by Max Ehrlich
Someone in the knot of spectators spoke up. It was a young soldier.
"So Allison's meeting Bakhanov. Geez, I hope they work out something!"
"I doubt it," said an older man. "Talk, talk, talk. Nothing but talk. That's all we've heard for years. The way it's going to end up, we'll talk ourselves into six feet under."
"Well, anyway," said the soldier, "nothing's gonna happen while they're sitting around a table."
"Oh no?" The older man laughed harshly. "Listen, sonny, ever hear of a man named Hull?"
"Hull?"
"Yeah. I guess you wouldn't remember, sonny. You were still pretty wet behind the ears. But Hull was our Secretary of State then. Back in '41, it was. He was sitting around a table with two Jap diplomats, and no one thought anything would happen. Not right then, anyway. Then all of a sudden -- wham! Right in the middle of everything, the Japs let us have it at Pearl Harbor."
David listened and remembered. He'd been only eleven then. But he remembered his father, white-faced and shaking in anger, turning off the radio. He remembered the bewilderment, the surprise, the disbelief. The Stab in the Back, they had called it then.
David shivered a little as the gray-haired man on the screen went on:
"It seems incredible that the peoples of the earth stand on the brink of holocaust tonight, that the lights have gone out in the great cities of the world. Tonight, like a great colossus, the Soviet Union stands astride Europe and Asia, while we have declared our defense responsibility through the whole of the Western Hemisphere, from Canada, through South Amer-ica. Tonight the Soviet Union, as well as ourselves, has the bomb. And tonight the world waits for the zero hour -- the hour that no one wants to come but everyone expects to come. . . ."
A soldier on David's left muttered, "Yeah, it's the waiting. It's the waiting that's tough. It's the waiting that's driving everybody crazy."
"What I want to know is, Frank, what are we waiting for?" His companion was emphatic. "Why don't we throw it first, before they do? Somebody's going to throw it first, and it better be us. Or else . . . !"
"You can say that again." A sergeant was talking now. "Listen, you guys, I heard something, and it ain't from the latrine either. The Reds are supposed to have an atom cocktail planted in one of these here buildings, or down in the subway somewhere. I dunno, there may be ten of 'em, or a hundred, for all I know. They've got some kind of gadget where they can set 'em ofE from Moscow without getting off their fannies."
There was silence for a moment. The faces of the men looked white and set and unreal in the glare of the television screen. Then someone in the rear said:
"Maybe they're touching off a few rockets right now, headed F.O.B. New York. How the hell do we know? Why take a chance? Let's give it to 'em and get it over with!"
That was the popular opinion. Everyone said that when the pay-off came -- not if it came, but when it came -- New York would get it first.
It was the biggest city in the world, the prime target. It would make the loudest noise, illustrate the power of the enemy in the most potent manner, create the most dramatic devastation. Aside from Washington, which was now a ghost capital by orders of the Army, the big city had completed a state of evacuation much farther along than any other. It was possible that the Soviet might pick Detroit, or Chicago, or St. Louis, or Los Angeles, if they threw the first punch.
But everyone said, everyone whispered, New York. That was the one, the big one; that was where it would come first.
The telecaster up in the illuminated screen was saying:
"In retrospect, the catastrophe that faces us now was not a matter of science, of atomic fission, of research or manufacturing techniques. It was a matter of the human mind, its ability to adjust itself to the fact that it had unleashed a terrible and destructive power, and that men must either live with it, or he destroyed by it. But two decades were a pitifully short time to wipe away the accumulated mental debris, the accumulated prejudices and suspicions which had been bred in men for centuries. And we failed. For a while we thought we had succeeded. There was the United Nations, the various conferences of the Foreign Ministers at Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow. And after that the international control commissions and the nations' agreement to disarm. But then came the arguments over the veto power -- the differences over the extent of inspection beyond national boundaries -- the finger-pointing, the accusations of bad faith and subterfuge. And finally, the great blow -- the dissolution of the United Nations -- and separation.
"We might have succeeded, we could have succeeded with sincerity and mutual trust, and an awareness of how much we had to succeed.
"But we failed. And now, the world faces the consequences."
A phone rang on the telecaster's desk. He picked up the receiver, listened a moment, nodded, and hung up.
Then he looked directly at David and the other men on the Broadway street corner and said simply:
"We take you now to the new Kremlin in Kirensk, Russia."
The television screen crackled, sputtered a little, faded, and finally blacked out. The darkness smothered David and the others huddled with him in an eerie, impenetrable blanket. They waited silently, shivering a little, listening to the sharp wind whining up the deserted side streets.
And then the glow came to the screen again and a voice with a Russian accent said:
"This is Kirensk, capital of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics."
The screen showed a street in the Soviet capital in bright daylight. A crowd of people lined the curb, waiting impassively. They seemed quiet and well disciplined, not surging forward like American crowds. But perhaps the line of Red soldiers guarding the approach had something to do with their good behavior.
The invisible telecaster spoke briefly again:
"The crowd outside the new Kremlin awaits the coming of the American envoy, Mr. Allison, to confer with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Bakhanov."
"Well, I'll be damned," commented the soldier named Frank. "Look at the people in that crowd. They look just like we do." He giggled nervously. "I swear to Christ, that big guy on the left with the fur hat looks just like my uncle Phil out in Detroit."
"Sure they look the same as we do," said the sergeant acidly. "What'd you expect 'era to have -- horns?" He profferred a word of wisdom. "Hell, what's so tough about them? We can take 'em any time we want to, if you ask me. They put their legs in their pants legs one at a time just like we do, don't they?"
"Geez," a civilian said. "Look at their faces. What do you know? They're just as scared as we are!"
The voice of the Russian telecaster came again:
"Now the American envoy is arriving."
An armored car came into view, bristling with Red Army men. It was followed by a huge black limousine, and another armored car followed the limousine. The camera moved with the procession. It stopped at a big gate in front of a building set back behind a wall. Soldiers pushed the onlookers away. A gray-faced man got out of the limousine, carrying a brief case. The gate opened, and he walked between two lines of grim Russian soldiers standing at attention. The gate closed behind him.
The Russian telecaster concluded:
"Thus the envoys of two great powers meet to confer in this great crisis. We of the Soviet Union want no war, and neither does America, nor any of the other countries of the world. Let us hope that the envoy of your great country and mine come to an understanding on this historic occasion"
That was the trouble, thought David. Everyone hoped the same thing, but nobody did anything about it. The grim game of waiting, the tension, could not go on forever. The fear of men for each other had been like a progressive madness, a subtle and cumulative poison seeping into the blood stream, and there was a limit to how much the patient could take, a limit to human endurance.
The scene shifted back to the United States, back into the paneled study again.
The gray-haired telecaster was at his desk, staring down at Times Square. He began to speak again, when a young ma
n came from the left of the television screen and gave the man at the desk a note. He glanced at it briefly and then looked grimly at the men on the street corner:
"I have a special bulletin here. Professor Albert Wholey, world-famous authority on atomic fission, and one of the scientists who aided in the preparation of the original Hiroshima bomb, committed suicide tonight. He was seventy years oW
The telecaster paused for a moment. Then he nodded and smiled -- a wooden, professional smile. You could see that his heart wasn't in it, that the smile was merely a signature, a way of signing off.
"This is your telecaster, Arthur Morrow, speaking for the Downysoft Corporation and bidding you all -- good night!"
The paneled study swung around on a turntable and disappeared, and the commercial came onto the screen in colors. First there was a household scene. A motherly-looking woman opened the door of a linen closet and took a blue blanket from the top shelf. She examined the label and as she did, the camera panned down to the label -- DOWNYSOFT! The woman nodded, smiled, and shut the door.
An announcer crowed:
"Yes -- it's DOWNYSOFT -- DOWNYSOFT blankets!"
The camera followed the woman into a nursery. Tenderly she placed the blanket on a tousle-haired child sleeping in a crib. Then she caressed the blanket and smiled again.
The announcer said in an unctuous voice:
"For that soft and intimate touch -- it's DOWNYSOFT. DOWNYSOFT blankets and DOWNYSOFT towels!"
The first scene whirled out of sight on the turntable, and a new scene whirled in. This time it was the interior of an orchid-colored bathroom. A tall, lissome blonde who looked like the third from the left in a chorus line was standing in front of a glass-enclosed stall shower. She was dressed in a bright orange silk robe, and from the way it clung to her curvaceous body it was plain that she wore nothing else underneath. She turned to a small towel shelf and took out two towels. She hung them carefully on a rack, caressed them with her fingers, and smiled. The camera panned down to a close-up of the labels again.
Then the blonde began to take off her robe in a kind of televised strip tease. First there was a view of a smooth back, with the curved suggestion of the girl's breasts barely showing. Then, just as she dropped her robe, she opened the door of the stall shower and stepped behind it. She stood there for a moment in a side view, every feature of her body etched sharply in silhouette behind the translucent glass. Then she reached up and turned on the shower.
The announcer crowed again:
"Yes! For that soft and intimate touch -- it's always -- DOWNYSOFT! DOWNYSOFT blankets and DOWNYSOFT towels!"
The man on David's right spoke softly. "Soft and intimate touch is right. Oh, brother!"
"Geez!" said his companion. "Geez, Joe! That blonde! How would you like to have that little number?"
David felt a little sick in his stomach. He turned up his coat collar and started to walk up Broadway, his feet echoing dismally on the empty pavement, past the dull marquees, the empty boarded-up stores, the dead neon signs. The wind whistled down the darkened canyon, and its cold breath, too, smelled of the Fear.
At Columbus Circle, the traflfic lights, blinking sentinels on the dark-shrouded, desolate streets, continued to operate stubbornly. As they went red, green, red, green, the click of their mechanism as they changed sounded abnormally loud in the brooding silence.
David Hughes watched the lights break into a long illuminated V, one arm of lights extending up Central Park West, another up Broadway. They changed in a kind of staggered beat and cadence, red and green, red and green, winking glassily in a ghostly and grotesque stone-and-steel fairyland.
It seemed fantastic to David that he was here now, in the city of New York, a lone pedestrian walking through a wind-swept graveyard, committed to the most dangerous and most important mission of his life.
Ten hours ago his day had started like any other day.
A rough hand shook David.
"Wake up, Dave."
Dave tried to push the hand away and draw the covers back over him. But the shaking persisted, and finally he opened his eyes to look sleepily at the grinning, freckled face of his roommate, Joe Morgan.
"Rise and shine, Reverend," said Morgan. "Time the priest was preparing for the pulpit."
Morgan, a long string bean of a man with a constant grin under his sandy hair, was the spectrograph expert at Palomar. He had worked with David at the Harvard Observatory, later served a term at Yerkes, then at Mount Wilson, and finally hooked onto the Big Eye under the Old Man. Like David, he was a bachelor, and the two of them lived in the dormitory, an ascetic, monklike place of soundproofed walls and doors and black curtains, for men who slept all day and worked all night. They called the place the "Monastery" and each other "priests."
As for Morgan's reference to the "pulpit," that was David's special province. It was the nickname for the telescope control board, where David flicked switches or pushed buttons to turn the dome, open it, and swing the Big Eye onto a star, at the whim and direction of the Old Man up in the capsule at the top of the tube.
"Just came back from the observatory," said Morgan as David began to shave. "And the Old Man's acting mighty strange. Dave, what the hell is going on, anyway?"
"I don't know."
"You're his assistant," said Morgan. "You ought to know."
David turned to Morgan. "I'm just as much in the dark as you are. He hasn't told me a thing, and his own wife doesn't even know what he's up to. He's found something, Joe, I'm sure he has. But you know the Old Man, you know how he's acted about these things before. Until he gets it on the line, photographs, calculations, and theory, with a solid conclusion to go with it, everyone on the observatory stafi can just keep on whistling."
Morgan lit a cigarette and flung the match into the wastebasket. "Maybe. But I think this is something big, Dave, much bigger than anything that's happened before. I've never seen the Old Man act like this. Working all night and all day, skipping meals, taking an hour or two of sleep when he's almost dead of exhaustion. You can almost see his cheekbones popping out from under his skin." He paused and threw away his cigarette. "You know what happened to me a little while ago at the observatory?"
"What?"
"I'm supposed to be the spectrograph man here. But I tried to get into the spectrograph room in the telescope girder, and it was locked. Had some plates there I wanted to see. The Old Man was in there, and he told me to go away. Go away, mind you! He sounded a little wild, like a jealous kid guarding a toy. I don't know, I've never heard him talk like that before."
David was thoughtful. "It could be the times, Joe. The trouble with Russia, everything. Everybody's snapping at each other these days. You couldn't find a calmer, more even-tempered man than Dr. Dawson. But the generals have been hounding him, running him ragged, for months."
"Yes, I know." Morgan spoke soberly now. "They've been taking the Old Man off his mountain every now and then, and he doesn't like it. That trip to New Mexico on the rocket-projectile thing -- that Maryland job. He's kicked like a steer each time, but he's had to go. And those security guards they've got posted around the place. You'd think the Russians were going to drop paratroopers right through the dome."
David adjusted his tie. "Hear anything new on the saber-rattling up at the observatory, Joe?" He spoke casually, almost too casually.
Morgan shook his head. "Same old stuff. The fuse is lying right out there in the open, inviting somebody to light it. Francis had the radio on, and to hear the commentators tell about it, this little two-bit planet is scheduled to blow up any minute now." He grinned a little sickly. "It's funny."
"What's funny?"
"I don't know. Up here, on this nice, remote, clinically clean mountain, it's hard to get excited about this cold war. But I was down in San Dipgo last night -- and it's different. The place is like a morgue, most of the lights are out. And that suits me fine!"
David stared at him, and Morgan grinned. "Professionally, I mean. Or,
to repeat the old saying, it's an ill wind that blows no good. And I'll show you why." He reached into a box he had brought from the observatory and took out a number of photographic plates. "Here. Take a look at these, Dave. Developed 'em a couple of days ago."
David picked up a plate, looked at it. It didn't look like much, a few faint smudges of silver granules on a film of gelatin. "You haven't got it labeled, Joe. What is it?"
"Messier 31. One of our more skittish island universes, way about beyond the suburbs of our own star system. You see how clear it is?"
David nodded, and Morgan picked up another plate, gave it to him. "Here's the same thing, taken months ago, before the lights went out in Dago."
This spectrograph plate was fogged. "Mostly the scattered blue light of mercury," explained Morgan. "From the advertising signs in San Diego. It's been ruining our plates. Remember the last mess with the 100-inch eye at Mount Wilson? Los Angeles was growing too fast for the observatory there. The lights began to creep way out in the suburbs, making a nebula of their own and cluttering up the sky. That white, acrid haze they called smog climbed right over Mount Wilson, dimming the sky nebulae." David returned the plate to Morgan, and he restored it to the box. "And now we've got the same thing, Dave. San Diego's grown almost as big as Los Angeles in the last ten years, and conditions have been getting worse every day because of those damned lights."