by Mark Clifton
It did not occur to Strickland, then, that his contempt for Miller had, on occasion, made him underestimate the man; that more than once Miller had stood patiently at his elbow while he worked the combination of the vault door which opened to the rooms of all those secret dossiers here in his building. That, as his personal secretary, Miller knew his movements so well that he knew when it was safe for him to work the combination he had seen and memorized, to go into these rooms where none but Strickland was ever allowed to go—and there to find out why.
Strickland let him stand, a moment longer, passively; then dictated an announcement to him that the Government was about to take dramatic action against the enemy. As easily, he could have picked up the phone and dictated the message to his editor in chief. He knew Miller knew that, knew Miller could see no reason for being pulled off whatever he had been doing just for this—except that the boss preferred to do it this way. Which should be reason enough. And Miller knew that, too.
"Oh,” Strickland said as an afterthought, “have the agency compile the usual data on a Dr. Ralph Kennedy, some goddam title like Extraterrestrial Psychologist. The agency can find him. He's big enough to be invited to the White House for consultation of the psychology of the enemy. He gave me some trouble. Damn near had the General Staff convinced they ought to wait until the enemy ... Never mind, just tell the agency to drop everything and get on it."
He waved a negligent hand then, and Miller walked back to the elevator which was waiting for him in the floor below, out of earshot but handy. Strickland turned to the fax machine and began watching the sweep hand of the clock to see how many seconds it would take for the announcement to show.
It hit the special-bulletin-to-all-communication-mediums machine when it should. Regardless of what might be going on elsewhere, his machine was still functioning as it should. It backed up his confidence that even if the rest of the country, the rest of the world, was going to the dogs he was still in position to grind out the easy-to-repeat slogans which would gel into public opinion, made to order.
Less than two minutes after reading his bulletin on the fax machine, that the Government was going to get off the dime and act, Higgins’ call came through from Washington.
"Okay, Harvey,” Higgins said in a voice which seemed drained of all life. “They made the decision you want. They're going to put H-Bomb war heads on some anti-missile missiles. They've got ‘em stored in ordnance depots around, labeled ‘Experimental Explosives.’ That's so the local commands won't guess what they really are, panic, and try to get out. They couldn't decide which city to use first. The President made the decision. I expect he remembers the way the last vote went. He's got that kind of mind. So it's St. Louis.
"If we fail there, then next is Detroit; then Toledo; then Dallas. God have mercy on us all. God have mercy on you, Harvey ... and on me.” The voice trailed away.
"Splendid, Tom,” Strickland said heartily. “You always deliver. I'll personally watch it on my television monitors."
If the Senate Majority Leader appreciated this special consideration he was getting, he didn't acknowledge it.
"Washington disconnected, s-sir,” his operator said nervously. It was unheard of that anybody should hang up before Strickland. “Shall I get them back?"
"I'll take care of that later,” Strickland promised. “Don't disturb me again until I tell you."
He turned to the network monitor to watch St. Louis go out in a blaze of glory, hoping to catch a glimpse of the actual explosion before the screen would go blank and dead. Instead of St. Louis, he saw one of his goddam panty-waist announcers driveling along about the formations over New York, as if that were important.
He felt a quick surge of anger until he realized the network couldn't know something was going to happen over St. Louis. He pulled the phone toward him to tell the network to switch over to St. Louis; but an afterthought made him pull his hand away without lifting the receiver. Just in case, just in case there ever were enough opposition to amount to anything, and just in case some treacherous traitor in his own outfit told them he'd switched them over to St. Louis before the explosion ... before, meaning he'd known in advance...
He would have to deny himself the pleasure of watching his orders carried out.
Never mind, there was another way. There'd have to be some kind of communication between the projectiles. Those circling overhead would know their St. Louis formation had been wiped out. They'd go streaking west to concentrate on the attack. That would tell him, just as well.
He wanted to go out to his roof garden again, to be watching them at the instant they heard; see their confusion, see them go. But he also wanted to stay by his fax machines and television monitors because in Kansas City, maybe as far away as Des Moines, they'd pick up the explosion and report it.
The conflict of desires made him furious, and he pounded on his desk in frustration that he couldn't be both places at the same time. He looked up at the offending roof over his head. Goddam it, somebody in his organization should have known he would want to watch the projectiles without having to go out of his house. They should have had his roof replaced with a plastic dome for the occasion. Goddam it, nobody ever considered his comfort.
He decided against going out into his garden. He decided to trust the reporters in cities surrounding St. Louis to let him know. Maybe the overhead discs wouldn't go to the aid of their St. Louis formation. But he could be sure his own organization would function.
The minutes ticked slowly away. The fax machines were still reporting nothing beyond the paralysis of the big cities, the fear, the foreboding, the total helplessness.
Goddam it! Why did the military have to be so slow! Them and their red tape! Now if it was under his control—if it was his organization, St. Louis would have been destroyed in five minutes and his stupid minions would be back clicking their heels and asking what he wanted now, sir. But the goddam military. He thought of the handsome, lean, virile young officers. He turned livid with rage. Handsome, lean, and virile be had never been.
And then he chuckled softly. There would be handsome, lean, and virile ones manning their stations at St. Louis. They would be putting the X Explosive in their missiles, not knowing, never knowing, that in another instant they would be handsome, lean, and virile no longer. Nor anything.
It was fully dark out now. Here in New York. It would still be light in St. Louis, but it was dark here. There was a red glow around the discs, but nothing like the flaming skies of the first night.
Twenty minutes passed, then one of the fax machines began to clatter at a fast tempo, transmitting the excitement of the operator through his fingers. The machine began to jangle loudly, to call attention to the special news, as distinct from filler stuff.
It would be the far machine to make him get up from his desk!
But it was date-lined St. Louis! That couldn't be!
The message rolled out before him. The local anti-air-attack services had decided to try a secret explosive not yet tried against the projectiles. But the anti-missile missiles had failed to function. There was no accounting for it. They just didn't function. Not one would fire.
The X Explosive was being loaded into interceptor jets. It would be taken by human pilots directly into the formation of the enemy and released. Upon request of their commanders, suicide volunteers had stepped forward to the last man.
The machine fell silent.
Strickland sighed in relief. So that was the reason for the delay. Well, it simply prolonged the pleasure of anticipation. He'd look at it that way. The suicide boys would do the job. Too bad there hadn't been time for his local organization to get television cameras on the scene. They'd be young and handsome, lean and virile. The envisioning was almost as satisfactory as an actual picture might have been, but not quite.
More minutes passed. He remained standing at the machine. He didn't really expect it to register another message. How could it, when the H-Bomb let go? But another city, on this or s
ome other machine, depending on which line was clear. He waited. Still more minutes passed.
The machine jangled again. And again date-lined St. Louis.
"Interceptors return to base—30—"
"What do you mean, end of message?” Strickland roared. “Goddam it, you're fired out there, whoever you are!"
But another machine began to jangle and pulled him away from the silent one. Detroit was reporting the same failure of missiles to fire. The same suicide pilots to take the X Explosive to the enemy. Then the same silence, the same waiting.
And the same report that the interceptors had returned to base. But this reporter, apparently more enterprising, gave out with more.
The pilots were obviously out of their minds.
"I couldn't trip the release,” one of them was babbling, according to the fax machine. “The automatics wouldn't function on proximity. I didn't bring her back. She brought me back. Something took over the controls of the ship. I didn't land her, she landed me."
In sheer fury, Strickland kicked the machine, and tears formed in his eyes at the hurt to his foot.
Sheer funk, it was. Sheer yellow funk! Goddam! What an investigation this would make when it was all over!
A moment to sober his mood. A moment's thought.
The mind in the projectiles hadn't let him respond to their feelers! They hadn't let him wipe out a few of their ships, just to show them he could do it. They weren't opening negotiations with him. They didn't play the game according to the human rules. If he were willing to sacrifice a million or so of his own pawns, they should have been willing to sacrifice theirs. That was the way the game was always played before the big boys got down to serious business of dividing up the pot.
For the first time he allowed the doubt to take form: the doubt that they might need him, after all.
His contemplation was interrupted by a clear, piercing note. It was like a trumpet; no, more like a bugle call. It came through the French windows. It flooded the room with its warm, golden sound. He whirled away from the fax machines and rushed to the garden outside.
The last, lingering notes seemed to flood the whole city.
He stumbled out to the edge of the garden, to lean against the parapet while he gazed up into the heavens.
There were the projectiles, seeming to draw together now. But high above them, apparently so high they still caught the light from the sun below his horizon, a new set of ships had appeared. Each an iridescent globe. They flew in a wing formation, a vast wing. It was like a wing of shining pearls.
They came closer. They began to shade into iridescent blue.
And like the star sapphire, even at this distance he could see the symbol on each of them—a shining white cross of radiant light.
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CHAPTER TEN
Just before the trumpet flooded Washington with golden sound, we were on our way home from the White House conference. The plan was for the Space Cadet driving our staff car to drop Sara off at the building where she shared an apartment with Shirley; then to take me to my hotel; then for the Space Cadet driver to do whatever Space Cadets do when they are not driving staff cars, parading for newsreel cameras, or appearing in television serials.
The summons to the White House conference had hit me with a gulping surprise. It shouldn't have. For three days now, and a good share of the hours in the two nights, our department in the Pentagon had been swarming with brass and braid trying to get a line on the psychology of our enemy. Which was natural enough, since that was supposed to be our job.
Dr. Kibbie was a bitter disappointment. He plain funked it. There was no other interpretation. On that first morning, after the evening strike, it became abundantly clear to me that in spite of all his talk about the rumors of the Black Fleet, he hadn't really believed in it—that he merely used the rumors to further his con game.
The other department heads in the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Psychology responded characteristically. In common with government bureau heads generally, they could talk learnedly about the problem so long as it was kept at a distance, but displayed a complete helplessness to cope when it pushed its reality into our faces.
Somehow, without intending it, I found myself covering up for them, rationalizing their vagueness into something which sounded at least remotely sensible, taking on the burdens of soothing irate and insistent generals and admirals which Kibbie and his other department heads were shunting in my direction. Without intending it, I was rapidly becoming the answer-boy. Only I didn't have any solid answers, either.
Word had got around about my previous dealings with psychological oddities. There had been the little poltergeist girl who threw things without touching them, set things on fire without matches. There had been the fake swami who had been the most frightened of all when he learned he really wasn't faking it. There had been the five lads who had pursued the practice of Gestalt empathy to the point of creating a superentity which controlled them as if they were merely parts of its body (and which, for a time, had controlled the entire production of Computer Research); and finally there had been the Ex-Colonel Logart, sent out from the Pentagon's own Poltergeist Division, and who had proved the greatest enigma of them all.
This seemed to make me an authority on alien psychology. Perhaps the experiences had helped. Perhaps, without realizing it, I actually had developed—well, if not an open mind, one which was at least cracked.
Dr. Gerald Gaffee, Harvard's gift to the science of vocational guidance for extraterrestrials, turned out to be astonishingly useful. Of course science fiction was now old enough, traditional enough, and therefore respectable enough that it was no longer scorned by the literary elite. And, seventy-eighty years later, Dr. Gaffee had learned, in his early research, what the pioneer writers and fans of that literature had known all along; that not only did it provide the power thrust to enable the mind to take off and soar into the unknown geographies of undiscovered mental continents, but that it was virtually the only way this could be done. He proved surprisingly adept at speculative extrapolation. He proved a most useful assistant, since he had the capacity for picking up the vaguest speculation, expanding it, rationalizing it until it made logical sense.
That he was probably quite wrong was in itself an asset. The human mind, somehow, seems much more attracted by the false than by the true; and, being wrong, therefore, we were able to satisfy the brass and braid, and send them on their happy way.
Being wrong in so many ways assisted me in another respect. Since the wrong answers differed so widely in their substance that they couldn't all be the right wrong, I began to doubt the rightness of any of the wrongs. A little more time and I would have begun to doubt the reality of the ominous discs overhead at all.
It was in this mood that I talked at the White House conference. There, in that soundproofed room, presumably not bugged by more than a half-dozen foreign powers, although certainly bugged by our own secret services who would record each word spoken and try to confound its author twenty years later if he began to give trouble, the reality of the maneuvering discs overhead seemed less believable, and the smell of their Evil seemed not to penetrate.
I had almost convinced the General Staff and the President that, since we hadn't yet been hurt, only frightened, and didn't really know these things were our enemy (but only smelled bad enough to raise the hackles on our animal necks), perhaps our best course was to do more sampling, collating, and correlating of statistics, to learn more about them—particularly since we had already shot everything except our ultimate weapon against them without effect.
It was then that Senator Higgins had been called out of the conference. When he came back, I could see at once that I had lost. With a few terse words, spoken through grim lips which hardly moved, he pointed out that the enemy discs were hovering over every major city of the world, that they were in a position to strike the killing blow without giving us the chance to defend ourselves; and that it was the height of
irresponsible cowardice to wait until they had done it.
It was the semantics of “cowardice,” of course, which turned the tide. Better-to-be-cautious-and-alive-than-brave-and-dead was not a concept of speculative extrapolation comfortable to the military mind. The President, after a shrewd look at Higgins, and an apparently correct interpretation of the message he read in the Senator's sick eyes, switched polarity with the practiced ease of a winning politician, and added his argument that it was time America recaptured its leadership of the world, that other nations were faltering in the face of duty, and that once more we had opportunity to be First.
I was peremptorily dismissed with the implication that in the face of all this opportunity I had counseled cowardice, which was no more than might have been expected from a civilian. As a working arrangement it was conceded that I had some kind of commission in the Space Navy, but no one knew, yet, the exact status. Each time the ranking board settled on a rank for me and started the red tape moving through channels, by the time it had cleared I had hired more people in my department than such a rank was permitted to command, so the process had had to begin again. At the time of these proceedings they were up to Semi-Planet Admiral, Rear Side (or, more succinctly, in the words of my Space Cadet chauffeur when he came into the department to tell me the car was ready, “Where is that half-assed Admiral I have to drive to the White House?").
