first, at fifty thousand. If it gets through them there are ... othermeasures, of course."
"This one beats me!" said Coburn. "Why?"
The ensign shrugged again. "They tried for you last night."
"I'm not that important, to them or anybody else. Or am I?"
"I wouldn't know," said the ensign.
"I don't know anything I haven't told," said Coburn grimly, "and thecreatures can't suppress any information by killing me now. Anyhow, ifthey'd wanted to they'd have done it."
A dull, faint sound came from high overhead. Coburn stepped out fromunder the shelter of the upper works of the island. He stared up intothe sky. He saw a lurid spot of blue-white flame. He saw others. Herealized that all the sky was interlaced with contrails--vapor-trails ofjet-planes far up out of sight. But they were fine threads. The jetswere up very high indeed. The pin-points of flame were explosions.
"Using wing-rockets," said the ensign hungrily, "since fifty-calibresdid no good last night, until one made a lucky hit. Rockets withproximity fuses. Our jets don't carry cannon."
There were more explosions. There was a bright glint of reflectedsunshine. It was momentary, but Coburn knew that it was from a flat,bright space-ship, which had tilted in some monstrously abrupt maneuver,and the almost vertical sunshine shone down from its surface.
The ensign said in a very quiet voice: "The fight's coming lower."
There was a crashing thump in the air. A battleship was firingeight-inch guns almost straight up. Other guns began.
Guns began to fire on the carrier, too, below the deck and beyond it.Concussion waves beat at Coburn's body. He thrust Janice behind him toshield her, but there could be no shielding.
The air was filled with barkings and snarlings and the unbelievablyabrupt roar of heavy guns. The carrier swerved, so swiftly that ittilted and swerved again. The other ships of the fleet broke theirstraight-away formation and began to move in bewildering patterns. Theblue sea was criss-crossed with wakes. Once a destroyer seemed to slidealmost under the bow of the carrier. The destroyer appeared unharmed onthe other side, its guns all pointed skyward and emitting seeminglycontinuous blasts of flame and thunder.
* * * * *
The ensign grabbed Coburn's shoulder and pointed, his hands shaking.
There was the Invader ship. It was exactly as Coburn had known it wouldbe. It was tiny. It seemed hardly larger than some of the planes thatswooped at it. But the planes were drawing back now. The shining metalthing was no more than two thousand feet up and it was moving inerratic, unpredictable darts and dashes here and there, like adragon-fly's movements, but a hundred times more swift. Proximity-fusedshells burst everywhere about it. It burst through a still-expandingpuff of explosive smoke, darted down a hundred feet, and took a zig-zagcourse of such violent and angular changes of position that it lookedmore like a streak of metal lightning than anything else.
It was down to a thousand feet. It shot toward the fleet at a speedwhich was literally that of a projectile. It angled off to one side andback, and suddenly dropped again and plunged crazily through the maze ofships from one end to the other, no more than fifty feet above the waterand with geysers of up-flung sea all about it from the shells thatmissed.
Then it sped away with a velocity which simply was not conceivable. Itwas the speed of a cannonball. It was headed straight toward a distant,stubby, draggled tramp-steamer which plodded toward the Bay of Naples.
It rose a little as it flew. And then it checked, in mid-air. It hungabove the dumpy freighter, and there were salvoes of all the guns in thefleet. But at the flashes it shot skyward. When the shells arrived andburst, it was gone.
It could still be sighted as a spark of sunlight shooting for theheavens. Jets roared toward it. It vanished.
Coburn heard the ensign saying in a flat voice: "If that wasn'taccelerating at fifteen Gs, I never saw a ship. If it wasn'taccelerating at fifteen Gs ..."
And that was all. There was nothing else to shoot at. There was nothingelse to do. Jets ranged widely, looking for something that would offerbattle, but the radars said that the metal ship had gone up to threehundred miles and then headed west and out of radar range. There had notbeen time for the French to set up paired radar-beam outfits anyhow, sothey couldn't spot it, and in any case its course seemed to be towardnorthern Spain, where there was no radar worth mentioning.
Presently somebody noticed the dingy, stubby, draggled tramp steamerover which the Invaders' craft had hovered. It was no longer on course.It had turned sidewise and wallowed heavily. Its bow pointedsuccessively to every point of the compass.
It looked bad. Salvoes of the heaviest projectiles in the Fleet had beenfired to explode a thousand feet above it. Perhaps--
A destroyer went racing to see. As it drew near--Coburn learned thislater--it saw a man's body hanging in a sagging heap over the railing ofits bridge. There was nobody visible at the wheel. There were four menlying on its deck, motionless.
The skipper of the destroyer went cold. He brought his ship closer. Itwas not big, this tramp. Maybe two thousand tons. It was low in thewater. It swayed and surged and wallowed and rolled.
Men from the destroyer managed to board it. It was completely unharmed.They found one small sign of the explosions overhead. One fragment of anexploded shell had fallen on board, doing no damage.
Even the crew was unharmed. But every man was asleep. Each one slumberedheavily. Each breathed stertorously. They could not be awakened. Theywould need oxygen to bring them to.
* * * * *
A party from the destroyer went on board to bring the ship into harbor.The officer in charge tried to find out the ship's name.
There was not a document to be found to show what the ship's name was orwhere it had come from or what it carried as cargo. That was strange.The officer looked in the pockets of the two men in the wheel house.There was not a single identifying object on either of them. He grewdisturbed. He made a really thorough search. Every sleeping man wasabsolutely anonymous. Then--still on the way to harbor--a reallyfine-tooth-comb examination of the ship began.
Somebody's radium-dial watch began to glow brightly. The searcherslooked at each other and went pale. They hunted frantically, fearmaking them clumsy.
They found it. Rather--they found them.
The stubby tramp had an adequate if rather clumsy atomic bomb in each ofits two holds. The lading of the ship was of materials which--accordingto theory--should be detonated in atomic explosion if an atomic bombwent off nearby. Otherwise they could not be detonated.
The anonymous tramp-steamer had been headed for the harbor of Naples,whose newspapers--at least those of a certain political party--had beenscreaming of the danger of an atomic explosion while American warshipswere anchored there.
It was not likely that two atom bombs and a shipload of valuablesecondary atomic explosive had been put on a carefully nameless shipjust to be taken for a ride. If this ship had anchored among theAmerican fleet and if it had exploded in the Bay of Naples ...
The prophecies of a certain political party would seem to have beenfulfilled. The American ships would be destroyed. Naples itself would bedestroyed. And it would have appeared that Europeans who loved the greatUnited States had made a mistake.
It was, odd, though, that this ship was the only one that the Invaders'flying craft had struck with its peculiar weapon.
VI
We humans are rational beings, but we are not often reasonable. Thosewho more or less handle us in masses have to take account of that fact.It could not be admitted that the fleet had had a fight with a shippiloted by Invaders from another solar system. It would produce a wildpanic, beside which even a war would be relatively harmless. So theadmiral of the Mediterranean fleet composed an order commending his menwarmly for their performance in an unrehearsed firing-drill. Theirtarget had been--so the order said--a new type of guided missilerecently developed by hush-hush agencies of the Defense Department
. Theadmiral was pleased and proud, and happy....
It was an excellent order, but it wasn't true. The admiral wasn't happy.Not after battle photographs were developed and he could see how thealien ship had dodged rockets with perfect ease, and had actually takena five-inch shell, which exploded on impact, without a particle ofdamage.
On the carrier, the Greek general said mildly to Coburn that theInvaders had used their power very strangely. After stopping an invasionof Greece, they had prevented an atomic-bomb explosion which would havekilled some hundreds of thousands of people. And it was strange thatthe turtle-shaped ship that had attacked the air transport was soclumsily handled as compared with this similar craft which had zestfullydodged all the missiles a fleet could throw at it.
Coburn thought hard. "I think I see," he said slowly. "You mean, they'rehere and they know all they need to know. But instead of coming out intothe