“Sir,” said Porter, “most things can be talked about and should, but I assumed the test, if not a security matter, at least, was highly confidential.”
“It’s a good thing you assumed that,” Vv7hiteside said sourly.
“Which I take to mean that it might be a long time before anything at all can be said of it.”
“That’s why I asked you in,” said the President. “I respect you and your viewpoint sufficiently that I don’t want to leave you operating in a vacuum. When you hear what Henry has to say, I think you’ll agree it should be kept under cover.”
He nodded at Whiteside. “If you’ll run through it again, Henry.”
The general settled himself more firmly in his chair. “I think that both of you are familiar with the exercise. We mounted a .30 caliber and took movies of the bullet’s path, thousands of frames a second.”
The President nodded. “Yes, we know.”
“It was incredible,” said Whiteside.
“O.K., Henry. Go ahead and tell us.
“When the bullet struck the visitor,” said the general, “the skin of the visitor indented. The bullet did not penetrate. It simply made a dimple in the thing’s hide. Like pushing a fist into a feather pillow. Like pushing a finger into your cheek. Then, almost immediately, the dimple rebounded back to its original position and a flare of energy bounced back, striking the mounted rifle and melting it. The funny thing about it is that the bullet itself, the projectile, was not thrown back, not all the way, that is. It bounced back for a short distance, then fell. Later we found it on the ground, where it had fallen.”
The general stopped talking for a moment, sucking in his breath.
“Our people tell us,” he said, “that is, our scientists tell us, that the visitor converted the kinetic energy of the projectile into potential energy. Doing that, you see, so that the energy could be handled. It’s not absolutely certain, but indications are that the Visitor absorbed the potential energy, analyzed it, and tossed back an even bigger flare of raw energy that destroyed the weapon. It struck the weapon square, dead-on, and that, the scientists say, is because the indentation was a parabolic indentation, its axis along the line of the projectile’s trajectory. The indentation bounced back to its original position, but the shape of it was so precise that it threw back the energy, in some new form, exactly to its source. The scientists talked about a wave pulse or a reflected wave, but they lost me on that one. The point is that the visitor flung back the energy of the projectile, or at least that much, straight into the weapon that fired it. Even if the shot had been a lobbing shot, say, from a mortar, the return blast of energy would have followed precisely the trajectory of the projectile.”
He paused, sucking in his breath again, looking from one to the other.
“Do you realize what that means?” he asked.
“A perfect defense system,” said the President. “You toss back to the other fellow whatever he throws at you.”
Whiteside nodded. “And perhaps in different forms of energy. That’s what the people at the lab think, anyhow. It wouldn’t have to be a blast of heat. It might be radiation—say, a storm of gamma rays. The visitor can convert kinetic energy to potential energy and it may have a wide choice of energy conversions.
“How many people, besides the three of us, know of this?” asked the President.
“Quite a number of people, service technicians, troops and so forth, witnessed the exercise. If you mean what I’ve just told you, only three others than ourselves.”
“They can be trusted?”
“They can be trusted. There’ll be no talk.”
“I think, to be on the safe side,” said the President, “we must insist the firing test never happened. Would you go along with that, Dave? I know how you feel.
“Much as it goes against my grain,” said Porter, “I would agree I’d have to. But it will be difficult to keep the cover on. Some of the servicemen, possibly some of the technicians, will talk. Isn’t there some other way it can be done? Say yes, there was a test, but there were no clear-cut results, that what little data we got was confusing and inconclusive.”
“My advice,” said Whiteside, “is that we stonewall it. That’s life only safe way.”
“Dave,” said the President, “I’ve never asked you to cover up before. I’m asking you to cover up now. There was, of course, the matter of the object in orbit beginning to break up. I think I made a mistake on that one. You argued for full disclosure, but I weaseled on you. I made a mistake. I should have turned you loose rather than using the NASA announcement. But this is a different matter.”
“This,” said Whiteside, “could give us the edge we need. If we only can find out how it’s done.”
“We could call in Allen.”
“Mr. President,” said Whiteside, “I wish you wouldn’t. Maybe eventually he can help with an answer, hopefully without actually knowing what he’s doing. But he shouldn’t be told about this. Six men know about it now; six men are too many, but there’s nothing we can do about that. Let’s keep it at the six. Allen is soft and a bit given to talk. He is somewhat bitten with the idea that scientific knowledge should be shared. The force that he has pulled together is working outside security and
“You don’t need to belabor the point,” said the President. “You are entirely right. We’ll keep Allen out of it.”
“My people think,” said the general, “that with the visitors it is not a matter of defense at all. Not defense against an enemy, that is. They think the visitors absorb energy from any source that is available. Out in space, they’d absorb energy from all sorts of radiations or from small particles of matter, perhaps on occasion rather large particles of matter that might collide with them. In such an instance, they can convert the kinetic energy of such particles into potential energy, absorb what they can of it and reject that part they can’t absorb. The ability is a sort of built-in safety valve against excess energy.
“You used a .3o-caliber projectile,” said the President. “Do your people have any estimate of how much larger projectiles the visitor could withstand?”
“I suppose a nuke might destroy them,” said the general, “but the probability seems to be they could withstand anything short of that. The dimple made by the rifle bullet was small and shallow. The dimple would increase in size with anything heavier, but there is plenty of leeway. The visitor we used for the test didn’t seem to notice. When the bullet struck, it never even flinched. It was standing, doing nothing, before the test. At least, nothing we could notice. It was still standing there, doing nothing, after the firing. What I’d like to do is try something a little heavier, progressively heavier firing tests.”
“You can’t do that,” warned Porter. “You would blow your Cover. Maybe we can get by, just barely get by, denying this one test. If you tried others, there wouldn’t be a chance.”
“That’s right,” said the President. “For the moment, we must be satisfied with what we have. What we must do now is find what the visitors are. How they are made. How they operate, if that’s the word. Allen may be pulling something together soon that will help us.”
“He hasn’t much to work on,” said Porter. “About all his people can do is stand to one side and observe.”
The box on the President’s desk beeped. Frowning, he reached out and punched a button.
“Grace, I thought I told you .
“I’m terribly sorry, sir. I thought you’d want to know. Dr. Allen is here. He says he must see you immediately. It seems that someone out in Minnesota has found a dead visitor.”
33. MINNEAPOLIS
The room was closing in on him and that was strange, for it had not closed in before. For the first time since he had lived there—a long two years—he became aware of the room’s smallness, its cluttered bareness, its squalidness. He saw the grime upon the windows, the water streaks upon the wall.
He shoved the papers on the desk to one side and stood up, looking out the window to where kids were playing one of those nonsensical, running-and-yelling games that had no significance to anyone but themselves. An old woman, struggling with a grocery bag, was limping down the broken sidewalk. A dog sat lopsided before the stoop of a ramshackle house. The old wreck of a car, its battered fenders drooping disconsolately, stood in its accustomed place beside the curb.
What the hell is the matter with me? Jerry Conklin asked himself. And asking, knew.
It was this visitor business. It had preyed upon him ever since it had happened. He had not, since then, been himself. The worry of it had robbed him of his dedication as a student, had nagged at him almost every waking hour. It would not let him be. It had interfered with his work on his thesis and the thesis was important. He simply had to get the thesis written.