"If anybody else finds out what we know, the children will be hated as nobody was ever hated before. They'll be known for the deadly danger they are. We're primitives, beside their civilization! We'll have to fight, because there's no room for the population of another whole world, here! There's no food for more people! We can't let them come, and they must die if they don't come, and the children must be here to open the way for them to come in hordes.
"The children mustn't be allowed to build anything we don't understand or that might let them open communication with their people. If they try, they'll be trying to serve their own race by destroying this. And they'd have to destroy us and—" his voice was fierce—"I'm not going to let anything happen to you!"
Gail's cheeks were white, but a trace of color came into them then. Yet she looked remorseful as she glanced forward to where the children murmured hopelessly together.
CHAPTER 5
The jet transport got new flight orders while it was in the air over South Carolina. There was a new attitude toward their ship and its occupants among the military men and the political heads of governments. The new attitude was the result of mathematics.
It was the burst of static screaming, three whole seconds long, which made the matter something much more than a thing to maneuver with and make public pronouncements about. In every nation it eventually occurred to somebody to compute the power in that meaningless signal. It was linked with the appearance of the children's ship—which nobody really believed had contained children—and therefore it was artificial. But the power, the energy involved was incredible. The computations went to defense departments and heads of state. They reacted. And in consequence the jet-plane was ordered to change course and head west.
After many hours the transport landed. A hillside rose before it. A vast, grass-covered area lifted up. It was a great door. The transport rolled deliberately into a monstrous, windowless, artificial cavern, and the hillside closed behind it.
This was a base, too, but not like the one at Gissell Bay. The existence of this one would be denied. It was hoped that it would be forever unused for its designed purpose. Soames never saw any part of it that he was not supposed to see. Nobody ever mentioned to him any function it could perform except the hiding of children from a spaceship that happened to have crashed on Antarctica. But he guessed that if atomic war should ever burst on Earth, that rockets rising from this place and others like it would avenge the destruction done to America.
Presently Gail and the children were installed in a remarkably ordinary small cottage, and Soames frowned. They'd arrived at the village by elevator from a tunnel hundreds of feet underground, but the village in which the cottage stood looked exactly like any other remote and sleepy settlement. Soames began a protest against Gail being so isolated and so much alone. But, unsmilingly, he was shown that there was an electrified fence, with guards, and another a mile beyond, and a third still farther, with watch-posts beyond that. Nobody would intrude upon the village. But from the air it would look perfectly commonplace. There was no indication at all of shafts from deep underground to what appeared an ordinary country general store. There was no sign of tunnels from the different houses to that merchandising mart.
Soames went off to be assigned other quarters. He wanted to work on some items that had come into his mind during the last hours of the flight. He'd guessed, to Gail, that the children came out of remotest time. There was evidence for it, but it need not be true. So he'd made a test.
When the children had breakfasted he drew on a sketch-pad a diagram of part of the solar system. A dot for the sun, and a circle with a dot on it for Mercury, the innermost planet. Another dot on a circle for Venus, the second world out. A third circle and a dot for Earth and its orbit, and beside the dot indicating Earth he drew a crescent, for the moon. Alongside the dot standing for Mars he drew two crescents, because Mars has two tiny moons.
The children discussed the diagram. Zani ended it with a decisive remark in the language they used. Fran drew a fifth circle, placed a dot to indicate a fifth planet, and put four crescents beside it, then drew a sixth circle with a large dot and drew twelve crescents beside that.
Soames drew a deep breath. The twelve-moon planet was certainly Jupiter, which is now next out from the sun after Mars. The number of moons made it unmistakable. But Fran put a Fifth Planet, with four moons, where now there is only planetary debris, the asteroids.
The diagram quite distinctly proved, to Soames' satisfaction, that the hypothetical Fifth Planet had existed, with four moons, and that the children had come out of time rather than across space. And he was now grimly sure about the reason for the children's coming to Earth of here and now.
Bombardment from space is not unknown. In 1914 there was a meteoric fall in Siberia which knocked down every tree for fifty miles around. A few thousand years earlier, eight or ten, Canon Diablo crater was formed in Colorado by a missile from the heavens which wiped out all life within a thousand-mile radius. Earlier still a much larger crater was formed in Canada, and there are yet traces of an even more remote monster-missile landing in South Africa. The ring-mountain there is largely worn away, but it was many miles across.
The situation of the children's race amounted to an infinitely speeded-up bombardment instead of a millennial sniping from the sky. The Fifth Planet was newly shattered into bits. Its fragments plunged upon Earth and moon as they had weeks earlier battered Mars, and as fortnights later they would devastate Venus and plunge upon Mercury. Jagged portions of the detonated planet filled the sky of Earth with flames.
The ground shook continuously. With a mad imprecision of timing, mountain-ranges plummeted out of the sky at utterly unpredictable times and places. Anywhere on Earth, at night-time, living creatures might look upward and see the stars blotted out in irregularly-shaped, swiftly enlarging areas which would grow until there was only blackness overhead. But that could not last. It turned abruptly to white-hot incandescence as the falling enormity touched atmosphere, and crashed down upon them.
No living thing which saw the sky all turned to flame lived to remember it. Not one survived. Obviously! They were turned to wisps of incandescent gas, exploding past the normal limits of Earth's air. Some may have seen such plungings from many miles away and died of the concussion. The ground heaved in great waves which ran terribly in all directions. Vast chasms opened in the soil, and flames as of hell flowed out of them. Seashores were overwhelmed by mountainous tidal waves, caused by cubic miles of seawater turned to steam when islands fell into the ocean at tens of miles per second.
This was what happened to Earth in the time from which the children came. Perhaps their elders had foreseen it in time to take some measures, which would be the children's ship. But that ship had been built very hastily. It could have been begun before the bombardment started, or it could have been completed only near the end, when asteroids already plunged into defenseless Earth and it heaved and writhed in agony.
Humans caught in such a cosmic trap would be in no mood to negotiate or make promises, if any sort of beachhead to the future could be set up. They would pour through and the world of the present must simply dissolve into incoherence. There could be no peace. It was unthinkable.