Earth Alert!, Kris Neville [best value ebook reader TXT] 📗

it, army men—officers and enlisted men—were scurrying about, up and down ramps, in and out of the endless maze of corridors. There was a brisk hum of voices; it was like a giant bee hive. The high heeled shoes of female personnel chattered efficiently from room to room.

"Stay close," the colonel said. "It's easy to get lost."

All the noises of the building were swallowed up when the colonel closed the office door on the third floor. The elderly female receptionist at the desk looked up.

"They're waiting, Colonel Robertson. Go right in."

"Right through here," the colonel said.

Walt and Julia followed.

He opened the door, and they issued into the conference room. Talking broke off; faces swung to confront them.

"Gentlemen," the colonel said, "this is the girl, and this—this is the man from the space station."

The audience around the table rustled.

"You'll sit right here," the colonel told them. He helped Julia to her chair. When they were both seated, the colonel withdrew.

Chairs scraped and squeaked.

One of the men across from Julia cleared his throat. He was in civilian clothes. He was slightly stooped and partly bald. He wiped his glasses nervously. "We would like a demonstration of your—your, um, um unusual propensities." He adjusted his glasses.

The glasses disengaged themselves from his ears and floated toward Julia. Julia stood up and walked through the table toward them.

She reached out. Both she and the glasses vanished.

One of the general officers made a check mark on his note book. "I'd say our report is substantially correct."

The other civilian in the room, a youngish blonde woman, lit another cigarette. The ash tray before her was overflowing. Her fingers were nicotine stained. "Very extraordinary."

Julia materialized back in her chair. She replaced the glasses.

The conferees began to whisper softly.

The blonde nodded her head. She turned to Julia. "About this space station—"

"This is Doctor Helen Norvel," one of the general officers told Julia.

Dr. Norvel ignored him. "Is there some way we could detect it?"

"I'd like to try to explain the nature of the distortion field surrounding it to a physicist."

"Dr. Norvel," someone said, "is one of our better experimental physicists."

"Oh?"

"Gentlemen," Dr. Norvel said, "let me talk to her in the next room while you question this man."

The bald civilian said, "Go right ahead, Doctor."

The doctor stood up. Lighting another cigarette, she said, "We'll go right in there, if you don't mind."

Julia got to her feet.

When they had gone, a lieutenant sitting beside the civilian looked up from a sheaf of papers in front of him. "Walt Johnson, isn't it?"

Walt gulped. He felt clammy and frightened.

"I'm supposed to interrogate you—ask you some questions."

"All, all right," Walt said nervously.

"Now, Mr. Johnson, if you'll just tell us—take it slowly; take your time—about life on this space station. Any details you can remember will prove helpful. Describe your quarters, the nature of the aliens—anything at all."

Walt twisted in the seat. He looked around at the waiting faces. A general lit a cigarette. The heating system hummed softly.

Walt began to talk.

From time to time, someone interrupted him with a question.

It seemed to go on forever.

"About this focus rod?"

"It sends out a, a radiation. Something. I don't understand too well. It's lethal."

"What is the radius of destruction?"

"I don't know; I don't remember."

Pens scribbled.

"Please continue," the lieutenant said.

Walt's throat grew dry as he talked. Someone got him a drink of water.

"Could you estimate the number of mutants in this other compartment?"

"I couldn't say. I couldn't swear that there is another compartment."

"A hundred? Five hundred?"

"I couldn't say."

"I see."

"About," a general asked, "how much of the total area of the ship would you say your compartment occupied?"

On and on.

"Let's go over the description of that machine again. Did you ever see this Fierut disassemble any part of it?"

Walt was limp and exhausted. His mind was dulled by the effort of concentrating continuously. "Yes." "No." "To understand that...." "I don't know." "No, no more than that.... Please. I'm getting confused."

"You've been very helpful, Mr. Johnson," the lieutenant said. "Gentlemen, I'm afraid he's getting a little tired. Shall we postpone further questioning?"

"I believe we better. Would you call in Dr. Norvel, please."

Walt slumped down in his seat.

The conferees whispered among themselves and compared notes.

Julia and the doctor came back.

"It took longer than I thought," Dr. Norvel said. "I had to teach her quite a bit of math."

"What's your opinion?" the bald civilian asked.

"I believe her, gentlemen. She has just shown me how to build some electronic equipment. I'll have a picture of that space station for you within two weeks."

"That will be all, then, for right now," the civilian said. He nodded at Walt and Julia. "The colonel is waiting to take you back to your hotel."

"You're not to talk to anyone about this," one of the generals said.

Thursday. They came for Walt and Julia at nine o'clock. The hotel was aswarm with the military.

"Security measures," the colonel explained as they waited for the elevator. "If any information about this leaks out, the whole country will be thrown into a panic."

Julia nodded.

"We've evacuated the civilians to another hotel," the colonel said.

Two guards with rifles stood at the street doorway.

"It's going to be a hard day for you both," the colonel said once they were in the car. "You're scheduled to meet representatives of some foreign countries at ten o'clock. And after that, we'll spend the rest of the day picking both your brains as clean as we know how."

"That's the way it's got to be," Julia said. "I understand."

It was after midnight when she returned to her hotel. Surprisingly, she was able to sleep until dawn. She arose and showered in the first sunlight and dressed and ordered breakfast. The sergeant on duty at the desk downstairs went out himself to get it for her.

At nine (this was Friday morning) she and Walt were back in the Pentagon. Walt's face was puffy, his eyes were red. "I'm tired," he murmured as an officer hurried him toward a meeting with the Ordnance Section. For a moment Julia considered restoring his mutant bridge. But she was not completely certain that she could trust him; even the tiniest doubt was an excuse not to—since there was no overwhelming advantage to be gained from having two mutants instead of one in the Pentagon.

A few minutes later, Julia was ushered into the office of one of the very high ranking general officers. He rose to greet her, and then returned to his desk. Julia sat down across from him and he pushed stacks of reports to one side until he located his cigarette box.

Julia took a cigarette.

"Julia? I may call you that?"

"Please do."

He bent across the desk to light her cigarette. He pushed an ash tray toward her.

"I expect you'd like to know what we've done so far?"

"Very much."

"I'm preparing a report for the President. I hope to have it for him by noon." He glanced at his watch. "I want to verify with you everything that goes into it."

The smoke made Julia dizzy. She cleared her brain. It was a relief to hear someone else talking for a change.

"... we're preparing an atomic rocket to intercept their space station," he said. "I understand from this report that your mutant powers aren't infinite. It says in here somewhere that it would be impossible to stop by, by teleportation you call it, don't you? an object as large as a rocket?"

"It's mostly a question of inertia. There's a mass-speed-time ratio involved. The greater the first two, the more time required to divert the missile from its path. The mass-speed must be sufficient to create a greater diversion period than exists between the time of detection and the time of impact."

"You would say that the rocket could get through?"

"If the same rule holds for the aliens as for us, I don't think they would have time to teleport it away."

"That's what I wanted."

"Just a minute, though. How long will it take you to complete it?"

"Give us another week," the general said. "That's one of the things I wanted to see you about. It will take Doctor Norvel longer than that to plot the orbit of the station. I want you to plot that orbit for us—"

"I'm sorry, General. This is in your reports somewhere, too. I can't. Not until Doctor Norvel can locate it. It's too far out for me to locate. I'd have to have an, an anchor on that end—something I could contact—before I could center on it. And I don't have. I can't even feel it, if you see what I mean. There's, nothing to get ahold of. If I could ... I could just teleport an atom bomb there, and we wouldn't need to worry with the rocket at all." She snubbed out her cigarette.

"Couldn't you get a fix on this frequency that controls your mutant powers and locate the space station that way?"

"Neither Dr. Norvel nor I could detect it with the available equipment: we tried. There's no way of knowing what equipment's required. It's probable the frequency is displaced from normal space; if it is, we can't even tell the increment of displacement. It's just a hopeless task."

"Well, it will take us two weeks or more, then...." He crossed out something on the paper before him.

"Suppose they attack before that?"

"I'm coming to that possibility.... I see you say here that mutants can be destroyed by bomb concussions because they can't displace sufficiently far without teleporting. What do you mean there?"

"It's complicated. If the bomb has too much inertia to be teleported off target, they have to remove themselves from the blast area. And they can't remove themselves far enough—not in space, but in relation to space; so they'd have to teleport, and that would be fatal."

"Ummm. Bullets?"

"They could displace themselves far enough to avoid a bullet."

The general wrote something down. "How large an explosion would suffice?"

"I believe Dr. Norvel has those figures. I didn't stay long enough to see the results of her computations. She figured it out. They rushed me off somewhere else."

"I'll have to ask her.... Now. I'm counting on there being five hundred saucer ships in the first wave. With luck, our Air Force will get a few of them. You say—ah, yes, right here: 'If hit in the air, the pilots cannot displace out of the ship because they would be killed by the fall to Earth.' That's correct, isn't it?"

Julia nodded. "Yes."

"But I expect we'll have to destroy the majority of them after they land; luck only goes so far."

"If they scatter all over the planet?" Julia asked.

"We have bombers alerted."

"Suppose they land in a city? You'd have to bomb immediately. You'd have to destroy the whole area before they could escape. You wouldn't have any time to evacuate the population. But even so, they could destroy the bomber crews with their focus rods before the planes were over the target—"

"Automatic bombers," the general said. "I hope we've got enough of them. As for the populations, I hope they don't land in our cities." He puckered his lips. "I've alerted all our ground forces. We'll have our whole supply of atomic artillery available. Whenever we discover a focus rod in operation, we intend to hit the center of the area of destruction with everything we've got."

"What do you honestly think?" Julia asked.

He shuffled papers, thinking. He looked up from the report. "... it will take us over a week to get even partially ready. If they strike before that, we'll be able to kill some of them. If they give us a week, we might even hope to kill half of them—half of the first wave—before we're destroyed.... I was hoping you might offer us an alternative, or a supplement; or something."

Julia took another cigarette. She fumbled in her handbag for a match. She lit the cigarette. "No," she said.

"I rather thought not," he said. "I expected you'd have already told us."

"I've thought about it every way I know how.... I thought about displacing all of them when they land; keeping them displaced, where they couldn't reach us.... But there'll be too many of them. I might be able to hold one mutant in displacement, even if he resisted me. I know more than he does. But five hundred?" She shook her head.

"Could we build a machine to do that job?"

"You'd have the rocket done much sooner."

"... I expect that's right. I hope they just give us time."

"If I think of anything else—"

"Oh, I wanted to mention that," the general said. "I want to give you a phone number. You can reach me any time, day or night, through it." He wrote it on a piece of paper.

Julia memorized it at a