Triumph (23 page)

Then, in a matter of many hours of at first slow, finally swift, northing, just before the fall of the now lengthening arctic night, the
Tiger Shark's
periscope emerged, between the ice cakes of a broken floe. After a careful, 360-degree search, her snorkel and then her conning tower rose, scattering ice chunks with a roar. At last her decks came clear. Men in radiation-shielding arctic clothing then charged on deck wearing masks and began the strange operation of wiping down the wet, somewhat rusted plates of the sub's

"sail," or superstructure. That job completed, they applied themselves, in the dark and using dimmed hand-lamps, to a second, odd chore: all the upper works of the boat were painted white. Thus, when the sun again rose for its next brief curve across these wastes of polar ice, the visible part of the boat gleamed white, and near-unseeable, amid the ragged heaps of berg and pack ice around her.

Meantime, Kim Daley, the communications officer, had not slept.

Trying one frequency after another, one channel after another, now this communication band, now that, he had gathered in hundreds of messages--most, mere scraps of useless international talk from below the equator, but a few, of consummate interest.

In the morning, on orders, he wakened his skipper, after the latter had allowed himself a three-hour sleep. Seeing Daley, and as he put on those few garments he'd removed, the skipper said, "You got news for me, eh?"

"Plenty!"

"Okay. I'll grab some coffee. Come on! Anything from the U.S.S.R., though?"

"I'll say!"

When they were alone in the officers' mess with two mugs of coffee, the skipper's

"black," Daley's "blonde and sweet"--in Navy parlance, sugared and with cream--Daley's report began. "All the Soviet signals were in code. Brief. And fairly short-range. But
Russian alphabet.
Besides--!"

"You got
fixes?"

Daley nodded. "The whole navigation gang stayed on it all night. The enemy is talking from what seems to be three spots down in the Caucasus area, under the mountains. From made caves, I'd think. Three more in the Urals. One in Baikal area. And one in the Sea of Okhotsk, inside Kamchatka. A job like the one we located yesterday, we assume. And just before the sun rose, our lads tuned in on
our
little Soviet submarine city, loud and clear. Millen, Davis, MacKaye, and Dunn are sweating to break the code."

"Even if they can't, we've got
nine
of the hide-outs staked!
Boy!"

"We could handle up to a dozen.
Easy!"

The skipper was annoyed. "Buried how deep, under mountains how high? With openings how small? And how well blocked up? We could hit, or hit near, all nine, but we gotta get
help,
if there is any to get, to make sure all of maybe nine, or ten, or twenty--

are given a dose that'll make it not just red-hot in their holes but, if we can manage, not even possible to walk away, for a long, long time! Besides, we gotta try to make sure that the points of sending you located, aren't remote from the damned ratholes! Aren't blinds.

Again, if that can be done! So what we do first--"

"Break radio silence?"

Dingo ignored that. "--is, get on down below the equator—fast--checking at night, for new bearings on the ratholes, and
then
let out a peep, to see if anybody else can join what, I hope before God, will be a really total massacre. The
------s!"

Daley responded to the lurid names his skipper had called the enemy with a smile devoid of amusement. "I'll buy that! And raise it to the
nth
power! History's most treacherous, murdering huns, vandals, barbarians, you-name-'em, were
amateurs,
compared to those Soviet--hell! there's no word in English that
fits
'em!"

"Yeah," Dingo nodded. "Anything else?"

"Lot of miscellaneous stuff, giving a better idea, if we needed one, that what we used to call the good, old U.S.A.,
ain't!
And--"

The captain was hurrying away when he heard the last word. He halted. "And--?"

"--one, kind of odd thing." Daley shrugged and went on, since the skipper waited.

"We got a message, in plain Morse code, sent rather well but by an amateur, the gang thought, from
some
spot in the New England area, where a handful of American
civilians
are still holed up."

Dingo said, almost disgustedly,
"Hell!
In spite of the shooting and the sodium bath the Reds gave the home folks, there are probably thousands still alive! Temporarily."

"I know. But these folks are far better fixed even than any military people in rock mountains. Against the worst. Better off than those who've shot their wad, come out, and died."

"Yeah?"

"Thought you'd like to know that. Twelve men and women.

Two kids. Asking 'anybody' to answer, and stating they are set for an indefinite period. Their words. Giving their exterior radiation level at sixty-three roentgens. And other data. The poor so-and-so's!"

The skipper smiled briefly. "Maybe a day will come when we can answer 'em--

even go
get 'em,
somehow I Though, more likely--"

No need to finish. More likely, in a final mission, the
Tiger Shark
would pay the price its officers and men knew other submarines had paid for striking Russia, however swiftly they'd submerged and however stealthily rushed away: convergence of Soviet subs and planes from unknown but still-secure regions, on the belated attacker; discovery; and extinction in subsea nuclear upheavals. Still, now, there seemed a thin chance. . . .

The "poor so-and-so's" for a time had been sending their dispatches over the radio set Ben had designed, to employ available antennas, and with on-hand materials. They ceased to flash forth their, for a time, regular announcement of the group's location, status, safety, long-range living capability, and so on, after some weeks. The reason for ceasing baffled them:

No one had replied.

They had listened to countless distant stations that seemed
able
to reply, if they wished. But nobody did.

What could be inferred from that silence?

After lunch, on the sixty-first day underground, Farr launched on one more repetitive discussion of that startling circumstance.

"Of course," he said, "the answer is, they are
scared
to reply to our signals. Ben is sure and so am I that we've been heard--in Africa, Latin America, Central America, probably even Australia.
Why
are they scared to respond, then?"

"There could only be the one reason we've already mulled over," Ben said slowly.

"They won't respond because they still fear some sort of Soviet retaliation. On
them.

Which means they must know or at least suspect that the Reds still have, somewhere, the power to hurt, and hurt bad."

Faith spoke--Faith, who had proven to be very well informed about the Soviets and had steadily added to that unexpected knowledge by reading, since their immolation.

"Perhaps nobody in the Safe Zone--" they'd come to call the nonradiated half-and-more of the planet by that term--" has the nerve, yet, to do anything but care for themselves and yell for help, for themselves. I mean, maybe they feel their internal troubles will continue--"

George interrupted, "There've been no H-shots for weeks."

"Do we know everything's over, for sure?" Faith smiled apologetically at George.

"After all. Does anybody? Was there any surrender? Are Commies in the Safe Zone raising hell? Has victory been proclaimed by a single soul?"

"I agree with Faith," Vance said. "She's argued, whenever this thing came up, that the Reds had the world so scared, even before they erased the Temperate Zone and got rubbed out for doing it, that no one will risk anything that sounds like a friendly act toward the United States, even if it concerns only a mere fourteen Americans."

"Oh, heck!" Peter "the Meek" (as they occasionally called him, in amiable, private talks) said that. "Surely, somebody has guts enough to radio something to us! I'd do it!"

Vance chuckled. "By golly, Pete, I believe you would! But remember, you haven't survived a world holocaust
outdoors!
It may make a lot of difference."

Valerie re-entered the Hall just then, saying, "Who's for roller-skating practice with me?"

She completed the cheery question, then staggered.

The seated people felt the Hall heave, the floor shake, the passages vibrate. An alarm bell rang in Passage C--a bell that meant something had stopped one of the diesels.

Dust and bits of stone fell from the now pale-rose ceiling, far overhead. The earthquake was repeated, less violently. Then, it seemed, the deep-buried labyrinth began to shudder under an interminable but diminishing series of temblors.

Ben leaped to his feet, got his balance, and rushed for the seismographs. George was on his heels. Lodi, just then entering the Hall, pale and questioning, turned to follow without a word.

The instruments soon let them compute, in general, what had happened--what was, in fact, still happening, in a wave of titanic explosions that moved westward from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific: a great sweep of the United States by many hundreds of blasts.

While the group had been considering any possible further Soviet menace, the menace had materialized. But not really as a coincidence, inasmuch as they spent many hours over the question, once they had slowly, and dejectedly, realized their signals were not answered.

Ben began studying the zigzag lines drawn by the quake-measuring instruments, racing to those located at the farthest-practicable distance and gathering more material there, making pencil calculations for which George and Lodi ran about gathering data from other recording devices. In half an hour they could report. By that time not even the faintest tremor could be detected.

A computer had spilled out a string of figures and letters, a message coded in its special language. Ben translated it to the entire group standing in the passageway:

"It looks," he said hoarsely, "like this: some three hundred or more bombs, of about one megaton each, exploded in about five bursts per cluster, near the ground, starting here. One, the biggest shock we felt, was very close to us. These shots moved east to west in a random but apparently pretty thorough plastering of all the United States.

Some short while after each burst of five or six near-the-ground warheads, a real monster of a blast in the atmosphere far above went off. Say, about sixty-seventy of such high bursts of, maybe, fifty megatons each."

"It's insane!" Vance Farr cried from the passage. Ben nodded. Then leaped to his feet. "The counters!" he shouted, and rushed toward another chamber.

There, again assisted by George and Lodi, he first listened with earphones to a roar of "clicks" far too fast for enumerating. Then, as his two assistants switched them on, he, Vance, Valerie, and the others looked numbly at dials that computed outside radiation levels at various distances around the top of Sachem's Watch.

Those dials had shown for weeks a steady drop in the outside count. But now they were quivering up and up until they reached a point at which Ben and George switched them over to other mechanisms designed to register not in hundreds but in thousands of roentgens. And those big-scale dials moved, shakily, up and up, past two thousand, three, four, five, and continued climbing.

Farr cursed softly.

His wife prayed, in a clear, quiet, steadying voice.

Nobody else spoke for a while. They kept watching Ben and his two helpers.

George and Lodi merely gazed at their chief. He was reflecting, leaning against a naked stone wall in a room jammed with equipment and piled with electronic "black boxes," his body relaxed, his blue eyes blank, his fingers tugging at his scimitar-like nose. Presently, still oblivious, he lighted a cigarette. And at last he turned to speak:

"It can only be one thing, I believe. If I'm right, a mighty ingenious, a devilish, thing. A thing probably set up to go off at this late date automatically or, maybe, on command. A battery of specialized, invulnerably-hidden superrockets--less than a hundred, if our computer's correct. This battery--or these batteries--have sent over the Atlantic huge rockets that in turn ejected toward the American earth five or six smaller rockets apiece, accelerated so as to strike the earth far ahead of the main vehicle. The comparatively small ones blew up on or just above ground. Then, after they'd exploded, but not long after--the timing had to be good! the big hydrogen warhead in each still-high-up main rocket went!"

Lotus, whose
expertise
in mathematics had already been applied in many practical fashions new to her but in which she had proven extremely able, said, softly, "I
think
I see! It was rigged so the big, high burst would blow
back toward the ground
some great part of the hot material from smaller H-blasts beneath, pressing it back, to spread out in the lower air,
instead
of rising to the stratosphere?" She looked inquiringly at Ben.

He nodded. "Must be."

"But
why,
at this late date, in the merciful name of heaven?" Farr asked.

Ben tried to speak in measured tones. "Well. First, we long ago had some piggyback rockets a lot like that, though without the big high bang, delayed feature. So it's a workable gambit, rocketwise. Second, because as the counters made plain, the one-megaton low-level bursts were very dirty. Very radioactive. H-bombs with cobalt jackets, maybe. Cesium. Strontium. Take time to tell, by measuring the radioactivity from its peak into the first phases of decrease. Time to calculate half-lives of the hot elements to be sure
what
they used. And Lodi's correct. The big bangs, high up, pushed back the already-rising, very radioactive lower bursts, and so, spread the fallout. Very smart."

"But, man,
Why?"
Vance's voice was tortured.

"I suppose," Ben said, and by then the entire company was pale with dismay,

"because the enemy figured that around now, any remaining, safely-sheltered Americans-