by Ron Cocking
tospecial duty." He glanced briefly at Forster. "Up until now, we assumedthat only the directors at Aiken and Oak Ridge knew the realsituation--outside of the Atomic Energy Commission and C.I.A., ofcourse. This represents a very serious leak--or...." His voice trailedaway.
"Colonel Barfield, Intelligence?"
The young colonel tried to sound flippant, unsuccessfully.
"General, acting on the assumption the story is true, it would answerabout two hundred question marks in our files. Maybe more, with furtherstudy."
The C.I.A. man cleared his throat and raised a finger.
"For everybody's information," he said, "a preliminary field check showsthat Dr. Preston's train was stopped for ten minutes by fog last night.The train's radar installation failed simultaneously. There wouldn't beanything odd about that except the temperature at the time was about 65degrees, and the humidity was only 55 per cent. Consider that,gentlemen.
"Theoretically, fog can't form under such conditions. Similar local fogoccurred on the occasions when O'Connor and Walters were reportedmissing. The Met. people couldn't explain that, either. That's all."
Morganson sat up straight, as though he had suddenly made a decision.
"I don't think there's any value in further discussion at this point.You will all have transcripts of Dr. Forster's statement within a fewminutes. According to that statement, we are due to lose a number of keymen in the next few hours. I'll have Code One emergency precautionsinstituted at all research establishments, and I think the chairman ofthe Joint Chiefs should hear from me right away. Colonel Barfield, I'dlike you to ask Colonel Malinowski, the Russian military attache to seeme here not later than an hour from now. We'll have a full dressconference here at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, with written evaluationreports in detail from all branches. Dr. Forster, consider yourselfassigned to Pentagon duty as of now, and until further notice."
* * * * *
Forster sat, dazed, until he realized that the others had left, and thegeneral was standing in front of him.
"Go get some rest, Forster," the other man said with surprisinggentleness. "You've had a tough day."
As Forster slept that early summer night, weathermen across the worldwere marking their weather maps with thousands of observations--featherywind arrows, temperatures, barometric pressures and relative humidities.
Then, as they drew their isobars, the pattern for the northernhemisphere emerged. A giant high pressure system with its center innorthern Oklahoma promised warm fair weather across America. Another,centered east of the Ural Mountains, forecast clear weather for most ofEurope and northern Asia.
A low pressure trough between was dropping light warm rain on the greenfields of England, but from Seattle to Washington, D. C, from Stettin toVladivostock the sun was rising or setting in clear skies.
Then about 9 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, a thickening mist descendedover warm and drowsy southwest South Carolina. It was a fog that was nota fog, observers said afterwards, because there was no damp, nocoldness--just a steady loss of visibility until a man couldn't see hishand held up in front of his face, even though a bright moon wasshining. Most of the reporting night shift at the Aiken hydrogen bombplant never reached the tightly-guarded gates. Those who did were notallowed in.
At the same hour, across the world at the newly-built underground heavywater factory of Rossilovskigorsk, west of the southern tip of LakeBaikal, the late morning sun cast deep shadows into the gaping holes inthe hillside which marked the plant entrances and exits. Deep below,miles of filtration chambers hissed quietly as they prepared theirdeadly concentrate.
Then, without warning, the sun grew watery and paled, and within a fewminutes a haze began to form at ground level. It grew thicker andthicker; the sun became a dim orange sphere, then was blotted out. Totaldarkness enveloped the area.
And at the same hour, the watchers manning the lonely circle of probingradar domes, facing each other across the frozen wastes of the Arctic,cursed softly in Russian and English as their scopes sweeping the upperair first went blank and then dark.
* * * * *
They were shaken men at the meeting in General Morganson's office thenext morning.
"Over 30 key men gone from Aiken," Morganson was saying. "In terms ofgoals, it means that our 1960 program now cannot possibly be fulfilleduntil 1965. If the situation develops as forecast in Dr. Forster'sstatement, our entire nuclear weapons program will grind to a haltwithin two weeks. If we drain men from civilian research, it will causea total breakdown in the civilian atomic power production program. Asyou all know, the nation's entire economic expansion program is based onthe availability of that power. Without it, industry will be forced intoa deep freeze. That in turn means we might as well run up a white flagon the White House lawn."
He smiled thinly. "I would be a lot more worried than I am except wehave the first indications that the other side is in the same boat. Ibroke every regulation in the book last night when I talked toMalinowski. I took the liberty of warning him, on the basis that therewas nothing to lose. His reaction then was that it was all a WallStreet-capitalist plot--'psychological warfare,' he called it.
"He phoned me an hour ago. Sounded as though he'd just seen a ghost. Hesaid the Russian ambassador had asked for an appointment with theSecretary of State this morning...."
Forster, bewildered and out of his depth in these global problems, letthe flood of words pour over him.
Then he realized that Morganson was staring at him over the telephonereceiver at his ear, and that the room was very quiet.
Then Morganson said respectfully: "Very well, Mr. President. We'll haveDoctor Forster there."
Forster was relegated to the sidelines after his interview with thegrave-faced man in the White House. Events were moving swiftly--eventswhich Forster could read behind the blurred black headlines of thenewspapers.
The Russian ambassador was closeted with the Secretary of State for arecord six-hour talk. Then the Soviet Foreign Minister took off forWashington at 30 minutes' notice, and another record was made when hespent all day with the President. The Washington columnists began tohint of lessening tension in the cold war, and the wire services carriedreports of Russian radio broadcasts talking of a new era of cooperationbetween East and West.
Only fragments of the broadcasts could be monitored, because radioreception had suddenly deteriorated right across the world. The reportscould not be confirmed because Russia had cut all phone communicationwith the outside world. There was no possible mode of contact.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in the United States, television reception was blacking outfor hours at a time, with no explanation available. The CivilAeronautics Administration and the Air Force banned all plane movementsunder instrument flight conditions, because radar navigational equipmenthad become so unreliable as to be useless.
Newspapers across the nation were reporting sudden fogs of shortduration which baffled local weathermen. The U. S. Weather Bureau inWashington refused to comment.
For the first time in the history of an East-West conference, there wasno haggling, no propaganda speeches. Hour after hour, even as the talkswent on, the cream of the world's scientific brains quietly continued todisappear, it was revealed later.
In three days, the major powers accomplished what they had failed to doin the previous 15 years. Just 4 days and 21 hours after Forster hadfirst talked to General Morganson at the Pentagon, a treaty was signedending the world atomic weapons race.
And it had all happened, was over and done, before the people of theglobe could realize what was happening, before they could rise in masspanic in the face of the incredible unknown.
Almost immediately after the announcement, radio and radarcommunications suddenly returned to normal, and reports of themysterious fogs ceased.
Back at the Center, as he walked down the floodlit ramp of the heliporttowards his car, Forster found himself t
hinking of the experimental workon the dream state which he had performed as a graduate student. He knewthat a dream which might take half an hour to recount took only afraction of a second to occur in the sub-conscious of the sleeper as heawoke.
It was the same way with the events of the last five days; alreadydetails were becoming fuzzy and blurred as though they had happenedfive years ago.
He opened the car door, and the soft glow of the dome light filled theinterior.
Then he saw again the neat rectangular discoloration on the seat covers,and the jolt back to reality was almost a physical thing. Relief,overwhelming, flooded over him.
He looked up into the indigo-velvet sky. Above him was the enormoustriangle formed by Deneb, Vega, and Altair. Framed within it were athousand other dimmer stars, but all, he knew, far, far bigger than thespeck of solidified gases called Earth.
Somewhere out there, living, thinking, breathing was Bentley.
"Good night," Forster said out loud.
And somehow, he was sure he wasn't talking into thin air.
THE END
Transcriber's Note
This etext was produced from _Amazing Science Fiction Stories_ April1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling andtypographical errors have been corrected without note.
