by Pat Frank
Raoul saw that indirection was impossible. Shock treatment was required. “What would you say,” he asked, “if I told you that an H-bomb was going to drop on Washington Monday morning?”
Henrietta applied butter and marmalade to a thin sliver of toast. “Why, I’d say ridiculous. I was talking to Genevieve Snavely only yesterday afternoon at the Comptons’ bridge. She’s the wife of the Senator from Mississippi, you know, and she and the senator were gone all summer and most of the fall on a trip around the world. The senator is on some sort of committee. You should see the lovely silk brocades and shantung gowns she brought back from Hong Kong. Got them for nothing, really absolutely nothing. Anyway, Genevieve told me that nobody speaks of war any more. Not only that, but she met a Russian refugee in Tokyo who told her that he didn’t believe the Russians had an H-bomb at all. Just a lot of bluff. She said she had the most wonderful time everywhere and that some of the hotels in Turkey and Lebanon and places like that were as modern as the Statler, and that almost everyone she met spoke English. Imagine.”
Raoul smiled. No use trying to shock Henrietta, because Henrietta’s mind was equipped with a built-in censor to block unpleasant realities, just as Gus, the chauffeur-butler, shooed peddlers from the door. Henrietta heard and read only what she wanted to hear and read, and therefore she was as serene and happy as any woman in Washington. He would have to try something else. “To tell you the truth, Henrietta,” he said, “I was hoping to take Katy Hume to Front Royal with us.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Walback. “So that’s how it is. I should have guessed. Well, of course you’ll need a chaperone. I’ll be delighted. Such a lovely girl. So healthy-looking. And, really, from quite good family, isn’t she?”
“Her father was a very distinguished scholar,” Raoul said.
“Do you know anything about her mother?”
“Nothing, except that she had one.”
“I believe she said her mother was from Virginia. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Infallible. This morning I’ll drop by the bank, and then I’ll call on her.”
“I think that’s very nice. When do you want to leave?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning! I couldn’t possibly be ready by tomorrow morning! Why, I’ll have to send regrets to half a dozen people.”
Raoul realized that Henrietta could be rushed only so fast. “Well, we’ll make it Friday. There’s a lot of shopping I have to do, and that I can do better in Washington than in Virginia. We’ll have to take both cars because we’re going to have quite a load. Gus can drive yours.”
Henrietta said nothing, although this sounded like a very considerable expedition. When she thought it over, she was certain that Raoul planned to marry the Hume girl quietly in Front Royal, and, blessed boy, wanted his mother to be there. It would be a very proper elopement and would cause quite a stir in her set. She would pretend surprise, and not buy presents until she made up her mind as to what Katharine needed.
4
That morning Katharine had phone calls from Colonel Cragey, Felix Fromburg, and Simmons. She realized, with some pride, that they automatically and without any spoken agreement regarded her as the clearinghouse for their information. Simmons was senior, but the group’s vigor centered in her. At noon Raoul arrived carrying a pigskin dispatch case. “Going somewhere?” she asked.
“Depends,” he said. He dropped the bag on her desk, sat down in her swivel chair, and swung around to face her. “Hear anything?” he asked.
“Yes. Nothing good. Nothing even hopeful, except from Steve Batt. Navy won’t interfere in Clumb’s action, but Navy will send a hunter-killer group into the North Atlantic if and when the ships can be detached from present duty. They’re helping the Air Force look for B-Ninety-Nine survivors.”
“What about Cragey?”
“Poor fellow. He bumped into the wrong General in G-2. The General was a classmate of Clumb’s at The Point. Cragey’s on the way home to Charlottesville, more or less in disgrace.”
“He could be worse off,” said Raoul. “And Simmons?”
Katharine detected an unusual tenseness in Raoul. She wondered about the reason. She lighted a cigarette and stretched her legs out on the couch before she replied. “Simmons said that most of the people in authority at State are out of the city. Simmons got the brush from one who wasn’t. Now he’s writing memos. He doesn’t believe he can get any action, because it’s hard to get action in State without meetings and conferences, and with Christmas coming next week it’s difficult to get people together.”
“And Fromburg?”
“He’s beside himself. Waited all afternoon to see the FBI’s counter-espionage chief. Finally he talked to an assistant who just happened to be looking around for more people to do field security checks. Welcomed Felix with open arms and tried to put him to routine snoopin’. Felix refused. Says he’ll wait in his chief’s outer office until eternity if he has to. That’s exactly how long he may have to wait.”
“I had somewhat the same experience in CIA,” Raoul said. “We’re not getting anywhere and we’re not going to get anywhere. Not in time. The people of this country are going to catch hell, Katy, and they deserve it. They’re selfish, and stupid, and blind. We’re in the fumbling hands of the bourgeois. The solid middle class is up on the pedestal. It’s solid—all right—through the ears.”
Katharine had never heard Raoul speak this way before. As a matter of fact, she had never heard him express any clear-cut social or political opinions. His use of the word bourgeois angered her. It was a propaganda word. British and French aristocrats had found it useful, in the nineteenth century, in expressing contempt for Americans. The Communists had adopted it for the same purpose in the twentieth. She took off her glasses, like a small boy who has been called a fighting word. “I’ve never thought about it much,” she said, “but I guess I’m middle class and I suppose that makes me bourgeois.”
“Quite the contrary,” Raoul said.
“Don’t think this country is selfish or stupid, because it isn’t. Complacent we may be, and overly optimistic, and even blind. The people of this country haven’t been conditioned to its desolation. There has been no fighting on this soil for a hundred years. Total catastrophe is outside their experience and beyond their imagination. Except for the few of us whose job it is to think of nothing else. A Frenchman or a German or an Englishman whose guts have been wrenched apart—or his family wiped out—by a one-ton bomb has some idea of what thirty million tons of TNT might be like. Not much, but some. He doesn’t understand radiation, perhaps, but he understands the thermal effect, and blast. And there are survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who understand all of it. We understand none, except for a handful of us—those few million veterans who actually have heard and seen and felt and smelled war. So for most of us the danger is theoretical, not real. You can tell a child, over and over, that a rattlesnake is dangerous. But if the child has never seen any kind of snake, doesn’t know what one looks like, he may try to pet a rattler. Perhaps that is stupidity.”
“Now, Katy,” Raoul said, “I didn’t come over here to get into a philosophical argument. Mother and I are going to our place in the mountains Friday. We want you to come with us.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you and I want you to be safe.”
The merit of evacuating the big cities, when attack seemed near, had been discussed by everyone in the Pentagon. The idea was not foreign to her. Indeed, it had been agreed that for the inhabitants of cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, flight was the only practical form of civil defense. Yet, now that she was being asked to run away, the thought was stunning and abhorrent. It was one thing to speak dispassionately of mass evacuation, and to expect to be part of it. It was quite another thing to sneak off. That wasn’t flight, but desertion in face of the enemy. It was like clawing your way aboard the first lifeboat to leave a sinking ship. She said, “Raoul, you
can’t mean it.”
“Certainly I mean it. We may be able to ride out this thing in Front Royal.”
Katharine sat up straight and looked at him, and he looked different, and she knew he would never look the same to her again. “You’re a fool,” she said. “You can die in Front Royal, too. A little slower, perhaps, but you’ll die. If the wind is from the northeast you’ll be blanketed by fallout from Washington or Baltimore or both. If it’s from the northwest you’ll catch it from Pittsburgh. The wind doesn’t blow that won’t kill you.”
“You’re wrong,” Raoul said. “I’ve thought of everything. There’s a deep cellar under the lodge. My father used it for hanging game and storing wine and cheeses and vegetables. An old-fashioned cold room. It’ll be adequate protection against radiation, particularly if we spread a layer of earth between tarps on the floor overhead. And everything we need, we’ll have. Stayed up last night typing a list.” From his inside coat pocket he brought out folded pages. “Let’s check it over.”
“I’d rather not,” she said.
He examined his list with satisfaction. “Canned goods enough to last a year. Went by a wholesale grocery house this morning. A truckload of stuff is on the way now. Whisky, cigarettes, medical supplies, knives, axes, candles, ammunition, fishing tackle, even mousetraps. When we get up there Friday, first thing I’ll do will be buy a side of beef and load up the freezer with meat.”
She laughed at him. “How long do you think you’ll have electricity in Front Royal—or any other small town for that matter? Who’s going to worry about hauling coal so Front Royal will have its electricity? And I suppose your lodge has an electric kitchen, hasn’t it? Hard to cook on an electric stove without current.”
“Katy, you underestimate me. We have our own generator. Rural light systems are always uncertain. Another thing I’m going to do, Friday, is get the garage filled with drums of gasoline.”
“You certainly have thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Now most people would forget finances. But once New York is gone, the whole financial system of the country will crumble. Bonds, stocks, insurance policies, bank accounts—all useless. There’ll be a general moratorium on debts, and only cash will be worth anything. So this morning I converted a hundred thousand in governments into cash. I have it right here.” He tapped his dispatch case.
She shook her head. “Wrong, Raoul, dollars won’t be worth their weight in canned beans.”
“Beans or dollars,” he said, “we’ll have ’em both.”
Katharine got up from the couch and started to pace, as she always did when angry or excited. “One thing you haven’t thought of—people.”
“What do you mean, people?”
“The people around Front Royal aren’t going to like you very much, Raoul. You’ll have everything and they’ll have nothing. They aren’t going to like you at all, and maybe they’ll start spreading the wealth, beans or dollars or whatever you’ve got. Then there’ll be other people—city people like me—who will escape the blast and fire and swarm out over the countryside. They’ll be hungry. They’ll want part of that side of beef.”
Raoul’s mouth set, and she saw how thin, like a skate’s, his mouth could be, and how flinty his eyes. He said, “They put a foot on my property and I’ll shoot ’em down like rabbits!”
“Will you, now?”
“Yes, I will. We owe it to ourselves to stay alive. We’re the ones who have a right to live. I’m not a snob, social or intellectual. It’s just an old law—survival of the fittest.”
“Not we,” she said. “Only you.”
Raoul looked up, startled, and slipped the list back into his pocket. “Katy, this isn’t the time for you to try to be a heroine. Think it over. I still have an awful lot of things to buy. I’ll be back tomorrow. At one, say? Lunch at the Mayflower?”
She said, quietly, “When you come back, tomorrow or any time, I won’t be in.”
After he was gone she felt nauseated, as if she had picked a firm, ripe fruit from a ribboned basket, and bitten into worms.
5
At ten o’clock that morning a B-99 had taken off from a SAC base near Corpus Christi, Texas, on an interesting mission. In its belly was a concrete replica, in weight and size, of a twenty-megaton H-bomb. Its flight plan called for it to fly out over the Gulf for fifteen minutes, at low altitude, turn 180 degrees, and then arrow back to shore. It would pass inland between Galveston and Sabine Pass at an altitude of less than a thousand feet, and maximum speed. It would stay on the deck for another hundred miles, then climb to 55,000 feet, and fly on a plotted zigzag course to Kansas City. It would simulate the bombing of Kansas City from 65,000. The mission, in type of terrain to be crossed, speed and altitudes maintained, and duration, approximated a flight from a SAC base in Turkey across the Black Sea to the Russian coast between Tuapse and Sochi, then on to Gorki on the Volga. It was a very practical mission. The B-99 was to attempt to sneak in from the Gulf at less than a thousand feet to avoid the eyes of coastal radar, which is subject to blindness when a plane hides behind the curvature of the earth. It was primarily a test of fuel consumption and speed at this inefficient low altitude, and of Texas radar defenses as well.
Operations at Corpus Christi was in touch with this plane on its flight out over the Gulf, and radar picked it up as it made its turn for the dash back to the coast. Radar lost it before it raced over the shore line at 600 knots, its afterburners flaming, but Corpus Christi, of course, kept in touch with the aircraft commander. Over Lufkin, Texas, the B-99 began to climb, as if Russian coastal defenses had been evaded, and the danger now was interceptors. Thirteen minutes later the pilot’s voice, recorded on tape at Corpus Christi, said, “This is Georgia Peach . . . am approaching Red River at Angels two five . . . repeat two five . . . two five thousand feet . . . speed . . .”
They never learned what his speed was, because that was the last message Georgia Peach sent.
In a few minutes, at Corpus Christi, at Fort Worth, and the other big fields in Texas, they knew they had another. They had a vanishing jet bomber like the three from Hibiscus and the one from Lake Charles.
But this one was not quite the same.
It was over land, not water. It was witnessed. And there was a human survivor, although the B-99 itself was shredded into bits of metal that fell like silvery rain over a five-mile area not far from Texarkana. Except for the eight engines. They came down like smoking meteors.
This B-99 was making a contrail, a clean white chalk line across the pale blue blackboard of the winter sky, so that many eyes were turned up to it, and saw it happen. Most of them agreed that they saw a red flash and then an explosion. Or perhaps it was two explosions, a small one and a big one later. The witnesses spoke of a ball of orange fire and a black cloud where there had been no cloud before, but, being eyewitnesses, none of their stories were exactly alike. Some told exactly what they saw, but most related what they thought they should have seen, or allowed their memory to be influenced by the tales of others.
All agreed that out of the cloud a number of specks fell. When it was five or ten thousand feet above the ground—the guesses of the witnesses naturally differed—one of these specks changed shape. A filmy white parachute mushroomed above it, and, swinging gently, it floated to earth. The survivor, Master Sergeant George Lear, radarman, fell within five hundred yards of the 3-X ranchhouse and received immediate first aid. Both eyes were blackened, his scalp lacerated, his hands and face burned, his body bruised, and he was stunned and suffering from shock. But he was alive, and by the time the rescue helicopters and intelligence teams arrived on the scene he was able to talk.
Georgia Peach was fitted with ejector pods, and to this Lear owed his life. An ejector pod is a plastic capsule which encloses an airman’s seat. The front section is open so he can perform his duties. If it becomes necessary to abandon the aircraft, he pulls a lever at his side, a cowl drops to complete the closure of the cap
sule, and an explosive charge ejects the pod into space, exactly as a shell is fired from a gun. It is a desperate and dangerous means of escape, but it gives a man a chance. The pod protects his body, and prevents him from being pulverized by a six- or seven-hundred-mile-an-hour blast of air. However, within ten seconds, at very high altitudes, he must remember to put on his oxygen mask. Then he must remember not to leave the pod until the speed of his fall is slowed by heavier atmosphere. And after he pushes the pod aside in mid-air he should allow himself to fall to within ten thousand feet of earth before pulling his parachute ripcord. After that, he should look around for a hospitable spot on which to land, guide himself to this landing by manipulating his shroud lines, and remember to absorb the shock by rolling like a cat as his feet touch.
Master Sergeant Lear was the first B-99 crewman called upon to do all these things and he didn’t remember any of them. All he knew was that suddenly there was fire all around him and a tremendous noise and he was kicked hard in the rear. The next he knew he was holding on to his shrouds, swinging like a pendulum. That was all he knew. All.
A tremor ran through the communications ganglia of the Air Force. A hundred questions, a few answers, a few commands whined and hummed over the wires. From Hibiscus to the Pentagon, thence to the SAC command post in Omaha, finally to Fort Worth, the teletypes chattered an admonition from General Keatton. The intelligence teams standing by at the Texarkana hospital should rush, by fastest plane, all of Lear’s clothing, and his parachute, to the Wright Field research laboratories.