Triumph

by Philip Wylie

  Both men pulled themselves out of the moat at the terrace, where Farr had started.

  Ben wasn't even panting, which Farr noticed with no comment.

  "Get in last night?" Ben asked.

  "Around two this morning." Farr took a huge towel from a waiting stack and tossed another to Ben. "Miss Li arrive?"

  "She did. Charming girl!"

  "M'm'm'm! Her dad's quite a guy, too. He stayed in town, though. Be out here early this evening. Business kept him." Farr laughed, for some undiscernible reason, and then eyed the scientist candidly. "What fools men are! 'Business,' I said. Actually Sam Li had a girl friend he wanted to visit. His wife--Lodi's mother--is still in Hong Kong. I wouldn't divulge Sam's pleasure to my wife. Or Faith. But why should I push alibis with you?"

  Ben smiled but never made a reply; Paulus Davey appeared soundlessly and said,

  "Telephone, Mr. Farr."

  The redheaded businessman excused himself. He was gone for some time-time enough for Ben to decide, after Paulus had made the suggestion, to have breakfast on the terrace and in the garment he wore-bathing trunks. He was eating an omelet with strawberry jam in its fluffy middle when Farr returned.

  A different Farr. Pale. Stiff. Remote. Silent.

  A Farr who rang for the butler, said, "The usual," and then sat in silence broken only by sudden exhalations from his puffed-out cheeks . . . the half-comic but seriously-intended antic of a man preoccupied by something very disturbing. Finally he gave Ben a partial explanation. "Friend of mine, a senator, phoned just now from Washington. New crisis blew up last night."

  Ben's calm eyes met the other man's blue gaze. "Serious?"

  "Aren't they all?"

  "Potentially." A long pause. "What happened? Or is it a confidential thing?" Ben asked.

  Farr was scowling with inner concerns and he looked at the scientist now almost as if he'd forgotten he was there. Forgotten--in seconds. But remembering, recognizing, he smiled faintly. "'Liberation army' marched into Yugoslavia, yesterday. Still under wraps, Ben. But, I daresay, you're a bank vault of much greater secrets."

  "A few," Ben agreed. "Though since I left Los Alamos, since I gave up weapons work, I--"

  Farr nodded rather curtly and excused himself. "Think I better put in a call or two." Ben was left facing an empty chair, a half-eaten croissant, and a partly-drained coffee cup.

  By and by he completed his solitary meal and entered the house through a

  "sunroom" adjacent to the terrace. Covered walks led to his quarters; Ben dressed quickly in his coolest slacks, lightest sports shirt, and loafers without socks. From the library corner of his chambers he selected a book, after deciding his initial impulse to pick a volume from one of the many, leather-bound sets of classics would seem ostentatious.

  Too academic. Anti-weekend in spirit.

  So he scanned a shelf of recent novels of at least some importance and chose the first attempt at fiction to be made by William Percival Gaunt, the popular philosopher. It had proven already that he was even more popular as a novelist. The book was called, The Laser of Lemuel Lett. It concerned, Ben knew, the imaginary events that ensued upon the establishment of communications with an earth-bound space ship coming in from one of the planets in a system known for some years to exist around Proxima Centauri. The tale was, essentially, a spoof of the current, wasteful, hostile, and emperiled societies on Earth.

  Ben went back to the terrace and read until half-past ten. Nobody, the butler excepted, appeared there. Music from somewhere in the house suggested that others were awake and, perhaps, breakfasting in bed. A sensible way, Ben thought, of starting a day that was, according to all meteorological predictions, sure to break the all-time Weather Bureau heat records for the date, in New York City and south to Philadelphia and Washington, as well as throughout most of New England.

  When the moving sun touched him, Ben pushed his chair into the remaining shade. He was eventually relieved by the starting of the terrace air-conditioner, which soon reduced the terrace temperature from a (guessed) ninety-five to a very comfortable eighty--again, at a guess.

  In the distance he did see or hear signs of life.

  A station wagon, driven by a man in a white coat, was visible, serpentining down Sachem's Watch. Beside the man was a gray-haired colored lady--the butler's wife, Ben surmised.

  Later the sound of tennis reached him and, faintly, the voices of a woman (Connie?) and a man, calling scores. He also heard a motorcycle approach the premises, but did not look up from his book in time to catch sight of its rider.

  Eleven o'clock.

  The novel had now captured Ben. He scarcely noticed as the butler made quiet trips to clear the breakfast table. He did notice, however, on two or three occasions when Paulus Davey went through the door, that Farr, by the door-hushed sound of his voice and by its intervals, was still on the phone. And, plainly, still agitated.

  Eleven-nine.

  The tennis had stopped. There was relative silence: only a very faint, incessant hum from the distant Turnpike; the chirping of birds in the shrubbery and trees of Uxmal; the remote sky-scuffle of a commercial jet carrying passengers on a course which, if Ben had given it his attention, he might have guessed would take it east and north toward Ireland. Toward Shannon Airport. Aside from that, almost nothing. The hottening, whitening sunlight, that made shadows constantly blacker and sharper; and haze transpired from reluctant leaves that half-obscured the white walls and gray steeples of Fenwich Village.

  Eleven-ten.

  Some further seconds.

  And hell broke loose.

  Ben leaped to his feet, dropping his book, as an ear-splitting scream blasted over the lawns, gardens, and the hilltop. It stopped, and came again, migrainously, enormously. In the interval Ben had heard the unmistakable wail of Fenwich Village sirens.

  For seconds, he stood still, startled, uncertain.

  For seconds, he insisted this instantaneous clangor could not possibly be what it seemed. And when he acknowledged the potential meaning, he still told himself it must be a mistake, or at most a practice alert.

  But then he saw people streaking toward the place where he stood galvanized, half-crouched, with a dropped book at his feet.

  A moment later, eyes dilated, skin a strange yellow, voice hoarse, Paulus Davey appeared. He said repeatedly and with a sort of crazed urgency, "This way, Doctor Bernman! This way, please!"

  Ben finally understood. Understood the words, at least. He croaked, "Shelter?"

  The butler nodded, took his arm, made him run.

  The ensuing ten or twelve minutes were perhaps the most mixed-up and forever impossible-to-unscramble of any in Ben's life.

  He went, with the shaken and shaking butler, through the house--the sunroom, the great living room with its recessed sitting area, and the hall. Outdoors, next: the quadrangle. Thence through a geometrical rose garden brilliant with early-watered blooms, toward a paved area beyond the open garage.

  Arriving there, he was told to wait, by the frantic butler. "Don't under any circumstances go anywhere else! Just wait." Paulus Davey then ran back toward the door through which they'd emerged.

  Ben waited.

  But not alone for long. The courtyard rang and bellowed with the electric alarms, a battery of hooting horns. In the middle of the concrete area beside which Ben had been ordered to wait, two portals rolled apart. They were, Ben saw in a sort of pop-eyed wonder, steel. Thick steel. Very thick steel--like heavy battleship plating or submarine-hull steel. And huge. They opened to reveal a vertical shaft that went--Ben walked nearer, his muscles leaping--down and out of sight: bottomless, it would seem, and big enough to swallow a house.

  Then, people. Mrs. Farr first, in a morning coat and slippers, clutching a large, lavender case to her bosom, dough-pale and sweating.

  Then Lotus Li, looking almost calm, sprinting lightly, carrying nothing at all but wearing a rose-beige tennis dress. Behind her, running hard and also empty-handed, Faith. She saw Ben a
nd rushed to his side. "I looked in your rooms but you weren't there!" She said that, smiled, and took his hands. "God! I'm scared!"

  She looked at the sky apprehensively. So did he. There was nothing to see but the steamy azure.

  The girl called Connie ran into view half-dragging a tall, apparently dumfounded young man whom Ben had not seen. Re carried a small, cheap, and obviously heavy satchel; his trousers were clipped to his ankles; he wore no jacket and his blue shirt had an open collar. But though Ben noticed the clips he failed to think of the motorcycle he'd recently heard. Paulus Davey was next, sobbing. And carrying a light, automatic rifle.

  Then Farr, also with an automatic weapon and a belt from which grenades bobbed.

  Nobody seemed to think this sudden-appearing arsenal was strange, except Ben, who winced a little.

  Farr stopped in their midst and called their names. Then he turned raging eyes on his wife and half yelled, "Maids? Sam Hyama? Mrs. Davey?"

  Valerie answered in a moan. "Gone to Fenwich."

  "Good God!"

  Ben heard a rumble of machinery and turned. A railed platform, an elevator bigger than Ben had seen anywhere, was slowing to a stop at pavement level. Nobody stood on it, so plainly it ran automatically. None of the group moved until Farr bellowed,

  "Get aboard, damn it! Everybody!"

  They got on.

  Tires squealed outside the buildings and a sports car thundered into view, crashed through the rose-bed and halted. A handsome, big blond man vaulted out and said,

  "Cheerio, people! It's it! Right?"

  Vance bellowed again. "Didn't you bring anybody?"

  "Tried to. My folks are in Maine. As you know. I let the servants take off the weekend, starting early this A.M. Saw some women and kids as I came up. Stopped.

  Offered 'em shelter. They didn't even speak. Just kept running. Panic."

  The hoot of Farr's sirens suddenly stopped. In a shuddery aftermath the Fenwich Village sirens sounded plainly. Davey stepped off the elevator, saying, "Guess I'll wait for Mother."

  Vance yanked the thin, light Negro back on the platform. "No use! They'll find shelter where they are. Listen, people! It's eleven-nineteen! If there's nobody on the premises--if you're sure-- down we go!"

  He waited and was answered only by far-off sirens and the butler's sobbing.

  Farr moved a lever on the elevator rail and Ben, like the rest, felt it begin to sink into the earth. Like the rest, his eyes raised as the descent accelerated and, like them, he took a final, though unconscious look at the sky, swiftly narrowing to a slot and soon wiped out, as two portals of incredible size closed together along a horizontal plane.

  Running, Ben thought, on heavy-duty and, doubtless, multiple tracks, recessed in the shaft.

  The platform went faster and faster, down and down, not quite in darkness, because dim lights came on, above the railing, as the first portals crashed together.

  Vance Farr, near Ben, murmured, "Five thousand psi." And when they passed a second, yard-thick slot that extruded another pair of doors, the same figure was repeated.

  "Five thousand psi."

  It happened a third time, with a third pair of doors. Ben had by then noticed that each pair of the doors met at right angles to the pair above. The elevator kept dropping.

  Without any special reaction Ben found that Faith was holding his hand. He did not notice she was holding Kit Barlow's hand, too. He saw Farr unbuckle the belt from which his grenades hung and in a gingerly fashion set down the load.

  Ben was on the verge of asking how much farther into the limestone mountain this shaft would take them, when he felt a slowing of the flat, vast conveyance.

  CHAPTER 5

  On that hot last Friday of July, America was on vacation, in millions, and at work in towns and cities--again in millions--on its streets and in its offices, stores, restaurants, subways, buses. Americans were busy outdoors in suburban yards and at work on farms and on weekend junkets to the seashore, lakes, mountains.

  The President had thought, earlier in the morning, that the new menace would, at worst, become negotiations which, if the alleged Red "volunteers" had managed to occupy and panic Yugoslavia, might end up in the loss of that country and its people to the West. He'd requested an extension of the "ultimatum" and a halt of the invaders for six hours expecting to gain at least something more than the proffered two hours. He was, to his initial surprise, granted his request.

  In Washington and in New York political and military leaders began, before dawn, a telecast "conference" with their opposite numbers in London, Paris, Moscow, and Peking. Satellite-repeaters enabled all participants to see as well as hear each other.

  The talk dragged on till the six inconclusive hours of "armistice" had passed. The President Conner had received, meantime, reports that the invading "volunteers" were swiftly fanning out in Yugoslavia and, though dressed as civilians, their hordes were equipped with the latest conventional weapons and mobile arms. They had shattered all Yugoslavian military resistance.

  Charging Grovsky, the Soviet Premier, with treachery, he received a not-unexpected reply:

  "These freedom fighters, Mr. President, are not to be controlled, I regret to say."

  He stroked his waxed and elegant mustache and gave the free-world leaders his familiar, panther-like smile. Grovsky was the first Russian Premier to be an out-and-out dandy--a tall and handsome man who wore Bond Street clothes; his mustache had endlessly beguiled cartoonists and was compared to the similar adornment of a renowned, if unfathomable artist, Salvador Dali.

  Grudgingly, at a quarter to ten, A.M., Grovsky agreed to send Red troops into Yugoslavia to check the "volunteers" so that a new "free election" could be held. The pledge was considered empty. For the Soviet boss had insisted this was not a "take-over"

  but represented the "inevitable march of free Communist hero-volunteers" on a step toward the "eventual liberation of the entire "capitalist-imperialist" world. But he would not, Grovsky had said--to the exhausted joy of the long-distance conferees--"annihilate London and Paris," so long as no outside power interfered with his promised Soviet endeavor to "restore order in Yugoslavia." His troops, weapons, navy, and so forth would nevertheless engage in practice alerts "just in case" the Western powers, or anyone of them, did start "meddling." This decision was hardly ideal but, to the President of the United States and to the heads of government in England and France, it was welcome.

  With it the long, trans-TV conference ended. Reporters everywhere, aware of some new but as-yet unannounced crisis, were given a general account of the situation and, at about ten-thirty, Eastern Daylight Time, they began to file their stories and to broadcast an outline of the new Red "Push."

  A little later the giant radar receptors in Greenland, northern Canada, and Alaska began to show ever-increasing numbers of blips that indicated planes winging toward North America, and, minutes later, the upsurge of swarms of what seemed to be missiles.

  In Nebraska, where the information was collected and computer-analyzed, there was a period of hesitancy, owing to the fact that Grovsky had asserted some such "maneuvers"

  could be expected. Many precious minutes were lost before the warning system made its electronic knowledge certain:

  This was an attack aimed at America.

  And now, as the red phone did ring at President Conner's White House desk and as the nightmare of three Presidents became imminent reality, he gave coded orders in a steady voice, while tears ran down his cheeks. Then, impulsively (and disastrously) he phoned his mother in Seattle to urge her to take cover. After that, with his wife and three daughters, who had been waiting outside his door, he proceeded to the helicopter on the lawn. It took off, swiftly, toward the cavern carved in a Maryland hill provided for just such danger.

  The helicopter did not reach it.

  The delaying confusion as to whether the Soviets were merely staging maneuvers or starting assault--and the call to Seattle--had cut the time left to a margin not q
uite sufficient.

  Still, the President and his family, their pilot and co-pilot, were fortunate, in a fashion--more fortunate than scores upon scores of millions of their fellow citizens. For they, at least, never clearly knew the cause of their swift obliteration.

  Of the salvo of twenty-three, five-megaton missiles launched at the Washington-Baltimore area, seven were precisely on target and eight burst within twenty-five miles of their aiming-place. Most, as intended, went into fission-fusion-and-fission on or just above the ground, with a burst-altitude variation of some twenty thousand feet. One of them opened in the hot, clear sky almost directly over the green field where the President and his party were about to descend in order to reach the fortified cave, mere yards away from the landing field.

  Father, mother, daughters, and two fliers neither saw nor heard--and probably did not even have time to feel--what happened.

  The missile exploded at eighteen thousand feet. Its nature and effects were characteristic of most intercontinental warheads in the current Soviet arsenal. . . .

  The burst of a nuclear weapon is curiously different from an ordinary explosion.

  An observer, providing he has adequate protection for his eyes and is far enough away to survive, at first merely senses some tremendous event in the air. There occurs a not-really-seen but shocking awareness, as if of an invisible leap, or as if the air itself had been smitten by a colossal but unseen fist.

  This, in the case of a weapon such as annihilated the presidential party, swells, to engulf between two and three miles of whatever surrounds it. For seconds, with unholy glare, it grows. Where it touches the earth, it melts it, rends it, converts millions of tons of it to gas, and only then, heaved upward by a rebound force of its own making, the fireball climbs and flickers, in vast churnings of white light mixed with enormities of darknesses, until, free of earth, it gradually billows out as pure light, and still ascends steadily, a torrent of interwhirling luminosity of every hue, composed from the intermixed and sun-hot elements of itself and the air and the cratered earth beneath.