Triumph

by Philip Wylie

  After that meal the two youngsters were told they would have to stay in their rooms--together, if they liked--as a "film for grownups only" was going to be shown in the Hall. Obediently, they accepted those orders.

  Dot and Dick were biddable, and besides, they had not yet completely recovered from the numbing knowledge of their abandonment as their crumbling air-raid shelter was deserted by their own mother, or from the dreads that came afterward, even though all such alarms were kept as unfearful as the people who'd saved them or had been saved with them could manage. These shocks had made slow-healing wounds in ten- and twelve-year old children. As a result they were still abnormally docile.

  The adults arranged themselves, just before eight o'clock, in two rows of chairs facing, at some distance, the white, curved surface of a TV set, a surface the size of screens made for the exhibition of home movies.

  George and Ben manipulated the dials of this most modem TV set, and soon a color picture appeared-the head and shoulders of a handsome, somber man, who was talking rapidly. Headphones on a trailing wire were given to the group's linguist, Connie Davey, who had a place in the center of the front row. There was no need of turning on the loudspeaker, inasmuch as the beautiful colored girl alone knew much Spanish.

  She immediately began to translate what was being said by the Costa Rican announcer: "You are about to be shown what this station has been able to gather together of photographic and taped records of the American holocaust. The first sequence you will see was taken by an American photo"--Connie hesitated--"photo-reconnaissance plane.

  This plane was dispatched from Homestead Air Base, in Florida, United States, on the mission of photographing effects of the United States attack on the Soviet Union. When some way out over the Atlantic, one of the plane's six jet engines failed, and then another lost power.

  "The commander was therefore forced to turn back. Information had reached him by radio that his home base in Florida was nonexistent, and also many other air bases in the United States. Hence he flew his plane to the middle American coast, which he reached north of Charleston, South Carolina. The plane arrived at that point some three hours after the start of the first Soviet strike. By then the plane's flight engineer had restored power in one of the two crippled engines.

  "The men in the plane were shielded against radiation because its mission was expected to involve flights through enormously-contaminated enemy air. The film and cameras were specially designed and protected to operate safely and to prevent film from damage by radiation, up to tremendous intensities. The crew had been trained to regard their planned mission as militarily essential even if their own radiation dosage passed the lethal level and insured their ultimate deaths.

  Now, on the TV set, came a still photograph of eight young men in the uniforms of the Air Force of the United States. They looked familiar, and yet, somehow, a little less vital and less military in bearing than most such crews.

  The announcer apparently began talking over the "still" picture, for Connie went on:

  "These are the eight officers and enlisted men on board that plane. After reaching the eastern coast of the United States they headed north, hoping to locate some field, military or civilian, where they could land. They had fuel for many more hours of swift flight. It did not at once occur to them that, since their mission had been--" Connie again seemed to have missed the Spanish word, then found it--"aborted, they might usefully employ their special aircraft and its equipment to make a record of enemy damage to their homeland. That opportunity was realized only as they approached Norfolk, Virginia.

  You will now see Norfolk, a great naval base, as their cameras filmed it."

  Connie fell silent.

  On the screen came a distant horizon and, along it, a stretch of land, in the middle of which rose a rosy-orange cloud of smoke that intermittently broke into what seemed mile-high surges of flame. The picture faded. The screen went blank.

  Connie spoke: "The next views are of Richmond, Virginia."

  The city was on fire from scattered suburbs to its center, but not yet in the single pyre of firestorm. From high up it looked like an endless city dump spread over many square miles. The jumbled mass of unidentifiable objects that had once been homes, apartments, stores, skyscrapers, hospitals, police stations, movie theaters, and so on now lay in shambles, eaten by ten thousand fires and marked by as many smokes.

  The camera, after panning across that immensity of leveled city in conflagration, focused on a special area, and the stunned viewers realized that either the plane had descended or a telephoto lens was used. For what was displayed seemed close: a hole. A hole, in farmland, near the vastness of the burning ruins. As flattened farmhouses and roads became discernible, they realized the hole must have been a mile in diameter and hundreds of feet deep. Nothing moved in the hole except, here and there, a thin rise of vapor. A yet closer view revealed the pit was gouged from rock and its cliff-like sides had melted down into the bottom. The material lay there still, glowing faintly and steaming, a liquid like hot tar. That grim vista vanished.

  Connie next said, shakily, "Washington, D.C., the national capital."

  There was not much to see. The plane tried to obtain views of the ground near Washington, but towering walls of fire intervened everywhere. A new angle of the camera caused Farr to gasp, "Good God! That's twenty miles up the Potomac! And look!

  Not a house standing even there! Not a bridge over the river, even that far away!"

  While many aspects of this holocaust were shown, Connie translated more comment:

  "The plane is now skirting the firestorm. From some few, last-minute radio messages it is known that approximately eighteen bombs, of some five megatons each, hit the Washington-Baltimore area. It has been obliterated and we see here the beginning of the absolute end. In a moment a longer shot will show you the wall of fire, rising two miles wide or more, over Baltimore, and the continuous reach of fire and smoke between the two cities, where small towns, isolated farmhouses, all other buildings, stalled traffic, and all woodlands blaze."

  They saw that: a reach of sky-licking and continuous combustion some fifty miles in length.

  Now, huskily, Connie said, "Philadelphia."

  Again, from an altitude of, George audibly suggested, about five miles, they beheld another city-and-suburb-thick pillar of flame and smoke that continuously surged to a far greater altitude than that of the plane. The pilot had taken his craft close to this Cyclopean blast furnace. They could therefore even see objects hurled up in the incredible skyward thrust of the super-heated flame. In some glimpses the things shooting aloft were momentarily recognizable: a heavy sedan, turning end-over-end; a farm tractor, its wheels ripped off; a locomotive; some connected bars that Angelica suggested, in a gasping voice, were "part of a jail" and that George stated, flatly, afterward--and probably rightly--were animal cages from a zoo.

  That incredible portion of the "tour" ended and the announcer prepared his viewers, wherever they might be, for another: "New York," Connie moaned, ignoring all else the announcer said.

  New York existed as a far-vaster firestorm than Philadelphia's, on a screen that showed, in the distance, a mountain-range of moving fire stretching from edge to edge.

  That titanic--actually incomprehensible--sea of flame faded out. The face of the announcer reappeared.

  "We will now interrupt that awesome picture of New York--the five boroughs and all adjacent suburbs and towns and cities--just seen in a single measureless blaze. For we have, by chance, some film of New York and its environs, taken only last week by special cameras operated from remote-controlled, or 'drone,' planes, which were flown over the region from an aircraft carrier, the USS Conner, lately commissioned and, on the day of assault, cruising in the South Atlantic, hence unharmed."

  What appeared was worse than the firestorms.

  Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and King's County and Staten Island were no longer easily recognizable. The firestorm had burned ou
t, although individual fires still flickered here and there and smoke still rose from myriad ungues sable objects on an endless landscape of devastation. In the merely murky air, each bomb hit that was close enough to the earth to leave its print could be discerned. Like pockmarks, often a mile across and more, these craters--some many hundreds of feet deep but others shallow--lay on the land amid mile upon mile of surrounding debris.

  Manhattan itself had been sliced in half at about the southern edge of Central Park, which contained two more, quarry-like depressions. It was not recognizable as a park at all, inasmuch as rubble, heaped in uneven mounds that rose to heights of many stories, had erased lawns, lakes, and all else.

  Downtown Manhattan was no longer a needle-pack of skyscrapers but a wilderness of melted, shredded, and blackened stone, concrete, brick, and steel--a domed-up slag heap. Long Island, out as far as Mineola, was the same. Newark and other New Jersey cities were simmering reaches of carbonized nothing, as desolate, cratered, and empty of movement as the surface of the moon.

  Somebody was sobbing. Ben did not look, but soon he recognized the person from the very intensity of the effort summoned to try to stifle the sound. It was Lotus Li, moaning for her father, surely, since he had died somewhere in the blasted shambles that had been Manhattan. No building, identifiable as such, could be discerned. Streets had disappeared under moraines of rubble, created, not slowly, as by glaciers, but in seconds.

  One feature, shown in one sweep from south to north, alone could be explained and exactly located-a great, straight streak of shimmering material which Ben was first to identify:

  "Melted glass," he said slowly. "The earliest hit must have smashed all the windows on Park Avenue. That would make a few miles of broken glass a couple of stories deep. A following burst evidently threw the buildings away from the thoroughfare, in both directions. And that bomb, or some other--mere firestorm even--melted the deep, smashed glass that had choked the avenue."

  Nobody debated his analysis of the shining spear of congealed material that evidently ran from where the New York Central Building had once straddled Park A venue, north, to about Ninetieth Street.

  The camera now quit looking at titanic potholes, down-bashed bridges, titanic rubble heaps, and the belt of water that, in mid-Manhattan, connected the East and Hudson rivers.

  The drone plane circled north, and soon, east.

  They were given a long-range glimpse of the Connecticut shore line and its nonextant cities, their grave pits, their spattered buildings, and their blackness from burning. At one point, however, as the plane turned back on a westward course, Kit said what all the straining, dazed viewers were thinking, "In the distance, where you can see a high mound bare of trees, is where we are, right now!"

  The announcer reappeared on the screen and Connie recommenced her translating, in a strained, dry voice:

  "You thus have seen the present, or, more exactly, recent state, of New York City, first photographed in firestorm by the reconnaissance plane. We will now resume a display of that first plane's pictures as it flew west, encountering nothing but cities blazing and towns and villages flattened and burned, or, as you will notice, unruined but without life-a strange phenomenon exhibited by one town the plane descended to circle, a town we have not yet surely identified but believe to be Zanesville, Ohio. It represents the state of many towns, villages, and small cities that escaped blast and fire."

  When sights of more metropolitan areas in firestorm--Pittsburgh, among others--

  had become almost familiar to the appalled audience, there came swiftly into camera range a distant, good-sized town which had suffered no visible damage.

  It stood, intact, with surrounding farmhouses and barns untouched. Streets of red-brick houses, a downtown area, shopping centers on the town edges, manufacturing plants, schools, hospitals, and all the other structures and appurtenances of an ordinary American town or small city now were shown from low-level, slowed flight. It made a vista so well known to all persons who had traveled by air in the United States that, at first, these viewers felt like cheering at the sight: a big town, undamaged and, they would have thought, full of thousands of nice, ordinary folks, still presumably going about their business at the hour when the picture was taken.

  But though the plane flew around the center of the town at an altitude at which the camera would have shown even a small dog, had a small dog been there, what they saw was a town empty of life. Not a car moved. Not a single person walked across the streets.

  No one appeared in the myriad yards and lawns. No truck budged. The town--or city, as its inhabitants probably had proudly insisted--seemed to have been abandoned. Even beyond its streets and highways, on the farms they viewed, no people were seen, no cows, pigs, or chickens stirred.

  The announcer evidently began explaining, for Connie gave a little gasp before she undertook a tremulous translation:

  "This area, like numberless others photographed in that flight, made so soon after the first strike, apparently received warning enough of what was happening or imminent elsewhere, and apparently had a well-enough-organized civil-defense program, so that the inhabitants shut off electric plants, turned off gas, took cover, and so on. It may be that in the scenes being shown, some persons were still under cover, even still alive. Along with their sheltered farm animals and pets. However, the fact that subsequent photographs taken of similarly intact areas still show no evidence of life anywhere, suggests two things. First, towns like the one here being reconnoitered must have been enveloped, very soon after the strike began, with extraordinarily radioactive fallout, coming perhaps on a freak wind current so that right after the inhabitants had taken cover, intense radiation swept through the area and destroyed all life in it.

  "We also know that in the night following the rocket-and-plane attack, a great mass of immensely radioactive material was created by submarine mines of a special sort detonated along both coasts of the United States. And we know that a continent-wide juggernaut of short-lived, but incredibly radioactive material spread some distance inland on the East Coast and was carried by the dominant weather pattern eastward, as is normal, from the Pacific clear across the United States and over much of Canada and part of Mexico.

  "That marching 'rain' deposited on all that immense area--some three and one-half million square miles--a layer of invisible radioactive sodium. It had a radiation level of, initially, upwards of one million roentgens, and before moving off the land and out over the Atlantic, even in the last-coated regions, some tens of thousands of roentgens.

  "Here in Zanesville, if we have named the place correctly, a very efficient civil-defense preparation must have led to the swift taking of shelter by all persons and even, in the farmland beyond, to the gathering and sheltering of domestic animals in barns and so forth, where presumably what was thought to be adequate fallout protection had been installed on roofs and walls. Then the freakish wash of extra-high radioactive gases and dusts fell, and so great and swift was the penetration of the radiation that here-as everywhere with the sodium assault that night--all civilian life was exterminated. For the people of North America had not, anywhere, prepared shelters against fallout of such high levels. It was known that weapons could be easily made to deliver that radiation.

  But, alas, it was also known that even the United States lacked the technology, wealth, and even the political means to create equal defenses."

  The screen momentarily went blank, then was overspread with another horizon-to-horizon wall of smoke beneath which miles-high flames wavered, shot upward, and swirled spirally. The scene was different from others shown, in one way, however. In its foreground lay a stretch of water, churned by mighty waves so that it dizzily reflected its background of flame and infinite smoke. Connie translated: "Cleveland."

  The face of the announcer now reappeared, a long sad-seeming face with all the tragedy Latin eyes can express in its steady, dark-eyed gaze. The man had very curly, gray hair, and a thin hand that touched a tre
mbling mouth, tremulously. He seemed to gather his courage in order to go on talking.

  "The plane," he said, and Connie's hushed translation obviously echoed his tone,

  "next flew to Chicago. Here the city was not yet in firestorm, though it lay in ruins, and among the ruins many hundreds of big fires and thousands of small ones, as you will see, showed that firestorm would soon cremate what was not already wrecked and dead.

  "The reason for this delay in the combining of Chicago's multitudes of fires into the usual, single, city-storm of flame, was deduced by our scientists, who have viewed all the film we are now telecasting. Evidently, though either six or seven hits were made on Chicago and its suburbs, destroying the whole region, a bomb, or more than one, of large caliber and probably dropped from a Soviet plane either missed Chicago and exploded in or above Lake Michigan, or did so owing to some deliberate plan, the reason for which cannot be determined by us. For it is apparent that one or more tremendous explosions in or over Lake Michigan, shortly after the initial strikes on Chicago, literally lifted up the water in the southern end of that huge lake and hurled it onto shore.

  "The paths of the ensuing, unimaginable tidal wave over the already-ruined city, as it surged inland and, later, when it withdrew, can be discerned. That inundation undoubtedly extinguished the uncountable fires set by the land hits. Only later, as the film you will see clearly shows, did new fires arise and the soaked hundreds of square miles begin to burn again, and to dry out in new heats, and so, to meet the final fate of all hit cities that follows blast, heat, and raying: the firestorm fate."

  Now they looked down at the self-illuminated, fire-patched residue of the great Chicago urban area. And they could see, from the high-altitude photography, linear streaks that indicated the coming and going of the unimaginable tidal wave. Someone else in the group was now sobbing softly, for the orientation of Chicago was plainer than that of any other of the devastated cities, save only for the second views of New York.