There was a crashing thump in the air. A battleship was firing
eight-inch guns almost straight up. Other guns began.
Guns began to fire on the carrier, too, below the deck and beyond it.
Concussion waves beat at Coburn's body. He thrust Janice behind him to
shield her, but there could be no shielding.
The air was filled with barkings and snarlings and the unbelievably
abrupt roar of heavy guns. The carrier swerved, so swiftly that it
tilted and swerved again. The other ships of the fleet broke their
straight-away formation and began to move in bewildering patterns. The
blue sea was criss-crossed with wakes. Once a destroyer seemed to slide
almost under the bow of the carrier. The destroyer appeared unharmed on
the other side, its guns all pointed skyward and emitting seemingly
continuous blasts of flame and thunder.
* * * * *
The ensign grabbed Coburn's shoulder and pointed, his hands shaking.
There was the Invader ship. It was exactly as Coburn had known it would
be. It was tiny. It seemed hardly larger than some of the planes that
swooped at it. But the planes were drawing back now. The shining metal
thing was no more than two thousand feet up and it was moving in
erratic, unpredictable darts and dashes here and there, like a
dragon-fly's movements, but a hundred times more swift. Proximity-fused
shells burst everywhere about it. It burst through a still-expanding
puff of explosive smoke, darted down a hundred feet, and took a zig-zag
course of such violent and angular changes of position that it looked
more like a streak of metal lightning than anything else.
It was down to a thousand feet. It shot toward the fleet at a speed
which was literally that of a projectile. It angled off to one side and
back, and suddenly dropped again and plunged crazily through the maze of
ships from one end to the other, no more than fifty feet above the water
and with geysers of up-flung sea all about it from the shells that
missed.
Then it sped away with a velocity which simply was not conceivable. It
was the speed of a cannonball. It was headed straight toward a distant,
stubby, draggled tramp-steamer which plodded toward the Bay of Naples.
It rose a little as it flew. And then it checked, in mid-air. It hung
above the dumpy freighter, and there were salvoes of all the guns in the
fleet. But at the flashes it shot skyward. When the shells arrived and
burst, it was gone.
It could still be sighted as a spark of sunlight shooting for the
heavens. Jets roared toward it. It vanished.
Coburn heard the ensign saying in a flat voice: "If that wasn't
accelerating at fifteen Gs, I never saw a ship. If it wasn't
accelerating at fifteen Gs ..."
And that was all. There was nothing else to shoot at. There was nothing
else to do. Jets ranged widely, looking for something that would offer
battle, but the radars said that the metal ship had gone up to three
hundred miles and then headed west and out of radar range. There had not
been time for the French to set up paired radar-beam outfits anyhow, so
they couldn't spot it, and in any case its course seemed to be toward
northern Spain, where there was no radar worth mentioning.
Presently somebody noticed the dingy, stubby, draggled tramp steamer
over which the Invaders' craft had hovered. It was no longer on course.
It had turned sidewise and wallowed heavily. Its bow pointed
successively to every point of the compass.
It looked bad. Salvoes of the heaviest projectiles in the Fleet had been
fired to explode a thousand feet above it. Perhaps--
A destroyer went racing to see. As it drew near--Coburn learned this
later--it saw a man's body hanging in a sagging heap over the railing of
its bridge. There was nobody visible at the wheel. There were four men
lying on its deck, motionless.
The skipper of the destroyer went cold. He brought his ship closer. It
was not big, this tramp. Maybe two thousand tons. It was low in the
water. It swayed and surged and wallowed and rolled.
Men from the destroyer managed to board it. It was completely unharmed.
They found one small sign of the explosions overhead. One fragment of an
exploded shell had fallen on board, doing no damage.
Even the crew was unharmed. But every man was asleep. Each one slumbered
heavily. Each breathed stertorously. They could not be awakened. They
would need oxygen to bring them to.
* * * * *
A party from the destroyer went on board to bring the ship into harbor.
The officer in charge tried to find out the ship's name.
There was not a document to be found to show what the ship's name was or
where it had come from or what it carried as cargo. That was strange.
The officer looked in the pockets of the two men in the wheel house.
There was not a single identifying object on either of them. He grew
disturbed. He made a really thorough search. Every sleeping man was
absolutely anonymous. Then--still on the way to harbor--a really
fine-tooth-comb examination of the ship began.
Somebody's radium-dial watch began to glow brightly. The searchers
looked at each other and went pale. They hunted frantically, fear
making them clumsy.
They found it. Rather--they found them.
The stubby tramp had an adequate if rather clumsy atomic bomb in each of
its two holds. The lading of the ship was of materials which--according
to theory--should be detonated in atomic explosion if an atomic bomb
went off nearby. Otherwise they could not be detonated.
The anonymous tramp-steamer had been headed for the harbor of Naples,
whose newspapers--at least those of a certain political party--had been
screaming of the danger of an atomic explosion while American warships
were anchored there.
It was not likely that two atom bombs and a shipload of valuable
secondary atomic explosive had been put on a carefully nameless ship
just to be taken for a ride. If this ship had anchored among the
American fleet and if it had exploded in the Bay of Naples ...
The prophecies of a certain political party would seem to have been
fulfilled. The American ships would be destroyed. Naples itself would be
destroyed. And it would have appeared that Europeans who loved the great
United States had made a mistake.
It was, odd, though, that this ship was the only one that the Invaders'
flying craft had struck with its peculiar weapon.