Triumph

by Philip Wylie

  How could Faith be saved, then, from--? A sad loss of face, call it. He cogitated. .

  . .

  Ben had been yawning over a game of solitaire one day, when Angelica had brightly asked him if he would take her on a "tour of the machines and stuff." He now thought of what followed.

  He had assented and, for the whole afternoon, he'd led the alluring young woman through the passages and chambers of the Farr redoubt. These, fanning out like the galleries of some long-worked, vast mine, with their intricate machines, had fascinated Angelica. But in the end she'd seized his arm, when they were alone with the silent vastness of one of the "stacks" which contained gaseous-diffusion elements.

  She had murmured, "Gee! I didn't realize you could get so far away in this joint! I bet nobody looks in here even, for weeks on end."

  He'd nodded. "That's right, Angelical Nobody needs to, till a day comes when we blast to outside air, and perhaps find we can use it."

  She then sat down on a long wide bench. Lay back and sighed, feet dangling, relaxed and smiling a little. He'd said he was sorry she was so tired. And she'd sat up, almost angrily.

  "Let's beat it, Ben!" She looked up at the near, enormous installation. "Gives me the creeps!"

  Now, remembering, Ben chuckled a bit ruefully. Angelica had made that tour, not from any curiosity about their maintenance engines and equipment, but to see, instead, how she would feel when she had him alone and far from the others. And she'd found she felt zero interest. So, anyhow, he'd inferred. It hadn't entered his head that his lack of any reaction had caused the briefly-inviting beauty to rise and alibi her behavior to spare him from distress.

  No wonder. He was ugly. Not hideous. But no bargain in the good-looks department.

  He'd never needed a mirror to affirm his opinion of why the world's Angelicas (and Faiths, too! and all the lovely rest) rarely even looked twice at him and his freakish features.

  As well as a mirror, he'd had in addition, and for years now, a very vivid recollection of an afternoon at Brookhaven. . . .

  Needing a special piece of equipment, he had left his lab and walked down a hall to a stockroom. There, as he hunted for the thing he required, he heard three men approach. They were talking in German, which most scientists learn and Ben knew perfectly. Two of the men, indeed, were Germans--visitors from the Munich Radiation Laboratory for Experimental Study. One visitor asked, as they came within earshot,

  "Who's that kike we met who looks like a cross between your American eagle and a turkey buzzard? The doctor with the bat-wing ears?"

  The answer, in German, was made by their escort, Dr. John Hazelwirt, Assistant Director of the wonderland of Brookhaven. It was an answer spoken with some hurt, but with a partly-amused chuckle, and, at its end, with pride. "That must be Dr. Ben Bernman, the fellow who has just won a Fermi Prize for his theoretical equations showing a relationship between quanta and relativistic mathematics."

  The other German said, "Ach! So! A Jew--and that prize! I wonder from what Anglo-Saxon he stole his theory? Which, I admit, is brilliant."

  "I am sure," Hazelwirt said aggrievedly, "Ben never stole anything, let alone that theory!"

  "He is a Jew! Whatever he did, he therefore stole it, from some non-Jew! The myth that Jews can produce original thought is a Jewish deceit! They rob other brains; they then bribe or blackmail their plundered victims to silence! From whom did Einstein steal relativity? We cannot say. But he surely stole it and perhaps did away with the real creator! Yes? So! We Germans know the Jew mind!"

  Then they passed out of earshot.

  Ben had stood a moment, raging, the wanted apparatus in his shaking hands. He found himself thinking: For almost a generation the bones of Hitler have rotted in their unfound grave, yet the Nazi lie endures, like an endemic disease, ready to burst out in plague!

  He had considered pursuing the trio down the hall and confronting the VIP guest from Munich.

  It would have been a pleasure to take them apart.

  And Ben Bernman was a man who could do just that, however gymnastic or soldierly the two Nazis might have deemed themselves to be. Which act would disgrace Brookhaven, himself, and Doc Hazelwirt, who, as the three retreated, by his tone was bitterly repudiating the black libel.

  Ben had returned to his job.

  But he never forgot the incident. The phrase "American eagle crossed with a turkey buzzard," had made him avoid looking at his face as a whole even to shave. It became Ben's measure of his ungainliness. Added to that were childhood recollections of the days when his Newark schoolmates had called him "Bat," because of his outflung ears. . . .

  Now, realizing how long he'd sat musing, he also realized how ridiculous had been his fantasy--the dream of saving Faith from the humiliation of accepting her fiancé as a lover, simply to prevent the fool from taking up Angelica's invitation. And it would be humiliation, Ben knew. For Faith had been very proud of Kit, and of their propriety, since their immolation here. So proud!

  That pride would now be diminished. For it was not likely any man and woman in this place, despite its vastness, could keep private any intimate relationship.

  Thus, in spite of all their circumspection, George and Lodi were known to be having a love affair. However (Ben smiled), everybody had uncritically and without comment accepted that relationship of his two assistants. Then he remembered one exception to that--remembered how Kit, at the emotional instant they had reached usable, outside air, had first hugged and spun Vance Farr, and afterward glared hatefully at the special rapture in the embrace of the Chinese girl and the young Japanese man.

  In that now recollected look, unexamined at the time, Ben had been given a clue to the menacing sensations rising in Kit Barlow.

  And done what? Nothing.

  With a tremendous sigh, a glance at his wrist watch, a shrug at the lateness of the hour, Ben at last bent again to his work. . . .

  He would have done so in a very different, though still-pained mood, had he known what Faith actually had whispered to her avid fiancé that evening.

  For Faith, noticing Kit's flagrant stare at Angelica, hitherto considered by her as a mere "Kit-like" fascination with what Valerie called "dolls," had suddenly faced the truth.

  For months she had considered her fiancé's patent and reciprocated passion for Angelica in exactly the manner Ben had imagined. Faith had finally, and scornfully (but without quite knowing why), determined she would never break her original and proud decision to keep Kit at a distance, especially just to halt mere playboy urges toward herself.

  So, that evening, she had actually whispered to Kit: "Look, dear! I had presumed you might cheat on me if we married. I was going to ignore it when you did! So, if you can't resist that rich dish of Irish-Italian, why, I'll ignore it before the fact of our marriage.

  Seems only fair." To that, Kit had given his startled, double look, the first of shock, the second of greedy joy.

  The look Ben had wholly misinterpreted and, after some foolish plotting, thought of as evidence of a different surrender he could not prevent. A different sort of face-loss for Faith. And a potential trouble source.

  Blind spots in the minds and hearts of brilliant, versatile men are often as strangely extensive as their perceptions.

  Nocturnal assemblies in the vast, void midst of the Indian Ocean were made as few and as "secure" as possible. They took place on one or another of the submarines, the boat used thus being crowded with skippers and other experts in sundry techniques. One sub was used for each conference, because while the carrier tarried in the area, she presented a far more likely object for detection. So the men gathered nightly while the three other submarines dove and scattered and the Conner zigzagged till near dawn and

  "pickup time."

  First, it was decided--from the accurate data furnished by the evidently unsuspected satellite the carrier had launched--that the Soviets, in their many emergence points, did not constitute an immediate threat to anybody.

  Time af
ter time, as immensities of poisoned air--so largely of their making and entirely their fault--circled the globe and returned to them, the Reds were forced back into their underground and subsea retreats. When they were able to work outside, they were at first, and for weeks, busy with the decontamination of the near environment. For that, they used hydraulic-mining hoses that drew, plainly, upon stores of uncontaminated water.

  Much of two flat regions near two bases had been covered with some unidentifiable material before Phase One. The stuff was removed, obviously to make airfields. But the fields, it seemed, had not been sufficiently protected by the material. So, in cumbersome, shielded bulldozers, crews of men were currently trying to scrape those surfaces clear, to a usable depth. The job was not only taking time, but, after some weeks, the observable fact that the bulldozers were being operated by men unfamiliar with them and learning on the job, indicated that the dozer crews spared for such work as this airstrip-clearing had succumbed, and almost certainly to radiation sickness.

  The exact location of the now barn-sized openings to the land bases was known.

  Behind those maws there would be baffles, but parades of heavy-duty equipment in and out of the caverns revealed that all such radiation-screens still in place were not very numerous or heavy; they were opened and closed too readily to be very ponderous.

  Land bases now under construction near the "cities" under the two seas, it could be seen, had accomplished their initial objective, which was, to open deep silos where they had placed missiles, of high yield, suitable for fusing and aiming by computer--

  obviously, as a protection for the surviving thousands in the U.S.S.R., against attack from precisely such American vessels as now had gathered. There were twelve such "ready"

  missiles, in two locations, and presumably many more lay ready at the bottoms of concrete wells, or silos, elsewhere.

  The Americans were certain, too, that somewhere--in the known caves and subsea cities or in other caverns unlocatable--the Soviets would have stocks of hundreds more nuclear weapons for the purpose of subjugating surviving nations and peoples when they were ready to undertake that act.

  Two recent drone-plane launchings--doubtless for round-the-world reconnaissance--had been observed. However, one such plane had crashed at take-off and the other had plunged into the Pacific. No further planes were brought out, indicating the enemy had to be sparing with that resource.

  In general, the Americans also gathered, order was being established by many subequatorial peoples and surviving nations, some of which had been in pandemonium.

  Persons, in millions, who had fallen ill of radiation sickness in North Africa, much of India, Central America and, spottily, elsewhere, had now either more or less recovered, or died. Radiation levels were growing lower steadily, south of the equator; they had not been widely dangerous there at any time. Some nations were intercommunicating now, in the tacit belief that the United States, the U.S.S.R., most of China, Japan, and other North Temperate Zone regions had been depopulated, or virtually so.

  The only peculiar circumstance in this round-the-Southern-Hemisphere reporting of the widespread re-rise of man, society, law, and of uncivilized activity, too, was the silence of Australia and New Zealand. Satellite information showed that subcontinent and island complex to be physically unharmed. Its people were going about their usual affairs with seeming vigor and purpose and in excellent order. There was not much traffic, as no shipping was accepted and gasoline was probably very short in supply.

  The puzzled Americans wondered if perhaps the Australians had suffered some freak radiation damage, or feared they might--although their scientists by now would certainly know they were not threatened. It was finally decided that Australia, having long ago refused the Conner permission even to dock, was sedulously keeping itself to itself. And New Zealand was following suit. Merchant ships were sometimes seen being turned back by Australian naval craft. And it made sense.

  For the Aussies had been stripped, at their own request, of all nuclear weapons.

  So, the attentive Americans finally decided, they were afraid of being overwhelmed by the peoples of one of the surviving, overpopulated states. In that fear, they refused to communicate, turned back alien vessels, and were keeping to themselves, while they still, certainly, listened to the now-chattering part of the world that had endured.

  "They are probably," Dingo Denton said, at one of the last conferences, "getting set in case of invasion later on, by anybody in the Southern Hemisphere. We know their industries are going full blast. They are moving daily back and forth, in what the photo experts say are wood-burning buses, tens of thousands of factory workers. Making, I bet, the best possible conventional weapons, to be able to meet any extant weapons which might be used in such an attack. If they hadn't been so bloody peace-minded, they could now get up a sky-spy like ours and learn the Reds are still after them, and the world. Be a shock, if the Reds land one day--in Melbourne, say--and demand that Australia turn Commie at once. And that's what the Reds will do. Maybe."

  It seemed the likeliest summation of Australia's rejection of the world outside and its internal, immense activity. And evidently Australia could not hear the infrequent, brief directional radio broadcasting in the U.S.S.R. Or else it regarded what was heard as an interchange by forlorn, scattered survivors.

  Code experts of the Navy, meantime, had finally broken the Soviet cipher and now could read the rare messages sent back and forth within that area. These messages meant nothing on their face; they evidently had been prearranged to have special import but to look and sound like the wan, frightened, occasional talk of little groups of Soviet citizens who had survived and still lived and possessed, or had rigged, radio sending and receiving sets with barely power enough to communicate with each other.

  Indeed, with the passing of months each group even radioed to the rest the alleged names of its asserted "total of survivors"--in no case more than fifty per group, whereas the observant but undetected United States Navy satellite had disclosed about a hundred thousand people, minimally, and perhaps twice that number, as still living and urgently at work.

  In a final conference Vice-Admiral Sydnor, the carrier's skipper, summed up the American plan for a truly "last-ditch" effort:

  "We're agreed, then, gentlemen, that as soon as I return to my ship, she will head due south under full power and, skirting Antarctica, return to the natural "slip" where we originally hid her, there to be quickly camouflaged." His brilliant eyes looked from face to face beneath black, beetling brows. "You sub skippers will join me, at the intervals arranged, by following courses you know, one at a time, first rendezvous to occur ninety days hence. It will be hard on your men. You will have to depend more and more"--he grinned--"on our night work.

  Thank God, the Conner's deep-freezes are again full of something, even if it's only tuna! Albacore. Whatever. Night fishing here, by all hands, Denton, was a hell of a bright idea!"

  "Thank you, sir."

  The carrier captain's tornadic personality was renowned. A Virginian, Lee Warington Sydnor seldom was lavish with praise. "My men," he said unthunderously now, "went crazy over that first meal of fresh meat you anglers supplied! They are still fish-crazy."

  Dingo's Exec smiled without joy. "Our gang doesn't care what it eats, just so it eats something long enough!"

  Vice-Admiral Sydnor bellowed, "Right! And let's get on with it! In ninety days, on the carrier, we will have done our job. New warheads will be ready for the missiles on your four Sharks. You will enter our hidden slip in the manner described. The rearming of your missiles will be done as planned. We shall then conduct the mission as per orders you know. I think that's about all. I daresay you gentlemen would like to have one more final and general conference with me before we make our effort. It will not be necessary, I believe. If it is, I shall inform you at rendezvous, as you, in turn, come alongside. But I would prefer to avoid any maneuver that might result in your four boats and my carrier being even
within a thousand miles of the same spot at anyone time. As you know.

  "My carrier may well be located by the enemy and destroyed before your arrival at the Pacific hiding place, in sequence and separated, as you will be, by great distances.

  The carrier also may be found and vaporized after anyone of you reaches her and while that boat is being rearmed. She may be destroyed later on. Any of you may be found en route and destroyed by some Soviet nuclear hunter-killer sub we don't know of. Or from the air. Even from space. If the carrier is lost before we rearm you, then you, at least, can attempt what is essential. If any of you are lost, those who remain can try at the set instant, carrier or not, new warheads or not. That, I believe, is all. I'm damned anxious to get my ship away from this area. It's too dangerous for my liking, in several ways." He shook twenty hands.

  "Good luck!" echoed as he was taken from the Tiger Shark toward his distant, uneasy carrier.

  Immediately after he was piped aboard the Conner headed south, and in minutes, it seemed to the men on the bridge of the Tiger Shark, she had vanished at tremendous speed, vanished under the lush, tropical stars, her bows throwing a briefly visible, phosphorescent wave as she'd gathered speed and knifed into the slow, easy swells of the Indian Ocean.

  The Shark-class submarines took back the officers and specialists who had attended that final conference. Then they too vanished, and even more rapidly than the carrier. Its immense bulk had settled beyond a star-marked horizon, hut the four boats submerged and at maximum cruising depth scattered in four directions. When dawn seeped across the indigo immensity of the region, no sign remained of the strange, long vigils held there.

  The Tiger Shark, like the rest, was shorthanded, owing to the men transferred to her stricken sister sub, the Whale Shark. She headed west. In the next ninety days she was expected to make a cautious, slow voyage up the Atlantic after rounding Africa at a distance. On, from there, beneath the north polar ice, into the Pacific, and south, standing off the Alaskan, Canadian, and American coasts. South, still, off Central America, and at last, timing the turn to allow the White Shark to precede her by a specified interval, west beneath the Pacific for her remeeting with the carrier.