Tomorrow! (41 page)

“The meeting,” he said, “will come to order.”

Chairs moved. Attendants brought stretchers close.

Harry Jackson Gates was sworn in as President of the United States. It was done quickly, in low tones. The only Justice they could find gravely administered the oath. When it was over, all but the new President sat down. He returned to the head of the long, gleaming table. On it, there was only the gavel and a Bible.

“Our group,” he began, in a somber voice, “constitutes, as you all know, all the high-echelon members of the Government who could be assembled, this frightful Christmas Day.” He looked at a notebook which he took from a jacket pocket. “Three members of the late President’s Cabinet are here.” He named them. “Supreme Court Justice Willard. Seventeen members of the United States Senate. Thirty-eight members of the House of Representatives. In an adjacent room, General Faversham and some other high military officers are waiting and I shall ask them in—with your consent. All in favor?”

There were grave “Ayes.”

“Opposed?”

Silence.

The new President nodded to the guards at a far door and it swung back. The military men carne in quietly, took chairs. The President spoke their names, gave their rank, and continued:

“I shall be brief. As you know, panic reigns from coast to coast. Four great cities were totally obliterated by hydrogen bombs in the afternoon and early evening of the twenty-third.

Washington met the same fate later. Twenty-five cities have been struck by plutonium bombs of exceptionally high power. Some twenty millions of us were killed or injured in the attack. Untold numbers, hundreds of thousands, are dying in the progressively worsening riots. It is the judgment of the military”—he paused, looked at the officers—“that weeks, if not months, will be required to restore order, and an indeterminate interval, many more months, to bring the nation back to a state of production and communication which will support the survivors at a survival level. I am sure you are, in general, familiar with those ghastly facts.”

There were murmurs of assent.

“Three possibilities face the United States of America. The first is—surrender.”

A heart-rending “
No
!”
was wreathed in low-toned murmurs of rejection.

“The enemy,” the President went on grimly, “has offered terms.”

That, too, stirred the audience.

“We have learned the terms by radio, through neutrals. They are quite simple. We are to surrender all atomic weapons, to dismantle all atomic plants and works, to allow enough of the enemy free access within this nation to ensure that the status is permanent. There will be no occupation, no tribute.”

His eyes went over the room. Some of the haggard faces were stony. But some glowed with hope.

“A great predecessor of mine, in an hour of trial, once called an example of wanton assault ‘a day that will live in infamy.’ No phrase, in any language, can be made to speak the evil now done to this nation. I shall not try to give you any condemnatory words. But, let me point out, the offered terms
seem
reasonable. It is
only
a seeming. If we grant those terms, nothing—

ever afterward—can prevent the enemy from working upon us whatever his further will may be.

We know his philosophy. We bleed now under his treachery. Disarmed, we shall surely soon be enslaved. But surrender is one possibility.

“Another—is to continue the assault we are making. I assure you, the foe is suffering grievously. But his cities are so few, his dispersion of populace is so great, that our gallant Air Force cannot readily drive his people into the general panic that has uprooted this nation and destroyed its social organization. In time our effort might be equally effective. We must inquire if we have the time. The bombs, the planes, the determined men to fly them, we do have. But let us suppose the effort took thirty days. Meanwhile, other assaults would probably be launched against us. Our citizens would continue to battle one another, freeze, soon die of hunger, go mad.

In the end, there might remain in both nations that utter wreckage of civilization which the few predicted for so long, and the many refused to believe. But that is a
second
possibility.”

“The third?” a woman’s voice called. “What’s the third?”

For a moment, the new President reverted to his old habit as Speaker of the House. “The lady from Massachusetts asks the third. I’ll explain as best I am able. I am not a scientist. The military will amplify.”

He frowned, cleared his throat. “First, I must state that my late, great predecessor, though he worked hopefully for peace, somewhat feared a situation like this. He feared, as did his Chiefs of Staff, the very danger we have encountered. He, with them, prepared a threat of their own—of our own—a dreadful threat, intended only for use as a menace. You are familiar with the
Nautilus
. . . .”

The silence in the old room was absolute.

“. . . the first of the atomic-powered submarines. As the ‘peace’ negotiations reached a high degree of intensity, it was felt in the—the”—he stumbled—“White House that the enemy was probably sincere. But the possibility remained that such negotiations might be the immediate precursor to the disaster that now is fact. Or to the threat of it. Consequently the
Nautilus
was drydocked and secretly reconverted. She is still a ship, still a submarine, still atomically driven, but she is also a bomb. She contains, now, the largest hydrogen bomb ever assembled, and around it and in her sides, replacing armor, and in her keel, for ballast, is the element cobalt with other readily radioactivated elements. She stands, this day, in the North Sea, awaiting orders. She could be sent swiftly into the Baltic. She could approach the ways to the enemy, dive to bottom, and explode herself.”

“The crew. . . ?” someone interrupted.

Gates said nothing. His long, thin face turned toward the questioner and his hazel eyes burned into the man. Then, at last, he spoke again.

“This is one of the greater-than-super weapons mentioned at least as far back as the Truman Administration. Its exact effect is not known and cannot be calculated. A few scientists fear its detonation at sea bottom might actually set up the planetary chain reaction. Most say not.

I believe the latter. It would, however, unquestionably devastate the enemy’s nation, obliterate perhaps two-thirds of his people and leave hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of square miles of enemy land radioactive, deadly even to vegetation. It might, according to the uncertain vicissitudes of weather, of high-altitude winds, of the so-called jet of air which waveringly girdles our planet, transport a large amount of this lethal material across the Pacific and conceivably leave here a lesser but real train of death and sickness, sterility, misery and additional fear. That is an indeterminate risk involved in the weapon’s use. It is our third possibility—the only alternative I can offer to a surrender that would surely become unconditional with passing time, or to a continuation of the existing holocaust with present weapons. I shall have a few of the military men and scientists speak to you. . . .”

An hour and a quarter later, it was voted to order the
Nautilus
to proceed—and to demolish herself, and the foe.

They could have seen it from the planets.

On Mars, if there are naked eyes, they could have seen it without other aid.

On that Christmas night, the Baltic Sea erupted. There was no warning. The faint signals the
Nautilus
received were not intercepted by the beleaguered but seemingly victorious Reds.

She penetrated the Gulf of Finland, dove to bottom and her skipper, summoning the men, prayed, Bashed a last word, and touched a small button installed some hours before on the table directly below the periscope. The rays, the temperatures, vaporized Finland’s Gulf in a split part of an instant. The sea’s bottom was melted. The Light reached out into the Universe.

Finland was not. Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, they were not. Kronstadt melted, Leningrad.

The blast kicked up the ashes that once had been Moscow, collected the burning environs and pulverized them and hurled their dust at the Urals. In the ensuing dark, a Thing swelled above the western edge of Russia, alight, alive, of a size to bulge beyond the last particles of earth’s air.

On the wind currents it came forward, forward across the north-sloping plains, a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles, and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land that night, and the day after, and the next. It thinned, over Siberia, thinned and spread until it was no longer blinding, till men could no longer see it or smell it or taste it. But still, where it rolled, day or night, they died.

The farther it surged from the reshaped Finnish Gulf, where the sea had come sparkling back, the longer men took to perish. But they perished. The radiation-emitting particles filled their lungs, they contaminated their food, they polluted . their water and could not be filtered out.

Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened and perished in a day, a week, two weeks—men and women and children, all of them, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. Wherever they took refuge, men still perished. On the high Urals in the terrible cold. In the deepest mines, the steam-spitting darkness. There was no refuge from the death; it took them all, the birds of arctic winter, the persistent insects which had survived geological ages, the bacteria—all.

Surrender of those who survived, the southern dwellers of the nation, was delayed because they could not find who should make the offer; they did not care how abject the terms might be. But days passed. A week. Two weeks. And the message winged from Tiflis. It was over. The last war was finished.

The last great obstacle to freedom had been removed from the human path.

On a sunny afternoon, just before June became July, during a Midwestern heat wave, a young man pushed a hand mower back and forth over a Walnut Street lawn in the city of Green Prairie.

He looked to be twenty-two or -three years old though, actually, Ted Conner was not yet nineteen. He had grown big, like his Oakley grandsire, the blacksmith, bigger than his father, a good deal bigger than his older brother. In addition, there was something about his face (besides the scar on the forehead) which suggested more years than the teens. He limped, too. It was noticeable when he walked over to a shady spot behind the ferns and picked up a glass jug of water. His right leg was slightly shorter than his left.

He took a bandanna handkerchief from the belt that held up his shorts; he wiped his mouth, then his brow. After that he returned to work. But before he started the mower’s clattering monody he looked at the house for a moment.

Two and a half years had passed, since the Bomb.

But only the attic windows were boarded up. Glass was still rationed-along with a hundred other things—but householders had enough, now, to take care of two floors per family.

It was the necessary new construction, as much as replacement, which had caused the shortage to last so long.

The Conner house needed paint. Every house did, these days. But paint was short, also, though not rationed. They hadn’t bothered yet to try to get the house back exactly on its foundations. Men had come, that first winter, with powerful jacks and pushed the frame building as near to its proper position as they could. Joe Dennison had helped with his bulldozer. And Ed Pratt had followed with bricks and cement, bringing out “temporary” foundations to support overhanging sills and to close in the basement. A power pole, sawed on a diagonal at the top, leaned across the drive from a concrete base on the ground to the eaves, a brace against winter wind.

Have to paint that pole, Ted thought; wouldn’t want it to rot. He moved again, drowning out the cicadas in the trees with a not dissimilar sound.

His father had boarded up all the windows that first winter, when there was no window glass and when he had been in the hospital. At the Country Club, that was—with many other people. He was among the lucky. Plenty of them hadn’t left that place alive. They’d died of about everything you could think of, injuries and burns, shock and even of radiation, like that Catholic priest and the Baptist minister. So
many
people. . . !

For a moment, the fear of those days returned to him. No one had been sure of anything.

Everything was short—food, blankets, bandages, medicine. Nobody knew whether the war was over or not; they knew only that the Soviet planes didn’t come back. Mobs were ravaging the countryside; for weeks it seemed the armed forces couldn’t stop them, couldn’t restore order.

couldn’t prevent the looting and the murdering and everything else. Everybody was scared, scared the bombers might return, scared the mobs might come back to the cities or to what was left of cities.

That time passed.

Peace came. Then, for more weeks, the burying. It was still going on when he could sit up in bed and look out the window. They made a new cemetery of the Green Prairie Country Club golf course, the last nine holes. Digging and blasting all through February and March, burying people, or whatever they found that had been a person. Later that spring, in common with other bombed cities, they designed their Cenotaph and it stood now above the graves-a monument to the ninety-some thousand known dead of Green Prairie. There was one in River City, also-for a hundred and twenty thousand. At what had been the ball park.

Ted mowed down the edge of the sidewalk.

It must have been—when?—around June, around this time, two years back, that they’d stopped all the mobs. What a job!
Still
a job! Some of the towns and villages that city dwellers had overrun were almost as bad off, afterward, as the bombed areas. Nobody knew, exactly, how many people had been killed by the crazed fugitives or how many people had been killed in self-defense and killed by the soldiers and the police. The total was thought to be more than a million.

More than two million people had been hurt that way, besides, and as many more driven mad.