Not This August

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “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.