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Title: Not This August
Author: Kornbluth, Cyril M. (1924-1958)
Date of first publication: 1955
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 27 July 2011
Date last updated: 27 July 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #827

This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






NOT
THIS AUGUST


C. M. KORNBLUTH



DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK


_The characters and the incidents in this book are entirely the product
of the author's imagination and have no relation to any person or event
in real life._


Copyright , 1955, by C. M. Kornbluth
All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States of America


_To my son David_


"Not this August, nor this September; you have this year to do what you
like. Not next August, nor next September; that is still too soon . . .
But the year after that or the year after that they fight."

                                               Ernest Hemingway
                                                 _Notes on the Next War_


BOOK 1




CHAPTER ONE


April 17, 1965, the blackest day in the history of the United States,
started like any other day for Billy Justin. Thirty-seven years old,
once a free-lance commercial artist, a pensioned veteran of Korea, he
was now a dairy farmer, and had been during the three years of the war.
It was that or be drafted to a road crew--with great luck, a factory
bench.

He rose, therefore, at five-fifteen, shut off his alarm clock, and went,
bleary-eyed, in bathrobe and slippers, to milk his eight cows. He hefted
the milk cans to the platform for the pickup truck of the Eastern
Milkshed Administration and briefly considered washing out the milking
machine and pails as he ought to. He then gave a disgusted look at his
barn, his house, his fields--the things that once were supposed to
afford him a decent, dignified retirement and had become instead
vampires of his leisure--and shambled back to bed.

At the more urbane hour of ten he _really_ got up and had breakfast,
including an illegal egg withheld from his quota. Over unspeakably
synthetic coffee he consulted the electricity bulletin tacked to his
kitchen wall and sourly muttered: "Goody." Today was the day Chiunga
County rural residents got four hours of juice--ten-thirty to
two-thirty.

The most important item was recharging his car battery. He vaguely
understood that it ruined batteries to just stand when they were run
down. Still in bathrobe and slippers he went to his sagging garage,
unbolted the corroded battery terminals, and clipped on the leads from
the trickle charger that hung on the wall. Not that four hours of
trickle would do a lot of good, he reflected, but maybe he could
scrounge some tractor gas somewhere. Old man Croley down in the store at
Norton was supposed to have an arrangement with the Liquid Fuels
Administration tank-truck driver.

Ten-thirty struck while he was still in the garage; he saw the needle on
the charger dial kick over hard and heard a buzz. So _that_ was all
right.

Quite a few lights were on in the house. The last allotment of juice had
come in late afternoon and evening, which made considerably more sense
than ten-thirty to two-thirty. Chiunga County, he decided after
reflection, was getting the short end as usual.

The radio, ancient and slow to warm up, boomed at him suddenly: ". . .
bring you all in your time of trial and striving, the Hour of Faith.
Beloved sisters and brethren, let us pray. Almighty Father----"

Justin said without rancor, "Amen," and turned the dial to the other
CONELRAD station. Early in the war that used to be one of the biggest of
the nuisances: only two broadcast frequencies allowed instead of the
old American free-for-all which would have guided bombers or missiles.
With only two frequencies you had, of course, only two programs, and
frequently both of them stank. It was surprising how easily you forgot
the early pique when Current Conservation went through and you rarely
heard the programs.

He was pleased to find a newscast on the other channel.

"The Defense Department announced today that the fighting south of El
Paso continues to rage. Soviet units have penetrated to within three
hundred yards of the American defense perimeter. Canadian armored forces
are hammering at the flanks of their salient in a determined attack
involving hundreds of Acheson tanks and 280-millimeter self-propelled
cannon. The morale of our troops continues high and individual acts of
heroism are too numerous to describe here.

"Figures released today indicate that the enemy on the home front is
being as severely and as justly dealt with as the foreign invader to
whom he pledges allegiance. A terse announcement from Lewisburg Federal
Penitentiary included this report: 'Civilians executed for treason
during the six-month period just ending--784.' From this reporter to the
FBI, a hearty 'Well done!'

"The Attorney General's office issued a grim and pointed warning today
that the Harboring of Deserters Act means precisely what it says and
will be enforced to the letter. The government will seek the death
penalty against eighty-seven-year-old Mrs. Arthur Schwartz of Chicago,
who allegedly gave money and food to her grandson, Private William O.
Temple, as he was passing through Chicago after deserting under fire
from the United States Army. Temple, of course, was apprehended in
Windsor, Ontario, on March 17 and shot.

"Good news for candy lovers! The Nonessential Foodstuffs Agency reports
that a new substitute chocolate has passed testing and will soon be
available to B-card holders at all groceries. It's just two points for a
big, big, half-ounce bar! From this reporter to the hard-working boys
and girls of the NFA, a hearty----"

Justin, a little nauseated, snapped the set off. It was time to walk up
to his mailbox anyway. He hoped to hitch a ride on into Norton with the
postwoman. The connecting rod of his well pump had broken and he was
getting sick of hoisting up his water with a bucket. Old man Croley
might have a rod or know somebody who'd make him one.

He dressed quickly and sloppily, and didn't even think of shaving. "How
are you fixed for blades?" wasn't much of a joke by then. He puffed up
the steep quarter mile to his box and leaned on it, scanning the winding
blacktop to the north, from which she would come. He understood that a
new girl had been carrying the mail for ten days or so and wondered what
had happened to Mrs. Elkins--fat, friendly, unkempt Mrs. Elkins, who
couldn't add and whose mailbox notes in connection with postage due and
stamps and money orders purchased were marvels of illegibility and
confusion. He hadn't seen the new girl yet, nor had there been any
occasion for notes between them.

Deep in the cloudless blue sky to the north there was a sudden streak of
white scribbled across heaven--condensation trail of a stratosphere
guided missile. The wild jogs and jolts meant it was set for evasive
action. Not very interested, he decided that it must be a Soviet job
trying just once more for the optical and instrument shops of Corning,
or possibly the fair-sized air force base at Elmira. Launched, no doubt,
from a Russian or Chinese carrier somewhere in the Atlantic. But as he
watched, Continental Air Defense came through again. It almost always
did. Half a dozen thinner streaks of white soared vertically from
nowhere, bracketed the bogey, and then there was a golden glint of light
up there that meant mission accomplished. Those CAD girls were _good_,
he appreciatively thought. Too bad about Chicago and Pittsburgh, but
they were green then.

He sighed with boredom and shaded his eyes to look down the blacktop
again. What he saw made him blink incredulously. A kiddie-car going
faster than a kiddie-car should--or a magnified roller skate--but with
two flailing pistons----

The preposterous vehicle closed up to him and creaked to a stop, and was
suddenly no longer preposterous. It was a neatly made three-wheel wagon
steered by a tiller bar on the front wheel. The power was supplied by a
man in khaki who alternately pushed two levers connected to a
crankshaft, which was also the rear axle of the cart. The man had no
legs below his thighs.

He said cheerfully to Justin: "Need a farmhand, mister?"

Justin, manners completely forgotten, could only stare.

The man said: "I get around in this thing all right and it gives me
shoulders like a bull. Be surprised what I can do. String fence, run a
tractor if you're lucky, ride a horse if you ain't, milk, cut wood,
housework--and besides, who else can you get, mister?"

He took out a hunk of dense, homemade bread and began to chew on it.

Justin said slowly: "I know what you mean, and I'd be very happy to hire
you if I could, but I can't. I'm just snake-hipping through the
Farm-or-Fight Law with eight cows. I haven't got pasture for more and I
can't buy grain, of course. There just isn't work for another pair of
hands or food for another mouth."

"I see," the man said agreeably. "There anybody around here who might
take me on?"

"Try the Shiptons," Justin said. "Down this road, third house on the
left. It used to be white with green shutters. About two miles. They're
always moaning about they need help and can't get it."

"Thanks a lot, mister. I'll call their bluff. Would you mind giving me a
push off? This thing starts hard for all it runs good once it's going."

"Wait a minute," Justin said almost angrily. "Do you have to do this? I
mean, I tremendously admire your spirit, but Goddamn it, the country's
supposed to see that you fellows don't have to break your backs on a
farm!"

"Spirit hell," the man grinned. "No offense, but you farmers just don't
_know_."

"Isn't your pension adequate? My God, it should be. For _that_."

"It's adequate," the man said. "Three hundred a month--more'n I ever
made in my life. But I got good and sick of the trouble collecting it.
Skipped months, get somebody else's check, get the check but they forgot
to sign it. And when you get the right check with the right amount and
signed right, you got four-five days' wait at the bank standing in line.
I figured it out and wrote 'em they could cut me to a hundred so long as
they paid it in silver dollars. Got back a letter saying my bid for
twenty-five gross of chrome-steel forgings was satisfactory and a
contract letter would be forthcoming. I just figured things are pretty
bad, they _might_ get worse, and I want to be on a farm when they do, if
they do. No offense, as I say, but you people don't know how good you
have it. No cholera up here for instance, is there?"

"Cholera? Good God, no!"

"There--you see? Mind pushing me off now, mister? It's hot just sitting
here."

Justin pushed him off. He went twinkling down the road,
left-hand-right-hand-left-hand-right----

_Cholera?_

He hadn't even asked the man where. New York? Boston? But he got the
Sunday _Times_ every week----

The postwoman drove up in a battered '54 Buick. She was young and
pretty, and she was obviously scared stiff to find a strange unshaven
man waiting for her at a stop.

"I'm Billy Justin," he hastily explained through the window lowered a
crack. "One of your best customers, even if I did forget to shave.
Anything for me today?"

She poked his copy of the _Times_ through the crack, smiled nervously,
and shifted preparatory to starting.

"Please," he said, "I was wondering if you'd do me a considerable favor.
Drive me in to Norton?"

"I was told not to," she said. "Deserters, shirkers--you never know."

"Ma'am," he said, "I'm an honest dairyman, redeemed by the Farm-or-Fight
Law from a life of lucrative shame as a commercial artist. All I have to
offer is gratitude and my sincere assurance that I wouldn't bother you
if I could possibly make it there and back on foot in time for the
milking."

"Commercial artist?" she asked. "Well, I suppose it's all right." She
smiled and opened the door.

It was four miles to Norton, with a stop at every farmhouse. It took an
hour. He found out that her name was Betsy Cardew. She was twenty. She
had been studying physics at Cornell, which exempted her from service
except for R.W.O.T.C. courses.

"Why not admit it?" She shrugged. "I flunked out. It was nonsense my
tackling physics in the first place, but my father insisted. Well, he
found out he couldn't buy brains for me, so here I am."

She seemed to regard "here"--in the driver's seat of a rural free
delivery car, one of the cushiest jobs going--as a degrading,
uncomfortable place.

He snapped his fingers. "Cardew," he said. "T. C.?"

"That's my pop."

And that explained why Betsy wasn't in the WAC or the CAD or a labor
battalion sewing shirts for soldiers. T. C. Cardew lived in a colonial
mansion on a hill, and he was a National Committeeman. He shopped in
Scranton or New York but he owned the ground on which almost every store
in Chiunga County stood.

"Betsy," he said tentatively, "we haven't known each other very long,
but I have come to regard you with reverent affection. I feel toward
you as a brother. Don't you think it would be nice if Mr. T. C. Cardew
adopted me to make it legal?"

She laughed sharply. "It's nice to hear a joke again," she said. "But
frankly you wouldn't like it. To be blunt, Mr. T. C. Cardew is a skunk.
I had a nice mother once, but he divorced her."

He was considerably embarrassed. After a pause he asked: "You been in
any of the big cities lately? New York, Boston?"

"Boston last month. My plane from Ithaca got forced into the northbound
traffic pattern and the pilot didn't dare turn. We would've gone down on
the CAD screen as a bogey, and _wham_. The ladies don't ask questions
first any more. Not since Chicago and Pittsburgh."

"How was Boston?"

"I just saw the airport. The usual thing--beggars, wounded, garbage in
the streets. No flies--too early in the year."

"I have a feeling that we in the country don't know what's going on
outside our own little milk routes. I also have a feeling that the folks
in Boston don't know about the folks in New York and vice versa."

"Mr. Justin, your feeling is well grounded," she said emphatically. "The
big cities are hellholes because conditions have become absolutely
unbearable and still people have to bear them. Did you know New York's
under martial law?"

"No!"

"Yes. The 104th Division and the 33rd Armored Division are in town.
They're needed in El Paso, but they were yanked North to keep New York
from going through with a secession election."

He almost said something stupid ("I didn't read about it in the
_Times_") but caught himself. She went on: "Of course, I shouldn't be
telling you state secrets, but I've noticed at home that a state secret
is something known to everybody who makes more than fifty thousand a
year and to nobody who makes less. Don't you feel rich now, Mr.
Justin?"

"Filthy rich. Don't worry, by the way. I won't pass anything on to
anybody."

"Bless you, I know that! Your mail's read, your phone's monitored, and
your neighbors are probably itching to collect a bounty on you for
turning you in as a D-or-S." A "D-or-S" was a "disaffected or seditious
person"--not quite a criminal and certainly not a full-fledged citizen.
He usually found himself making camouflage nets behind barbed wire in
Nevada, never fully realizing what had hit him.

"You're a little rough on my neighbors. Nobody gets turned in around
here for shooting off his mouth. It's still a small corner of America."

Insanely dangerous to be talking like that to a stranger--insanely
dangerous and wildly exhilarating. Sometimes he hiked over to the truck
farm of his friends the Bradens, also city exiles, and they had sessions
into the small hours that cleared their minds of gripes intolerably
accumulated like pus in a boil. Amy Braden's powerful home brew helped.
. . .

_Rumble-rumble_, they rolled over the Lehigh's tracks at the Norton
grade crossing; Croley's store was dead ahead at the end of the short
main street. Norton, New York, had a population of about sixty old
people and no young ones. Since a few brief years of glory a century and
a half ago as a major riverboat town on the Susquehanna it had been
running down. But somehow Croley made a store there pay.

She parked neatly and handed him a big sheaf of mail. "Give these to the
Great Stone Face," she said. "I don't like to look at him."

"Thanks for the ride," he said. "And the talk."

She flashed a smile. "We must do it more often," and drove away.

Immediately, thinking of his return trip, he canvassed the cars and
wagons lined up before Croley's. When he recognized Gus Feinblatt's
stake wagon drawn by Tony and Phony, the two big geldings, he knew he
had it made. Gus was that fantastic rarity, a Jewish farmer, and he
lived up the road from Justin.

The store was crowded down to the tip of its ell. Everybody in Norton
was there, standing packed in utter silence. Croley's grim face swiveled
toward him as he entered; then the storekeeper nodded at a freezer
compartment where he could sit.

Justin wanted to yell: "What is this, a gag?"

Then the radio, high on a shelf, spoke. As it spoke, Justin realized
that it had been saying the same thing for possibly half an hour, over
and over again, but that people stayed and listened to it over and over
again, numbly waiting for somebody to cry "Hoax" or "Get away from that
mike you dirty Red" or anything but what it would say.

The radio said: "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United
States." Then the inimitable voice, but weary, deathly weary. "My fellow
Americans. Our armed forces have met with terrible defeat on land and at
sea. I have just been advised by General Fraley that he has
unconditionally surrendered the Army of the Southwest to Generals
Novikov and Feng. General Fraley said the only choice before him was
surrender or the annihilation of his troops to the last man by
overwhelmingly superior forces. History must judge the wisdom of his
choice; here and now I can only say that his capitulation removes the
last barrier to the northward advance of the armies of the Soviet Union
and the Chinese People's Republic.

"My fellow citizens, I must now tell you that for three months the
United States has not possessed a fleet in being. It was destroyed in a
great air-sea battle off the Azores, a battle whose results it was
thought wisest to conceal temporarily.

"We are disarmed. We are defeated.

"I have by now formally communicated the capitulation of the United
States of America to the U.S.S.R. and the C.P.R. to our embassy in
Switzerland, where it will be handed to the Russian and Chinese
embassies.

"As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States I now
order all officers and enlisted men and women to cease fire. Maintain
discipline, hold your ranks, but offer no opposition to the advance of
the invading armies, for resistance would be a futile waste of
lives--and an offense for which the invading armies might retaliate
tenfold. You will soon be returned to your homes and families in an
orderly demobilization. Until then maintain discipline. You were a great
fighting force, but you were outnumbered.

"To the civilians of the United States I also say 'Maintain discipline.'
Your task is the harder, for it must be self-discipline. Keep order.
Obey the laws of the land. Respect authority. Make no foolish
demonstrations. Comport yourselves so that our conquerors will respect
us.

"Beyond that I have no advice to give. The terms of surrender will reach
me in due course and will be immediately communicated to you. Until then
may God bless you all and stay you in this hour of trial."

There was a long pause, and the radio said: "Ladies and gentlemen, the
President of the United States."

"My fellow Americans. Our armed forces have met with . . ."

Justin looked around him incredulously and saw that most of them were
silently crying.




CHAPTER TWO


Along about one o'clock people began to drift dazedly from the store--to
their homes in Norton to talk in stunned whispers on the board sidewalk
fronting the grocery. Old man Croley turned the radio off when a girl's
voice said between replays of the surrender statement that there would
be a new announcement broadcast at 9:00 P.M. for which electric-current
restrictions would be temporarily relaxed.

"That'll be the surrender terms," Gus Feinblatt said to Justin.

"I guess so. Gus--what do you think?"

There were four thousand years of dark history in Feinblatt's eyes. "I
think the worst is yet to come, Billy."

"You'll get your kids back."

"At such a price. I don't know whether it's worth it . . . Well, life
goes on. Mr. Croley?"

The storekeeper looked up. He didn't say "Yes?" or "What can I do for
you?" He never did; he looked and he waited and he never called anybody
by name. He wasn't an old-timer as old-timers went in Norton; he had
come ten years ago from a grocery in Minnesota, and had used those ten
years well. Justin knew he sold hardware, fencing, coal, fuel oil,
fertilizer, feed and seed--in short, everything a farmer needed to earn
his living--as well as groceries. Justin suspected that he also ran a
small private bank which issued loans at illegal rates of interest. He
did know that there were farmers who turned pale when Croley looked
speculatively at them, and farm wives who cursed him behind his back. He
was sixty-five, childless, and married to an ailing, thin woman who
spent most of her time in the apartment above the store.

"Mr. Croley," Gus said, "I might as well get my feed. My wagon's outside
the storeroom."

Croley put out his hand and waited. Gus laid twenty-seven dollars in it,
and still the hand was out, waiting. "Coupons?" Gus asked wryly.

"You heard him," Croley said. (After a moment you figured out that "him"
was the President, who had said that civilians were to continue as
before, maintaining order.) Gus tore ration coupons out of his "F" book
and laid them on the money. The hand was withdrawn and Croley stumped
outside to unlock the storeroom door and stand by, watching, as
Feinblatt and Justin loaded sacks of feed onto the stake wagon. When
the last one went _bump_ on the bed, he relocked the door, turned, and
went back into his grocery.

"Gus," Justin said, "would you mind waiting a minute? I want to see if
Croley happens to have a pump rod for me--and then I'd like to bum a
ride home from you."

"Glad to have your company," Feinblatt said, politely abstracted.

Croley listened to Justin in silence, reached under his counter, and
banged a pump rod down in front of his customer. He snapped:
"Twelve-fifty without hardware coupon. Three-fifty with."

The old skunk knew, of course, that Justin had used up his quarterly
allotment of hardware coupons to fix his milker. Justin paid, red-faced
with anger, and went out to climb alongside Feinblatt on the wagon. Gus
clucked at the horses and they moved off.

_Rumble-rumble_ over the Lehigh tracks and up Straw Hill Road, with Tony
and Phony pulling hard on the stiff grade, the wagon wheels crashing
into three years of unfixed chuckholes. Halfway up Feinblatt called
"Whoa" and fixed the brake. "Rest 'em a little," he said to Justin. "All
they get's hay, of course. Feed has to go to the cows. How's your herd?"

"All right, I guess," Justin said. "I wonder if I can let 'em go now.
You want to buy them? I guess I don't get drafted for a road gang now if
I stop farming."

"Think again," Feinblatt said. "My guess is you better stick to exactly
what you've been doing. Things are going to keep on this way for a
while--maybe quite a while. You know about the postal service in the
Civil War?"

Feinblatt was the local Civil War fanatic; every community seemed to
have one. They spent vacations touring the battlefields ecstatically,
comparing the ground with the maps. They had particular heroes among the
generals and they loved to guess at what would have happened if this
successful raid had failed, if that disastrous skirmish had been a
triumph.

"Lincoln called for volunteers," Gus Feinblatt said impressively.
"Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. The war was on. And yet for _months_
there was no interruption of the U. S. mail between the two countries.
Inertia, you call it. So maybe even if there isn't any war left to fight
now, maybe even if the Reds kick the President and Congress out of
Underground, D. C., there will still be people on the state and local
level to enforce drafting you for labor if you quit farming." He
released the brake and clucked to the horses. The bay geldings strained
up the hill again.

"I guess you're right," Justin said reluctantly. "Things won't be
squared away for a long while. I guess after things get settled, they
replace government people with Reds, if they can find enough." He
laughed unpleasantly. "Wait and see what happens to that snake Croley
then! If ever there was anybody who qualified in the Commie book as a
dirty capitalist exploiter it's our buddy down in Norton."

Feinblatt shrugged. "He made his bed. When I think my boys were fighting
for _him_----!" He spat over the side of the wagon, his face flushed.

"What do you hear from them?" Justin hastily asked. He had stopped one
in Korea, but was guiltily aware that there was a keener agony of war
that he had never known--the father's agony.

"Card from Daniel last week. Infantry replacement training center in
Montana. He was just finishing his basic. We worked out a kind of code,
so I know he was hoping they wouldn't ship him South as a rifleman, but
he thought they might. He was bucking for 75-millimeter recoilless
gunner. It would have kept him on ice for another two weeks. From David
not a word since he joined the 270th at El Paso. I don't know, Billy. I
just don't know. It's over, sure, they'll come back maybe, but I don't
know. . . ."

There was little more talk from then on. "Here's where I get off,"
Justin said at last. "My best to Leah." He swung down at his mailbox and
limped down the steep hill to his house. May be able to get some decent
shoes after things settle down, he thought bitterly. That'll be
something.

It still did not seem real.

Obviously things were badly disorganized somewhere. The house lights
kept going on and off; the phone rang his number now and then, but when
he answered there was only the open-circuit hum of a broken line. He
couldn't call anybody himself. He had a useless electric clock on the
mantel which told him that the electric service was going badly off the
beam. He timed the second hand with his watch and discovered that the
alternating current delivered to his house was wobbling between 30 and
120 cycles per second instead of flowing at an even 60 per. A bomb at
Niagara? Fighting for a power substation somewhere? Engineers quitting
their posts in despair?

But the Eastern Milkshed Administration truck had picked up his milk
cans while he was gone. He herded his cows into the barn, belatedly
washed the milker and pails, and relieved their full udders once more.
God alone knew whether the milk would ever reach (cholera-ridden?) New
York City, but the mail would go through, the EMA truck driver would
report him if there were no cans to pick up, and the administrative
machinery of a nation which was no longer alive would grind him through
the gears into a road-mending crew whether it mattered a damn or not.

Once during the afternoon somebody goofed at the local radio station,
which was rebroadcasting the message of capitulation. A woman's voice
screamed hysterically: "Rally, Americans! Fight the godless Reds! Fight
them in the streets, from behind bushes, house to house----" And then,
whoever she was, somebody dragged her away from the mike and said
wearily: "We regret the interruption of our service due to
circumstances beyond our control." Then, again: "Ladies and gentlemen,
the President of the United States."

"My fellow Americans. Our armed forces have met with a----"

The current went off again, this time for an hour.

    *    *    *    *    *

There was a calm, slow knock on the door. Through the kitchen window
Justin recognized Mister, sometimes The Reverend Mister Sparhawk.
Sparhawk happened to be the last man on Earth whom he wanted to see at
the moment. He also happened to be a man practically impossible to
insult, completely impervious to hints, maddeningly certain of his
righteousness.

Justin sighed and opened the door. "Come on in," he told the lean old
man. "Just, for God's sake, don't talk. Find something to eat and go
away." He opened his breadbox and retreated into the living room hoping
he wouldn't be pursued. Sparhawk was a ref, an Englishman. Justin was
sick of refs, and so was everybody. The refs from the Baltic, the
Balkans, Germany, France, England, Latin America--he vaguely felt that
they ought to have stayed in their countries and been exterminated
instead of bothering Americans. English refs were the least obnoxious,
they didn't _jabber_, but Sparhawk----

The lean old man came into the living room eating bread and cheese.
"Buck up, m' boy," Sparhawk said cheerily. "All this is only a Trial,
you know. You should regard it as a magnificent opportunity. Here's your
chance to play the man, acquire merit, and get a leg up on your next
incarnation."

"Oh, shut up," Justin said.

"Natural reaction, very. I don't blame you a bit, m' boy. But sober
reflection on the great events of this day will show you their spiritual
meaning. How else would you haughty Americans get the chance to humble
yourselves and practice asceticism if there were no Red occupation?"

Justin studied Sparhawk's neatly pressed garb, a collection of donated
items in good repair. He snapped: "If you're so damned ascetic, why
don't you go around in a jockstrap like your beloved yogis?"

Sparhawk stiffened ever so slightly. "My dear young man," he said,
"Anybody who wore only a loincloth in your atrocious climate might or
might not be a saint, but he'd certainly be a bloody fool. I see you're
in no mood for serious discussion, sir. I'll bid you good day."

"Good riddance," Justin muttered, but only after Sparhawk had shouldered
his rucksack again and was going down the kitchen steps.

    *    *    *    *    *

At about seven in the evening Justin decided to visit his friends the
Bradens a mile and a half up the battered road. He hadn't seen much of
them during the winter; his meager gas allotment had been cut to zero in
the general reduction of November 1964. He had missed them personally,
missed their off-beat chatter and Amy's generously shared home brew. The
only other liquor in the area was a vicious grape brandy illegally
distilled by old Mr. Konreid on Ash Hill Road. It put you under fast.
The next morning you wished you could die.

Lew Braden had a weird profession. He was a maker of fine hand-laid
papers for bookbinders and etchers. Before the war it was his custom to
tour the country each summer in a battered Ford offering picayune prices
to farm wives for their soft old linen tablecloths and napkins, washed
thousands of times, worn to rags, and stored thriftily in an attic
trunk. He would finish his tour with bales of the inimitable material
and spend the winter turning it, with the aid of simple tools,
dexterity, and a great deal of know-how, into inimitable special-purpose
papers. The Braden watermark was internationally famous--to about five
hundred bookbinders and etchers--and he cleared perhaps three thousand
dollars in an average year. It was, he often said nostalgically, a very
easy buck. Under the Farm-or-Fight Law he and Amy had elected to start a
piggery and truck farm for the reason that it required less effort than
dairying or field crops. They turned out to be right. They had sailed
through three years of war without much trouble, with time to read,
paint, play violin-piano duets, and drink. Justin, chained to the
twice-daily milking and the niggling hygiene of the milk-house, envied
their good sense.

Good sense, he thought, picking his way around the chuck-holes in the
moonlit road--maybe they can explain to me what the devil has happened
and what happens next.

The countryside was winking on and off in the dusk like a Christmas
tree. The Horbath farm up the hill, the Parry farm to the south with its
big yard light, his own house behind him alternately flared with lights
in every window and then went out. He hoped the current would steady
down by nine--time for "the further announcement."

Lew Braden prudently called as he entered their dark yard: "Who's there?
I've got a shotgun!"

"It's Justin," he called back.

The yard light went on and stayed on. Braden studied him with mild
perplexity. "Darned if you aren't," he said. "Come in, Billy. We were
hoping somebody'd drop by. What's going on with the lights and the
phone?"

"_You haven't heard?_"

"Obviously not. Come in and tell us about it, whatever it is. Nobody's
been by and the radio won't go since Amy fixed it."

The radio was indeed roaring unintelligibly on an end table.

"It's over," Justin said. "That's what it's all about. Fraley
surrendered at El Paso. The President capitulated through the embassies
in Switzerland. They've been broadcasting it since noon. Let me see that
damned radio. It sounds as if you just haven't got it on a station."

He pulled the chassis out of the plastic case and saw the trouble. The
cord from the tuning-knob pulley to the variable condenser was slack
instead of taut; the radio worked but you couldn't tune it from the
knob. He picked up a stub of pencil and shoved the condenser over to
one of the CONELRAD stations.

". . . in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States I now order all
officers and enlisted men to cease fire. Maintain discipline, hold your
ranks . . ."

They listened to it twice through and then turned it down. Between each
of the replays now the woman's voice announced that a further statement
would be made at nine.

Lew and Amy were looking at each other. The expression on their faces
was unreadable. At last Lew turned to Justin and said softly: "Don't
worry about a thing, Billy. You're going to have to make a big
readjustment in your thinking, but so will almost everybody. You'll find
out you've been fed a pack of lies. You'll fight the truth at first, but
finally we'll prove to you----"

"_We?_ Who's _we_?" Justin demanded.

"Shut up, Lew," Amy said briefly.

He turned his kindly, round bespectacled face to her. "No, Amy. You,
too, are having difficulty in readjusting. Conditions have changed now;
we're suddenly no longer conspirators but the voice and leadership of
America. A new America."

Guilelessly he turned again to Justin. "We're Communists, Billy. Have
been for twenty years. This is the grandest day of my life."

Justin felt an impulse to back away. "You're kidding. Or crazy!"

"Neither one, Billy. You see, this is the first of the readjustments you
will have to make. You think a Communist must necessarily be a fiend, a
savage, a foreigner. You couldn't conceive of a Communist being a
soft-spoken, reasonable, mannerly person. But Amy and I are, aren't we?
And we're Communists. When I was on those linen-buying trips, I was
doubling as a courier. I was in the Party category you call 'floaters'
then. Since the war I've been what you call a 'sleeper.' No
conspiratorial activity, no connection with the activist branch. I have
merely been under orders to hold myself in readiness for this day. I
know who lives hereabouts, I know their sentiments. I am, I think,
almost everybody's friend. My job will be to educate the people of this
area.

"You see? Your education is beginning already. There will be no brutal,
foreign tyrants around here. There will be Amy and me--friends and
neighbors--just the way we always were, explaining to you the new
America.

"And what an America it will be! Freed from the shackles of capitalist
exploitation and racial hatred! Purged of the warmongers who imposed a
crushing armament burden on the workers and finally goaded the U.S.S.R.
and the C.P.R. into attacking! An America freed from bondage to ancient
superstition!"

There were tears of joy in his eyes.

Justin asked slowly: "Have you spied? Have you been traitors?"

Lew said with dignity:

"You're thinking of cloak-and-dagger stuff, Billy. Assassination. Break
open the locked drawer and steal the great atomic secret for godless
Russia. Well, there was a little melodrama, but I never liked it. I've
risked my life more than once and I was glad to. Amy and I were couriers
in the Rosenbergs' apparatus; drawings from Los Alamos passed through
our hands. It was only by a fluke that the FBI didn't stumble onto us.
If they had, I suppose we would have fried with the Rosenbergs. Gladly.
For America, Billy. Because I did not spy against the people. I did not
commit treason against the people."

Justin said: "Good night, Lew. Good night, Amy. I don't know what to
think. . . ."

Lew said confidently to his back: "You'll readjust. It'll be all right.
Don't worry."

    *    *    *    *    *

He walked home and found that the current was on again, apparently for
good. He climbed to the attic and brought down a half-full gallon of
old Mr. Konreid's popskull. He filled a tumbler and sipped at it until
nine, when the radio said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary of State."

"Fellow citizens, I have been ordered to communicate to you the Articles
of Surrender which were signed in Washington, D.C., today by the
President on behalf of the United States, by Marshal Ilya Novikov on
behalf of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and by Marshal Feng
Chu-tsai on behalf of the Chinese People's Republic.

"One. The United States surrenders without conditions to the Soviet
Union and the C.P.R. Acts of violence against troops of the Soviet Union
and the C.P.R. on or after April 17, 1965, are recognized by the high
contracting parties as criminal banditry and terrorism, subject to
summary and condign punishment.

"Two. The high contracting parties recognize and admit the criminal
guilt of the United States in provoking the late war and recognize and
admit the principle that the United States is liable to the Soviet Union
and the C.P.R. for indemnities in _valuta_ and kind.

"Three. The high contracting parties recognize and admit the _personal_
criminal war guilt of certain civilians and soldiers of the United
States and recognize and admit that these persons are subject to condign
punishment."

The Secretary's voice shook. "I have been further asked to announce that
the central functions of the United States Federal Government were
assumed today by Soviet Military Government Unit 101, which today
arrived by air in Washington, D.C., under the escort of two Russian and
two Chinese airborne divisions.

"I have been further asked to announce that under Article Three of the
Articles of Surrender I read you the President and Vice-President of the
United States were shot to death at eight o'clock, P.M., by a mixed
Russian and Chinese firing squad."

That was all.

Justin's hand was trembling so the raw brandy slopped over the tumbler's
edge.




CHAPTER THREE


April 23, 1965, seventh day of the defeat . . .

Justin leaned on his mailbox waiting for Betsy Cardew, his morning
chores behind him, and reflected that things had gone with amazing
smoothness. Nor was there any particular reason why they shouldn't.
Soviet Military Government Unit 101 had certainly planned and practiced
for twenty years. The Baltic states, the Balkans, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, East Germany, West Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and
England--they had been priceless rehearsals for the main event.

And what a main event! Half the world's steel, coal, and oil. All the
world's free helium gas. Midwest grain, northwest timber, and the
magnificent road net to haul them to magnificent ports. Industrial New
England, shabby streets and dingy factories, but in the dingy factories
the world's biggest assemblage of the world's finest precision tools.
Detroit! South Bend! Prizes that made all the loot of all the conquerors
of history flashy junk. SMGU 101 would not let the plunder slip through
its fingers. It was moving fast, moving smoothly.

For the greatest part of the loot, the part without which the materials
would be worthless, consisted of 180 million Americans. They knew how to
extract that steel, coal, oil and gas, harvest the grain, log the
forests, drive the trucks, load the freighters, run the lathes and punch
presses.

Betsy Cardew had yesterday delivered to him--and to everybody on her
route--SMGU Announcement Number One, so Gus Feinblatt was right. They
turned over a carload of SMGU announcements to the Postmaster, D.C.,
with the note "one to each address," and it was automatic from there.
The carload was broken down by regions, states, counties, towns, rural
routes, and three days later everybody had one in his hand.

They hadn't been using radio. When current was on, and it was on more
and more frequently as the days went by, all you heard were
light-classical music, station breaks, and the time.

The SMGU announcement didn't come to much. It was simply a slanted recap
of the military situation, larded with praise of General Fraley and his
troops, expressing gentle regret that so many fine young men and women
had been lost to both sides. As an afterthought it stated: "The
nationalization of all fissionable material is hereby proclaimed, and
all Americans are notified that they must turn in any private stores of
uranium, thorium, or plutonium, either elemental or combined, to the
nearest representative of the U.S.S.R. or C.P.R. at once."

Justin decided the first announcement must have been a test shot to find
out how well the distribution would work. Its message certainly was
pointless.

Betsy Cardew pulled up in the battered car. Lew and Amy Braden were in
the back. She said: "No mail today, Billy. Do you want a ride in? Mr.
and Mrs. Braden here were first, but there's room."

"Thanks," he said, and got in. He couldn't think of one word to say to
his former friends, but they had no such trouble.

"I've been called to Chiunga Center," Lew said importantly. Chiunga
Center was _the_ town thereabouts: twenty thousand people in a bend of
the Susquehanna, served by the Lehigh and the Lackawanna. "Advance units
have reached the town."

"Yesterday," Betsy said. "A regiment, I guess, in trucks. Very G.I.,
very Russian, very much on their good behavior. They're barracked in
the junior high. They set up a mess tent on the campus and strung barbed
wire. Nine-o'clock curfew in town and patrols with tommy guns. So far
everything's quiet. A couple of kids threw rocks." She laughed abruptly.
"I saw it. I thought the sergeant was going to cut them in half with his
tommy gun but he didn't. He took down their pants and _spanked_ them."

"Smart cooky," Lew said gravely from the back of the car. "He played it
exactly right."

"So," said Betsy, "there I am in the post-office sorting room busy
sorting and in march six of them, polite as you please, and say through
the window, 'Ve vish to see the postmahster,' and old Flanahan comes
tottering out ready to die like a man. So they hand him six letters.
'Pliss to expedite delivery of these, Mr. Postmahster,' they say, and
_salute_ him and go away. And one of the letters is for Mr. and Mrs.
Braden here and they won't tell me what it's all about, but they don't
look like a couple going to their doom and I'm too well-trained a postal
employee to pry."

Her flow of chatter was almost hysterical and Justin thought he knew
why. It was the hysteria of relief, the discovery that the Awful Thing,
the thing you dreaded above all else, has happened and isn't too bad
after all. Chiunga Center was occupied, taken, conquered, seized--and
life went on after all, and you felt a little foolish over your earlier
terror. The Russians were just G.I.s, and weren't you a fool to think
they had horns?

"You see?" Lew Braden said to nobody in particular.

"What I think," Betsy chattered, "is that they're just as dumb as any
army men anywhere. You know what the first poster they stuck up said?
Turn in your uranium and plutonium at once. The dopes! The _second_
notice covered pistols, rifles, shotguns, and bayonets. That touch of
idiocy is almost cute. Bayonets!"

They had reached State Highway 19 and stopped; Norton lay dead ahead
and Chiunga Center was fourteen miles to the right on the highway. A
convoy of trucks marked with the red star was rolling westward at maybe
thirty-five. They were clean, well-maintained trucks and they were full
of Russian soldiers in Class A uniforms. They caught a snatch of
mournful harmony and the rhythmic nasal drone of a concertina.

"My Lord!" Betsy said. "They really do sing all the time. And in minor
fifths. I thought they were putting it on at the mess tent, impressing
the Amerikanskis with their culture and soul, but there isn't any
audience here."

The last of the convoy, a couple of slum-guns, field kitchens like any
army's field kitchens complete to the fat personnel, rolled past and
Justin realized that they were waiting for him to get out and proceed on
foot to Norton.

"Take it easy," he said to the Bradens, and watched the car swing right
and pick up highway speed. The Bradens were about to enter into their
own peculiar version of the kingdom of heaven. He himself needed another
pump rod. The one Croley sold him turned out to be a painted white metal
casting instead of rolled steel. It had, of course snapped the first
time he used it.

Perce, Croley's literally half-witted assistant, waved gaily at him as
he approached the store. Perce bubbled over: "Gee, you should of seen
'im, mister, I bet he was a general or maybe a major. Boy, he came right
into the store and he looked just like anybody else on'y he was a _Red_!
Right into the store. Boy!"

Perce couldn't get over the wonder of it, and Justin, examining himself,
was not sure that he could either. When would this thing seem _real_?
Maybe it seemed real in the big cities, but his worm's-eye view
frustrated his curiosity and sense of drama. It was like sitting behind
a post in a theater, only the play was _The Decline and Fall of the
United States of America_. A Russian--a general or maybe a
major--appeared and then disappeared. The local underground Reds were
summoned to service--where and what? The convoy passed you on the road,
to duty where?

Croley was tacking up a notice, a big one, that covered his bulletin
board, buried the ration-book notices, the draft-call notices, the
buy-bonds poster. It said:



                       _SOVIET MILITARY GOVERNMENT_
                               _Unit 449_
                       _Chiunga County, New York State_


     _Residents are advised that on and after April 23, 1965, the
     following temporary measures will be observed:_

     1. _A curfew is established from Nine O'Clock_ P.M. _to Five
     O'Clock_ A.M. _All residents must be in their homes between these
     hours._

     2. _Fissionable material must be turned in to this command at once
     since uranium, thorium, and plutonium have been declared
     nationalized and unlawful for any private person to hold._

     3. _All privately held pistols, rifles, shotguns, and bayonets must
     be turned in to this command or representative. For the township of
     ________ this command's representative is __________. The weapons
     should be tagged with the owner's name and address and will later
     be returned._

     4. _Violators of these measures will be subject to military trial
     and if found guilty liable to sixty days in jail._


                                                         _S. P. Platov
                                                   Colonel, Commanding_


Justin shook his head slowly. Sixty days! Was _this_ the Red barbarian
they had all been dreading? He seemed to hear Lew Braden saying again:
"Smart cooky . . . exactly right."

Croley had gone behind his counter for something, a price-marking
crayon. He was filling in the blanks in Number 3. "For the township of
NORTON this command's representative is FLOYD C. CROLEY. The weapons
should----"

Croley stepped back, looked for a moment at the black, neat printing,
stuck the crayon behind his ear, and turned to Justin, waiting and
blank-faced.

Justin asked: "Since when have you represented the Red Army?"

Croley said: "He wanted a central place. Somebody steady." And that was
supposed to dispose of that. O.K., you skunk, Justin thought. Wait until
my two traitorous friends blow the whistle on _you_. When the Bradens
finish telling the Reds all about Floyd C. Croley, Floyd C. Croley will
be very small potatoes around these parts, or possibly Siberia. And
aloud: "You sold me a dog, Mr. Croley. Look at this crumby thing."

He slapped down the two broken halves of the cheap cast pump rod. Croley
picked them up, turned them over in his hands, and put them down again.
"Never guaranteed it," he said.

"For twelve-fifty it shouldn't break on the first stroke, Mr. Croley. I
need a pump rod and I insist on a replacement."

Croley picked the pieces up again and examined them minutely. He said at
last: "Allow you ten dollars on a fifteen-dollar rod. Steel. No
coupons."

And that, Justin realized, was as good a deal as he'd ever get from the
old snake. Too disgusted to talk, he slapped down a ten-dollar bill.
Croley took it, produced another rod, and a queer-looking five-dollar
bill in change. The portrait was of a hot-eyed young man identified by
the little ribbon as John Reed. Instead of "The United States of
America," it said: "The North American People's Democratic Republic."

Justin's voice broke as he yelled: "What are you trying to put over,
Croley? Give me a real bill, damn you!"

Croley shrugged patiently. A take-it-or-leave-it shrug. He condescended
to explain: "He bought gas. It's good enough for him, it's good enough
for me. Or you." And turned away to fiddle with the rack in which he
kept the credit books of his customers.

Speechless, Justin rammed the phony bill into his pocket, picked up the
rod, and walked away. As he opened the door, the old man's voice came
sharply: "Justin."

He turned. Croley said: "Watch your mouth, Justin." He jerked his thumb
at the announcement. (". . . representative is FLOYD C. CROLEY. The
weapons . . .") He went back to his credit books as Justin stared
incredulously, torn between laughter and disgust.

He walked out and across the Lehigh tracks. Nobody seemed to be in town;
he was in for a four-mile walk, mostly uphill, to his place. The cows
would be milked late--he quickened his pace.

At the highway a couple of Russian soldiers beside a parked jeep were
just finishing erecting a roadside sign--blue letters on white, steel
backing, steel post, fired enamel front. They hadn't rushed _that_ out
in six days. That sign had been waiting in a Red Army warehouse for this
day, waiting perhaps twenty years. It said: "CHECK POINT 200 YARDS
AHEAD. ALL CIVILIAN VEHICLES STOP FOR INSPECTION." That would be the old
truck-weighing station, reactivated as a road block.

The Russians were a corporal and a private, both of the tall, blond,
Baltic type. They had a slung tommy gun apiece. He said: "Hi, boys."

The private grinned, the corporal scowled and said: "_Nye ponimayoo_.
Not per-mitten."

He wanted to say something witty and cutting, something about
sourpusses, or the decadent plutocrat contaminating the pure
proletarian, or how the corporal might make sergeant if his English were
better. He looked at the tommy guns instead, shrugged, and walked on.
Yes, he was scared. With the vivid imagination of an artist he could see
the slugs tearing him. So the rage against Croley festered still, and
the taste of defeat was still sour in his mouth. And he still had four
uphill miles to walk to milk those loathesome cows of his.

    *    *    *    *    *

By nine that night he was thinking of starting to work on Mr. Konreid's
brandy. The current was on and, according to his electric clock, steady.
He had lost the radio habit during the silent years. There was now
apparently only one station on the air and it offered gems from
_Mademoiselle Modiste_. He didn't want them. He leafed over a few of his
art books and found them dull. Somewhere in the attic a six-by-eight
printing press and a font of type were stashed, but he didn't feel like
digging them out to play with. That had been one of the plans for his
retirement. Old Mr. Justin would amuse himself by pottering with the
press, turning out minuscule private editions of the shorter classics on
Braden's beautiful hand-laid paper. Maybe old Mr. Justin would clear
expenses, maybe not----

But now he was too sick at heart to think of the shorter classics and
Braden was much too busy securing his appointment as Commissar of Norton
Township or something to contribute the beautiful paper.

The phone rang two longs, his call. It was a girl's voice that he didn't
recognize at first.

"It's Betsy," she said with whispered urgency. "No names. Your two
friends--remember this morning?"

Yes; yes. The Bradens. Well? "Yes. I remember."

"In the basement of the school. The janitor saw the bodies before they
took them away. They were shot. You knew them. I--I thought I ought to
tell you. They must have been very brave. I never suspected----"

"Thanks," he said. "Good-by," and hung up.

Betsy thought the Bradens were some kind of heroic anti-Communists.

Then he began to laugh, hysterically. He could reconstruct it perfectly.
The Marshal said to the General: "The first thing we've got to do is get
rid of the damn Red troublemakers." And so it trickled down to "Pliss to
expedite delivery of these, Mr. Postmahster," and so the Bradens got
their summons and, unsuspecting, were taken down-cellar and shot
because, as Braden knew, those Reds were very smart cookies indeed. They
knew, from long experience, that you don't want trained revolutionaries
kicking around in a country you've just whipped, revolutionaries who
know how to hide and subvert and betray, because all of a sudden _you_
are stability and order, and trained revolutionaries are a menace.

No, what you wanted instead of revolutionaries were people like Croley.

_Croley!_

He couldn't stop laughing. When he thought of thousands of underground
American Communists lying tonight in their own blood on thousands of
cellar floors, when he thought of Floyd C. Croley, Hero of Soviet Labor,
Servant of the North American People's Democratic Republic, he couldn't
stop laughing.




CHAPTER FOUR


April 30 . . .

The first of the spring rains had come and gone. They were broadcasting
weather forecasts again, which was good. You noticed that forecasts east
of the Mississippi were credited to the Red Air Force Meteorological
Service. From the Mississippi to the Pacific it was through the courtesy
of the Weather Organization of the Chinese People's Republic. Apparently
this meant that the two Communist powers had split the continent down
the middle. China got more land, which it badly needed, and Russia got
more machinery, which it badly needed. A very logical solution of an
inevitable problem.

The Sunday _Times_ had stopped coming, but Justin hardly missed it. He
was a farmer, whether he liked it or not, and spring was his busy
season. He had grudged time to attend the auction of the Bradens'
estate, but once there he had picked up some badly needed tools and six
piglets. Croley, under whose general authority the auction was held,
himself bought the house and twelve acres for an absurd eight hundred
dollars. Nobody bid against him, but after the place was knocked down to
him, half a dozen farmers tried to rent it. They were thinking of their
sons and daughters in the service who should be back very soon. Croley
grudgingly allowed the Wehrweins to have the place at fifty dollars a
month, cash or kind.

Justin was almost happy on the spring morning that was the fourteenth
day of defeat. His future looked clear for the moment. The red clover
was sprouting bravely in his west pasture; he'd be able to turn his cows
out any day now and still have hay in reserve. Electric service was
steady; he'd be able to run a single-strand electric fence instead of
having to break his back repairing and tightening the wartime
four-strand nonelectric fences. The piglets looked promising; he
anticipated an orgy of spareribs in the fall and all the ham, bacon, and
sausage he could eat through the winter. His two dozen bantams were
gorging themselves on the bugs of spring and laying like mad; it meant
all the eggs he wanted and plenty left over for the Eastern Milkshed
Administration pickup. His vegetable garden was spaded and ready for
seeding; his long years of weed chopping seemed to have suddenly paid
off. There wasn't a sign of plantain, burdock, or ironweed anywhere on
his place.

At ten-thirty the EMA truck ground to a stop at his roadside platform
and even McGinty, the driver, was cheery with spring. He loaded the cans
and handed Justin his monthly envelope--and stood by, grinning, waiting
for Justin to open it. Justin understood the gag when a few of the new
phony bills fluttered from the statement. He counted up ninety-three
dollars in Bill Haywood ones, John Reed fives, and Lincoln Steffens
tens. He didn't give McGinty the satisfaction of seeing him blow his
top. As a matter of fact, he wasn't particularly upset. If everybody
agreed that this stuff was money, then it _was_ money. He murmured:
"Paying in cash now? I guess that means I sign a receipt."

McGinty, bitterly disappointed, produced a receipt book and a stub of
pencil. "You should of heard old lady Wehrwein," he said reminiscently.
Justin checked the statement (Apr 1-Apr 15 a/c Justin WH, Norton Twp
Chiunga Cy, 31 cwt at $3.00, $93.00) and signed. McGinty's truck rumbled
on.

It was a miserably small two-week net for eight good Holsteins, but they
were near the end of their lactation period; soon he'd have to arrange
for freshening them again.

He was planting onion sets and radish seed in his vegetable garden when
Rawson came down the road--the legless veteran whom he had met on the
day of defeat. Rawson turned up at the estate sale and he found out that
he had indeed got work at the Shiptons' farm, but for how long was
anybody's guess, with the Shiptons' three boys and two girls due for
demobilization.

Rawson seemed to be in a hell of a hurry to get to him. Justin
straightened up and met him at the road. "What's up?"

"Plenty, Billy. Couple of Red Army boys over at the Shiptons'. One's a
farm expert, the other's an interpreter. They're going over the place
with a fine-tooth comb. Boils down to this: the Shiptons have to turn
out 25 per cent more milk, 10 per cent more grain, and God knows what
else. The old lady told me to pass the word around. Fake your books,
hide one of your cows--whatever you can think of. Push me off, will you?
I've got some more ground to cover."

"Thanks," Justin said thoughtfully, and pushed. The little cart went
spinning down the road, Rawson pumping away. He called it "my
muscle-mobile."

Justin mechanically went back to his onion sets and radish seed, but the
savor had gone out of the spring morning. He couldn't think of one
right, definite thing to do. He didn't come from twenty generations of
farmers consummately skilled at looking poor when they were rich. He
didn't know the thousand dodges farmers everywhere always used, almost
instinctively, to cheat the tax man of his due for the tsar, the
commissar, the emperor, the shereef, the zamindar, La Rpublique, the
American Way of Life. Billy Justin, like a fool, kept books--and only
one set of them. He was a sitting duck.

The jeep with the red star arrived in midafternoon while he was mending
fence in the pasture with a sledge, block and tackle, nippers and
pliers. In spite of his heavy gloves he had got a few rips from the
rusted, snarled old wire. He was feeling savage. He heard them honk for
him, deliberately finished driving a cedar post, and then slowly
strolled toward the road.

Two privates were in the front seat, chauffeur and armed guard, two
officers in the back, a captain and a lieutenant. Both young, both
sweating in too-heavy wool dress uniforms with choker collars, both
festooned with incomprehensible ribbons and decorations.

The lieutenant said, looking up from a typewritten list, "You're Mr.
William H. Justin, aren't you?"

Justin gulped. To hear the flat, midwest American speech coming from
this fellow in this uniform was a jolt. It made the whole thing seem
like a fancy-dress party. "Yes," he said. And then, inevitably, "You
speak English very well."

"Thanks, Mr. Justin. I worked hard at it. I'm Lieutenant Zoloty of the
449th Military Government Unit. Translator. And this is Captain Kirilov
of the same command. He's the head of our agronomy group."

Kirilov, bored, jerked a nod at Justin.

"We'd like to look over your layout as part of a survey we're running. I
see you're listed as primarily a dairy farmer, so let's start with your
cow barn and milkhouse."

"Right this way," Justin said flatly.

Captain Kirilov knew his stuff. He scowled at the unwashed milker, felt
the bags of the eight Holsteins, kicked disapprovingly at a rotten
board. Through it all he directed a stream of Russian at Zoloty, who
nodded and took notes. Once the captain got angry. He was burrowing
through the corncrib and found rat droppings. He shook them under
Justin's nose and yelled at him. After he disgustedly cast them aside
and wiped his hands on a corn shuck, the lieutenant said in a undertone:
"He was explaining that rodents are intolerable on a well-run farm, that
grain should be raised for the people and not for parasites."

"Uh-huh," Justin said.

When the captain came across the six piglets, he was delighted. Zoloty
said: "The captain is pleased that there are six. He says, 'At last I
see the famous American principle of mass production. Our peasants at
home wastefully indulge in roast-pig feasts instead of letting all the
young grow to maturity.'"

Finally the captain snapped something definite and final, left the barn,
and headed for the jeep.

Zoloty said: "Captain Kirilov establishes your norm at twenty
hundredweight of milk per week. Do you understand what that means?"

"I know what twenty hundredweight of milk is. I don't know what a norm
is."

"It is your quota. If you fall below twenty hundredweight per week
consistently, or if your production fails to average out to that, you
will be subject to review."

Zoloty started to turn away.

"Lieutenant, what does 'review' mean?"

"Your farming techniques will be studied. If you need a short course to
improve your efficiency, you'll be given an opportunity to take it.
We're organizing them up at Cornell. Or it may turn out that you're just
temperamentally unsuited to farming. In that case we may have to look
for a slot where you'll function more efficiently."

"Road gang?" Justin asked quietly.

Zoloty was embarrassed. "Please don't be truculent, Mr. Justin. Why
should we put an intelligent person like you on a road gang? Now please
come along to the jeep. Military Intelligence drafted us for another
survey they're running. It'll only take a moment."

Justin managed to conceal his relief. He could manage twenty
hundredweight a week very easily. Just a little more care to the herd's
diet, get that rock-salt brick he'd been letting slide, promise the
Shiptons a hog in the fall for some of their hoarded cottonseed cake. It
would be a breeze, and Rawson had been unduly alarmed. But farmers had
this habit of screaming bloody murder at the least little thing. He
hated to admit it, but the red-star boys were being more than fair about
it. He had drifted into sloppy farming.

At the jeep again Zoloty got out some papers and said: "Now, Mr. Justin,
this is official. First, do you have any uranium, thorium, or other
fissionable material in your possession?"

Astounded, Justin said: "Of course not!"

"A simple 'No' is sufficient. Sign here, please." He held out one of the
papers, his finger indicating the space. Justin read; it was simply a
repeat of the statement that he did not have any fissionable materials
in his possession. He signed with the lieutenant's pen.

"Thank you. Do you know of any fissionable material that is held by any
private parties? Sign here. Thank you. Would you recognize fissionable
material if you saw it?"

"I don't think so, Lieutenant."

"Very well then. Please pay attention. Refined uranium, thorium, and
plutonium look like lead, but are heavier. A spherical piece of uranium
weighing fifty pounds, for instance, would be no larger than a soft
ball. Please sign here--it is a simple statement that I have described
the appearance of fissionable materials to you. Thank you. Now, would
you recognize the components of an atomic bomb if you saw them?"

"No!"

"Very well then. Please pay attention. An atomic bomb is simply a
fifty-pound mass of plutonium or uranium-235. Before exploding it
consists of two or more pieces. These pieces are slammed together fast
and the bomb then explodes. The slamming can be done by placing two
pieces at opposite ends of a gun barrel and then blowing them together
so they meet in the middle. Or it can be done by placing several chunks
of plutonium on the inside of a sphere and then exploding what are
called 'shaped charges' so the chunks are driven together into one mass
and the atomic bomb proper explodes. Do you understand? Then sign here.

"Now, our Military Intelligence people would like you to swear or affirm
that you will immediately report any evidence of fissionable material or
atomic-bomb parts in private hands which you may encounter. Do you so
swear?"

"I do," Justin said automatically. Zoloty had for a moment grinned
wryly--and there had been a sardonic inflection on "Military
_Intelligence_." Hell, no doubt about it--all armies were pretty much
alike. Here these two serious people were going about the serious
business of stabilizing the country's food supply and some brass hat got
a bright idea; saddle them with another job, even if it's a crackpot
search for A-bombs in Chiunga County.

He signed. Zoloty handed over a poster, a hastily printed job with
hastily drawn line cuts. "Please put this up somewhere in your house,
Mr. Justin, and that will be that. Good afternoon."

He spoke to the captain in Russian, the captain spoke to the chauffeur,
and away they drove.

Justin studied the poster; it conveyed the same information Zoloty had
given him. Atomic bombs! He snorted and went back to his fence mending.

Yes, it seemed the Reds were determined to be firm but fair. Betsy told
him there had been a near rape in Chiunga Center one night last week. By
the next morning the attacker had been tried, found guilty, and shot
against the handball court of the junior high school--a beetle-browed
corporal from some eastern province of the U.S.S.R. It hadn't healed the
girl, but at least it showed that the Reds were being mighty touchy
about their honor.

He chuckled suddenly. Without recording the fact he had noticed that all
four of the soldiers in the jeep had wrist watches, good, big
chronometer jobs, identical government issue. So the Russians were still
sore about their reputation as snatchers of watches, and had taken the
one measure that would keep their troops from living up to it: _giving_
them all the watches they could use.

Betsy said she and most of the people in the Center were pleasantly
surprised. She, in fact, wished that her father hadn't run away. Nobody
had even been around asking about him, National Committeeman though he
was, yet he was hiding out now in some Canadian muskeg living on canned
soup and possibly moose meat--though Betsy doubted that old T. C. was
capable of bringing down a moose. She hoped he would drift back when the
word got to him that the red-star boys' ferocity had been greatly
exaggerated.

She saw Colonel Platov every now and then from a distance; he was the
big brass of SMGU 449. He looked like a middleaged career soldier, no
more and no less. He seemed to be a bug on spit and polish. People
observed him bawling out sentries over buttons and shoelaces and
suchlike. There were always plenty of K.P.s in the mess tent on the high
school campus.

What else was new? Well, there was a twenty-four-hour guard on each of
the town's two liquor shops to keep soldiers from looting or trying to
purchase. There seemed to be movies every evening in the school
auditorium. There was a ferocious physical-fitness program going on;
SMGU 449 started the day with fifty knee bends, fifty straddle hops, and
fifty pushups, from Platov on down, rain or shine, on the athletic
field. They also played soccer when off duty and they sang interminably.
Wherever there were more than two Russians gathered with nothing to do,
out came a concertina or a uke-sized balalaika and they were off.

A big, fat cook shopped in town for the officers' mess, which must be
located in the school cafeteria. The enlisted men lived on tea,
breakfast slop called _kasha_, black bread, jam, and various powerful
soups involving beef, cabbage, potatoes, and beets. The ingredients came
in red-star trucks from the South.

Rumors? Well, she had a few and she was passing them on just for
entertainment. The Russians would shortly be joined by their wives. They
would close all the churches in Chiunga Center. They would not close any
of the churches but instead would forcibly baptize everybody as Greek
Orthodox. Demobilization of the United States Army would be completed by
next week. Demobilization of the United States Army would be begun next
month. The United States Army was being shipped in cattle boats to
Siberia. The United States Army had disintegrated and the boys and girls
were finding their way home on foot. The United States Army Atomic
Service had made off with two tons of plutonium from Los Alamos before
the surrender----

As that one ran through his mind, Justin suddenly straightened up from
the tangled wire.

Two tons of plutonium was enough for eighty atomic bombs. It seems that
in any machine shop you could put the bombs together if you had the
plutonium.

Two tons of plutonium adrift somewhere in the United States, scattered
but in the hands of men who knew what they were doing, might explain
quite a few things that had recently puzzled him.

And the thought gave him a stab of painful hope. It let him feel at last
the full anguish of the defeat, the reality of it. He burned with shame
suddenly for his lick-spittle acceptance of firm-but-fair Lieutenant
Zoloty and his gratitude, his disgusting gratitude that they had raised
his norm no higher, his pleasure at Captain Kirilov's bored compliment
about the pigs.

Suddenly the defeat was real and agonizing. Two tons of plutonium had
made it so.




CHAPTER FIVE


"Good drying weather," the radio had been saying for days. Justin,
breaking clods and weeding in his cornfield, reflected that once you
would have called it the beginning of a serious drought. The passage of
two months, however, had made pessimism unfashionable--almost dangerous.
Not that he was afraid. Nobody had anything on Billy Justin; he met his
quota and he had been left alone . . .

Until now. A jeep was tooting impatiently for him in front of his house.
More foolishness, he supposed, with Kirilov and his interpreter. At
least it would be a break in the weeding. [**F1 looks like a trimmed
line here]

There was only one Russian there, however; some kind of sergeant. He
said: "Fermer Yoostin?"

"I guess so," Justin said.

The sergeant handed him a sheet of ugly two-column printing on flimsy
paper; Russian on the left, English on the right. _Readjustment of
Agricultural Norm--W. Justin._ Good! Now, how much were they going to
cut from---- He hauled up short at the words filled in, "increase 1 cwt
per 2 wks."

He said angrily to the sergeant: "In this weather? Kirilov's--mistaken.
It can't be done. I'm hauling water for the cows now. And we haven't got
DDT. Flies cut down the production. I haven't got a seed-cake quota; my
herd's too small. There must be some mistake. Can you take back word to
the captain?"

The sergeant, bored, said: "_Ya nye ponimayoo vas_." He held out a
clipboard, a ruled form, and a pen. "_Podtverdeet poloocheneyeh._"

Justin said uncertainly: "Speak English? Tell Captain Kirilov?"

Headshake, then, very slowly and patiently, "_Nye--ponimayoo. Nye_."
Brandishing the form and pen: "_Poloocheneyeh. Eemyah. Zdyehs_." He
pointed to a line; Justin could do nothing but write his name numbly.

The sergeant roared off in a cloud of dust. Justin stood there and spat
grit from his mouth. This time no genial interpreter; this time no
firm-but-fair agronomist. This time--orders. Quite, unarguable orders.

He noticed the date on the quota form. July 4.

    *    *    *    *    *

Rawson came visiting in his gocart and Justin sourly told him his
discovery. The legless man shrugged his giant shoulders. "Shiptons got
one too," he said. "That's why they sent me over. Didn't want to use the
phone. They're thinking about holding kind of a meeting and getting up
kind of a petition."

Justin said violently: "The old fools!" And then, slower, "But they
_are_ old. I guess they just don't get it. Didn't you try to talk them
out of it?"

"Me? The hired man? To Sam Shipton that's farmed his farm for sixty
years and his father and his gram'pappy before him? I saved my breath.
Rather take a little spin in the muscle-mobile than pitch manure any
day. I guess I tell them 'No' from you?"

"Of course. But isn't there some way you can try and keep them out of
trouble? Explain, for instance, that it isn't like petitioning the
highway commissioner to grade a road or put in a new culvert? _Entirely_
different?"

"Sam Shipton's an independent farmer, Billy. He's going to stay one if
it kills him."

"It may do that, Sarge. Sooner than he thinks."

"Been wondering why you call me 'Sarge.' Matter of fact, I was a
bucktail private in the rear rank. Another thing--confidentially. On my
own, not the Shiptons. I happen to have a little bit of contraband . .
."

The word covered a lot of ground. Narcotics. Untaxed liquor. Home-grown
tobacco. Guns, ammunition--even reloading tools. Any item of Red Army
equipment, from a pint of their purple-dyed gasoline to a case of their
combat rations. Unlicensed scientific equipment and material. It was all
posted on the board down at Croley's store in Norton. Not once had
Justin heard of anybody being arrested or even chided for violating the
rules, though old Mr. Konreid continued to distill and peddle his
popskull, and those who smoked up here grew their own tobacco, minimally
concealed, with varying success. Guns and ammunition--practically all of
it--had been turned in and stood racked and tagged in Croley's
storeroom, under Red Army seal. There was a widespread impression that
about guns and ammunition the orders were not kidding, that the rest was
just the product of some brass hat covering himself for the record. They
were farmers up here, but farmers who had been under fire at San Juan
Hill, Belleau Wood, Anzio, Huertgen, Iwo, Pyongyang, Recife,
Tehuantepec--not one of them but was "army wise."

Why speak of contraband?

"What about it?" Justin asked warily.

Rawson shrugged. "I want to pass it on to a fella I know, but I don't
especially want him to come to the Shiptons'. It isn't bulky. I'd just
like to drop it off here sometime and he'll come by in a day or less and
pick it up."

"Why me?" Justin asked flatly. "Do I look especially like a smuggler?"

"Not especially," Rawson grinned. "Mostly because you live alone. Also
because you wouldn't chisel on me. You're a guy who can't be bothered
with doing things the crooked way. Old man Konreid lives alone, but he'd
rip open the package as soon as I was out of sight, taste it, and then
when my friend came, he'd pretend he didn't know what he was talking
about."

So it was liquor or drugs or something of the sort. Justin felt pleased
that he had got the answer without crude questioning. Not that Rawson
would have had anything to do with anything organized which might
conceivably bring retribution. The man was a born scrounger, a cutter of
not very important corners. He told him: "Drop it off when you want. Any
time I can't do a favor for a neighbor I'll close up shop."

"Thanks, Billy," the legless man said. "Push me off, will you?"

    *    *    *    *    *

At mail time Justin got to wondering if the Fourth of July was a
national holiday in the North American People's Democratic Republic, of
which he was a citizen. The morning was shot anyway; he strolled up to
the mailbox. It was an easier trip than it used to be. As a citizen of
the North American People's Democratic Republic he had lost a
comfortable layer of fat at the waist.

Betsy Cardew was waiting at the mailbox looking tired.

He said: "Cultural greetings, comrade-citizeness-post-woman."

"Cultural greetings to you, comrade-citizen-milk-farmer. What the heck
kept you?"

"July fourth. I dithered around a couple of minutes wondering if you'd
be here."

"Oh, the mail must go through," she said vaguely.

"Then where's mine?"

"As a matter of fact, you haven't got anything today. I wanted to talk
to you."

"I'm listening."

"You got one of those quota increases?"

"Yes. Fifty pounds more per week. I don't know how I'm going to make it.
They can't really expect it from me, can they?"

"They expect it. It went through two weeks ago in Pennsylvania. They've
been picking up families who didn't make the norm. Families with the
biggest and best farms. They go South in trucks, men, women, and kids.
Nobody seems to know where. Then they turn the acreage over to families
from marginal farms that couldn't possibly raise a cash crop. Billy,
could you make your new norm with a farm hand?"

"You know I can't support a----"

"This farm hand would have his board paid by the SMGU."

"That's different. And what's the catch?"

"He'd be a little nuts. Wait a minute, Billy! Don't let panic make up
your mind until I tell you about him.

"You know I'm a nurse's aid three nights a week at Chiunga General. I
was in surgery a week ago when they brought this guy in. His name's
Gribble. He was in shock and he'd lost plenty of blood. His hands were
lacerated and there was a gash along his right forearm that cut the big
superficial veins. But somebody, a cop I think, slapped a tourniquet on
him and got him to the hospital. We sewed him up and gave him plasma and
whole blood--he got a pint of mine--and smugly waited for him to wake
up. He did, and he was nuts. Incoherent, disoriented. At that point I
tottered off to home and bed.

"When I came in on Wednesday afternoon, they had him transferred from
surgery to psycho. Lieutenant Borovsky's in charge of psycho, but I
don't think you have to know very much to handle a psycho ward Russian
style. They have something they call 'sleep therapy.' This means you
give the patient a twenty-four-hour shot of barbiturate. If he's still
nuts when he wakes up, you give him another one, and so on. Maybe there
are angles to it that I don't understand, but Borovsky's English isn't
any better than my Russian.

"I'd asked around during the day and found out what happened to Gribble.
He was a stranger in town and he turned up at Clapp's Department Store.
He bought a pair of socks and a salesgirl noticed him standing around
for maybe ten minutes inside, hanging back from the revolving door. The
side doors were locked, and nuts to the fire laws. Clapp's doesn't aim
to air-condition the whole town. Well, she's seen eighty-year-old
farmwomen do exactly the same thing, but she thought it was awfully
funny for a middle-aged man. Finally Gribble made the plunge into the
revolving door, and naturally it stuck halfway. The wooden tip from
somebody's umbrella jammed it. Gribble began screaming and pounding and
in no time at all he had the glass smashed and his arm cut up. So they
toted him away and the salesgirl said Mr. Clapp was _livid_ because his
plate-glass insurance is all whacked up by this new insurance-company
consolidation that nobody seems to be able to collect from and also he
had to open the side doors and turn off his precious air conditioning.

"So much for that. I looked at Gribble's papers in the hospital office.
He's a machine-shop setup man from Scranton. He was released as surplus
last week by the Erie. He got a travel permit good to Corning to look
for a job there. His hobbies are baseball, bowling, and fishing. He
belongs to the American Federation of Machinists, the Red Cross, and
the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Normal?"

"Normal," Justin said.

"Phony. Because I went to see him in psycho. He was just coming out of
his first twenty-four-hour-sleep. Mumbling and stirring. Then the
mumbling got clearer. Gribble the normal machinist was reciting Molire
in the original. As far as I could judge, his accent was very good. It
was Act Two of _Le Misanthrope_. He seemed to be enjoying himself."

"Come _on_," Justin said. "It happens every day. He heard the Molire
once, maybe when he was a child, and it stayed in his subconscious.
Under drugs----"

"Naturally," Betsy said, very cool and composed. "And tell me, doctor:
when and where in his childhood did he hear the order of battle of the
Red Armies as of April 17, 1965?"

"No," Justin said defensively.

"Yes. I don't remember it all, but after the Molire his face changed
and he began to mutter the date. Then he began to rattle off the armies,
the corps, the divisions. With commanders' names and locations around El
Paso. Map-grid locations. He was just swinging into 'Appreciation and
Development of Combat Situation, for Eyes of Combined Chiefs of Staff
Only' when Borovsky came strutting down the ward.

"He beamed down at Gribble, the normal machinist, who by then was
massing a Canadian Army Group, the 17th, I think, for a spoiling attack
on the left flank of the Red bulge. 'Patient motch batter,' Borovsky
said, and on he went. His English is 99 per cent bluff, thank the Lord.
But the night-duty officer was Major Lange and I had to shut Gribble up
before his inspection. He really talks it. I finally slapped Gribble
awake and he began to cry.

"'Pull yourself together,' I told him. 'You've been talking about the
wrong things in your sleep. They'll give you another shot if they don't
think you're better. You're in the Chiunga General Hospital. Tell 'em
you're just nervous and tired. They _want_ to get minor cases out of
here if they can. Play along with them. Fit into the routine and you'll
be out of here fast.'

"He understood me, the scared little guy. I don't know what kind of
personal hell he was going through, but I could _see_ him pushing it
away, hard, with every muscle. 'Fit into the routine,' he said at last.
'This is the Chiunga General Hospital. I'm Gribble. I just got panicky
stuck in the--that place. I'm better now. Just tired and nervous.'
Hysteria kept trying to break in between the words. And he wouldn't let
it.

"'Great,' I told him. 'Stay on the rails. Here they come.' Borovsky was
leading Lange through the ward. When they stopped at Gribble's bed,
Lange asked me what the devil I was doing there. Told him I might be
able to expedite the discharge of Mr. Gribble.

"'Discharge? What are you talking about? This man is seriously ill.'

"Gribble spoke up then, bless him. 'I don't _think_ I am, sir,' he said
apologetically. 'I know I blanked out, but I feel all right now. Just a
little nervous and tired.' They didn't notice that he had his eyes on me
through it--I think that helped him.

"'Patient motch batter,' that pompous ass Borovsky said.

"Lange put him through the questioning. Gribble knew who he was and
where he was and why he was there. Then there was a good deal of Russian
between Lange and Borovsky, and then the major said to me: 'It seems you
were correct. He should not be in one of our beds. Have the clerical
section arrange for outpatient status and board with some responsible
family.'

"That wasn't quite what I'd hoped for, but then I thought of you." She
came to a dead stop.

Billy Justin said slowly: "How long would he be on my neck?"

"Until he's discharged. Comparable cases have been discharged after two
checkup visits--call it a month."

"Who do you suppose he is, Betsy?"

"I don't know. I can't imagine. He wasn't any government official up
top; I know most of the faces. He couldn't possibly be a field
commander. Our Mr. Gribble would never rise to corporal in the field
army. He's some kind of planner, maybe a Pentagon colonel, though that
doesn't seem right either. Whoever he is, he's had a shock that almost
broke him. He's a brave little man. And they'll shoot him if they find
out that he isn't who he claims to be."

"He isn't the only one they'll shoot," Justin said. She made some kind
of reply and he shouted at her: "All right. I'll be the responsible
family. I'll be his mother and his father and his goddamned old aunt
Tissie." She raised one hand feebly as he spewed his rage at her. "Send
him along! Dump him here. You knew I couldn't turn you down. Even if I
thought I closed the books in Korea. Even if I've been wasting the best
years of my life as a peasant. Billy's a patriot, you can always count
on him. You think it's a game. You live in a white house on the hill and
you've never been shot. You never lay in a field hospital with an
infected wound eating your leg off; you never screamed when you saw them
coming with the needle for your fifteenth penicillin shot in two days.
You think it's a game. So send your brave little man along, I'll take
care of him. But after what you've done, don't ever speak to me again."

He turned from her stunned white face and limped down the hill.




CHAPTER SIX


Two Russian medics delivered Gribble the next afternoon. They looked
about in a puzzled way and kept asking: "_Sooproogah? Seen? Donkh?_"
Justin supposed they were wondering about the rest of the responsible
family. "I don't understand," he told them, dead pan. Finally there was
the receipt to sign and they drove away, still with the puzzled air.

"You're Gribble," Justin said to the little man. He was trembling under
the hot sun. He nodded and gave a frightened glance at the house.

Justin, through an almost sleepless night, had decided on his approach.
If the man wanted to be Gribble the machinist, then Gribble the
machinist he would be. Justin wanted no confidences. Justin wanted
Gribble to be a nervous-breakdown outpatient and nothing more. He also
wanted the two medics to report that fermer Yoostin had no family and
that patient Gribble should therefore be placed somewhere else, but he
doubted that they would go so far.

"Ever done any farming?"

"No."

"Ever have a little vegetable garden?"

"Yes. Oh yes. I've done that."

"Good. Well, I'll show you your room." He started for the house, Gribble
lagging behind. When Justin entered the kitchen, he was climbing the two
steps to the porch. And there he stood, before the screen door, with the
look on his face of a man who has seen a cobra.

"Come on in," Justin said through the door.

"I'd rather not unless I have to, Mr. Justin," came from that mask of
terror.

Justin remembered that his blowup had occurred when he was trapped in a
revolving door. And he was also wearily conscious of the endless petty
inconveniences that would nag him if Gribble balked at every doorway.

"Nothing's going to happen to you, Gribble," he said with an edge on his
voice. "It's a perfectly ordinary fly-blown slummy bachelor's kitchen."
The man smiled meagerly. Justin held the door open and waited; Gribble
stepped convulsively over the threshold, closing his eyes for a moment.
Justin closed the door quietly on Gribble's rigid back; instinct told
him that to let it slam in its normal violent fashion would immediately
involve him in a pack of trouble.

"Sit down and have some coffee," he told the little man. Coffee was not
casually drunk these days. If you had it, you saved it for a good jolt
in the morning. But he _had_ to make this man relax; otherwise life
would be an unbearable round of walking on eggs.

Gribble sat and said "Thank you" into his steaming cup.

"It isn't such a bad life here," Justin said tentatively. "I think
you'll eat a little better than you would in town. You can hold back
eggs and hide your chickens when they come around. And the work won't be
too hard with the two of us. Hell, wherever you are you have to work--it
might as well be here."

"That's right," said Gribble eagerly.

The conversation then petered out. They finished their coffee and Justin
led the way to the porch. "The barn needs cleaning out," he said. "I'll
show you where the----" He stopped. Gribble stood inside the kitchen and
he outside, the screen door between them.

Justin sighed and held the door open for the little man. With an
apologetic smile Gribble lunged through the doorway, eyes shut for a
moment.

So it went through the afternoon. Gribble walked willingly into the barn
and worked hard, but when Justin sent him to the tool shed built on the
house for a trenching spade he was gone ten minutes. Justin went after
him, swearing. It was, of course, the tool-shed door. Gribble was
reaching for the handle, but he couldn't quite bring himself to touch
it.

Justin opened the door grimly, yanked out the spade, handed it to
Gribble, and closed the door. His resolution to let Gribble be Gribble
cracked wide open. "What is all this?" he demanded.

The little man said faintly: "I had a very disagreeable experience once.
Very disagreeable." He leaned against the tool-shed wall, his face
white. "I'd rather not discuss it."

Justin, alarmed, said: "All right. We won't. Let's get back to the
barn--if you can make it?"

Gribble could make it. He worked through to dinnertime, hard and well.
Justin cooked a wretched bachelor's meal big enough for two and held the
door for Gribble to come in and eat. He didn't eat much; something was
on his mind. He finally asked if he could have a cot on the porch
instead of a bedroom.

"Sure," said Justin. "I'll get a cot from the attic." And to himself: I
might have expected it.

After dinner they had three hours of light and used it to haul water
from the spring up the road to the tank in the cow barn. When he did the
job himself, he could use nothing but a pair of galvanized pails.
Gribble's help meant that between them they could fill a hundred-pound
milk can on each trip. Justin began to feel a little more optimistic
about meeting the brutal new milk norm. Each of his cows would, for the
first time since the pasture spring went dry in June, get all the water
she wanted that night. In his cheerfulness he scarcely noticed Gribble
except as the hand on the other handle of the hundred-pound can. But
when they topped off the tank with their twenty-fourth load, an
exhausted voice asked him: "Is there more to do?"

Gribble was on the verge of collapse. "My God," Justin said, "I'm sorry.
You're out of the hospital--I didn't think. Cows come first," he added
bitterly. "Sure, we can knock off. I'll get that cot."

The little man slumped on the porch steps while he set it up in the
gathering darkness and then without a word fell onto the dusty canvas.
He was asleep in seconds. Justin thought, went for a cotton blanket, and
spread it over Gribble to keep the flies off his face and hands and went
to the road for a final smoke before turning in. There was a sawed-off
tree stump he usually sat on where you could watch the sunset.

Rawson was waiting there. "Hi, Billy," the legless man said easily.

"Hello." Justin had his pouch out. Grudgingly he held it to Rawson.
"Smoke?"

"Thanks." Rawson whisked a single cigarette paper from his breast
pocket, dipped thumb and finger in the pouch. In a twirl and a lick he
had a cigarette made. A _tramp_, Justin thought. A _drifting bum with
all the skills of a drifting bum_. _How easily he takes it! What's it to
him that he's a drifter under the Reds or the United States?_ A
_perennial outlaw--and God, how I envy his peace of mind_! Heavily he
stuffed his pipe with dry tobacco. Rawson had lit his cigarette and
politely passed him the burning match. He puffed the pipe alight. It
tasted vile, but it was tobacco.

Rawson was inhaling luxuriously. "Not bad," he commented. "Your own
stuff?"

"About half. The rest is from Croley. There was a tax stamp on it, but I
think it's local stuff too. He probably refilled a pack with some junk
he bought from a farmer."

"My, such goings on from the virtuous storekeeper. Well, I brought that
package. A man'll be by tonight or tomorrow."

"Well, let's see it."

Rawson reached deep into the "boot" of his gocart, a space where his
legs would have fitted if he'd had any. The package was small and dim in
the fading light.

The set of his muscles, the leverage of his arm should have warned
Justin to brace himself when the package was handed over, but he was
disarmed by the smallness of the thing. He took the package, found it
amazingly heavy, fumbled it for a moment, and dropped it, almost on his
toe. It sank an inch into the not particularly soft ground.

"Oops!" Rawson said apologetically. "I should have warned you it was
heavy."

"Yes," Justin said. "And maybe you should have warned me it was an
atomic bomb."

"Just part of one," Rawson said.

"You know Betsy Cardew?" Justin asked, looking at the package by his
toe, wondering vaguely about radioactivity, wondering whether he ought
to move his toe.

"Of course. Mailwoman."

"Are you and she in this together?"

"In what?" Rawson asked blandly.

"We are not amused, Rawson. This thing----" He choked. "I got
beautifully mad at her. I'm still sore. I think she's a silly kid who
had no right to get me involved. You--you know the score. So--why me,
Rawson? _Why me?_"

The legless man said brutally: "If you think I'm going to flatter you,
you're going to be disappointed. It's you, Justin, because we're
scraping the bottom of the barrel. Our best and bravest are in Siberian
labor camps now, or mining uranium in the Antarctic. Why _you_, indeed!
Have _I_ got any business scooting around after dark with a suitcase
bomb in my lap?"

"But what's it all for?" Justin almost begged. "What can we do? Suitcase
bombs, yes, but then what?"

"That," Rawson said, "is none of your business, as a moment of thought
will convince you. Will you handle the transfer or won't you?"

"I will," Justin said bitterly. "Thanks for your confidence in me. I
hope it's well placed."

"So do I, Justin. So do I. Will you push me off?"

He went creaking down the road.

Justin relit his pipe and studied the dying sunset. Then he picked up
the heavy little package, walked to the barn, and hid it behind a bale
of hay. It was not very well hidden. He wanted to be able to get it fast
and get it off his hands fast. Furthermore, he knew very well that no
amount of energy spent in hiding unshielded uranium or plutonium would
safeguard it against search with a scintillation counter.

He stepped quietly past Gribble, sleeping on the porch, and went
upstairs to his bedroom. He did not intend to sleep that night--not
while waiting for an unknown person to pick up an atomic-bomb
subassembly for use in some insane, foredoomed scheme of sabotage.

He tried to read but could not. He smoked the last of his tobacco in two
unwanted pipefuls.

Insane, the whole business! There were supposed to be 5 million
occupation troops east of the Mississippi alone. Their own third-rate
shopping place, Chiunga Center, was garrisoned by the 449th Soviet
Military Government Unit, which, when administrative transport and
medical frills were ripped off, turned out to be a reinforced infantry
regiment: about one thousand fighting men armed to the teeth.

And what could you do?

Well, you could denounce Rawson and turn his bomb over to the 449th
SMGU. You could denounce Betsy Cardew--nit-witted rich girl who used sex
and your vestigial pride to unload a deadly menace on you. You could get
written up as a patriotic citizen of the North American People's
Democratic Republic, get a life pension as a Hero of Socialist Labor.
And then there would be nothing for you to do but cut your throat in
self-loathing.

In spite of himself he fell asleep at 3:00 A.M., with the 40-watt bulb
shining on his face and the unread book open across his chest.




CHAPTER SEVEN


He woke with a panicky start at eight-thirty. What was wrong? Something
was terribly wrong.

At the window he saw the cows turned out to pasture. But they should
have been bellowing, unmilked, for an hour or more----

But the milk cans were stacked on the loading platform for the pickup
truck. Gribble had milked them! With only a few words from yesterday
afternoon to go on he had worked the milking machine and turned the cows
out.

And that meant he had been in the barn, where----

Justin dashed downstairs, his heart thudding, and then slowed
deliberately to a walk. He found the little man in the yard before the
barn scouring the milker and pails. "Good morning," he said.

"Good morning, Mr. Justin. I don't know if I did the right thing, but
the cows were stamping around and I remembered what you told me--it
wasn't hard."

"You did exactly the right thing. I couldn't get to sleep last night.
And when I did, I guess I couldn't wake up. I'm sorry I left it all to
you. Have you been in the--kitchen?"

Gribble smiled nervously and shook his head.

"I'll fix breakfast."

Justin kept himself, by an effort of will, from walking into the barn,
in plain sight of Gribble, and looking to see whether that bale of hay
had been disturbed. He turned to the house, started the stove, and
cooked oatmeal. Half a pint of withheld butterfat made oatmeal breakfast
enough for a morning's hard work. When it was cooked, he called Gribble,
who stopped on the porch apologetically until the door was held open for
him.

They ate silently.

"Mind washing up?" Justin asked at last. "I'll be working in the kitchen
garden." As he left, he latched back the screen door, feeling like a
fool.

He was heading not for the garden but for the barn when the chug of a
worn-out truck sounded along his road. It was Milkshed arriving ahead of
time, he absently supposed, and went over to the loading deck to give a
hand with the cans. But it wasn't the Milkshed truck that rounded the
turn. It was a worn blue panel job throbbing and groaning out of all
proportion to its size. On the near panel was lettered: _Bee-Jay Farm
Supplies and Machinery, Washington, Penna_.

It stopped by the milk cans and a nondescript driver leaned out. "This
the Justin place?"

"Yes. I'm Justin. You have anything for sale, mister?"

"Might let you have some plastic pipe."

"Got an electric pump to go with it? My spring's downhill from the
barn."

"Yes, I guess I passed it. Sorry about the pump, but we don't have them
yet. Maybe by next spring, the way things are going."

"That's good to hear. You know you're the first salesman I've seen here
in three years?"

"That's what they all say. Bee-Jay's an enterprising outfit. We got the
first A-440 passes in the state. Say, are you by any chance a friend of
Rawson's?"

Justin knew then who he was. "I know him," he said. "I guess I shouldn't
take the pipe if I can't use it right away. Seen Rawson lately?"

"I heard he was somewhere around here. He didn't happen to leave
anything for me, did he?"

"Just a minute." He went to the barn aware that this was the moment of
decision. There was no reason why Rawson and Betsy _couldn't_ be framing
him. There was no reason why Gribble _couldn't_ be a planted witness for
corroboration. The heavy package was behind the bale of hay where he had
put it in darkness. He couldn't possibly know whether Gribble had found
it and replaced it or not. And now, picking it up, carrying it, handing
it silently to the man in the truck, he had completed his treason to the
North American People's Democratic Republic. He had received, harbored,
and transmitted fissionable material. His head was in the noose from
that moment on.

He felt all the better for it.

"Good old Rawson," the Bee-Jay man chuckled, hefting the package. "Well,
Mr. Justin, I'll try to pass by again--with a pump."

"Do that," Justin said steadily. "And if you ever feel any need to call
on me, do it. I'm available. For anything."

The man smiled blandly. The starting motor cranked and strained for
fifteen seconds before the engine caught and the little truck lurched
off down the road. Justin followed it with his eyes until it was over
the next crest and out of sight.

He turned to find Gribble staring at him from the corner of the barn.
Justin wasn't frightened; the time for that was past. He realized that
he would feel physical fear before long while he waited in some
schoolhouse cellar for the MVD to come clumping in with truncheons and
methodically reduce him to a blob of pain, shrieking confessions on
demand. But he did not fear the fear to come.

He told Gribble easily: "The first salesman in three years. He had some
pipe but he didn't have a pump. Maybe by spring, he said. I guess things
are picking up all around."

"Yes," Gribble said vaguely, his eyes full of tears.

They worked steadily through the morning and afternoon. Gribble spent
two hours on the milk cooler, which had been grunting, gurgling, and
creaking for a month, on the verge of a breakdown. Whatever else he was
besides--quoter of Molire, Pentagon colonel--he was unquestionably an
able refrigeration mechanic and bench hand. He serviced the motor and
coils, disassembled the pump, cut new gaskets from a discarded inner
tube, filed a new cam from scrap metal and installed it. The cooler
whispered happily and the red line of the thermometer dropped well below
the danger mark for the first time that summer. He showed Justin his
work, dimly proud, and then joined him in cultivating the knee-high
field corn until it was time to haul water from the spring again. They
had a late supper at three-thirty: a dubious piece of boiled salt pork,
potatoes from the barrel in the cellar, milk. It was then that Gribble
asked whether Justin happened to have anything to drink.

"Some local brandy," Justin said, wondering. The little man was
tightening up again. If you were an artist you saw him as taut cords
vibrating in the shape of a human body. He had seemed almost happy and
slack when he showed Justin the cooler. . . .

"Could I please----?"

Justin got the carelessly hidden bottle of Mr. Konreid's popskull.
Gribble methodically poured himself half a tumblerful, not bothering to
rinse his glass of its skim of rich milk. Methodically he drank it down,
his Adam's apple working. "Rotten stuff," he said after a long pause.
Justin was about to be offended when he somehow realized that Gribble
didn't mean his liquor in particular. "I was partly tanked when I had
that trouble in the--department store." The taut strings were relaxing a
little. "But sometimes you haven't got anything else and you have to get
to sleep."

Uninvited, he refilled his tumbler to the halfway mark. Justin
protested: "Man, what's the good of getting drunk in the afternoon? We
have another milking and the corner fence post is sagging; that'll take
both of us to fix. Pour that back in the bottle, will you? You can have
it after supper if you can't sleep."


Gribble methodically drank it down. "No point in fooling around," the
little man said gravely. "You pretend you're somebody else, fine. But
you know you aren't, especially when you're trying to sleep. You're
still the fellow who closed the door. But that was only half the job,
Justin. Funny part is if you do the first half--that is if you're a
fellow like me--then you can't do the second half. They never thought of
that. I must have looked pretty good on the profile. Hard-bitten,
waspish executive and all that. But I didn't fool the combat boys. I
went right out of Prudential--you should have seen my office,
Justin!--and right into the Pentagon. I told them--what do you say?--I
told them: 'Alert, capable executive desires connection with first-class
fighting force. Feels his abilities are not being used to the utmost
capacity in present employment.' I went through the lieutenants and
captains like a hot knife through butter. I've handled kids like that
all my life. G-1 checked me through. You know why? Because G-1's just
office management in uniform. We talked the same language. I was exactly
like them so they thought I was _good_. So I got my appointment with
Clardy. Three stars. Colonel Hagen--imagine having a chicken colonel for
a _secretary_--Hagen briefed him first, told him I was talent,
hard-boiled talent, kind of talent they needed fast for a battalion,
then a regiment, then maybe a division. You go up fast in wartime if
you've got the stuff. So Clardy talked to me for a few minutes and then
he turned to Hagen. As if I wasn't there. Cussed Hagen out for wasting
his time. 'Good Lord, Colonel, get him something in G-1 or G-4, but
don't ever give him a combat command. Look at him! Can you imagine _him_
committing troops?'

"You see, Justin? He was on to me in two minutes. They never say it,
even among themselves, but they know combat command doesn't take brains.
They talk about brilliant field generals, but when you try to find out
what the brilliance was it's always this: G-1 gets the brilliant general
his men; G-2 gets the brilliant general his information, G-3 trains the
men and plans the attack, G-4 gets the supplies. Then the brilliant
general says 'Attack!' and it's another victory.

"You know, you don't need brains to say 'Attack!' Plenty of them have
brains and they don't seem to do them any damage, but brains aren't
essential. What you need's character. When you've got character, you say
'Attack!' at the right time. And Clardy saw in two minutes that I didn't
have it. That I'd wait and hang back and try to think of ways around
when there aren't any ways around at all. That when G-3 told me it was
time to attack I wouldn't take his word for it, I'd hem and haw and
wonder if he really believed what he was telling me. Clardy saw clean
through me, Justin. I'm a man who can cheerfully commit a battery of IBM
card punches to the fray and that's all."

The little man lurched to his feet and stared, red-eyed, at Justin.
Waiting.

Slowly and unwillingly Justin said: "What do you want, Gribble? What am
I supposed to do about all this?"

Staring, Gribble said: "Very cagy, Justin. But you've got to help me. I
know you're committed. I milked the cows this morning. I'm a picture
straightener; I always have been. So I started to straighten that bale
of hay. Package behind it--heavy package. So heavy it's got to be gold
or lead or plutonium. And I know it isn't gold or lead.

"The farm salesman came by. I looked in the barn--no package. You're in
it, Justin. You've got to help me. I can't help myself. Five thousand of
them! And then, of course, I couldn't pull the second half of the job.
Clardy was right. . . ."

He stood up, swaying a little. "Come along, Justin. You've got to do
something for me."

Gribble lurched through the doorway, past the latched-back screen door,
down the cement walk to the road.

Justin followed slowly. "It's about fifteen miles," Gribble said over
his shoulder.

I've got to go along, Justin told himself. The little man's guessed--and
he's right--that I'm a traitor to the People's Democratic Republic. He
might tell anybody if it takes his fancy. Perhaps, he bleakly thought,
I'll have to kill him. Meanwhile he doesn't get out of my sight.

"What do you want me to do, exactly?" he asked Gribble in a calm,
reasonable voice.

The little man said abruptly: "Open a door."

They walked for two hours, Gribble in the lead and mumbling.

Justin tried at first to get him to make sense, then to at least accept
a cover story. "We're going to Bert Loughlin's about a calf, Gribble.
O.K.? Will you tell them that if we get stopped? Bert Loughlin's about a
calf----"

"Cobalt," Gribble said, preoccupied.

Six miles along the road they were overtaken by a wagon, Eino Baaras at
the reins. He was returning from Clayboro to Glencairn--"Little
Finland"--with locust poles. He scowled at them and offered a ride.

"Thanks," Gribble said. "We're going to see Bert Loughlin about a calf."

Baaras shrugged and waited for them to get up before he said: "Loughlin
ain't got no calf." He touched up the team and the wagon rolled.

"Selling, not buying," Justin said.

"Loughlin ain't got no money," Baaras said unconcernedly.

"Maybe something to swap," Justin said. He was clenching his fists. What
came next? _Loughlin ain't got nothing to swap. Where you really headed,
Yustin?_ But Baaras just dipped some snuff, spat into the dust, and said
nothing.

Silent Finns, Justin thought suddenly, drowsy with the afternoon heat.
Worse for them than for us. They've been followed halfway around the
world by the neighbors they fled while we sat and waited and perhaps
were happy in our blindness. . . .

He dozed for a while; Gribble shook him awake. "We get off here, Mr.
Justin." The wagon had stopped and Baaras was sardonically waiting.

"Thanks," he said to the Finn, and looked uncertainly at Gribble for a
lead. The little man started up a rutted and inconsiderable wagon track
that angled from the blacktop. Justin followed him, disoriented for a
moment. Then he realized that they were on the west side of Prospect
Hill and heading up it.

Baaras looked at them, shrugged, and drove on. Justin thought flatly: A
_total_ botch. I said the wrong thing, we got off at the wrong place. I
couldn't have botched it worse if I'd been waving a flag with TRAITOR
embroidered on it. The only thing to do now is wait and hope. Baaras is
going to talk about my peculiar goings on, and the people he talks to
will talk. Eventually it'll get to somebody like Croley and that means
I'm dead.

Meanwhile you keep climbing Prospect Hill.

The Hill was about 2,500 feet high and heavily wooded. It was supposed
to be owned by one of the great New York real-estate fortunes. Farmers
who tried to buy small pieces adjoining their fields for woodlots were
rebuffed. A fair-sized local mutual insurance company which tried once
to buy a big piece for development got an interview in New York City and
a courteous explanation that the Hill was being held against the
possibility that the area would experience major growth. The president
of the company considered that interview one of the high points of his
life, and Justin had heard all about it. So had practically everybody
who'd spent ten minutes with the president.

The Hill was posted against hunting and fishing, but not fenced in.
Farmers around it had more or less fenced it out with their own wire,
but there were gaps like the one Gribble had found. Kids and hunters
stayed clear of the Hill for the most part. Among the kids there was a
legend that the Vanderbilts--or was it the Astors?--would jail you for
twenty years if you got caught trespassing. And the hunters knew that
the Hill had no springs and only one intermittent stream. It was against
local custom to carry a canteen for a day's hunting; you were heavily
joshed for dressing up like a Boy Scout. So you pretty much stayed
away----

But what wheels had worn the twin ruts up the Hill?

Justin kicked at an angle of crushed rock. It should have flown up and
away from the loose gravel it was embedded in and Justin should have
strode on feeling infinitesimally better for the release of tension. It
didn't happen that way at all. The rock stayed where it was and blinding
pain shot through Justin's foot. While he stopped and swore, Gribble
turned. "Wasting time," he said mildly.

"In a minute," Justin said. The pain was dying down, but he wasn't ready
to go on walking. He stooped and tried to wiggle the fang of rock
protruding from the gravel, work it loose, and throw it away. It had
wounded him and it must surely die.

The rock wouldn't wiggle. Evidently it was a protruding corner of a
really big chunk. He pawed at the loose gravel to investigate. It wasn't
loose gravel. His fingers skidded over the surface without disordering a
single one of the round and oval glacier-ground stones.

"Come on," Gribble said impatiently, and resumed climbing. Justin
followed thoughtfully. The rutted, worn secondary road, this road that
was clearly on the very verge of breaking up, was a very remarkable road
indeed. It looked bad. It _was_ bad. It would give the springs of a
truck a very hard time.

But it would never get worse. It would never break up. It was a good
road disguised as a bad one. Reinforced concrete a yard down, no doubt.
On top of that the crushed rock and gravel mortared into position. A
heavy-duty highway that would pass air reconnaissance and even a ground
patrol.

"Yes, yes, yes," Gribble was muttering ahead of him.

A heavy-duty highway to where?

"Gribble," he said.

The small man turned on him in fury. His voice was an almost womanish
screech. "Leave me alone, Justin! Don't distract me. This thing's hard
enough without you yammering and yipping at my heels. I'm fighting with
myself to keep from turning around and running down the hill. I could
break down right now if I let go. I could have a fine time crying and
kicking and screaming and letting the clouds close in on what I have to
do. But--I--won't. _Shut up and follow me!_"

Justin followed, confused and burning with resentment. He had been in
contact with psychopaths before and, as now, it was never pleasant. A
girl in the ad agency, years ago, at the next drawing table to his, took
six months to go thoroughly insane, a little more each day. Toward the
end there were worried conferences behind her back, long wrangles about
when eccentricity slips over into mania, and always the stolid,
unimaginative conferee who spoke what was in everybody's mind: "All she
has to do is get hold of herself; she doesn't _have_ to act like a nut."
Naturally in the age of Freud no really informed person spoke those
words; naturally you were shocked to hear them. But oh, the resentment
that filled you when you had to humor and defer to and make your life
miserable because of a crackpot!

A faded sign nailed to a tree pointed up the peculiar road: PROSPECT
VISTA, it said, which made no sense at all. A prospect is a vista and a
vista is a prospect. Justin could have said something about it but dared
not, bullied into silence by the little man who wouldn't control
himself.

The road shot suddenly upward and ended at a big, littered clearing. The
litter was the debris of a housing development that had never come to
pass. Justin never knew it was there. This was Prospect Vista, a big
rain-dimmed sign said. Below, in smaller letters, the sign announced
split-level homes, no down payment, seventy dollars a month, pay like
rent.

Bulldozers had been at work tearing out trees and piling them like
jackstraws. Dirt streaks had been hoed out of the forest duff long
ago--long enough for underbrush and scrub to spring up again in
barbed-wire tangles. The bulldozed roads-to-be were now more impassable
than they had been before the bulldozers came. But hopeful signs marked
them: Onondaga Avenue intersected Seneca Street where they stood on the
clearing's edge.

Sewer trenches were dug clear down to hardpan, an elephantine
checkerboard converging on the principal landmark of Prospect Vista,
which was a huge hole, obviously the excavation for a treatment plant.
And that was as far as things had got. Here and there was a load of
rusty pipe or pencil rod to reinforce concrete that had never been
poured. Gravel and sand stood in low cones dotted through the clearing.
In the years that passed, they had found their angle of repose and would
slump no lower. It occurred to Justin that one pile of gravel may be
alive and another dead. These were dead.

Gribble was saying suddenly in a tone of sweet reasonableness: "Of
course, I wasn't in on the planning end. I came in fairly late, after
Clardy turned me down for a command. But you can guess how they put it
together. The techniques the Scandinavians developed, plus the
brute-force Manhattan District idea plus a security plan borrowed from
the Japanese and improved on by the supply system of the Czarist Army.
The one that kept losing them all their wars.

As he spoke, he moved up and down a few yards of the steeply inclined
end of the road like a hound trying to pick up a scent. Now and then he
knelt and fingered a stone.

"All that planning," he chattered, "and then in a weak moment they
turned it over to me. A fuzzy-faced West Point second-classman would
have been better, of course. I was supposed to be a hard guy. Once I
signed orders for a 20 per cent firing effective Christmas Eve.
Deliberately, to make the surviving 80 per cent cringe a little. But
there's a difference----"

He had found whatever he was looking for. "Lift here," he told Justin,
indicating two shards of concrete that projected from the good-bad road.
His face was deathly pale.

Justin hadn't been listening. He had been thinking: _A total breakdown.
He's completely irresponsible, in a dream world. He's likely to say
anything to anybody. Perhaps I ought to pick up one of those reinforcing
rods over there and----_

"What's that?" he asked the little man.

Gribble patiently repeated, "Lift here," and showed him the hunks of
concrete.

Murder was on Justin's mind. "Stand over there," he said sharply. He
wasn't to be caught bending over with the lunatic behind him and
reinforcing rods conveniently near. Gribble, pale and exhausted, stood
where he pointed, yards away, and nevertheless, Justin watched him as he
heaved on the shards. Because of that he missed seeing the miracle, but
he felt its weight through his back and shoulder muscles and heard its
creak and hum.

A great slab of the good-bad road came up like a door, twelve feet wide,
easily twenty feet long. He crazily thought at first that he had pried
it up with his fingers, and then he heard a motor and the whine of a
gearbox.

Justin leaped back and the hinged slab continued to rise. It was a yard
thick, supported on I beams.

To where?

The good-bad road ended at the gateway to a tunnel angling sharply down.
At the gateway the masquerade ended. The tunnel flooring was plain
concrete. Lights had gone on, one every couple of yards along the
ceiling. He had a confused impression of huge counterweights moving down
as the slab moved up, and then motion stopped; the tunnel lay open.

Gribble's voice penetrated his stupor. "Come on, Justin. Inside." He
stepped in and let Gribble show him a lever, which he pulled, and which
lowered the ponderous slab down on them again. He let Gribble,
stammering and sweating, lead him a hundred feet down the inclined
tunnel to a huge door, to Justin's eyes exactly like that of a bank
vault.

"That's it," Gribble said, his voice charged with poisonous self-hatred.
"Open it, Justin."




CHAPTER NINE


The artist stammered a question about the combination. Gribble
whispered: "No combination. Just that lever."

No--it wasn't like a bank vault's door after all. There was just the one
lever. This door was meant to open easily. From the outside.

Justin turned the lever and pulled. The door glided open and starved
concentration-camp corpses tumbled out into the tunnel. Justin leaped
back; his own scream of horror yelled back at him, reverberating along
the tunnel's smooth walls.

He was turning to run blindly back when Gribble took his arm. "Look at
them," Gribble said softly. "There was no pain. I was never sure of
that. Naturally I was told it would be painless, but they'd tell me that
anyway. But it was true. They never knew what hit them, Justin. I feel
just a little better now."

Justin finally forced himself to look. There was no distortion of agony
on the faces; they were people who had gone to sleep and never wakened.
He became conscious of a cool, dry, gentle draft from the open doorway.
"Pseudo mummies," Gribble said. "You find them in high, dry places. The
Andes, the Iranian upland." He looked earnestly into one of the calm
faces. "Dr. Swenson. A very good man. I suppose he guessed what had
happened, got a few people together, and went to work on the door.
Quietly--no panic."

The dry, brown hand of the man he looked down at was cramped around the
twin pipe of an oxyacetylene torch. Another pair of dry brown arms held
cylinders of gas. Another had been straightening a kinked tube when time
became eternity.

"No panic," Gribble mused. "His watchword used to be 'Step back and take
a long, calm look.' He kept us together after the polio epidemic. I for
one was ready to yell for help. 'Step back,' he said, and I did and we
decided we could swing it as we were. That Swenson. He felt the air go
cold and dry, he figured it out, he got his men together, they got to
work on the door. And then the gas came. Without pain."

All Justin could make of it was that Gribble had killed--or thought he
had killed--some people beyond the door. "Tell me about it," he said
calmly.

"I'll show you," said the little man. "After all, it's your baby now. I
couldn't be expected to go on with it now, could I? _Could I?_" His eyes
were wild.

"Of course not," Justin said very steadily. "You just show me what you
have to and don't worry. I'll see that the right thing's done."

"Come on," Gribble said.

They stepped around the bodies and through the door. Into a garage. The
little man absently went from wall to wall turning on lights. It was
quite a place, and it was crowded with servicing equipment and trucks.
No two trucks were built alike, painted alike, or marked alike. Some of
them Justin vaguely recognized. There was the two-ton stake-bed job,
very battered, marked _P. DiPumpo & Sons, Contractors_. He had
absent-mindedly registered the odd name a few times during the past few
years. The battered truck of P. DiPumpo & Sons had intersected his orbit
on the highway, or in town, or perhaps during the early months of the
war passing his farm. Trucks came and went.

A half-ton cab-over-engine job: _Hornell Florists_.

A huge, ordinary, bright-red gas truck: _Supeco Refining Company_.

A tractor-trailer job, special trailer with the bed sunk between the
axles: _U. S. Bridge Building Corporation_. He had seen that one,
noticing the odd profile of a bulky load covered with roped tarpaulins.

Thirty more of them, reefers, pickups, vans, dumpers, tow cars--you name
it and it was there. Two hundred feet under Prospect Hill was a haunted
garage with dry, brown people sprawled here and there, as they would
fall from timing an engine, cleaning spark plugs, turning down brake
drums, and--in one small corner--stamping out counterfeit license plates
for 1966.

"Come on," Gribble said again.

He led Justin from the garage into a bewildering underground industrial
complex. There were drafting rooms, with dry brown draftsmen slumped
forward on their tables. Offices, foundries, machine shops, welding
bays, sheet-metal shops, laboratories, and desiccated corpses
everywhere. Gribble kept pausing to look into faces. Sometimes he would
name a name; usually he would turn to Justin and ask shrilly whether it
wasn't obvious that they had died painlessly and in peace. Justin
assured him over and over again.

The living quarters, below the working level, were the same. Spartan
cubicles tunneling deep into the hill--Justin guessed dazedly that there
might be five thousand of them strung along twenty corridors radiating
from a plaza. The library, the cafeterias, the gymnasium. Sun lamps
there, of course. And brown figures sprawled on the board track that
circled it.

"What was it?" he had been asking for some time now of the unhearing
little man. "I can't help if I don't know what it was, Gribble."

The little man led the way up from the living quarters to a freight
elevator on the manufacturing level. He jerked the starting cable and
the platform rose slowly with them to a square of blackness in the
roof. "The satellite," Gribble said. "The super gadget, the ultimate
doohickey that was going to win the war and keep it won."

"The satellite's lost, Gribble," Justin said evenly. "They overran it in
the sweep North. Betsy Cardew told me about it."

Gribble looked at him scornfully. "Not that one, you bloody fool," he
said. "This one. The _real_ one."

The freight elevator passed through the square of blackness and lights
went on in a huge domed chamber of rock. In the center of the chamber
stood a towering, spidery structure. Even Justin's untrained eye could
see that it was a three-step rocket. Even he could see that the third
step was designed to circle the Earth as an artificial satellite. And
that it was heavily armed with bomb-launching racks.




CHAPTER TEN


You're a well-read average man, thought Billy Justin, so you're aware
that the human race is about to take its next giant step. It's a pity
that it takes a war to do it, but that seems to be the way people are.
British imperial greed long ago caused a Mr. John Harrison to fuse
metallurgy, physics, and genius into the first marine chronometer, by
means of which the captains of His Britannic Majesty's Navy was able to
find a not yet plundered island twice in succession. Before that Signor
Tartaglia, under the necessity of battering down medieval walls
sheltering medieval thugs for the benefit of Renaissance thugs with
Renaissance cannon, stole sine, cosine, and tangent from the
philosophers' toy chest and gave them to the world for tools. You know
it was war that put jigs and fixtures on our machine tools, which is to
say mass production: muskets to sewing machines, washers, kitchenware,
Grand Rapids furniture, and the American standard of living. And another
put planes in the air. And another avalanched radar, atomic bombs, and
the first crude spaceships on us. You knew, therefore, like everybody
else, that the current war was going to bring space flight, particularly
the bombardment satellite _Yankee Doodle_ a-building in the Southwest
somewhere on the Colorado plateau. The marvelous satellite would circle
the Earth like the eye of God, but improved by American ingenuity; its
more than Jovian thunderbolts were to strike down not one sinner at a
time but whole sinful cities and--if they didn't disperse into
ineffectiveness--sinful army groups. It was going to be a harsh, just
world for sinners when the satellite _Yankee Doodle_ roared up to begin
its swift circling of the heavens, troubled though the progress of its
construction was by sabotage. Troubled though it was by paratroopers.
And there wasn't a dry eye in the house when the radio told you how
_Yankee Doodle_ was steam-rollered by the fifty thousand death-or-glory
Chinese fanatics, hopped up to the eyebrows, of Task Force Tsing. The
announcer brokenly announced: "Our men and women fought to the end
against the human sea that engulfed them. The last weak radio
communication from the site announced that thermite and demolition bombs
had been fired to utterly destroy all components of _Yankee Doodle_ so
that the fanatical barbarian invaders----"

"Not that one, you bloody fool. This one. The _real_ one."

Billy Justin craned his neck to study the monster. Its nose was lost in
the upper gloom of the chamber. He emitted a sound like a nervous
giggle. "I never thought we were that smart," he breathed.

Gribble was very happy. This was the ultimate in the pleasurable game of
giving away confidences. "It's nothing new," he said with elaborate
casualness. "We suckered the Germans this way when we invaded Europe the
last time. There was this army group, see, waiting in England to make
the real attack on the pas de Calais. The Germans knew it; they knew
Patton was in command, they intercepted the radio traffic of the army
group every day. Orders, acknowledgments, rations, troop movements,
supplies, personnel transfers. So they almost ignored the feint by
Bradley on the Cotentin Peninsula; they held forty divisions ready to
meet the real thrust by Patton's army group. When it was too late, they
found out that Patton's army group consisted of Patton and a couple of
hundred radio operators. By then Bradley had broken out and was chewing
his way across France."

"It is--ready?" asked Justin.

"No." The little man squatted on the concrete. "I'll begin at the
beginning. You've got to know it all anyway."

"Why?" Justin asked sharply.

Gribble screwed up his face and his eyes began to leak tears. "I thought
you agreed," he said miserably. "Didn't you say you'd handle it? I'm
shot, Justin! I can't take any more----" His voice was soaring into
childish shrillness.

"All right," Justin said hastily. "All right. Don't worry about a thing.
If I've got to, I've got to. Just tell me."

Gribble blew his nose and shuddered. Shrilly at first, then more easily,
he said: "It hasn't got any name. It's a three-step hydrazine-fueled
bombardment satellite. It has a fish-bowl reactor for housekeeping
current. It has a hydrophonics room in action now under sun lamps. It's
built for two. The TV tape and film library includes fifty thousand
movies and books. An all-transistor radio sending and receiving set will
function for an estimated seventy-five years without requiring
servicing. Efficient waste and water regenerators are patterned after
those aboard our long-cruise atomic submarines. Up there you can see the
bomb deck, which accounts for half the weight of the third stage,
neglecting fuel. A radar-computer bomb sight is capable of directing
missiles to any point on the Earth's surface; delivery within five
square miles is guaranteed. The satellite is armed with thirty-six
hydrogen bombs and two special cobalt-jacketed bombs. I don't know why
I'm telling you all this. You must have been reading about it since
1950."

Justin nodded. He had. Sandwiched between do-it-yourself pieces in the
mechanics magazines, sandwiched between boy-and-girl stories in the
slicks. He had. Everybody had. And here it was. . . .

"Well, 1950's when it began. Ninteen-fifty's when I went to Clardy and
offered my services. Nineteen-fifty's when all those ads appeared
everywhere for engineers, scientists, technicians, toolmakers,
mechanics. Remember the deluge?"

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.

BOOK 2

[Blank Page]




CHAPTER ELEVEN


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.

"C'm into the office," Croley grunted, and they disappeared.

"Things are picking up all over," a little old man said hopefully to
Justin. "If the price's right, I could use a dozen myself. Sick of
scouring and patching the old cans. Don't you think things are picking
up?"

Somebody else snapped: "For Croley they are. Crooked skunk." The little
man looked alarmed and started to move away. The dangerous
talker--Justin thought he was one of the Eldridge brothers from Four
Corners--took the little man's arm and began pouring into his ears a
tale of how Croley paid off every week to a SMGU major who pretended to
inspect his freezer room----

"Mebbe, mebbe," the little man kept saying as he tried to get away.

Justin told himself: _There's my man._ In Croley's office. I wait for
him to come out, I walk along as he heads for the bus, we whisper an
appointment, and I meet him somewhere. And then, thank God, it'll be
over. No more bombardment satellite for me. A smooth conspiratorial
group somewhere will take it over, do what has to be done. I'll have
done my share. I'll watch and secretly know that someday I'll be in the
history books as the daring civilian who contacted the organization at
the risk of his life . . .

It didn't work out that way at all.

The bus driver called: "'Board!" and the salesman appeared at the door
of the little office, still talking to Croley and shaking hands. He
talked Croley out through the door of the shop with him, swung up the
steps of the bus still talking, and collapsed comfortably into a dirty
oilcloth-covered seat while Justin gaped and the bus chugged off down
the road.

Contact broken.

    *    *    *    *    *

Justin found himself swearing, almost frenzied, as he stumped along the
dirt track to the Shiptons' woodlot. The flies were bad in the summer
heat; he slapped viciously at them, missing oftener than not, knowing
that frustration was making him behave like an idiot. _But he had to
dump this load!_

Rawson came into sight about where they told him he'd be. The crippled
veteran was strapped into his gocart, leaning far out to bore a hole
with a post auger. The Shipton milk quota had been stepped up again. To
meet it they'd have to breed their heifers early; to feed the calves
that would come they needed more pasture. So here was Rawson boring
postholes to enclose land supposed to be set aside as woodlot for the
future.

Justin hailed the legless man abruptly. Rawson gave the pipe handle of
the auger a final turn and hauled it up, loaded with sandy clay, his
huge shoulder muscles bulging. "Good day's work," he said proudly. "What
brings you here, Billy?"

"I know where the bombardment satellite is," Justin said flatly.

Rawson grinned. "Why, so do I. Poor old _Yankee Doodle's_ a few miles
south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, what's left of her. Too bad they didn't
get her up in time----"

"I mean the real one," Justin said. "_Yankee Doodle_ was deception. I
know where the real one is. Rawson, you've got to put me in touch with
your higher-ups. Don't act dumb, Rawson! You've got something to do with
the suitcase A-bombs. I saw that salesman who picked up the assembly
from me that time. He was in Croley's store but he was gone before I had
a chance to talk to him."

"Near by?" Rawson asked thoughtfully.

"Skip that. Just let me know who's your boss and how to get in touch. I
want to dump this business. I don't know what to do with it, where to
begin. I've got to turn it over to somebody."

"You're nuts," Rawson said. "I don't know about any A-bombs and you
don't know about any bombardment satellites lying around. What A-bomb
was this--that liquor you helped me out with?"

"Liquor be damned! Who's your boss?"

"Convince me, Billy. You haven't yet. And if it'll help you talk, you
might as well know I used to be, in my time, the youngest general
officer in the Corps of Engineers."

"You're in command?"

"Of what? I'm not giving information, Billy. I'm only taking today."

So, Justin thought bitterly, I don't get to lay it down. Instead I get
involved deeper. Now I have the burden of Rawson's identity on
me--unless he's lying or crazy. He began to talk.

Gribble, the psychosis, the satellite.

When there was no more to tell, the legless man said: "Very
circumstantial. Maybe even true."

"You'll take it from here?" Justin demanded.

"Go home and wait, Billy. Just go home and wait." Rawson shoved his
gocart five feet farther down the line and stabbed his auger into the
sod for the next post hole.

Justin started down the dirt path, the burden still on his back. He
thought of blood-spattered cellar walls against which men exactly like
him, but with less than a millionth of the guilty knowledge he
possessed, were beaten and killed. When would they let Billy Justin be
Billy Justin again? It went far back into childhood, his involvement.
Were the old wars like this rolling, continuous thing of which he had
been a part for as long as he could remember, this thing that would not
end even now that it was ended? Item: childhood games. Item: high school
R.O.T.C. Item: propaganda poster contests. Item: Korea (and an infected
leg wound from a dirty, nameless little patrol). Item: War Three (and
cows). Item: defeat and occupation. And still he was entangled in spite
of his fatigue, his hundred-times-earned honorable discharge.




CHAPTER TWELVE


Justin waited through two weeks of summer drought and flies, having a
minimum of talk with Gribble, collapsing every night in exhaustion. They
came very close to meeting their milk norm.

The signal was a long blast of the mailwoman's horn--it meant registered
mail, an insured package or something of the sort. Justin climbed the
steep, short hill to the mailbox suspecting nothing more. But Betsy
Cardew told him: "Think up a good reason. You're going into Chiunga
Center with me."

"Rawson?" he asked. She nodded. "Can you wait while I throw a bucket of
water over myself and change my shirt?"

"I can't. Please get in."

They chugged the long mail route almost without conversing. She had
nothing to say except that he would meet some people. He tried to tell
her that she shouldn't be mixed up in anything like this and she said
she had to be. They had to have the mail carriers. And, after
reflecting, he realized that they did. Mail carriers were daily
travelers who met everybody and carried packages as part of the job.
Mail carriers were essential, and if one of them happened to be a slim,
clear-eyed girl entirely unsuited for torture and death in a cellar, so
much the worse for her.

She showed no fear at the check points. The Red Army men who stopped her
and signed her through on their registers were friendly. She said to
them, "_Prohsteetye, chtoh behspohkohyoo vas_," while Justin stared and
the soldiers grinned.

"Very difficult language," she told Justin as they drove on. "I'm making
slow progress."

"Those soldiers looked pretty sloppy to me."

"Colonel Platov got a girl. Mrs. Grauer."

Justin whistled. The Grauers were Chiunga Center aristocracy. Young Mr.
Grauer was president by primogeniture of the feed mill, Mrs. Grauer was
an imported Wellesley girl and very slim and lovely. The husband, of
course, was whereabouts-unknown after surrendering his National Guard
regiment in the debacle at El Paso. "Goes right to the house?" he asked.

"Right to the big red brick Georgian show place," she said,
concentrating on her driving. "I don't know if they're in love or not.
There's an awful lot of it going on."

So Colonel Platoff had a girl and the soldiers at the check points had
murky brass and had skipped shaving. The soldierly virtue was running
fast out of SMGU 449. Justin was suddenly more conscious than ever that
he smelled like what he was: a farmer in a midsummer drought.

Justin got out when they reached the post office by late afternoon.
Betsy Cardew said she had two hours of sorting ahead of her, and would
he meet her at her house on Chiunga Hill.

He wandered through the town unmolested. Mr. Farish, the bald, asthmatic
young pharmacist, called to him from behind his prescription counter as
he strolled down High Street. Mr. Farish and he had been fellow members
of Rotary in the old days before the Farm-or-Fight Law; the membership
of a freelance commercial artist made Chiunga Center Rotary more
broad-minded and cultured than the other chapters down the valley. They
valued him for it, especially Mr. Farish who daydreamed of escaping from
pharmacy via an interminable historical novel he was writing.

Justin stepped into the store and nervously blurted out his cover story,
an unconvincing bit about buying seed cake from the local feed store,
Croley's price being too high for comfort.

Mr. Farish, completely uninterested, waved the yarn aside and set him up
a root beer. "Red Army boys are crazy about root beer," he said.
"Nothing like it where they come from."

"How're they behaving?"

"Pretty fair. Say, did you hear about Colonel Platov and Mrs.----?"

"I heard. Customer, Fred."

It was a Red soldier with a roll of film. "_Sredah?_" he asked,
grinning.

"_Pyatneetsah_," Mr. Farish told him. "O.K.?"

"Hokay," said the soldier. He contorted his face and brought out from
the depths: "Soap?" And grinned with relief.

Mr. Farish sold him the soap and put away the film. "He wanted it on
Wednesday and I told him Friday," he said casually. "You saw how he took
it, Billy. There's no harm in them. Of course, you farmers are eating a
lot better than we are here but after they get food distribution squared
away----"

Justin gulped his root beer and thanked Farish. He had to find out about
that seed cake, he said, and hurried out. The bald young man looked hurt
by his abruptness.

The bald young idiot!

He headed for one of the elm-shaded residential streets and paced its
length, his hands rammed into the pockets of his jeans. Farish didn't
know; Farish knew only that farmers were always griping. He didn't
realize that the problem facing the Reds in the valley was to squeeze
the maximum amount of milk from it and any time spent batting the
mercantile population around would be wasted. After the pattern was set,
after the dairy farmers were automatic serfs, then they would move on
the shopkeepers. Currently they were being used, and skillfully, to
supply the garrison and the farms.

And still there was a nagging thought that these Red G.I.s were just
human, and that their bosses were just human, that things seemed to be
easing into a friendlier pattern of live and let live.

And beneath that one there was the darker thought that it was too good
to last, that somehow the gigantic self-regulating system would respond
to the fact that Red G.I.s were treating the conquered population like
friends and that Colonel Platov had a girl.

An off-duty soldier and _his_ girl were strolling the elm-shaded street
with him, he noticed. The girl he vaguely recognized: one of those town
drifters who serves your coffee at the diner one morning and the next
day, to your surprise, is selling you crockery at the five-and-ten.
Margaret something-or-other----

A sergeant bore down on the couple, and the soldier popped to attention,
saluting. Without understanding a word Justin knew that he was
witnessing a memorable chewing-out. The spitting, snarling Russian
language was well suited to the purpose. When it ended at last, the
chastened soldier saluted, about-faced, and marched down the street at
attention, with Margaret something-or-other left standing flat-footed.
The sergeant relaxed and smiled at her: "_Kahkoy, preeyatnyi
syoorpreez!_"

Margaret had her bearings again. She smiled back, "_Da_, big boy. Let's
go," and off they went arm in arm.

Justin walked back to High Street, deeply disturbed. He liked what he
had seen. It was too good, too warmly human, to be true.

Mr. Sparhawk was established on a crate at the corner of High and
Onondaga outside the bank preaching to a thin crowd, none of whom stayed
for more than a minute. The pinched British voice and the bony British
face had not changed in the months since Justin last saw him. Neither
had his line:

"My dear friends, we have peace at last. Some of you doubtless believe
that it would be a better peace if it had been won by the victory of the
North American Governments than by their adversaries, but this is vain
thinking. Peace is indivisible, however attained. It is not what it has
come out of but what we make of it. Reforming ourselves from within is
the way in which we shall reform society. In the lonely individual
heart begins what you are pleased to call progress. I rejoice that
there is a diminished supply of meat and pray that this condition will
reveal to you all the untruthfulness of the propaganda that meat is
essential to health, and that from this realization many of you will
progress to vegetarianism, the first great ascetic step along the road
to universal life-reverence . . ."

Justin could not stand more than a minute of it himself. He headed north
along Onondaga Street toward Chiunga Hill and the big white house where
Betsy lived. He knew why it hadn't yet been requisitioned, even after
the guilty flight of her father, the National Committeeman. The Russians
were supposed to live like Spartans in their barracks, officers faring
not much better than the troops. But he thought he scented a trend in
town that would end only with the expropriation of every decent dwelling
in the Center.

    *    *    *    *    *

The second and third floors of the house were closed off. There was
still plenty of room for Betsy and a Mrs. Norse, the last of the
servants. She was tottery and deaf; actually the two women waited on
each other. Betsy matter-of-factly offered Justin a bath, which he
eagerly accepted. When he emerged from the tub, she called to him: "I've
found some of my father's gardening things for you to put on. I don't
suppose you want me to save your clothes?"

"No," he called back, embarrassed. "You caught me by surprise today, you
know. I was wearing them just to clean the barn----"

"Of course," she said politely. "I'll have Mrs. Norse burn them, shall
I?"

Clean socks, underwear, and clean, faded denims--he had to take up six
inches of slack with his belt--left Justin feeling better than he had in
months. Mrs. Norse was noisy about the improvement. She remembered the
day when a man wouldn't dream of setting foot outside his bedroom unless
he was decently clothed in stiff collar, white shirt, tie, and jacket.
She told Justin about it and Betsy cooked dinner.

A panel truck pulled into the driveway while they were eating spanish
rice, the main dish. It proceeded on to the back of the house, but
Justin had time to read the lettering on it as it passed the window.

"'Department of Agriculture,'" he said to Betsy. "And in smaller
letters, 'Fish and Wild Life Survey.'"

She was blank-faced. "Go into the library when you've finished," she
said. "Mrs. Norse and I will clear things up." He found he was gobbling
his spanish rice and deliberately slowed down. Then the stuff balled in
his mouth so he couldn't swallow.

"Excuse me," he said, gulping coffee and standing. He went into the
library.

There were three men, all strangers, all middle-aged. One was the lean
little gnome type, one was heavy and spectacularly bald, one was a
placid ox.

Mr. Ox said, "Put up your hands," and searched him. Mr. Egg said, "I
hope you don't mind. We have to ask you some questions," and Justin knew
at once who he was--The Honorable James Buchanan Wagner, junior senator
from Michigan, nicknamed "Curly." He had shaved his head, and for
safety's sake really ought to do something about his superb voice.
Though perhaps, Justin thought, he as a commercial artist was a lot
quicker than most to fill in the outlines of that bushy head.

Mr. Gnome said, "Sit down, please," and opened a brief case. He laid a
light tray and variously colored tiles before Justin and said: "Put them
in the tray any way you like." Justin built up a nice design for the man
in about a minute and sat back.

Mr. Gnome said: "Look at this picture and tell me what it's about." The
picture was very confusing, but after a moment Justin realized that it
was a drawing of one man telling another man something, apparently a
secret from their furtive expressions. He said so.

"Now what about this one?"

"Two men fighting. The big one's losing the fight."

"This one?"

"A horse--just a horse."

There were about fifty pictures. When they were run through, Mr. Gnome
switched to ink-blot cards, which Justin identified as spiders, women,
mirrors, and whatever else they looked like to him.

Every now and then Justin heard Senator Wagner distinctly mutter,
"Fiddle-faddle," which did not surprise him. The senator, known as a man
who saw his duty to the United States and did it, was nevertheless not
distinguished for broad-gaged, liberal leadership.

There followed word-association lists. Not only did the gnome hold a
stop watch, but Mr. Ox calmly donned a stethoscope and put the button on
Justin's wrist.

Then they seemed to be finished. The gnome told the senator: "I guess
he's all right. Yes--he's either smarter than I am or he's all right.
Sincere, not too neurotic, a reasonably effective person. For what it's
worth, Senator, I vouch for----"

The senator said angrily: "No names!"

Mr. Gnome shrugged. "His reaction time on 'Congress,' 'hair,'
'wagon'--he recognized you all right."

"Very well, Doctor," rumbled the celebrated voice. "Mr. Justin, I wish
to show you something." The senator turned down his collar on the right.
He was still bitterly hostile--fundamentally scared, Justin realized,
with two kinds of fear. There was the built-in animal fear of pain,
mutilation, death. There was the abstract fear that one wrong decision
at any stage of this dangerous game would blow sky-high any hope that
America would rise again.

The senator was showing Justin a razor blade taped inside his collar.
"You can seem merely to be easing your collar, Mr. Justin. With one
swift move, however--_so_--you can slash your carotid artery beyond
repair. Within seconds you will be dead. Your orders are not to be taken
alive," the senator said. And he added grimly: "My psychologist friend
indicates that you have sufficient moral fiber to carry them out." He
tossed a blade and an inch of tape at Justin. "Put them on. Then tell
your story. General Hollerith assures us through Miss Cardew that it is
of the utmost importance."

"Is Hollerith Rawson?" Justin demanded.

"I don't recall his cover name. No legs," said the psychologist.

His friend Rawson a general after all. Then what might not be true? The
psychologist slipped out while Justin told Senator Wagner and Mr. Ox--of
the FBI?--about his bombardment satellite.

The senator was apoplectic. He fizzed for minutes about abuse of the
executive power; apparently Congress had been told as little about the
bombardment satellite as an earlier Congress had been told about the
atomic bomb. Well--sigh--what's done is done. Now the problem is to
integrate the windfall into existing plans.

Mr. Gnome returned and said: "Miss Cardew will brief you, Mr. Justin. We
have to be on our way now."

They left and Justin heard the Fish and Wild Life Survey panel truck
move out of the driveway and down the road.

Back in the dining room Miss Norse was dozing in a corner.

"Well?" asked Betsy Cardew.

He turned down his collar and showed her the blade.

"The man said you were in and I was to brief you. What do you want to
know about us?"

"What's there to know? How many. What you plan. Whether you think you
can get away with it. Who's the boss."

"I don't know how many there are. I don't really _know_ whether there's
anybody in it except a couple of local people and those three. They came
around a month ago--I used to know the senator. I don't know who's in
charge, if anybody.

"They told me it's a war plan, one of those things that lies in the
files until it's needed. Well, it was needed when the collapse came at
El Paso. The orders were for as many atomic-service officers as possible
to grab all the fissionable material they could lay their hands on and
go underground. The same for psychological-warfare personnel. Then start
recruiting civilians into the organization."

"And what do we _do_?"

"They've mentioned a winter uprising. They hope by then to have a large
part of the civilian population alerted. There should be food caches,
caches of winter clothing, weapons, and ammunition stolen from Red
supply dumps. Then you wait for real socked-in, no-see flying weather
and fire your suitcase A-bombs. Washington, of course, to behead the
Administration. Ports to prevent reinforcement. Tank parks. Roads and
railways. Simultaneously a scorched-earth guerrilla war against the
garrisons while they're cut off.

"Oh, and you asked me whether I think we can get away with it, didn't
you? The answer is no. I don't think so. I don't see anything coming out
of it except defeat and retaliation. But is there anything else to do?"

"No," he said gravely. Nor was there.

"What did you tell General Hollerith, anyway?" she asked. "Something to
do with Gribble, wasn't it?"

"Sorry. They asked me not to say." He fished for a change of subject.
"How did you arrange the meeting, get in touch with them? If it's all
right for me to know."

"I suppose so. Believe it or not, our conspiracy has a complete secret
telegraphic network covering most of the United States. I didn't believe
them when they told me, but it's true. Like finding out that you don't
have to dig a tunnel under the English Channel; there's one already dug.
The senator found out about the wires when he was on the crime
commission. They call them 'dry wires.' They're the old Postal
Telegraph network from before your time and mine. Public clocks in all
sorts of places used to get correcting pulses over the wires. When
Western Union absorbed Postal Telegraph, they just blanked off their
clock wires because radio had come along by then and any disk jockey

could give you Naval Observatory time. I located one of the painted-over
terminals in the Lackawanna station. Ticket clerk there's in with us.
All you need to activate a link of the circuit are a battery, a key, and
a buzzer. He covers the wire for us. A brave man, Billy . . ."

"We're all heroes," he said bitterly.

"Yes, I suppose we are. Would you like a drink?"

"I ought to start for home. Maybe I can hitch a ride."

"Nonsense. Stay the night and take the Keoka bus. If you stay for
breakfast it'll improve your cover story. I think I told you--there's a
lot of it going on."

"I think what you said was, 'It isn't love, but there's a lot of it
going on.'"

"Something like that. There isn't much love around these days. A lot of
loneliness, a lot of monotony, a lot of shattered pride."

"I'll take that drink, please," he said.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN


They walked together down Chiunga Hill toward the town, savoring the
still cool morning. The reservoir off to the north was a sheet of blue
glass and the pumping station a toy fort in the clear air.

"I'm glad they never bombed us," Betsy said. "I really like this
place."

He thought of reminding her what a scorched-earth guerrilla campaign
meant, but did not speak.

"Convoy," Betsy said, pointing down at the highway. The buglike trucks
must be hauling supplies--but the tanks? "Maneuvers somewhere," she
said.

They walked on in silence, and Chiunga Hill Road became Elm Street and
they joined other morning walkers to work. A letter carrier in gray
said: "Morning, Miss Cardew. What do you suppose those trucks are up
to?"

He meant the convoy. Instead of by-passing the town they had turned off
the highway and were rolling down High Street, three blocks farther on.

"Maybe they're going across the bridge to the Tunkhannock road, Mr.
Selwin. Mr. Selwin, do you know Mr. Justin?"

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure," the old man said. "You a
farmer, Mr. Justin?"

"Yes."

"You're a lucky man, then, I can tell you that. At least you get all you
want to eat. Say, Mr. Justin, I hear that sometimes you people up in the
hills have a few eggs or maybe a chicken or some butter left over and I
happen to know a family with a little girl that's real sick with anemia.
Blood needs building up. Now if I could fix it up with you----"

Justin shook his head. "I can't get away with it, Mr. Selwin. I'm very
sorry. And by the way, the farmers may be eating better than the city
people, but they're sweating it right out again making milk. The norm's
always moving up, you know. Soon as you catch up, it jumps again."

"He's telling the truth, Mr. Selwin," Betsy said. "Ask any of the rural
carriers. Surely those trucks aren't stopping for our little traffic
light, are they?"

"They never have before," Mr. Selwin said. They were now only a block
from High Street. The postman peered over his glasses at the standing
trucks. "But then," he said, "they don't seem to be regular Red Army
trucks. Instead of the red star they have--let's see--MBA. What's MBA
mean?"

"In the first place," Betsy said slowly, "it's MVD."

"Beats me, Miss Cardew. I don't know how you and the other young people
do it." He winked at Justin privately.

"They're the border guards. And the political police," Betsy said.

Two trucks turned out of line on High Street and came roaring down their
way along Elm. Justin got only a glimpse of young faces and special
uniforms. Green, with polished leather.

_They can't have come for us_, thought Justin incredulously. There's a
_regiment_ of them. Fifty personnel-carrier trucks, command cars, half a
dozen medium tanks. They can't have come for Betsy and me!

Walking in frozen silence, they reached High Street. The main body of
the convoy was parked there, the young men in their special uniforms
impassive under the eyes and whispers of five hundred work-bound men and
women. At the far end of High Street, on the old bridge across the
Susquehanna, stood two of the tanks. The four other tanks were crawling
northeast from High along Seneca. Nothing was in that direction except
the high school--the 449th SMGU garrison.

A fat man in a high-slung command car got up, looked at his watch, and
blew a whistle three times. The convoy erupted into action. People
laughed shrilly; it was comical to see almost one thousand young men who
had been stock-still a moment ago begin to climb out of their trucks,
hand down equipment, consult maps and lists, snap salutes, and pass
low-toned commands and acknowledgments.

A pattern appeared. Justin knew it from Korea. There are only so many
ways to occupy a town. This outfit was doing it the expensive, foolproof
sledge-hammer way. The strings of sixteen burdened men in double column
were machine-gun sections streaming out to the perimeter of the area;
they would set up a pair of cross-firing guns at each main road into
the Center. The squads double-timing ahead of them would be pickets
linking the machine-gun points. And there was a mortar section, sagging
under their bedplates and barrels and canvas vests stuffed with bombs;
they were on their way to the Susquehanna bridge embankment to reinforce
the pair of tanks. A cheap little mortar bomb would sink a rowboat
unworthy of a 155-millimeter shell from the tank; a white phosphorus
bomb would be more effective against forbidden swimmers than machine-gun
fire.

And the specialist squads moved down to the railroad station to hold all
trains, and into the small A.T. & T. building to take charge of
communications, and into the Western Union office with its yellow and
black hanging sign and varnished golden-oak counter and scared
nineteen-year-old girl clerk.

And riflemen consulted maps and went and stood like traffic cops, a pair
at every intersection, sweeping the crowded sidewalks with stony eyes.

Beside Justin, Mr. Selwin gibbered: "It must be some kind of drill,
don't you think? Just what you call a dry run, don't it look like?"

A vast relief was blossoming inside Justin. "I think so," he said. "I
can't imagine what else it could be. Just practice in case." _In case of
me--but not yet._

A sound truck rolled down the street, stopping at each corner to make an
announcement in Russian and one in English. They saw the crowds melt
from the sidewalk and into shops as it approached; from three blocks
away they caught the English: "All persons off the streets at once and
await further inspections. Persons on the street in three minutes will
be shot----"

They dived for a store the instant it sank in. The store happened to be
Mr. Farish's pharmacy. "Thank God," said Betsy. "A place with coffee."
Her voice shook.

The sound truck stopped only a couple of yards away at the intersection
and bellowed in Russian and English. The score or so of people crowded
into the store debated on the Russian announcement. They more or less
agreed at last that the announcement had been orders for all SMGU troops
to report at once to the high school athletic field.

Bald young Mr. Farish was behind his soda fountain making and serving
coffee mechanically. When he got to Justin, Betsy, and Mr. Selwin, he
twinkled: "Little break in the monotony, eh?"

Mr. Selwin said: "I ought to be in the sorting room. I've been late
before this year, no fault of my own. It's going to look awfully bad."

The coffee was some terrible synthetic or other.

Betsy said from the window: "They're arresting the SMGU men--I think."
Everybody crowded up to see a couple of regular-detachment people being
marched along by MVD troops. The green-uniformed young men had taken the
regulars' tommy guns.

"It's something like a visit from the inspector general," said a man who
actually took a short step through the door onto the sidewalk to see
better. "Only--Russian." One of the MVD men posted like traffic cops
yelled at him and brandished his rifle. He grinned and ducked back into
the store.

"Russians don't scare me any more," he announced. "You know what I mean.
I thought it was the end of the world when they came, but I learned.
They're G.I.s, and so what?"

A woman looked around, scowled, and said: "Speak for yourself."

It precipitated a ten-minute debate in the crowded little store. Chiunga
Center had not yet decided on the relationship between itself and the
Russians. "We might be across the Mississippi," said somebody. "How'd
you like to have a bunch of Chinks swaggering around? Yeah, the Russians
aren't so different from Americans. It says in the _Times_ they both
have characters shaped by frontiers . . ." A Toynbeean's view was that
the occupiers would be softened and democratized by their contact with
the occupied.

Through it all Justin and Betsy stood in a rear corner, their hands
nervously entwined. Mr. Selwin left them long enough for a worried
glance through the window. While the old man was gone, Justin had time
to mutter: "Have you got a blade? I could buy one for you."

"I have one," she said, barely moving her lips.

Mr. Selwin came back. "I believe it's all over," he said. "The streets
are clear and those soldiers are just standing there and I ought to get
to the sorting room."

"Better not, Mr. Selwin," Betsy said.

"You don't understand, Miss Cardew. You just took a mail job because you
had to work at something. I've got thirty-two years in and absences
don't look good when a man's my age. They start to say you're slipping.
Young people don't understand that. I believe I'm going to ask that
soldier if I can go now."

"I wouldn't, Mr. Selwin," Justin told him.

Selwin went anyway. He shouted from the doorway at the pair of riflemen:
"Is it all right now? We go? Free?" They stared at him.

Some of the other Americans stranded in the store called out hopefully
in Russian. The faces of the young men in green didn't change. "Better
not," a man told Mr. Selwin.

Mr. Selwin said: "I'll try a few steps out. It all seems to be over
anyway."

He stepped out tentatively, keeping his eye on the Russians. They simply
watched incuriously. The postman turned and grinned for a moment at the
people in the store and took a couple of cautious steps down the street,
then a couple more.

One of the Russians raised his rifle and shot Mr. Selwin in the chest.
The big bullet blasted a grunt out of the old man, but after he fell he
was silent. Apparently the sentry had been waiting for Mr. Selwin to
step past the glass window of the drugstore to brick wall that would
provide a backstop.

The man who wasn't scared any more said slowly: "I think this is a
different kind of Russian we have here."

A middle-aged woman began to whoop and sob with hysteria. Mr. Farish
yelled: "Don't let her knock those bottles over, please! I'll get some
ammonia spirits----"

He fed them to her from a glass, nervously stroking his bald head. She
calmed down, took the glass in her own hands and gulped, coughing.

They heard the boom of the sound truck in the distance again, and
another sound: machine guns, a pair of them firing short, carefully
spaced bursts. "It isn't combat firing," Justin said in bewilderment.
"It sounds as if they're shooting for badges on a range."

Then a spattering of rifle shots confused the sound and then the truck
rolled down High Street and drowned out the small arms with its yammer.

"All persons registered with the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit
are ordered to report at once to the athletic field. Stragglers will be
fired on. All persons registered . . ."

After the case of Mr. Selwin they did not hesitate. The shops along High
Street erupted civilians who streamed toward the field, some of them
running.

The field was clear on the other side of town from High Street. The
congestion as they neared it was worse than it had ever been for a
Saturday football game, even the traditional rivalry of Chiunga
Catamounts versus Keoka Cougars. The bellowing sound truck dimmed behind
them. The queer and prissy bursts-of-four machine gunning became louder,
with the occasional spatter of rifles still occurring now and then.

Green-uniformed MVD men were posted around the field, gesturing the
crowd through. One man was going the wrong way; he charged out of the
gate beneath the stands, stumbling and caroming off the incoming
civilians. Justin dodged and yanked Betsy aside as the man leaned over
and was sick. Then the crowd swept them on through the narrow gate. They
popped out inside on the cinder track that circled the field; MVD men
gestured them along. The small bleachers across the field from them and
the small stands sloping back behind them were full; these late arrivals
were to be standees.

The field itself was crowded with something Justin at
first--idiotically--took to be a dress parade. As he and Betsy shuffled
sideways along the cinder track under the pressure of more arrivals, his
eye gradually sorted out the two thousand odd soldiers on the field.

First there were the disarmed men of the 449th rigidly at attention
behind their officers. They were drawn up in a solid block of companies
that stretched from the north goal line to the 30-yard line. Everybody
was there, down to the medics in their hospital coats and the cooks and
bakers in their whites.

Then he saw the tanks, one at each corner of the field, their machine
guns and cannon depressed to fire point-blank into the 449th. Then he
saw the green-uniformed MVD men with rifles and tommy guns and a pile of
new dead directly before them on the 50-yard line.

Machine guns roared above his head. Betsy screamed and clapped her hands
to her head. The muzzle blast was terrific----

He turned and saw where they were coming from. A pair of them was
mounted in the little press box hung from the roof of the stands, the
box where the _Valley News_ used to cover the games and WVC-TV used to
broadcast the traditional rivalry each year. The guns hammered with that
firing-range artificiality for a while and then stopped. Justin noticed
that directly in front of them in midfield five soldiers of the 449th
lay butchered.

Somebody in the field bawled: "_Roh-tah--gay!_"

MVD men began to hustle officers and men from one of the company blocks.
All the officers, one enlisted man in four. The uneven rifle shots were
explained while the selection was going on. One of the enlisted men
broke loose and ran, screaming, when a green-uniformed youth tapped his
chest. He was shot down as he sprinted sweatily toward the bleachers.
The rest moved like zombies to the killing ground. In a few seconds they
too were sprawling and screaming while the plunging fire from the press
box hacked up the carefully tended sod of the stadium.

The word was traveling from early arrivals in the stands to those who
had come late and were jammed onto the track. "They made a big speech in
Russian and English first," a man next to Justin reported after whispers
with _his_ neighbors. He spoke to Justin, but he couldn't take his eyes
off the charnel heap in the infield. His face and voice were just a
little insane. "Fella says they called the 449th traitors to
international socialism. Stuff about sloth, negligence, corruption,
disgrace to the Army. Then they shot all the top brass, starting with
Platov. Say, did you hear about Platov and Mrs.----?"

"I heard," Justin said. He turned away.

"_Rohtah gay_," Betsy whispered. "Company G. That's only the fourth in
their alphabet. They'll be busy all morning."

They were.

At noon the last of the job was done. The weeping, or blank-faced, or
madly grinning survivors of the 449th were loaded onto trucks and the
field PA system cleared its throat.

"Proclamation. To the indigenous population of the area formerly under
control of the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit. You are ordered to
inform all persons unable to attend the foregoing demonstration of what
has happened. You are advised that this is the treatment that will be
accorded to all such betrayers of international socialist morality as
the late Platov and his gang of bourgeois-spirited lackeys. You are
advised that henceforth this area will be under the direction of the
_Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl_, the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
You are advised that all laws and rules of the occupation will be
rigidly enforced from this moment on. You are ordered to disperse within
ten minutes. Troops will fire on stragglers."

This might have been intended to precipitate a panic and an excuse for
slaughter. It did not. Justin, sated with the horror of the morning's
work, still had some room for pride in him when the people in stands and
bleachers rose and slowly filed from the stadium, turned their backs on
the green-uniformed young monsters and their pile of carrion without
cringing.

Justin walked with Betsy to the post office and left her there with a
silent squeeze of the hand.

At the restaurant that doubled as bus station an old woman told him: "No
busses been along all morning, mister. Should of been the Keoka bus at
eight, ten, and twelve. And this fella in the green with the fancy belt,
he walked in and he ripped down the bus schedule right off the wall. I
guess he didn't speak English, but then I guess he didn't have to, did
he?"

"I guess not," Justin said.

He went out and started the fifteen-mile walk home under the broiling
midsummer sun.

BOOK 3

[Blank Page]




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Justin was scything down the dry grass of autumn for winter feeding to
the cows. Behind him Gribble followed with a rake and a hoarded ball of
twine ends, making bundles they could carry to the barn.

It was October.

In the monotony of scything, the hypnotic
_step--swing--slice--step--swing--slice_, Justin could almost believe in
the role he was playing. Of all the roles he had played, it was the
queerest. Successively he had impersonated a grownup, a soldier, a
business artist, a farm front fighter. Now what he had to tell himself
was: "You're a peasant. This is what it's like to be a peasant."

And he was. Dirty, coarsened, tired and underfed, Justin, who had
supposed himself a democrat all his life, found himself at last a member
of the eternal overwhelming majority, brother at last in space and time
to the stone-age grubbers of roots, the Chinese toiling with an aching
back and thighs over rice shoots in the dynasty of Han or Comrade Mao,
potato eaters of the Andes or the Netherlands, all those who in time
past, time present, and perhaps for all time to come must dig in
stubborn ground while the knees shake with fatigue. The emblem of the
brotherhood was hunger and fatigue.

Three months under the _Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl_ had left him
a clear choice. He could be a debased animal or he could die.

He knew of people by the dozen who had chosen to be people. They had
died. There was the case of the Wehrweins of Straw Hill. The Wehrweins
refused to understand that things were different now. They refused to
make their quota, trusting to the farmer's old technique of the blank
stare, the Who-me-mister? and the sullen "'Tain't no business of mine."
A polite search would have shown them nothing, but the MVD searched with
crowbars and found a hoard of grain.

The Wehrweins were shot for sabotage. Their children were shot for
failing to report their sabotage.

The Elekinnens of Little Finland, one of those big close-knit European
family complexes, were wiped out to the last man, woman, and child. Papa
Gunder, their patriarch, cursed and struck an MVD Agro section
inspector: unlawful violence against the occupying authority.

Mr. Konreid made no more popskull brandy from his sprawling, slovenly
vineyard. Mr. Konreid had been shot for failure to obey agricultural
crop-acreage regulations. His fifty-year-old son and the son's
fifty-year-old wife, workers in the feed mill, town dwellers who had not
seen the old man since a bitter estrangement three decades ago, died
with him in the center of the athletic field: failure to report
contravention of agricultural regulations.

There was a new whispered phrase, "shipped South." Mr. and Mrs. Lacey of
Four Corners had been "shipped South." They were back in two weeks,
cringing away from questions, seemingly half insane. All their teeth had
been pulled and they worked their fields with lunatic zeal. The four
nearest neighbors of the Laceys were arrested shortly after by MVD teams
who knew exactly where to find their hoards of grain, the eggs laid down
in water glass, the secret smokehouse in the wood where hams and bacon
slowly turned on strings over smoldering hickory chips. The neighbors
were shot.

There were never audible complaints any more, through two milk-norm
increases and two ration reductions. Everybody had taken to frantic
weeding in every spare second; leisure did not exist. The smallest
children were pressed into work. A three-year-old who carelessly tore
out a turnip top instead of parasitic wild mustard was beaten and did
not eat that night. Possibly a generation of permissive-discipline
pediatricians were whirling in their graves, but the pediatricians had
not expected that American parents, comfortable in mortgaged homes,
secure in union contracts, nourished at glittering supermarkets, neat in
their twelve ninety-eight dresses and forty-dollar suits would soon
rejoin the eternal majority of hunger and fatigue.

Even the great American bathroom was a mockery. Nobody talked about it
but everybody was squeezing the utmost from his land by manuring with
human excrement, an Oriental practice from which the fortunate North
Americans had been excused by virtue of the Haber process, Peruvian
guano, and Mexican phosphate rock. But there was no fertilizer
compounded of nitrates, guano, and phosphorus to be had at Croley's
store these days. Presumably it was being shipped directly to Russia and
China.

Justin, shorter, darker, and dirtier than he had been two months ago,
stooped and swung his scythe. Gribble absolutely couldn't get the hang
of it, not after days of hand-blistering practice. The co-ordination
wasn't there. The little man and his shattered nervous system were good
for nothing but gleaning with a sickle behind Justin, raking and
bundling.

Had there once been one-man balers? Had there really? Had one man,
proudly astride a snorting red tractor, chugged down a field,
importantly leaning far out and peering behind him as the scoop swept up
mowed windrows, the plunging tamper arm compacted the hay, the binder
twirled cord around and tied, and the machine bumpingly ejected bale
after perfect bale?

Justin now was a citizen of the North American People's Democratic
Republic, at last in formal existence months after its currency had gone
into circulation. Everybody had been ordered to report to the Center for
ceremonies and a spontaneous demonstration. Betsy Cardew was prominent
in the demonstration. She had joined the Party of the People and worked
at it with shrill fanaticism. Condescendingly mentioned in one speech as
a tireless worker for the cause of peace and democracy, she looked, when
Justin met her occasionally at the mailbox, very tired indeed. She
sometimes passed him a note, because now there was a tape recorder
behind the dashboard of her car.

When one of the notes said something like, "Still heard nothing. Must hv
been picked up. Prsme used bldes in time snce we're still at lrge.
Billy, Billy, how I wish----Wht's use?" he would start to recall that he
belonged to a conspiracy of the oppressed, that he was the trigger man
of the bombardment satellite. And that one step outside the narrow lines
would mean his death.

It was easier to go on mowing than to stop and let his muscles knot up
in the first cutting winds from the north. They had to get in the hay.
They had to fell trees in the woodlot and buck them up with a Swedish
saw and split them for the stove. Dry autumn was going to be followed by
cold winter. There would be no coal; coal was for Russia and China
these days.

The North American People's Democratic Republic was born, puppet of
Asia, and the United States of America--obstinately the consciousness of
it would not die--was a puppet's slave. Chiunga County produced a
"surplus" of food--while its inhabitants were verging on
starvation--that went to New York for shipment to Russia in a steady
flow with shipments from thousands of other rural counties.

But whispered tales said the factory cities were worse! It was easy to
imagine how, once self-pity admitted the possibility. Barracks. Two
twelve-hour shifts. Starvation rations at a patrolled mess hall. A belt
line whose speed could be pushed up imperceptibly until you dropped at
your job--and were flogged or shot for dropping.

And whispered tales said the young men and women of the North American
Armies were toiling half at reclamation projects in the Soviet Arctic,
the rest in the arid Chinese interior.

Of course they would never come back.

Even to the peasant that Billy Justin had turned into the brutal
audacity of the over-all plan was slowly becoming clear. It was
attrition of the U. S. population. The oldsters were to die off
gradually of scanty food and pneumonia--the coming winter without coal
would sweep like his scythe through the population. The youngsters who
would normally make up the loss were safely in the Arctic and the Gobi.

Within a couple of years more Russians and Chinese would begin to
arrive--colonists this time instead of soldiers.

The senator, the psychologist, and the FBI man were dust by now.

The Postal Telegraph "dry wire," still guarded at fantastic risk by the
ticket seller in the railroad station, was silent and had been for two
months.

Rawson--but he was a general named Hollerith, wasn't he?--could only say
he knew nothing, he had heard nothing, they must wait.

Betsy Cardew was dying by inches of fatigue and strain, impersonating a
fanatical convert, waiting for the hand on her shoulder, praying there
would be time for her first to open her carotid artery.

There was nothing he could do. There was absolutely nothing he could do.
All he could do was scythe down the dry grass, stop every dozen paces,
and sweep the whetstone twice along the worn steel blade. It was
important to keep the blade keen; a dull scythe crushed down the grass
instead of slicing it. Grass crushed to the ground was wasted and he
would need every blade of it to see the small herd through the winter.

He woke from his daze to find himself at the end of the field of redtop.
Beyond was the stubble of his corn land, which had been reaped for
silage a month ago. He looked around and saw Gribble far behind him,
doggedly raking. And behind Gribble an approaching figure, tall and
gaunt as a scarecrow.

"Hello there, William," called Mr. Sparhawk. "I've come for a bit of
dinner and a pallet for the night. Don't mind, old boy, do you?"




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


It was the hour after dinner. These days that meant the hour when
quarrels flared between Justin and the feeble, whining Gribble. There
was something about a meal utterly without pleasure that your temper
couldn't take. No coffee, not even synthetic, no pepper or spices, no
dessert, no meat. They dined on baked mashed potatoes with an
unsuccessful experiment at cheesemaking sprinkled over the top. Boiled
greens on the side. They lay like stones in the stomach.

It was the hour for Justin to curse Gribble for his laziness and Gribble
to cower and complain.

Mr. Sparhawk was there that night, however. He had said a heathen grace,
eaten sparingly of the potatoes--apologetically scraping off the
unsuccessful cheese topping--and finally excused himself to sit on the
floor cross-legged. He looked about the same as ever. His rucksack was
worn, he had a new peeled branch for a staff, and he wore jeans instead
of Red Army pants and shirt. He talked less than usual, perhaps judging
that Justin would welcome an excuse to throw him out.

Justin studied the old man morosely. There was something awfully
peculiar about his presence, something he couldn't put his finger on.

"Where've you been lately?" he asked.

"South to Maryland. North to Vermont. Where the Ground that is the
Oversoul bade me----"

"I didn't ask you that, damn you!"

Mr. Sparhawk shrugged apologetically, but he couldn't resist preaching.
"I forgive your curse," he said. "I know that in your present
incarnation you're still Earth-and-Appetite-bound----"

"Maryland and Vermont." Justin slowly ruminated. "How?"

Mr. Sparhawk looked politely baffled. "I'm sorry, William," he said.
"Your question conveys nothing to me."

"I mean _how_? How do you travel? How do you get through the check
points? Why aren't you picked up?"

"Oh," Mr. Sparhawk said, surprised. "But I am. Often."

"And what _happens_?"

Modesty and pride struggled visibly on the old man's face. At last he
said: "When it's a case of the other ranks--privates and noncoms, you'd
say--I reluctantly put on an outworn garment." He stood to attention and
his mild face hardened. The jaw thrust out and the very nose seemed to
turn into a predator's beak. "Damn you," Sparhawk rasped, "what's the
meaning of this? How dare you obstruct a loyal citizen and a minister
of the gospel? By God, you popinjays stand aside or your superiors shall
hear of it and so much the worse for you!"

The windowpanes rattled. Justin and Gribble quailed before his raucous,
righteous anger and authority. Mr. Sparhawk smiled apologetically and
folded into a cross-legged squat again. "It usually works," he said
mildly. "When it doesn't, I'm brought in for questioning. Officers tend
to bring one in no matter what one does, so when confronted with a
commission I spare myself the necessity of reverting to my evil old
ways.

"Once I'm in the local chokey I politely but firmly invoke the North
American People's Democratic Republic guarantee of freedom of worship,
and quite a good guarantee it is, too. My particular way of worship, I
explain politely, is to wander and preach. To make a long story short,
William, I'm usually released after a couple of days, though once I was
held as long as a week. Our custodians take the stand that I'm free to
wander and preach as long as I wander and preach outside their
particular jurisdiction. They escort me to the border, quite often kick
me in the seat, and tell me not to come back."

Justin moistened his lips. "Haven't you ever been on the--Conveyor?"

"Conveyor, William? Oh yes. You mean that strange new sacrament of
theirs."

Sacrament? Well, that was one thing you could call it with its element
of penance and confession. Another was sadistic lunacy, systematic
starvation, drugging and torture designed to exact a meaningless
"confession" which everybody knew was worthless. Perhaps it was a dark
sacrament after all, intelligible only to faith.

Mr. Sparhawk was saying: "Yes, I've been on the Conveyor. But what did I
have to confess? They gave up after three days."

"They won't give up in MVD territory," Justin said grimly. "You were a
fool to move in here. Did you think they were gone by now?"

"My dear fellow, of course I didn't. It was a Test."

A Test. Justin went silently to the corner and pried up a floorboard.
Under it was the last of the Konreid brandy, a pint in a former
cleaning-fluid bottle. A Test, he thought. A Test of manhood,
patriotism, sanity----

"Do you drink?" he asked Mr. Sparhawk.

"Only natural wine," the old man apologized. "It is a clear
contravention of the intended mission of alcohol to drink fortified
wines or distilled liquors. But please don't let my presence stop you
from indulging."

"It won't," Justin said flatly. He knew Gribble's eyes were on the
bottle in his hand, hungrily hoping. He poured a glassful for the little
man and shoved it at him. He himself drank from the bottle, carefully,
and put it in his pocket. The raw liquor cut like a file and he felt the
dizziness of intoxication almost at once. Careful, he said sharply to
himself. Get brave if you have to but don't become a drunken fool. He
asked Mr. Sparhawk: "What do you mean by Test?"

"Why, William, a Test is a Test. A trial, an assay--I don't really know
how to answer. But every once in a while one must prove that he isn't
relapsing into sloth and merely mumbling words. One must _do_ something,
deliberately and knowing it will be difficult, dangerous, disagreeable.
Surely you understand. That's why I entered territory under the
direction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It's quite a good Test,
too. Not _nasty_, like Saint What's-her-name swallowing tubercular
sputum. When people do that sort of thing, there's always the
possibility that some confounded Freudian is going to call them
lunatics. Oh, a good Test is hard to find, William! I flatter myself
that I've found one in our green-clothed friends' rigorous enforcement
of the occupation statutes . . ."

While the old man rambled on, it suddenly became crystal-clear to Justin
that he had all along been able to re-establish communications with the
bomb plot.

All he had to do now, all he'd needed to do all along, was walk out and
do it.

First try walking to Washington, Pennsylvania, to find the Bee-Jay
salesman.

If that failed, as it might, he should walk to the senator's home town
in Michigan and inquire around.

If that didn't work, he should walk to Washington, D.C., and find out
what was going on in the Fish and Wild Life Survey.

If none of these worked, he would have to try some of the more tenuous
clues.

There were certain objections to the scheme, he realized. One was that
he'd probably be arrested before he got a mile beyond Norton, New York.
This would probably lead to his torture, confession, and execution
unless he used his razor blade in time. But he smiled incredulously at
himself for once having thought that this objection overruled the need
to walk out and re-establish contact so that the satellite could be sent
up.

If Mr. Sparhawk could take the beatings and the uncertainty in exchange
for his urge to wander and preach, what shouldn't _he_ be able to accept
and risk with nothing less at stake than the nation?

It was as simple as that. If you have to walk out and do it, the way to
do it is to walk out and do it.

And the first thing to do was disobey his first command: not to be taken
alive.

"Mr. Sparhawk," he said abruptly, "your time on the Conveyor--is there
anything you did so you kept from breaking down? Have you got sedatives
or anything like that?"

The old man said: "I must confess I used Yoga--abused it, rather, for to
use it is to abuse it. Yoga is, of course, a set of philosophical
systems intended to put one beyond identity and desire, but the Conveyor
is peculiarly persuasive that one has an identity and desires to retain
it." He chuckled complacently. "Asana postures are effective while
confined in a cell waiting. It is part of their scheme to break one down
by waiting. The soul which does not seek release from the Wheel is prey
to terrors and fancies during such an interlude. However, I would assume
the siddhasana, thus----" Mr. Sparhawk squirmed into a Buddha-like
posture which outraged Justin's training as an artist in that it went
far beyond the bounds of what his anatomy textbooks regarded as possible
to a human being.

"And I would vary it with the padmasana, thus----" Mr. Sparhawk squirmed
again, and this time settled down into a position which looked possible
but exquisitely uncomfortable. "The postures," said Mr. Sparhawk, "have
carried me through a bit of solitary confinement. They use dark cells,
you know, and that's the sort of thing that drives most chaps absolutely
crackers. And there's pranayama, of course." He seemed to have finished.

"Pranayama?" Justin urged gently.

"Oh, you don't know about it, do you?" asked the old man disapprovingly.
"It's the yoga of breathing, and quite important. I used it when they
were beating me a bit. You see, one breathes in through the left nostril
seven and a half seconds and holds it for thirty and a half seconds. One
then expels through the right nostril in fifteen and a half seconds,
then inhales through the same nostril for the same period, then one----"

"And this--helped?"

"How could it fail to, William? During pranayama one is sometimes so
freed of distractions that one floats about the room, though I admit
I've not done that yet or seen it. Surely a truncheon across the shins
could be only a minor nuisance to one deeply engaged in pranayama, don't
you think?"

"As long as it works."

Sparhawk sighed regretfully: "William, old man, I can see you're
struggling with it as a difficult idea. If only you were a bit along in
Zen, how simple it would be! I'd merely kick you in the bum by surprise
or unexpectedly shout 'Fiddle-dee-dee!' in your ear and it would all
come to you. What a mess you've made of your life, William. No Zen at
all. The time you've wasted!"

Justin clenched his fists and said: "I'm not going to waste any more
time, Mr. Sparhawk. Take me with you."

The old man asked coldly, suddenly alert, "Is this what you call a rib,
William?"

"I'm perfectly sincere. I want to go with you. To Washington,
Pennsylvania."

"My dear boy, it doesn't matter where one goes. But I'm afraid a
vestigial attachment to worldly vanities keeps me from enjoying this
joke of yours. If you'll excuse me, I must say my prayers and turn in."

"He means it!" Gribble suddenly squalled, terrified. "Don't leave me,
Justin, don't leave me alone here, they'll beat me up to find out where
you went and they'll shoot me in the cellar----"

"Work it out for yourself, Gribble," Justin said gently. "I'm going.
I've got to. Tell them any lies you like and if they don't work, die
like a man. _Before you tell the truth._"

Sparhawk rose from his padmasana posture, excitement in his eyes. "You
do mean it, William?" he asked tremulously. "This isn't a joke?"

Justin said: "I'm not joking. Not about risking my life. I want to go
with you."

_And_, he said to himself, _by this token you cease to be a peasant, an
animal_. _It's important that you set out on your military mission, of
course. But it's more important that you set out on any mission at all
and by that token become once more a man._

"Mr. Sparhawk," he said diffidently. The old man was silently praying,
but turned to smile beatifically at him. "Mr. Sparhawk, I know you make
a point of early departure, but could we stay here until mail time
tomorrow? I want to say good-by."

"I understand." The old man beamed at his convert. "I think we can
permit it."

_Good-by, Betsy Cardew. What might have been will never be._




CHAPTER SIXTEEN


They had been five days on the road and covered twenty miles as the crow
flies, eighty on the back roads chosen from an old Texaco map, when they
met their first Reds.

Sparhawk was drilling Justin when it happened; they were in a quiet
clearing outside Leona, Pennsylvania, which the old man thought suitable
for contemplation.

Justin, under his direction, contorted himself into the joint-wrenching
padmasana and was trying not to snicker at the order which followed. It
was to look at the space between his eyebrows and meditate upon the
syllable "Om." The soldiers, a ten-man squad, came out of the woods at
that point.

The soldiers looked at them and roared with laughter. Their sergeant and
Mr. Sparhawk were able to converse after a fashion in mixed English and
Russian. Justin did not succeed in looking at the space between his
eyebrows or in meditating upon the syllable "Om." Locked in the
padmasana, he watched the parley between the two men and meditated on
the Conveyor. From time to time one of the soldiers would poke him
curiously and grin: "_Galyootsinahtsya_."

The parley ended; the soldiers left. The tremendous fact was that they
had been intercepted, had been unable to show documents justifying their
presence, and yet had not been arrested.

"How did you do it, Mr. Sparhawk?" he gasped.

"_Satagraha_," Mr. Sparhawk said absently. "Soul force. It works, you
know. Most of the time, that is. Their tendency is to assume that one's
probably all right and that anyway it's no business of theirs. Marked
contrast with the MVDs, whose assumption is that one probably isn't all
right and that everything's business of theirs. But let's not chatter,
William. You're supposed to be in the padmasana. Supposed to be, I say
with reason. What is the padmasana? It is the right foot on the left
thigh, the left foot on the right thigh, holding the right great toe
with the right hand, the left great toe with the left hand, the hands
coming from behind the back and crossing, the chin resting on the
interclavicular space, the sight fixed on the space between the
eyebrows--failing that, the tip of the nose. In one respect you succeed,
William; you have managed to look at the tip of your nose. You must try
harder."

Justin, his eyes aching from being crossed on his nose, his neck aching,
his thighs and arms and back aching, tried harder. Mr. Sparhawk slid
easily into the posture and went on: "When the command of padmasana has
been attained, you will find there is no longer suffering from cold,
heat, hunger, thirst, fatigue, or similar afflictions . . ."

It was nice that the old man believed it all, Justin thought as he
ached. His belief, even expressed in pidgin Russian, shone
transcendently through the words and had got the pair of them tacitly
certified as harmless lunatics.

    *    *    *    *    *

Their second week on the road, trending generally southwest into the
Allegheny Valley, found them one night approaching a run-down farmhouse.
There was no light to be seen. A starving mongrel dog snapped at them
when they climbed to the littered, unswept porch; Justin drove him off
with a stick while Mr. Sparhawk rapped politely on the door. There was
no answer. Mr. Sparhawk rapped again and the unlatched door swung open,
creaking. By moonlight through a window they saw an old man sprawled on
the floor.

Mr. Sparhawk took over with crisp efficiency. Pulse, skin, and a hoarse
rattle in the chest told him, he said, that the man was suffering
pneumonia and starvation. They brought the cot from his bedroom into the
kitchen and built a roaring fire in the stove. They made gruel and
spooned some down the sick man's throat, and for a couple of hours while
they watched he seemed to rally. He died at midnight, though, and they
buried him in the morning in his dooryard. Justin had to keep driving
off the dog and was careful to put a layer of heavy stones on the grave.

The weather was hardly brisk yet--at least to men who had been through
the war years on scant fuel rations. The old man must have been ready to
go from the first bug that got into his system. But it was a foretaste
of the coming winter, which would do the Reds' work thoroughly and well.
It would kill Americans by the million, and would leave open to
settlement new acres by the million.

Who said there were no continents left to discover? A dozen winters
would come and go, and finally the Russians would come and find a land
almost as bare of humanity as Columbus had.

While Mr. Sparhawk whispered a meditation of St. John of the Cross by
the graveside, Justin methodically searched the farmhouse and struck
gold. A hard lump in the old man's pillow turned out to be a tin box
crammed with sewing needles, thread, razor blades, and a can of black
pepper. He distributed the treasures among his pockets and returned to
the grave, where he joined in the meditation.

    *    *    *    *    *

The signpost said they were three miles from Clarion and the map said
this was a town of some size lying astride a national highway. It was to
be avoided. They had lost a week traveling by a stop to get in the corn
crop of a sick old couple. They worked from sunrise to sunset for seven
days, and when the golden ears were neatly stored in the cribs, were
told they were a pair of heathen and had better git before they got the
law put on them.

"Rub of the green, William," Mr. Sparhawk said philosophically as they
trudged away.

Justin was glad to get away on any terms. The work had been nothing to
him; he was inured to fatigue and hunger. The lost week had been agony,
every hour of it. Finally Mr. Sparhawk was forced to say gently:
"Washington, Pennsylvania, won't run away, William. Surely we are doing
as much good here as we could do there?"

And that meant _shut up_. There Justin had to leave it. It was barely
possible that the old man might continue to tolerate his presence, might
even act as a cover story if he knew that Justin was using him to
establish communications with a revolutionary army. It was certain that
he could not do it without losing his appearance of blissful sincerity
and gentle mania which had carried them through every brush with the
occupation.

It was three miles out of Clarion, perhaps halfway on the road to
Washington, Pennsylvania, that they met the kid gang. They leaped on
Justin and Mr. Sparhawk from the roadside; perhaps some of them swung
down cinematically from tree limbs. There may have been two dozen of
them, between eight and fifteen years of age. They gave the two
travelers the treatment they gave all travelers whom they surprised and
outnumbered; they beat and kicked them viciously, robbed them, stripped
them to their underwear and moved on, laughing and shoving. Mr. Sparhawk
after moving his jaw tentatively mumbled between bruised lips: "You did
well not to resist, William. Such groups have been known to kill."

"I couldn't resist, damn it!" Justin snorted. "The little demons were
all over me. I'd like to meet just four of them in a dark alley
sometime. I think I've got a couple of broken ribs----"

He and Mr. Sparhawk helped each other to get up; they hobbled down the
road.

"Look," Justin said, alarmed, "this'll take us to Clarion. Township
seat, ten thousand people, U. S. 322, a Red garrison for sure. Let's
figure a detour."

"We must _find_ a garrison of the occupying forces," Mr. Sparhawk said
serenely. "We must report this incident. We owe it to those boys; we
must stop them before they do irreparable damage to their souls. I have,
thank God, been privileged to report five such wandering bands and each
one was rounded up within a day or two. Whatever penalties were exacted
from them, they were at least stopped in their careers."

The mad reasoning on alien values would work. Justin knew it. They would
be two lunatics wandering into town half naked in late October, gently
and without acrimony urging that the authorities pick up the kid gang
without ado--for the good of their souls.

On to Clarion, Pennsylvania.

    *    *    *    *    *

Early November brought a cold snap and wet, heavy snow. They were
floundering, calf-deep, by afternoon along a blacktop between Leechburg
and North Vandegrift, about two hundred miles beeline from Norton, about
fifty miles from Washington, Pennsylvania. It was clear that the journey
would soon be over. Justin had lost twenty pounds and gained an
impatient respect for Mr. Sparhawk's innocent tenacity.

He had seen a countryside under lock and key, reverting sullenly to the
ancient peasant status never known before on the continent. They had
by-passed manufacturing towns--Mr. Sparhawk believed in reasonable
caution until his disciple's spiritual qualities were more highly
developed--and so had not seen the worst.

A woman in an ancient Model A sedan stopped and called to them: "Want a
lift, boys?" It was the first time this had happened in their month on
the road. She had a gas-ration sticker on her windshield and the trunk
of the car, which _was_ a trunk and not a streamlined cavern, stood half
open. It was crammed with canned goods.

The woman was fat, red-faced, and smiling. Strangely, her fat was not
the waxy, loosely attached "potato fat" of an all-starch diet; it was
firm plumpness. In the fall of the year 1965 it meant villainy.

"No thank you, madam," Justin said automatically.

Beside him Mr. Sparhawk looked mulish. "I think we ought to, William,"
he said gently. "Madame, we'll be pleased to ride with you." Resignedly
Justin got in.

She outtalked Mr. Sparhawk for ten miles. She was the widowed Mrs.
Elphinstone. She had a farm worked by six good-for-nothing orphans she
boarded for the county out of the goodness of her heart. She didn't
believe in saying anything about a person if you couldn't say anything
good, _but_----

It was common knowledge about the Baptist preacher and Miss Lesh.

But that shouldn't surprise you because _Mister_ Lesh had died in a
madhouse even if they called it a rest home. When it's in the blood,
there's nothing you can do.

Mr. Tebbets, the lawyer, was drunk again when she was in town.

Everybody knew he bought it from Mrs. Grassman, whose husband drank
himself to death on home brew, and somebody should tell the authorities
before more damage was done.

But it was probably Mr. Tebbets' conscience that drove him to drink, the
way he swindled the Murdocks out of their insurance money.

Not that Tebbets was the worst of the gang; she wasn't a prude, dear no,
but the way his crony Dr. Reeves carried on before right-minded people
ran him out of town, why she herself knew a girl who had been given gas
by Dr. Reeves for an extraction and woke to find her brassire unhooked.

Though it was hard to see why the little slut--it was Margie
Endicott--should care, since every boy in the senior high had done at
least as much.

And if the truth were known----

She saw a couple walking along the road and stopped the car. They were a
farmer and his wife; each carried a sack. "Hello, Elsie," the man said
nervously. His wife looked murder and said nothing.

"Why, Ralph and Kate, imagine running into you here! Where you going?"

"Little walk," the man muttered.

The woman was staring at their sacks, licking her lips. "The Ladies,"
she said, "are getting up a little luncheon, I meant to tell you. Times
being what they are, we're all chipping in on the eatables. You're
invited of course, Kate." Her voice became shrill and childish. "Now I
was just wondering if you'd like to save a trip by handing over any
little thing you have with you--for the Ladies."

"We haven't got anything," the farmer's wife said sharply.

"My goodness, isn't that too bad? I heard somebody around your way
butchered a hog and I thought you might have some old scraps of it. For
the Ladies."

The farmer rummaged in his sack and pulled out a four-pound flitch of
bacon. Naked hatred was in his eyes. He chucked it into the car beside
the woman. "Come on," he said to his wife flatly. She shouldered her
sack and they walked on through the swirling snow.

Justin knew he was riding with a woman who one of these days would be
murdered.

She started the car. "The Perkinsons," she said. "Worthless, lawless
trash. I've got half a mind to tell Lieutenant Sokoloff they've been
butchering without a permit--but forevermore, who doesn't?" She turned
around as she drove to smile at her passengers. "What I say is the
important thing is not to get caught at it." The car eased into the
right-hand roadside ditch before she turned back to her driving; she
squawked, spun the wheels, and killed the motor.

"Isn't that awful? I wonder if you boys'd try what you can do. I'll just
stay here in case you need help from the engine----"

They got out in the snow and heaved and looked for rocks to lay as a
tread under the spinning wheels and from time to time asked her to try
driving out. They got snow spun into their faces and bruised their
fingers on frozen rocks. They talked in whispers. The woman's ruddy face
was hanging out the window; she was watching with interest.

"Blackmailing old----"

"Steady on, William."

"We shouldn't have got in the car."

"Is _her_ salvation unimportant for some reason known to you? We must
give each person we meet his or her chance."

"The only way you can save that type is with a firing squad. The
neighborhood gossip, the village terror, hand in hand with the Reds.
She'll get hers the way Croley's going to."

"Mr. Croley has been charitable to me."

"Sure. Croley's smart enough to play _all_ the sides--not like her."
Justin pounded a rock under the wheel with another rock. "Give her a
try, ma'am," he said aloud.

"I certainly hope it works, boys," she said. "I'm getting awfully
chilly." She roared the motor, let in her clutch, and was off in a
shower of slush and small stones.

Justin waited for her to stop on the road for them but she chugged on.
When the Ford vanished around a distant curve, he did some swearing and
wound up: "At least we don't have to listen to her any more."

"No," Mr. Sparhawk said, and for a moment Justin thought the look he
gave him was compassionate.

The woman must have hurried home and put in a phone call. Half an hour
later a pair of Red jeeps overtook them. An hour later they were being
booked for sabotage, counter-revolutionary wrecking, and sedition in
what had once been the principal's office of the Leechburg Consolidated
School.

The next day they were on the Conveyor.

    *    *    *    *    *

Justin sat in the dark and absently rubbed his aching neck. The session
had lasted for six hours, and Lieutenant Sokoloff had been yawning at
the end of it. It was not surprising; Sokoloff was merely a cop and he
himself was merely a vagrant against whom a routine accusation had been
brought. Sokoloff would sleep now for eight hours; Justin would be kept
awake and presumably irritated just below the threshold of pain by
irregular switching on and off of the lights, peering guards with
raucous orders, the steel-pipe bunk without bedding, to corrugate his
back.

Then, rested and refreshed, Sokoloff would plump himself into a padded
swivel chair, Justin would sit bolt upright on a too-low stool, the
dazzling light would be switched on, and the interrogation would
proceed.

The bright cell lights flashed on and a soldier's heavy face peered
through the bars. He pounded on them with a night stick and growled,
"Prisoner hobey hord-erss," and stood waiting. Justin obediently went
and lay down on the steel-pipe cot, face up, hands at his side, and
closed his eyes. The light beat through his eyelids. The transverse
pipes bit into his heel tendons, his calfs, thighs, buttocks, back,
neck, and skull. Orders were being obeyed. He was not being physically
tortured. He was merely lying on a bunk, and if the bunk was somewhat
uncomfortable, what in heaven's name could you expect to find in a
detention cell? Their strange passion for legality again--a sort of
legality, at least.

It showed up strongly in the questions during interrogation. Justin was
at sea several times until he inferred the hypothesis behind such a
question as: "Did the prisoner ever take part in the workers' struggle
before organized assistance to the clandestine N.A.P.D.R. began to
arrive?" What Sokoloff wanted to know was had Justin been a Communist
before the war. Justin had not been a Communist before the war, and if
he answered "No" to the question as Sokoloff phrased it, he was saying a
great deal more than that he had not been a Communist before the war. He
was admitting Sokoloff's premise about "organized assistance to the
clandestine N.A.P.D.R." He was agreeing with Sokoloff that the war was
not a war of aggression at all but an internal revolution by the
Communist Party with some assistance from the Soviet Union and the
Chinese People's Republic. Therefore he could not answer such questions
yes or no, and therefore Sokoloff became very angry and turned the light
that glared in his eyes brighter. But that wasn't torture, of course.
Could one expect an interrogation room to function without a light by
which notes could be jotted and the expression of the prisoner observed?

Justin didn't know where Mr. Sparhawk was except that he was in some
place exactly like this, or what he was doing except that it was exactly
what Justin was doing: hanging on.

A sacrament, Mr. Sparhawk called it, innocently blasphemous.

"Is the prisoner aware that to absent oneself from one's assigned
agricultural holdings is sabotage of food production?"

"Spreading the Word of God comes first, Lieutenant Sokoloff. Under the
guarantees of religious freedom of the North American People's
Democratic Republic no functionary is empowered to interfere with the
private or public worship of a religious body."

The passion for legality cut both ways.

"The prisoner is not a religious body!"

"I consider myself the disciple of Mr. Sparhawk, Lieutenant Sokoloff,
and I consider Mr. Sparhawk a lay preacher."

"What is the name of your religion?"

"It has no name. It incorporates what Mr. Sparhawk finds inspired in all
religions."

"There are no such religions. The prisoner is a poseur. Is the prisoner
aware that he has been denounced as a counter-revolutionary wrecker by a
loyal adherent of the N.A.P.D.R., to whom he made inflammatory and
seditious speeches?"

"If you please, Lieutenant, I made no speeches to the lady you mean. I
would have spoken to her about God--but I never got the chance."

Sokoloff's face, dim on the fringes of the dazzling interrogation light,
wrinkled into a brief grin. He knew the lady, then.

And so it went for six hours, the two of them pounding each other with
stuffed clubs labeled respectively SABOTAGE and FREEDOM OF WORSHIP.

Justin shifted on the bunk, acutely uncomfortable. That was supposed to
be Lieutenant Sokoloff's margin of victory. The lieutenant would rest
well, he would rest not at all. The next session he would swing his
padded club with less vigor while Sokoloff's blows would be as strong as
ever. At last, after a week or so of interrupted sleep, scanty meals,
inflamed eyelids, and backache, Lieutenant Sokoloff would be flailing
away as hard as ever and he would sit apathetically, without the
strength or spirit to strike a blow. He would sign anything, admit
anything, to sleep on a cement floor instead of the steel-pipe bunk.

In theory.

He tried one of Mr. Sparhawk's heathen tricks which had served him on
rainy nights before. He willed his muscles to relax one by one, from his
toes up. He sent out his will to gather up his aches into a ball twelve
inches in diameter and he floated the ball twelve inches above his
forehead, where he could inspect it impersonally. The distractions kept
trying to crowd in, but he succeeded in keeping them out by not giving a
damn about them. When the ball slowly began to sag down and threatened
to re-enter his body, he thought relaxedly that to do so would result in
the discovery of the bombardment satellite and that therefore the ball
should continue to float. It did, and he slept. Much better than young
Lieutenant Sokoloff, who was tossing and turning and worrying about what
to do with these lunatics he had been saddled with by that horrible
woman.

    *    *    *    *    *

The private ceremoniously kicked Mr. Sparhawk in the seat, booting him
over the township line. Justin, moving fast, stepped across without
assistance. They started down the road.

Behind them Lieutenant Sokoloff, dark bags under his eyes, yelled: "And
don't you ever come back into this area again, do you hear me?"

Mr. Sparhawk turned and waved. "Yes, Lieutenant. God bless you."

They heard the jeep start up and roar away.

They had been five days on the Conveyor. They were skin and bones; their
backs and buttocks were covered with bruises from all the hours spent
rigid on the pipe bunks and hard interrogation light and the lights in
their cells. They were filthy; it was part of the system to allow no
water for washing and thereby further break down the morale of the
prisoner. Mr. Sparhawk's left thumb and index finger were broken and
splinted; a guard, strictly against orders, had whacked him with his
night stick. Six of Justin's molars had been pulled; the unit dentist
had examined them, decided fillings were needed, and done considerable
drilling before further deciding they could not be saved after all. She
had done her work without anesthetic and Lieutenant Sokoloff had stood
by to distract the prisoner by chatting about the pleasures of the
pretrial cells, which were furnished with regular army cots. These
pretrial cells were only for prisoners who had cleared all preliminary
hurdles, such as the signing of confessions.

His jaws ached horribly, he had ridden the Conveyor for five days and
they were walking into the town of Washington, Pennsylvania.




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


They signed in first thing in the Transients book of the local SMGU.
They explained to a puzzled English-speaking sergeant that they were
ministers of the gospel and that he might check with his neighboring
SMGU, where, through a misunderstanding, they had been detained,
interrogated, and cleared. Then--it was about noon--they made their
pitch on a busy corner of the main shopping street.

Mr. Sparhawk lectured on Conscience and Submission; Justin borrowed a
hat and passed it. One of the people who dropped in coins was the
salesman from Bee-Jay. "Meet me later," Justin muttered. The man gave
him a brief appraising stare and walked away.

After the lecture they almost quarreled. Justin was for finding a
rooming house with a bath and taking a week's lodgings. Mr. Sparhawk,
now that Justin's irrational desire to see Washington, Pennsylvania, had
been gratified, was for a one-day stay mostly devoted to preaching.

They had dinner in a tavern, Mr. Sparhawk relenting to the point of
taking a glass of watery beer and allowing Justin one. But no matter how
longingly the disciple eyed the steam table of sausages and roast horse
meat, they ate the vegetable plate.

The dispute was still unresolved when they checked in at a rooming house
down near the railroad tracks. Justin's jaws were aching badly but he
didn't care. The Bee-Jay salesman had passed by the tavern and glanced
in while they were eating. The contact had not been broken. Surely they
were being followed and marked. . . .

They bathed in turn, very gratefully, and turned in. Mr. Sparhawk slept
on the floor and laughed when Justin offered him the bed. Justin
understood the laughter an hour later while he tossed and turned and
angrily commanded his muscles to relax. He had made up his mind at last
to spread a blanket on the floor and sleep there himself when he heard a
scratching on the door.

The long ordeal was ended.

He opened up. It was the Bee-Jay salesman, of course, and two other men.
They all wore coveralls and carried telephone linemen's gear in broad
leather belts.

"Come along," the salesman said softly. "We have a truck. And guns."

He assumed they would have guns. "We don't have to wake up the old man,"
he whispered to one of them who was stooping over Mr. Sparhawk.

"He's coming," the man said, and shook him.

"Friends of mine, Mr. Sparhawk," Justin whispered. "We're taking a short
trip."

"Yeah," said the salesman. He raised his hand. "No arguments. Explain
everything later."

"I never argue," Mr. Sparhawk whispered loftily, and they dressed and
went quietly down the stairs, the salesman in front of them and the two
strangers behind. The truck was an olive-green A.T. & T. cab-over-engine
repair job, the kind of truck that can appear anywhere on the continent
without a word of comment or stir of interest as long as there is a
telephone within fifty miles. Justin was struck by the brilliant
simplicity of the idea. When they were settled in the dark body of the
truck with the two strangers, he started to say as much. They told him
to be quiet. He didn't like their manner, but set it down to the strain
of a risky mission.

Mr. Sparhawk settled down on the floor in the padmasana posture while
the truck bumped over a lot of railroad tracks and made a lot of left
and right turns and a couple of U turns that could only have been meant
to confuse their sense of direction. In half an hour the truck stopped
definitely, the hand brake rasped along its ratchets, and the motor
stopped.

They hustled Justin and Mr. Sparhawk out of the truck onto a dimly lit
loading deck of concrete. Down a concrete corridor where fork hoists and
stacks of pallets stood. Past a thousand stacked new milk cans shining
dully. Past crates of pitcher pumps and a thousand cream separators.
Into a concrete room where a dozen men awaited them. When the door
rolled shut behind them, Justin weakly said, "I'm glad to see you." But
he already knew that it was no joyful reunion but a trial.

"Now we can talk," the Bee-Jay salesman said grimly.

"Yes," said Justin between his teeth. Then he yelled at them: "Why was
Chiunga County deserted?"

Their faces were shocked. The trapped mouse had turned and bit them on
the finger.

"Not that you give a damn," Justin said, "but Chiunga happens to be the
key to the whole situation, as you'd know if your organization were
conducted sensibly. Why haven't we had any couriers? Why don't you
answer us on the dry wire? Why were we left to rot?"

"While we're asking questions, William," Mr. Sparhawk said mildly, "what
on earth are you talking about?"

They ignored him. The Bee-Jay salesman said slowly: "You might as well
know my name, Justin. Sam Lowenthal. I used to be a civilian consultant
to the psychological-warfare branch. You don't have to know who all
these people are. It's enough to say that they constitute a
court-martial of the United States Army. You're on trial for treason. We
suspect you of being a stool pigeon, Justin. We thought so when we got a
dry-wire message that somebody named Justin had important information
for a top contact team. We sent in the team--and never heard from it
again.

"Now we find you here in a fairly important subheadquarters town after a
250-mile journey. People don't make such journeys nowadays--not unless
they're helped either by us or their friends the Reds. And we know we
didn't help you. And with you is an unexplained person."

That was with a jerk of the thumb at Mr. Sparhawk, who had indignantly
withdrawn into the padmasana. Justin could see from the shape of his
mouth that he was meditating on the syllable "Om."

"And once you're here you brazenly try to make contact with us. Our
idea, Justin, is that this is a nave attempt--motivated by Marxist
fanaticism, perhaps--to infiltrate our group and put the finger on us
for the Reds. If you have anything to say, speak up--but I suspect
you're going to wind up tonight in the Bee-Jay fertilizer division."

The first thing Justin did was take off his shirt. They gasped at the
bruises and sores. He told them: "They also drilled my teeth for six
hours the other day. Can any of you comfortable masterminds say as much?
No, I didn't break. That's because I've learned a great many things from
the eccentric gentleman sitting in the corner there. One of them was
patience and another was recklessness. You people could use some of
both.

"I believe you when you tell me the senator and his two friends
disappeared after they interviewed me. People are disappearing all the
time in this year of grace. I presume they used their razor blades
before they were questioned, so my information died with them. Now
listen to it this time.

"_Yankee Doodle_ was a diversionary dummy. The real bombardment
satellite, about 99 per cent completed, is under Prospect Hill in
Chiunga County in a limestone cavern. It needs electronics men and
electronics parts. It needs an ace rocket-interceptor pilot. It needs a
bombardier with plenty of VHB time and a background in math. Of course,
if you people would rather spend your time holed up comfortably worrying
about stool pigeons, that's your business; I'm not running your campaign
for you."

Lowenthal was stunned by the outburst. He said shakily: "I used to hear
a rumor when I was detached to the AEClisten, Justin. We'll quarantine
you and pass the matter up higher for a decision as soon as
possible----"

Justin put on his shirt and turned to the door.

"Justin!" Lowenthal snapped, pulling out a .45 pistol.

"Yes?" Justin asked mildly.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Out."

"I'll kill you if you take another step toward the door."

"I suppose you will. Why should that stop me? Don't you realize I was
supposed to be shot for walking 250 miles to listen to your drivel about
passing it up for a decision? Hell, man, I wasn't supposed to get past
one township line, let alone fifty! I was supposed to be shot for
storing that hunk of A-bomb you picked up at my place. I was supposed to
be shot for not reporting the top contact crew you sent. I was supposed
to be shot for not turning over the bombardment satellite to the Reds as
fast as my scared little legs could carry me.

"Go ahead and shoot, man. But if you don't, if by some chance I get out
of here, I'm going to rustle up some electronics men, some parts, and a
crew while you good people are waiting for a decision from higher up.
Good-by."

He started for the door again. Lowenthal's pistol slide went back with a
click and forward with a thud. "Wait," the psychologist said when Justin
put his hand on the door.

"What do you want?" Justin demanded.

"I think," Lowenthal said slowly, "you may have a valid point. Perhaps
we do sometimes display a little less divine madness than we ought
to--suppose, Justin, I send you off to Chiunga County in a sealed
freight car tomorrow with our Dr. Dace. He's the head of research and
development for Bee-Jay. We can arrange a breakdown from overwork for
him."

Justin snapped: "Is your Dr. Dace a satellite crew, a team of
electronics men, and half a ton of equipment?"

Dace himself, small, peppery, white-haired, and mean-eyed, got up and
snarled, "You arrogant pup, who the hell do you think you are to survey
a bombardment satellite? 'Half a ton of equipment'--do you think that's
the same as half a ton of candy bars? Now sit down and shut up while we
plan this thing through." He suddenly looked conscience-stricken and
added lamely: "Er, naturally we all appreciate the, uh, heroism you
displayed in making the very arduous trip you did to re-establish
contact with us . . ." He trailed off and sat down.

The discussion became general and complicated. After a while Lowenthal
dismissed four men who seemed to have nothing to contribute on the
technical side. Justin suspected they were to have been the firing
squad.

Dace relentlessly probed Justin's every recollection of the satellite's
appearance and scribbled notes. Lowenthal tsk-tsk'd because Justin had
left Gribble on his own.

"What should I have done?" Justin demanded.

Lowenthal hesitated. "Maybe parked him in the cave. Or killed him."

Justin found himself on his feet raving: "God help the human race if you
thugs are its fighters for liberty. If we kill a man like Gribble in the
name of security how are we different from the Reds or the Chinese? We
don't even have the excuses they have of ignorance and oppression and
hunger. What kind of cowards are you that you'd kill a sick man so you
won't have to worry about betrayal?"

"Take it easy," Lowenthal said. "You'll kill before this is over."
Justin sat down, shaking. He knew he would. He also knew the
psychologist was deliberately missing the point.

A little information about the rebellion as a whole seeped out of the
general discussion. Justin could gather that there were many areas which
had been quarantined like Chiunga County as too dangerous to work into
the scheme. Elsewhere they had the dry wires, postmen, and traveling
salesmen for communication. They had seeded professional soldiers across
the country--Rawson was Chiunga County's leader-to-be.

The situation in the great cities was either they were very strong at a
given time or they were wiped out. The cities offered countless hiding
places where arms could be stored and food cached and plans made. They
offered countless volunteers--among whom were traitors. There were many
people in the cities who had responded to the relentless psychological
pressure of Red propaganda and thought they were sincere, idealistic
Marxists. It was impossible to say without the latest word from the
wires whether they had a working organization or a demoralized
corporal's guard in, for instance, New York. The organization in New
York City had collapsed five times and risen six. Thousands had been
shot in roundups; there were always thousands more to recruit.

"We don't think," Lowenthal said slowly, "the Reds realize the magnitude
of it. They're hypnotized by their fable of 'counterrevolutionary
wrecking.' This handicaps them in dealing with the real situation.
That's how the Nazis were handicapped in dealing with underground
organizations throughout Europe during World War Two. They were
thunderstruck when the French underground recaptured Paris before the
Allied troops arrived."

"But the Allied troops were on their way," Justin said pointedly.

"You're right. Perhaps I should have cited the uprising of the Warsaw
ghetto, where the remnants of the original population organized and
supplied an army that held the Nazis at bay for ten days. I had uncles
and cousins in Warsaw; I've often wondered since I got into this thing
whether they fought in the uprising or whether they were shipped to an
extermination camp before it happened."

Justin had been in high school during that war. "How did the uprising
come out?" he asked.

"They were killed to the last man, woman, and child," Lowenthal said,
surprised. "The ghetto was pounded into gravel by artillery."

Dr. Dace snapped: "I'm sick and tired of your Warsaw Concerto, Sam.
Let's get on with the work."

But after a while they were talking again. Justin learned that nobody
there knew where Headquarters were, that the Russian railroad inspectors
were free-wheeling, happy-go-lucky types whom it was easy to hoodwink
and possible to bribe, that so far nobody had succeeded in corrupting an
MVD man.

The situation across the Mississippi, under the Chinese, was more urgent
than it was in the East under the Russians. The ancient Chinese contempt
for human life led to executions for such things as smoking in public.
There was some sort of decree posted everywhere in which every American
was placed under suspended sentence of death for banditry and terrorism;
any noncommissioned officer could execute the sentence for reasons which
seemed sufficient to him. However, the language difference made
organization and communication much easier. If the American cringed to
the color-conscious invader, the invader was happy enough about that
gratifying fact to neglect training sufficient officers in the difficult
English language to police the mails and wires.

Somebody had a watch and announced that it was four-thirty and he for
one wanted some sleep.

"One last item," said Dace. "What about him?" That was Mr. Sparhawk,
sleeping soundly on the concrete floor. The old man woke up at once and
asked mildly: "What about me?"

"I'd like him to come along with us in the freight car," Justin said.
"We can keep him in the cave."

"Freight car?" said Mr. Sparhawk disdainfully. "William, how am I
supposed to preach and teach in a freight car? You're acting awfully
strange, I must say. I had no particular objections about coming to this
town, because after all one must go somewhere. But now a freight car and
a cave? Too foolish!"

Dr. Dace said: "I've heard about this egg. He preaches submission.
Furthermore, he's nuts. I say rub him out."

"What a savage little man you are," Mr. Sparhawk said wonderingly. "You
know, it's all very well to talk, but violence won't do. I was a colonel
in the Brigade of Guards, gentlemen; I know what I'm saying."

"What _are_ you saying?" Dace bristled.

"Why, that I saw the Guards break under the Russian armored attack on
Salisbury Plain. I saw the capture of the Royal Family with my own eyes.
Her Majesty, of course, was superb. But--it _was_ defeat, you know. That
was when I discovered there was a basic mistake. If the Guards could be
broken and Her Majesty captured, _obviously_ we'd been mistaken all
along with our guns and rockets and bombs and the answer lay elsewhere.
Since then I've been seeking it, gentlemen----"

"Mr. Sparhawk," Justin said, "I wish you'd come along. I couldn't have
got this far without you. I don't know whether I can finish it without
you."

"You want me for a mascot?" the old man asked wryly.

"Not a mascot. As--as a chaplain, I suppose," Justin said.

"Well--I'll come along," Mr. Sparhawk said. "As a chaplain. You
bloody-minded individuals can use some spiritual ministration in any
case."

Justin, without knowing why, felt immensely relieved. More, he had the
impression that everybody else in the concrete storeroom was too.




CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


"Where the hell have you been?" demanded Gus Feinblatt in an angry
whisper.

They were in front of Croley's store in Norton; Justin had walked down
for sign-in day. The MVD _starsheey syerjahnt_ was presiding inside the
store over the book. Men and women apathetically walked in from time to
time, found their place on the page, and signed. Then they stood around,
or bought something, or just walked out.

"Where the hell were you last sign-in? For that matter, where the hell
have you been all month?" whispered Feinblatt. "We had Stan Potocki sign
in for you. When we found you were gone and that nut Gribble of yours
couldn't tell us anything, we had Stan practice for a week and then come
in with a bunch of us early to sign for himself and another bunch late
to sign for you. We could have been shot! You just shouldn't have done
it, Billy!"

"I had to," Justin said. "Thanks, Gus." He reached into his pocket and
found a penny, a steel disk with a wreathed star on one side and the
head of Tom Paine on the other. "Here," he said. "Christmas Eve." Gus
took the penny automatically, looked bewildered, and Justin went into
the store.

"Vot name?" The sergeant scowled.

"_Moyoh eemyah Yoostin_," Billy said. "_Fermer._"

The sergeant put his finger on the rectangle. He glanced at Justin and
looked a little puzzled. Justin took the pen and looked at the signature
above. It was a pretty bad imitation Potocki had done. With his trained
fingers he imitated the imitation, trying not to _draw_ the letters too
obviously. It passed the sergeant's comparison. Whether it would pass
the later, leisurely comparison of the headquarters officer who was at
least a part-time handwriting expert, he did not know.

Justin read a comic book--_Joe Hill, Hero of Labor_--for half an hour.
At twelve noon a jeep came by for the sergeant; he closed his book
grimly and drove off with it to the next hamlet down the line.

The store came to life then. Mr. Croley emerged from his cubbyhole to
wait, dead pan, for customers to speak up. He sold some binder twine,
fence staples, seed cake, cheese, imitation candy, and dark gray bread
in a little flurry of business activity and then the store was empty
again. Justin went to the counter.

"I'd like to talk in your office," he said. The storekeeper lifted the
counter flap and went in first. "I hear you have some surplus stuff."

Croley sat at his small roll-top desk with the stuffed pigeon-holes and
waited. Justin knew for what. He took out a bundle of money, big bills
from Lowenthal's safe.

"Don't _have_ any," Croley said. "Know where there _is_ some, maybe. Big
difference."

"Yeah. Big difference. Well, do you know where there might be some sacks
of flour, dried peas, and beans? And case lots of canned horse meat,
sugar, dried eggs, and tea?"

"Expensive stuff."

Justin spread out the bills in a fan.

Croley took them and said ritually: "I dunno for sure but I think maybe
Mrs. Sprenger down past the gravel pit might be able to help you. I'll
just write her a note about it."

He wrote a note to Mrs. Sprenger on the back of an old sales slip and
sealed it with a blob of flour paste. Justin got a glimpse, unavoidable
in the tiny place unless he had turned his back, and saw that it seemed
to be about flower seeds.

Croley handed him the note and Justin started to leave. Transaction
over. End of incident. But amazingly Croley detained him. "Imagine
you're getting around," the storekeeper said with a wintry little smile.

"Maybe," Justin said cautiously. So the old skunk was adding up his
absence--he had noticed it of course; Croley noticed everything--and the
big bills. Justin counted on Croley's own illegal part in the
black-market transaction to keep his mouth shut. Counted too far?

But Croley said: "Anything I can do for you, let me know." _And shook
his hand!_

In a daze Justin said, "Christmas Eve," and gave him a penny. Croley
was looking at it in bewilderment as he left.

Justin thought he had Croley figured. The old man was now firmly poised
on the fence. Without being committed in any way whatsoever he was now
ready to jump to either side. Never underestimate the adaptability of a
Croley, Justin told himself.

Gus had loaded his feed on the wagon. It was a pitifully small load, and
his horses were gaunt.

"Business proposition, Gus," Justin called up to him. "Short trip down
Cannon Road, light work, big pay."

"O.K.," Gus said disconsolately. Justin climbed up and Gus flapped his
reins on the horses' backs. The wagon creaked down Cannon Road toward
the gravel pit.

"I should have warned you," Gus said bitterly. "You're taking a chance
being seen with me. I'm under suspicion as a dangerous conspirator--to
be exact, a rootless Zionist cosmopolitan. The MVD came around last
week. They searched the house. They took our Menorah, the Sabbath
candlestick I haven't lit since Pop died. And in the attic they found
the real evidence. A bunch of mildewed haggadas, Passover prayer-books I
haven't used for twenty years. And Granpa's Talmud in forty little
volumes of Hebrew and Aramaic which I can't read. That makes me a
rootless-internationalist-cosmopolitan-cryptofascist-Zionist
conspirator. They warned me to keep my nose clean. I guess they'll be
back one of these days when they haven't got anything better to do and
haul us away." He lapsed into silence.

"Stop at Mrs. Sprenger's," Justin said.

The birdlike old lady read the note in terror, whispered to herself, "I
wish I didn't have to," and showed them to the cistern in the back yard.
The two of them levered its concrete slab cover aside. There was a
ladder and the cistern was stacked with provisions.

"Please," Mrs. Sprenger begged them, "please don't take more than the
note says. He thinks I take the things myself but I wouldn't do
anything like that. Please don't make a mistake in counting."

They carried up the food and loaded the wagon, hiding it under the
original load of fodder.

"Christmas Eve," Justin said to Mrs. Sprenger. And gave her a penny.

"Thank you," she said faintly.

Driving away, Feinblatt asked, "What's this Christmas-Eve-and-penny
routine, Billy?"

"Just a habit I have."

"You didn't have it a month ago. Where've you been? You look different.
You lost some weight, but your whole face looks different.

"I had some teeth pulled."

"I see; that would do it. Billy, stop me if I'm going off side, but did
you have your teeth pulled like, say, the Laceys down at Four Corners?"

"That's the way."

They were heading up Oak Hill Road by then and Justin was debating
furiously with himself. He had to start somewhere, he had to start with
someone. There'd never be a better starting place than strong, steady,
bitter Gus Feinblatt. But he didn't want to; he didn't dare. He was
learning the difference between trusting only yourself and trusting
others. It was an agonizing difference.

Stalling deliberately, he asked, "What'll you have for your share of the
loot?"

"I don't care. Some of the beans and flour, I suppose. We're sick of
potatoes. Lord, what a winter this is going to be! I'm lucky to have
Tony and Phony here; they can haul wood so I can spend my time bucking
and splitting. I guess we'll make out if we close off most of the house
and if we can get another grate for the stove. The old one's about
burned through. They aren't supposed to go fifteen years without a
replacement."

"Turn right," Justin said when they reached the fork that led on the
left to his place and on the right to Prospect Hill.

"What for, Billy?"

"There's something I want to show you. And something I want to ask you.
Look, you rootless Zionist, how'd you like to join a real conspiracy?"

The horribly risky job of local recruiting had begun.

BOOK 4

[Blank Page]




CHAPTER NINETEEN


NOVEMBER 18 . . .

The farmer lay trembling with cold on the concrete basement floor of the
Chiunga Junior High cellar.

"To your feet, please," the bored lieutenant said. The farmer tried to
get up but his knees betrayed him. He collapsed again and whispered from
the floor: "I told you I don't know what you're talking about, mister. I
told you I just got in the habit because everybody was doing it and I
didn't mean anything."

"To your feet, please," said the lieutenant. "Now sit on the stool
again." He took a deep breath and roared in the exhausted man's face:
"Do you think I'm a child to be taken in by fairy stories? The prisoner
is lying! The prisoner knows very well that the greeting 'Christmas Eve'
with the passing of a coin is a symbol of defiance!" He turned down the
dazzling light that reddened the farmer's eyes and equally turned down
his voice to a murmur. "You see, Mr. Firstman, we know the truth. Why
are you keeping us awake with this stubbornness? You could be in bed now
if you'd just said an hour ago that it's merely a token of resistance, a
sort of game, merely. What do you say, Mr. Firstman; will you be a sport
and let us all get some sleep?"

"All right," the farmer screamed. "All right, I guess maybe it was. I
guess we got a kick out of it, it was like a password, something you
Reds didn't know anything about. Call it anything you want to!"

This took the light down another notch. The lieutenant offered him a
cigarette and a light and cooed: "Please, Mr. Firstman, what we want is
not the point. We hope you'll help because whoever planted this
dangerous seed wishes you and your friends no good. You're in trouble
now in a way, but it's not your fault; the blame lies with whoever began
this silly business. We only want you to help us find him, and certainly
you don't owe him any friendship the way he's landed you here."

Firstman swayed on the stool after two deep drags at his cigarette. "I
don't know who started it," he said stubbornly. "Like I said, everybody
started to say it and pass pennies around but that's all I----"

The lieutenant plucked the cigarette from his lips and snarled: "There
is no need to lie to us, prisoner." And again the light blazed into his
red-rimmed eyes.

Two hours later he signed the confession and tumbled into his cot,
snoring.

The lieutenant studied the document with a look of deep disgust; the
captain to whom he reported came in and caught him scowling.

"And what's wrong, Sergei Ivanovitch?"

"Nothing, Pavel Gregorievitch. Also everything. Farmer Firstman had
signed an admission of his guilt. In principle, so he should have; his
attitude was contumacious and it was clear to me that even if he has not
so far engaged in wrecking, he certainly would when the occasion
presented itself."

"What about 'Christmas Eve,' Sergei Ivanovitch?" the captain asked,
beginning to set up the chessmen for their game.

The lieutenant's lips went tight. 'Christmas Eve' was the captain's
discovery, and on the strength of it the captain hoped to be a major
soon. "It seems to mean 'Pie in the sky,' Pavel Gregorievitch. If you
know the phrase?"

"Approximately the same as _Nietchevo_," the captain sighed. "I feared
as much." He moved pawn to king four.

Immensely relieved, the lieutenant sat down and played the queen's pawn
gambit. "Administrative disposal?" he asked.

Pawn took pawn. The captain nodded yes.

The lieutenant pursued two trains of thought simultaneously. One
concerned the "administrative disposal" of farmer Firstman: it would be
his job to administratively dispose of him with a pistol bullet in the
back of the neck; he was wondering which pistol to use. His cherished
souvenir Colt .45 was far too heavy for the job--the other concerned the
margin by which he should lose the chess game to the captain.

The captain said abruptly: "We should sweat a few more of these
'Christmas Eve' sayers, Sergei Ivanovitch, but I will understand if
results are negative. One cannot be right every time."

The lieutenant suppressed a smile. The captain felt self-pity, and his
course was now clear. It was his duty to be roundly trounced in a dozen
moves.

    *    *    *    *    *

NOVEMBER 20, temperatures seasonably cold with snow flurries over the
Northeast and light variable winds.

The proclamation left by the corporal in the jeep said the indigenous
population was ordered to discontinue the faddish, slangy salutation
"Christmas Eve" forthwith. For the said phrase could be substituted any
one of the traditional cultural salutations and farewells in the
following list:

Ah, good day sir (or madame)!

How are crops, (first name of person addressed)? And more. Mr. Croley
looked it over word by word in his empty store, then slowly tacked it to
his bulletin board and waited.

Lank old Mark Tryon came in after a while and asked: "Got any white
bread?"

Mr. Croley took a huge loaf of dark rye bread from its screened box in
answer to that.

"Cut me off two pounds," Tryon said. "I s'pose you couldn't slice it for
me?"

Mr. Croley shook his head once and measured carefully to cut off two
pounds. Tryon read the placard meanwhile. He turned from it, dead pan,
to pick up his chunk of bread and put down his dollar.

"Christmas Eve," Mr. Croley said, shoving back a penny change at him.

Tryon blinked, said furtively, "Christmas Eve," glanced at the placard,
and scuttled out with the bread under his arm.

Mr. Croley looked after him for a moment and then turned to check
through the credit books on the widespread rack. He worked through the
As, noting who was over five dollars, who over ten, who over fifteen.
Sir or madame! he snorted to himself silently.

    *    *    *    *    *

NOVEMBER 23.

Stan Potocki and his wife were out in the crisp cold butchering hogs. A
huge fire roared and stank, for as they boned the meat they threw bones
and gristle onto the blazing chunks. It was a funny way to butcher. Stan
sawed and sliced, his wife dragged cuts away to hang in the barn and
between times kept herself busy digging in a row of barrels. When she
finished, the barrels would be flush with the ground, filled with brine
and pork, covered with the winter woodpile.

Mrs. Potocki leaned on her shovel for a moment, stamping her feet in the
powdery snow. "Mrs. Winant didn't say anything when I met her," she
said.

"Henry Winant's yellow," Potocki grunted. "Killing ten sheep. 'Maybe
more later, Stan, but I can't tell him hog cholera got my sheep, ya
know.'" He was imitating Henry Winant's nasal twang. "I told him wild
dogs could just as easy kill twenty as ten, but he's yellow. Got to face
up to the Agro man anyway, why not do it for twenty sheep?" He added,
"Goddamn it," whetted his butcher knife, and stuck another pig in the
throat. Inside he was already rehearsing his story for the Agro man.
"Hog cholera, sudden outbreak. Had to slaughter and burn 'em fast,
Lieutenant, you being an Agro man know how it is with cholera. Wanna see
the bones and ashes? I'll get a shovel, buried 'em right here."

"Stan," his wife said.

He stopped and patiently began to whet his butcher knife.

"Stan, what's gonna happen on Christmas Eve?"

He said slowly: "I don't know. I wish to hell I did. Whatever happens,
we'll take it as it comes."

"I guess," she said, "hiding the pork's got something to do with it?"

"I guess," he said shortly, and laid down his whetstone and tried his
butcher knife on his thumb carefully.

    *    *    *    *    *

NOVEMBER 23.

The old phenomenon of persecution, the one that persecutors never learn,
was working itself out again. The Feinblatts were getting ready for
dinner. In a bungling way it was as Kosher as they could manage,
considering that they had not kept a ritual kitchen since Gus's father
died years before.

Mrs. Feinblatt was worrying over which dish towel was which. Did the red
band mean meat dishes and the blue band mean milk dishes, or was it
vice versa? She had forgotten; she'd have to write it down somewhere.
Kosher was a nuisance, no denying it, but a nuisance with compensations.
Nowadays when they had so little they had at least this feeling that
they were a link in a chain through fifty centuries. . . .

Gus was finishing a report on a lost heifer. "Condition of fence, time
last seen, direction of hoofprints . . ." It had to be turned in to the
Agro man when he made his rounds. He washed his hands and went through
the sliding double doors to the dining room. Before sitting down he went
to the sideboard where the canister set stood and scooped out half a cup
of flour and a small handful of beans. He lifted a loose floor board and
dumped them into flat cans waiting there between the joists.

Mrs. Feinblatt complained: "You're getting awful queer, Gus. Why do you
put the stuff away? Why ask for trouble? They shot the Wehrweins for
hoarding, didn't they? And the _heifer_! Maybe you'll get away with it,
but my heart stops every time I think of the man looking in the barn,
walking over the barrel--Gus, I was talking to Mrs. Potocki in the store
when there wasn't anybody around and she _knows_ about it. Gus, did you
tell Stan?"

"I told him, I told him," he said wearily. "He's doing the same with his
hogs. And if your heart stops, your heart stops. Sit down."

She sat.

Gus put on a hat and thought. He was vaguely aware from a novel he had
read once that the fifty centuries of Jewish sacred literature provided
blessings for every occasion--tasting a perfect melon, seeing purple
clouds at sunset, hearing that a relative had been ransomed from heathen
captivity. Presumably there was one for sitting down to a thin stew of
turnips and beef in the first year of a pagan conquest, but he didn't
know it. He sighed and recited the only prayer he did know, the "Hear, O
Israel," and they began to eat.

    *    *    *    *    *

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. . . ."




CHAPTER TWENTY


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----"

It was about fifteen yards from the board fence where they crouched to
the little castle. "They ought to be heavier," Betsy said fretfully.
"You should have put them in heavy bottles or wrapped them with wire or
something. The pamphlet said all that."

"I forgot," Farish said miserably. "I can go back and----"

"No," she said. "There's no time." And she wrinkled her face, trying to
think, trying not to cry. The pamphlet assumed the bottles would be
heavy enough for a solid throw, the pamphlet assumed the druggist would
have nerves of steel and the soul of a punch card, omitting not one step
of the twenty it listed. The pamphlet had to assume so, and the pamphlet
was wrong. Many things would go wrong that night, Betsy suddenly
realized. She stood in paralysis watching the sentries pace, realizing
that every mistake would be paid for to the last penny.

"Try throwing one," she said to Farish.

He eased a small bottle from its nest and pulled off his right glove
with his teeth. He went into a rusty windup and hurled the bottle.

It made a very sharp, loud noise that rocked them back and made the
board fence ripple against them. It wasn't at all the dull,
reverberating boom Betsy had prepared herself for but more like the
crack of a gigantic whip.

There didn't seem to be a second's pause before the reaction from the
pumping-station-guard detachment came. Floodlights glared out, and in
the frosty air they heard clanks from the roof as the section of machine
guns was full-loaded and unlimbered. The two guards shouted at each
other and crouched, unslinging their tommy guns and moving right across
the little plaza to the edge of shadow.

The nitro bottle had pocked up the pavement yards from the door. Total
failure. The sentries, ready to fire from the hip, were almost upon the
fence that sheltered them.

Farish said abruptly, "Good-by, Betsy," which was the first time the
bald young man had dared call Miss Cardew from up the hill by her first
name. In floodlight filtering through cracks in the fence she saw the
silly, terrified grin on his face. He vaulted the fence into the light
and cried, his hands up, "I surrender! I give up!"

There was a wild burst of shots from one of the startled guards; they
stitched the fence not far from Betsy's head. Through a crack she saw
Farish talking earnestly to the guards, his hands up high; they were
marching him to the pumping station. She stayed there shivering with the
cold for two minutes. If nothing happened, she'd have to make a try with
her thermit . . .

But there was the whipcrack again, enormously louder this time, and the
floodlights went out and fragments rained about her. One brick smashed
through the fence like an artillery shell, whistling.

Perhaps, she thought, he swung one of them so they'd shoot, or perhaps
he fell forward and broke the bottles next to his chest--or perhaps he
repented of the whole thing, perhaps he had been frantically undressing
to ease the bottles to a table somewhere and his nervous hand and the
cold detonated them all.

She would never know the answer, she thought, but the results were
coming thick and fast. Lights were blinking on in windows, the strident
ringing of telephones had already begun. Neighbors were calling from
porch to porch.

And the reservoir was cracked.

It was nothing spectacular. It was just water beginning to rill from the
crack in the face, bubbling into the gutters, slopping over a little
onto the sidewalks, bubbling and racing on its way through town to the
storm sewers of the business section, which would convey it harmlessly
into the river.

Betsy got up creakily and walked a block into the darkness. She found a
big frame house where lights shone upstairs as some
family--whose?--chattered about the explosion and wondered if they
should call up or go out and see or what. She took a beer can from her
shopping bag and snapped her lighter. The twist of magnesium ribbon
trailing from the can caught suddenly and with almost explosive
violence; burning metal sputtered and seared the fork of her hand. She
hissed with the pain and flung the star-bright flare under the big
wooden porch. She should have moved on at once. Instead she dubiously
watched and wondered. The igniter caught, then, slowly, the
iron-aluminum reaction began. In twenty seconds the beer can melted into
a puddle of orange-white brilliance that crawled in an amoeboid fashion.
The porch flooring above it caught, then the porch posts, then the
siding of the house.

Betsy moved on amid screams from windows. At the next block she went
down an alley and lobbed a beer can against a smaller house. At the next
block she laid one against the foundation of a row of shops and ignited
it and walked away, not looking back. Chiunga Center was beginning to
wake up screaming. The streets were filling with people wearing coats
over pajamas. The fires were spreading, of course, even though the
volunteer hose company had come zooming from its garage; there was no
pressure at the hydrants. Fred Farish had seen to that. Betsy Cardew
became one among hundreds, a dazed-looking woman wandering through
blazing streets with a shopping bag in her hand, here and there stopping
to do something with a can from the bag.

When she saw a wall of flame ahead of her, she knew that Mr. Hosmer, the
railroad ticket man, had done his job too, working his way north with
the other druggist's thermit. She headed for the post office, her face
streaked with tears and soot.

    *    *    *    *    *

By ten forty-five Justin, in Croley's truck, had met the convoy and
passed over the rest of his rifles. There was almost murder done when
some of the men saw Croley driving. The old storekeeper put on his
accustomed contemptuous silence in the face of their threats. Justin
told the men to leave him alone and they almost backed away, but it was
Hollerith who acted like a general and saved Croley's life. "You men,"
he roared at the loudest of them, "are in the Army!" In retrospect,
thought Justin, it was a silly thing to say. It was even demonstrably
untrue; they were bandit terrorists according to the prevailing law of
the land; by a generous construction of the rules of warfare, irregular
partisans at the most. But somehow the word _Army_ from Hollerith's
mouth canceled all that . . .

So it was that Hollerith's truck and Croley's stood abreast at the
intersection of the highway and the Norton road, and down the highway
gleamed the light in the roadblock that used to be a truck-weighing
station. They were waiting for the rest of the convoy to rendezvous,
each truck with its load of hastily awakened, hastily armed farmers who
knew only that it was Christmas Eve and that their neighbors were
telling them: "Fight or die now."

Hollerith was twiddling the dials of a command radio set in the cab of
his truck, loot from the cavern. It crackled Russian wherever he tuned
it. Croley complained to Justin: "My feet're freezing. Why'n't you drive
for a spell?"

"All right," Justin said, and they shifted seats. Croley stamped his
feet against the floor boards and grumbled: "Damn foolishness. Get us
all shot."

Justin said: "If you can't stand the suspense, get out and start
running. You'll get shot that much sooner. By me."

Croley was loquacious. "Young snots," he muttered. "What I can't see is
a steady man like that Rawson chargin' around. Him you call Hollerith
now."

Justin repeated his suggestion.

"Don't talk foolish," Croley said testily. "Think I'm a nut? I'll go
along. I'll go along with anybody. Doesn't matter who."

And, Justin sensed, Croley did not realize he was degrading himself
below the level of mankind to say such a thing, to be such a thing as he
was. . . .

The sky lightened glaringly to the north, then subsided to a dimmer
glow.

"General!" Justin yelled. He cranked down his window, reached over, and
jabbed Hollerith. "Look!"

Hollerith turned from his radio, blinking, and awakened to the north
sky. He whipped out a compass, took a bearing on the center of the
lightness. His face broke out into a sunny grin. "Elmira!" he breathed.
"Elmira! The air base and the gas depot. No Stormoviks tonight, Billy!
They got Elmira!"

They--what handful of desperately frightened men?--had got Elmira and
solved General Hollerith's pressing problem of air attack. And
elsewhere? Justin asked.

"The radio's pretty hot," Hollerith said, indulging the civilian
situation. "Every command's yelling for Washington, but Washington
doesn't come in at all. They _should_ be transmitting in code," he said
with a momentary frown. "It's elementary that modern guerrillas will
have an RT intercept service. I'm surprised at them."

Justin begged for detail. Hollerith genially translated snatches. "Tank
park in Rochester says its vehicles are out--sugar in the gas tanks.
Speaking of sugar, did Gribble get off?"

"He got off," Justin said as if to a child. "Betsy delivered the
uniform, he filled his pockets, and away he went. What else is going
on?"

"Well, a smug MVD general in New Orleans says the situation's under
control, 'brief and petty insurrection well in hand'--but they were
supposed to get two suitcase bombs. I wonder who goofed? Never occurred
to me that New Orleans would be under the MVD, but I suppose it's only
natural. They're a stiff-necked people; it took old Silver Spoons Butler
to handle them in the Civil War. And let's see, the Transport
Overcommand is pulling rank from Pittsburgh. They want all units to
furnish via their own trucks 20 per cent of their strength for immediate
and vital rail, highway, and harbor repairs. And there're some Chinese
coming in from the West, but I don't know the language."

"What about the satellite?" asked Justin.

The general said with elaborate detachment: "Not my baby. Couldn't say,
Billy." He glanced at his watch. "_Where_ are the rest of the trucks?
Billy, run and take a look up Oak Hill Road, see if there're any
headlights coming our way. We have to take the blockhouse sooner or
later."

Justin saw no headlights.

"I guess they're held up a little," Hollerith said. "Let's go get that
roadblock now."

Justin was speechless for a long moment. He said at last: "You
mean--us?"

Hollerith lost his temper. "And just who in hell did you think I meant,
the Fighting 69th? I mean _us_. Feinblatt and I will roll up with our
lights on. You and Croley ride in the back. Drop off and walk the last
hundred feet. Feinblatt'll gun the motor and I'll keep 'em busy with
small talk in broken Russian. Then you shoot 'em from the dark. Croley,
you got a rifle? Take my carbine."

"I don't trust Croley," Justin said flatly.

"Billy," said Hollerith, "I've had considerable experience with both
turncoats and reorganizing a war-disrupted area. We're going to need
Croley and we can trust him. He'll stay bought."

Croley snorted in the dark. Justin and he got out and climbed into the
back of the other truck.

The little raid went like clockwork. The two Russian soldiers,
gesticulating in the light, collapsed like puppets with cut strings
under the murderous fire of Justin and Croley from twenty feet away.

It was Justin's first personal killing. Like most riflemen of the
twentieth century he had done his firing at two to three hundred yards,
aiming at impersonal specks which usually dropped when he fired, giving
him no clue at all as to whether they were killed, wounded, or taking
cover. He felt sick and shaken. Not so Croley. The old man inspected the
two Russians and said: "Dirty skunks."

"You did business with them," Justin said faintly.

"I can do business with anybody. But you think I _liked_ them going over
the books, bothering a man all the time? Things are going to be better
if we get away from this."

It was as tepid a revolutionary manifesto, perhaps, as was ever spoken.

Hollerith was eased down from the truck and into his gocart by Feinblatt
and Justin. He muscled himself into the blockhouse and called to Gus to
bring the radio in and then stay outside on guard.

"Rank has its privileges," he said, gratefully turning up a kerosene
heater. "And I see they had a pot of tea brewing. Croley, pour me a cup
and help yourself."

Feinblatt popped in. "Headlights," he said. "It's either our boys or the
whole Red Army."

"Detruck them, Billy," said Hollerith. "Get 'em into some kind of
formation. Yell 'Attention' when I come out to talk."

Practically every man in the fifty trucks had gone through military
training; there was little confusion. There seemed to be about two
hundred gathered by scouring the hills for all males of sixteen and
over. Justin got them into ranks grouped on the fifty men who had
received some briefings over the past two weeks.

Hollerith's speech went like this: "Christmas Eve. It's here. I'm
General Hollerith. And you, my friends, are the Army of the United
States. See the sky to the west? That's Chiunga Center, burning to the
ground. You heard some thunder a while ago? It wasn't thunder; it was
the Susquehanna bridges being blown.

"The Red troops in the Center have got to pull up and march. Their food
dumps have been burned. We've destroyed their water supply. We've cut
their highway and rail lines so they have no way of getting any more.
Right through here is the only way they can march.

"We have to knock out their trucks and kill their commanders. We have to
leave them starving, frozen stragglers in our hills, where we can kill
them on our own terms. They are a regiment--about a thousand of them.
There are about two hundred of you. You have rifles and an average of
two dozen rounds apiece. For you crow-shooting, deer-hunting S.O.B.s
that should be plenty. Leaders, take your groups and move out."

He wheeled his gocart about and rolled into the blockhouse. Justin
followed and closed the door.

The general said, not looking around, in a hoarse whisper: "But will
they?"

Justin looked and said: "Sure. There they go. Whooping and yelling,
too."

The general said, "They must be nuts," and turned on the radio.

At 11:30 P.M. in the vehicle park of the MVD detachment in Chiunga
Center the man called Gribble was doing the job he had demanded, fought,
even brokenly wept for.

The park was the drill field back of the high school building, and it
was in ordered confusion. The vicious incendiary fires lapped at the
rim of the field, dying now as century-old houses crumbled into
orange-flecked charcoal. A tide of people surged against the field also
and was turned back repeatedly by soldiers who clubbed and jabbed with
their rifles. Within the line of troops the MVD regiment was forming for
motor convoy. Their colonel was doing the obvious, inevitable thing.
Without food and water soldiers cannot live; therefore the regiment must
go to food and water.

The trucks were ready and waiting. Somebody shouted something at
Gribble; he said, "_Da_," saluted, and hurried on. He was wearing a
homemade imitation of the MVD green uniform. The green would never pass
by daylight, nor would the linoleum imitations of leather belt and
puttees, but it was not necessary for them to pass by daylight.

Gribble was looking for the field kitchen and found it. The cooks,
overcoats on top of their whites, were serving one for the road to the
troops; hunks of solid black bread and dippers of tea from great
boilers. Against the blazing background of the school building the men
filed past, one hand out for the bread, canteen cup out for the tea.
There were five boilers left when Gribble found the tent; he didn't know
how many had already been emptied. As he watched, the cooks came to the
bottom of one boiler; they yanked it back into the tent and shoved
another into place at the serving counter. As he watched, the rear fly
of the tent was pulled, folded, and hurled aboard the mess truck; the
tent was disintegrating from the rear under the practiced attack of the
cooks. Gribble drifted among them, among the three boilers of tea in
reserve, despite their warning shouts. When they were all struggling
with a big side fly, he impartially sweetened the boilers of tea with
white powder from his pockets.

He had morbidly asked about it and learned that the stuff was arsenious
trioxide, procured from the remelt shop of Corning Glass.

He wandered off foggily. There was a spark in the fog which wanted him
to run screaming to the cooks and tell them he had poisoned the good
tea, that they must stop serving it to the soldiers--he saw them drain
the boiler at the counter, hurl it back, and drag forward the next.

He knew by then that he was a monster. Who but a monster could do what
he had done, slaying five thousand devoted scientists and engineers by
the simple closing of a door? Now causing the horrible death of how many
young soldiers he did not know?

He screamed and began to run away from himself, hurtling into tents,
trucks, soldiers. Somebody seized him by the front of his coat and
slapped his face sharply; he broke loose and ran again. Then there was a
brief interlude under a flashlight during which sharp questions rang in
his ears and he could answer them only by weeping.

It ended with a tremendous padded blow on the back of his neck, which
was all he felt of the lieutenant's pistol bullet destroying his brain.
He never knew hundreds of soldiers squirming themselves settled in the
trucks were at that very moment complaining about food as soldiers
always do; they said their tea was too sweet.

    *    *    *    *    *

At eleven-thirty Justin was establishing the first roadblock in the path
of the MVD motor convoy, five miles east on the highway from Chiunga
Center. Heading a commando of five untrained men and boys whom he didn't
know, he steered his truck athwart the two-laned concrete strip and
ordered them out. The six of them grunted and strained in the icy night
air rocking the truck on its springs, trying to tip it over. It swayed
farther and farther with each shove; on the twentieth it almost heeled
but then crashed back solidly on its four wheels while the six men stood
panting and beaten.

"Lights," said a sixteen-year-old boy named Sheppard. The aura of
headlights was just becoming visible over a rise to the east. They
scrambled for the roadside and into the brush about ten yards.

"Remember what I told you," Justin whispered. "Don't look at their
headlights at all. Officers first. When they come after us, fall back
and snipe the main body of the convoy."

"Yeah," the Sheppard boy whispered, fascinated.

The aura of light became beams and then blazing pairs of eyes. "_Don't
look_," said Justin.

The lights snapped out fast when they picked up the truck. The advance
guard--it was six jeeps--knew a roadblock wasn't a roadblock unless it
was defended. By starlight and a little moon the commando saw MVD men
scrambling out and flattening on the road. One soldier talked loudly
into a radio before getting out. Justin discovered that he couldn't tell
insignia.

"Forget what I said about officers," he said. "Fire and fall back, then
west."

He aimed into a clump of three men who were belly down on the road,
peering off the roadside and whispering. At least one had to be an
officer or noncom giving orders. He fired six shots from his carbine; at
the range he couldn't miss. All three men floundered and yelled.

Around him blazed the rifles of his men, firing at what he didn't know.

A command in Russian from the road and the MVD men uncertainly began to
fire in their general direction; somebody had seen muzzle flash from one
of the old guns. The bullets whistled above them (people fire high in
the dark) except for one that stopped with a meaty chunk in young
Sheppard's head. Justin scooped up the boy's varmint rifle and box of
ammunition. "Fall back," he said.

They clustered tight behind him, trampling and talking until he cursed
them. He headed right, guiding on glimpses of the white road in
starlight seen through ragged trees until there were the brighter lights
of the convoy to guide them. They had stopped on radio word from the
point, but had not yet blacked out. Justin fell farther back into the
woods, saw the black hump of a little rise, and crawled up it on his
belly.

"Don't fire," he whispered. "Something's going on."

One truck was emptying; that would be a platoon sent forward to
reinforce the point and get the truck off the road. In the headlights
half the platoon seemed to be drunk; they were lurching and holding
their stomachs. Justin could barely make out features when they swayed
across a headlight's beam. They were in agony, and Justin knew what it
meant. Gribble had made it with his white arsenic. Good-by, Gribble,
insurance executive, security officer, hatchet man, poisoner, child of
self-torment. . . .

Some men were hanging from the other trucks, vomiting.

"Fire off your rounds," Justin said. "Officers and noncoms. Then we get
out of here and back to the roadblock." They spread out along the rise
and began to squeeze off careful shots. Justin fired four times at a
shouting, waving captain and missed all four times. Grinding his teeth,
he hurled his carbine aside and blazed away wildly with young Sheppard's
.22; just before the convoy lights went out he dropped his man.

They had lost their night vision watching the convoy; they stumbled and
crashed their way east along the roadside until it slowly returned. They
heard shots behind them and then machine-gun fire. It was probably
another commando sniping the convoy from its left flank and getting
worse than it gave.

They hugged the roadside, passing other roadblock trucks, some
successfully toppled, on their way back to the weighing-station commando
post. ("Christmas Eve" was the watchword.)

Justin went in and told Hollerith: "We lost one man and wasted a lot of
ammunition but our truck stopped them temporarily five miles out of
town. Gribble got through with his sugar; my guess is one man in four
affected."

"Good," Hollerith said. "Have some tea."

Justin gulped a tin cup of scalding tea from the top of the kerosene
heater. "What about the satellite?" he asked.

Hollerith said tightly: "One man said he believes he saw it take off at
eleven forty-five but he wasn't certain. I was busy at the time."

One of the trained men came in, wild-eyed and bleeding from a crudely
wrapped wound of his left hand. "Hi, Rawson," he said. General Hollerith
looked annoyed. "We got there second," the man said. "Some other gang
was banging away and they blacked out. They fired at us a lot and a
machine gun killed both my brothers. With the same burst."

"What did you see?" Hollerith urged gently.

The man rambled: "They looked sick, lots of them. They unloaded a lot of
their men and their medics with the bands and a lot of blankets. Left
'em right there in the road and the trucks moved on up with their lights
out and soldiers out beating the bushes on each side of the road."

"That's fine," Hollerith said quietly. "About five miles an hour in low
gear?"

"That'd be about right," the man said. "Did I tell you they killed James
and Henry? My brothers."

Hollerith said: "Have some tea, Hanson. Take it outside with you." He
nodded to Justin, who put a mug of tea in the man's unwounded hand and
gently steered him from the little house. Hanson sat down and began to
cough. Justin walked away when the coughs turned into sobs.

There were headlights coming down Oak Hill Road off the highway. The car
made the turn and headed for the command post, stopping a hundred feet
away. Justin didn't know how he knew, but he was sure it was Betsy. She
was soot-stained and bedraggled and silent; she carried a bulging
shopping bag. He took her in to Hollerith. She laid down the shopping
bag carefully and began to unpack it on the general's table. She said:
"Winkler had a sudden rush of courage. He met me at the post office
garage with this stuff. Extra thermit he turned out and some nitro in
flat bottles."

"How's the Center?" snapped Hollerith.

"Still burning, I guess," she said listlessly. "What about the
satellite?"

Hollerith said in a low, venomous voice: "To hell with the satellite.
How am I supposed to know about the satellite? Maybe it's crashed in
Nebraska or the Atlantic by now. Maybe it never got up. Maybe it's on
its way into the sun. I'm no mind reader, Miss Cardew, so kindly shut up
about the satellite."

Stan Potocki came in and looked apologetic. "Gus got killed," he said.
"One of their patrols tossed grenades when they heard us. Blown in
half--but I guess you want a report. The convoy is proceeding east on
the highway under blackout with flank patrols. They are stopping from
time to time to move our roadblocks. They are averaging maybe three
miles an hour, I figure, because their walking patrols aren't having any
trouble keeping up. I don't know whether our sniping's having any real
effect on them except to kill a few of their people. They're going to
get through, General."

"Thanks, Potocki," Hollerith said. "We've got some stuff here for you to
lay in their path. It's nitroglycerine; handle with care. Mass all these
together; maybe we can crater the road. Put it where one of our
roadblock trucks'll run over it when they move it. And send in anybody
outside who wants a job."

Two exhausted men came in; one saluted shame-facedly. Hollerith gave him
the thermit bombs. "Take these to the top of the old Lehigh cut. They're
incendiaries; you just light them. Got matches? Here, take mine. You
ought to get some fine results from dropping them into open personnel
trucks."

The man grinned, took the shopping bag, and left. "Young Joe Firstman.
They killed his father a few days ago," he told Justin in an aside. To
the other man he said: "Take those dinner plates out of that cabinet
there. Yes, that's what I said! I want you to lay 'em face down in the
road between Truck Six and Truck Seven."

"Aw," the man said incredulously.

"Listen," Hollerith said patiently. "I mean what I say. It'll cost them
ten minutes and thirty men if our shooting is any good. They'll see
them, they'll know they're plates, and still won't dare roll over them
until their bomb-disposal men have come up and removed them. Is that
clear?"

"I guess so," the man said doubtfully, and took the plates and went out.

"Five to one he goofs off," said Hollerith, looking after him dismally.

Mr. Sparhawk entered and came to a heel-clicking, palm-out British
salute before Hollerith. "Sir," he said, "I have the honor to report
that the satellite vessel was launched at 11:45 hours. Dr. Dace said
that all appeared to be well on radar track. He instructed me to take a
recon car and report."

"Thank you," Hollerith said. "Now everybody be quiet and let me think.
Very shortly the Reds will decide they won't be made to eat soup with a
knife. They'll pull in their flank guards, turn on their lights, and go
barreling through, taking their losses and consoling themselves with
thoughts of coming back and killing us bandit terrorists an inch at a
time. I think they'll reach the decision at about oh-oh-one-five.
Justin, sound the recall, check the wind, and give 'em gas."

Justin went outside, Betsy trailing after, and cranked a siren on a
truck loaded with long cylinders from the satellite cavern. "Betsy," he
said, "this stuff is chlorine. I'm going to drive east to the cut about
three miles from here. If the wind is right, I open the valves for the
Red convoy to run into a cloud of the stuff. Will you tail me in your
car so I can hop in and get back here? By then the command post will be
dismantled and we'll all be heading for high ground."

"All right," she said.

On Christmas morning at 12:30 A.M. General Hollerith, Justin, Betsy, Mr.
Croley, and Mr. Sparhawk were in Sparhawk's recon car on the ridge road
with a view of the chlorine-filled cut below.

"I was right," Hollerith said abstractedly. "Here they come."

With headlights on the convoy was rolling eastward at fair speed. Into
the chlorine.

It was easy to imagine the hellish confusion below. Headlight beams
angled crazily as drivers found themselves retching over their wheels;
in the trucks dazed soldiers must have been scratching wildly under
useful blankets, mess gear, and overcoats for long-forgotten gas masks.
Some trucks butted into the walls of the cut. But slowly, slowly, the
convoy reformed and limped on.

Hollerith was swearing under his breath. At last he said: "We didn't
smash them locally." The radio in the recon car squawked in Chinese.
"What's happened elsewhere we don't know yet. Compared to what I
privately expected, it's been a howling success. If it could be followed
up--but of course it can't be followed up. It was a one-punch affair. If
the Reds had broken and scattered, it would have been . . ." He sighed.
"But they're going to make it through to Rochester or Syracuse or
wherever they're headed, and they'll regroup and . . ." He sighed again.

The radio switched from Chinese to Russian. The general's head snapped
sharply toward the speaker and he said at last: "That was it. English
next."

The radio said: "M.S. One to Earth. To the peoples of Russia and China.
This is Military Satellite One of the United States Armed Forces
broadcasting. We hereby deliver the following ultimatum: Your occupation
troops in North America must surrender within twenty-four hours.
Repatriation of North American prisoners of war must begin within
twenty-four hours. Unless these demands are met, the cities of Moscow
and Peiping will be destroyed. If the demands are still not met within a
further twenty-four hours, the cities of Leningrad and Hong Kong will be
destroyed. If our demands are not met, we shall continue destroying
Russian and Chinese cities at twenty-four-hour intervals until our stock
of hydrogen weapons is exhausted. We shall then drop cobalt bombs on
Russia and China which will wipe out all life in those areas. Peoples of
Russia and China, make your voices heard while you can. It is your
rulers alone who condemn you to certain death if they refuse our
ultimatum."

The voice switched to Chinese again.

They stood in utter silence through a complete replay of the ultimatum
in three languages. The general reached out at last and gently turned a
switch and the radio fell silent. "That will do it," he said softly.
"Feng and Novikov are stubborn, but when their cities begin to go,
they'll come around--or be deposed by rulers who will come around."

"So it's all over," Betsy said wonderingly.

Hollerith's face was a mixture of bitterness and defiant pride. "No," he
said. "We've got to start work on people immediately. They mustn't make
_that_ mistake, not ever. It isn't over and it'll never be over. What
happens next is the Reds build a bombardment satellite of their
own--secretly, in spite of all the controls we clamp on them. It'll take
them a few years. We use those years to build a better satellite that'll
shoot them out of the sky--but they'll know that, so theirs will be
armed and steerable. Don't ever think it'll be over. There's always
going to be work for people like me."

Sparhawk was down on his knees talking quietly: "Deliver me, O Lord,
from the evil man, preserve me from the violent man which imagine
wickedness in their hearts; continually are they gathered together for
war . . ."

Justin noted that he was praying not to Annie Besant or the Zen
patriarchs or to Vishu but to the God of his Sunday school and
regimental worship. He wondered if somehow the past night had burned
away a great deal of wordy nonsense from Mr. Sparhawk's brain and left
the pure metal of worship.

"Croley," General Hollerith was saying, "this is where you come in. We
now have hell's own problem of supply and housing. I suppose I'm the
government hereabouts now, but I'm going to be a very busy man making
the Reds decent prisoners of war, keeping them from turning into bandits
and scavengers. I'm going to delegate food supply to you; you know
rationing procedures from your business and you know where and who the
jobbers and wholesalers are. Think you can handle it?"

"Might," said Croley.

"Billy," the general said, "you're a good man and we need you. You can
be my right arm in this prisoner-of-war roundup deal or you can work
with Croley here getting the food lines in operation again----What's the
matter?"

Billy Justin, once a commercial artist, thirty-eight years old, a
pensioned veteran of Korea, four years a dairy farmer and one year a
conspirator, trigger man of the weapon that held Earth hostage, newly
and suddenly seeker of God, said over his shoulder to Hollerith,
"Nothing's the matter, General. I just decided I couldn't work with you
or Croley. No offense, I hope."

He knelt beside Mr. Sparhawk, who was praying, "Put up again thy sword
into his place for they that take the sword shall perish from the sword.
Ye lust and have not; ye kill and desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye
fight and war because ye ask not . . ."

They stared at Billy Justin, but after a while Betsy came and joined
him.



Transcriber's Note:

page 146--typo "limestown" changed to "limestone"

page 179--typo "Atttention" changed to "Attention"




[End of Not This August, by C. M. Kornbluth]
