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It did not pause when it came over the military camps there the massive ordnance depots in which were stored new and improved killing tools that had long been idle in that irksome interplanetary peace. They flew on, over the desert, until the Gray Mountains loomed on the horizon. On, over the tumbled rocks, interspersed with the strange red thorny vegetation common in the Martian desert.
They were not to enter the engagement, for their huge size would make them as vulnerable to the tiny darting mites of space as the Nigran ships had been to the Interplanetary Patrol. The little ships could not conveniently stock for more than a week of engagement, then drop back to these warehouses of space, and go forward again for action.
The results of the calculations have hardly been encouraging to possible investors in interplanetary telegraphy, since it appears that heliographic mirrors with reflecting surfaces measured by square miles, instead of square inches, would be required to send a visible beam from the earth to Mars or vice versa. The projections of light on Mars can be explained much more simply and reasonably.
As Brent had told them, it was good to watch. It was half an hour later when they gathered in the kitchen of the Platform. The man who had been loading launching tubes now briskly worked to prepare a meal on the extremely unusual cooking-devices of a human outpost in interplanetary space. The food smelled good. But Joe noticed that he could smell growing things. Green stuff.
It came into Joe's mind that garbage-disposal was hardly a subject one would expect to be discussing in interplanetary space. But the Platform wasn't the same thing as a spaceship. A ship could jettison refuse and leave it behind, or store it during a voyage and dump it at either end. But the Space Platform would never land. It could roll on forever.
Everybody was interested in, or affected by, interplanetary travel, now. On a workbench, standing amid a litter of metal chips and scraps of color-coded wire, was the Bunch's second ionic, full-size this time, and almost finished. On crossed arms it mounted four parabolic mirrors; its ion guide was on a universal joint.
But on September 23, 1947, when the letter was written, ATICs intelligence specialists were confident that within a few months or a year they would have the answer to the question, "What are UFO's?" The question, "Do UFO's exist?" was never mentioned. The only problem that confronted the people at ATIC was, "Were the UFO's of Russian or interplanetary origin?"
Instead, they seek salvation from outer space, on the forlorn premise that flying saucer men, by their very existence, are wiser and more advanced than we. Such people may reason that a race of men capable of interplanetary travel have lived well into, or through, an atomic age. They have survived and they can tell us their secret of survival.
If it does, then the invisibility of the other systems must be due to their distance diminishing the quantity of light that comes from them below the limit of perceptibility, or to the interposition of absorbing media; if it does not, then the reason why we cannot see them is owing to the absence of a means of conveyance for the light waves, as the lack of an interplanetary atmosphere prevents us from hearing the thunder of sun-spots.
A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed, the people at ATIC decided that the time had arrived to make an Estimate of the Situation. The situation was the UFO's; the estimate was that they were interplanetary! It was a rather thick document with a black cover and it was printed on legal-sized paper. Stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET.
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