Chapter VI

"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.