. "We are attacked by the Ellsworth Self-Guided Missile. I caught sight of it coming a-beam, just in time to land on the acceleration. It missed by yards. It is now making an off-beam swing, curving below and inward. It's going to come up from behind at about five o'clock. Any orders, Commander Hogarth?"

"Repel it!" roared Hogarth. He looked at Peter. "How do we stop this damned Juggernaut of yours?"

"I don't know," said Peter.

"You'd better find out!"

Peter shook his head. "Everything I could think of was rigged into it."

Hogarth snorted and went up the ladder to the pilot's bridge. Peter followed.

The scene in space was depicted on the radar. Far behind and a bit to one side, the missile was turning to follow them, coming around in a graceful arc. The Vanguard's velocity-meter was mounting swiftly; but not fast enough by far. The missile, much lighter than the Vanguard, was capable of higher acceleration. Also there was no need of a Lanson generator on the completely mechanical gadget, so that the counter-fields and the necessary mass did not interfere with high gee. So inevitably the missile would catch up with them, and that would be that.

Hogarth looked at Ellsworth. "Radar?" he snapped.

"Radar, infra-red, visible light, and ultra-violet as well as mass."

"Countermeasures! Prepare and launch six radar corner-reflectors, three fission-flash bombs, three oxy-hydrogen flares, two Röntgen radiators and a Lanson generator."

Only seconds later there was a series of whooshing sounds as the items were released. From below came a scattering of flares and blinkings that fell behind as the ship's acceleration lifted it above the speed of the countermeasures devices.

"Turn off the radar and the radio!" ordered Hogarth. "No radiation! Henderson, turn up the Lanson—maybe we can change the pattern of the Vanguard."

The Vanguard was hitting it space-ward at seven gravities now and the accelerometer was climbing. As the Lanson generator was turned up, the neutralized-to-normal gravity lightened so that each hundred pounds weighed only about twenty-five. Henderson nursed the rate-of-rise dial so that the acceleration increased more rapidly.

Radar complained: "What's going on?"

"Can't see. Dangerous to radiate."

"Dangerous to not-see," growled Radio.

"What do we do about it?" asked Hogarth.

Peter thought. "We're like a man being hunted by a vicious animal," he said. "In order to run we've got to keep an eye on him—but if we can see him, he can see us! I—Look, Hogarth, we're not using the Z-wave that couples Drone and Mother, are we?"

"Not any more."

"Well, that's the one band that the missile is blind in," said Peter. "We put in a filter so it wouldn't be able to follow the Z-wave ... that's the only thing that isn't according to the specs. If you can tune your radar to use Z-waves, you can make that tick at least. Anything else you use to look at it will be an open door and a wide road for it to follow."

"Why didn't you put in a disabling circuit?" complained Hogarth.

"So your gang couldn't find it and use it."

"But at least you could have slipped in a self-destruction circuit to click off after a certain length of time."

Peter shook his head with a sour grin. "Why bother?" he said. "It couldn't miss."

Hogarth roared, "You'd better pray that it does!"

Inaudible, but strong enough to feel through the frame of the ship, the after-station battery went to work. It was a staccato bark, one each second. A veritable hail of high-explosive shells roared back into space.

One of the power-demand meters rose suddenly as the main beam-battery lashed out with raw energy.

A pilot lamp winked on and off and on and off, each wink lighting up the tiny words "Solid Mines" as two cannisters of two-inch steel spheres were strewn in the trail of the Vanguard.

From the squawk-box came a cackling laugh as someone pulled the inevitable, banal remark: "When you hear a pistol shot, duck; it's inside the ship!"

Then the radar screen went on again. It was littered with flashing motes; below them was the missile, coming up and up inexorably. As they watched, sweating, a pale blue flash winked on its nose. The flash became a needle-beam that flicked on and off, and at each flick one of the high-explosive shells blossomed briefly in space. It did not bother with shells that would be absolute misses; just those that might be dangerous. The beam licked one of the countermeasures gadgets and the flare blew out far and wide.

It came up through the curtain of gadgets without pause. The circuits in its finder had decided some time before that these were diversions and not its intended target. It ignored them all—except the one it blasted out of its path.

The main beam-battery fired again; three barely-visible columns of light streaked away from the Vanguard and thinned in the distance. As the columns encountered the missile, the nose of the torpedo disappeared behind a diaphanous-looking hemisphere of pearly-flesh-colored hue. The powerful main-battery beams splashed away from the missile's defences like water hitting a smooth stone.

Hogarth bawled: "Main Battery: off Beams!"

The beams winked out. The pearly radiance ceased and the pale blue flicker came on again, dancing madly as it cleaned out a pathway through the soliding mines. A shell, lazier than the rest, flared briefly.

"Henderson: are we on emergency acceleration?"

"We're climbing."

"Climb faster!"

"Can't. We might overload the Lanson."

"Take a chance. We're dead if we don't."

III

The floor surged up below them; the accelerometer crawled up past twenty gravities and kept on going. The complaining cry of the Lanson could be heard throughout the ship now; its output could not keep up with the increasing acceleration. Peter felt as though it must be at least three gravities behind and lagging more and more.

The missile came on. Its slow, steady advance was maddening. Endowed with a fiendish sentience, it seemed to know that sooner or later it would win and therefore need not extend itself beyond its maker's design.

The range kept closing.

"After Station reporting: target visible on the optics!"

Henderson snapped at the spaceman beside him: "Keep it in aim!"

The spaceman took the handles of the optical system and peered into the eye-piece. In the glass above Henderson's board appeared the distant mote that carried their numbers etched on its mechanical guts.

Fascinated, they watched it.

It grew.

It was still coming in from one side, still tending to line up its drive with the drive of the ship, closing steadily. Henderson's knuckles whitened on the steering controls; his feet fumbled for and found the right pedals and put them under a slight pressure.

From behind there came the coughing of the heavy space rifles; three of them side by side, barking in sequence and vomiting one high-explosive shell every second. The space-mines light winked again and again. The main-battery lashed at the missile; its beams splashed aside again, even at this range. The battery-crew stopped, for want of power and to let the projectors cool. The winking light on the nose of the missile flickered madly and the space below the Vanguard became dotted with shell-bursts and flickers from the solid mines.

A lamp winked on the board and Peter roared: "No! After Station, for God's sake, no!"

The repeller-beam punched out, big and thick and tough as it went from the throat of the projector, and thinning as it reached out for the nose of the missile. It touched.

The pearly barrier screen winked on briefly and then it flickered off again. In its place there came a larger flicker of the pale blue.

The ship staggered as it took the shock. The missile's self-defence beam speared upward through the repeller-emplacement and the enclosure exploded outward into space. There was a quick scream of escaping air, cut off a split-second later as several safety-bulkheads slapped shut.

"Report!" roared Hogarth.

"Jones got clipped, but he's not killed. Get Medico, commander."

"Medico coming!" came another voice. Hatch-warning lamps on the panel traced the course of the ship's doctor as he went below to the training station for the repeller emplacement.

"Torpedo Crew! Prepare and launch Missile Number Two!"

"Correct, sir. Take four minutes."

"Four?"

"We've anticipated you, sir."

"Henderson, have we got four?"

"Yes."

"Good, good. Torp Crew?"

"Yes?"

"Good work. Take four—take five if needed but no more."

"Make it three with luck, sir."

"Fire whenever you get the damned thing loaded."

Hogarth looked at Peter with a grim smile. "Why didn't you think of that?"

"I did. It won't work."

"Why not? The defence against a perfect missile is to use another perfect missile!"

"But the one that's running now is hot and ready. The new one will take a few milliseconds to get to running heat. In that time—"

Hogarth growled. "We'll try it."

"Go ahead; but I say it won't work."

Hogarth half-turned away, and then swung back. "Look, Ellsworth, you seem to forget one thing."

"What?"

"This is no longer a game! At this sitting if you prove your ability to make a non-lousable missile you'll get the contract, all right, but it'll go to your heirs and assigns—because in getting the contract you'll lose your life. You can stay alive only by helping to screw up that damned thing out there."

"What are you driving at?" Peter said coldly.

"I'm just thinking that no man ever made anything so perfect that it couldn't be undone somehow. You're familiar enough with that gewgaw to have developed some contempt for it. Now—what's its weak link?"

"There aren't any, according to my knowledge."

"Damn you, there must be!"

"I've spent a number of years thinking about it," said Peter. "Every factor that could be thought of is covered."

"But look at it, man! Your life is riding on the nose of that thing. What's money and position now?"

"Nothing," admitted Peter.

"Get used to the idea," snapped Hogarth angrily. "It's—"

The Vanguard lurched a trifle as the new torpedo was launched. Everybody turned to watch in the optical system.

Missile Number Two whuffed out of the torpedo tube and started to turn in a short arc that would make it intercept the course of Missile Number One at precisely the same instant that Number One was passing through that point on its course.

What happened then was merely a matter of circuitry. Number One caught the new menace in its search beams and computed its course in its think-machinery. The answer came out bad; this new device was a definite menace, even though it was far to one side and still looping away. It would return.

The tiny, pale blue flicker thickened into a ravening beam as it lashed across space to drill into the newcomer.

The same sphere of pearly radiance flashed into being around Missile Number Two, but it was not fast enough. The primary battery beam of Number One was into the midsection of Number Two before the screen went up. It did get up, however, to cut off the rest of the beam, which splashed aside in a splatter of eye-aching fireworks and raised the color of the barrier radiance. But the initial thrust of the beam drilled home and Missile Number Two lost its drive. It faltered a bit on its course; it wavered. It fell from power and loafed along for a quarter of a minute before it burst in a blinding incandescence.

"And that," said Hogarth, "is what is in store for us—"

The Lanson, straining below, slipped a cog or missed a beat; more likely, one of the overloaded parts flashed over to relieve the strain. For a bare instant, everybody in the ship felt the full, bone-crushing strain of more than thirty gravities. There was no question of its being deadly in magnitude, and only the brief duration saved their lives; the gravity switch did not even throw, and it was set for about six gravities. The Lanson took up where it had left off, and the Vanguard went on and on.

That bare instant was not long enough to cover more than a tiny portion of Commander Hogarth's past life, but the high spots he hit made him remember. He looked at Peter Ellsworth icily and said: "You know your Regs, Ellsworth."

Peter nodded.

"Then you know that I have the power to call upon any man, civilian or not, to perform whatever duty I feel is within his power."

"Do go on! Are you going to order me to stop this game?"

"I so order."

"Why not offer me a purse of money?" Peter said harshly.

"I'll have no contempt, Mister Ellsworth!"

"I'm not giving you contempt. I'm just telling you that if you think for one moment that I'm not doing all I can to keep us in a whole skin, you're thinking wrong as hell!"

"You'll—"

Peter held up a hand. "There is one way," he said thoughtfully.

Henderson's hands went whiter on the levers. Out of the corner of his mouth Peter said, "Steady, spaceman."

"Best I can, sir."

"What way?" asked Hogarth.

"We'll have a fifty-fifty chance if we cut the ship in half! The circuits in the missile won't register properly on a couple of ship-halves—"

Hogarth grunted angrily. "Thus making it appear as though your missile was unbeatable? Not on your life!"

Peter looked at Hogarth as he might have at a roach in his coffee. "I'm still a young man," he said calmly. "I've been reasonably happy and I dislike immensely the idea of dying. But if that's the way you feel, I'll go along with you quietly—but with a big flare to mark the spot."

Hogarth's face was puffy and red. "I still have the power to impress you as I think you're able. I hereby make you temporary Executive Officer of the Vanguard—and since I have been on duty for three hours without relief, I am going off duty, leaving you to command. I have one order: keep this ship intact!"

"I suppose it's court martial if that critter of mine roughs it up a bit?"

"Don't be banal. Just—"

"Cutting apart might be a good idea," suggested Henderson. "It—"

"You'll stay out of this!" roared Hogarth.

Peter turned to the intercom and opened the key: "Radar! Radio! Countermeasures! Fire up!"

"What about the radiation-silence?" asked Radar.

"Forget it! The missile has our picture in its mind. We're not agile enough to play squirrel, and there just ain't no place to hide. We might as well radiate all we want and get a better picture of the thing. Fire up!"

The blank screens went on; the one that had been pasted and patched to use the Z-wave band winked out for a few seconds and then came back as the regular—and more accurate—radar came back. The spaceman gave up the optical sighter because it was no longer needed. The ranging-radar and the course-finding radar, coupled together with a ton of electronic equipment, produced a graphic diagram of the courses of missile and target—including the point where they crossed. Time and range were instantly computed, and the ordnance men in their turrets relaxed; the various projectors were now aligning themselves automatically with the intercept-spot.

The missile was a few thousand yards behind and closing up the distance at an alarming rate.

"Can you jerk-slew it?" snapped Peter.

Henderson's white-knuckled hands moved. The drive ceased.

"What in hell goes on!" roared Hogarth, coming out of his chair.

"I'm not relieved of command," replied Peter. "Sit down!"

Henderson hit the steering drivers and turned the free-flying ship sidewise to its course.

"Now!"

Henderson hit the power lever as hard as he could. The Vanguard headed out on a vector-angle to its course, leaving the proscribed orbit at the maddeningly slow crawl of feet per second. At the same thirty-odd gravities, it still took time to put some space between the tail of the ship and the course upon which it had been running.

The angle was a backwards drive by some degrees. The effect was almost exactly the same as if the quarry had stopped and then angled sharply on its course. The fact that the Vanguard's velocity with respect to Sol (or anything else in the universe) could be measured in thousands of feet per second had nothing to do with it. Relativity. The important thing was the Vanguard's course and velocity with respect to the missile.

The missile, aware in its delicately-balanced circuits that the target had swooped aside, was forced to repeat the same maneuver.

After it had seen the maneuver performed.

In spacial terms, the maneuvers of ship and missile could be described as "right-angling" away from their former course; but in relative terms, as seen from the ship, the missile seemed to perform a sharp curve in pursuit of its target ... but not sharp enough. It missed. And the Vanguard had another few minutes of respite; a few precious yards of safety.

In no man's mind was the idea that this spelled defeat for the Ellsworth Self-Guided Missile. The first knockdown does not end a prize-fight; in fact, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The Vanguard had been on the defensive from the beginning, and the entire criterion of the exercise was whether the Vanguard and its crew could make Earthfall in one, well-integrated piece.

Peter watched Henderson eye the radar screen and begin to get set for the same maneuver again. Then he opened his intercom and called: "Countermeasures? Get with the After Battery and see how fast you can rig up a fast-time electronic switch. Can you patch one between the pressor-battery and the barrier screen?"

"Probably. Why?"

"You've got to push that thing in the face and then cover your own face when it shoots back. You'll have a little longer time if you can make it a one-two-three with the screen, the main battery of beams, and then the pressor. Get it?"

"On the hop, sir."

Peter looked at Commander Hogarth. The commander was sitting tense in his chair, his elbow on the computer's table, his chin cupped in his hands. There was a completely nondescript expression on Hogarth's face. If the obvious willingness of the crew to leap to Peter Ellsworth's slightest suggestion irked him, it did not show.

And of the latter there was plenty of evidence. There was a ring to the voice of Countermeasures—a sound of confidence. The tone of a man who knew and respected the person and the abilities of Peter Ellsworth. There had been a sort of friendly rivalry when Peter had come aboard: Peter had been the renegade who had gone over to the other side. But now he was back; and that he was back—and working against himself—because his hide depended upon it seemed unimportant. The basic fact was that of Peter's return.

IV

Plates groaned and girders complained as Henderson went into the jerk-slew maneuver again. And the missile missed again, simply because it was a trailing device and had no precognition.

But it was a losing fight. Respite for the moment was gained—but this could not go on forever. Each dodge brought the flaming death of the missile's warhead nearer to them, so far as actual distance was concerned; it merely brought it nearer "slower." The Vanguard was the clever rabbit running from the dog. But there was no bramble in which to find safety.

Peter studied the ranges, then glanced at the screen that diagrammed the ship's course during such an operation. He grinned faintly. So far the Vanguard had eluded the missile; but if this had been a real space engagement, the Vanguard, in its preoccupation with the missile, would have been a sitting duck for the enemy ship that had released it.

The squawk-box said: "The gizmo is connected as you suggested, sir."

Peter said, "Good. Let it rip!" He turned to Henderson. "Let's go, Henny. Straightaway, fast and hard!"

Henderson leaned down on the levers, made the dodge, and went straightaway.

"Can you line up with our other course?"

"Sure ... but why? Intrinsic velocity doesn't mean a thing. We're fighting one another, not one-another-with-respect-to-Sol. As far as relative positions go, we're just standing still and all I'm doing on these levers is running your missile back and forth in space."

"I know; but I have an idea."

Henderson nodded and fiddled with his levers again until the course was lined up with the previous line of flight.

"Okay, idea ahead," he said. He set the rate-of-rise dial as high as he could without winking on the alarm lamp and began to lean back.

"Don't relax yet. This might not work."

"I'm not relaxed. I won't be relaxed until I'm back on Mars, steering my blonde around a crowded dance floor."

From below came the alternate hiss and click of equipment, and on the radar screens there was an off-and-on stuttering. The deadly, eye-searing columns from the main beam-battery lashed out, flickered a moment against the inside of the Vanguard's defense-barrier; then the barrier winked off and the beams drilled down at the missile, to splash aside as spectacularly harmless. A moment later the beams themselves winked out; and the missile's pearly-radiant barrier, its stimulus gone, died also. Instantly the pressors slammed their thick columns against the missile's nose. They gave a hard, powerful thrust, then were cut off. The Vanguard's barrier leaped up again just in time to stop the missile's counter-attack.

It was bang! press! cover-up! ... again and again and again.

"Are we making any headway?"

"The range-record says we're not losing ground as fast as we were."

Peter took a breath. "We'll hit a balance point," he predicted.

"When?"

"Pressors exert force in inverse proportion to the range. So—the closer that thing of mine comes, the harder it'll get pushed back. Eventually the thrust versus the missile's drive will reach a balance."

Henderson nodded. "And when does that goddammed monster of yours run out of power so we can leave it here and go home to my blonde?"

"It's got about twice as much reserve as the Vanguard."

Henderson groaned and looked at the range-record; it was mildly heartening. The missile had closed from ten thousand yards to five thousand yards in a matter of a minute; but the next twenty-five hundred yards had taken a bit more than a minute, and the next section of twelve-hundred fifty almost two minutes.

The process of bang! press! cover-up! continued.

Every eye on the Vanguard watched and every mind was busy with the same computation. And in a half hour the missile had closed up to a couple of hundred yards and was, to all intents and purposes, stationary with the ship. As far as the missile was concerned, its driving thrust was now equal to the resistance it encountered, and so it no longer moved.

Henderson asked: "May I relax now?"

"Until we can think of something, yes."

Hogarth sat up, cleared his throat, and said, "You've done half a job, Ellsworth. Keep it up."

Peter eyed the commander. "What do you mean?"

"I hate to admit this, but the rules regarding self-guided missiles state no time-limit. From a statistical point of view, you're a fifty-fifty success, so far. If this were a real engagement, the Vanguard would now be considered immobilized ... your one-million dollar missile has immobilized a fifty million dollar spacecraft. So only until we finish this job can anybody come up with a decision. So go right ahead, Ellsworth."

Peter grunted. "Now you're thinking about this as a game, Hogarth. This is no time to yap about contracts." He turned to the intercom and asked:

"Supplies! Have you got a spare Lanson?"

"Three of 'em."

"Crew hear this: Maintenance prepare to jury-rig the ship's spares for operation. Engineering, prepare to connect the control circuits to the existing servos." He glanced at Hogarth. "We may get out of this yet!"

"How?"

"We've one chance," said Peter. "And it'll take time. You see, the Lanson field tends to neutralize mass. The missile has no Lanson generator because it is not equipped with a crew that starts to fold up under a few gravities."

"That's a great help," snorted Hogarth.

"Damn right it is! If we can set up a terrific Lanson field we can neutralize our mass ... then we can run up our acceleration to some really high values! We can probably approach velocities in the region where the Einstein increase in mass becomes considerable; but since our mass will be neutralized, we can squeeze right up in there near Constant. And the missile, having no Lanson, won't be able to make it. We can then run away from it."

"You can't neutralize that much mass."

"I know it. But even one Lanson field in the ship will do the job of making fifty gravities feel like three. So pack two of 'em side by side and you can double it, at least—"

"Fifty times the square-root of two times fifty, plus—"

"—all right, we'll go through the figures later. But it adds up."

"Right. That it does."

"And with four of 'em—"

Henderson turned back to his radar for a moment and then shook his head. "You sound like the guy who installed three fifty-percent power-savers on his crate and had to bale out the gas-tank every thirty miles! What're you trying to do? Get half-way to Centauri?"

Ellsworth shrugged. "We're half way to Hell right now."

They all turned to watch the screens. This, if anything, was worse than before. There had been a tenseness, then; the excitement had poured adrenalin into the veins and tuned them high. There had been deadly danger, averted only by some very fast and rough action.

But now the deadly danger was back there, dogging their heels by a couple of hundred yards.

It was held rigidly at that distance by the pressors, which were protected by the fast flash of the barrier screen, and given their opportunity to press down by the switching needs of the missile's own circuitry.

The crew could do nothing ... nothing but watch; for the super-fast electronic switches could outperform the human mechanism by at least a thousand to one. So instead of being tensed for action—human beings toned into momentary supermen by adrenalin—these same human beings sat and worried about the missile because they now had the time to sit and worry.

All it would take to blast them into nothing-much was to have a fuse blow or a tube kick out or a capacitor break down or a resistor overload or a transformer flash over or a circuit breaker crash open ... so many things could go haywire. To be sure, such a failure could be repaired in a matter of five minutes by this particular crew of technical experts. But five minutes was about four minutes and fifty nine seconds too late.

It took a little longer than it should have taken to rig the auxiliary Lanson generators, because the gang was busy taking quick looks out of the after-ports or into the radar screens to see their nemesis. But eventually they got the extra generators rigged, and then, with specialized men sitting at various relay stations to observe the possible effects of overload, Henderson cut them in and at the same time upped the rate-of-rise dial.

The accelerometer on Henderson's instrument board quietly zipped across the scale, bent the needle against the safety-peg, and then after waiting for a few minutes, gave up. A small cloud of white smoke obscured the scale; that meter would smell like hell when the meter-repair man took it apart. Of course, it was useless anyway. Normal accelerometers depend upon the apparent increase in the gravitational constant. But on a spacecraft where a Lanson generator is used to create a neutralization of part of the mass so that the acceleration can run high without crushing the crew, the accelerometer was a complex integrating circuit that measured the power going into the Lanson, compared it to the power that went into the drivers, measured the true gravity of what was left, performed some internal computations and came up with an electrical current that registered on the control panel.

With three Lansons running beside the normal one, and the drivers pushing far beyond their usual scope, the power was so far above its top reading of fifty-gravity emergency power that the accelerometer was useless.

Peter rigged up the doppler spectrograph and tried to get an estimate of how fast they were going away from Sol. It was a good try, but it failed; the constant flash-flash-flash of the main battery of the missile, mingled with the ripostal flash-flash-flash of the Vanguard, loused up the observations. Not even the heavens forward could be seen through the blaze.

Henderson called Engineering, and soon a sequence-camera was being rigged—one that would be open only when the flashing was off.

"Now," said Peter, "we wait."

V

Hours passed. Velocity mounted. The missile was still dogging their tracks. It stayed about two hundred yards back, retreating a bit under the lash of the pressors and coming up between thrusts. Its average distance had not changed.

The worry and concern over a possible failure was almost gone. With nothing to do but fret, the crew to a man had spent their time buttering up their hastily-rigged circuits. The first electronic switch had been augmented by another one and semi-connected, so that in case of a failure in the first the second would cut in with no more than one single sequence of failure. Men sat over the Lanson generators, watching. The back covers were off and set aside and the crew worked over them with test equipment. Voltages and currents were read from point to point and the alignment was under constant observation. Parts were replaced by the techniques once started by the telephone companies of an early Terrestrial Era, who learned how to transfer the lines from one cable to another, and from one central office switchboard to another, without causing the man who might be using one of the lines to suspect that his voice had suddenly changed its route. Of all of the various operations, only the doppler spectrograph proved a flat failure. The sequence-camera was set up and tried; but the time-interval between exposure and development was too long to permit the careful focusing of the instrument on Sol. All they got was smudge after smudge.

Then they gave up, because someone down in Observation cried: "We're pulling away!"

Everybody went below.

It was true. The sequence of flashing had changed, too; but the important thing was that—perceptibly—the missile was receding.

Slowly it dropped back and back until it was no more than a mote in the distance.

Warily, the fire-push-barrier system was shut off.

Radar reported the missile as fifty thousand yards behind and losing range.

No one heard Radar except vaguely. What they were more interested in was the sight of space around them.

It was a complete and total blank. Not a star, no trace of Sol, not a smudge of distant galaxy or even the slight luminosity of galactic gases. The sky in any direction was a complete and horrid black nothing.

It was Peter that said it: "No one knows how fast we've been accelerating. But let's face it: we can't expect much measureable increase in mass until we get into the upper brackets of velocity. We're probably running to within a few tenths of a percent of the velocity of light."

Hogarth shook his head. "We haven't had time. To accelerate to the velocity of light with ten thousand gravities would take—"

Peter nodded. "And we haven't ten thousand, I'm sure. But don't forget that we may have been running on subjective time, too."

"Huh?" said Hogarth.

"Time ceases to exist for those running at Constant."

"And—?"

"As you approach the speed of light time slows down toward zero."

"Just what do you mean?"

"Just what I said."

Henderson groaned. "My blonde," he complained. "Not only have I stood her up, but she'll be a hag by the time we get back."

Hogarth snarled, "Henderson, shut the hell up! I've got a wife and kids back there that I'd hate to find gone. Forget that damned blonde of yours. She's probably unfaithful anyway."

Henderson chuckled. "That's what bothers me. I know she is—"

Hogarth started to roar, and Henderson shut up finally.

"So what do we do now?" asked Hogarth of Peter.

"We can't just swap ends, because my missile will continue on its normal course," he said thoughtfully. "What we've got to do is to continue accelerating for some time, but adding a sidewise component to our course once we know that we are out of detection range of the missile. Then we can turn around and head back."

"And what's the detection range?"

"I'm not sure. As good as ours or better."

"Radar!" bawled Hogarth. "Radar, fire up that loused-up Z-wave radar hookup of yours and see if you can catch that asterisked missile."

"That's what I'm worried about mostly," said Peter. "I have a Z-wave locator in the missile, too. It runs on gravitics, you know, which have an instantaneous speed of propagation; the range is limited to the power. It would—"

The squawk-box opened up and said: "According to this Z-wave gewgaw, your missile is almost three thousand miles behind. Fading fast. Four kilos now, and you can make that five by the time I end this gab. Yah—five!"

"—normally begin to come weak at about twenty thousand miles," continued Peter. "But if we're hipping it up close to the speed of light, our mass must be something terrific, and that extends the effectiveness of the Z-wave, too."

"But the Lanson—"

"The field from the Lanson generator is local. And even so, it has nothing to do with the Einstein Increase. So far as the outside universe goes we are a massive something-or-other traversing space at a velocity near to that of light. I'm of the opinion that we are near enough to Constant so that the increase in mass has gone high enough to produce the Einstein warping of the space fields. That's why no light is getting in."

No one felt too much like arguing with Peter. Radar eventually reported that the missile had dropped beyond range. Hogarth looked at Peter, who still shook his head. "Let's run like this for another hour," he said. "I'd like to be sure."

If anybody ever got around to plotting it, the course of the Vanguard would be magnificent ogee curve, covering an astronomical distance.

They had come straight out from Sol. Now the Vanguard stopped accelerating along the line of flight, turned sidewise, and started to accelerate in a direction at right angles to the original course. Since the Vanguard still moved in the original direction at a constant velocity but was now adding the sidewise component, the course would take the shape of a logarithmic curve. Peter Ellsworth and Henry Henderson, the pilot, drove the Vanguard for four solid hours in this sidewise direction; then, of course, it was necessary to swap ends with the ship to decelerate another four hours.

The end-product of this maneuvering was to place the Vanguard on a parallel course to the original, but displaced by some distance astronomically high enough to permit the ship to return without meeting the missile.

The stars returned after a long interval of deceleration. They appeared in that outside field of awesome blackness as faint misshapen smudges of spread-out light that showed a tendency to coalesce. The stars condensed slowly, looking like the effect on the ground glass of a camera during a focusing operation. It was some time before they actually sharpened down to their familiar pinpoint appearance, and even then there was a definite fore-to-aft dissimilarity in color: the Vanguard was still going faster than any ship ever had.

But of more interest to the crew, who watched with their hands ready to crash down on the switches that controlled the system that held the missile at bay, was the sky nearby. The missile must not be there. It could not be there. By all of the laws of logic and of science it should not be there. The Vanguard could be pronounced safe if the theory held true: If A cannot detect B, then B can not detect A, all other things being equal.

The theory seemed to hold true. No missile. The crew relaxed.

"Which is Sol?" asked Hogarth. "It doesn't show a disc."

"We must have cut us up quite a distance," said Peter. "But we're not lost. That's Sol right there; the bright one that doesn't belong in that constellation. Catch it?"

Hogarth nodded. "Let's get there. For one thing, I want to find out about this subjective-objective time business."

Peter nodded. He swung the dials and centered the viewplate on a binary below. "That's Centauri," he said. "But we can't tell how close we are to it, any more than we can measure the distance back to Sol. We can compute it when we get back, maybe. But let's face it, we probably are not more than a few light-weeks out from Sol, which means that we've spent some real weeks of time en route. Say six. Maybe eight. So what? We'll get those answers when we get back home. But for the moment, Commander Hogarth, may I now resign from my post? I have succeeded in carrying out your orders; I have eluded the Ellsworth Self-Guiding Missile. Your Vanguard is in one piece. We can now return and make Terrafall in one chunk." He sighed. "Peter Ellsworth is a flat failure as a design engineer and a total loss as a financial risk. I'd like to take my somewhat mingled feelings somewhere and nurse them."

"Mingled?"

Peter nodded. "Mingled. This has been a rough row to hoe: I've invented the missile that no man could louse-up, and then I've had to go out and louse it up in order to keep my hide whole. I'm almost convinced that it isn't too bad to be a dead hero."

Hogarth said gruffly, "If that's the way you feel, you're relieved of duty. You will get my official recommendation. Okay?"

"Okay as it can be, I guess. I'm going to my quarters. Wake me up when we get to Terra."

The Vanguard came down onto the vast sands of the desert spaceport, where it was met by hordes of military bigwigs and sobbing relatives. The crewmen were enfolded by the latter. Hogarth went into the Countermeasures office to report. Henderson hiked to the telephone to see what he could do about repairing the damaged affections of his stood-up date.

Peter looked at the men who had come to meet him. They piled him into their car and drove back to Operations.

"Well?" one of them asked coldly.

Peter explained.

"But you were so damned certain."

"I know what to do—"

"Forget it, Ellsworth. Forget it. No man has ever made anything that someone couldn't un-make. So what do we do about the investments?"

"I'll pay it back."

"With what?"

Peter shook his head. "Tactically, there is a good chance that the thing will be acceptable. You see, even though we got away from it, the missile immobilized the Vanguard for about—what was it?—four months?"

"Not good enough. A normal contract for making these things doesn't pay high enough to make it worth while. The initial contract-grant would have paid us back neatly if we'd been able to follow the stipulations. We invested on a short-term proposition, and none of us can afford the long-term contract."

"There's this," suggested Peter. "We can put a Lanson in the missile—"

"No good. The first thing that OpNav is going to do is to install multiple Lanson gear in the ships. You're licked."

Peter nodded.

"That isn't all. You're bankrupt."

Hogarth came into Operations. "Got some news, Ellsworth. OpNav is going to install the multi-Lanson equipment in their crates. They'll assume that you were the inventor and pay you a fee—"

"How much?" one of Peter's backers asked bluntly.

Hogarth smiled. "They're looking up Peter's financial status right now. The fee will be made exactly the amount that Peter Ellsworth borrowed from you gentlemen to create the Ellsworth Missile."

"Excellent!" the backer said.

Peter grunted. "Broke but honest. Why not add me a couple of dollars?"

Hogarth shook his head. "With you broke and no future," he said slyly, "there's only one thing for you to do. You'll have to rejoin the Force."

One of Peter's creditors asked: "You'll turn over that payment, of course?"

Peter nodded. "We'll accept."

They left him, then. He stood there by the window, looking out across the bald spaceport. The Vanguard, empty and deserted, stood against the sky a few miles away like a monument to his big flop. Gone were his hopes, his ambitions, his chances to make a barrel of cash so he could retire and spend the rest of his life tinkering with doodads and gadgets as he pleased. He was no longer bankrupt; but it stood to reason that he was looking at his next home: the Vanguard. He'd have to re-enter the Service, and when he did they'd toss him into his old job again. Peter could see nothing more for the rest of his active life than driving the ship up and down the solar system.

"Damn it!" he breathed bitterly. "I wish that missile had hit us!"

There came the sudden scream of a siren; it broke off to permit the stertorian roar of the landing field's monster speaker to cry: "Battle Stations!"

Men raced out across the field; projectors swiveled around to point upwards and vomit beams of energy that seared the air and made the screech of the siren pale by comparison; a launching station across the field slapped a rising web of missiles across the sky—

No one saw it.

But there was a burst of intolerable light across the field that expanded into veritable sunshine. Heat tightened Peter's face as he took a step backward. The blast came next, to shatter the windows. The room filled with the tinkle of falling glass. The shock tore at Peter, spinning him half around before it hurled him to the floor. Plaster sifted down on him. The ground itself shook.

Out where the Vanguard should have been was the beginning of a pillar of white billowing smoke.

Peter looked at the pillar rising towards the stratosphere.

He did not look blankly, nor uncomprehendingly. He looked with gratification. All he had to do now was to talk his way out of the fact that there was one hell of a big hole in Terra's finest spaceport and a lot of busted glass to account for.

Peter Ellsworth's mind was busily planning his next gadget as he left Operations to find Hogarth.

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