The skipper perspired. He'd have worked out the same thing in the long run, but Nolan saw it right away. He went away and got the ship's engineers. They brought an X-ray for finding flaws in metal. They took pictures of the inwards of the brass-barreled instrument in its place. They traced two separate, incomprehensible circuits. But they were separate.
At long last the skipper nodded permission for Nolan to try the eyepiece, to see what it showed with heavy metal and much soil and vegetation atop it. They taped the trigger so it could not be moved. The controls affecting the eyepiece they left free. The skipper almost dripped sweat as Nolan turned on the eyepiece circuit, peering in.
For a long time he saw nothing whatever. Then a tiny disk moved slowly into the eyepiece's field. It was barely larger than a point. Nolan moved one of the eyepiece controls. The disk enlarged. It enlarged again. A tiny red dot appeared in the center of the field of vision. As the disk enlarged, the red dot grew larger and became a tiny red circle.
Nolan fumbled. He shifted the position of the instrument with a micro-control. He moved the faintly glowing disk until it was enclosed in the red circle. He enlarged.... Presently the disk was very large, and the red circle ceased to enlarge. It enclosed only a part of the disk.
Nolan felt cold chills down his spine. He swallowed and asked for the angular relationship of Planet Four to Three. The skipper sent someone to find it out. But Nolan had found Planet Four before the answer came. The first disk was in some fashion a representation of Planet Three—the Earthlike world which was dead. The second was a representation of Four. There was a bright spot near the equator of Four—the equator being located by the flattening of the poles. It would be just about where a gigantic atom-bomb crater still existed.
Nolan drew back and took a deep breath.
"Apparently," he said unsteadily, "this eyepiece detects radioactives, converting something that I can't imagine into visible light after it's passed through a few feet of metal and a good many more of dirt. There's a red ring which makes me think of a gun-sight. And there's a trigger. Skipper, would you send half an ounce or so of ship-fuel out to space in a drone? I think we're going to have to pull this trigger."
The skipper wrung his hands. He went away. And Nolan stood staring at nothing in particular, appalled and sickened by the thoughts that came to him.
Presently the skipper came back and mumbled that a drone was on the way up. Nolan searched for it with the eyepiece. He found it. The sensitivity of the eyepiece was practically beyond belief. What it worked on—what it transmuted and amplified to light—was wholly beyond his imagination.
The drone went four thousand miles out. Nolan absently asked for somebody to be posted out of doors, watching the sky. He got the vivid spark that was the half ounce of ship-fuel in the center of the red luminous ring. He turned his eyes away and pulled the trigger.
There was no sound. There was no vibration. There was no indication in the underground room that anything at all had happened. There was only a violent flare in the eyepiece, from which Nolan had just drawn back.
Someone came shouting from out of doors that there had been an intolerable flash of brilliance in the sky.
A few moments later the word came that the drone control board indicated that the drone had ceased to exist.
The Com Ambassador sighed a little when he saw the expression on the Coordinator's face. Interviews with the titular head of the alliance of all Western nations became increasingly a strain on his politeness. But the Coordinator said grimly:
"I think I can guess what you're here to tell me!"
The Com Ambassador said politely:
"It is painful to—ah—beat around the bush. May I speak plainly?"
"Do," said the Coordinator.
"Our base on the Moon," said the Ambassador with a fine air of frankness, "some time ago reported military preparations on Earth, among the WDA nations. Those preparations could have no purpose other than an unwarned attack upon us. We felt it necessary, then, to take countermeasures of preparation only. We modified the plans for our moon base to have it contain not only the telescopes and such observational equipment, but to have an adequate armament of missiles. It is now so armed."
The Coordinator whitened a little, but he did not look surprised.
"Well?"
"I have to inform you," said the Com Ambassador, "that any military action directed against any Com nation, or its troops, or the Union of Com Republics, will be met by atomic bombardment from the moon as well as—ah—our standard military establishments. This, of course, does not mean war. To the contrary, we hope that it will end the possibility of war. We trust that all causes of tension between our nations will one by one be removed, and that an era of perpetual peace and prosperity will follow."
The Coordinator's lips twisted in an entirely mirthless smile.
"Military action against Com troops," he observed, "means resistance to invasion or occupation, doesn't it?"
"It would be wiser," said the Ambassador carefully, "to protest than to resist. At least, so it seems to me."
The Coordinator of the Western Defense Alliance said:
"Tell me something confidentially, Mr. Ambassador. How long before you expect—no. You wouldn't answer that. Ah! How long do you think it will be before I am shot?"
The Com Ambassador said politely:
"I would hesitate to guess."
The Lotus started back to Earth with the enigmatic weapon fastened firmly in its cargo hold. Great pains had been taken to keep it from being knocked or shocked or battered in its transfer to the ship. Firmly anchored, Nolan had insisted that the stops, which prevented it from being aimed below the horizon or toward the radioactives in the base, be adjusted so it could not be aimed at the Lotus's own engines or fuel-stores. There were no missiles to worry about, of course.
Even this precaution, however, roused doubt and uneasiness, especially among the scientific staff. It was highly probable that when the Lotus reported in from space, the Coms would ask to examine such specimens as she brought back. The request would be expressed as scientific interest, but a refusal would be treated as a concealment of dire designs. There were those on the ship who felt that the weapon should be dismantled and made to seem meaningless, to avoid any chance of a humiliating squabble with the Coms.
The skipper roared at them. It was the only time on the voyage when he displayed anger. But he glared at those who proposed the act of discretion. He drove them out of the cabin in which the suggestion was made. He turned to Nolan, who definitely was not a party to it. His manner changed. He said querulously:
"Nolan, why do you want that thing mounted so it could be used if necessary?"
"That's the way it was mounted on Planet Five. To box it or case it might injure it. To take it apart might mean that it could never be got together in working order again."
"Is that the real reason?" demanded the skipper. "It's a good reason, but is it the real one?"
"No," admitted Nolan. "It isn't."
The skipper fumed to himself.
"We might get home," he said fretfully, "and find things just as we left them. Then there'd be no harm in the mounting. We'd at least try to diddle the Coms and get it ashore without their knowing it was important. We might get home and find that war'd broken out and Earth was dead like the Third Planet back yonder, only not all yet turned to desert. Then the mounting wouldn't matter. Nothing would! Or we could find that the Coms had smashed the West and were all cockahoop about what they'd managed to do in a sneak attack. So it had better stay mounted. I covered everything, didn't I?"