by Philip Wylie
So it is not like the shuddery thump of a land mine or the geysering bang of a torpedo or the boom of shell. There is no sudden noise. When the noise comes, it is infinite, enduring, and more a compression than thunder--thunder augmented beyond belief.
Radiation, however, will already have sluiced in every direction at light's speed from the first instant of burst. That, alone, will have destroyed all life and all semblance of livingness in all creatures within the closest miles. Heat, too, hundreds of thousands of degrees of out-charging temperature, will have reduced everything to gases, alive or not, within a comparable range.
In a roughly circular area, miles across, underneath this thing, all buildings will have been vaporized. Farther out, for more miles the thrusting ram of steel-hard air will topple the mightiest structures and sweep all lesser edifices to earth, as if their brick and stone, girders and beams were tissue paper. Locomotives, even cathedrals, will be tom from the ground and pitched perhaps a far, far way, in hundreds of square miles of further-out regions where, still, the blast marches, tearing, rending, breaking, and splintering. If a million people happen to be behind a million windows in any such enormous area, glass alone will carve them up in the way of ancient Chinese torturers.
And still the capacity for ruin of just one such weapon is but fractionally spent.
Its light, alone, has peculiar horror. In clear weather all persons with unprotected eyes who are in a position to look will do so involuntarily, before they have time to think they must not look. These, upon staring with naked pupils at the white expansion, will be blinded--their retinas scorched--and they will remain forever blind if they even glance at such a thing in such lucid weather from twenty miles away, or thirty.
So all the men and women and children who look, without any chance of not doing so, will experience dazzlement and pain and tum away reflexively, but too late.
Then all of them who looked, even though they are not otherwise injured, will cease to see. These will everywhere probably be tens of thousands, driving cars and trucks and buses; they will be locomotive engineers and the pilots of commercial planes . . . struck blind, in an area of a thousand square miles or more.
Hence, myriads of cars and trucks and buses in a populous area where one weapon opens the sky, though beyond the range of other immediate damage, will stop, collide, skid into each other, and roll off bridges. Planes in hundreds will crash, no matter how long their blind pilots can keep them hopefully aloft. Trains will run through signals and be wrecked. Hence people hoping to evacuate cities, and people who merely happen to be leaving or approaching struck areas, even if they are shielded from each such sky-glare, will be trapped in miles of vehicular disaster, of fire and blood and blinded agony.
Next, the heat of the thing will set alight every desiccated, flammable object--leaf, bit of paper, shingle roof, telephone pole, bam, fence, tree, and wooden box--in instants, and over an area, again, of a thousand square miles or more. The wave of the city-toppling blast that follows will surely blowout multitudes of such millions of instantaneous fires; but not all; thousands will continue to bum. Near the hot vortex of the phenomenon, if a city lies there, it will now be ruins. Within its jagged shambles other fires will start, where pipes leak gas, wires spark, blowtorches fume under the rubble, electric stoves glow, gasoline-station hoses meet cigarettes, and where all similar flame-points find any fuel.
Soon those fires will coalesce and become one great pyre, city-wide and suburbs-wrapping. This blaze will rise from each area of urban residue for miles into the sky. And air will come hurtling to supply oxygen for that firestorm--air to feed the appetite of this giant crematory--air sucked at a speed, around the unlit perimeter, of a hurricane. Men and cars and implements for fighting fire will hardly dare approach the incandescent edge; if they do so, they will be tornadoed, bodily, into the roaring, miles-high blaze of a city afire in its wrecked totality where rushing wind would snatch even the heaviest fire trucks into the appalling mountain of flame.
People in shelters under these holocausts, people in subways, even miners, if their mines run beneath these H-hit areas in firestorm, will soon die hideously, deprived of oxygen, as every breath of underground air is pulled out to hotten every Everest-tall blaze. Or else the sheltered will be smothered, or baked alive, with the replacement of subterranean air by carbonic gases heated to such temperatures as wilt steel.
By that time each mushroom cloud will have lofted itself to the upper atmosphere and commenced to dissipate on whatever wind prevails at the moment, hiding the sky as if a dirty banner had replaced the blue vault: a banner moving outward and downwind, a bunting of many, darting hues, each miles-long and sullied by its burden of vaporized buildings and earth and rock that was heat-stolen from the crater left behind.
In an hour or so, from each such "banner," the heaviest particles will fall, then the finer particles, so that a seeming "snow," and soon an invisible "snow," will gently descend on a great oval tract, downwind. That is "fallout," highly radioactive, even if invisible, and it may cover an area of some five thousand square miles per bomb. In each average square foot of such region, for a day or so, the earth, however unaltered it appears, and all streets, roofs, walks, tops of trees, and every place where the hot dew rests, will emit so much radioactivity that a man exposed for fifteen minutes, anywhere, will likely die in days, or a week, or perhaps two.
Fifteen of such warheads, then, exploded over and around Baltimore and Washington within a period of nineteen seconds. Eight others, also aimed at those targets, were either intercepted by American defense rockets or--in four cases--detonated over or pitched into the Atlantic, miles from the coast.
But these were two areas only, of hundreds under attack.
Weapons aimed at hardened missile bases in America destroyed sixty-five per cent of such retaliatory installations before they could be used for a single launch. From a merely military viewpoint that was not of great moment: the remaining thirty-five per cent of bases flung up missiles that did, as calculated, approach the Soviet Union in their outer-space trajectories. The U.S.S.R., like the United States, intercepted only a third of them. The rest were sufficient to accomplish their retaliatory intent, and more.
In all, during the initial hour of attack, approximately one thousand enemy missiles of an average caliber of five megatons reached their targets, or a nearby area, in the United States.
Few airfields were left, fit for launching supersonic bombers. But many American planes, at that time, were already on the way to the enemy. These carried twenty-megaton bombs, three or four to a plane. When their long-trained pilots drew within range of the calculated borders and enemy rockets rose toward them, they followed their gallant, necessary procedure. They launched their own, aimed, long-range missiles. Then, one by one, like giant descendants of the kamikazes of another war, the planes dived in the twilight, toward their attackers, and set their triads and quartets of H-bombs hurtling, under separate rocket power, toward the enemy bases. The first dozen, of most of the many invading files of planes, missed some of their targets and were themselves blown to sun-hot gas by A-weapons, or in a few cases were destroyed when their own weapons were detonated by the defenses of a still-distant foe.
But each invading American plane was able to approach closer to the enemy frontiers than its leader and each, in perishing, shook the defenders more savagely and made possible a nearer strike for the plane behind. So, plane by plane, as crews died in the prodigious burst of enemy weapons and their own, corridors were cut through the Soviet defenses until planes somewhere in each strung-out squadron and all those beyond were able to penetrate the last defenses and reach the Red military bases and Russia's cities.
These, for the most part, had by then already been turned into separate mountains of fire by American missiles, launched from far and near, land and sea. The subsequent bombers blasted fire deeper into the gigantic nation, seeking out the hidden industrial complexes in Siberia and leaving them in conflagrations that towered h
igher than the night-hung Ural Mountains. They flew on then to hunt for lesser targets if they had unspent bombs. At last the surviving planes turned, but not back to America. Their crews knew that what they witnessed on Russian earth was happening at home. They had not actually expected or intended to return. There was nothing to go back to.
By midaftemoon that Friday two-thirds of the surface of the United States had become--irregularly and unpredictably--so radioactive it might as well have been molten rock. Not one major city and few suburban areas of any size remained standing; and nearly all were in firestorm.
In those command posts undestroyed by nuclear fire, in many naval vessels, and in certain far-flung, deep-secreted, retaliatory bases--secure, still, because enemy agents had never learned of them--haggard commanding officers waited, aware, even where their communications had failed, owing to a thousand factors, that their nation had been reduced, in hours, to a fraction of its population. Reduced to a scattered minority who, even if they lived through the weeks ahead, would generally be in shock or madness and beyond sensible reorganization, for an unguessable time. They would also lack the most rudimentary means of sustenance, nearly everywhere.
Most commanders (who thus waited for anticipated orders) had come to share the commonest military view of any potential thermonuclear assault: that it would be designed to limit America's reaction and, at the most, to destroy a large enough part of America's industrial power to prevent speedy recovery.
No other enemy intent had seemed sane. Mere city-smashing had been semiofficially declared senseless, since the population and their facilities would expectably be spared to serve as productive agents for the conqueror. Because no method could be devised for assuring the safety of city populations under thermonuclear attack, the military effort had been concentrated upon hardening and dispensing ever more
"sophisticated" systems of defensive and retaliatory weapons.
American military "assumptions," furthermore, had always envisaged as the most appalling possible form even of a "first strike," enemy use of mere hundreds of megaton weapons. The fact that the United States had made it known, as long ago as 1961, that it had in being and ready for use " tens of thousands" of nuclear weapons, had not impressed upon the Pentagon another obvious fact: that the U.S.S.R. doubtless possessed near-equal numbers, even that long ago. One additional datum had been long known even to that part of the American public interested in such matters and informed enough to comprehend its implications. That datum, announced in the mid-Fifties, when the earliest practical H-bombs had been tested, revealed such weapons were "open-ended" and so could be built in any megatonnage desired. But again the official American view had been that a twenty-megaton weapon-large enough to wreck a city, set it and its environs into firestorm, and powder ten thousand square miles downwind with radioactive death--
was large enough for any military purpose.
The American war planners had not revised such ideas even after the U.S.S.R., in 1961, had exploded a bomb of one hundred megatons tamped to yield fifty-eight and, even so, three and more times the caliber of any weapon stockpiled by the United States and the free-world nuclear powers. The giant Soviet "device" had been simply dismissed as "fit for no military end," and so, a "useless, air-contaminating gesture," intended to arouse mere terror and to create, among less-advanced peoples, an "untrue sense of Soviet might." "Anybody," it was also noted scornfully at the time of the giant-H-bomb test, "could do as much"--if any other nation was that "foolish."
What, fundamentally, the free-world leaders--military and political--had never understood was that the Russian Communist leaders had always been willing to pay any price whatever to conquer the world, so long as some world remained to be ruled in slavery, and so long as some of the Soviet elite survived to be its rulers.
So, as that lethal Friday night fell over a Russia illumined everywhere by the miles-high towers of its city-flames, in certain long-planned and meticulously-selected areas thousands of Soviet men and women and children, hand-chosen, screened in a hundred ways, waited in safe shelters both amid and outside the holocaust. Top political echelons waited in safety. The most versatile, talented, and politically "reliable" scientists and technologists, along with metalworkers, agriculturists, and other essential cadres, waited. Even certain authors and artists, chosen to record in every medium what was to eventually happen and to propagandize the subdued survivors of that happening, waited.
They constituted the complete human material for restoring civilization and for ruling a planet, in whatever great part mere ruins. And they were occupied with myriad tasks, in their gigantic catacombs, built, in the main, under the Ural Mountains, the Caucasus, and the highlands around Lake Baikal. They knew where stores of nuclear bombs were safe-hidden against the day when all probable enemy bombs had been expended and when the men who could have employed any leftover weapons had been destroyed. And yet other Soviet groups with other storage facilities waited in two areas hundreds of feet beneath the sea, in myriad caissons, built for that purpose.
Some of the thousands of such refugees had inhabited their regions for months, some even for years. But no one in the free world--no one anywhere outside the U.S.S.R.-
-even knew of that program, or of its completion, or of the timing of the first strike, on that day of Armageddon, to match infinitely-complex arrangements for the survival of these selected "fittest," and for their subsequent overmastering of the undestroyed peoples.
To the personnel of the still-effective American redoubts and to those on ships and submarines (where sickened but valorous men steadfastly waited to learn if a second, massive, retaliatory strike would be ordered), the very fact that, when night came, all the United States was lighted by fire and nothing human that could find cover even moved in a nation that seemingly had turned to lava--even such devastation of their homeland was not a sufficient warrant to cause sickened but alert and waiting commanders to expend America's remaining weapons. No orders to do so had arrived by any of the many emergency means they still believed to be feasible.
They, far better than still-living, agonized tangles of panicked citizens, of remote families, of solitaries, knew what the American strike had done to the enemy.
So they waited--in most instances at long-ago-devised positions which would enable them, on land or at sea, to continue holding their fire--for the weeks they were capable of surviving. A very secret, few naval vessels, indeed, had intended no immediate attack. In one instance a vessel had speedily learned its potential for assault was plainly unneeded and, like the other few, that unit obeyed standing directions which sent them hurtling beyond probable enemy range.
By midnight, then, after the surge and countersurge of missiles, rockets, and planes, scattered commanders of deep, land-based rocket batteries and the captains of naval remnants were certain the enemy had been saturated. They knew that every important mile of the U.S.S.R. lay under a cloak of radiation at the level of three thousand roentgens or more, that the enemy's cities were in firestorm, and that the rest of Europe, like much of China, had been drowned in solar temperatures and coated with deadly isotopes. These military men assumed the war was finished and the victory, however Pyrrhic, America's.
To the Soviets, however, what had occurred was merely the completion of Phase One of a long-range plan.
CHAPTER 6
The mind of a mathematical physicist is not the same in every fashion as the mind of any other man. It is a mind that has come to understand the special language of mathematics well enough so that its possessor also understands certain logical concepts concerning time, space, and the nature and behavior of matter that cannot be intuitively comprehended even by the best brain that is ignorant of the special language.
In the case of scientists with Ben's special attainments, men who have had experience in the observation and measurement of explosions (an inadequate term!) of some of the mightier examples of nuclear weapons, another, uncommon dimension may have been added. And t
hat mental increment had occurred in Ben. He was able to conceive of magnitudes of ruin, annihilation, super-light, and all violence with a clarity that common unfamiliarity (and its constant companion, fear) neither blurred nor disturbed. And he was capable of making lucid observations under conditions which would prevent most men from all willed thought.
As the elevator slowed, Ben held tightly to Faith's hand but remained almost unaware of that, for he was thinking of the enormous mountain of tailing, the "slide" of huge, blast-riven boulders outside the cliff-face on Sachem's Watch. Their significance was now plain: they had been removed to make this rectangular shaft . . . and whatever lay beyond. In a swift but very rough calculation he appreciated that, whatever the depth and size of the shaft, "what lay beyond" must still be of awesome extent.
Before their conveyance stood still Vance Farr confirmed that conjecture by addressing the other seven and, especially, two people: Ben, and the stranger with the open blue shirt who stood in a sagging way that suggested he might soon faint. "We're only eight," the red-haired magnate said in a quiet, deep voice. "Nine, if George is on the job--"
The beautiful colored girl, Connie, interrupted: "He went down . . . came down . .
. a little while ago. We were playing tennis. Then he said he had to check something, and quit."
"Great!" There was relief in the deliberately-assumed tone of command and confidence. "Fine! All right. In seconds a door will let us into the main chamber of an air-raid shelter that I've had crews working on for years. The one tragedy of the moment is simply that we're so few. I have accommodations for fifteen people--for ample time."
Ben looked at Farr with surprise and unaware that he was licking his lips nervously. He finally ventured a question: "Air?"
"Plenty! Of all we need. You'll see. And I'm glad you're one of our number, Ben.
This is a mighty complex establishment. We can use your skills, here." He hesitated. The elevator bumped to an almost imperceptible stop. Farr said, "Now."
