by Jerry
“The whole business,” Dwane said, after a long silence, “could be a hoax. If the entire work party engaged in Test Series Avalanche formed a conspiracy——”
“Why should they?” asked Weatherby.
“Because, Mr. Secretary,” Dwane answered, “a good many people on this globe think mankind has carried this atomic-weapons business too far.”
General Colton smiled. “I can see a few frightened men conspiring against the world and their own government, with some half-baked idealistic motive. But not a fleet and an army. Not, for that matter, Stanforth or Scott. Not Scott. Not a hoax.”
“They’ll report here tonight, gentlemen, in any case.” The President walked to a window and looked out at the spring green of a lawn and the budding trees above. “We’ll know then what they learned, at least. Luncheon?”
On the evening of the third day afterward, Marc Scott greeted the President formally in his office. At the President’s suggestion they went out together, in the warm April twilight, to a low-walled terrace.
“The reason I asked you to come to the White House again,” the President began, “was to talk to you entirely alone. I gathered, not from your words, but from your manner at recent meetings, general, that you had some feelings about this matter.”
“Feelings, Mr. President?” He had feelings. But would the statesman understand or regard them as naive, as childish?
The President chuckled and ran his fingers through his thick white hair in a hesitant way that suggested he was uncertain of himself. “I have a fearful decision to make.” He sighed and was silent for several seconds as he watched the toy silhouettes of three jet planes move across the lemon-yellow sky. “There are several courses I can take. I can order complete silence about the whole affair. Perhaps a hundred people know. If I put it on a Top Secret basis, rumors may creep out. But they could be scotched. The world would then be deprived of any real knowledge of your—angel.
“Next, I could take up the matter with the other heads of state. The friendly ones.” He paused and then nodded his head unsurely. “Yes. Even the Russians. And the satellite governments. With heaven knows what useful effect! Finally, I could simply announce to the world that you and a handful of others found the body of what appears to have been an angel, and that it was irretrievably lost while being flown to Washington.”
Since the President stopped with those words, Marc said, “Yes, sir.”
“Three equally poor possibilities. If it was an angel—a divine messenger—and our test destroyed it, I have, I feel, no moral right whatever to keep the world from knowing. Irrespective of any consequences.”
“The consequences!” Marc Scott murmured.
“You can imagine them!” The President uncrossed his legs, stretched, felt for a cigarette, took a light from the general. “Tremendous, incalculable, dangerous consequences! All truly and decently religious people would be given a tremendous surge of hope, along with an equal despair over the angel’s death and the subsequent loss of the—body. Fanatics would literally go mad. The news could produce panic, civil unrest, bloodshed. And we have nothing to show. No proof. Nothing tangible. The enemy could use the whole story for propaganda in a thousand evil ways. Being atheistic, they would proclaim it an American madness—what you will. Even clergymen, among themselves, are utterly unagreed, when they are told the situation.”
“I can imagine.”
The President smiled a little and went on, “I called half a dozen leaders to Washington. Cardinal Thrace. Bishop Neuermann. Father Bolder. Reverend Matthews. Every solitary man had a different reaction. When they became assured that I meant precisely what I said, they began a theological battle”—the President chuckled ruefully at the memory—“that went on until they left, and looked good for a thousand years. Whole denominations would split! Most of the clergy, however, agreed on one point: it was not an angel.”
The general was startled. “Not an angel? Then, what——”
“Because it died. Because it was killed or destroyed. Angels, general, are immortal. They are not human flesh and blood. No. I think you can say that, by and large, the churches would never assent to the idea that the being you saw was Gabriel or any other angel.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I had,” the President replied. “You are not, general, among the orthodox believers, I take it.”
“No, Mr. President.”
“So I judged. Well, let me get to my reason for asking you to confer privately with me. The churchmen debated hotly—to use the politest possible phrase—over the subject. But the scientists—whom I also consulted”—he drew a breath and swallowed, like a man whose memory of hard-controlled temper is still painful—“the scientists were at scandalous loggerheads. Two of them actually came to blows! I’ve heard every theory you can conceive of, and a lot I couldn’t. Every idea from the one that you, general, and all the rest of you out in the Pacific, were victims of mass hypnosis and the whole thing’s an illusion, to a hundred versions of the ‘little men from outer space’ angle. In the meeting day before yesterday, however, I noticed you were rather quiet and reserved about expressing any opinion. I’ve since looked up your record. It’s magnificent.” The President hesitated.
Marc said nothing.
“You’re a brave, brilliant, levelheaded, sensitive person, and a man’s man. Your record makes a great deal too plain for you to deny out of modesty. You are an exceptional man. In short, you’re the very sort of person I’d pick to look into a mere report of an incident of that sort. So what I want—why I asked you here—is your impression. Your feelings. Your reactions at the time. Your reflections since. Your man-to-man, down-to-earth, open-hearted emotions about it all—and not more theory, whether theological or allegedly scientific! Do you see?”
The appeal was forceful. Marc felt as if he were all the members of some audiences the President had swayed—all of them in one person, one American citizen—now asked—now all but commanded—to bare his soul. He felt the great, inner power of the President and understood why the people of the nation had chosen him for office.
“I’ll tell you,” he answered quietly. “For what it’s worth. I’m afraid that it is mighty little.” He pondered a moment. “First, when I suddenly saw it, I was shocked. Not frightened, Mr. President—though the rest were. Just—startled. When I really looked at the—casualty, I thought, first of all, that it was beautiful. I thought it had, in its dead face, great intelligence and other qualities.”
The President rested his hand on the uniformed knee. “That’s it, man! The ‘other qualities’ ! What were they?”
Marc exhaled unevenly. “This is risky. It’s all—remembered impression. I thought it looked kind. Noble too. Almost, but not exactly, sweet. I thought it had tremendous courage. The kind that—well, I thought of it as roaring through space and danger and unimagined risks to get here. Daring H-bombs. And I thought, Mr. President, one more thing: I thought it had determination—as if there was a gigantic feel about it of—mission.”
There was a long silence. Then the President said in a low voice, “That all, Marc?”
“Yes. Yes, sir.”
“So I thought.” He stood up suddenly, not a man of reflection and unresolved responsibility, but an executive with work ahead. “Mission! We don’t know what it was. If only there was something tangible!” He held out his hand and gripped the general with great strength. “I needed that word to decide. We’ll wait. Keep it absolutely restricted. There might be another. The message to us, from them, whoever they are, might come in some different way or by more of these messengers! After all, I cannot represent them to the world—expose this incredible incident—without knowing what the mission was. But to know there was a mission——” He sighed and went on firmly, “When I finally get to bed tonight, I’ll sleep, Marc, as I haven’t slept since I took office!”
“It’s only my guess,” the general responded. “I haven’t any evidence to explain those feelings.
”
“You’ve said enough for me! Thank you, general.” Then, to Marc Scott’s honor and embarrassment, the President drew himself straight, executed a salute, held it a moment, turned from the terrace and marched alone into the White House.
During the months-long, single day of Northern Siberia’s summertime, on a night that had no darkness, a fireball burst suddenly above the arctic rim. As it rose, it turned the tundra blood-red. For a radius of miles the permafrost was hammered down and a vast, charred basin was formed. In the adjacent polar seas ice melted. A mushroom cloud broke through the atmospheric layers with a speed and to a height that would have perplexed, if not horrified, the Free World’s nuclear physicists.
In due course, counters the world around would begin to click and the information would be whispered about that the Russians were ahead in the H-bomb field. That information would be thereupon restricted so that the American public would never learn the truth.
In Siberia the next morning awed Soviet technicians—and the most detached nuclear physicists have been awed, even stupefied, by their creations—measured the effects of their new bomb carefully: area of absolute incineration, area of absolute destruction by blast, putative scope of fire storm, radius of penetrative radiation, kinds and concentrations of radioactive fall-out, half-lives, dispersion of same, kilos of pressure per square centimeter. Then, on maps of the United States of America, these technicians superimposed tinted circles of colored plastics, so that a glance would show exactly what such a bomb would destroy of Buffalo and environs, St. Paul, Seattle, Dallas, as well as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and so on—the better targets. These maps, indicating the imaginary annihilation of millions, were identical with certain American maps, save for the fact that the latter bore such city names as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Vladivostok, Ordzhonikidze, Dnepropetrovsk, and the like.
It was while the technicians were correlating their bomb data—and the sky over the test base was still lava—that coded word came in to the commanding officer of the base concerning a “casualty.” The casualty had been found in dying condition by a peasant who had been ordered to evacuate his sod hut in that region weeks before. After the casualty, he had been summarily shot for disobedience.
The general went to the scene forthwith—and returned a silent, shaken man. Using communication channels intended only for war emergency, he got in touch with Moscow. The premier was not in his offices in the new, forty-six-story skyscraper; but his aides were persuaded to disturb him at one of his suburban villas. They were reluctant; he had retired to the country with Lamenula, the communist Italian actress.
The premier listened to the faint, agitated news from Siberia and said, “The garrison must be drunk.”
“I assure you, comrade——”
“Put Vorshiv on.”
Vorshiv said, uneasily, the same thing. Yes, he had seen it . . . Yes, it had wings . . . No, it could not be an enemy trick . . . No, there were no interplanetary vehicles about; nothing on the radar in the nature of an unidentified flying object . . . Certainly, they had been meticulous in the sky watch; this had been a new type of bomb, incorporating a new principle, and it would never have done to let an enemy reconnaissance plane observe the effects.
“I will come,” said the premier.
He ordered a new Khalov-239 prepared for the flight. He was very angry. Lamenula had been coy—and the premier had enjoyed the novelty of that, until the call from Siberia had interrupted. Now he would have to make a long, uncomfortable journey in a jet—which always frightened him a little—and he would be obliged to postpone the furthering of his friendship with the talented, beautiful, honey-haired young Italian.
Night came to the Siberian flatlands and the sky clouded so that there was a semblance of darkness. A frigid wind swept from the Pole, freezing the vast area of mud created by the H-bomb. In the morning the premier came in at the base airfield, twelve jets streaming in the icy atmosphere, forward rockets blasting to brake the race of the great ship over the hard-packed terrain. It stopped only a few score rods short of the place where the “inadequate workers” lay buried—the more than ten thousand slaves who had died to make the field.
Curiously enough, it was an American jeep which took the premier out to the scrubby patch of firs. The angel lay untouched, but covered with a tarpaulin and prodigiously guarded round about by men and war machines.
“Take it off.”
He stood a long time, simply looking, his silent generals and aides beside him.
Not a tall man, this Soviet premier, but broad, overweight, bearlike in fur clothing—a man with a Mongol face and eyes as dark, as inexpressive and unfeeling as prunes. A man whose face was always shiny, as if he exuded minutely a thin oil. A man highly educated by the standards of his land; a man ruthless by any standard in history.
What went through his head as he regarded the dazzling figure, he would not afterward have catalogued. Not in its entirety. He was afraid, of course. He was always afraid. But he had achieved that level of awareness which acknowledges, and uses, fear. In the angel he saw immediately a possible finish to the dreams of Engels, Marx, the rest. He saw a potential end of communism, and even of the human race. This milk-white cadaver, this impossible reality, this beauty Praxiteles could never have achieved even symbolically, could mean—anything.
Aloud, he said—his first remark—“Michelangelo would have appreciated this.”
Some of the men around him, scared, breathing steam in the gray, purgatorial morning, smiled or chuckled at their chief’s erudition and self-possession. Others agreed solemnly: Michelangelo—whoever he was or had been—would have appreciated this incredible carcass.
He then went up and kicked the foot of the angel with his own felted boot. It alarmed him to do so, but he felt, as premier, the duty. First, the noble comment; next, the boot.
He was aware of the fact that the men around him kept glancing from the frozen angel up toward the barely discernible gray clouds. They were wondering, of course, if it could be God-sent. Sounds came to him—bells of churches, litanies recited, chants—Gregorian music in Caucasian bass. To his nostrils came the smell of incense. He thought, as atheists must, what if they were right?
Against that thought he ranged another speedily enough; it was his custom. He wrenched the ears and eyes of his mind from the church pageantry of recollected boyhood, in the Czar’s time, to other parts of his expanding domain. He made himself hear temple bells, watch sacred elephants parade, behold the imbecile sacrifices and rituals of the heathen. They, too, were believers, and they had no angels. Angels, he therefore reasoned, were myths.
It occurred to him—it had already been suggested to him by General Momsk, of Intelligence—that some such being as this, come on a brief visit from an unknown small planet, had given rise to the whole notion of angels. He chuckled.
Vorshiv had the temerity to ask, “You have formed an opinion, comrade?”
The premier stared at the stringy, leathern man with his watery eyes and his record: eighteen million unworthy citizens “subdued.”
“Certainly.” He looked once more at the casualty. “Autopsy it. Then destroy the remains.”
“No,” a voice murmured.
The premier whirled about. “Who said that?”
It was a young man, the youngest general, one born after 1917, one who had seen no world but the Soviet. Now, pale with horror and shame, the young man said, “I merely thought, sir, to preserve this for study.”
“I detected sentiment. Credulity. Superstition. Your protest was a whimper.”
The young officer showed a further bright flicker of dissent. “Perhaps—this being cannot be destroyed by our means.”
The premier nodded at the body, and his thin, long lips became longer, thinner. A smile, perhaps. “Is not our second test planned for the very near future?”
“Tomorrow,” Mornsk said. “But we are prepared to postpone it if you think the situation——”
“Postpone it?” The premier smiled. “On the contrary. Follow plans. Autopsy this animal. Attach what remains to the bomb. That should destroy it effectively.” He glanced icily at the young general, made a daub at a salute and tramped over the ice-crisped tundra toward the jeeps.
On the way back to the base, Momsk, of Intelligence, decided to mention his theory. Mornsk turned in his front seat. “One thing, comrade. Otir American information is not, as you know, what it was. However, we had word this spring of what the British call a ‘flap.’ Many sudden, very secret conferences. Rumors. We never were able to determine the cause—and the brief state of near-panic among the leadership has abated. Could it be—the ‘flap’ followed one of their tests—that they, too, had a ‘casualty’ ?”
“It could be,” the premier replied. “What of it?”
“Nothing. I merely would have thought, comrade, that they would have announced it to the world.”
The thin lips drew thinner again. “They are afraid. They would, today, keep secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it into limbo—their kind. To limbo.” He shut his prune eyes, opened them, turned to the officer on his left. “Gromov, I hope the food’s good here. I’m famished.”
An old Russian proverb ran through his mind: “Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear.”
The trick, he reflected, was to keep that fire of fear alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the trick was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men’s souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see how their hale was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful.
There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate: