Triumph

by Philip Wylie

  "I know. But these folks are far better fixed even than any military people in rock mountains. Against the worst. Better off than those who've shot their wad, come out, and died."

  "Yeah?"

  "Thought you'd like to know that. Twelve men and women.

  Two kids. Asking 'anybody' to answer, and stating they are set for an indefinite period. Their words. Giving their exterior radiation level at sixty-three roentgens. And other data. The poor so-and-so's!"

  The skipper smiled briefly. "Maybe a day will come when we can answer 'em--

  even go get 'em, somehow I Though, more likely--"

  No need to finish. More likely, in a final mission, the Tiger Shark would pay the price its officers and men knew other submarines had paid for striking Russia, however swiftly they'd submerged and however stealthily rushed away: convergence of Soviet subs and planes from unknown but still-secure regions, on the belated attacker; discovery; and extinction in subsea nuclear upheavals. Still, now, there seemed a thin chance. . . .

  The "poor so-and-so's" for a time had been sending their dispatches over the radio set Ben had designed, to employ available antennas, and with on-hand materials. They ceased to flash forth their, for a time, regular announcement of the group's location, status, safety, long-range living capability, and so on, after some weeks. The reason for ceasing baffled them:

  No one had replied.

  They had listened to countless distant stations that seemed able to reply, if they wished. But nobody did.

  What could be inferred from that silence?

  After lunch, on the sixty-first day underground, Farr launched on one more repetitive discussion of that startling circumstance.

  "Of course," he said, "the answer is, they are scared to reply to our signals. Ben is sure and so am I that we've been heard--in Africa, Latin America, Central America, probably even Australia. Why are they scared to respond, then?"

  "There could only be the one reason we've already mulled over," Ben said slowly.

  "They won't respond because they still fear some sort of Soviet retaliation. On them.

  Which means they must know or at least suspect that the Reds still have, somewhere, the power to hurt, and hurt bad."

  Faith spoke--Faith, who had proven to be very well informed about the Soviets and had steadily added to that unexpected knowledge by reading, since their immolation.

  "Perhaps nobody in the Safe Zone--" they'd come to call the nonradiated half-and-more of the planet by that term--" has the nerve, yet, to do anything but care for themselves and yell for help, for themselves. I mean, maybe they feel their internal troubles will continue--"

  George interrupted, "There've been no H-shots for weeks."

  "Do we know everything's over, for sure?" Faith smiled apologetically at George.

  "After all. Does anybody? Was there any surrender? Are Commies in the Safe Zone raising hell? Has victory been proclaimed by a single soul?"

  "I agree with Faith," Vance said. "She's argued, whenever this thing came up, that the Reds had the world so scared, even before they erased the Temperate Zone and got rubbed out for doing it, that no one will risk anything that sounds like a friendly act toward the United States, even if it concerns only a mere fourteen Americans."

  "Oh, heck!" Peter "the Meek" (as they occasionally called him, in amiable, private talks) said that. "Surely, somebody has guts enough to radio something to us! I'd do it!"

  Vance chuckled. "By golly, Pete, I believe you would! But remember, you haven't survived a world holocaust outdoors! It may make a lot of difference."

  Valerie re-entered the Hall just then, saying, "Who's for roller-skating practice with me?"

  She completed the cheery question, then staggered.

  The seated people felt the Hall heave, the floor shake, the passages vibrate. An alarm bell rang in Passage C--a bell that meant something had stopped one of the diesels.

  Dust and bits of stone fell from the now pale-rose ceiling, far overhead. The earthquake was repeated, less violently. Then, it seemed, the deep-buried labyrinth began to shudder under an interminable but diminishing series of temblors.

  Ben leaped to his feet, got his balance, and rushed for the seismographs. George was on his heels. Lodi, just then entering the Hall, pale and questioning, turned to follow without a word.

  The instruments soon let them compute, in general, what had happened--what was, in fact, still happening, in a wave of titanic explosions that moved westward from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific: a great sweep of the United States by many hundreds of blasts.

  While the group had been considering any possible further Soviet menace, the menace had materialized. But not really as a coincidence, inasmuch as they spent many hours over the question, once they had slowly, and dejectedly, realized their signals were not answered.

  Ben began studying the zigzag lines drawn by the quake-measuring instruments, racing to those located at the farthest-practicable distance and gathering more material there, making pencil calculations for which George and Lodi ran about gathering data from other recording devices. In half an hour they could report. By that time not even the faintest tremor could be detected.

  A computer had spilled out a string of figures and letters, a message coded in its special language. Ben translated it to the entire group standing in the passageway:

  "It looks," he said hoarsely, "like this: some three hundred or more bombs, of about one megaton each, exploded in about five bursts per cluster, near the ground, starting here. One, the biggest shock we felt, was very close to us. These shots moved east to west in a random but apparently pretty thorough plastering of all the United States.

  Some short while after each burst of five or six near-the-ground warheads, a real monster of a blast in the atmosphere far above went off. Say, about sixty-seventy of such high bursts of, maybe, fifty megatons each."

  "It's insane!" Vance Farr cried from the passage. Ben nodded. Then leaped to his feet. "The counters!" he shouted, and rushed toward another chamber.

  There, again assisted by George and Lodi, he first listened with earphones to a roar of "clicks" far too fast for enumerating. Then, as his two assistants switched them on, he, Vance, Valerie, and the others looked numbly at dials that computed outside radiation levels at various distances around the top of Sachem's Watch.

  Those dials had shown for weeks a steady drop in the outside count. But now they were quivering up and up until they reached a point at which Ben and George switched them over to other mechanisms designed to register not in hundreds but in thousands of roentgens. And those big-scale dials moved, shakily, up and up, past two thousand, three, four, five, and continued climbing.

  Farr cursed softly.

  His wife prayed, in a clear, quiet, steadying voice.

  Nobody else spoke for a while. They kept watching Ben and his two helpers.

  George and Lodi merely gazed at their chief. He was reflecting, leaning against a naked stone wall in a room jammed with equipment and piled with electronic "black boxes," his body relaxed, his blue eyes blank, his fingers tugging at his scimitar-like nose. Presently, still oblivious, he lighted a cigarette. And at last he turned to speak:

  "It can only be one thing, I believe. If I'm right, a mighty ingenious, a devilish, thing. A thing probably set up to go off at this late date automatically or, maybe, on command. A battery of specialized, invulnerably-hidden superrockets--less than a hundred, if our computer's correct. This battery--or these batteries--have sent over the Atlantic huge rockets that in turn ejected toward the American earth five or six smaller rockets apiece, accelerated so as to strike the earth far ahead of the main vehicle. The comparatively small ones blew up on or just above ground. Then, after they'd exploded, but not long after--the timing had to be good! the big hydrogen warhead in each still-high-up main rocket went!"

  Lotus, whose expertise in mathematics had already been applied in many practical fashions new to her but in which she had proven extremely able, said, soft
ly, "I think I see! It was rigged so the big, high burst would blow back toward the ground some great part of the hot material from smaller H-blasts beneath, pressing it back, to spread out in the lower air, instead of rising to the stratosphere?" She looked inquiringly at Ben.

  He nodded. "Must be."

  "But why, at this late date, in the merciful name of heaven?" Farr asked.

  Ben tried to speak in measured tones. "Well. First, we long ago had some piggyback rockets a lot like that, though without the big high bang, delayed feature. So it's a workable gambit, rocketwise. Second, because as the counters made plain, the one-megaton low-level bursts were very dirty. Very radioactive. H-bombs with cobalt jackets, maybe. Cesium. Strontium. Take time to tell, by measuring the radioactivity from its peak into the first phases of decrease. Time to calculate half-lives of the hot elements to be sure what they used. And Lodi's correct. The big bangs, high up, pushed back the already-rising, very radioactive lower bursts, and so, spread the fallout. Very smart."

  "But, man, Why?" Vance's voice was tortured.

  "I suppose," Ben said, and by then the entire company was pale with dismay,

  "because the enemy figured that around now, any remaining, safely-sheltered Americans-

  -civilian or military--would have about used up their facilities for holding out in shelters or caves that maybe did spare a few mountain people this long, or people in mines, or in certain military 'hard' bases that I've heard about. Three weeks was the civil-defense idea of a time limit for safe coming-out. The military, I believe, figured on about sixty days for its 'hardest' installations."

  "Wasn't it enough," Farr said hollowly, "to soak us with sodium?"

  "Evidently not." Ben's head shook in a sort of angered stupefaction. "Plainly, they wanted to make sure, when enough time had passed, that the United States would get one more general lathering of hot isotopes. And it, I think, will be something that will stay hot for a long stretch. Not like the first, sodium shots from the seas, with their half-life of a mere fifteen hours."

  "Like how long and how hot?" Vance asked, almost in a whisper.

  Ben shrugged. "If it's cobalt, cesium, or strontium, the half-life could be fifteen to twenty-five years. Oh, hell, Vance! I can't say! Could be sodium again, and soon gone.

  Could be, if my interpretation's in error. We'll simply have to wait and watch the radiation count."

  Stoically, perhaps even with considerable hope, they waited out the initial hours that followed the delayed devastation caused by what certain Soviet war-planners had long termed Phase Four.

  The count did not rise to the fantastic levels measured in the hours and first days after the sodium bath of the nation. But it reached some five thousand roentgens, plus or minus a thousand, depending upon the location of the counter radioing measurements from the bleak landscape above and around them.

  As days passed, that new level fell very slowly. Ben concluded, tentatively, that the nation, this third time, had been "salted" with radioactive isotopes of cobalt. In that case, much of it would remain too "hot" even to step on, for a long, long while. Years . . .

  in most areas.

  A few moments of exposure to any surface dusted with radioactive material of that intensity would result in certain death, even for a person plucked into some safe area afterward. Continued exposure at that level, as Ben and those who had begun reading up on the medical literature of radiation-poisoning and death knew, would cause sickness and sure dying, in less than an hour.

  This third assault had still another effect on the occupants of Farr's shelter.

  Fiendishly planned, mechanical, executed by Reds who were now dead or, at best, alive as a remnant not unlike their own, it added a new kind of anger to their depression: an infuriated feeling that a large and so-called scientific part of mankind--a Russian part--

  had thought of humanity as if the species was a kind of bug. It was enraging because it was so belittling.

  Ben kept to himself, in consequence, certain of the likely aftereffects of this toxic and massive new showering of the United States by a blasted Soviet Union. It was bad enough that his shelter companions knew the long-range physical effects to be expected.

  Such added biological and, especially, ecological effects as were bound to be caused by the new bombing, sure to be multiplied enormously by it, were not thoroughly understood and had, in prewar days, been largely ignored by engineers and military men.

  Many biologists and radiobiologists had long tried to break through the curtain of disregard maintained by those physicists, soldiers, and politicians too, when they contemplated nuclear war; but the dire concepts of the biologists concerning the unlivability of continents after nuclear assault (owing to the strange effects of radioisotopes in and on living things) had seemed too unearthly, improbable, incomprehensible, insufficiently proven, and unresolvable for most experts in war and for their principal scientific advisers.

  Even without the grewsome expectations Ben now envisioned (since he was one of the few physicists who had listened to the biologists), the mere fact that the United States had once again been lethally "crop-dusted" with hot material of a much longer half-life than that of sodium oxide, reduced people in the shelter to an unprecedentedly high level of frustration and so, in certain cases, to a new fury.

  There had been quarrels in the past, of course.

  But in the immediate aftermath of this thing, there were more quarrels. Tempers burned hot and broke out with slight cause. It was a situation bound to lead to explosion. .

  . .

  One evening, at bridge, Pete the Meek scowled suddenly over some misplay he attributed to George Hyama, his partner. George, usually in control of a temper that was, however, mercurial, saw the scowl and said instantly and sneeringly, "If you didn't like that finesse, say so!"

  "It was stupid," Pete responded, paling but continuing. "You ought to have known from the bidding that the king of clubs was in the other hand."

  George's chair fell over as he stood. Valerie and Faith, playing opposite the two men, normally would have intervened then. But the prevailing mood was abnormal.

  Besides, Valerie was consuming a fifth or sixth highball and not herself.

  Pete thereupon strode around the table and Valerie said, thickly but with a certain taunt, "Fight?" Faith spoke bitterly to nobody in particular: "Oh, for God's sake!" Her disgust and her mother's fuddled, approving cry launched Pete at George.

  For half a minute the tall man and the wiry Japanese stood toe to toe, slugging each other. Valerie shouted hoarsely when either landed a hard blow. Faith ran from the room and found Ben. He raced back ahead of her, in time to see both combatants stagger apart and stand, panting, bleeding from cut faces, but gathering rage to go on. Ben lunged between them, face fixed. "Quit it, you idiots!" His voice was so high and so stressful that it astonished everybody. That tone had never been used by Ben before. Pete and George glared at each other. Ben shoved both apart with his long arms, sent both sprawling. They rose, after that, Pete daubing his cuts with a handkerchief and George wiping skinned knuckles on a just-pressed, clean jacket.

  Nobody had heard Kit enter the Hall with Angelica in his wake. But they heard Kit's words, addressed to Faith: "So a fight started and you went for help from our Navy-trained, judo-Jew! Why not for me, darling? After all, I boxed in college!"

  Faith said, "Oh, simmer down, Kit! I didn't know where to find you."

  Kit was staring at the now embarrassed Ben. "I wonder," he said, nastily, "if you really are a better man than I? I've got fifty pounds on you, about. And I never did believe your dirty fighting tricks could stand up to a real man, even handicapped by only knowing how to fight fair."

  The others looked from Kit to Ben.

  In that next moment Ben nearly succumbed to the general stress and the sense of helpless anger. He almost invited Kit to "put 'em up," with an offer to stick to the Marquis of Queensberry rules. Ben felt he would like to find out for himself whether or not he
could outbox Kit Barlow. But though his lips began to frame a challenge, his voice never sent the defiant words through them. Instead, he said, "Don't be childish. So things are worse outside. Is that a good reason to worsen things here? If we ever get away, it'll be by sticking together. Not"--he turned from the flushed Kit to the now humiliated George and Pete--"by acting like kids."

  Valerie Farr poured half a tumbler of whisky into the remaining half of her highball. Her too-wet, too-bright eyes fixed on Ben. "You ruined," she said unevenly, "a peach of a fist fight!" She lifted the glass to take what they knew would probably be the evening's final self-dosing of alcohol that would send her weaving and swaying to her room and alcoholic unconsciousness.

  But she did not drink. Instead, her eyes focused, imperfectly and by accident, on Angelica, who had simply stood watching the violences. Watching miserably. And Valerie Farr saw the misery. Very slowly, she sat down the whisky-laden highball. To nobody, she muttered, "I encouraged that fight!" The words were spoken in a sort of shamed wonder.

  Faith said, "Forget it, Mother."

  But Valerie was still eying Angelica. She said, "Come here."

  The black-haired girl half closed her sapphire eyes and stood where she was, paling a little. "Come here!" Mrs. Farr's tone was clearer and contained command.

  So Angelica drew near, with reluctance, even fear.

  Faith watched the highball, fearing her mother would use it, and her sudden-released but endlessly pent-up emotions, to hurl on the lovely ex-mistress of Vance Farr.

  Valerie did no such thing. When Angelica was almost within touching distance, Valerie said, quietly, "I want to apologize, dear, since all our emotions are being stripped naked tonight, for treating you as I have, ever since you came here."

  Angelica's eyes widened. "But you've been perfectly wonderful to me. When you consider that before the war, I--"

  "The hell I have! I've gone on getting half cockeyed, night after night, almost as I did all the years when Vance cheated me and pretended a sickly innocence. We've been in this stone trap over two months now, child, and I've kept on drinking. Without cause.