by Philip Wylie
A man with brown hair-clean shaven, a high, important-sounding voice, and a row of pencils in the pocket of a time-buffed, faded corduroy waistcoat that once had been green. Gaunt had it: Averyson!
On the semi-Gothic campus that sprawled and towered in the night beyond the station, Averyson had once been a great economist. At the White House during the atomic war, this same man had cracked up. Apparently they had brought him home and Averyson had recovered enough to become a station agent! He was adding, with the pompousness of a man calculating billions owed by governments to governments, a few pennies of tax to the cost of a round-trip Trenton ticket.
Gaunt worried when his tum came. Averyson looked him in the eye and did not recognize him at all. He firmed his lips in a bureaucrat’s smile and gave his voice the inflection of vast significance: “Where to, my good man? Don’t stand there ogling!
You’re holding up Progress!
A week later, Gaunt left Urbana by plane. He had arranged to cross the Chicago area, although such flights were ordinarily forbidden. To himself, he admitted mere curiosity motivated his wish to see the devastated area from the air. That was the only way by which it could safely be observed. In requesting the flight to be set up, however, he had stated that he believed a personal inspection of the results of atomic warfare might be of use in his evaluation program.
A special plane, its underbelly sheathed with lead and its observation ports made of resistant glass, had been dispatched from Washington by the now almost nonexistent Air Force. It carried Gaunt over the site on a clear and frigid noonday after a light, fresh snowfall.
Everything, of course, was now known concerning the annihilation of Chicago by Gaunt and by all others who cared to read. On the night of death, a Soviet jet bomber had left an arctic base (not then known to American Intelligence) across the Pole. It landed (on skids) on a snowfield prepared by the crews of five submarines. These subs (type and capabilities also then unknown in the United States) had traveled in secrecy from Krondstadt to Greenland, whence, proceeding under the ice, they had entered Hudson Bay in January.
(Here, again, a thitherto unknown fact was revealed. The ultimatum and onslaught with which the Short War began had been planned long before the Disappearance. That unanticipated event had not, however, interfered with the Kremlin’s scheme to assault America at many points and without warning. On the contrary, the violent shock following the disappearance of the women had caused the Soviet government to set ahead its schedule, partly to take advantage of a presumed equal chaos in America and partly to enable the Communists to impose the harshest disciplines of war on an awed and frantic male population.)
The specialized submarines, long rehearsed in their particular duties, baked their way through the ice to the surface of Hudson Bay during a blizzard, broaching at a point ninety miles off the nearest shore. Their crews, using bulldozers, cleared an airstrip on the ice. The huge jet bomber thus was able to land, take on its single immense bomb, refuel, and head for Chicago at its battle speed of six hundred and eighty miles an hour. It reached the target early in the morning.
The scientific monstrosity in its bomb bay was a plutonium-tritium-lithium missile of a type similar to the one luckily discovered, before its detonation, in Pittsburgh. It was officially known as an XFR 17, and familiarly, amongst Soviet scientists and military men, as a “Lenin.” Most of its weight was casing, designed to act as a millionth-of-a-second “tamper.” The casing, radiation absorptive, was of a sort unknown to American scientists; after the blast it was deposited in a thin sheet so radioactive as to heat up the elements upon which it “rained.” The plutonium detonation mechanism was remarkably light. A water hammer, involving tritium and the liquefied second isotope of hydrogen, aided in obtaining the “tamping” effect. The weight of the whole bomb (which was actually more like a physics laboratory combined with a machine shop) was eighty-nine tons. The fact that the distance from the submarine rendezvous point in Hudson Bay to Chicago was small enabled the six-jet plane to carry the large bomb to its target.
The flight was made shortly after the destruction of San Francisco by a suicide submarine, the ineffective effort to wreck New York City, and the unsuccessful attempt to detonate a bomb smuggled piecemeal to the U.S.A. and assembled and hidden in Pittsburgh. It took place in the predawn period when fighter defense in Canada could be expected to be handicapped by darkness. The great, swift plane was heard by many but seen, apparently, by no one. Chicago officials, in spite of being “alerted” by Washington, presumed the only immediate threat would be to coastal cities. (No city, at that time, had been advised of the finding of an H bomb in Pittsburgh, as it was certain that such news would create national urban panic with side effects probably more disastrous than the total loss of half a dozen major cities.)
The Soviet jet plane arrived according to schedule. Its bomb fell, as planned, toward the coastal rim of Lake Michigan, near the Steel Pier and “exploded” six thousand feet in the air. The plane that had carried it had been ordered to put back to Hudson Bay where (the crew had been told) submarines would return all hands to Russia—and they would live out their days with pensions and extra privileges, as Heroes of the Soviet. The jet plane had fuel enough for the short return, but, although it aimed its bomb by radar from an altitude of sixty-two thousand feet, the blast instantly destroyed it—an inevitability known only to the superiors in the crew.
Such were the principal facts which, at the conclusion of the Short War, had been shared with the American government, just as data on other secret and surprise missiles had been exchanged upon the signing of the Co-operative Peace.
When his plane swung in toward Hobart, Indiana, Gaunt could see Lake Michigan, blue and partly frozen, on his right. Ahead on his left were towns, villages and farms such as he had crossed all the way from Urbana to this point. Snow lay whitely on them. Horses and cattle could be discerned. Here the stubble of a cornfield showed mathematically; there a black rectangle revealed a hogpen. Smoke rose from chimneys.
Trucks, cars and occasional sleighs could be seen, along with several working snowplows. It was the familiar landscape that any traveler on commercial airlines would see all the way across the Middle West in wintertime.
But just beyond Hobart a change became noticeable. People and livestock vanished. Presently, Gaunt saw a little church with its steeple cleanly broken off. Then a farm that had been flattened. White walls of a clapboard house, red walls of barns and outbuildings, and even the chimneys lay spattered on the earth, identifiable only because wind had cleared away the new snow.
The plane began to climb. Its pilot, a major in a winter uniform, waved a gloved hand toward the area ahead.
“The ‘rim’ begins soon. Still hot. Got to have altitude. In this area, the blast effect was freaky. Took a farm here, left a town yonder. Took a village. Left the farms in front and behind.”
The copilot, a lieutenant, pointed toward the earth directly below. “That was New Chicago, that pile of junk under the snow.”
Gaunt nodded. He had seen much of bombed-out Europe; this did not seem new to him. But as the plane, still climbing, approached Gary, he stiffened. For here the lake came inland. Where once there had been a city, a bay spread out beneath them, a shallow bay, evidently, for its frozen surface was dotted with “islands.”
Again, the major pointed—to one of the snowpowdered islets. “That’s all that’s left of the Bragerton Iron and Steel Works. About fifty acres of buildings including seven blast furnaces. Nobody’s been up there, personally. Robot boats were sent through to take pictures. It just looks like slag. All these islands you see are either hilltops or the remains of buildings. The land around here was hammered down below water level and Lake Michigan poured in.”
There wasn’t any Chicago.
Just an estuary that ranged out toward Oak Park and included Evanston on the north. Where a “shore” emerged, the land, for miles upon many miles, was slick. Wind had bared great patches of it. In the bright
sunlight, it glittered.
“Silicates?” Gaunt asked.
The major jerked his head in confirmation. “Melted. Ran like hot wax. Tidal wave cooled it off when it roared back, afterward. The bomb’s hammer effect depressed the shoreline, all along. Threw aside the water. Then the lake rushed back to its level—set up a hell of a steam cloud—and that was it. You have to go about fifty miles from the old Loop district to find any body living, these days. Place is mostly too hot to explore. We did a lot of telephoto work last summer for the Department of Agriculture. Some green stuff is springing up in the hot areas. Botanists were anxious to look it over. From the pictures, it seemed like new species—genetical morphosis, I think they called it.
Radiation result. Our pictures created a lot of excitement and discussion-but nothing satisfactory. Next year, they hope to drag the place with hooks on ropes, pull up some of the vegetation—find out what it is. And was. The plants themselves will be hot, I’m told.”
Gaunt had seen enough. More than enough. Here, beneath the pale-blue ice and the bluer water, here where the glassy shores glittered in the January sunshine, had once been a mighty metropolis. A city he had loved. A university where he had held a chair for three contented years. Laboratories in which he had been a distinguished visitor. Stores he had shopped in. Schools his children had attended. People, young and old: brilliant professors, genial neighbors. Everything that had meant security, prosperity, civilization and home, to millions. All of it gone. Melted, vaporized and partly covered by a silent lake.
Was the mere inclination to perform an act of such a sort the force which, in some inscrutable and “unscientific” fashion, had denuded earth of women before the awesome inhumanity could begin?
Who could say?
He heard about it from a survivor. . . .
At Waukegan, where the plane came down, Gaunt presented his Federal Food Ration Card at a lunch counter. Its sole factotum, a redheaded, pimply young man in a battered chef’s cap, whose neck bore the purplish-red scar mass of a radiation burn, talked readily. Indeed, he talked incessantly, mechanically, with a puzzled, faraway look in his pale eyes and a voice that spoke from rote, so it was evident he had told the same tale over and over to hundreds of diners at the airport.
“See you came in on a lead plane,” he began. “Musta been taking a squint.
What’ll it be?” The young man chuckled. “We got eggs. What eggs’ll it be?”
“Fried—poached—boiled—anything,” Gaunt said.
“I was in it.” The man pointed at his neck. “Radiation. Doing okay, too. No cancer-so far, anyhow. Just scar tissue. You know how I got it?”
“No.” Gaunt wasn’t eager to hear. He’d read accounts enough. Still, the man wanted to talk—seemed to need to talk. So Gaunt raised his eyebrows and gave the eyes beneath an attentive look.
The young man nodded in agreement with himself; he had decided evidently, where to begin and what to say. “I’m a poker player.” He turned his back and spilled vegetable oil on a hot griddle. “That night I was at it, with a bunch of pals, in the back room of the Elks Building in Mellodilla—that’s a suburb—thirty-six miles as the crow flies from the Loop. As the crow used to fly.” He laughed at his own, old joke. “My wife, she was twenty-two, used to give me this night off, once a month, and we boys made the most of it. Poker till daylight—that was us. The dames go.” He paused. “But we play, anyhow.”
Gaunt grinned, as a fellow poker player might.
“I’m about eighteen bucks ahead and holding three queens when the whole world lights up, bright orange, I say it was. Some said reddish. Some said yellow. Some, white.
But I’m facing the west, away from Chi, and I see the reflection and it’s orange. ‘What in hell?’ asks somebody. Jev Connors, he’s a mortician—was, yells, ‘Bomb! The goddamn Rooshians have hit Mellodilla by mistake!’ And he nose dives under the poker table, taking his hand along. A couple of other guys do, among ‘em yours truly. What the hell!
Bombs I have seen before, at Guadal and other spots. Now, a little time passes. That orange light dies down but she don’t entirely go out. Through the windows, from under the table, while the bunch is telling us to come out and it was only a trolley or a frozen wire, I see a glimmer of all sorts of colors that keep fizzling up and down and I say to myself, ‘Will, that’s an atom bomb! That’s Chi!’”
Eggs broke and sizzled. The redheaded man went on. “Somewhere along in there, real soon after the flash, the Elks’ hall rocks like an earthquake and slowly falls apart.
The lights go out. The cinder blocks grind and wallow around. The boys begin to scream where they’re hurt. There’s a concussion that saps out your wind. And the Elks’ roof goes for a sail. You can feel the cold rush in, and now it’s dark. It sounds like the town is coming apart in a Cecil B. De Mille spectacle. The yells increase and the old poker table takes. a rafter across the middle that splits it and I’m knocked out. Sunny side up?”
“Please,” Gaunt said.
“I wake up. It’s daylight. I get loose from the debris. I’d of been frozen stiff, but four-five guys were on top of me. The top ones are froze. I check. I’m not hurt, just scratched up and beat up and aching inside, but not bad. I get loose and walk around.
Between Mellodilla and Chi, there’s big hills, otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you this. So I stumble out and the town’s a wreck. People ambling here and there like zombies. I head for my place, which is five blocks, and I ain’t got no place—no home, no two boys, no uncle lookin’ after ‘em while I’m out that night. Just a mess, with frozen flesh in it. I steal a coat off a corpse and some other extra duds—and I trek.
“That day I make about three miles. It’s like walking through where there was an avalanche. I meet folks. We don’t speak much. I don’t eat. It doesn’t enter my head to.
That night I hole up in what’s left of a factory. Can’t tell for sure, even, what kind it was.
Metalwork of some type. Place partly burned and it’s warm. I sleep with my damned neck next to a big metal plate.” He touched the scar. ‘Thing must have been hotter’n radium; that’s where I picked up this bum. Well, I go on the day after. Trying to get far away from Chi. Hearing the news, seein’ the sights. You know. Like all the blind people.
And the crazies. Like men dragging the frozen corpses of their pals along on kids’ sleds.
such stuff.”
“Yes.”
“And finally I’m picked up and taken care of for shock—that’s eight days afterward—and all I eat in the whole time is about a case of condensed milk I snitched out of a groceriteria that I haul along on a sled I foraged. I don’t even care much for that, since I seen two-three of the crazies, somewhere on the way, sittin’ around outdoor fires in the snow, eating what looked damned like roasted human parts, to me. And seen a lot of spattered human parts too, like at Guadal, so I’m kind of an expert on the subject. The bread’s lousy here at Waukegan. Want bread?”
“Thanks,” Gaunt answered, “I guess not. Just the eggs.”
He had hoped it would be warm in California.
That February, it was not. Every morning a gray fog rolled in from the sea. Nearly every afternoon the fog lifted enough to become clouds. From the clouds a chilly rain descended.
Los Angeles seemed without liveliness although it teemed with life—with people, unoccupied for the most part, hungry, and apprehensive, now, about the rains. They knew the Portland story. ‘They feared that somewhere, out over the Pacific, another
“undissipated air mass” was drifting eastward from the site of the unfortunate ‘Soviet experiment and that it would reach rainy California in a sufficient concentration to duplicate the “Oregon effect.”
The retired aged, the war workers now without work, and the numberless citizens whose trades, businesses and professions could not be conducted owing to shortages, or to the lack of market in a listless world, or to government order, were preoccupied with somber chores.
&n
bsp; They searched for extra food; they scoured their environs for fuel in a land where fuel was scarce; and they still made efforts, by letter and through the “interview centers,”
to get in touch with loved ones missing now for two years.
It was difficult to arrange transportation to Pasadena and Gaunt’s encounter with Amos Steadman was like the rest of his Hadean journey.
He could not at first believe the huge man could have lost so much weight.
“Steady” was sitting behind his paper-heaped desk and its racks of cotton-stoppered tubes. The monel-metal tables and the glass labyrinth of his laboratory were visible through an open door. He saw Gaunt come in, rose halfway and spoke in his always melancholy voice:
“I got word you’d arrive around now. I’m glad to see you, Bill. I hope you’ve got good news of some sort.” Gaunt sat down and smiled and shook his head. “That’s what I hoped you might have.”
Amos Steadman’s lugubriousness had once concealed a merry disposition. Long ago, Gaunt had said of him, “I know a lot of biologists, but only one the subject has made humaner, though you’d think it ought to. Steady learned how to be a better, happier person by studying protoplasm.”
But now, looking at the man, he felt that melancholy had sunk into the bony frame, extinguishing the fun, the whimsy and the humanness of the man. He looked such a figure of despair as John Bunyan might have dreamed. His skin hung upon him like a man’s robe on a small boy. His eyes were bloodshot and evasive.
“We’re nowhere,” he said. His head shook. “Nowhere!”
“I’d heard—last spring—”
“That was last spring.” Steadman leaned back; his swivel chair creaked as if it soon would break. “We had a somewhat promising line then. We had raised heaven only knows how many fertile ova of mammals in the uteruses of different hosts. So we felt we had the medium, if we could get the first fertile cell. And there was where we had an idea. A certain rare, cancerous affliction of the testes occasionally sets the spermatozoa dividing in a way that resembles the early mitosis of the fertile ova. Under the microscope, it looked as if multiple pregnancy had begun in the testis.”