Lester del Rey - The Mysterious Planet

And back in the huge factories of Earth, more were coming off the assembly lines, just as a constant supply of lithium bombs were being made. It was on those that most of the hopes of the Fleet were based. If a few ships could penetrate the lines of the Planet X fleet, and get through to X itself, they might be able to eliminate the whole world.

Meantime, speculation ran high about the absence of attack from Planet X. The more optimistic claimed that this meant that X might have superior ships, but so few that they had to stick to their own planet. The pessimistic claimed that they were waiting for all ships to be based on Outpost, and would then sail in and wipe out all the other planets.

Two weeks after the ill-fated mission to Planet X, the sirens went off wildly in the middle of a work period. Ships were finally sighted and identified as the enemy! The three boys were forced into the stuffy shelter which would be no protection at all if a real attack came, but which gave some feeling of safety to the civilians. They could not make out details from the garbled radio reports at the time, but the crisis was soon over.

Later, they found that three black ships had cruised over, and that ten Wings of battleships had gone up after them. The black ships had waited around, and then simply put on a burst of speed that carried them almost instantly out of sight, down toward Neptune. There was some question as to whether a lithium bomb had destroyed one of them before it disappeared, but it had probably gotten away safely.

Bob and the other two discussed the situation all that night, but there was no real meat for talk. And the next day was their day off, which left them nothing to do. Bob tried to call his father, but found he was in conference with the staff. He went out to take in a show, and gave that up; with the new workers and the whole Navy here, seats were available only on some kind of a black market at prices far beyond his reach.

“We can go over to the observatory,” Jakes suggested. “Old Smedley called me up yesterday. He can’t find anyone else to play chess with, with this war going on.”

Juan stood up promptly and began getting ready, but Bob shook his head. He’d remembered that a letter to his mother was long overdue, and this was the best tune to write it. He pulled out his typewriter as soon as the other two were gone, put in a sheet of paper—and stopped.

Plenty had happened, but she already would know everything permitted by the censors. He’d already described his work in the repair shop. And there was liter-ally nothing to say. For the first time, he realized that war was not only frightful; to the man just outside it, it was dull and monotonous!

Maybe that was why war had become unpopular until this new alien world had frightened people into it again. In the old days, men had fought almost hand to hand, and there had been at least the excitement of any good private fight; also, people had been able to get the full picture, and know what was going on. It was almost like a football game. But with advancing technology, an individual became just a dumb cog in a machine so big, he couldn’t begin to understand or take any great personal credit. And war lost its neurotic zest.

For want of anything else, he began writing about this idea to his mother, along with the few little personal items he could remember. He stopped to look out into the street and see countless men and women hanging around, having nothing to do once their period of work was over, and he fitted their boredom into his letter.

Then he got up and tore it up. If he ever sent that, his mother would feel sure he was sick and would start worrying twice as much as she would if he didn’t write at all.

He went out and bought one of the expensive tissue copies of the Martian Chronicle, and tried to read it, since he hadn’t seen more than the little local Post. But much of the news was meaningless to him. He hadn’t followed the current wrangles of the Federation Congress over policy enough to know what they were arguing about.

The editorial pages interested him more. Again he found the curious mixture of fear and eagerness to strike at Planet X and get the suspense over with, and the general dissatisfaction with having to be mixed up in anything as out-of-date as warfare.

Prices were going up on some things. Transportation between planets was being limited.

Mars and Earth were blacking out their cities at night. And piracy had increased.

That should have been expected. There were always some people who took advantage of trouble. Another item caught his eye.

Then Bob whistled. It seemed that Simon’s father was in trouble; Simon had given the Academy an assignment to his invention of the acceleration seat, and the elder Jakes had patented it without any right to do so. Apparently Simon had been honest in his surprise at his father’s actions, and really had been doing the right thing all along.

Bob struggled. He was almost beginning to like the clumsy Jakes, but Simon was such a mixture that there was no way to tell what would come up next. He could do things that required real sacrifice without expecting any credit; and then he could turn around and ruin all his efforts by some stupid and boorish gesture.

Bob went back to try to write a letter, just as the two others came into the apartment. He glanced up to give a casual greeting, and then stopped. Something had obviously happened. The two were no longer bored, and Juan was practically bubbling with excitement.

“You didn’t beat Smedley that badly,” Bob guessed.

Jakes shook his head. “He beat me—he always does. But Juan slipped in and used his telescope. Not the big one, but the fifteen-inch one with the electronic amplifier. And he found something!”

“On Neptune’s side of us… a little moon it was, maybe three miles big—half a million miles away. And I didn’t tell Smedley, because Simon wanted you to know first, too.” Juan’s English had a stronger accent than usual.

Bob grinned in puzzlement. “Nothing new about that. Neptune has quite a few of those tiny moons between us and Triton.”

Juan nodded. “That I know. But not with the wreck of a Planet X ship upon them. And this one I saw. It was turning around, but I saw it clearly. Lying on a bunch of big white rocks was a black thing, big at both

ends, narrow in the middle. And shouldn’t I know a ship like that when I see it?”

“Juan came back just when the game was over,” Jakes added. “I saw something was up, so we got out fast. As soon as Juan told me about it, we came here on the double.”

Bob blinked, slowly digesting this information. If they could get their hands on one of those mysterious ships, and learn how they operated…

“How badly broken up, or could you see?” he asked. It would do little good to have only mangled pieces of a ship left over after a lithium bomb had hit.

But Juan shook his head. “Not broken. It was all there, Bob. A whole black ship, just waiting for us.”

CAPTURE OF A SHIP of the enemy might change the whole picture of the war. Earth scientists couldn’t produce the miracles that the Planet X race had, but, once having a ship in their hands, they probably could find out how the machinery worked. Then they would be ahead of the other side, since they’d have their own science, plus that of the aliens—which might prove a great deal more than either had alone.

It would take time, of course; even if they unraveled the secrets quickly, it would require tremendous effort and expense to start the new production and reach an effective level. But there might be ways of stalling for time, and of letting the aliens win hollow victories by carefully planned retreats.