by Philip Wylie
She looked out the kitchen window. A great smoke towered over the north view, but there was no visible fire. The kitchen was a shambles, but she had expected that. Women coming and going from the vast hospital area at Crystal Lake had described just such messes already.
She tried the gas stove; it didn’t work. She went back to the hall and opened the suitcase. There was a Sterno stove in it, six cans of pink fuel, powdered coffee, sugar, tinned milk—amongst many other items. She took the things for coffee, and a flashlight, and went back to the kitchen and tried the water but that didn’t run either.
Downstairs, in the air-raid shelter Henry had fixed up years before, were the five-gallon bottles of distilled water he made her change every six months. She was too exhausted to lug one up but she found a pan on the floor—silently thanking Lenore, because she otherwise would not have used any metal objects. She went down in the cellar. Light penetrated it from numerous places; she could see how the house had moved on its foundations. She poured water and went into the jelly closet, discovering that most of the canned things were still on the shelves where she’d placed them, labeled and tidy, all summer long and all during the fruit season in the fall.
They could eat, then, without drawing from the Green Prairie food stocks.
She went up with the water, unfolded the little stove, lit the solidified alcohol and put on the water. Someone knocked at the front door, frightening her. She ran to it.
“Hi, Mrs. Conner! Henry home yet?” It was Jed Emmings, from Spruce Street.
“Not yet”
“You all right?”
“Yes, thanks. Are you?”
“You bet—and thank God. So are my folks. I just came by, to let you know your Ted’s okay, too.”
“Ted?” She stared at him perplexedly. He was filthy dirty, like almost everybody. “I didn’t know,” she said finally, “Ted was hurt.”
“Hurt bad, Mrs. Conner. But he’s over in the Green Prairie Country Club, getting real good care. I was on duty there. I talked to him.”
“What happened?”
“Got buried in a brick slide. Broke both legs.”
“But. . . ?”
Jed Emmings smiled because he understood. “Absolutely okay, Mrs. Conner—or I’d have said so. No head injuries worth worrying about and nothing internal. Chipper and full of beans already. In traction, of course.”
She said, “Thank you, Jed.”
He nodded. “Glad to tell you. Glad to bring some good news to one door, anyhow!”
He went down the walk.
She noticed that the sun was shining. She hadn’t really noticed that before. She felt almost surprised that the sun was still there in the sky in its place.
When she went back to the kitchen, the water was close to a boil. She found an unbroken cup, rinsed it, put in some hot water and a spoonful of powdered coffee, started to take sugar and refrained, sat down on the seat of an armless chair to sip the hot fluid.
A little later, she heard car brakes.
I got home just in time, she thought. More visitors.
The car went on before she reached the hall and what she heard, she did not believe. It was Nora’s voice calling. “Mummie! Mummie! Aren’t you home?”
There she was, running up the walk, the way she always did, and Mrs. Conner felt things start to go black because she did not, could not believe. But there was a car, going away, a colored girl at the wheel, and it wasn’t quite the same Nora, coming up the steps on her spidery legs. She wore a different coat, too small for her, and a dress Beth didn’t recognize. Her hat was missing and one side of her long bob had been chopped off short. There was a big pad of bandage on her right cheek. Mrs. Conner still wasn’t absolutely sure, until she felt Nora in her arms.
“We thought—” she started to say.
Nora leaned back and looked up. “I had one hell of a time, I really did!” Nora said.
Henry didn’t get home till evening.
15
Outside of the place where Washington had been—far outside—in a big house that had belonged to a famous eighteenth-Century American, some fifty men held a meeting in the lamp-lit drawing room. The men came there by automobile, mostly; but three or four walked, and one arrived as the original householder often had, riding on a horse. Some of the men wore bandages, two were brought on stretchers, and all of them had to go through a considerable process of identification at check points around the estate. Bayoneted rifles and even cannon bristled on every hand.
When they had assembled, when they had waited for an hour beyond the agreed time—
and greeted a few additional arrivals with quiet joy—a man who wore the white garments of a doctor, and around whose neck a stethoscope hung, said to a man in slacks and a tweed jacket,
“Mr. President. . . .” The man shook his head. “I haven’t taken the oath yet.”
The doctor shrugged. “Mr. Gates, then. I think you ought to have the meeting soon, if possible. The Secretary of State is slipping fast.”
The man in tweeds, in slacks—“Mr. Gates”—walked to the middle of the handsome drawing room and stood at the head of a carved mahogany table. A young man handed him a gavel and he rapped. Talk stopped. Every person present turned toward Mr. Gates.
“The meeting,” he said, “will come to order.”
Chairs moved. Attendants brought stretchers close.
Harry Jackson Gates was sworn in as President of the United States. It was done quickly, in low tones. The only Justice they could find gravely administered the oath. When it was over, all but the new President sat down. He returned to the head of the long, gleaming table. On it, there was only the gavel and a Bible.
“Our group,” he began, in a somber voice, “constitutes, as you all know, all the high-echelon members of the Government who could be assembled, this frightful Christmas Day.” He looked at a notebook which he took from a jacket pocket. “Three members of the late President’s Cabinet are here.” He named them. “Supreme Court Justice Willard. Seventeen members of the United States Senate. Thirty-eight members of the House of Representatives. In an adjacent room, General Faversham and some other high military officers are waiting and I shall ask them in—with your consent. All in favor?”
There were grave “Ayes.”
“Opposed?”
Silence.
The new President nodded to the guards at a far door and it swung back. The military men carne in quietly, took chairs. The President spoke their names, gave their rank, and continued:
“I shall be brief. As you know, panic reigns from coast to coast. Four great cities were totally obliterated by hydrogen bombs in the afternoon and early evening of the twenty-third.
Washington met the same fate later. Twenty-five cities have been struck by plutonium bombs of exceptionally high power. Some twenty millions of us were killed or injured in the attack. Untold numbers, hundreds of thousands, are dying in the progressively worsening riots. It is the judgment of the military”—he paused, looked at the officers—“that weeks, if not months, will be required to restore order, and an indeterminate interval, many more months, to bring the nation back to a state of production and communication which will support the survivors at a survival level. I am sure you are, in general, familiar with those ghastly facts.”
There were murmurs of assent.
“Three possibilities face the United States of America. The first is—surrender.”
A heart-rending “No!” was wreathed in low-toned murmurs of rejection.
“The enemy,” the President went on grimly, “has offered terms.”
That, too, stirred the audience.
“We have learned the terms by radio, through neutrals. They are quite simple. We are to surrender all atomic weapons, to dismantle all atomic plants and works, to allow enough of the enemy free access within this nation to ensure that the status is permanent. There will be no occupation, no tribute.”
His eyes went over the room. Some of the haggard face
s were stony. But some glowed with hope.
“A great predecessor of mine, in an hour of trial, once called an example of wanton assault ‘a day that will live in infamy.’ No phrase, in any language, can be made to speak the evil now done to this nation. I shall not try to give you any condemnatory words. But, let me point out, the offered terms seem reasonable. It is only a seeming. If we grant those terms, nothing—
ever afterward—can prevent the enemy from working upon us whatever his further will may be.
We know his philosophy. We bleed now under his treachery. Disarmed, we shall surely soon be enslaved. But surrender is one possibility.
“Another—is to continue the assault we are making. I assure you, the foe is suffering grievously. But his cities are so few, his dispersion of populace is so great, that our gallant Air Force cannot readily drive his people into the general panic that has uprooted this nation and destroyed its social organization. In time our effort might be equally effective. We must inquire if we have the time. The bombs, the planes, the determined men to fly them, we do have. But let us suppose the effort took thirty days. Meanwhile, other assaults would probably be launched against us. Our citizens would continue to battle one another, freeze, soon die of hunger, go mad.
In the end, there might remain in both nations that utter wreckage of civilization which the few predicted for so long, and the many refused to believe. But that is a second possibility.”
“The third?” a woman’s voice called. “What’s the third?”
For a moment, the new President reverted to his old habit as Speaker of the House. “The lady from Massachusetts asks the third. I’ll explain as best I am able. I am not a scientist. The military will amplify.”
He frowned, cleared his throat. “First, I must state that my late, great predecessor, though he worked hopefully for peace, somewhat feared a situation like this. He feared, as did his Chiefs of Staff, the very danger we have encountered. He, with them, prepared a threat of their own—of our own—a dreadful threat, intended only for use as a menace. You are familiar with the Nautilus. . . .”
The silence in the old room was absolute.
“. . . the first of the atomic-powered submarines. As the ‘peace’ negotiations reached a high degree of intensity, it was felt in the—the”—he stumbled—“White House that the enemy was probably sincere. But the possibility remained that such negotiations might be the immediate precursor to the disaster that now is fact. Or to the threat of it. Consequently the Nautilus was drydocked and secretly reconverted. She is still a ship, still a submarine, still atomically driven, but she is also a bomb. She contains, now, the largest hydrogen bomb ever assembled, and around it and in her sides, replacing armor, and in her keel, for ballast, is the element cobalt with other readily radioactivated elements. She stands, this day, in the North Sea, awaiting orders. She could be sent swiftly into the Baltic. She could approach the ways to the enemy, dive to bottom, and explode herself.”
“The crew. . . ?” someone interrupted.
Gates said nothing. His long, thin face turned toward the questioner and his hazel eyes burned into the man. Then, at last, he spoke again.
“This is one of the greater-than-super weapons mentioned at least as far back as the Truman Administration. Its exact effect is not known and cannot be calculated. A few scientists fear its detonation at sea bottom might actually set up the planetary chain reaction. Most say not.
I believe the latter. It would, however, unquestionably devastate the enemy’s nation, obliterate perhaps two-thirds of his people and leave hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of square miles of enemy land radioactive, deadly even to vegetation. It might, according to the uncertain vicissitudes of weather, of high-altitude winds, of the so-called jet of air which waveringly girdles our planet, transport a large amount of this lethal material across the Pacific and conceivably leave here a lesser but real train of death and sickness, sterility, misery and additional fear. That is an indeterminate risk involved in the weapon’s use. It is our third possibility—the only alternative I can offer to a surrender that would surely become unconditional with passing time, or to a continuation of the existing holocaust with present weapons. I shall have a few of the military men and scientists speak to you. . . .”
An hour and a quarter later, it was voted to order the Nautilus to proceed—and to demolish herself, and the foe.
16
They could have seen it from the planets.
On Mars, if there are naked eyes, they could have seen it without other aid.
On that Christmas night, the Baltic Sea erupted. There was no warning. The faint signals the Nautilus received were not intercepted by the beleaguered but seemingly victorious Reds.
She penetrated the Gulf of Finland, dove to bottom and her skipper, summoning the men, prayed, Bashed a last word, and touched a small button installed some hours before on the table directly below the periscope. The rays, the temperatures, vaporized Finland’s Gulf in a split part of an instant. The sea’s bottom was melted. The Light reached out into the Universe.
Finland was not. Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, they were not. Kronstadt melted, Leningrad.
The blast kicked up the ashes that once had been Moscow, collected the burning environs and pulverized them and hurled their dust at the Urals. In the ensuing dark, a Thing swelled above the western edge of Russia, alight, alive, of a size to bulge beyond the last particles of earth’s air.
On the wind currents it came forward, forward across the north-sloping plains, a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles, and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land that night, and the day after, and the next. It thinned, over Siberia, thinned and spread until it was no longer blinding, till men could no longer see it or smell it or taste it. But still, where it rolled, day or night, they died.
The farther it surged from the reshaped Finnish Gulf, where the sea had come sparkling back, the longer men took to perish. But they perished. The radiation-emitting particles filled their lungs, they contaminated their food, they polluted . their water and could not be filtered out.
Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened and perished in a day, a week, two weeks—men and women and children, all of them, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. Wherever they took refuge, men still perished. On the high Urals in the terrible cold. In the deepest mines, the steam-spitting darkness. There was no refuge from the death; it took them all, the birds of arctic winter, the persistent insects which had survived geological ages, the bacteria—all.
Surrender of those who survived, the southern dwellers of the nation, was delayed because they could not find who should make the offer; they did not care how abject the terms might be. But days passed. A week. Two weeks. And the message winged from Tiflis. It was over. The last war was finished.
The last great obstacle to freedom had been removed from the human path.
17
On a sunny afternoon, just before June became July, during a Midwestern heat wave, a young man pushed a hand mower back and forth over a Walnut Street lawn in the city of Green Prairie.
He looked to be twenty-two or -three years old though, actually, Ted Conner was not yet nineteen. He had grown big, like his Oakley grandsire, the blacksmith, bigger than his father, a good deal bigger than his older brother. In addition, there was something about his face (besides the scar on the forehead) which suggested more years than the teens. He limped, too. It was noticeable when he walked over to a shady spot behind the ferns and picked up a glass jug of water. His right leg was slightly shorter than his left.
He took a bandanna handkerchief from the belt that held up his shorts; he wiped his mouth, then his brow. After that he returned to work. But before he started the mower’s clattering monody he looked at the house for a moment.
Two and a half years had passed, since the Bomb.
But only the attic windows were boarded up. Glass was still rationed-along with a hundred other things—but hous
eholders had enough, now, to take care of two floors per family.
It was the necessary new construction, as much as replacement, which had caused the shortage to last so long.
The Conner house needed paint. Every house did, these days. But paint was short, also, though not rationed. They hadn’t bothered yet to try to get the house back exactly on its foundations. Men had come, that first winter, with powerful jacks and pushed the frame building as near to its proper position as they could. Joe Dennison had helped with his bulldozer. And Ed Pratt had followed with bricks and cement, bringing out “temporary” foundations to support overhanging sills and to close in the basement. A power pole, sawed on a diagonal at the top, leaned across the drive from a concrete base on the ground to the eaves, a brace against winter wind.
Have to paint that pole, Ted thought; wouldn’t want it to rot. He moved again, drowning out the cicadas in the trees with a not dissimilar sound.