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“Heavens!” said Bartok mildly. “And Oh, my Lord!” His face wore a curiously complex look, as though he were half stunned with shock and otherwise doubting what he saw. Said Bartok: “They can’t do this to us.” He turned decidedly from the transceiver and began to pace his office. Into his personal mike he snapped: “Send in the number one houri.”

Babe MacNeice entered on cue. “What,” she asked, “is the matter with our overlord and preceptor?” She studied his face and dropped the smile. “Barty,” she said worriedly, “what’s wrong?”

“Sit down,” he growled, shoving a chair at her. Looking fixedly at the ceiling he said: “I just got a report from somewhere in the neighborhood of a punky little star named Arided in Cygnus. Babe, we’re being invaded. The world is being invaded.”

The girl laughed briefly. “Don’t be an ass,” she said.

“It’s true,” said Bartok.

She rose and began to pace beside him. Finally she exploded: “They can’t do this to us! They simply can’t—why, we’re the invaders; we always have been!”

Bartok looked sidewise at her. “That’s the way I felt,” he observed sagely. “I know what you mean. Question is, what do we do now?”

“I don’t know. Let’s hear the transcript from the communications outfit.” Silently he turned on the rewind and replay. It said mechanically: “Office of Commander Bartok, Intelligence Wing, Fleet Command. Go ahead.” That was a sort of letterhead.

Immediately there was the agitated voice of some man or other: “Barty? This is Hogan, of the Aries Hogans. I jammed this through to you—personal report. It’s going to panic them if it gets out. Be very careful.”

Bartok’s voice: “I remember you—patrol duty for the Arided section. Give me the facts in a hurry, son.”

Hogan’s voice: “Ships coming at us from everywhere, it seems. A big lineship was blown to pieces before it could report. I’m the only intelligence man in the district, I guess. I don’t know whose the ships are—I don’t know how they work. I’m speaking from the fourth planet of Arided—polyp-like natives, oxygenous atmosphere. They’re systematically bombing the cities.”

Bartok’s voice: “Stop beating yourself over the head, Hogan. You’re crazy!”

Hogan’s voice: “If that’s the way you feel. They’re laying a line barrage along the planet, letting it rotate under their fire. We can’t get a thing into the air—it’s jammed up bad. I don’t know, Barty, honest I don’t know—” What Hogan didn’t know remained a mystery, for the transcript ended right there with a strangled wail and a deafening report.

“Oho,” said Babe MacNeice in a long exhalation. “He wasn’t kidding.”

Bartok was at the phone: “Get me Fitzjames,” he said. “Yes—the all-highest Admiral of the Fleet, the slave-minded ol’ windjammer in person.” In a rapid aside to Babe he snapped: “I can’t handle this. I’ll leave it to the navy—it’s their baby.”

Again at the phone. “Admiral? Shoot some patrollers out to Cygnus Arided. Don’t be surprised if they don’t come back. Invasion, admiral. I wouldn’t kid you.” He hung up sharply.

“That,” he said absent-mindedly, “is that. Whether their tactics are capable of defensive war remains to be seen. There is room for doubt.”

The patrollers did not come back. However, one managed to keep unbroken contact with the flag-ship until it was blown out of the ether, and the story it told was plenty nasty. No description of the invading ships was given except what the patroller got over in the customary strangled wail just before it broke off sending. It could be assumed that they weren’t reaction-type vessels. They moved faster than light, which meant knowledge of the unified field theory’s most abstract implication. They had, without a doubt, bombed or rayed out of existence, the populations of about three score planets. This meant that either their science was something infinitely beyond the Terrestrial grasp, so far beyond it that it could not be called classified knowledge at all but must, necessarily, he lumped together as a divine attribute, or their ships were big.

The Fleet had successfully colonized a great deal of space and in the course of wiping out unsuitable native populations and encouraging others, battling moderately advanced peoples and races, suppressing the mutinies inevitable in a large, loose organization, and smacking down the romantic imbeciles who had a few tons of hard cash to throw away on what was considered a career of piracy, had developed an extraordinary amount of offensive technique and armament.

Their ships were marvelous things. They were so big that they were built at special dry-docks. When they took to the ether from these they would never touch land again until they were scrapped. There simply wasn’t anything firm enough to bear their weight. You could explore a line-ship like a city; wander through its halls for a year and never cross the same point. When the big guns were fired they generally tore a hole in space; when the gunshells exploded they smashed asteroids to powder.

But the Fleet had nothing to show that could match the achievement of the as-yet nameless invaders, who had rayed the life out of a major planet as it revolved beneath them. According to the reports the job had been done in the course of the planet’s day. One ship could not send a ray powerful enough to do that; possibly twenty might, but they would inevitably foul one another if they got within a million miles nearness. And a million miles clearance between each ship would mean that they’d separately be about eight million miles from the planet. And from that distance you can’t work rays or bombs. From that distance you can just barely think unpleasantly of the planet, which doesn’t do either good or harm.

From all accounts and from the terrified deductions these invaders packed solid jack, and plenty of it.

It wasn’t very long before the invaders were in complete control of the sector they had first arrived at, and had won that control without a real fight or even once tipping their hands as to what they had and what they could do if they were hard-pressed.

There had begun a general exodus back to Earth; one would have thought that there was already a major space-war on from the scrambling and confusion. Any planet that boasted a graving-dock for minor ships of the line was thrice overloaded with a charge of human beings, for the mere presence of dismantled destroyers was a guarantee of temporary security. After three weeks of the senseless scrambling the Admiral was forced to declare that there would be no more admissions to planets and whole systems having vital bearing on the welfare of the Fleet. He quietly began a program of evacuation so that if there should be a raid on a Fleet base there would be no deaths save those in the service. Things were confused; public temper was generally timid. The prospect of a defensive had scared the living daylights out of them. It was utterly unthinkable that Earth, the great invader, should get a taste of her own medicine.

Where they came from nobody knew, where they were going nobody dared to say. But it was perfectly obvious that the All Earth and Colonies culture stood in their way, and that they were bound to stamp them flat. The invaders must have been awfully foul creatures in their psychological make-up to do what they did, for they gave no hint of their moves, which is the dirtiest trick that you can play on anyone. They simply moved up slowly and surely from their obscure base on the outermost planets of the Earth culture.

And they kept moving. There were no survivors; that was the most appalling part of their technique. Everybody who could run, ran. Everybody who was left, died. Communication was cut off simply and efficiently by scrambling techniques which must have meant the expenditure of trillions of kilowatts per hour. Or did the invaders have some unsuspected source of energy? Nobody knew; that was the hell of it.

* * * * *

Bartok was good and ready to blow his brains out. It was his specialty, as commander of the Intelligence Wing, to relay information as to the whereabouts and plans of whatever enemy might be at hand. It was his misfortune that this enemy simply refused to let him know.

He was brilliant, brilliant as a flawless diamond, and just as hard. Give the man a problem in smuggling or in colonial subjugation and he’d have it cracked in jig-time. But this—! It was impossible.

Babe MacNeice, assistant extraordinary, consoled him with: “Barty, you’ve done all you can—all anybody can to stop them. It isn’t your fault that they’ve got more on the ball than we have or could hope to have.” A philosophical shrug of the shoulders. “It’s a question of making room for our mysterious friends. They may not even strike at Earth. They may even turn back.”

“They may even,” said Bartok sourly, “turn into packages of Rinso. But don’t count on it. Babe, this is a spot.” There were dark circles under his eyes big enough to make barrels with.

“Then how about a joy-ride?” asked the girl. She looked absent-mindedly at her fingernails.

Bartok was studying her closely. “Yeah,” he said. “How about it?” He dropped into a chair. “Shoot,” he said. “I know that mysterious air of yours.”

In cloyingly sweet tones she replied: “Barty, darling, don’t be an old silly. Aintcha gonna take itsy-bittsy Babesy for a ride?”

He stiffened as if he had been shot. “Sure,” he said. “Why didn’t you say it that way before?” They shot up to the roof in Bartok’s private elevator and got into the commander’s very private plane. As they took off he growled: “All right—spill it.”

“I’m sorry I had to be sickening before you got the idea through your skull that I wanted absolute and complete privacy,” she said, again her own brisk self. “But I have a notion.”

“She has a notion,” said Bartok expectantly.

“Take it easy. Only a hunch—still—where do you suppose there’s enough room for a complete invasion-culture to develop without once coming into contact with the Earth culture till now, when it’s at its height?”

“Space is plenty big, Babe. There’s room for a thousand colonial systems as big as ours that we’d never even know of.”

“Okay. That establishes the very first postulate. Those things are real. Therefore one doesn’t have to be a psychic to investigate them. I am not psychic; ergo I can and will investigate them—in person.” The girl avoided Bartok’s eyes, and rattled on: “May be that my logic doesn’t hold water, but I think I can handle the job. You wouldn’t send me out there, and I know you’re on the verge of saying that you’ll go yourself.

“Well, you’ll do no such damned thing, because they need you here as a relay center and someone whose statements to the public have some degree of authenticity. You’re the only one in the whole blasted navy that’s worth a whoop in hell, and our benighted citizens know that as well as that yellow-bellied Admiral of the Fleet Fitzjames. Now that it’s settled that you can’t be spared we’ll get around to the reasons why I, rather than any other agent from the wing, should be assigned to this job.”

“We can dispense with that,” said Bartok wearily. “The fact is that next to me you’re the best worker we have. So go, my child, with the blessings of this old hand.”

“Cut the kidding,” she snapped. “I mean business. Instead of the blessing of that old hand I’d like some advice from that old head.”

“You can have my biography,” said Bartok. “ ‘Twenty Years a Spy, or, The Tale of a Voyeur Who Made Good’.” He took from his pocket a small package. “This,” he said, “I have been carrying for the moment when you’d pop your kind proposition. It’s lightly sealed. In a moment of supreme danger you are to open it and be guided accordingly.”

“Thanks,” she said grimly. “Whatever it is, I believe I’ll need it.”