The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  The instinct of self-preservation had yielded somewhat, however, to other urges and moods. Life in May was not so dangerous as it had been in February and early March. Organized bands of armed women less frequently assailed houses or communities better off than the average. Such bands, “raiding,” or driving out those in possession to seize their places, had been common in the first weeks. But by May the average woman and her daughters, whether they lived in the country, the gritty residue of a city, or some relatively untouched suburban area, were not in imminent peril of fire, blast, wreck, dis-possession or murder.

  Central government offered the one logical way of dealing with grotesquely unbalanced local circumstances. Several states had a measure of self-rule. In other areas women had organized for maintenance and defense without regard to state boundaries.

  Trade among such groups was difficult. Here, money was pegged; yonder, prices found their own level; elsewhere, the dollar was ignored and all business was conducted by barter. This region had beef; another, vegetables; between them, there might be no transport. In some sections, the rare trains ran intermittently and at times empty, or carrying nonessential goods.

  Thus, into Omaha, a freight with a proud blonde in the cab of its locomotive-the first train to reach that city from the outside world, brought three carloads of kapok, a car of upright pianos, two cars of circus animals (cats for the most part and hence inedible) a half-car of hat trimmings (the other half was empty), and eight carloads of baled wool.

  The press of hopeful, hungry women who greeted that train had become a furious mob; the cars were burned on the tracks. The blonde engineer luckily escaped that show of public wrath. She had simply brought, from a nearby town, such cars as happened to be coupled to an engine which she and two friends had contrived to fire, start, and run on a stretch of track that chanced to be clear.

  But the infinite multiplication of such witless episodes—added to the daily ordeals—set up a nation-wide cry for “order.”

  Its institution was first undertaken by an assembly of the wives of congressmen.

  This Congress of Wives (it was dubbed COWS within a day) met early in May.

  Unfortunately, the American people had usually selected their Congressional representatives with the view toward gaining local or even private advantage. A lawyer, a

  “neighborly” fellow, who promised that he would use his office to obtain every possible dollar and benefit not just for Oklahoma, but for certain Oklahoma counties, was the sort who won most of the seats in the House. Senate seats went as a rule to shrewder samples of the same species. Both frequently made promises to the people they had no intention of keeping and secret promises to the heads of various large industries, which were kept, to the public detriment.

  Hence America had long been represented by men who did not have the nation as a whole in mind when they considered legislation. Moreover, vast problems of agriculture, taxation, welfare and the like were beyond their average competence. Few had broad education. Foreign relations were foreign, indeed, to such: they were as ignorant of England or France as of ancient Chaldea. The history and traditions of their own nation were closed books to many. Others had no understanding of the philosophy of liberty, which was the core of their nation; they traded freedom for mortgages on the future and for every imbecilic kind of “military security.” Scientifically, of course, a full nine-tenths of them were ignoramuses—although nine-tenths of the problems and the laws with which they were supposed to concern themselves were rooted in matters of a scientific nature or matters upon which science had shed a great light they had never learned of.

  The cosmic ignorance of America’s representatives, though grossly and horribly displayed in every Congressional session held during the twentieth century, did not impress itself upon the American public because these men reflected and personified the stupidity, greed and ignorance of the electorate.

  As the will to defend liberty ebbed, and then as liberty itself diminished, the sick condition of the Republic remained invisible to all but a few individuals. Chicanery and bribery increased as they do when confusion is every day augmented. Cow hands, mill hands, farm hands and other oafs who had “made good” financially or politically or both (but learned nothing in the process) came to be “spokesmen”—in a world of intricate psychological conflict, or nucleonics, of complex biological discovery and every sort of applied technology. They understood none of it. The astonishing feature of the unsteady shambles democracy had unnecessarily made of itself was not that it came to be before the Disappearance, a society doomed either to change or to collapse, but that it lurched along with the outer semblance of sanity for so many years, under so many incompetents.

  Such men—there were, of course, exceptions—could not be expected to have chosen for wives women more knowledgeable than themselves. And since, in the pre-Disappearance era, women were regarded as inferior persons (and had so been regarded for thousands of years), the men could not have chosen superior wives even if they had wished to do so; there were too few. No desire was further from their minuscule personalities, in any case.

  Their wives had been selected, as a rule, for one of two reasons: youthful physical appeal or wealth, with the former predominating. The selection was made, customarily, during or soon after adolescence; but the congressmen were, on the average, middle-aged. Hence their wives—again, with some exceptions—comprised a miscellaneous and inept group who generally spent such time as they did not devote to their children in a passionate attempt to elevate themselves in the pecking orders of Washington society.

  These were the women summoned in May. Slightly fewer than three hundred could be found in Washington, or elsewhere. They convened in the hall of a club of which, as the wives of congressmen, they were automatically members. Thence, in buses, they moved to the Capitol with pomp and tittering. The most able among them had prepared agenda for the conference and, after its opening, tried to present their policies and aims. That soon proved impossible.

  A “president pro tem” was easily elected, a Mrs. De Wyss Altbee, the wife (or former wife) of Senator Altbee and, of course, a woman very high in social circles. Mrs.

  Altbee chose a cabinet—and the ensuing four days were spent in ratifying her selections.

  She was forced to change all but one to gain the ratification. On the fifth day the convention was thrown open to a general discussion from which, Mrs. Altbee stated, she expected “the main lines of immediate action to emerge.”

  Unfortunately, her secretary of state (whose husband once had held that office) made the first proposal. Her suggestion was that, in view of the general confusion, the need of leadership and the appalling shortages of everything, the initial step of the

  “congress” should be to design a suitable uniform for the members. Such a uniform, she said, ought to be chic, to keep up morale. But it ought to be practical, to provide a good example. And its adoption should be their first business so that, wherever they went, the ladies would be marked as persons of authority.

  The women of sense in the assembly tried to postpone consideration of that suggestion. They were overridden by a majority of four to one.

  The secretary of state, twice listed amongst America’s ten best-dressed women, had had the forethought to invite to the congress her world-famed couturier. That designer, Elsie Bazzmalk, had already “created” a number of sample uniforms. She dressed several Powers models in them. Scarcely a woman in the convention but had yearned to wear a Bazzmalk frock; as a result, the desperate business of the nation was set aside while the mannequins, flown from New York by a famed woman pilot, paraded incessantly.

  Some of the responsible members tried anew to quash the matter. But others argued that, since the ladies were so urgently concerned with it, the best thing to do would be to hurry the selection and get on to real problems.

  However, there was no hurrying the ladies’ choice. Almost every point of the sample uniforms became the subject of vehement disc
ussion. The width of revers, the most practical color or colors, the suitability of peaked caps as opposed to brimmed hats, the matter of skirt length, and a hundred other details carried the opening debate well past midnight and took up the whole of the following three days. On the fourth day a woman from Atlanta, who had staunchly held out for a less “mannish” and “dressier” costume than any offered, and who had gained considerable support, hit upon the notion of filibuster. An exhausted and enraged congress adjourned five days after that—without having accomplished anything save the selection of temporary officers.

  Later in the month the officers were forced to act. The circumstances surrounding that emergency were typical of the period.

  Certain radio stations and a few amateur radio operators had irregularly communicated with various European countries. Many sets in America were able to pick up the gradually increasing broadcasts from overseas. The women of America knew, in general, that their sisters everywhere had shared their fate. Western Europe was in no different condition from the United States. The women and girls of China and India were gripped by starvation and pestilence. The Soviet was silent.

  It was, therefore, a shock to Mrs. Altbee to learn by way of such broadcasts that the women of Russia were about to dispatch to the United States an “Armada of Liberation.”

  This armada, increasingly frequent broadcasts made plain, would be escorted by naval vessels bearing atomic weapons and well able to fend for itself. A hostile reception would be met by the vengeance of the “free, women Soviet workers.” A friendly reception was hoped for and expected, on the grounds of “our common destitution,” and the further grounds that “the Soviet women come in friendship and with love, bearing only liberation, peace and culture for the capitalist-enslaved masses of their American sisters.”

  Mrs. Altbee was frightened.

  She was even more frightened when a report reached her of the passage, through the English Channel, of an aircraft carrier, a heavy cruiser, three destroyers and two submarines, all Russian and all headed in the direction of the United States.

  She was not acquainted with the fact that, since the Revolution, Soviet women had participated in men’s affairs—attending engineering schools, fighting cheek by jowl with the army, serving in the merchant marine, running locomotives, superintending the erection of steel buildings, doing a fair share of laboratory experiment at all levels and holding executive posts. So, at first, she tried to allay her panic by the wild hope that some men must have survived in Russia.

  That was the idea she finally presented to her secretary of state, who scotched it instantly: “My husband and I spent three dreadful weeks in the Soviet, dear! Those women are capable of anything! They pave the streets. They repair airplane engines. I’ve seen them! They run factories!”

  The cabinet was therefore duly summoned to Mrs. Altbee’s country home, “Oak Manor,” situated in the center of some two hundred undamaged acres near Kensington, Maryland. The ladies who arrived were aware that they had been virtually commanded to attend, but they thought the principal purpose of the convocation was social—tea and bridge. Mrs. Altbee had used the stratagem to prevent, as long as possible, news of the actual sailing from spreading through the land.

  In a plum-colored tailored suit which, as several ladies agreed, “did things” for her iron-gray hair—in a wide-brimmed hat of matching hue, with a dark fitch stole thrown over one shoulder—Mrs. Altbee informed the assembled ladies of the situation.

  Their shock was of such proportions that initial reactions were not of a very useful sort.

  “Our Navy,” said Mrs. Weller, the secretary of the interior, “will have to steam out immediately and destroy them!”

  “Who’ll steam it?” asked Mrs. Dwight, the secretary of agriculture.

  There was, at that time, no secretary of defense to reply. An appointment for that office had not been deemed necessary.

  “We have plenty of women fliers,” Mrs. Leete, the secretary of the treasury, said heatedly. “Let them carry atom bombs to sea!”

  “Do we know where the atom bombs are?” Mrs. Guegresson, secretary of commerce, asked.

  “They’re at that place—that Lost Almost, I call it,” said Mrs. Weller.

  “And do we have anybody,” Mrs. Altbee put in, “who understands just how to use atomic bombs? I mean to say, I feel they have to be fiddled with, to shoot them off.

  They’re terribly on the gadgety side.”

  “Some of the girls must have worked on the project,” said Mrs. Clatley, of labor.

  “I don’t believe,” Mrs. Dwight responded, “that women got very high up in that secrecy business. I mean to say, the men were horribly careful about it all. You know how they feel about women’s wagging tongues. I very much doubt if many women were given information classified as top secret. Perhaps a few. Secretaries and such. But I doubt if any of them would violate security—with the men away. They’d be loyal types, I’m sure.”

  “Idiots!” snapped Mrs. Guegresson.

  “Poor, poor dears,” Mrs. Weller murmured, taking out her handkerchief and dabbing her eyes.

  Mrs. Dwight stuck to her position. “Of course, it turned out the men blabbed all over the place—and I, for one, don’t blame them! How would you like to be a nuclear physicist—and refused permission to talk by a lot of brass that hadn’t the faintest conception of what you wanted to talk about? They should have known they could never keep their little secrets! After all, the Russians are clever; and the secrets really weren’t anything but plain facts our men had found out. Besides, when hundreds of people know anything, everybody knows it. When even a dozen do, everybody does, more or less.

  That’s rudimentary!”

  “Maybe,” said Mrs. Leete cheerfully, “there’ll be a storm, or something, and the Russian ships will sink. After all, remember the Spanish Armada—”

  Very few of those present did clearly remember the Spanish Armada; but all of them gave Mrs. Leete unencouraging looks.

  “We might try to radio them,” Mrs. Dwight suggested, “that the United States is being simply devastated by epidemics. Smallpox and things. Maybe they’d turn back.”

  “Oh, no!” cried the secretary of state. “You don’t know the Russian women!

  Things like epidemics don’t bother them in the slightest! They would either come right ashore and start vaccinating us, probably for the wrong diseases, or they’d ignore it. After all, people in Russia die like flies and nobody turns a hair!”

  “Couldn’t we just surrender?” Mrs. Weller asked. “I, for one, don’t particularly care what happens—with the men gone.”

  “Apparently,” Mrs. Altbee reminded them, “we aren’t being asked to surrender, exactly. We’re to be liberated.” She gave her purple hat a push. “The effrontery of it! The gall! The presumption!”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Dwight, “we could pretend to be liberated and see what happened. After all, a few shiploads of women can hardly take over the country-not when we can’t seem to set up any management of it ourselves. I think we should agree to parley. Let them land. Give them a banquet, or something. Then, if we don’t care for the look of things, we could simply arrest the ones on shore! After all, the Greek women did something like that, once. I saw a play about it. Or maybe it was one of those Balkan countries, in the last war.”

  “What if they shoot off their atom things, then?” Mrs. Weller asked. Mrs. Altbee was evidently in favor of Mrs. Dwight’s line of thought. “A few of them could hardly make such difference, the way conditions are. I believe we should get in touch with them immediately—”

  “Who speaks Russian?” Mrs. Clatley asked. ‘We’ll have to find somebody to interpret.”

  There was a pause. Mrs. Guegresson suddenly said, “I know a perfectly darling woman that does!”

  The ladies looked at her with suspicion and doubt. Mrs. Weller gave a nervous laugh. “Why, Ada! Surely you don’t know anybody who speaks Russian!”

  “But I do, though!
She majored in languages and has a Ph.D. She’s terribly bright—”

  “We’d have to be extremely careful,” Mrs. Altbee murmured judicially, “in the matter of anybody who actually spoke the language!”

  “Not in the case of the woman I know!” Mrs. Guegresson snapped. “She is an alumna of my university. She comes from quite an old American family. Very respectable, too. She told me, once, she had eight claims to D.A.R. membership, though she never would join—”

  “There you are!” said the secretary of state, gesturing with a petit four. “Traitor to her class! Communist at heart! To have eight Revolutionary ancestors and to refuse to belong to the D.A.R. is the same thing as being a member of subversive organizations.”

  “Rubbish!” Mrs. Guegresson replied. “Ridiculous! Her husband is one of the most famous men in the country. He had a very hush-hush job in the war. He was quite close to Roosevelt—”

  “And you call that a recommendation—!” the secretary of state half shouted.

  “Ladies!” Mrs. Altbee said firmly. “Ada! Who is it?”

  “Mrs. William Percival Gaunt. Paula Gaunt. They’ve built, recently, somewhere near Miami.”

  The secretary of state said, “Oh.”

  “At the time she studied the Russian language,” Mrs. Guegresson continued,

  “people didn’t feel the way they do now. They were interested in Russia. Anyway, Paula was a language phenom. She knows French and German and Latin and Greek and Italian and Spanish and I forget what others.” She pressed an advantage indicated by a momentary cessation of protests. “We’ve got to have somebody who can talk to them, after all, and she’s our sort.”