by Philip Wylie
Let's say, on our anniversary day, the ceremony consists in opening up a pool. It'll be, roughly, ten feet deep, fifty long, forty wide--the balconies, then, at water level, nearly.
Right? Great!"
The talk turned to other matters. How, for example, to make good on their promise to supply any potential rescuer with the radiation levels of the waters of Long Island Sound, and elsewhere. This was a subject they'd touched on before.
The best method suggested that night was to construct balloons which could be inflated beyond the airway. On a favorable wind they would carry radiation monitors with radio-telemetric gear over any ocean waters to be measured. Arrived there, they would, on command, vent their hydrogen and so lower the monitors into the sea. There, floating, they would signal levels of radioactivity. Ben's idea. It was tentatively accepted even though it involved a good deal of work on balloons and new instrumentation.
The trio was about to break up when footsteps approached. Halted. Came on, determinedly. A woman's footsteps.
Connie stood in the doorway. She was wearing a nightdress of gauzy, crimson stuff. The outline of her body could be seen as she entered-a feline, dark body, a black panther body. Her face was intense and her dark hair disarrayed, as if she'd been asleep.
Her lips were without lipstick. She looked at Vance, then the other two, shrugged, and said, "May I come in a minute?"
The three men had risen. Vance said, "Sure." George brought another chair. The nubile woman sat down, languidly, looked from face to face, cleared her throat but not of all its huskiness, and said, "What are the chances of our ever getting out of here?"
Vance said, "Good." He always did.
Ben looked at Connie and then, over a shoulder, at the vast assembly of communicating devices that had sent out so much and received nothing whatever that was intended for them. He said, "Why, Connie?"
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she regarded the men one by one, weighing an answer. Finally she asked a question. "You think I've been useful to Pete Williams?"
Vance took it. "If it hadn't been for you, daughter, he probably wouldn't have made it. As it is, he's a man. Grade A."
"He's white," she said. That seemed cryptic to Vance.
But Ben understood. "You gave up white men long ago."
She nodded. "It was too easy. And too wrong. And too tempting."
Farr blushed, Ben noticed. Just . . . blushed. Decent of him. Not that he'd ever been a lover of this calm, intelligent, highly-educated, yet feral woman. Merely that he'd seen and desired.
Ben said, "So? You're thinking of changing your vow?"
Connie shrugged. "Not yet. I mean. If I knew we'd be here for good. Die here.
Even if that was the likely thing, I would. Pete wants me. I want him. Only human. But I know more than Pete about things. Down here we could be fine. I think--" she looked at Vance-"he may even ask you, if I go on saying 'no,' to marry us. Or, as near as can be done. And I'd be for that, too, if I was even pretty sure the end would come here."
"But if you felt we had a decent chance of rescue, or escape?"
She smiled at Farr, wistfully. "Down here with all of you, I can be Pete's friend. I could also be his girl friend. It wouldn't matter. Being the people you are, you'd probably even be pleased. And I could even become his wife, or as near to that as you might agree on. After a marriage service of some sort and papers signed. But I also know Pete. And myself. And what that tells me is, if we ever get back to humanity, it wouldn't go on working--for Pete. Or me. I'd feel the way I got feeling before the world blew up. I mean: I'm colored and I'll always be; and a white man too close always feels he's too close--to a colored girl. I hate that. And that would smash up Pete, outside among strangers, worse than he was broken before I helped put him together here with you. If that's lucid."
"It's lucid," Farr said. "But is it necessary?"
"I came to ask."
Farr shook his head in quandary.
Ben said, "Can't Pete accept that situation as stated?"
"No."
"Why?" Ben was perplexed.
"Because Pete's an everything--forever or nothing--ever kind of man, Ben. And so are you. And so is George. And so you've become, Vance, lately!" She rose, smiling.
"Then that's my answer, isn't it? So I'll have to start weaning Pete of wanting me." Her smile vanished. "And vice versa. I'll need help, right?" She started out. Stopped as a thought struck her. "I might get some . . . from Angelica."
"Angelica?" Farr repeated, not comprehending.
"She's mighty bored with Kit," Connie answered. "Haven't you noticed?" His head shook and she said, "What girl wouldn't be?" Her "Good night, all" came from the passageway.
Reluctantly, Farr put the butt of his cigar, a minimal stump that threatened to bum his lips, in an ash tray. "Some woman, Connie!"
Both men nodded. Ben yawned. "Bed?" he suggested.
Time continued to pass and apprehension to grow. The swimming pool changed August into a month of new interest, fun, and partial forgetfulness.
In September "school" started for Dick and Dorothy. The youngsters attended what was probably the best-taught and most strenuous seventh- and ninth-grade classes in the world. Their teachers were devoted women, of whom one, Connie, was a language scholar and another, Lodi, a mathematics major, and equally-devoted men, among whom were a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the holder of a Fermi Prize who'd been certain of a Nobel, too, had Nobel laureates still been chosen.
Then it was October and the rains began outside.
Still no answer to the irregular but detailed and impassioned appeals sent world-wide from bleak, radioactive Sachem's Watch.
November 11. . . .
That day the caverns, passages, rooms, and chambers under the Connecticut hill trembled for more than an hour. Seismographs showed incredible explosions at nine different sites in the U.S.S.R., and many beyond it.
No one knew what to make of it.
The Russian-studying would-be code-breakers had not managed to interpret the few, faint messages received from the devastated areas where, apparently, some Soviet survivors had now either been blown to atoms or exhausted their resources for survival and so destroyed themselves.
During the days after those remote but repeated earthquakes the living world flickered with radioed questions: what was it!--where?--who did it?--why?
Answers did not come quickly.
In subsequent weeks, as the world's weather brought the atmospheric debris from the U.S.S.R. across the Pacific and also across an almost lifeless continent in the middle of which stretched what had been the United States, Ben and his two assistants shut down, for a period, even the air intake that had supplied the diesels. They switched over to filtered air, highly compressed, stored lately in the emptied oxygen tanks.
It was lucky they'd had the foresight--or that Ben had--to refill those "tanks" to capacity, against any subsequent radiation rise, however unexpected. On account of that foresight the fourteen people went on living comfortably while very radioactive air swept over them, left its fallout, rounded the northern hemisphere, repeated the dosage at a lowered level, and moved on around the earth again. Without the refilled air tanks, relying only on the remaining oxygen together with the original recirculation air-cleaning-and-conditioning system, they would have been forced to reduce their activities, as well as to contaminate their filtration plant to a hazardous degree, thus shortening their expectable time of staying alive.
Faith kissed Ben for the act, when all were told of the new cloud of hot isotopes above.
And she went on studying.
Ben set himself to ascertain, from the circling clouds, what had happened in and around faraway Russia. His ultimate determination left him perplexed. The cloud had contained, for one thing, an almost fantastic amount of unfissioned plutonium, considering the blast forces. The surviving Russians, he decided tentatively, must have blown up all the fissile stuff they had, with most
of it not fissioning. Inefficient, but who would care about that, he reasoned.
Who, in destroying himself because living had become impossible, could care?
And would not a self-exterminating people also, in a sort of general effort to shrive their measureless guilt, make sure that every ton of residual atomic explosive remaining was blown to atoms, with their deaths, in widely separated fireballs? And would not such deliberate holocaust include the random flight and burst of many still-operable missiles?
It seemed understandable--even, likely.
It was not the fact.
In the timeless dark of Arctic night, as the November fringe of pack ice crept steadily southward sending ahead thin-formed, transparent ice windowpanes wherever the sea was calm, a new event had occurred. Where snow-deep floes were hilled up by the hulks of growlers and sometimes split on ink-dark waterways created with a roaring, continuous crash, the again-white mast of the Tiger Shark heaved, cold and dripping, into an open place. As thick-clad men rushed onto the decks, stars shone above, steady, brilliant, and sharp. Among them, vague-tinted light played like waved gauze--the aurora borealis.
Looking at its curtains of faint red and green, Dingo wondered if the Northern Lights would bollix up Soviet radar or radio, or both. He hoped so. He knew they would have no effect on the guidance systems of the missiles he would, God willing, begin to launch at an exact instant chosen long before.
Already men on deck had begun to inspect the tubes which, opened mechanically, contained sixteen missiles, preset, their fuel systems triple-checked in the past twenty-four hours, their warheads ready--the monstrous products of special labor on the Conner.
Time dragged. Long-confined men paced outdoors in the icy air without their usual appreciation of release. It would be soon now, or never, and for them soon could not be soon enough.
During the next slow passing hours, infinitely precise checks were made of the location and drift of the boat. With the drift, small, exact, and constant alterations were made in the "brains" of the missiles. Half of the tubes, after inspection, were reclosed for diving. Half the missiles remained ready, their sinister noses aimed at the stars, their silhouettes vague, huge, portentous, in the tubes, star-lit, silent, but somehow seeming alive.
The time neared finally and men took stations. Last checks were made. The last stage of countdown began. Dingo spoke, precisely and with no emotion, the words these men had lived so long, under such appalling conditions, to hear:
". . . Four, three, two, one, fire!"
From the Tiger Shark four mighty rockets lifted, burying hull, open water, and the floes around in golden fire. They came out of their cylinders slowly, slowly heaved higher, gathered a little speed, pulled their thundering fire-tails clear of the red-hot decks, accelerated triflingly, and at length rushed with violence into the black, star-pricked sky.
Thirty seconds passed. Then, four more rockets, pre-aimed and meticulously guided in flight, went the same way, toward the identical four targets: three east of the Urals, and one nearer by, in part under a freezing sea and in part on the land around that water.
After the second launch the Tiger Shark submerged, cruised fifty miles on a prearranged course, surfaced, and prepared to launch another four rockets, then four more.
The first four found their targets, or a point near enough so it did not matter. The mouths of three vast warrens east of the Urals were invaded by sections of the gigantic fireballs of twenty-megaton H-bombs. Within those labyrinthian workshops, storage places, and habitation areas, all that was alive died, and all that was fusable melted, including metal. Outside, on the extensive work areas, by then cleared of radio contamination and in multiple use by many people, the same fireball, its radiation and follow-up of blast, ended all life and shattered all equipment.
Retaliation rockets, zeroed in by radar warning and by computer calculation of the trajectory of the incoming missiles, had already lifted off, however. So, well before the H-blasts knocked the region to hot gas and flinders, they were beyond damage.
The second set of American missiles behaved, at detonation point, very differently. Their fireballs were comparatively less brilliant and certainly longer-lasting.
Each created a shallower crater than those in the first salvo and from each there fell to earth a seething eruptive ball of light, too brilliant for any near eyes, had there been any.
This nuclear fire, spreading, lake-like, boiling and erupting, threw out for a distance of many miles both superhot liquid and gases, overwhelming the region. The molten glare faded out; and yet, lying there, it emitted such an intensity of radiation that, for a century, were a man to approach the area, he would die.
The same fate overtook the undersea city and the port structures rising around its shore. A first missile burst underwater, imploded the ceilings of thousands of caissons on the people and things inside, let in the frigid sea, and also swept the near land bare of life and all objects, with blast and a following tidal wave. Thirty seconds later this region too was lighted by the sullen, slow-cooling nuclear reactions that would deny it, for a hundred years, to living beings. But additional retaliatory rockets had risen in revenge.
The Tiger Shark's second, double salvo was unnecessary, but had been ordered.
As she re-emerged, officers and men could plainly see, fifty miles away, the glowing sky-fudge of the first enemy reply. Grimly, perhaps daunted, but no less determined than before, they later discharged their second salvo, in the same timing and numbers. This but smeared and spread wider the awesome havoc at the target areas. Heat had jammed certain launch tubes and some minutes were required to close them.
The Tiger Shark then submerged a second time.
But her luck had run out.
From distant Soviet areas electronic instruments had tracked this new, second volley to its point of origin. So, as the Tiger Shark slid down beneath the ink-black Arctic, a great light burst above still-spreading ripples she had left, and a fist, with cosmic force, heated to many thousands of degrees, rammed into and through the water. The submarine, along with its officers, men, and their every trace, vanished, even before the mushroom carried their minute fragments skyward.
The White Shark met the identical fate, in the Gulf of Alaska, after she had erased the colonies of Red people and their machines the same way: both those in the Sea of Okhotsk and those near Lake Baikal. The Leopard Shark, in au effort to run the Bosporus, submerged, struck a Soviet nuclear mine long in place, and so, vanished, failing to fire at all. Her sister ship, the Whale Shark, on duty as stand-by in the Persian Gulf, swiftly detected the evidence of that disaster. The Whale then launched her double series and destroyed the unhit targets, the last vestige of the enemy and their possessions, before that submarine, too, died in a fireball.
Shortly afterward, planes that had long since left the Conner's decks appeared in those areas of recent enemy activity nearest the Mediterranean. There the carrier lay, after a bold decision to race past Gibraltar. The pilots of some of those high-altitude, heavily-armed bombers saw the Leopard Shark die. No pilot saw the mother ship as she launched swarms of missiles, directed at all targets. Then the carrier also disappeared, in a nuclear fireball five times her length.
The planes flew on to assigned destinations without interference, as had been expected. Upon the red-hot, smoking, dust-occluded, cratered hells their Navy comrades had already made, some dropped added loads of blast and of wide-spreading, enduring, radioactivity. Others annihilated the deep pits from which the defense rockets had soared.
The store of these was exhausted but the bomber commanders did not know that.
Some planes then turned about and started, hopefully, for the Mediterranean and, with luck, a safe landing on the Conner.
Of them, most found the place where their carrier had been. And knew she was no more. They turned inland and, in certain instances, found fields where they landed safely-
-fields near which they soon died of the lingering radioa
ctivity that covered France and Italy and Spain.
Other planes, after redemolishing and repoisoning the distant enemy bases in Siberia, tried neither to return (they lacked the fuel) nor to go on, there being no place to go. They solemnly shook hands and dove their planes the long way to earth. It was a quicker end than any other. And jubilant. For these Americans alone knew the mission had been accomplished. Operation "Last Ditch" was a triumph.
So, within hours, the last effective adherent of communism and its last effective instrument of force vanished.
The doctrines of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Merov, and Grovsky were finally undone . . . at the cost of half a world and of the vast majority of people who once called themselves free and civilized.
CHAPTER 15
Under a notation of the year, day, and date Lotus Li wrote in her journal:
"April, already! Or should I say 'at last!' Another April! Twenty-one months underground without a glimpse of sky (except by our color TV) and not one breath of true, fresh air, for me!
"And not--the fact brings tears-- any answer to our endlessly repeated requests for help!
"Some of the men, dressed in weird-looking suits that cover them completely (and weigh, they say, a hundred and ten pounds), have been outside, though. For more than a month they slaved to get the machinery working in the middle and top 'doors'--great, double-jawed steel things a yard thick. The lowest 'psi door' (antiblast portals) always did work. They got the middle pair to open, fairly easily. (These are in the very big shaft where we came down, on a huge, flat elevator that had already brought down everything which has made our survival possible.) Finally, they decided the top pair of doors would never be operable, so they carefully blasted the rock away all around them, and then, in their radiation-shielding suits, rigged up winches and a derrick that removed the beat-up, fused mess of those enormous, outermost barriers. Afterward, they shoved them aside on the now-naked rock dome of Sachem's Watch.
"Then, they fixed the elevator so it would reach the surface again. After that, using the psi doors as radiation baffles, and with a lot of careful washing and decontamination of themselves in special shower chambers up the shaft, they finally built a steel-pipe stand on the elevator, with a platform raised fifty feet above its floor. On that perch, later moved to one side of the shaft, Ben and Vance, in fresh suits, were first to ride up and out.