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Transcriber's Notes:

This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe Science Fiction, December, 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyrighton this publication was renewed. 

A number of typographical errors found in the original text have beencorrected in this version. A list of these errors is found at the endof this book. 

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The Answer

by

H. BEAM PIPER

For a moment, after the screen door snapped and wakened him, LeeRichardson sat breathless and motionless, his eyes still closed, tryingdesperately to cling to the dream and print it upon his conscious memorybefore it faded. 

"Are you there, Lee?" he heard Alexis Pitov's voice. 

"Yes, I'm here. What time is it?" he asked, and then added, "I fellasleep. I was dreaming. "

It was all right; he was going to be able to remember. He could stillsee the slim woman with the graying blonde hair, playing with the littledachshund among the new-fallen leaves on the lawn. He was glad they'dboth been in this dream together; these dream-glimpses were all he'd hadfor the last fifteen years, and they were too precious to lose. Heopened his eyes. The Russian was sitting just outside the light from theopen door of the bungalow, lighting a cigarette. For a moment, he couldsee the blocky, high-cheeked face, now pouched and wrinkled, and thenthe flame went out and there was only the red coal glowing in thedarkness. He closed his eyes again, and the dream picture came back tohim, the woman catching the little dog and raising her head as though tospeak to him. 

"Plenty of time, yet. " Pitov was speaking German instead of Spanish, asthey always did between themselves. "They're still counting down fromminus three hours. I just phoned the launching site for a jeep. Eugenio's been there ever since dinner; they say he's running aroundlike a cat looking for a place to have her first litter of kittens. "

He chuckled. This would be something new for Eugenio Galvez--for whichhe could be thankful. 

"I hope the generators don't develop any last-second bugs, " he said. "We'll only be a mile and a half away, and that'll be too close to fiftykilos of negamatter if the field collapses. "

"It'll be all right, " Pitov assured him. "The bugs have all been chasedout years ago. "

"Not out of those generators in the rocket. They're new. " He fumbled inhis coat pocket for his pipe and tobacco. "I never thought I'd runanother nuclear-bomb test, as long as I lived. "

"Lee!" Pitov was shocked. "You mustn't call it that. It isn't that, atall. It's purely a scientific experiment. "

"Wasn't that all any of them were? We made lots of experiments likethis, back before 1969. " The memories of all those other tests, eachending in an Everest-high mushroom column, rose in his mind. And the endresult--the United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble, awhole hemisphere pushed back into the Dark Ages, a quarter of a billiondead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde hair, and a little reddog, and a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitov had been going to marry. "Forgive me, Alexis. I just couldn't help remembering. I suppose it'sthis shot we're going to make, tonight. It's so much like the otherones, before--" He hesitated slightly. "Before the Auburn Bomb. "

There; he'd come out and said it. In all the years they'd workedtogether at the _Instituto Argentino de Ciencia Fisica_, that had beenunmentioned between them. The families of hanged cutthroats avoidmention of ropes and knives. He thumbed the old-fashioned Americanlighter and held it to his pipe. Across the veranda, in the darkness, heknew that Pitov was looking intently at him. 

"You've been thinking about that, lately, haven't you?" the Russianasked, and then, timidly: "Was that what you were dreaming of?"

"Oh, no, thank heaven!"

"I think about it, too, always. I suppose--" He seemed relieved, nowthat it had been brought out into the open and could be discussed. "Yousaw it fall, didn't you?"

"That's right. From about thirty miles away. A little closer than we'llbe to this shot, tonight. I was in charge of the investigation atAuburn, until we had New York and Washington and Detroit and Mobile andSan Francisco to worry about. Then what had happened to Auburn wasn'timportant, any more. We were trying to get evidence to lay before theUnited Nations. We kept at it for about twelve hours after the UnitedNations had ceased to exist. "

"I could never understand about that, Lee. I don't know what the truthis; I probably never shall. But I know that my government did not launchthat missile. During the first days after yours began coming in, Italked to people who had been in the Kremlin at the time. One had beenin the presence of Klyzenko himself when the news of your bombardmentarrived. He said that Klyzenko was absolutely stunned. We alwaysbelieved that your government decided upon a preventive surprise attack, and picked out a town, Auburn, New York, that had been hit by one of ourfirst retaliation missiles, and claimed that it had been hit first. "

He shook his head. "Auburn was hit an hour before the first Americanmissile was launched. I know that to be a fact. We could neverunderstand why you launched just that one, and no more until after oursbegan landing on you; why you threw away the advantage of surprise andpriority of attack--"

"Because we didn't do it, Lee!" The Russian's voice trembled withearnestness. "You believe me when I tell you that?"

"Yes, I believe you. After all that happened, and all that you, and I, and the people you worked with, and the people I worked with, and yourgovernment, and mine, have been guilty of, it would be a waste of breathfor either of us to try to lie to the other about what happened fifteenyears ago. " He drew slowly on his pipe. "But who launched it, then? Ithad to be launched by somebody. "

"Don't you think I've been tormenting myself with that question for thelast fifteen years?" Pitov demanded. "You know, there were people insidethe Soviet Union--not many, and they kept themselves well hidden--whowere dedicated to the overthrow of the Soviet regime. They, or some ofthem, might have thought that the devastation of both our countries, andthe obliteration of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere, would be acheap price to pay for ending the rule of the Communist Party. "

"Could they have built an ICBM with a thermonuclear warhead in secret?"he asked. "There were also fanatical nationalist groups in Europe, bothsides of the Iron Curtain, who might have thought our mutual destructionwould be worth the risks involved. "

"There was China, and India. If your country and mine wiped each otherout, they could go back to the old ways and the old traditions. OrJapan, or the Moslem States. In the end, they all went down along withus, but what criminal ever expects to fall?"

"We have too many suspects, and the trail's too cold, Alexis. Thatrocket wouldn't have had to have been launched anywhere in the NorthernHemisphere. For instance, our friends here in the Argentine have beendoing very well by themselves since _El Coloso del Norte_ went down. "

And there were the Australians, picking themselves up bargains inreal-estate in the East Indies at gun-point, and there were the Boers, trekking north again, in tanks instead of ox-wagons. And Brazil, with anot-too-implausible pretender to the Braganza throne, calling itself thePortuguese Empire and looking eastward. And, to complete the picture, here were Professor Doctor Lee Richardson and Comrade Professor AlexisPetrovitch Pitov, getting ready to test a missile with amatter-annihilation warhead. 

No. This thing just wasn't a weapon. 

A jeep came around the corner, lighting the dark roadway between thebungalows, its radio on and counting down--_Twenty two minutes. Twentyone fifty nine, fifty eight, fifty seven_--It came to a stop in front oftheir bungalow, at exactly Minus Two Hours, Twenty One Minutes, FiftyFour Seconds. The driver called out in Spanish:

"Doctor Richardson; Doctor Pitov! Are you ready?"

"Yes, ready. We're coming. "

They both got to their feet, Richardson pulling himself up reluctantly. The older you get, the harder it is to leave a comfortable chair. Hesettled himself beside his colleague and former enemy, and the jeepstarted again, rolling between the buildings of the living-quarters areaand out onto the long, straight road across the pampas toward thedistant blaze of electric lights. 

He wondered why he had been thinking so much, lately, about the AuburnBomb. He'd questioned, at times, indignantly, of course, whether Russiahad launched it--but it wasn't until tonight, until he had heard whatPitov had had to say, that he seriously doubted it. Pitov wouldn't lieabout it, and Pitov would have been in a position to have known thetruth, if the missile had been launched from Russia. Then he stoppedthinking about what was water--or blood--a long time over the dam. 

The special policeman at the entrance to the launching site remindedthem that they were both smoking; when they extinguished, respectively, their cigarette and pipe, he waved the jeep on and went back to hisargument with a carload of tourists who wanted to get a good view of thelaunching. 

"There, now, Lee; do you need anything else to convince you that thisisn't a weapon project?" Pitov asked. 

"No, now that you mention it. I don't. You know, I don't believe I'vehad to show an identity card the whole time I've been here. "

"I don't believe I have an identity card, " Pitov said. "Think of that. "

The lights blazed everywhere around them, but mostly about the rocketthat towered above everything else, so thick that it seemed squat. Thegantry-cranes had been hauled away, now, and it stood alone, but it wasstill wreathed in thick electric cables. They were pouring enoughcurrent into that thing to light half the street-lights in Buenos Aires;when the cables were blown free by separation charges at the blastoff, the generators powered by the rocket-engines had better be able to takeover, because if the magnetic field collapsed and that fifty-kilo chunkof negative-proton matter came in contact with natural positive-protonmatter, an old-fashioned H-bomb would be a firecracker to what wouldhappen. Just one hundred kilos of pure, two-hundred proof MC2. 

The driver took them around the rocket, dodging assorted trucks andmobile machinery that were being hurried out of the way. The countdownwas just beyond two hours five minutes. The jeep stopped at the edge ofa crowd around three more trucks, and Doctor Eugenio Galvez, thedirector of the Institute, left the crowd and approached at an awkwardhalf-run as they got down. 

"Is everything checked, gentlemen?" he wanted to know. 

"It was this afternoon at 1730, " Pitov told him. "And nobody's beenburning my telephone to report anything different. Are the balloons andthe drone planes ready?"

"The Air Force just finished checking; they're ready. Captain Urquiolaflew one of the planes over the course and made a guidance-tape; that'sbeen duplicated and all the planes are equipped with copies. "

"How's the wind?" Richardson asked. 

"Still steady. We won't have any trouble about fallout or with theballoons. "

"Then we'd better go back to the bunker and make sure everybody there ison the job. "

The loudspeaker was counting down to Two Hours One Minute. 

"Could you spare a few minutes to talk to the press?" Eugenio Galvezasked. "And perhaps say a few words for telecast? This last is mostimportant; we can't explain too many times the purpose of thisexperiment. There is still much hostility, arising from fear that we aretesting a nuclear weapon. "

The press and telecast services were well represented; there were closeto a hundred correspondents, from all over South America, from SouthAfrica and Australia, even one from Ceylon. They had three trucks, withmobile telecast pickups, and when they saw who was approaching, theyreleased the two rocketry experts they had been quizzing and pounced onthe new victims. 

Was there any possibility that negative-proton matter might be used as aweapon?

"Anything can be used as a weapon; you could stab a man to death withthat lead pencil you're using, " Pitov replied. "But I doubt ifnegamatter will ever be so used. We're certainly not working on weaponsdesign here. We started, six years ago, with the ability to producenegative protons, reverse-spin neutrons, and positrons, and thetheoretical possibility of assembling them into negamatter. We have justgotten a fifty kilogramme mass of nega-iron assembled. In those sixyears, we had to invent all our techniques, and design all ourequipment. If we'd been insane enough to want to build a nuclear weapon, after what we went through up North, we could have done so from memory, and designed a better--which is to say a worse--one from memory in a fewdays. "

"Yes, and building a negamatter bomb for military purposes would be likedigging a fifty foot shaft to get a rock to bash somebody's head in, when you could do the job better with the shovel you're digging with, "Richardson added. "The time, money, energy and work we put in on thisthing would be ample to construct twenty thermonuclear bombs. And that'sonly a small part of it. " He went on to tell them about the magneticbottle inside the rocket's warhead, mentioning how much electric currentwas needed to keep up the magnetic field that insulated the negamatterfrom contact with posimatter. 

"Then what was the purpose of this experiment, Doctor Richardson?"

"Oh, we were just trying to find out a few basic facts about naturalstructure. Long ago, it was realized that the nucleonicparticles--protons, neutrons, mesons and so on--must have structure oftheir own. Since we started constructing negative-proton matter, we'vefound out a few things about nucleonic structure. Some rather oddthings, including fractions of Planck's constant. "

A couple of the correspondents--a man from La Prensa, and anAustralian--whistled softly. The others looked blank. Pitov took over:

"You see, gentlemen, most of what we learned, we learned from puttingnegamatter atoms together. We annihilated a few of them--over there inthat little concrete building, we have one of the most massive steelvaults in the world, where we do that--but we assembled millions of themfor every one we annihilated, and that chunk of nega-iron inside themagnetic bottle kept growing. And when you have a piece of negamatteryou don't want, you can't just throw it out on the scrap-pile. We mighthave rocketed it into escape velocity and let it blow up in space, awayfrom the Moon or any of the artificial satellites, but why waste it? Sowe're going to have the rocket eject it, and when it falls, we can see, by our telemetered instruments, just what happens. "

"Well, won't it be annihilated by contact with atmosphere?" somebodyasked. 

"That's one of the things we want to find out, " Pitov said. "We estimateabout twenty percent loss from contact with atmosphere, but the massthat actually lands on the target area should be about forty kilos. Itshould be something of a spectacle, coming down. "

"You say you had to assemble it, after creating the negative protons andneutrons and the positrons. Doesn't any of this sort of matter exist innature?"

The man who asked that knew better himself. He just wanted the answer onthe record. 

"Oh no; not on this planet, and probably not in the Galaxy. There may bewhole galaxies composed of nothing but negamatter. There may even beisolated stars and planetary systems inside our Galaxy composed ofnegamatter, though I think that very improbable. But when negamatter andposimatter come into contact with one another, the result is immediatemutual annihilation. "

They managed to get away from the press, and returned as far as thebunkers, a mile and a half away. Before they went inside, Richardsonglanced up at the sky, fixing the location of a few of the moreconspicuous stars in his mind. There were almost a hundred men and womeninside, each at his or her instruments--view-screens, radar indicators, detection instruments of a dozen kinds. The reporters and telecastpeople arrived shortly afterward, and Eugenio Galvez took them in tow. While Richardson and Pitov were making their last-minute rounds, thecountdown progressed past minus one hour, and at minus twenty minutesall the overhead lights went off and the small instrument operators'lights came on. 

Pitov turned on a couple of view-screens, one from a pickup on the roofof the bunker and another from the launching-pad. They sat down side byside and waited. Richardson got his pipe out and began loading it. Theloudspeaker was saying: "_Minus two minutes, one fifty nine, fiftyeight, fifty seven_--"

He let his mind drift away from the test, back to the world that hadbeen smashed around his ears in the autumn of 1969. He was doing that sooften, now, when he should be thinking about--

"_Two seconds, one second_. FIRING!"

It was a second later that his eyes focussed on the left handview-screen. Red and yellow flames were gushing out at the bottom of therocket, and it was beginning to tremble. Then the upper jets, the onesthat furnished power for the generators, began firing. He lookedanxiously at the meters; the generators were building up power. Finally, when he was sure that the rocket would be blasting off anyhow, theseparator-charges fired and the heavy cables fell away. An instantlater, the big missile started inching upward, gaining speed by thesecond, first slowly and jerkily and then more rapidly, until it passedout of the field of the pickup. He watched the rising spout of fire fromthe other screen until it passed from sight. 

By that time, Pitov had twisted a dial and gotten another view on theleft hand screen, this time from close to the target. That camera wasradar-controlled; it had fastened onto the approaching missile, whichwas still invisible. The stars swung slowly across the screen untilRichardson recognized the ones he had spotted at the zenith. In amoment, now, the rocket, a hundred miles overhead, would be nosing down, and then the warhead would open and the magnetic field inside wouldalter and the mass of negamatter would be ejected. 

The stars were blotted out by a sudden glow of light. Even at a hundredmiles, there was enough atmospheric density to produce considerableenergy release. Pitov, beside him, was muttering, partly in German andpartly in Russian; most of what Richardson caught was figures. Trying tocalculate how much of the mass of unnatural iron would get down for theground blast. Then the right hand screen broke into a wriggling orgy ofcolor, and at the same time every scrap of radio-transmitted apparatuseither went out or began reporting erratically. The left hand screen, connected by wiring to the pickup on the roof, was still functioning. For a moment, Richardson wondered what was going on, and then shockedrecognition drove that from his mind as he stared at theever-brightening glare in the sky. 

It was the Auburn Bomb again! He was back, in memory, to the night onthe shore of Lake Ontario; the party breaking up in the early hours ofmorning; he and Janet and the people with whom they had been spending avacation week standing on the lawn as the guests were getting into theircars. And then the sudden light in the sky. The cries of surprise, andthen of alarm as it seemed to be rushing straight down upon them. He andJanet, clutching each other and staring up in terror at the fallingblaze from which there seemed no escape. Then relief, as it curved awayfrom them and fell to the south. And then the explosion, lighting thewhole southern sky. 

There was a similar explosion in the screen, when the mass of nega-ironlanded--a sheet of pure white light, so bright and so quick as to almostpass above the limit of visibility, and then a moment's darkness thatwas in his stunned eyes more than in the screen, and then the risingglow of updrawn incandescent dust. 

Before the sound-waves had reached them, he had been legging it into thehouse. The television had been on, and it had been acting as insanely asthe screen on his right now. He had called the State Police--thetelephones had been working all right--and told them who he was, andthey had told him to stay put and they'd send a car for him. They did, within minutes. Janet and his host and hostess had waited with him onthe lawn until it came, and after he had gotten into it, he had turnedaround and looked back through the rear window, and seen Janet standingunder the front light, holding the little dog in her arms, flopping oneof its silly little paws up and down with her hand to wave goodbye tohim. 

He had seen her and the dog like that every day of his life for the lastfifteen years. 

"What kind of radiation are you getting?" he could hear Alexis Pitovasking into a phone. "What? Nothing else? Oh; yes, of course. But mostlycosmic. That shouldn't last long. " He turned from the phone. "A devil'sown dose of cosmic, and some gamma. It was the cosmic radiation that putthe radios and telescreens out. That's why I insisted that the droneplanes be independent of radio control. "

They always got cosmic radiation from the micro-annihilations in thetest-vault. Well, now they had an idea of what produced natural cosmicrays. There must be quite a bit of negamatter and posimatter going intomutual annihilation and total energy release through the Universe. 

"Of course, there were no detectors set up in advance around Auburn, " hesaid. "We didn't really begin to find anything out for half an hour. Bythat time, the cosmic radiation was over and we weren't getting anythingbut gamma. "

"What--What has Auburn to do--?" The Russian stopped short. "You thinkthis was the same thing?" He gave it a moment's consideration. "Lee, you're crazy! There wasn't an atom of artificial negamatter in the worldin 1969. Nobody had made any before us. We gave each other somescientific surprises, then, but nobody surprised both of us. You and I, between us, knew everything that was going on in nuclear physics in theworld. And you know as well as I do--"

A voice came out of the public-address speaker. "Some of the radioequipment around the target area, that wasn't knocked out by blast, isbeginning to function again. There is an increasingly heavy gammaradiation, but no more cosmic rays. They were all prompt radiation fromthe annihilation; the gamma is secondary effect. Wait a moment; CaptainUrquiola, of the Air Force, says that the first drone plane is about totake off. "

It had been two hours after the blast that the first drones had goneover what had been Auburn, New York. He was trying to remember, asexactly as possible, what had been learned from them. Gamma radiation; agreat deal of gamma. But it didn't last long. It had been almost down toa safe level by the time the investigation had been called off, and, twomonths after there had been no more missiles, and no way of producingmore, and no targets to send them against if they'd had them, rather--hehad been back at Auburn on his hopeless quest, and there had been almostno trace of radiation. Nothing but a wide, shallow crater, almost twohundred feet in diameter and only fifteen at its deepest, already fullof water, and a circle of flattened and scattered rubble for a mile anda half all around it. He was willing to bet anything that that was whatthey'd find where the chunk of nega-iron had landed, fifty miles away onthe pampas. 

Well, the first drone ought to be over the target area before long, andat least one of the balloons that had been sent up was reporting itscourse by radio. The radios in the others were silent, and the recordingcounters had probably jammed in all of them. There'd be something ofinterest when the first drone came back. He dragged his mind back to thepresent, and went to work with Alexis Pitov. 

They were at it all night, checking, evaluating, making sure that themasses of data that were coming in were being promptly processed forprogramming the computers. At each of the increasingly frequentcoffee-breaks, he noticed Pitov looking curiously. He said nothing, however, until, long after dawn, they stood outside the bunker, waitingfor the jeep that would take them back to their bungalow and watchingthe line of trucks--Argentine army engineers, locally hired laborers, load after load of prefab-huts and equipment--going down toward thetarget-area, where they would be working for the next week. 

"Lee, were you serious?" Pitov asked. "I mean, about this being like theone at Auburn?"

"It was exactly like Auburn; even that blazing light that came rushingdown out of the sky. I wondered about that at the time--what kind of amissile would produce an effect like that. Now I know. We just launchedone like it. "

"But that's impossible! I told you, between us we know everything thatwas happening in nuclear physics then. Nobody in the world knew how toassemble atoms of negamatter and build them into masses. "

"Nobody, and nothing, on this planet built that mass of negamatter. Idoubt if it even came from this Galaxy. But we didn't know that, then. When that negamatter meteor fell, the only thing anybody could think ofwas that it had been a Soviet missile. If it had hit around Leningrad orMoscow or Kharkov, who would you have blamed it on?"

THE END. 

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TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS CORRECTED

The following typographical errors in the text were corrected asdetailed here. 

In the text: "Could they have built an ICBM with a thermonuclearwarhead . .. " the word "termonuclear" was corrected to "thermonuclear. "

In the text: "If it had hit around Leningrad or Moscow . .. " the word"Lenigrad" was corrected to "Leningrad. "

In the text: ". .. From all over South America, from South Africaand Australia . .. " the word "Austrailia" was corrected to "Australia. "

In the text: "Or Japan, or the Moslem States. .. . " the word "Moselem"was corrected to "Moslem. "

In the text: ". .. The director of the Institute, left . .. " the word"Insitutue" was corrected to "Institute. "

Misspelt proper names were also corrected: "Klyzneko" was corrected to"Klyzenko, " and "Pitou" was corrected to "Pitov. "

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