The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  I do not say that there are hydrogen bombs on the floors of the harbors of our cities. I merely say that none of these things is impossible, theoretically.”

  “Do you propose, then,” the industrialist asked, “to allow the Red armies to proceed without intervention?”

  “No. I don’t. I have made no proposals. I am waiting to hear what you gentlemen suggest.”

  Ames rose. He said nothing further. Locking his hands behind his back, he walked to the windows and joined the scientist who had shuddered.

  “One thing.”

  Everybody looked at Gaunt. A smile showed on his elongated face and it was of a sort that made the appalled men feel there might be resources and hopes of which they were unaware.

  “Obviously,” Gaunt began, “this dilemma cuts two ways. Knowing my own country and my countrymen, I’m quite sure that the United States has not taken the step of mining any Soviet harbors.” He glanced inquisitively at Blake, who smiled back faintly and shook his head. “But there seems to be no reason for admitting the oversight.”

  “Sly!” said one of the listeners.

  “We should,” Gaunt continued, “inform the Soviet immediately that we have similarly prepared certain of their harbors. Their neurotic suspicions of the democracies will tend to make them believe it and they will find themselves in an uneasy predicament, like our own.”

  “Uneasy!” someone murmured sarcastically.

  “Next,” Gaunt said, “in my opinion, we should endeavor, by submarine, or plane, to carry out precisely such mining. It would probably take time—”

  “It would,” Blake agreed grimly. “None of our atomic weapons has been prepared for use as a radio-detonated mine.”

  “Then we should prepare some,” the philosopher said. “A rather elementary step that should have been tended to, long since.”

  Blake flushed.

  “Beyond that,” Gaunt finished, “my own inclination is—let us tell them to detonate their mines and be damned!”

  A rumble came from the great, shaggy figure of Steadman, the geneticist. “Lord, man, do you know what you’re saying?”

  “I know.”

  Steadman got ponderously to his feet. “You’re saying—go ahead! Wipe out millions of us, if you’re not bluffing! Destroy our cities! Wreck our industries! Sicken and maim and injure and drive mad—sterilize and make cancerous millions more of us!

  Saying that, Bill—for the sake of a gesture!”

  “A gesture?”

  “What else is it?”

  Gaunt sighed. He walked to a position more nearly in the center of the congregation of men. “What’s the alternative? Europe overrun. England—probably hors de combat in a brief atomic blitz. It’s such a little target, as weapons go nowadays. Then there will be our one nation, alone, facing a Soviet-dominated planet, with the mines still undetonated, the danger still as real as whatever its degree is now. We had our chance; we ignored it.”

  Blake was looking at the thick, worn, Oriental rug. He did not raise his eyes.

  “What chance, Bill?” he asked quietly.

  Gaunt sighed once more. “I’ve talked about it, written about it, advocated it—for five long years. It’s simple. Too simple for men with modern, complex minds to see, I guess, Gentlemen, most of you are scientists. What you and your fellow scientists have achieved has been accomplished through freedom and because all knowledge was made accessible to all men. Nucleonics, atomic energy, is only one special branch of human inquiry into the facts of nature. To allow it to be made ‘secret’ simply because it produced fabulous weapons was the greatest blunder in American history. We offered it to the world. Russia rejected our terms of freedom and openness. At that time, we in our own turn should have refused flatly to let Russia—or any nation—so act that we were obliged to restrict American freedom of knowledge. Instead, we accepted abrogation—

  like weaklings, like beggars! Like men who had forgotten that all we stand for is freedom, that freedom alone sustains us, we assented to a Soviet world policy which obliged us to abandon at its heart the very concept of freedom.”

  Someone said, “Fiddlesticks.”

  Gaunt peered in the direction of the voice. “Fiddlesticks? If we had seen that our own liberty had suddenly, through no fault of ourselves, become one with world freedom—if we had stood fast for it—had the power to sustain our ideal without striking a blow. It was 1946. Russia had no bomb. Crushed, impoverished, starving, in chaos—

  Russia would have had to yield to the United States, the earth’s most powerful nation.

  Instead, we closed the hatch on freedom and crash-dived into a sea of secrecy where our secrets were re-discovered—as was evident they could be—or leaked out—as some did—or were stolen. For five wretched years we blundered in the dark. Now, as we emerge, we find the picture changed and our strength matched by enemy strength which is more ominous to us than we are to them, simply because we are more vulnerable!”

  Gaunt paused to light a cigarette. “America stupidly turned its back on freedom and this is the cost. So—if they mean to have war—I say, let us at least fight it in liberty’s name—bravely and openly—and give up trying to compromise, to stall, to outwit.”

  “I protest!” Wendley, with the white goatee and half-moon spectacles, was on his feet. “We need Christian leadership here—!”

  ‘We’ve been led,” Gaunt said coldly, “without the knowledge or consent of the people, for five years, by a handful of politicians and physicists. Led to this humiliating condition. Led as an unfree people—a people who decided not to know. Blake, and some of you others, have indicated feelings of guilt. Of ‘sin.’ Well—the sin was to abandon freedom. Failing to create a free world, our men of science, by refusing to act in a secret world, could have forced the issue single-handed. But they are, alas, only men. They had—it proved—no more insight or morality, no greater loyalty to liberty or larger idealism, and no more readiness for sacrifice, than the commonest ditchdigger. They are not to blame for not being superior. But they can never think of scientists, from now on, as other than, or different from, or superior to, the blindest amongst us. I have said it all over and over. If, now, when war is almost academic, when death to masses is almost a joke, you still will not rally for freedom, then, I think, the species deserves its fate!”

  Tolliver, the psychiatrist, said stammeringly, “C-c-c-c-he’s right!”

  The white-haired astronomer, Tateley, called, “I agree!”

  “Surely,” said Ames, the magnate, “there is another route—?”

  “Prayer!” Wendley half shouted. “Let us disband these conferences! Let us say to the Soviet that we surrender—rather than that we shall be the authors of our own effacement! Then—let us put our case before God Almighty!”

  “God Almighty,” said Blake, swinging his foot a little, “seems to have judged our case already—and unfavorably. Bill Gaunt has hinted at one factor which we’ve overlooked in the immediate fear of hydrogen bombs. We met here this morning to consider a problem far more crucial and disastrous than which nation may win any war.”

  “I disagree!” Dr. Averyson, the Princeton economist, still carried his pencils and wore his green corduroy waistcoat. “I feel, and I move, that we regard the Russian threat as paramount. For several reasons. First, we seem unable to do anything relevant or cogent about the disappearance of the women. Second, since they vanished by means beyond our control, we may logically assume they can and will be restored by the same means. Third, there may be no future for us under Soviet domination! Fourth—”

  “False logic,” Tateley said sharply. “A war—a victory—is nothing compared with the catastrophe that has already overwhelmed us.”

  “There’s this,” Gaunt put in, “and we ought to consider it, we keep looking at everything from the viewpoint that the Soviet is powerful and we are vulnerable. Let us turn that about. Let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that the citizens of Russia, being even more primitive than our o
wn, were even more disturbed by yesterday’s cataclysm. What would their government do in that event? With insurrection threatening in a population of frantic males? It would make some fresh, unprecedented challenge to divert the public mind—to keep the machinery of military control in motion—to replace helpless bewilderment with disciplined, comprehensible action. We may be facing, not a recklessly opportunistic government, but one that has taken new steps owing to internal disintegration.”

  There was silence for a moment while that thought was turned over.

  “V-v-very astute,” Tolliver presently stammered. “Very! And in that case, our rejoinder should be—not words—but deeds. All-out atomic attack. An effort to abet Soviet chaos before increased discipline firms up their public attitude!”

  “—which,” Averyson said in a sickly whine, “would probably bring down total ruin, instantly, upon ourselves. This very city. Even this room!”

  Mindebein, an anthropologist, who had not spoken until that moment, said, “God, how detestable a coward is!”

  The economist whirled. “I resent that, sir!”

  The thin little man came to his feet—for Mindebein weighed less than a hundred pounds. His large brown eyes were steady, “I believe,” he said, raising his face to the economist’s, “it is customary to ask if you would like to make anything of it. Would you, doctor?”

  Averyson was furious enough to lunge. Men stopped him. He sat down. Blake, who had leaped forward with amazing speed, now dropped back in his chair and threw a leg over its arm. “I don’t want anything said here taken personally or personally directed.

  Presumably, we are soon to give the President the benefit of our collective advice. Some points have been made. Are there others?”

  The talk went on.

  And talk, Gaunt found himself thinking, was all it would prove to be. It was the trouble with these men, this century. Given time, months or years, and they would have come up with several brilliant, if theoretical solutions of the present problems. Faced with them in a single hour, asked for decisions intended to regulate action, they could only argue.

  As the talk continued, food was served. The men ate, some even with relish. They mulled the ideas already presented and offered new ones. They theorized and they reminisced. They drew analogies and cited historical parallels. They described brilliantly to each other various processes—physicists making atomic energy understandable to economists—biologists making the mathematicians see what radioactivity did to human tissue—industrialists explaining the ingenuity and courage with which various great steps of warmaking had been financed and carried out in the past.

  But when, toward nine o’clock, the President asked for a verbal report from Blake, he left the chamber wearing an expression of embarrassment which revealed to everyone what Gaunt had observed: how ineffectual they were.

  He was gone for less than half an hour. When he returned, he was gray-faced. He sagged as he walked forward. The babble stilled. He looked from man to man, one by one, around the chamber.

  “Gentlemen.” he said, “any advice we might have had to offer would have been superfluous. At about four o’clock this afternoon, in a barn about half a mile from the center of Pittsburgh, a large moving van was discovered by some boys. They broke into the van. It contained what they described to the police as a boiler and a television aerial.

  The police investigated and summoned members of the university faculty. The ‘boiler and aerial’ have been examined and partially dismantled, at what personal risk to the professors you will appreciate when I say that it proved to be a very large uranium-lithium-tritium bomb, set to be detonated by radio signals. The Soviet statement that our cities have been mined is therefore not bluff. It is fact. The mine, in this case, was merely not in a harbor, as the declaration claimed. Its detonation would unquestionably have destroyed the Pittsburgh area.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Blake went on: “This circumstance was followed by another. An apparently similar bomb was detonated, at seven forty-two this evening, our time, apparently in the Bay, at San Francisco.” The young physicist shut his eyes and passed a hand over his forehead. “A few—disconnected—details—are coming in. Apparently all persons, buildings, and even the hills within some eight or ten miles of the San Francisco end of Golden Gate Bridge have been annihilated—vaporized—melted down. For another ten-mile radius not much life has been observed by planes cruising the area at suicidally low levels. Reconnaissance is continuing in planes carrying searchlights. Suburban areas not shielded by mountains, as far as thirty miles from the center, have been flattened and are on fire. A tidal wave inundated the towns above and below the bay—and, of course, across the bay. A cloud of radioactive steam, sea water, and mixed materials is blowing inland on a steady west wind and dispersing along the slopes of the Sierras. Its course and dispersal are being checked from the air by technicians and pilots who, obviously, will pay with their lives for their exposure to the radiation in the cloud.”

  Several men tried then to say something. Blake waved at them. “I have not quite finished. In view of these facts, and in view of extraordinary powers voted to the President by Congress in a closed session this evening, our bombers are taking off from bases outside this country, close to target areas, with nuclear bombs in their bays. We do not know how many will get through the radar, anti-aircraft and fighter screens protecting the Soviet Union. I think, however, you are entitled to be told that if even ten per cent of our planes reach their targets, it may be said with conviction that, before morning, Russia probably will be without a single, intact major city.”

  Toward morning, Gaunt found himself at the entrance of his hotel. . . .

  By that time he knew that many of the American aircraft had not only delivered their bombs but returned to their bases. He also knew that no further explosions had occurred in the United States. He had sat talking, with the others and with various officials of the government, through most of the night-expecting, like the rest, to glimpse a flash of light before Washington and its broad environs vanished from the earth.

  In the cold and the dark, he stepped from a limousine. But, instead of entering the dimmed-out lobby, he walked down the street a ways, pulling up the collar of his overcoat and stuffing his hands in its pockets. Few people could be seen. An occasional policeman or soldier. A rare jeep or military car. Once, a thundering procession of motorized antiaircraft guns came out of the night, shook the earth in passing, and roared on into the black city. Gaunt presently reached a small park and stood at a corner of it, looking at the sky where, now, the stars glittered.

  His eyes moved to the Great Dipper and Polaris. While they were thus fixed he saw—suddenly and only for an instant, to the left of the North Star—a flame-colored light. It was as if some cosmic hand had switched on and off the Aurora Borealis. He went back to his hotel knowing that a city in the direction of Chicago or Detroit—with all its inhabitants and their works—had been destroyed by a tumultuous flare of atomic energy which had towered so high in the stratosphere as to be visible around the earth’s curve, hundreds of miles away, where he stood.

  7

  IN WHICH CERTAIN LADIES TAKE LIBERTIES WITH THE LAW.

  That morning, after the night of wreck and fire and God-sent deluge, Paula was tired, yet not so tired as Edwinna. She sat awhile, admiring the annuals which grew in the bed bordering the porch. She watched, as Bill had, the defense of the bath and the feeding station by the mockingbird that held it against jays, ground doves, and all comers in the warbler family. When Hester brought a bacon and egg sandwich and coffee, she ate slowly and drank peacefully, her attention on the bright burgeon of the planet’s first morning without human males.

  It was impossible to conceive of. If Bill had died suddenly, she thought, it would have been utterly different even in respect to Bill. The shock would have been intense, the initial woe and mourning hardly more than a style of reflex, and true grief would have followed, bit by bit, in all the remaini
ng afterward. There was shock now, far more shock, in a sense, than even the death of her husband would have occasioned. No doubt grief would rise in her like a tide, each wavelet higher than the one before, in the uncertain future. Still—the mordant panoply, the tuberose smell of private death were absent here in spite of the ubiquity of death itself. That made a difference.

  You cannot say he is dead, or they are dead, she told herself; you cannot say Edwin’s gone, either, as he would have been gone if his plane had been shot apart in combat. It is so much not-death I can hardly feel that even the really dead women have really died. Their death seems more like another manifestation of what happened, a secondary effect; and that isn’t reasonable at all since they were burned, crushed, and torn to bits. But what is reasonable now?

  I will be, she thought.

  Then for a moment it was as if she could hear Bill dissertate: “My dear, I don’t know whether it’s environmental or sex-linked, but the constant, observable unwillingness of women to reason, when they are faced by a problem that will yield to logic but not to emotion, has given the ladies their ageless reputation for intellectual frivolity.”

  Paula wondered if men were really better reasoners. In local, immediate matters they might be more likely to reason. But the net result of their collective attempts to be logical was a preposterous society, a pervading sense of embarrassment, a lost feeling amongst women (that they knew about) and amongst men (that they seemed unaware of), along with what they called a “civilization” which, in the near-fifty years of Paula’s experience, had seemed not only heathen and barbaric, but blind to the fact, and getting worse every year. If that was the result of reason, she wanted something more than reason. And here, she thought, was an idea she might have used in rebuttal to Bill—and one Bill would heartily have denied. He would have said her list of particulars showed not where reason failed, but merely how little it was employed by women or men.