One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  The mountains were at their most pleasant, the mosquitoes gone and the snows not yet come. Lanny and Laurel greeted old friends, walked on paths through spruce and pine forests, slept on balsam pillows, ate freshly caught trout, and watched the moonlight making a path of silver across a cool mountain lake. It was all so lovely they wanted to stay; they looked at a place near by, and talked of buying it, and thought what fun it would be to line the walls inside and double the windows and stay through the winter. They had plenty of money, they could have been comfortable for the rest of their lives—and what fate was it which drove them out into a deadly cruel world?—

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  These lines had been true when Matthew Arnold wrote them, and they had been still more true when Lanny read them during the First World War. They were written on Dover Beach—and what would the poet have thought now if he had come back from the spirit world and inspected that beach, sowed with deadly mines, blocked with barricades of concrete and barbed wire, and with rubble blasted from the cliffs and houses above? It was “Hell’s Corner!”

  Lanny Budd climbed on a mountain trail, thinking about this all the way. He loved his life as much as any man, and he hated brutality and lies, apparently more than most men. He had been born too young to be drafted for the first holocaust and too old for the second, but he had surely given his share of warnings and incurred his share of voluntary risk. Why shouldn’t he lay off and rest for a while? The world’s wrongs were ancient, and what any ordinary man could do to diminish them was assuredly small in comparison. Why not learn to shrug your shoulders in the French fashion and say with Matthew Arnold again:

  Let the long contention cease!

  Geese are swans, and swans are geese!

  But Lanny thought of that tired man whom he had left in the Citadel of Quebec. The burden he was carrying was that of Atlas, and there was no way he could get from under it save by death. Lanny had commented on the stacks of tiresome documents, and the patience it took to meet the streams of bores. “Patience?” F.D.R. had said. “You acquire patience when you spend two years learning to wiggle your big toe.”

  That would be something for a sound man to remember all his days. A cripple had been elected President of the United States—the first time that had happened in our history—and he had been elected for three terms, that also being without precedent. He carried two colossal wars in his head, and had room enough left for all his friends, and also for his enemies; a cheerful smile for the former, and a whiplash for the latter.

  Lanny thought of the three tyrants whom he had watched arising during his mature years: Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, in order of appearance. They were three foxes whom he had pledged himself to hunt down, and to hang their brushes from his mantel. He had just seen the end of Mussolini—or so he thought at the moment—and it was “view halloo” for the others. Lanny knew that he could never be happy in the Adirondack Mountains, or in New York or any other place, if he were to drop out of that chase. Not with a wife and a baby and all the gold that was buried under the ground at Fort Knox, Kentucky!

  V

  Laurel phoned each day about the baby. Agnes had a reliable babysitter to help her, and all was well. But she said, “A Mr. Alston called up and wants to see Lanny. He is at the Hotel Commodore.” And that was the end of the holiday. Lanny called the hotel, and Alston said, “I’ll be here until tomorrow, and it’s rather important.” Lanny said, “I’ll leave in a few minutes, and it ought not take more than five or six hours.”

  Laurel’s heart sank, and she had to draw a long deep breath. However, she hated the tyrants as much as Lanny did, and she had as strong a sense of honor. They threw their few belongings into their bags and stowed them in the car and set out down the Keene valley, and out of the mountains by the valley of the Hudson, there a tiny stream. It grew wider, and when the Mohawk joined it at Albany it was a real river, with war traffic of barges and steamers. Adella had put some food into a basket, so they did not make a single stop, but sped down the west bank of the river, the less populated, and crossed the great George Washington Bridge, and so into crowded Manhattan. It was night by then and Lanny phoned Alston again, who said, “Get your sleep, and I’ll set everything else aside for nine in the morning.”

  Lanny replied, “Take a drive in the park with me.” He didn’t have to say more; the President’s “fixer” would have confidential things to impart.

  It was at the age of nineteen that Lanny Budd had become translator-secretary to this onetime professor of geography whom Woodrow Wilson had brought to the Paris Peace Conference as one of his advisers. This experience had determined the rest of Lanny’s life, for it had accustomed him to meeting eminent persons and watching history being made, not to his satisfaction. “Open covenants openly arrived at” had been a magnificent promise, but it had been forgotten before the Conference had got well under way. No matter how willing democratic statesmen might have been to negotiate openly, there was no getting the representatives of the British and French and Japanese Empires to come into a goldfish bowl.

  Alston, who had introduced Lanny to Franklin Roosevelt, was one person to whom the P.A. could talk frankly. They didn’t meet often because both had traveling missions and seldom knew where they would be. Now Lanny’s car drew up in front of the great hotel, and the ex-geographer stepped in without a word. Rolling up Park Avenue and into Central Park, they could say what they pleased without thought of dictaphones or keyhole listeners.

  “Charlie” was about the age of Robbie Budd, with whom he had been at Yale. He was one of those wiry small men who eat lightly and live long. Lanny had seen him tired, but never discouraged, and always too busy to talk about himself. Perhaps he kept notes, but Lanny never saw any; he listened attentively and remembered what he heard. He was a piece of walking loyalty, and F.D.R. had learned to appreciate it. When his advice was asked, he would give it; when the Boss said, “Let this be done,” Alston would make sure that it was done. It was wonderful what a clear, keen mind, rigid honesty, and a quiet voice could accomplish in the management of men.

  VI

  Now the manager said, “I have just come from Quebec. Tell me about Italy.”

  So Lanny went through that story again. When he came to his last talk with Badoglio, and his suggestion that the Americans might drop paratroopers into Rome and keep the Germans from seizing it, Alston declared, “That is exactly what we plan to do. Our information is that there are four Italian divisions in or about Rome, and only one German division near it.”

  “That one is a Panzer,” the P.A. warned. “But I suppose we have learned to deal with German armor.”

  “The Italians of course want to get out of the war. We shall get the Fleet and a considerable part of the Air Force, and that will be bad news for the Japs, because it will release many of our warships for the Far East.”

  Lanny asked, “Did the Boss tell you about my little scheme of taking some documents to Hitler?”

  “He did, and he told me to have them prepared for you. The question is, what use are you going to make of your visit? I have an important suggestion.”

  Lanny indicated his interest, and the “fixer” first cautioned him as to secrecy—something that wasn’t necessary but was required by protocol. Then he said, “We are coming on well with atomic research and are satisfied that the Germans are out of the running in this field. As matters stand today we have only one serious worry, and that is in the field of jet propulsion. The British are ahead of us, but the Germans are far ahead of the British; they have been working on it in the greatest secrecy for more than ten years.”

  “You may remember, Professor, I was asked to find out where they were working on this, and someone else got ahead of me with the information.”

  “We have bombed Peenemünde several times this year, and our airmen come back and report that they have knocked the place out. But we have learned that
airmen are inclined to optimism in regard to their achievements. Our information is that the experiments are going on and that rocket bombs are now actually in production. I don’t need to tell you how important that is to us; it might result in victory being snatched out of our hands. We cannot take the chance of having a shower of these frightful weapons falling upon our ships while our men are coming aboard in the English Channel ports.”

  “I understand, Professor, and I’ll make a try. But that won’t be an easy assignment.”

  “My point is, stick to that, rather than in helping with a job on Hitler. Neither Hitler nor any other German will surrender if he has such a weapon in his hands, and if we can get it in our hands we can knock out the whole kit and caboodle. Put your mind on getting anything you can—blueprints, technical descriptions, the formula of the combustibles they are using.”

  “How did we come to be so far behind in this matter, Professor?”

  “It is the custom to blame everything on the military mind, which is bent upon being ‘practical,’ and understands by that doing everything the way it has always been done. You cannot imagine what battles it has taken to force the adoption of new ideas. Nothing but a direct command from the President was able to get work started on atomic research, and I doubt if the general in command really believes in it to this hour. He is required to spend hundreds of millions of dollars at the demand of a bunch of young college professors who sit around and jabber mathematical formulas that sound like pure gibberish to him. He must feel himself in the position of Alice with the Mad Hatter and the White Queen and the Knave of Hearts and the rest.”

  VII

  So there was Lanny with a new job, and a new subject of study, what the graduate students in a university know as a “major.” This time he didn’t go down to Princeton and live en prince on a millionaire estate, and play Mozart’s violin sonatas with Professor Einstein by way of recreation. This time he took a suite in an obscure hotel, and one of those young professors of physics came and stayed with him, bringing a heavy briefcase full of “blueprints and technical descriptions and formulas of combustibles.” Last January at Casablanca F.D.R. had provided Lanny with some of this, but it had all been intentionally wrong, designed to fool somebody; this time it had to be right, and Lanny had to know why it was right—because otherwise somebody might fool him.

  He had to understand at least the elements of what the Americans knew about rockets and jets, and what they wanted to know from the Germans. He had to read, and then ask questions about what he didn’t understand, and then answer questions to be sure he had understood the answers. He was allowed to make notes, under the pledge that he would keep them pinned next to his heart and would destroy them before he landed anywhere on the Continent of Europe. Neither he nor young Professor Elbridge went out of the suite while this “majoring” was under way; their meals were brought to the room and they watched the waiter to be sure he didn’t pick up any papers. They had carefully searched the rooms for wiring, and now and then they opened the door to see if there was a listener in the hall. All this was melodramatic, and they made jokes while they did it—but they did it.

  The P.A. learned the difference between a rocket missile and a jet missile: the former carried its supply of oxygen in a tank, while the latter got its oxygen from the air. This meant, in effect, that the jet was limited to an altitude of some eighteen miles, beyond which there is no oxygen; the rocket could go to any height, but it was limited by the weight of the oxygen it required to get it up into the stratosphere. “Don’t bother to try to understand the mathematics,” said the young professor, “but just learn the fact that rockets fueled with liquid oxygen can never travel farther than five hundred miles, and perhaps not quite that.”

  “Do they need to go any farther?” asked the pupil, and the answer took his breath away. “We have reports that the Germans are working on a Raketenbomber that will be capable of carrying a load of explosives halfway round the earth. They will not be satisfied with bombing London; they expect to wipe out New York and Chicago and Detroit.”

  That might take some time; but now in production and immediately to be feared were guided missiles capable of traveling a couple of hundred miles, and at speeds faster than any Budd-Erling pursuit plane. Launching platforms for these were being built all along the coast facing England, and while these sites were being bombed, no one believed they had all been discovered. More alarming yet were experiments being carried on at Peenemünde and other places, aimed at the production of larger jet missiles, which would be able to rise into the stratosphere and there attain speeds faster than sound. The victims of such a missile would have no warning and no chance of escape; the tremendous explosion would come first, and the sound would come later—and in reverse, the louder sounds and then the less loud, as if the missile were going away instead of coming.

  Still more terrifying was the certainty that this knowledge of jet propulsion was being applied to airplane engines. Our brass hadn’t believed it could be done, and as a result we were behind the British, and the British were behind even the Italians. “Some of us are to be flown to Italy the day the armistice is signed,” reported Elbridge, “to see what we can learn. The Italians, no doubt, have many of the German secrets, but surely not the most important.”

  Such frightful dangers here, and such a mass of technicalities to be met! If airplanes were to be flown faster than sound—seven hundred and sixty miles an hour—they would compress the sound waves in front of them and thus generate turbulence which would shake them to pieces. They would have to have different shapes, with knife edges; and quite possibly the shapes which flew at supersonic speeds might not fly at subsonic speeds. What kind of fuel would they use in such jet engines, and of what materials would the engines be made in order not to melt in the tremendously high temperatures that would be created? Here, indeed, was mankind confronting a new future and terrified by what it saw!

  Said this young physicist, “We have seen a report by Professor Wernher von Braun, the scientist in charge of jet propulsion research in Germany, in which he suggests the building of a new satellite to be launched from the earth and to circle about it, making a complete circuit in an hour and a half. Once it got above the atmosphere, about two hundred miles, it would encounter no resistance; centrifugal force would balance gravity, and it would continue in its course forever. It could be supplied by jet vehicles shot up to it, and the technicians who lived on it would be in position to issue orders to all the nations of the earth and to be obeyed. That is what war may come to, Mr. Budd!”

  VIII

  Lanny went down to Washington, and in that old brick building near the gasworks he sat down with General Donovan and that section of his organization which had to do with jets. Orders had come from above—the P.A. was to have everything they could give him, and so the top-secret drawers were unlocked. Lanny learned a number of things that even Professor Elbridge hadn’t known. He gave the OSS people the names of all the persons in Germany, important or obscure, whom he was in position to meet, and they in turn gave him the names of various persons from whom he might get something if he could meet them.

  There, was, for example, that Professor Schilling, whose name—“the English coin”—had been haunting Lanny’s mind for the past two years and a half. It had been on the way to visit this German physicist, a secret sympathizer with the Allies, that Lanny had set out to fly from Newfoundland and had landed in the North Atlantic with two broken legs. Later on Bernhardt Monck had visited the man, so he had told Lanny, and got what he had. Schilling was a nuclear physicist, working at the splitting of the atom; but he would know men who were working in jets and might know one who was secretly anti-Nazi. Lanny went through a whole dossier on “the English coin,” including photographs of him which he studied carefully. Also he got the password, Raffaelli, which would tell the scientist that Lanny was to be trusted.

  Then there was Professor Salzmann, of the physics section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institu
t. Hitler himself had sent Lanny to this gentleman, and Lanny had promised to come back and bring him more information on his Specialität. That, as it happened, was jet propulsion, and now it was Lanny’s Specialität also. Salzmann was the perfect type of cold-blooded Prussian, with a shaven blond head and a double chin, and a neck and head straight up and down in back. Lanny looked him up in these files to see if by any chance six months of bombing had changed his mind; but he found no indication of any such development.

  Also, there was Professor Plötzen, one of the theoretical physics men of the same great institution: a very different personality from Salzmann, a man of wealth, a man of the world, interested in world culture; it had been a pleasure to spend an evening with him. In his home the startled Lanny had found Bernhardt Monck, acting as butler and stealing the eminent scientist’s papers. The Gestapo had come for Monck but he had got away. Now Lanny wondered, had Plötzen by any chance connected Monck with Lanny, and what would be his attitude to the American visitor next time? Lanny had to recur to this again and again; many Germans were bound to have suspicions, and how long would it be before they put this and that together? “Better take along a cyanide capsule,” advised one of the OSS men; but Lanny answered, “I can’t; they search me too thoroughly.”

  Most important of all was Bernhardt Monck himself. Lanny had lost contact with him since they had parted in Stockholm; in this secret work you didn’t ask about anybody unless you needed him for the job you were doing. Now Lanny would need him very much, for Monck, an old-time Social Democrat, had contacts with the anti-Nazi underground, now coming to life again. Inquiring, Lanny was told that Monck was living in Stockholm and in the pay of the OSS. The organization had a “post office” in the Swedish capital as it did in Rome, and they gave Lanny the address. All he had to do was to write a note to “Anton Vetterl” and deliver it to this place, and he would hear from his old friend if he was in town. Lanny said, “I’ll wait for him.”