"Why can't it wait, George?" Benton Allan asked tiredly.
"You'd better let me ask the questions!" Winthrop urged. "You said you
understood that autopilot/computer. Do you think we could send the ship
back?"
"Yes," Allan said. "The tape can be reversed. The computer would
compensate for elapsed time and orbital factors."
"Will you help me?"
Slowly Allan removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "That would be
the height of stupidity. We've a workable spaceship here. If we sent
it back without awaiting the awakening of its occupants we'd be acting
like congenital idiots!"
"Put your glasses back on!" Winthrop said irritably. His right
forefinger stabbed at the schematics, drawings, translated math. "Add
it up, Mister Computer!"
For a long moment Allan stared in silence. Then, suddenly, realization
blanched his face. "The trees for the forest," he murmured. "Let's go,
George!"
The sentry halted them at the ship's port, but passed them quickly when
they told him their mission was urgent. But as they entered the ship
they heard him calling for the officer-of-the-day.
Allan attacked the autopilot/ computer, inserting the reversed
tape carefully. Winthrop with utmost care rearranged the wiring in
accordance with the construction charts, and replaced everything else
as it had been on the ship's arrival.
"Agreed?" Winthrop asked.
"Agreed!" said Benton Allan.
They left the ship hurriedly, fastening the port securely behind them.
A moment later their triumph came. It was not a triumph to the general.
In stunned horror and desperation, he watched the gleaming ship lift
silently, slowly into the cool night air over Flushing Meadow Park, a
monstrous silver gourd stippled with starlight.
"What have you done, man?" he cried.
"We sent it back, Bert," Winthrop said with a calmness he had not felt
in years.
"But why? _Why?_ What in God's name shall I tell the General Staff?"
"The simple truth," Winthrop told him. "We reviewed the data and
reached an inescapable conclusion. Bert, when it came, the disarranged
circuitry cut into the anti-gravity mechanism and landed it safely, as
we suspected. Had it been wired properly, something forward would have
been awakened. I'm sure of that!
"The math explained the autopilot/computer, the anti-gravity mechanism,
the reactor, the fission bomb--and _something sinister_!
"The history book--not comic book--showed where the ship originated,
and it also showed clearly who launched it. The math is based on
fourteen symbols. The invaders in the history book have seven-fingered
hands, the pastoral folk five!"
Steadily Winthrop returned the general's stare. "I shouldn't have said
'ship'! It wasn't designed for passengers or crew. We thought the
forward portion wasn't described. But it was--in the same equations
that explained the reactor and the fission bomb!
"We use fission bombs to detonate fusion bombs. The _missile's_ warhead
contains a fusion bomb which the math proves would have caused a
spontaneous carbon chain reaction which would almost instantaneously
have wiped out the Earth! Through a technician's error it came to Earth
a dud. Its launchers will never know that. It will be _back where it
belongs_ twenty times quicker than the light now leaving Sol--and it's
no longer a dud!"
They all were silent then.
_You licked it_, Winthrop told himself, _when you armed the greatest
bomb_.
Verification of classification came almost nine years later. Then
a flareup of near-nova intensity was noted in Sirius, the finest
photographs being obtained by Englander in New Palomar Observatory on
Pluto.