One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  From Savannah they cut across to the western part of Florida and along the Gulf Coast. Laurel had got used to the trailer now and was no longer afraid that some truck was going to crash into the back of it. When they got a flat tire, it was a sociable truckman who stopped to help them out of their trouble, and tried to refuse the dollar bill which Lanny handed him. Now they rolled comfortably on Highway 90, dining on freshly caught shrimp and crabs, and forgetting that there was supposed to be a food shortage. Baker had supplied them with gas coupons, and Robbie had added more. To Los Angeles and back the trip would take less than four hundred gallons, which was only a small part of the “tank-car” full that Lanny was said to have earned.

  This was the land of the “Tin-Can Club,” as the trailerites playfully called themselves. They had worked all their lives on farms in Illinois or Minnesota, and in their old age had retired on a small competence and wanted to spend their days where it was easier to keep warm. They got their tin-can, old or new, and drove as far south as they could without wetting their feet. They lined up in rows in a camp—first a trailer, then a car, then another trailer, and so on. They put up an awning on two poles in front of the trailer to make a porch, and set flowerboxes along the edges to make a garden. The women sat in canvas deckchairs and told one another about their families up north, while the men pitched horseshoes in the vacant space alongside. Every Saturday night they had a country fiddler and danced the Virginia reel to the tune of “The Arkansas Traveler,” and on Sunday mornings they read a Hearst newspaper, printed a day earlier, and then attended a Four Square Gospel Church.

  To Laurel Creston, brought up in the secretiveness, called reserve, of the wealthy, this was a delightfully different way of life. So easy for a novelist, where characters revealed themselves in a half-hour’s conversation, and a whole family saga could be gathered in an evening! But there would be another camp just like it at the next stop, and so they moved on—along the Mississippi Sound, and across Louisiana and into Texas, which is an empire in itself and was preparing to win a war all by itself. As the motorist clocks it on his speedometer, Texas is eight hundred miles across, and there is every kind of scenery and climate and people. Most of it is outdoors, and the people are glad to show it and tell strangers about it. They are especially proud of their distances, and like to recite a jingle on the subject: “The sun has riz, the sun has set, and here we is in Texas yet.”

  IV

  So they came into southern New Mexico, a land of tumbled mountains and clear blue skies, of hot days and cold nights. Rain fell in winter, but mostly in the high mountains, and filled the dry arroyos with raging torrents. The mountains were bare, and the rocks of every color—gray, yellow, red, brown or black. The deserts were endless-seeming; with irrigation they could be turned into prosperous farms. Jack rabbits fled from you and coyotes kept up their shrill barking at night. If you turned over a stone you might see a centipede waving his tiers of legs like fringes, or a yellow scorpion threatening you with his claws and long inverted tail carrying a deadly sting. When these inexperienced tourists sat down on a rug for a picnic they discovered that little round-bellied ticks had crawled up their ankles and settled themselves for their picnic.

  There was a new town called Budd. The road to it turned north off the highway—a paved road, and there was a spur railroad near it, both climbing between almost white rocky mountains to a high plateau. Trucks roared past them, just as if it had been U.S. 1 between New York and Washington. The war had come to this land of sagebrush and Indian reservations, and wherever the war came there was hurry, hurry, hurry. The leisurely tourists climbed until there was a crackling in their ears; then suddenly a landscape broadened out, and there was the top of the world spread before them, miles and miles, and painted hills all around, a blazing sun and a sky without a cloud.

  There was a roadblock, and soldiers on guard, with side arms. Lanny gave his name, but it didn’t impress anybody. “This is the Army, Mr. Jones!” Contrary to what the song says, they had telephones, and a sergeant called the office. Then the barrier swung back, and a soldier on a noisy motorcycle led the way to the administration building. Lanny had heard all about this dream town of his father’s, but even so astonishment seized him. Two years ago there had been only sand and sagebrush, jack rabbits and coyotes, and now there was a settlement scattered over the landscape for miles.

  This had been the way of it: Robbie Budd had got what his associates called a “bug,” a stubborn determination to find out about jets, and what were then called rocket planes. The British were doing it, and why should America wait upon them? Everything the British had was available, and Robbie had sent for it. Because he wanted to experiment with hundreds of the most dangerous chemicals known, he had sent his men to find a tract of land where there was nothing to set on fire and nobody to kill but the scientists and technicians whose job it was to take risks.

  They had told him about this plateau that had water and power available from a government dam, and Robbie had bought it without ever seeing it—he hadn’t seen it yet. He had paved a road and built a laboratory and about a hundred little cupola structures of concrete, in which to keep the fuels, far enough apart so that one could blow up without hurting the others. There were concrete sheds where such things as eighty per cent hydrogen peroxide as oxidant and methyl alcohol and hydrazine hydrate as fuel could be slapped together and burned, with measurements made of the “thrust” they developed.

  And then, all of a sudden, somebody in the Planning Board in Washington had waked up to the fact that the Germans had jet engines actually in production; presently they would have jet planes flying in combat—planes that couldn’t be flown economically at less than four hundred miles per hour, and might go to six hundred. What then would become of our air supremacy, so painfully won only this year? What would happen to the flights of daylight bombers we were sending over Berlin and Bremen and Hamburg, figuring that we could stand a five per cent loss but not a ten per cent loss on each expedition?

  The Army had stepped in and insisted on buying for Robbie about ten times as much desert as he had expected to need, and on running a railroad up to Budd. They sent in a swarm of workers to live in tents and lay out a city and build it in a few weeks. There was nothing new about any of this, it was being done all over the land, and the more remote and unlikely the place, the more important it might turn out to be. Had not Presidential Agent 103 sent in word about the V-3 which the Germans were planning and perhaps building, and which would carry many tons of explosives a distance of five thousand miles and drop them where it was told to?

  Disperse industry, was the Army’s word, and here Robbie Budd had gone and done it. The town of Budd was ordered not merely to test jet engines, but to make them, and more important yet, to think them up in somebody’s head. To that end hundreds of scientists were assembled from all over the country, and some from England, plus refugees from Germany and France and all the Axis lands. Trainloads of cement were brought in, and as for sand, you didn’t have to look far for that in New Mexico. Laboratories and machine shops of concrete arose, almost literally overnight, and homes for the scientists and the workers. So here was a jet-engine center, and soon it would be a jet-plane center.

  V

  Robbie had written that his son and daughter-in-law were coming as his representatives, and to show them the works. That meant they were not merely VIP’s, but VGDIP’s. The manager of the plant took personal charge of them, and wanted to move somebody out of one of the best houses for their comfort. But Laurel laid down the law; this was a camping trip, and they had everything arranged in their little aluminum trailer, named Bienvenu. There was no opposing a lady’s will, and no accounting for the whims of the rich. A place was found for them among the workers, and they carried their trays in the cafeteria like everybody else.

  It was good food, served hot and in a clean place—for everybody had to be well and happy. They had crèches and kindergartens so that the wives and mothers might
work in the plant; they had movies every night, and community singing, and athletics, and dances, and homemade churches—everything that anybody could think of to keep workers contented in a desert wilderness. To keep them from packing up their belongings and driving down the trail! And better yet, to cause them to write to their relatives and friends, saying that Budd, New Mexico, was the best war town yet!

  The visitors were put into a jeep and driven around to inspect the wonders of the place. Everybody vied for Lanny’s favor, for it was important that his report should be right. They had expected to meet a playboy, and were surprised to find that he knew something about jet propulsion and could ask intelligent questions. He didn’t tell them that he had been coached on the subject off and on for a year, and had been boning up as hard as any would-be college students preparing for entrance exams. The scientists, old and young, took an interest in him and showed him what they had got from England, and what they had designed themselves; what they had on the drawing boards, and then what they had in action. After talking and thinking about jets for so long Lanny found it thrilling to observe one develop its “thrust” in actuality. There was a tremendous “whoosh,” but no sign of flame—the combustion was so perfect that the flame was all inside. The blast of hot air was terrific, and if you had stood within twenty feet of it you would have been burned to a crisp.

  The P.A. sat in at conferences in which the top men discussed in highly technical terms what they were doing and hoped to do. They reported that the Germans had been two years ahead of us in getting the first jet plane into the air, and were now two years ahead of us in production. The Heinkel concern was putting out an engine with a straight-through combustion system with downstream fuel injection. The Junkers had in production what they called the Jumo 004B, with an eight-stage axial compressor. The German Army now had in service a jet interceptor plane called the Viper, which was launched by rockets and was capable of rising to thirty thousand feet in less than one minute.

  Lanny asked, “How do you know these things?” And the answer was, “The OSS sends us information.” Lanny felt chagrined because he had not been able to get any of this; but he reflected that General Donovan’s organization no doubt had scores of men working on the subject in the enemy lands. He had contributed his mite, and once or twice the scientists gave him items which he recognized; but he said nothing about it, and nobody in this place ever knew that he had been inside the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute Physics Building in the winter and again in the summer of this year.

  The American Armed Forces were preparing to spend twenty-five billions of dollars during 1944 on airplane production and development. It was a scientist’s dream of heaven, for he could have anything in the way of resources and facilities that he called for—provided only that he could show the possibility of getting something new. Lanny met elderly bespectacled gentlemen who had spent all their lives in laboratories and had thought they were lucky if they could get a few hundred dollars for an experiment, but who now asked for tens of thousands and got them. He met young chaps just out of college whose eyes shone with excitement as they explained some oddly shaped piece of steel.

  In the not very elegant language of the time, the town was lousy with new ideas. There was the “Jato” rocket unit, that could be mounted on the outside of a plane’s fuselage, and be easily detached. It would “boost” planes to get them off the ground, and thus enable them to carry twice the loads they had formerly taken; or it would enable them to rise from half the flight space, which would mean smaller carriers, or that large carriers could utilize more of their flight deck for storing planes, and thus keep more planes in the air. There were blueprints for “composite-engine” bombers, and “jet-cumpropeller” fighter planes for carriers. Lanny listened patiently while a youngster who looked like a school kid explained a “reaction engine,” as they preferred to call the jet, that was so beautifully simple you could cry over it, he said. It had only one moving gear, the compressor and the turbine being on the same shaft; it had no vibration and very little noise to warn the enemy, it used little oil and needed no warming up, but could fly in thirty seconds; and, best of all, in peacetime it could use the cheapest fuel, even kerosene. The only trouble was it went so fast that you were liable to be blacked out on the slightest turn; also, they had had to put wire gauze over the air intake, because birds got sucked in out of the sky!

  VI

  The inspecting team spent a week at the plant, and so far as either of them could see, everything was all right. Lanny air-mailed a report, saying that all the people were wrapped up in their work, and their ideas appeared to be excellent. Laurel, who had spent her time among the wives, both in the trailer camp and in the villas, reported that there was the normal amount of backbiting, but none of the women knew what their husbands were doing—which was as it should be. Lanny knew that this would please his father, who was surely no feminist. Robbie’s pride in life was his ability to find the right men and then give them a chance to show what they could do. Women made good stenographers and filing clerks, but nothing else.

  The tin-can Bienvenu rolled again, and came into Arizona, which was like the rest of the Southwest, except that more irrigation works had been built and more crops were being grown. The valley in which lay Phoenix, the state capital, had grown so fast that the highway was like a city boulevard. The trailer camps and motor courts were crowded, so they had to spend the night by the roadside; because they had neither radio nor lights, they went to a movie, and discovered that many other persons were in the same fix and had found the same solution.

  More mountain passes to wind through, and they came to a long bridge over the Colorado River, and on the other side was that dreamland of movie addicts all over the world—California. Seeing was believing, and the addicts all knew that in this Golden State everybody’s kitchen was the size of a large drawing-room and had all the latest fixtures made of chromium; also, that boys who were poor but honest and handsome invariably married the daughters of millionaires. Animated by this certainty, thousands of new people were pouring into California every day, and a lot of them had come by Highway 80 on the same day as Lanny and Laurel. All had to sit and wait, and then turn out the contents of their cars and trailers, for the state authorities took strict measures to prevent the importation of infected fruits and plants. It didn’t constitute a cordial reception, but you could feel sorry for the poor inspectors, who worked long hours and still couldn’t keep up with the procession of cars.

  More mountains and deserts; it was Mary Austin’s “land of little rain.” A huge dam had been built on the Colorado, and an aqueduct brought the water some two hundred and fifty miles to the Los Angeles district—just in time to get the swarming new populations clean. Lanny told his wife about the political war going on over the name of the dam; the Democrats called it Boulder and the Republicans called it Hoover, and it was like casting a ballot every time you spoke the name. Lanny said that if the Japs were able to do a bombing job in this neighborhood, all they would need was to destroy a couple of aqueducts, and Southern California would have to be evacuated; quite probably a million or two persons would perish while trying to get out.

  They came to the Coachella Valley, the date country, and Lanny, who had been through here before, told the story of how a few shoots of date trees had been smuggled out of Arabia long ago—with difficulty, because the natives guarded their secrets closely. Now there were miles and miles of stately trees, each one resembling an enormous royal crown, and planted in rows as exact as a checkerboard. Dates require an immense amount of water, but it has to be underground and not in the air; they were told that the general irrigation of Southern California might change the climate and make date growing impossible.

  They spent a night at Palm Springs, which had once consisted of a hotel and a few villas nestled in a niche of mountains and was now a spreading town, with factories and trailer camps like everywhere else. Next morning they drove up a long pass and into the orange country—a
highway through fifty miles of orange groves, now loaded with blossoms and at the same time with ripening fruit. It was rapidly becoming a roadtown with “hotdog stands” and “eateries” and “real-toriums”—you could learn a whole new language on the way. The traffic was heavy, and you had to watch out or you would end up in the hands of a “mortician.”

  With every mile as they approached Los Angeles, this traffic grew worse, and it was well that Laurel had got used to the trailer by now. From Pasadena it was one continuous city, whatever the name. Industrial plants had sprung up everywhere, and many thousands of them were discharging smoke or chemical fumes into the atmosphere. The result was an extraordinary phenomenon, a dense gray haze that sometimes made it impossible to see more than a few hundred yards. The plain was bordered on the east by a long chain of high mountains, the Sierra Madre, and apparently this “smog” couldn’t get over them, but piled up against them, and from the ocean to the foothills people coughed and sneezed and wiped their eyes. Lanny said, “It’s the price for licking Hitler.”

  VII

  They had taken it easy on the way, and came into Hollywood toward sundown, the worst traffic hour. They found it as had been foretold; everything was packed to the doors. Lanny tried one hotel and was told that people were sleeping on the billiard tables and in the chairs of the lobby. He went to the telephone and tried half a dozen other hotels and got the same response. They drove to a few of the trailer camps and found that these had illuminated signs: “No Vacancy.” The visitors didn’t have to worry, for they could go a bit out into the country and camp by the roadside; but first they would have a meal, and do that in style.