The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

Vengeance Fleet

They came from the blackness of space and from unthinkable distance. They converged on Venus—and blasted it. Every one of the two and a half million human beings on that planet, all the colonists from Earth, died within minutes, and all of the flora and fauna of Venus died with them.

Such was the power of their weapons that the very atmosphere of that suddenly doomed planet was burned and dissipated. Venus had been unprepared and unguarded, and so sudden and unexpected had been the attack and so quick and devastating had been its results that not a shot had been fired against them.

They turned toward the next planet outward from the sun, Earth.

But that was different. Earth was ready—not, of course, made ready in the few minutes since the invaders’ arrival in the solar system, but ready because Earth was then—in 2820—at war with her Martian colony, which had grown half as populous as Earth itself and was even then battling for independence. At the moment of the attack on Venus, the fleets of Earth and Mars had been maneuvering for combat near the moon.

But the battle ended more suddenly than any battle in history had ever ended. A joint fleet of Terrestrial and Martian ships, suddenly no longer at war with one another, headed to intercept the invaders and met them between Earth and Venus. Our numbers were overwhelmingly superior and the invading ships were blasted out of space, completely annihilated.

Within twenty-four hours peace between Earth and Mars was signed at the Earth capital of Albuquerque, a solid and lasting peace based on recognition of the independence of Mars and a perpetual alliance between the two worlds—now the only two habitable planets of the solar system—against alien aggression. And already plans were being drawn for a vengeance fleet, to find the base of the aliens and destroy it before it could send another fleet against us.

Instruments on Earth and on patrol ships a few thousand miles above her surface had detected the arrival of the aliens—though not in time to save Venus—and the readings of those instruments showed the direction from which the aliens had come and indicated, although not showing exactly how far they had come, that they had come from an almost incredible distance.

A distance that would have been too great for us to span had not the C-plus drive—which enabled a ship to build up to a speed many times the speed of light—just been invented. It had not yet been used because the Earth-Mars war had taken all the resources of both planets, and the C-plus drive had no advantages within the solar system since vast distances were required for the purpose of building up to faster-than-light speeds.

Now, however, it had a very definite purpose; Earth and Mars combined their efforts and their technologies to build a fleet equipped with the C-plus drive for the purpose of sending it against the aliens’ home planet to wipe it out. It took ten years, and it was estimated that the trip would take another ten.

The vengeance fleet—not large in numbers but incredibly powerful in armament—left Marsport in 2830.

Nothing was ever heard of it again.

Not until almost a century later did its fate become known, and then only by deductive reasoning on the part of Jon Spencer 4, the great historian and mathematician.

“We now know,” Spencer wrote, “and have known for some time, that an object exceeding the speed of light travels backward in time. Therefore the vengeance fleet would have reached its destination, by our time, before it started.”

“We have not known, until now, the dimensions of the universe in which we live. But from the experience of the vengeance fleet, we can now deduce them. In one direction, at least, the universe is Cc miles around—or across; they mean the same thing. In ten years, traveling forward in space and backward in time, the fleet would have traversed just that distance—186,334186,334 miles. The fleet, traveling in a straight line, circled the universe, as it were, to its point of departure ten years before it left. It destroyed the first planet it saw and then, as it headed for the next, its admiral must have suddenly recognized the truth—and must have recognized, too, the fleet that came to meet it—and must have given a cease-fire order the instant the Earth-Mars fleet reached them.”

“It is truly startling—and a seeming paradox—to realize that the vengeance fleet was headed by Admiral Barlo, who had also been admiral of the Earth fleet during the Earth-Mars conflict at the time the Earth and Mars fleets combined to destroy what they thought were alien invaders, and that many other men in both fleets on that day later became part of the personnel of the vengeance fleet.”

“It is interesting to speculate just what would have happened had Admiral Barlo, at the end of his journey, recognized Venus in time to avoid destroying it. But such speculation is futile; he could not possibly have done so, for he had already destroyed it—else he would not have been there as admiral of the fleet sent out to avenge it. The past cannot be altered.”