CHAPTER 2

II

It was a short-lived respite, for no sooner had Norden reached the base on the Moon where the frenzied activity of the new laboratories went on than the tension returned.

The taped interviews had been signaled ahead, together with Hardwick's notebooks and Norden's suggested list of equipment. Apparently, the information on him hadn't been satisfactory. He was rushed to a small, rectangular room where three men mumbled and complained unhappily as he was given tests that served no purpose that he could see.

And finally, he was forced to wait in the corridor outside for nearly an hour while the three conferred, before he was given an envelope of papers and led to the office of General Miles, head of the entire Moon base.

Miles skimmed through the reports and reached for the hushed phone. He was a man of indeterminate age, with a young voice and old eyes. There was a curious grace to his gaunt body, and a friendly smile on his rough-hewn face, despite telltale marks of exhaustion.

Norden watched him tensely, but his reactions were not revealing until he turned back abruptly, and extended his hand.

"You're in, Dr. Norden," he said. "What you urgently need is rest. You've had a devil of a time of it, and you show it. But we can't afford to let you go." He nodded grimly. "You're no more psychotic than I am, since you're able to work. And we need your work. The last settlement on Mars was just wiped out before we could evacuate it. Hardwick's notes are pure gobbledegook, so we have to depend on your help. Come on."

He stood up and led Norden through a narrow door, and into a tunnel that connected GHQ with a large Quonset-type building to the south.

"We've secured everything we could for you," he explained. "We even got you an assistant, and the exclusive use of our largest computer." He threw open the door to the laboratory, and gestured. "It's all yours. I'll be around from time to time, but if you need anything extra-special don't hesitate to ask for it. All of our work is important but you have top priority here."

Norden closed the door firmly as the general left, studying the equipment—more than he'd dreamed they could provide. To them, he was probably off balance. But at the moment, he was convinced they would have given top priority to a man who could do the Indian rope trick. It seemed like a careless way of running things, particularly since they hadn't put a guard over him, or hinted at a penalty for failure.

He moved back through the laboratory, studying the equipment. Again, there was the disturbing sense that his experience had blanked out whole sections of his mind, until he had to puzzle out apparatus he must have used a thousand times. But it was still obvious that the laboratory had everything he could possibly want—and more.

He wandered back and around the big computer, and almost collided with a small, brown-haired girl in a lab smock who looked up at him with eager interest, her slender hands busy with the keyboard.

"Dr. Norden? I'm Pat Miles, your assistant. I hope you won't let the fact that the general is my father disturb you. I had three years of extraspectral math and paraphysics at Chitec, and I'm a registered computer operator in my own right, grade one." She smiled at him.

He knew at once that she was the guard placed over him—an extremely attractive guard who would keep the general informed as to his progress. But a known factor was always better than an unknown one. He offered her his hand, and she took it quickly.

"Glad to have you, Pat," he said. "But until I can decode Hardwick's notes from what little I've learned of them, there won't be much to do."

He'd decided that it was a reasonable job, and one which would take up enough time for him to orient himself. After that... his mind skidded off the subject.

She pointed to the work table by the machine where the notes lay spread out. "I've been systematizing it already. If you can supply half a dozen keys, the computer should be able to translate the rest."

It rocked him for a second. He hadn't thought of the possibility, and it meant an end to stalling, long before he could be ready. But there was nothing he could do about it. He picked up the notes, and began pointing out the few phrases he had learned, together with the only clear memory he seemed to have of his time with Hardwick.

"The last page covers the final test," he told her. "Hardwick had some cockroaches and mosquitoes left over from an experiment with various vermin, and he put them in a glass case. I stood at one side with the screen he'd made on me, and he stood on the other. Apparently he figured the things could sense the human aura, and the roaches should move toward my absence of one, the mosquitoes toward him for food. But there was no statistical evidence of its success."

She began feeding information to the machine, and reeling out the results, checking with him. At first, he begrudged the work, but then he found his interest quickening in the puzzle and its untangling. She was good at the work, though she found it hard to believe that the cult-inspired nonsense could be a correct translation.

He began trying to anticipate the problems of her programming, and to scan the results, cross-checking to reduce errors from his own confusion.

Finally she nodded. "That's it, Bill. The computer can cross-check the rest itself. All I've got to do is cut the notes on a tape, and feed them in. Why don't you go to lunch while I'm doing it? Dad has you scheduled for his table, down in the GHQ basement cafeteria."

"What about you?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I want to finish this. Go on, don't keep Dad waiting."

Norden found most of the seats filled, but Miles saw him and waved him over. There was a round of introductions to names that were famous in their fields—famous enough for even Norden to recognize, though he'd stuck pretty closely to his own specialty.

"How's it shaping up?" Miles wanted to know.

"We should have the notes decoded tonight," Norden told him. "After that, it's a matter of how useful they'll be."

Miles grunted unhappily. "They'd better offer a more promising lead than the others we've had. And soon! At this rate, in two more weeks at most, the Aliens will be taking over the Moon—and if that happens, we may as well stay here waiting for them."

He turned to the head psychologist, while Norden was still hunting for the meaning of the implied threat he thought he could reed into the words. "Jim, what about Enfield?"

"No dice," the psychologist answered. "He's obsessed with xenophobia—he hates the Aliens for breakfast, lunch and between meals. I can't treat him here. Of course, after what happened to his wife...."

Miles put his fork down and faced the group, but his eyes were on Norden. His words had the ring of an often-delivered but still vital lecture. "Damn it, we can't afford hatred. Maybe the mobs need it to keep them going. But we have serious things to do that take sound judgment. Why not hate disease germs or any other natural enemy?"

His voice hardened. "They don't kill for the pure love of evil. They're intelligent beings, doing what they believe has to be done. I think they're wrong, and I can't understand them—though I wish I could. I consider poisoning bedbugs a wise move, though no intelligent bedbug would agree with me. This expedition of theirs would be a major job for any trace, and they're going at it just as we would—if we had to exterminate the boll weevil.

"Emotions haven't a thing to do with it. We're in a battle for raw survival, and we haven't the time to indulge our animal emotions. It's a scientific problem that has to be solved for our lives—like a plague."

Norden added another intangible to the puzzle—either Miles was setting a trap for him, or it was hard to understand how he'd gotten the five stars on his insignia. An enemy was an enemy! He decided on silence as the best course, and was glad when the others began to leave. He watched them moving out, shocked again at the pretense that was going on. Did they really think war to the death was a game?

He started to follow, then hesitated, swayed by a sudden impulse. Surely it could do no harm. He located one of the waiters and asked for a package of food to take to Pat. To his relief, the man showed no surprise, and he soon had a bag in his hand.

Pat was still sitting at the machine. She took the food with a pleased smile that told him he'd done the right thing. "Why so glum?" she asked.

"Frankly, I'm puzzled," he told her. On a sudden impulse, he mentioned the lecture and how it had disturbed him.

"Dad!" She smiled, then laughed outright. "He always talks like that to a new man. Bill, did you ever see a little boy fighting a bigger one, wading in, crying, whimpering, but so mad he couldn't stop—couldn't even see where he was hitting? That's hate-fighting. And it's senseless, because the other side may be just as right. Professional fighters don't really hate—they simply do everything they can to win, coldly and scientifically."

She touched his arm. "Bill, be sensible. You act as if we couldn't win."

"What makes you think we can?"

"The computer thinks so. I tried it. We'll win because we know how to be efficient. We'll experiment a bit, because we don't have a set pattern—because we've kept individuality. The Aliens act like a preset machine. Like a crew killing pests.

"Start at the outside of a circle and exterminate inwards! Nonsense! They should have hit Earth at once, even if they had to retrace their steps a few times. But they aren't trying to find out whether we act like the enemy they planned on. No—what's the proper way is the proper way. A lot of our nations attempted that once—and look where they are now."

He shook his head, not believing her, but it left him uncertain and disturbed. The fact was that the enemy was closing the net—closing it so fast he'd be a dead man in two weeks, if he couldn't find the solution. As to hatred....

He shook his head, and went into his office. There were copies of his own published works there, as well as magazines he hadn't yet seen. He dropped down to fill in the flaws his memory had developed.

Paraphysics was tricky stuff. For a long time men had known no other spectrum but the electromagnetic, running from heat up through cosmic rays. When atomic particles moved from one energy level to another, they produced quanta of energy in that spectrum, which was limited to the speed of light.

The kinetogravitic spectrum began with gravity and moved up through nuclear binding force toward some unknown band. Apparently it was the product of the behavior of some sub-particle finer than any known, and its speed of propagation was practically infinite. Other spectra were being considered, but no order or logic had fitted yet.

He found an article by a Japanese scientist that suggested there might be a spectrum related to the behavior of atoms in the molecule—with crystals in some cases acting on one level due to the electron drift, and on another due to atomic strains within the molecule. Colloids, polymers and even the encephalograph waves were dragged in, but the mathematics seemed sound enough.

Norden caught his breath, and began digging into the equation. The third manipulation suggested that magnetism might somehow be involved, and that would mean....

He couldn't dig the idea out. Just when it seemed about to open before him, his mind shied away and drifted off to other things. He was still working on it when Pat came in, and dropped a sheaf of papers on the table. Strips of tape had been pasted together to form a crude book.

"The whole thing," she reported. "But most of it's nonsense. There's a page or two about some secret asteroid where the survivors of the fifth planet are waiting for men to mature before bringing the Great Millenium—or pages where Hardwick worked on the numerology of your name before he discovered your middle name had no H in it—or little notes to himself about buying a gross of Martian sand lizards. I had the machine go through it, strike out all meaningless matter, and come up with this."

It was a clip of five sheets. Norden skimmed through them, and groaned. The shield he had tested for Hardwick had been made of genuine mummy cloth, ground mandrake and a glue filled with bat blood.

"Yet you did live," Pat pointed out. "And he was right about their being able to detect life. We sent out sterile neoprene balloons loaded with live rabbits, and others with dead rabbits. Every balloon with the live rabbits was blasted—and none with the dead animals. We could use the same test to find out whether any one of those things worked—or any combination of them."

"We'll have to," he decided. "And then it may have been the closet instead of the shield—or an accident to their detector that saved me. Pat, have they got some kind of library here?"

It was already quitting time, but she went with him while he persuaded the library attendant to let him in, before the next shift came on. Mummy cloth, it seemed, might become infused with a number of aromatic preservatives, products from the mummy, and such.

It was ridiculous—but hardly more ridiculous than using the byproducts of mold to cure disease must have seemed. Anything dealing with life was slightly implausible. And when he phoned in the order for the materials to Miles, there were no questions.

"Thanks, Pat," he told her after she'd shown him where his sleeping quarters were located.

She shrugged. "Why? If we don't find the answer, I'll be as dead as you in a few weeks."

He shuddered, and then put it out of his mind. Worrying about death wasn't decent, somehow. He found his bunk, stretched out with his hands behind his neck, and tried to review the serious events of the day, without the problem of hatred, over-efficiency, or Pat and her father. He saved those to worry about in his mind after he rolled over on his side, and gave up all ideas of sleeping.

Then abruptly there was a yell from down the hall, and lights snapped on. Norden sprang out with the others, to see the outer lock click shut. In the glare of the overhead lights, he could see a figure running desperately for the edge of a further Quonset—running in the airlessness of the exposed surface without a spacesuit!

More lights snapped on, and a guard in a suit came around the corner, throwing up a rifle. There was a tiny spurt of flame from the weapon, and the running man pitched forward. The guard started toward him just as a few men began to dart out of the huts in hastily-donned spacesuits.

A greenish-yellow effulgence bloomed shockingly where the runner had fallen, and the floor shook under Norden. The guard was thrown backwards, and the others stumbled. When the explosion was over there was no sign of the man who had run.

"Alien!" somebody muttered. "A damned Alien! They always blow up like that before you can get near them! I've seen it out in space!"

And Norden remembered the bomb that had wrecked the dome on the asteroid—a bomb that had flared up with the same greenish-yellow color.

Guards came up to drive the men back to their huts, but Norden seemed to have high enough rating to stay for a while. He learned that one of the workers was missing, and that it had been his badge which the Alien had worn to enter the sleeping sections. Either the Alien had killed and destroyed the worker for his clothing or else he had been the worker!

And he had been discovered forcing the lock on the sub-section of the hut where Norden had been sleeping!