Triumph (36 page)

"Tremendous enterprise!"

"Sure! And haven't the 'tremendous enterprises' of the Soviets
always
happened?

And
always
stupefied our free-world experts who, nearly always anyhow, said the Reds couldn't do it?" Ben's pacing had stopped and his eyes widened. "In that case, Vance, what we thought of as accidentally-fired, random H-blasts, picked up in the arctic, and north of Japan, and in the Mediterranean, and at this end of the Black Sea,
may not have
been accidental!
"

"Don't get it!"

"Look! There used to be rumors, among physicists like myself, though we weren't then working on weapons, that the U. S. Government had some sort of supersecret

'ultimate-weapon' program. I'd always thought of it as one of those 'doomsday machines,'

like those sodium-jacketed H-bomb mines we knew
could
be made as far back as the late 1950s. That Pentagon plan had a super-supersecret name I heard a few times. 'Operation Last Stand.' No! 'Operation Last Ditch!' If it wasn't some 'doomsday machine' that we didn't touch off, it
could
have been a program for special units--of the U. S. Navy, say. In which case, the hits outside the U.S.S.R. were
counterfire
on a long-delayed
American
attack
that destroyed all the bases in the U.S.S.R. we've here hypothecated. But suppose
one
base even, was
not
found and destroyed. Suppose, from
that
presumed base in the U.S.S.R. the world has been forced, under threat of H-bomb attack, to become Red. And forbidden to contact
us.
You know, Vance, that idea seems plausible, however hideous it would seem as a war plan to genuinely civilized people! And we can
check
it!"

"Check
it? How?"

"By studying the seismographic and other records we kept in that period. Come on!"

Neither man slept that night. And their scrutiny of their abundant and varied information at long last told them the truth: there
had
been aimed, rocket assaults--many, in fact, on each area they'd previously heard conferring by coded radio. And from those same bases, before they were annihilated, counterrockets had risen, and apparently gone home on their targets--evidently American nuclear submarines, or possibly aircraft carriers. That became plain when they made a minute study of the timing of the many, enormous explosions and the location of each, in relation to time. But if any Soviets had survived that horror, they had maintained radio silence since. . . .

On another night Vance and Ben had been discussing possible, last-minute methods of somehow getting safely away from the deep caverns and from Sachem's Watch above.

Ben had listed the ideas, in pencil, along with the relevant objections: 1. Build a helicopter. Range too short. Aerodynamic knowledge insufficient.

2. Build a plane in a lead-shielded hangar above. Probably could not build good enough plane in time left. Also: how to take off?

3. Clear low-radiation path to sea. Build boat, transfer it to Long Island Sound.

Load personnel. Head for Costa Rica or other safe and relatively near place. Impossible to clear that much land of very hot debris and vegetation.

4. Radar recently installed aloft shows large lake formed, evidently when the H-bombing of Hartford threw massive wreckage into the Connecticut River. Lake might be reached, in shielded cart towed by shielded tractors. Lake might also be less radioactive than land. How to survive in lake? Build boat? Live on fish, if any there and safe to eat?

Probably the best remaining chance, if all efforts to get outside help fail. We will start working on equipment for that in another month, if appeals are still unanswered.

It was at that point on that particular evening of moody converse between Vance and Ben, when George appeared. Both men said then, in unison and with smiles,

"Where's Lodi?"

"Asleep. I couldn't, Sleep, I mean. Been looking at TV on the small-screen set in the communications room. Rio de Janeiro's about to broadcast that stuff you saw, Ben, long ago, from Montreal. Vance, you told me you'd like to see it."

"Not 'like,' George. But I did feel compelled to. But why
now?"

George grinned ruefully. "Oh, those Latins love gory stuff. I suspect some even like to see what happened to us gringos and Yankees." He smiled again, at their nods of unconscious assent to his inclusion of himself with "gringos" and "Yankees," and went on. "The excuse for the broadcast is kind of ironic. Tonight's the anniversary of the Grovsky-Conner agreement to begin a final and effective disarmament discussion.

Remember it? President Conner even thought the Reds
meant
it? And then, about six weeks later, the world came apart!"

Ben reluctantly, Vance face pale, followed George to the unpainted, black-box-crammed chamber cut in rock. They took chairs and listened to the incomprehensible Portuguese prologue. After it they saw the films Ben had watched, long before. Films taken by news photographers around Montreal in the early hours of the war and up until dusk. These films had been flown, by a Canadian jet, out over the Atlantic, to avoid the spreading atmospheric radiation, and south, to Rio and safety. The flight had been authorized by Canadian officials when they learned the film existed and realized it might be preserved by no less drastic means.

Montreal, Ben explained during some early shots of distant, horizon-to-horizon smoke, had not been hit. Apparently, of two or three weapons aimed at that city, only one had escaped interception and that one had fallen so far south and east of its target that, since the winds in the area were from the northwest, Montreal had remained unscathed until, that night, light fallout reached the city from the initial bombardment of the United States and from nearby Ottawa. Actually, till three and a half days later when the residual sodium clouds had arrived from the Pacific Coast, Montreal had remained alive though panicky.

The film now relayed from space and transmitted by Rio de Janeiro at first merely showed the shocking and violent efforts of the inhabitants of that city of well over a million to take cover, anywhere, or to escape in any sort of vehicle.

The onlookers had witnessed somewhat similar scenes, long ago, in films relayed the same way by Costa Rica.

But order was soon established in undamaged Montreal. The firestorm at Ottawa was visible as a mighty smoke cloud, but the winds bore the fallout away from Montreal.

Quebec's disappearance, in solar temperatures and bloody agony, equally had no effect on her sister city. What followed that was appalling: an endless variety of scenes showing the arrival of refugees from the United States.

They came, at first, in a trickle--cars and trucks loaded with the blind, the burned, the savagely cut, the dead. They came from Manchester, Vermont, and from Lowell and Lynn and Worcester and Springfield and even Boston. From all of Massachusetts. And from Albany, and later from the Buffalo area in New York. The licenses of their vehicles made their origins partly clear; and words, spoken, groaned, or screamed, supplied the rest of the information.

These were citizens of the United States--men, women, children, teen-agers, babies--who somehow had escaped from one or another ruined perimeter of an H-burst--

rocket warhead or plane-dropped, giant bomb. As the first of the arriving trucks, buses and, mainly, private cars grew to a flood that choked all roads leading to Montreal from the south, Canadian police, soon reinforced by soldiers, halted the columns at a distance from the city.

Filling all lanes of all highways, amid the roads through woods and farms, in hilly country and fiat, the titanic, wailing exodus came everywhere to a stop.

In each vehicle was at least one man or woman--the driver--who had not been blinded by seeing a fireball close enough--and in many cases forty miles was "close enough"--to lose his sight. But each load of refugees was in varied conditions that, even when shown one by one, beggared description.

Many were naked and of the naked, many were burned scarlet or, in places, black, from head to foot, or on arms and head.

The ears of thousands were gone. Their eyes had "melted" and lay on their cheeks in phlegm-like gobbets. Their noses were not there, and they breathed through holes in crisp, black faces. Their hair was gone. It was impossible to tell of thousands (unless they walked) which was the front, which the back of their horrible heads.

A sound rose from the stopped and backed-up caravan. It was like a dirge played on demonic, stringed instruments bloated in scale with the endless columns, a sound the ears even of the TV watchers could hardly believe, yet, on recognizing, recorded forever: the sound of thousands of people screaming and groaning and begging, often simply to be shot, by soldiers who tried, sick, nauseated, almost unable to carry out their orders, to give some sort of help to this interminable cavalcade of anguish.

But the soldiers did try! And they did not, could not, on orders, follow their often discernible desire to gratify some American, faceless, viscera in his own hands, burned to the rib bones, and still carrying a dead baby perhaps, who implored to be shot.

After a half hour of such horrendous viewing, came a series of pictures, all in color, in motion, of a great stadium. In this refugees were being assembled. It was half full when the cameraman had arrived. Nurses and doctors in white, or ordinary clothing, moved among boxes and reserved seats and in the bleachers and on the green, immense playing area.

They were constantly augmented, yet never enough for the ever faster accumulation of terribly burned or wounded refugees. The camera then showed the region outside the stadium. Ropes that seemed a mile long, fastened to stakes, were being followed by queues as long as the ropes, queues of bashed, smashed, burned, and sightless hordes who were able to move, on foot--or on what was left of feet--toward the stadium, by clinging to the guide-lines. Often, from that hideous queue, a man or woman or child would fall, and perhaps rise to grope again for the rope, perhaps crawl away to die, or, frequently, die where they had dropped.

In another sequence Canadians in white, heavy clothing that covered them from head to foot, with transparent plastic face masks for seeing, were walking along a highway clogged by four vehicles abreast, all of them motionless, unless ordered out of line. These men in hoods carried wand-like, metal objects which they passed over and around the standing vehicles. Quite often they would wave a car or bus or truck out of line and order it, backed up by armed soldiers when that was required for compliance, to leave the highway and drive to the farthest possible edge of vast grainfields flanking the road. Already those grain fields, ripe but not harvested, had been flattened by passing vehicles which stood in motionless rows at their far sides.

These vehicles and their passengers were, plainly, too "hot" to be allowed to continue toward Montreal.

A close shot of one such inspection showed, on the hood of a family sedan, a radiation reading of 760 roentgens. The reading on top of the car was higher. Inside were two young people and their three little children, frightened but seemingly uninjured. At the wheel was an old man who argued with the Canadians until the rifles of the soldiers made him go, grumpily, unbelievingly, toward the quarantine area of too-radioactive vehicles. All five in that car were, at the time they had been photographed, unaware of any hurt. But all five were as surely dead as if they'd had their hearts removed. One by one, in minutes, or hours at most, they would sicken and die from the almost invisible dust of a Massachusetts fallout area which they had brought, unknowingly, to this place of apparent safety. When the TV scene returned to a now overcrowded stadium, Vance muttered, "Let's shut it off!"

George obeyed.

"It's not we who need to see such examples of the hideousness that wiped out our world," Farr mused. "It was the people who were eradicated--that billion-plus. The facts were public that could have told them all that happened was possible--told them fifteen years ago or more. The one stark fact that when war starts the combatants may go all-out and the more terrible such fighting gets the more awesome and deadly the response on both sides-that, too, they could have applied to any picture of a war to come. I . . .
did."

Neither George nor Ben replied; but both nodded.

"All the fools--physicists and military men, politicians and congressmen--

assumed that whatever happened the United States would win. The experts never fed their computers with information about human hatred and cunning, or the problem of what our enemy would find itself obliged to do, in an H-war, even to have a shot at even a
sort
of victory."

George objected: "Our Navy did, kind of."

Farr grunted and took out a cigar. Put it back. "Operation Suicide, it was. Mutual suicide. The Rand Corporation, Kahn, all the rest, chatted about 'doomsday machines' and how to make them and then ignored the likelihood they'd
be
made. Sodium-jacketed H-mines. Depressed radiocobalt dusting a continent. It was
all
known to be possible. Only, von Neumann's
Theory of Games
was used by ten thousand dullards wearing uniforms or plastered with academic degrees, to extrapolate such wars, in an atomic age, that like
games
the United States might win. To calculate the blotting out of the North Temperate Zone, a new kind of stalemate, a stalemate of annihilation of both sides and everybody in between in both directions--
that
wasn't 'military.' Because to be military you must imagine you can fight and win. They fought, God knows! but where's your winning side?"

George said, grimly, "The Southern Hemisphere. The non-white peoples and the Latin Americans that so many white citizens of the United States considered not quite white.
They
won. And the Anzacs, unless something went haywire down there we don't know of."

Farr shrugged but said nothing.

The second anniversary of the descent to the shelter of ten people, later increased by four, was not celebrated. Everybody knew the date of the first cataclysm; everybody, even including Dorothy and Dick. But they had become sensitive to the moods of their elders and so, whispering together in a passageway that morning, the growing boy and girl agreed not to mention the special day and its meaning, unless somebody older did so.