Not This August (19 page)

DECEMBER 5.

A mass of cold Canadian air had bulged through the western Great Lakes area, bringing snow mixed with freezing rain to much of the northeastern N.A.P.D.R. Hospitals were already filled to capacity with old people coughing their lives away, and they called it virus epidemic. The truth of the matter was that it was cold and starvation.

Betsy Cardew, red-eyed and dog-tired from last night’s Young Communist League meeting and the subsequent hours of volunteer work unloading at the freight yards, made her first stop of the day at the Chiunga County Country Club that was. The MVD Agro detachment had plowed it up for an experimental station.

She blinked at a new sign nailed to the archway over the driveway. It said: “Collective Farm ‘Pride of Susquehanna’ (EXP CC 001)” in ugly, Russian-looking letters. She drove under it to the administration building, noting on the way other strange things going on at what used to be the first tee. Red Army trucks were arriving. Tents were being erected. Bewildered farm-looking couples were being unloaded from the trucks and guided to the tents. There was a kitchen tent with fat cooks boiling up breakfast; a chow line of farmers was shaping up.

Lieutenant Sobilov was waiting for her at the foot of the administration building’s steps as usual. He was trying to make her and simultaneously polish his English. He wore the MVD green, but as an Agro scientist was only nominally in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

She handed the mail through the window to him. “What’s going on, Lieutenant?” she asked.

Sobilov looked around first. The coast was clear. “We are setting up a pilot farm,” he grinned. “We are anticipating the problems of next year.”

“Problems?”

After another look around Sobilov ventured an amused laugh. “My dear girl,” he assured her, “peasants are peasants, the world over. Surely it can be no secret to you that your countrymen have turned obstinate?”

She looked ashamed. “But our YCL program, ‘Every Farmer a Shock Worker of the Revolution’—” she began to argue.

“Na, na, na! The time is past. There are cycles of behavior, and the secret is to anticipate them. There was first the cycle of shocked apathy, which we countered by occasional salutary executions for the good of all. There is now in effect a new cycle of sullen resistance. Your countrymen think they can—put one over, is the phrase?—on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

He offered her a cigarette and lit one himself. “It is amusing. It is what happened in the Ukraine in 1933. The peasants came out of shock and decided that they would put one over. They neglected to cultivate. They butchered their livestock rather than turn in the stated amount. They raised only enough grain for themselves. How is your history? What did the great Stalin do?” He chuckled affectionately at the thought of the shrewd old man.

“I don’t know,” she said faintly. “We’re working more on the origins and early heroes of the class struggle in North America—”

“And quite rightly. I will tell you what the great Stalin did. He waited. He smiled and waited. And then in the late fall of 1933, after months of the Ukrainian nonsense, he confiscated
all
grain and livestock. The foolish peasants died by the millions through the winter. In the spring their broken remnants were easily placed in collective farms, where an eye could be kept on them and no foolishness allowed.” He dragged deeply on his cigarette and shrugged. “If your countrymen too must learn the difficult way, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will be a cheerful schoolteacher.”

“You make it all so clear, Lieutenant,” Betsy said, and Sobilov smiled proudly.

As she drove on she reflected that the Ukrainians of 1933 had neither a war plan nor a bombardment satellite.

DECEMBER 14.

The cold did not penetrate the cavern under Prospect Hill, to Mr. Sparhawk’s faint regret. He thought: One really ought to be in that much communication with nature that one was aware of the seasonal cycle, the great rhythm we all echo in our small, hurried bodily tick-tocking.

He was serving stewed prunes in the cafeteria to Lieutenant Colonels Byrne and Patri, and he thought it was a good time to tell them about it.

“Sure,” Byrne said, eating his stewed prunes. He was a small, dark man and Patri was a small, fair man. They had arrived separately ten days ago, Byrne the pilot comfortably in a telephone-repair truck and Patri the bombardier blue with cold after a ride in an unheated freight car and Betsy’s unheated sedan.

“Got any more of these prunes, pop?” Patri asked. He had gobbled his dish. He was getting a little fat, overdoing his catching up on the scanty meals when he was under cover as a moronic paint sprayer in a Detroit auto plant. Byrne, a Tuskegee graduate, had hid out as a Black Belt saloonkeeper in Memphis and had missed no meals.

Mr. Sparhawk brought seconds on prunes. “You young men,” he said, “really ought to make some time for a study of Zen. Japanese archers, you know, practice Zen, and it makes them the best archers in the world. Qualitatively there’s no difference between the—ah—task ahead of you and archery. The great thing is to divorce oneself from the action, not to
will
. Let the bow shoot the arrow, not the bowman. Now—”

Patri wiped his mouth and got up. “Pop,” he said kindly, “we’d be in a helluva mess if we let that thing fly us instead of vicey versey.”

“Amen, brother,” Byrne said. “Just don’t you worry, pop; we’ll fly it O.K. when the time comes. The prunes were swell. I really like prunes.”

Mr. Sparhawk should have done the dishes; instead he trailed them forlornly to the hangar room. There they firmly said good-by and climbed into G-suits. A whining hoist descended from the jutting crane arm of Stage 1 and they hooked on and signaled. It lifted them like two drowned trout on a line, turning and swinging a little, into the dim upper reaches of the cavern. Time for another of their interminable dry runs.

Mr. Sparhawk sighed and buttonholed Dr. Dace as the white-haired little engineer hurtled past, his arms full of schematics. Dr. Dace cursed him efficiently for thirty seconds and ordered him back to the kitchen, where he was of some use. “And furthermore,” Dace snarled in conclusion, “leave my technicians alone, do you understand? There’s approximately 1,300 man-hours of work left to squeeze in. We’re still lacking components. We have no time for your drivel!”

Dr. Dace turned and hurtled on his way.

Mr. Sparhawk said a prayer for him and went to do the dishes.

December 20, dark and drafty in the Wehrweins’ barn at eleven-thirty. The meeting was to begin at midnight. Justin had arrived early to give Hollerith—who used to be Rawson—some bad news.

“It came over the dry wires,” he said. “The ticket man got it and passed it to Betsy. She gave it to me in a fake letter. Decoded, no bomb for Chiunga County. And—you’re reprimanded for requesting one.”

Hollerith’s face went red in the lamplight. He struggled with and gave way to the impulse to curse and rail, even in front of a civilian. “I’m supposed to make a fight,” he said softly. “I’m supposed to make a fight and cover the bombardment satellite with fifty farmers, some homemade firecrackers, and a few .22s. Those fatheaded—!”

“There’ll be the last-minute roundup,” Justin said unsympathetically. “And at least we have trucks. And the stuff they’re making in the drugstores they don’t use in firecrackers.”

“How’s she making out with the druggists?” Hollerith snapped.

“Winkler’s making thermit. He says he doesn’t know how to make nitro, but the fact is he’s scared to try in this weather. Farish is going to make nitro.”

“
Going
to make?”

Justin reflected that General Hollerith had been spoiled by having neatly packaged dynamite and TNT to play with too long. “The fact sheet explained all that. It doesn’t keep in the cold, General. Turns into crystals, and if one crystal gets nicked—wham. End of drugstore. Don’t worry. We’ll have the stuff unless they blow themselves up making it fresh, which I understand is also a distinct possibility.”

A couple of men came in and headed for the lantern light. “Christmas Eve,” they said.

“Christmas Eve,” said Hollerith.

When the rest arrived, the barn began to grow almost comfortable with their body warmth.

Hollerith leaned forward in his gocart and began to speak. “We’ll have a report later from each of you on his neighbors,” he said. “Tonight I want to make absolutely sure you know what we’ll be doing on Christmas Eve. We’ll be forcing the Reds to eat their soup with a knife…”

On Christmas Eve, December 24, 8:00 P.M., Justin was wrinkling his face against a drizzle of sleet and pounding on Croley’s locked door. The town of Norton was dark.

Mr. Croley’s feet eventually sounded on the stairs from his apartment above the store; the door rattled and opened. The storekeeper stood there and waited.

Justin said, “Christmas Eve,” and passed him a penny.

“Christmas Eve,” Croley said.

Justin took out Hollerith’s army .45 and stuck it in the storekeeper’s ribs. He said: “I need a steady man with a central location. Open your storeroom. I want the local people’s guns and ammunition.”

Croley shrugged and said, “I’m bein’ forced,” and walked to the storeroom. He winced when Justin ripped off the Red Army seal, but unlocked the door.

“We load these in your truck, Croley,” Justin said. From upstairs came a querulous voice. “Tell her it’s all right,” Justin said.

Croley called back upstairs that it was all right and, moving like a rusty robot, loaded rifles and boxes of ammunition in his truck outside. He broke silence only once to say: “They’ll kill you for this, Justin. Don’t be crazy.” Justin didn’t answer.

The storekeeper’s eyes widened when Justin told him he was going to drive. “Crazy,” he spat. “Check point on the highway’ll see us go up the hill. They’ll phone the road patrol. Next thing, jeeps and armored cars all up and down the farm roads.”

“Don’t argue. Just drive. To the Medford place first.”

Long horn-tooting brought out the Medfords. In the headlight’s glare Justin handed the old man and his sixteen-year-old boy each a good 30-30 and ammunition.

“These ain’t our guns, Billy, we just had little varmint rifles, and anyway what’s all this—?”

“We haven’t got time to sort them out,” Justin lied. “Wait inside. Have a hot meal. A truck’ll come by for you.”

The boy said joyously: “You mean—”

“Christmas Eve,” Justin said. “What did you think it meant?”

At the Lyman’s place up the road Henry Lyman was nothing but trouble. First he didn’t want a gun. Next he wanted his own gun, not the .22 which was all Justin thought he rated. Lastly he said he wasn’t at all sure he’d come when somebody came in a truck for him; he had himself to think about. Justin told him: “Mr. Lyman, you’ll be called on to fight for the United States of America tonight. If you refuse to fight, the United States has every right to shoot you for cowardice and every intention of doing so as soon as it has a free moment. Get in your house, have a hot meal, and wait for the truck.”

“Crazy,” Mr. Croley muttered as they drove to the next farm.

9:00 P.M., Main Street, Chiunga Center.

Betsy Cardew slipped into the drugstore by the back way. Bald young Fred Farish, R.Ph., started violently over his prescription counter when she spoke. “Got them, Fred?”

“The nitro, yes. I’m finishing the thermit. There was a surprise inspection before I closed up. Went fine. What’s to inspect? Nitric acid and glycerol—standard reagents. In the trash can some rust, some dust, and some beer cans.” He gave her a thin, terrified smile and went on with his work.

Cappable beer cans stood in a row on his counter. He had filled them with “rust and dust”—iron oxide and powdered aluminum. With deft druggist’s fingers he was filling gelatin capsules with barium peroxide and powdered magnesium; into each capsule he slipped a trailing tail of magnesium ribbon. He finished a dozen capsules, slipped them into a dozen beer cans, and passed them to Betsy. She had a shopping bag ready for them.

“And—the other stuff?”

He took a newspaper from a shelf; beneath it was a flat box partitioned into nests padded with cotton wool. The eggs in the nests were bottles filled with something that looked like yellow oil. Nitroglycerine is readily manufacturable on a small scale out of easily available chemicals by anybody who cares to take the horrible risk of doing it.

Farish gave her his terrified smile again and said abruptly: “I’m coming along, Miss Cardew. I’ll carry—them.” He methodically got into his overcoat and wound a scarf around his neck and tucked the padded box under the coat. “Mustn’t let them get cold,” he said with a near giggle. And: “I used to pitch in the Little League, Miss Cardew. Between attacks of asthma. Maybe…” He trailed off.

They went out the back way, she leading with her shopping bag through the dark winter street, he following at a good distance. They were heading for the north end of town, the reservoir and pumping station.

At nine-fifteen in the garage of the satellite cavern Gus Feinblatt lifted General Hollerith out of his gocart and heaved him up into the cab of a red gravel truck. Straps were sewn into the leather seat; Hollerith buckled himself in. Feinblatt climbed up in the left and started the motor. It was the signal for fifty motors in fifty trucks driven by fifty hard-core regulars of two weeks’ training to start.

Dr. Dace came running to the red gravel truck and called up to Hollerith: “Give ’em hell, General!”

Hollerith, like a good general, boomed with confidence: “The old one-two, Doc!” His eyes were haunted.

He raised his arm and dropped it; the exquisitely counter-poised trap door in the good-bad road hoisted up and a drizzle of freezing rain whispered down the tunnel. The trucks began to roll out.

At nine-thirty the two MVD guards were pacing their slow patrol before the Chiunga Center pumping station—a red brick scaled-down castle with false crenelations and two towers that looked like chess pieces. Behind it the solid wall of the reservoir.

Betsy Cardew and Fred Farish watched from the shadows. Farish’s teeth were chattering. “We better not get any closer,” he said. “The machine guns on the roof—”