“There were too many reports. We were very careful with Dora, you must understand; and though we had our contacts with the world outside, no one beyond the Battalion knew anything except our Plan, to control the balance when at last East and West joined in Gotterdammerung.” Riedel’s face gleamed with the sweat of earnestness. He brushed at his face and extended both thin hands toward Stone. “Our rocket scientists, you and the Russians had captured; but we thought all but the least word of the Diskus Projekt had been hidden. Now we began to fear that the other sightings were more than imagination, and that our secret had escaped.”
“You never saw them yourselves?” Stone asked. “The other UFOs, I mean?”
“I did,” Riedel said, pride warming his words. “We had completed the first disk to be built on the Moon and I was flight-testing it. Because we expected fleet maneuvers in the future, Engineer Tannenberg had coupled a locator to the engines to display other users of the spectrum—our own vessels, we intended. But as we began our first atmospheric approach—” and Riedel lived again the moments as he described them to Stone.
In a voice as wizened as his face, Tannenberg had announced, “Colonel, there is another ship within a kilometer, at five degrees to our heading and a little lower.”
“Nonsense!” Riedel snapped. At thirty kilometers altitude their test craft could have encountered only Dora, and she would have been a bright dot on their radar screen.
A bead glared suddenly against the screen’s green background. It was near them, much closer than it should have been before being picked up in the radar’s fifteen-second sweep. “Navigation!” he called, his temper that of a wounded bear looking for a victim. First trial of the new hull in the pressures and powerful magnetic fields of Earth was a tense enough business without having unknown vessels slip through undetected.
“S-sir,” said the white-faced technician at the main radar display, “it just now appeared.”
“Colonel,” Sgt. Mueller said, his hair-spined forefinger pointing downward into the blue-white haze into which their craft was descending. Metal winked, a reflection with no definable color.
“It’s off the screen again!” the fearful radarman was bleating, but Riedel’s voice cut through his junior’s without hesitation: “Attention! All crewmen to acceleration couches! Sergeant Mueller, arm the rockets and stand by.” Disconnecting his throat mike, for he spoke to himself rather than his men, Riedel added, “They think to play with us, do they? Well then, we will play with them.”
Only Sgt. Mueller heard, and he grinned a wolf’s grin as he ran his hands over the switches of his console.
At 300 meters, the black, portless hull of the foreign disk was stark against the sky-curve beyond. It bore no marking. Both craft were steady at a little over 1800 kph, far below the capacity of Riedel’s engines. This was not his Dora, though, he thought with rage. Impervium hulls were beyond their ability to forge on the Moon—or on Earth without arousing the interest of the nations who had to be lulled into forgetfulness. Aluminum was cheap, given lunar ores and abundant power, but the new hulls could not stand the friction heating of 4,000 kph or more in the atmosphere.
“Unknown craft, identify yourself,” Riedel ordered in German. He was broadcasting only on eleven meters, but with a 10 kw transmitter driving his beam, even the light bulbs on the other craft would be repeating his words.
There was no response. He tried again in English, for they were over northern Canada. All his subordinates but Mueller had slipped into their clamshell couches, taking their information from the gauges slaved into the panels over their faces. Riedel started to rebuke the sergeant, then realized that with the enemy able to evade radar, only visual control could be used for the rockets.
And there seemed little doubt that the black disk was an enemy. “Does anyone aboard speak Russian?” No one answered. Besides, what did they have to discuss with the conquerors of Berlin? “Fire one, sergeant,” Riedel said evenly.
Mueller’s finger stroked a 20 cm rocket from the ventral weapons bay. Its hundred kilos of explosive could be wire-guided 5,000 meters, but the gap between the two ships was point-blank range.
The charge went off scarcely halfway to the black vessel.
The spurt of red on black smoke, half a second early, was a greater surprise to Riedel than the howl of air through the fragment-riddled panels before him. The missile’s own fuse should not have armed at so short a distance. Something invisible surrounding the other craft had detonated the weapon while it was almost as dangerous to its user as its target, and the target was diving away. Riedel followed, ignoring for the moment the stresses to which he was subjecting his ship and his own unshielded body. Sgt. Mueller had yanked down a whole handful of switches and four guidance flares leaped together after the black craft. It wobbled under the multiple Shockwave, but a beam as pale as an icteric sclera needled back from its dome. Riedel saw the hull directly in front of him boil away as the laser struck it. His instant course change bagged his cheeks and flattened his eyeballs. The black vessel did not attempt pursuit.
The executive officer in his acceleration couch had taken over when Riedel regained full consciousness. They had resumed their planned course toward Antarctica, flying below 2,500 meters because of the gashed hull. Sgt. Mueller was clenching his hands in fierce frustration. “We need something better to kill them with,” he kept repeating.
“And we got it,” Riedel concluded, affect raining out of his voice. “Tannenberg said his detector could easily be modified to cause a surge in other electromagnetic engines, to cause them to vaporize. For twenty-three years he was right and we hunted the Russians throughout space. There were losses, since their lasers could very quickly slit the hulls of the ships we built—not a bad weapon, lasers; we might have fitted our bases with them sooner had not Tannenberg’s induced overloads left so little of their targets.” He paused in an aura of satisfaction, looking out over the clean, black sky but seeing something very different. “From a pip of light the disks we destroy become great expanding balls that are all the colors of the rainbow. In atmosphere even the copper burns, so intense is the energy released.”
“You bastards,” Stone said with utter conviction. “I wonder if you’ll find it so pretty when they come up with your gadget?”
“Colonel, we are closing with another vessel,” broke in one of the crewmen.
“It may be ours. We were to have an escort when we reached open sea, if the situation permitted it,” Riedel replied on his throat mike. To Stone he continued, “The Russians are an ignorant people, able only to steal from their betters. In all that time they have not duplicated the weapon.”
He took a deep breath, adding, “But six months ago, they found a defense against it. And since then only the few lasers for which we have been able to buy components have kept them from our bases.”
“You can’t be serious,” Stone said. But Riedel’s mind was like his body—gray and honed and rigid. He could no more accept the superiority of an “under race” than could a computer which had been misprogrammed to deny it. That quirk has caused Riedel and his men to ignore the obvious.
“Look, lasers—I don’t know how long we’ve had them, but they weren’t weapons back in 1950. And this detonator screen or whatever, we damned well don’t have it now. If—”