(3/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume III: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  Twenty-eight days after the milk first appeared, on a warm August evening, the first vehicle stood on the pads at Cape Canaveral, illuminated by towers of lights. Fuel crews had finished loading the tanks which would be jettisoned along with the engine at burn-out. Inside the rocket, Major Quartermain lounged uncomfortably and cramped in the take-off sling for a short but telling trip through the Van Allen radiation fields and back to Earth.

  The take-off sling rested inside an escape capsule since the use of chemical fuel brought back many of the old uncertainties of launchings. On the return trip, Quartermain would eject at sixty thousand feet and pull the capsule's huge parachute for a slow drop to the surface of the Atlantic where a recovery fleet was standing by. The light rocket hull would pop a separate chute and also drift down for recovery and analysis.

  Inside the ship, Quartermain sniffed the air and curled his nose. "Let's get this thing on the road," he spoke into his throat mike. "Some of that Florida air must have seeped in here."

  "Four minutes to final countdown," blockhouse control replied. "Turn on your blowers for a second."

  Outside the ship, the fuel crews cleared their equipment away from the pad. The same ripe, heavy odor hung in the warm night air.

  At 8:02 p.m., twenty-eight days after the new milks made their first appearance, Major Quartermain blasted off in a perfect launching.

  At 8:03 p.m., the two other Melody Mix hulls standing on nearby pads, began to melt.

  At 8:04 p.m., the still-roaring engine fell from the back end of Quartermain's rocket in a flaming arc back towards Earth. Fifteen seconds later, he hurtled his escape capsule out of the collapsing rocket hull. The parachute opened and the daring astronaut drifted towards the sea.

  Simultaneously, in a dozen labs around the nation, blocks and molds of Melody's Mix made from that first batch of milk, collapsed into piles of putrid goo. Every day thereafter, newer blocks of the mix reached the twenty-eight-day limit and similarly broke down into malodrous blobs.

  * * * * *

  It was a month before the stinking, gooey mess that flowed over the launching pads at the Cape was cleaned up by crews wearing respirators and filter masks. It took considerably longer to get the nation's three top plastics firms back in operation as the fetid flow of unfinished rocket parts wrecked machinery and drove personnel from the area.

  The glob that had been Quartermain's vehicle fell slowly back to Earth, disintegrating every minute until it reached the consistency of thin gruel. At this point, it was caught by a jet air stream and carried in a miasmic cloud halfway around the world until it finally floated down to coat the Russian city of Urmsk in a veil of vile odor. The United States disclaimed any knowledge of the cloud.

  * * * * *

  "LAS VEGAS, NEV., May 8 (AP)--The Atomic Energy Commission today announced it has squeezed the last drop from Operation Milkmaid."

  "After a year of futile experimentation has failed to get anything more than good, Grade A milk from the world's two most famous cows, the AEC says it has closed down its field laboratory at the Circle T ranch."

  "Dr. Floyd Peterson, who has been in charge of the attempt to again reproduce Sally's Milk, told newsmen that the famed Guernsey and her stablemate, Melody, no longer gave exotic and unidentifiable liquids that sent man zooming briefly to the stars."

  "For a while, it looked like we had it in the bag," Peterson said. "You might say now, though, that the tests have been an udder failure."

  "Meanwhile, in Washington, AEC commissioner...."

  THE END

  * * *

  Contents

  REVOLUTION

  By MACK REYNOLDS

  Before you wish for something--or send agents to get it for you--make very, very sure you really want it. You might get it, you know....

  Preface ... For some forty years critics of the U.S.S.R. have been desiring, predicting, not to mention praying for, its collapse. For twenty of these years the author of this story has vaguely wondered what would replace the collapsed Soviet system. A return to Czarism? Oh, come now! Capitalism as we know it today in the advanced Western countries? It would seem difficult after almost half a century of State ownership and control of the means of production, distribution, communications, education, science. Then what? The question became increasingly interesting following recent visits not only to Moscow and Leningrad but also to various other capital cities of the Soviet complex. A controversial subject? Indeed it is. You can't get much more controversial than this in the world today. But this is science fiction, and here we go.

  * * * * *

  Paul Koslov nodded briefly once or twice as he made his way through the forest of desks. Behind him he caught snatches of tittering voices in whisper.

  "... That's him ... The Chief's hatchetman ... Know what they call him in Central America, a pistola, that means ... About Iraq ... And that time in Egypt ... Did you notice his eyes ... How would you like to date him ... That's him. I was at a cocktail party once when he was there. Shivery ... cold-blooded--"

  Paul Koslov grinned inwardly. He hadn't asked for the reputation but it isn't everyone who is a legend before thirty-five. What was it Newsweek had called him? "The T. E. Lawrence of the Cold War." The trouble was it wasn't something you could turn off. It had its shortcomings when you found time for some personal life.

  He reached the Chief's office, rapped with a knuckle and pushed his way through.

  The Chief and a male secretary, who was taking dictation, looked up. The secretary frowned, evidently taken aback by the cavalier entrance, but the Chief said, "Hello, Paul, come on in. Didn't expect you quite so soon." And to the secretary, "Dickens, that's all."

  When Dickens was gone the Chief scowled at his trouble-shooter. "Paul, you're bad for discipline around here. Can't you even knock before you enter? How is Nicaragua?"

  Paul Koslov slumped into a leather easy-chair and scowled. "I did knock. Most of it's in my report. Nicaragua is ... tranquil. It'll stay tranquil for a while, too. There isn't so much as a parlor pink--"

  "And Lopez--?"

  Paul said slowly, "Last time I saw Raul was in a swamp near Lake Managua. The very last time."

  The Chief said hurriedly, "Don't give me the details. I leave details up to you."

  "I know," Paul said flatly.

  His superior drew a pound can of Sir Walter Raleigh across the desk, selected a briar from a pipe rack and while he was packing in tobacco said, "Paul, do you know what day it is--and what year?"

  "It's Tuesday. And 1965."

  The bureau chief looked at his disk calendar. "Um-m-m. Today the Seven Year Plan is completed."

  Paul snorted.

  The Chief said mildly, "Successfully. For all practical purposes, the U.S.S.R. has surpassed us in gross national product."

  "That's not the way I understand it."

  "Then you make the mistake of believing our propaganda. That's always a mistake, believing your own propaganda. Worse than believing the other man's."

  "Our steel capacity is a third again as much as theirs."

  "Yes, and currently, what with our readjustment--remember when they used to call them recessions, or even earlier, depressions--our steel industry is operating at less than sixty per cent of capacity. The Soviets always operate at one hundred per cent of capacity. They don't have to worry about whether or not they can sell it. If they produce more steel than they immediately need, they use it to build another steel mill."

  The Chief shook his head. "As long ago as 1958 they began passing us, product by product. Grain, butter, and timber production, jet aircraft, space flight, and coal--"

  Paul leaned forward impatiently. "We put out more than three times as many cars, refrigerators, kitchen stoves, washing machines."

  His superior said, "That's the point. While we were putting the product of our steel mills into automobiles and automatic kitchen equipment, they did without these things and put their steel into more steel mills, more railroads, more factories. We leaned
back and took it easy, sneered at their progress, talked a lot about our freedom and liberty to our allies and the neutrals and enjoyed our refrigerators and washing machines until they finally passed us."

  "You sound like a Tass broadcast from Moscow."

  "Um-m-m, I've been trying to," the Chief said. "However, that's still roughly the situation. The fact that you and I personally, and a couple of hundred million Americans, prefer our cars and such to more steel mills, and prefer our personal freedoms and liberties is beside the point. We should have done less laughing seven years ago and more thinking about today. As things stand, give them a few more years at this pace and every neutral nation in the world is going to fall into their laps."

  "That's putting it strong, isn't it?"

  "Strong?" the Chief growled disgustedly. "That's putting it mildly. Even some of our allies are beginning to waver. Eight years ago, India and China both set out to industrialize themselves. Today, China is the third industrial power of the world. Where's India, about twentieth? Ten years from now China will probably be first. I don't even allow myself to think where she'll be twenty-five years from now."

  "The Indians were a bunch of idealistic screwballs."

  "That's one of the favorite alibis, isn't it? Actually we, the West, let them down. They couldn't get underway. The Soviets backed China with everything they could toss in."

  Paul crossed his legs and leaned back. "It seems to me I've run into this discussion a few hundred times at cocktail parties."

  The Chief pulled out a drawer and brought forth a king-size box of kitchen matches. He struck one with a thumbnail and peered through tobacco smoke at Paul Koslov as he lit up.

  "The point is that the system the Russkies used when they started their first five-year plan back in 1928, and the system used in China, works. If we, with our traditions of freedom and liberty, like it or not, it works. Every citizen of the country is thrown into the grinding mill to increase production. Everybody," the Chief grinned sourly, "that is, except the party elite, who are running the whole thing. Everybody sacrifices for the sake of the progress of the whole country."

  "I know," Paul said. "Give me enough time and I'll find out what this lecture is all about."

  The Chief grunted at him. "The Commies are still in power. If they remain in power and continue to develop the way they're going, we'll be through, completely through, in another few years. We'll be so far behind we'll be the world's laughing-stock--and everybody else will be on the Soviet bandwagon."

  He seemed to switch subjects. "Ever hear of Somerset Maugham?"

  "Sure. I've read several of his novels."

  "I was thinking of Maugham the British Agent, rather than Maugham the novelist, but it's the same man."

  "British agent?"

  "Um-m-m. He was sent to Petrograd in 1917 to prevent the Bolshevik revolution. The Germans had sent Lenin and Zinoviev up from Switzerland, where they'd been in exile, by a sealed train in hopes of starting a revolution in Czarist Russia. The point I'm leading to is that in one of his books, 'The Summing Up,' I believe, Maugham mentions in passing that had he got to Petrograd possibly six weeks earlier he thinks he could have done his job successfully."

  Paul looked at him blankly. "What could he have done?"

  The Chief shrugged. "It was all out war. The British wanted to keep Russia in the allied ranks so as to divert as many German troops as possible from the Western front. The Germans wanted to eliminate the Russians. Maugham had carte blanche. Anything would have gone. Elements of the British fleet to fight the Bolsheviks, unlimited amounts of money for anything he saw fit from bribery to hiring assassins. What would have happened, for instance, if he could have had Lenin and Trotsky killed?"

  Paul said suddenly, "What has all this got to do with me?"

  "We're giving you the job this time."

  "Maugham's job?" Paul didn't get it.

  "No, the other one. I don't know who the German was who engineered sending Lenin up to Petrograd, but that's the equivalent of your job." He seemed to go off on another bent. "Did you read Djilas' 'The New Class' about a decade ago?"

  "Most of it, as I recall. One of Tito's top men who turned against the Commies and did quite a job of exposing the so-called classless society."

  "That's right. I've always been surprised that so few people bothered to wonder how Djilas was able to smuggle his book out of one of Tito's strongest prisons and get it to publishers in the West."

  "Never thought of it," Paul agreed. "How could he?"

  "Because," the Chief said, knocking the ash from his pipe and replacing it in the rack, "there was and is a very strong underground in all the Communist countries. Not only Yugoslavia, but the Soviet Union as well."

  Paul stirred impatiently. "Once again, what's all this got to do with me?"

  "They're the ones you're going to work with. The anti-Soviet underground. You've got unlimited leeway. Unlimited support to the extent we can get it to you. Unlimited funds for whatever you find you need them for. Your job is to help the underground start a new Russian Revolution."

  * * * * *

  Paul Koslov, his face still bandaged following plastic surgery, spent a couple of hours in the Rube Goldberg department inspecting the latest gadgets of his trade.

  Derek Stevens said, "The Chief sent down a memo to introduce you to this new item. We call it a Tracy."

  Paul frowned at the wristwatch, fingered it a moment, held it to his ear. It ticked and the second hand moved. "Tracy?" he said.

  Stevens said, "After Dick Tracy. Remember, a few years ago? His wrist two-way radio."

  "But this is really a watch," Paul said.

  "Sure. Keeps fairly good time, too. However, that's camouflage. It's also a two-way radio. Tight beam from wherever you are to the Chief."

  Paul pursed his lips. "The transistor boys are really doing it up brown." He handed the watch back to Derek Stevens. "Show me how it works, Derek."

  They spent fifteen minutes on the communications device, then Derek Stevens said, "Here's another item the Chief thought you might want to see:"

  It was a compact, short-muzzled hand gun. Paul handled it with the ease of long practice. "The grip's clumsy. What's its advantage? I don't particularly like an automatic."

  Derek Stevens motioned with his head. "Come into the firing range, Koslov, and we'll give you a demonstration."

  Paul shot him a glance from the side of his eyes, then nodded. "Lead on."

  In the range, Stevens had a man-size silhouette put up. He stood to one side and said, "O.K., let her go."

  Paul stood easily, left hand in pants pocket, brought the gun up and tightened on the trigger. He frowned and pressed again.

  He scowled at Derek Stevens. "It's not loaded."

  Stevens grunted amusement. "Look at the target. First time you got it right over the heart."

  "I'll be ...," Paul began. He looked down at the weapon in surprise. "Noiseless and recoilless. What caliber is it, Derek, and what's the muzzle velocity?"

  "We call it the .38 Noiseless," Stevens said. "It has the punch of that .44 Magnum you're presently carrying."

  With a fluid motion Paul Koslov produced the .44 Magnum from the holster under his left shoulder and tossed it to one side. "That's the last time I tote that cannon," he said. He balanced the new gun in his hand in admiration. "Have the front sight taken off for me, Derek, and the fore part of the trigger guard. I need a quick draw gun." He added absently, "How did you know I carried a .44?"

  Stevens said, "You're rather famous, Koslov. The Colonel Lawrence of the Cold War. The journalists are kept from getting very much about you, but what they do learn they spread around."

  Paul Koslov said flatly, "Why don't you like me, Stevens? In this game I don't appreciate people on our team who don't like me. It's dangerous."

  Derek Stevens flushed. "I didn't say I didn't like you."

  "You didn't have to."

  "It's nothing personal," Stevens said.

  Pau
l Koslov looked at him.

  Stevens said, "I don't approve of Americans committing political assassinations."

  Paul Koslov grinned wolfishly and without humor. "You'll have a hard time proving that even our cloak and dagger department has ever authorized assassination, Stevens. By the way, I'm not an American."

  Derek Stevens was not the type of man whose jaw dropped, but he blinked. "Then what are you?"

  "A Russian," Paul snapped. "And look, Stevens, we're busy now, but when you've got some time to do a little thinking, consider the ethics of warfare."

  Stevens was flushed again at the tone. "Ethics of warfare?"

  "There aren't any," Paul Koslov snapped. "There hasn't been chivalry in war for a long time, and there probably never will be again. Neither side can afford it. And I'm talking about cold war as well as hot." He scowled at the other. "Or did you labor under the illusion that only the Commies had tough operators on their side?"

  * * * * *

  Paul Koslov crossed the Atlantic in a supersonic TU-180 operated by Europa Airways. That in itself galled him. It was bad enough that the Commies had stolen a march on the West with the first jet liner to go into mass production, the TU-104 back in 1957. By the time the United States brought out its first really practical trans-Atlantic jets in 1959 the Russians had come up with the TU-114 which its designer, old Andrei Tupolev named the largest, most efficient and economical aircraft flying.

  In civil aircraft they had got ahead and stayed ahead. Subsidized beyond anything the West could or at least would manage, the air lines of the world couldn't afford to operate the slower, smaller and more expensive Western models. One by one, first the neutrals such as India, and then even members of the Western bloc began equipping their air lines with Russian craft.

  Paul grunted his disgust at the memory of the strong measures that had to be taken by the government to prevent even some of the American lines from buying Soviet craft at the unbelievably low prices they offered them.