I can’t help wondering about the Air Force and Navy guys in the front line of this thing. They have no way of knowing, of course, that they’re kicking off an illegal war. They just take orders. The President or his military representative says “Drop the bomb,” and they drop the bomb. He says “Fire the missile,” and they fire the missile. They’re all so accustomed to secrecy that it’s become a way of life. They wouldn’t even consider questioning their orders. My God, the President has awesome powers if he isn’t worried about legalities. Was this the sort of thing our founding fathers really had in mind? Well, who can say?
I asked Brian if he was going to give the nation any sort of warning. He said not until the attack commences. What could anybody do, anyhow? The panic. My God, the panic if everybody tried to bug out of the cities at once! And where would they go? Well, maybe this will be the answer to the problems of our cities. Maybe this is one way to be rid of the ghettos. Blow ’em to hell off the map. May even solve our race problem; and the labor problems. I don’t suppose anybody will be out demonstrating or marching over this deal. They’ll be too busy just trying to hold body and soul together.
I don’t believe Brian, of course: I’m sure he knows Russia will hurt us some. It seems inevitable that we’ll sustain some damage. If they only get one or two birds off at us, the U.S. death toll could be in the millions. They have subs, too, I’m told. They may even have a doomsday device, our intelligence isn’t all that hot.
I wonder if I could stop him. What could I do?
If I tried to alert the nation, who’d believe me? The people over in the Congress won’t even talk to me. My own State Department has disavowed me. What would happen if I tried to get on the hot line to Moscow? They wouldn’t even accept the call, probably. And if they did, what would it accomplish? It would just give them the first shot; that’s what.
I could kill Brian. I’ve already said that to myself probably a thousand times, so I may as well put it in writing. But could I kill him? I mean, right down to brass tacks, could I kill this man? I rather doubt it. As nutty as he is, I guess I love him. That’s a strange word to use, but none other fits. As mad, as lunatic as all this seems, I can’t regard Brian as a madman. Not unless I could regard God Himself as a madman. This is what sets Brian apart, I suppose: He is Godlike. He’s almost completely objective. He can balance, in his own mind, the relative values of a decaying society against the strong hope of eternal perpetuation of a special one, and in all Godlike candor he can decide to dispose of the decaying many.
God does it all the time, doesn’t he? In every natural disaster, every war, every movement of mankind against mankind. If you believe in a God, then you have to accept that. A God isn’t a God if he isn’t omnipotent, and if he’s omnipotent, he’s in charge. And if this idea of cycling civilizations and world regeneration is true, then God certainly does renew the world by sweeping everything away and beginning again. Doesn’t he? Well, that’s exactly what Brian’s doing. A controlled cataclysm; that’s what he’s planning. The sacrifice of the many for the perpetuation of the few.
God! I couldn’t do it. Which brings up the 64-dollar question: What the hell am I supposed to do? I think Brian expects to die, and I sincerely believe he expects most of the government to go with him. He has me set up as an heir to the throne, but what’s going to keep me from perishing with all the rest? And if I don’t, what’s going to prevent the outraged remnants of a nation from crucifying the heir? Eh? I’ll be nailed up by the balls, and I’ll deserve it.
Brian wants me to meet him down in the vault—the Presidential war room—at midnight. I guess he’s planning on sitting it out down there. He isn’t all that Godlike, I guess. I mean, if there’s one safe place in the nation, it’s that vault.
Well, we shall see. I will meet God Brian at the Vault of the Cataclysm...and we shall see
BOOK IV
FEBRUARY
1: ALPHA OF THE OMEGA
Henry Jensen had traveled this farm road across the South Dakota plains twice a day for the past three years, and he was getting damn sick of it. The ruts were getting ruttier and the bumps bumpier, and he didn’t know how much longer his ancient vehicle would be able to sustain the pounding. If they’d just taken a fraction of the millions they spent on those damn missile sites over there, and given it to the county to fix roads with, Henry would have a lot less to complain about. No rutted roads leading into the missile sites; that was certain; nothing but the very best for the boys in uniform. And to what purpose? It gave a man a pain to contemplate the tax money being poured down the drain on these lunatic ideas. Imagine! Just imagine! Missiles as tall as ten-story buildings planted in the rich farmland of South Dakota, just planted there, not growing anything, not even fertilizing anything; lying there under the ground, millions and millions of dollars worth of junk; that’s all it was. And here was Henry Jensen forced to drive the 40 miles into Rapid City twice a day, hauling his wife back and forth to a job that was hardly worth the gas money. Give Henry the money they’d spent on just one of those buried junk piles, and he’d show the government how to get the most of a dollar. He’d fix the damn road, first. And he’d buy a new car—one of those Fords with four-hundred and something cubes under the hood, and he could run Irene back and forth to town in forty minutes flat, maybe less. Hell, he wouldn’t have to run her; he’d buy her a car of her own. For that matter, she wouldn’t even need a car; she wouldn’t have to go into Rapid City six days a week and show her ass to just anybody that wanted to look at it. Cocktail waitressing was okay, Henry guessed, but he’d always wondered just how much cock and tail went into the job—especially where Irene was concerned. She certainly hadn’t minded when they started wearing those mini costumes like the Playboy Club girls wore. Henry felt a twinge in his stomach, but sighed philosophically. Well...somebody had to be bringing in some money. The damn dried-up farm sure wasn’t feeding them.
He was nearing the point where the dirt road looped around to avoid the chain-link fence of the missile complex when his right front wheel slipped off the crest of a rut and wallowed into the depression like a sow going to ground, the steering wheel nearly vibrating out of his grip. Henry stepped on the brake and got out to take a look. His first sinking suspicion was confirmed! He had a flat. A glance at his watch told him it was just a minute or two before ten o’clock. The night was clear and bright, but the South Dakota wind was holding forth as per usual, and the air temperature was close to zero, Henry was certain.
He returned to the car and sat and cussed awhile. Even if his rusted jack would raise the car, Henry was pretty sure the spare tire in the trunk wouldn’t carry him more than a couple miles. He entertained the notion of walking the fence around to the entrance of the government reservation and seeking help from the detested soldiers. But frankly—and he admitted it to himself—Henry was afraid to approach the place. He’d seen the sentries with their damn vicious-looking dogs tied to their wrists, stalking about the place in broad daylight; no telling what kind of traps they had set out for night prowlers. He’d also heard a lot of tales about those dogs and those sentries. Aaron Murchison had told one about just standing by the fence one day, on the outside looking in, and these guys swooped down on him, threw him face-down in the bed of this pickup truck and took him to this little concrete-block house. They’d kept him there for three hours, asking him every question under the sun until finally the sheriff had come out and identified him. Nuts; those guys were nuts.
He decided he’d try the jack. If nothing else, he could go on the rim. One thing for sure: He had to be in Rapid City on the stroke of midnight when Irene got off work. Yes sir. When she walked out of that joint, Henry Jensen was always sitting there waiting for her. Not that Irene would really go off with anybody else; he was positive she wouldn’t. But, no sense giving anybody any ideas.
He steeled himself and jumped out of the car, going quickly to the trunk, fumbling with the key through his thick gloves. His glance flashed toward the
missile site, well back from the outer perimeter of fencing. Lights were flashing over there. They always were, of course, but there were more of them tonight; all different colored lights. It looked weird. Henry shivered, and not from the cold. It was like some science-fiction movie: Why did he have to be stalled in this particular spot?
He had opened the trunk and was reaching toward the spare tire, hoping it at least had air in it, when the raucous sound of a large horn split the night. The klaxon was squawking in short blasts, repeating incessantly, and the lights around the raised antenna masts in the corner of the complex were flashing brightly now.
He stood stock still, one hand poised above the spare tire, eyes fixed on the center of the complex. Instinctively he knew what was happening, and yet it couldn’t be happening. As many jokes and bitter complaints as had been bandied about the countryside relating to these missile sites, everybody in the area was fully educated as to the purpose and function of the giant implantations. Henry knew they couldn’t be shooting one of those things!
Yet the ground was beginning to tremble beneath his feet, and a bright sheet of flame was rushing into the air from somewhere down in that maze of electric lights, washing the night like a dozen Fourth-of-July fireworks displays. The air was now vibrating about his head; his hands flew to his ears, but the painful roar of impacted molecules would not be shut out. Then an impossibly tall cylinder popped out of the ground a few hundred yards from Henry’s position, seemingly riding a cushion of rolling flame and smoke. The huge missile seemed to hang suspended briefly, then rose resolutely skyward, faster and faster, nearly blinding Henry with the glare of its tail-flame, and buffeting him with shock waves of sound. He watched it disappear from sight, but not before a companion seemed to join it many miles downrange, and over to the east, another roar joined the sounds of the night.
Henry stumbled back to the driver’s seat, started the engine and bumped ahead on the flat tire, the car’s trunk lid flapping crazily. He had to get to Rapid City. He had to. Everything in town would close now, and Henry wouldn’t be there waiting for Irene. He had to get to Rapid City.
2: WEAPONS SYSTEM
Major John (Jocko) Rawleigh, USAF, sat in the stillness of supersonic high-altitude flight; a robot, he thought of himself; a robot programmed to react instantly to the faintest manifestation of instability in his aircraft, as evidenced by the array of instruments banked about him. These things aren’t airplanes, he realized; they were flying electronic weapon systems, designed solely for destruction on a massive scale. And Jocko Rawleigh was not a pilot, not even a man; he was as much a machine as the thing he commanded—a mere extension of it. Or was the thing an extension of himself? He decided on the latter; it was a more comforting idea, somehow.
“Coming up on X-ray Yoke,” said a voice in his earphone. It was the navigator, another extension of Jocko—an intelligent extension, like a brain lobe, Jocko decided, feeding him information. Information to which he must react. So who was the extension of whom?
“Prepare to arm payload,” he responded into the throat-mike, his voice coining muffled and unreal through the earphones, with the sucking sound of the oxygen mask adding a machine-like quality to the words.
And now another extension of himself would perform a simple maneuver, and the supersonic weapons system would bare its fangs, though no one below would know of the horror tearing through the skies. Well, someone would know of its presence in the calm stratosphere above the Gulf of Bothnia. Perhaps already there was controlled panic on the ground in Finland as fighter pilots dashed to waiting aircraft. Perhaps they were experiencing the same disbelief and consternation Jocko had felt as he approached the usual diversion point with no diversion orders in evidence; perhaps they felt as sick and as exhilarated all at once as Jocko himself felt.
No man likes to contemplate his role in warfare, Jocko told himself. But still...when you’ve built a lifetime around a certain specific capability, and you’ve never actually exercised that capability... Well, every man liked to be confronted with the proof of his pudding. Jocko knew now that he was being confronted. The thousands on thousands of hours of training were now being put to the test. He had never really expected that the time would come when a routine exercise would suddenly become that big moment, when he would cease to be an over grown child playing at war, and begin to function in the role of his grooming. Yet here it was: The big spurt. No diversion, fail-safe GO, a live boom-boom in the bomb-bay, and an honest-to-God target for his bombsight.
“X-ray Yoke, Mark,” said the voice of his extended brain lobe.
“Check,” he whispered mechanically. It seemed so unreal. Not like war; like another training mission—the same silence, the same immobility; no bands playing, no drums rolling, nothing dramatic at all about it; not even a Van Johnson smile; just the hiss-suck of the oxygen. X-ray Yoke was the penetration point into Finnish airspace; they’d be seeing some fighters any moment now. Or perhaps they’d see nothing but the streak of an air-to-air missile.
“Radar Countermeasures...” he commanded, his eyes playing over the instrument panel, “Execute.” Another programmed reflex into another extension.
“Turning into evasion course,” the robot announced.
Was this not what the training had been all about? Specific reaction to specific stimuli; programmed performance; no human emotion, no mistakes, no fear, no regrets. Not even a desire for life.
“Fighters below. Radar fix...mark,” said a hiss-suck voice.
“Missiles away,” said another, mechanically unemotional.
“Scratch,” said the first voice, almost instantly.
“Coming up on X-ray Zebra,” reported the navigational hiss-suck.
“Roger. Maintaining Evasion Course Baker,” Jocko responded. “Make your next mark Zebra Zebra.”
“Roger.”
“Bomb-bay ready.”
“Roger.”
“Fighters abeam; starboard. Radar fix...mark.”
“Missiles away.”
“Scratch.”
Clockwork. It was more than clockwork, Jocko realized. It was precision engineering, reliability and maintainability, men like machines and machines like men. It was technology and silence and robots, and hiss-sucking. It was nuclear warfare.
“Coming up on Zebra Zebra; ten seconds.”
“Bombsight check...check.”
“Five, four, three, two, one, mark.”
“Mark, (hiss-suck) Bombs away, (hiss-suck) Coming around on course Charlie. (hiss-suck) Radiation seal, report.”
“Radiation seal affirmative.”
Jocko was aware of a curious vacancy just below his chest. An extension of himself was hurtling toward the earth far below. Perhaps a million men, women, and children would experience this remote extension of Jocko, and even now they probably had no inkling that a gift from heaven was on its way. Many of them would never know; they wouldn’t have time to know.
“Good God! (hiss-suck) Can you see it?”
The huge aircraft, perhaps a hundred tons of metal and plastic and glass and men, bucked and shuddered in a sudden atmospheric disturbance. Jocko made his corrections, as any good pilot would.
“Yes, I see it.”
“God!”
The flying electronic weapons system, plunged on through the silence of the skies, outrunning even the sound of horror, the machine and the men blending, but not quite, into indistinguishable components of each other.
Not quite. Jocko’s eyes were blurring. He dabbed at them with a soft cloth, carefully blotting the moisture which would interfere with perfect and instantaneous cognition of instrument indications. No, Jocko realized; the men and the machine did not blend entirely.
3: THE PEEPHOLE
Approximately one hour before Major Jocko Rawleigh penetrated Finnish airspace, the White House in Washington became the scene of a bizarre confrontation. It was almost exactly eleven p.m. E.S.T. when Richard Hunter was summoned to the Executive Office. Already there were t
he President, the Attorney General, two high-ranking Army officers, the senior United States Senator from the State of New York, and a number of other men who were identified merely as “federal agents.” The President introduced his Secretary of State, motioned Hunter to a chair beside the executive desk, and said, “Now, gentlemen, I will listen to what you have to say.”
“You have taken this all wrong, Mr. President,” Senator Wilson stated in a cold voice. “This action is not in any way to be construed as an arrest, or as a police action of any sort. We are merely asking that you and Mr. Hunter—”
“You mean Secretary Hunter,” Brian interrupted
The Senator’s face twisted into an expression of distaste. “Yes, sir. We merely ask that you accompany us to the Capitol to discuss these charges before the full committee.”
“At eleven o’clock in the evening?” Brian snapped.
“Due to the seriousness of the charges, yes, sir.”
“A bunch of old women!” Brian said scathingly. He looked at Hunter. “The Washington rumor mill has it that I’m launching a nuclear attack against the entire world and probably half of the solar system.”
“Mr. President, it is merely the irregularity of...of...” It was the Attorney General speaking, and he had run out of steam under the sudden impact of the President’s undiluted gaze.
“All right,” Brian said. “All right. So a lot of people in Washington dislike my executive footwork, and they want to talk about it. You set up your committee meeting for ten tomorrow morning, and I’ll talk to ’em. But I’m sure as hell not going over there tonight!”
Don Pendleton's Science Fiction Collection, 3 Books Box Set, (The Guns of Terra 10; The Godmakers; The Olympians) Page 45
