Not This August (10 page)

He did. Suddenly the United States seemed to have been gripped by a terrible hunger for trained men. It was as if—as if they were being drained off the normal labor supply. He said as much.

“That’s right. And we’re the ones who drained them off. We recruited for a year. Half the ads you saw during that time might have been genuine; the rest were ours. From ’51 on they were all genuine, and believe me, the aircraft and electronics industries were desperate. We’d drained off five thousand of the best people in the country. I sat in hotel rooms—Mr. Simpson of Aero Research, Mr. Blair of Pasadena Electronics—and interviewed around the clock. So did fifty others. We boiled down 200,000 people to five thousand.

“All the final selections knew was, ‘hard, interesting, remunerative work, draft-proof but with a spice of danger.’ When our table of organizations was filled, we had the darnedest collection of specialists ever assembled, and practically every one of them could double in construction work and the rest could learn. We trucked them in April ’51 to Prospect Hill. The construction and excavating machinery was here. I made my little speech telling ’em they were dead for the duration to the outside world. No passes, no furloughs, no anything. You see, Justin, there were spies among them. Had to be. But what’s wrong with a spy if he’s a good worker and can’t get word outside the project? My security boys shot four people who tried to sneak out in the first month, and after that nobody tried. Were they spies? I don’t know. Or care. They’d been warned…

“Nobody brought supplies to us; we went for our own. With my boys riding along in the cabs of the trucks. There’d be a freight car at an abandoned factory siding, we’d transfer the load, and that was that. We were under canvas through the first winter, but the Hill was beginning to take shape. It was the best cave in the Northeast. We enlarged it, braced it, squared it up.

“They were wonderful boys and girls, Justin. I don’t know how to tell you. You know what a ‘count’ means in prison? That’s how we treated them. Work gangs of twenty, always, and my security people roving around with whistles and guns. Blow the whistle at a gang, everybody drops everything and comes to attention and then you count them. If it’s nineteen or twenty-one you check. Immediately. Well, somehow they managed not to mind it. Maybe they were thinking of the pay checks piling up against their accounts, maybe they were worked too hard to care, but maybe they knew they were shock troops, too.

“The last of them was underground by October of ’52. It was still primitive in here—camp cots, no privacy, lousy food. Three good men went violently insane. What could we do? We locked ’em up and our medics cared for them and one of them recovered. We started stockpiling structural members for the satellite that winter. By then they knew what they were working on. Terrific lift. And by then—well, it was a good thing we had a computer man who also happened to be an ordained minister. Yes, Justin, I didn’t show you the nursery. I think I’m behaving very well, but the nursery would be just a little more than I could take…”

He began to cry silently. Justin got up and walked the circuit of the huge ship’s base. When he returned, Gribble was dryeyed. “We acquired more trucks at that point,” the little man said precisely. “For one year we did very little but warehouse supplies. Between times we improved our living quarters and recreational facilities. The monotony of the work had a bad effect. There were fads for painting, sculpture, and intramural competitive sports. I had to crack down on the waste of time and became utterly unpopular, which I was used to. The little stenos back in my insurance days called me ‘the Monster,’ you know. Things took an upturn when actual construction of the satellite began.

“The next year something unusual happened. There was somebody in one of those freight cars at one of those sidings. They brought him to me. He was a CIA man, and he knew he’d never be able to leave until the operation was over one way or another. He had a message that was a little too hot for our code room since it involved code-room personnel as well as the rest of us. Luckily—or by design—he was a former cafeteria manager, and was responsible for a great improvement in our mess. But the message, the message—when I decoded it in my own quarters I laughed and said: ‘Melodrama.’ And I went ahead and obeyed it. It was to install, under the guise of an air-conditioning device, masked tanks of lethal gas. And I was placed under standing orders to release the gas if certain circumstances should arise. Melodrama.

“The war came, of course. They worked like demons; our medics had very little to do except circulate and snarl at sick people to lie down for a half hour if they didn’t want to drop in their tracks. Our supplies chief broke down from frustration when supplies became a trickle, an erratic one. Our sponsors in the Defense Department could hardly tell a desperate major general whose division was headed for Recife without antitank guns that rail space was needed for something nebulous but infinitely more important. Or the President of Mexico that his capital city could not be defended because hydrazine was needed for something bigger than interceptor rockets. Or the Navy that a carrier launching must be postponed two months because control-system components had to be shoveled down a hole in Prospect Hill.

“Many, many times our trucks went to the appointed places at the appointed times and found only half a dozen crates in the freight car—or no freight car at all. Thank God the bombs came through. AEC must have interlocked with our operation somehow; they never shorted us, ever.

“We had a polio epidemic last year, Justin! And no vaccine! It swept through our electronics department like a prairie fire. We lost a dozen of our best men. Scores of them were crippled to the point where they could work only at benches, assembling. Only three men who really knew what they were doing were left to climb around the girders installing and testing. Volunteers made a lot of mistakes which the specialists had to undo. But things were drawing to a close. Our pilot and bombardier arrived and trained on the controls. They were good boys, just right for the job.

“It’s an awesome thing, Justin. That roof up there—it’s skillfully undermined. Push the button and it blasts away the crest of the hill and we stand open to the sky. One bright young man does the right things with the controls and the satellite soars and circles. The other young man does the right things with
his
controls and she spits hydrogen bombs one thousand miles straight down at speed far beyond detection or interception. That was to end the war, Justin. Thirty-six hell bombs. And to keep it ended, to prove to the enemy the final insanity of continuing, there are the two specials with their cobalt jackets. Drop one special somewhere over Finland. It blows, generating lethal radioactive dust. Southwesterly winds drift the dust across most of Russia, wiping out all plant and animal life in its path. The other cobalt job’s for China, even though the dust would kill as far as California. Last-chance weapons, Justin. Almost but not quite bluffs. Break glass only in case of insane continued resistance after thirty-six H-bombs destroy thirty-six Russian and Chinese population centers.

“Very close, Justin. Very close. A few hundred man-hours of electronics installation remaining, a few hundred components to procure. But then there was the surrender broadcast and my orders were clear.
This
was what the spies in the operation had been waiting for. Come hell or high water they’d get out and turn us in. My orders were—one—to release the gas in case of military defeat and capitulation. And—two—to contact responsible parties, assuming leadership of a project to complete and launch the satellite.

“I carried out the first half, Justin. You’ll help me, won’t you? They really can’t expect a person who’s been through so much to keep on going, can they? Is it reasonable? Is it fair?” His eyes were leaking again.

“If you only knew,” he groaned, surrounded by his five thousand dead, immured in his guilt.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Justin said quietly. “We’ve got a long walk. Those cows’ll be bellowing to be milked. Somebody might notice.”

A last look at the towering satellite and they started home to milk the cows.

The shelves at Croley’s store were filling up. Farm supplies were coming back. For the first time in three years neat tubes of aureomycin ointment for udder sores were neatly stacked in the old space on the shelf. Under the familiar red trademark was something new in small type about the State Antibiotics Trust. That was perfectly all right with Justin; they could call it anything they wanted as long as they were pitching in to keep his milk production up.

And then he sneered at himself for the thought. It was exactly the thought they wanted him to have, and they wanted him to chop it off right there. Not to go on and reflect: milk production for whom, where?

Half a dozen farmers were waiting for Croley. The old man came out of his miniature office, looked blankly at them, and went back in again. They sighed, studied the salt pork in his meat case, the sacks of rice from Louisiana—back after two years—and the comic books.
Billy Spencer, Northeast Farmboy
.
True Life Heroes
, the
Story of Klaus Fuchs
. Justin flipped through them, waiting. Billy Spencer was a clean-cut kid who lived only to make his milk norm and thereby build peace and the North American People’s Democratic Republic. Disaster threatened when his butterfat production slumped 50 per cent and all the other kids jeered at him. But one night he saw a sinister figure skulking around his barn and who should it be but Benny Repler, the loudest of the jeerers. Benny, caught in the act of administering an unspecified slow poison to Billy’s cows, broke down and confessed he was a tool of unreconstructed capitalist traitor saboteurs, and was marched off, head high, to expiate his sins by hard labor for the N.A.P.D.R. Billy, in a final blazing double spread, was awarded a Hero of Agricultural Labor medal by the President himself, and took the occasion to emit a hundred-word dialogue balloon pledging himself anew to the cause of peace and the people’s democracy under its great protector the Soviet Union.

And as for Fuchs, the saintly worker scientist in his long martyrdom at Wormwood Scrubbs Prison—Justin carefully closed the comic book and replaced it in its wire rack. Croley had emerged from his office again with a wrapped parcel. You could tell from the size and the neck that it was a quart bottle. “One of you call Perce,” he said to the farmers. His half-witted helper was lounging in the sun on the bench outside. Justin was nearest the door. “Mr. Croley wants you,” he told the boy.

The storekeeper handed Perce the wrapped bottle and told him: “Like yesterday. For the soldiers up at the truck station.”

Perce giggled slyly: “Soup for lunch. Like yesterday.” He glanced at the farmers to see that they got his joke. They were as stone-faced as Croley and he went on his way. Croley stared sullenly at the first man in line—his way of asking: “May I help you, sir?” A haggle began about tobacco. Croley was an industrialist now; he had started a small sweatshop business in Norton. Somehow he had located a bale of prewar king-sized cigarette papers; the widows and orphans of Norton worked at home turning them into Russian-style cigarettes with cardboard mouthpieces at a cent a dozen. With dependency allotments from the Army discontinued, it fended off starvation.

“Last batch stunk,” Croley said flatly. “Dime a pound and that’s that. Should be glad to make a payment on your bill, Hunzicker.”

Dirty pool! Hunzicker looked half around, shame on his face; everybody studiously avoided his eye. Justin wished the conventional wish that he could sink into the earth rather than see Hunzicker’s shame and Croley’s gloomy arrogance.

“Right,” the farmer muttered. “Dime a pound. But it’s better than last time. You’ll see.” Croley stared, impassive. He sold the cigarettes to the garrison at Chiunga Center. The 449th Soviet Military Government Unit winked at such rampant capitalism when it was practiced by handy, steady, centrally located Mr. Croley.

Bomb him, Justin thought vacantly. Bombardment satellite’s ready and waiting, short a few hundred man-hours and a crew. Find yourself the engineers and the crewmen, send ’em up, and then they drop an H-bomb on Mr. Croley and all’s well.

Thirty-six lousy bombs and two specials.

He remembered a story by H. G. Wells in which the world had been threatened by nothing worse than intelligent, three-inch ants. A gunboat captain—what else could he do?—fired the big gun at the ants and steamed away knowing that he had accomplished nothing and furthermore would catch hell for shooting off the expensive ammunition.

Let’s see, then. One H-bomb for Croley left thirty-five. One H-bomb for the 449th SMGU left thirty-four. If they weren’t skipping numbers, that left at least 448 SMGUs to be H-bombed, leaving a deficit of 414 bombs if you didn’t count the cobalt-jacketed specials, and what were they good for?

Well, you could wipe out Russia and China, including the slave laborers who used to be the North American Armies. This would leave the occupying troops here cut off from their home bases but still top dogs with their weapons, armor, and aviation. There was no reason to believe that their political bosses at home did not exert a moderating influence on the military commanders here.

And of course you couldn’t even find anybody who could locate the electronics men and crewmen you needed to fire the big gun at the ants. Rawson? A hard-boiled ex-sergeant, ex-hobo, probably ex-petty criminal, somehow involved in a bomb-smuggling ring of unknown potentialities. He had not dared tell Rawson; the thing was too big for the legless man, too big for anybody who thought only in rough-and-ready action terms.

The battered, unpainted Keoka bus stopped outside the store with a scream of brakes and sizzling radiator. Justin glanced at the schedule and the clock. It was thirty-five minutes late—about average for the service.

He recognized the man who swung down from the bus and came in. The salesman. The bomb runner.
Bee-Jay Farm Supplies and Machinery, Washington, Penna
. The man pleasantly elbowed his way through the crowd, explaining to one and all: “I don’t want to break in on the line, gentlemen, but you’ll thank me for it in the long run. The driver tells me—How are you Mr. Croley?—the driver says we’re stopping for ten minutes to let the engine cool down so I thought I’d let Mr. C. in on the big news. Gentlemen, we have milk cans again, ready for delivery, and I’m sure you’re all glad to hear it. Mr. Croley, would you be interested in six dozen hundred-pound tin-lined steel milk cans of the famous Bee-Jay quality for your customers?” He had his order book out.