The Day After Judgement

by James Blish

  Yet how to get there? He was isolated on an isthmus of mud, and he had no Earthly resources whatsoever. Just possibly, some rite of white magic might serve to carry him, although he could remember none that seemed applicable; but that would involve returning to Monte Albano, and in any event, he felt instinctively that no magic of any kind would be appropriate now.

  In this extremity, he bethought him of certain legends and attested miracles of the early saints, some of whom in their exaltation were said to have been lifted long distances through the air. Beyond question, he was not a saint; but if his forth-coming role was to be as he suspected, some similar help might be vouchsafed him. He tried to keep his mind turned away from the obvious and most exalted example of all, and equally to avoid thinking about the doubt-inducing fate of Simon Magus – a razor’s edge which not even his Dominican training made less than nearly impossible to negotiate.

  Nevertheless, his shoulders squared, his face set, Father Domenico walked resolutely towards the water.

  10

  Even after the complete failure of air power in Vietnam to pound one half of a tenth-rate power into submission, General McKnight remained a believer in its supremacy; but he was not such a fool as to do without ground support, knowing very well the elementary rule that territory must be occupied as well as devastated, or even the most decisive victory will come unstuck. By the day – or rather, the night – for which the attack was scheduled, he had moved three armoured divisions through the Panamint range, and had two more distributed through the Grapevine, Funeral and Black mountains, which also bristled with rocket emplacements. This was by no means either as big or as well divided a force as he should have liked to have used, especially on the east, but since it was all the country had left to offer him, he had to make it do.

  His battle plan was divided into three phases. Remembering that the test bomb had blown some thousands of enemy troops literally sky high for what was tactically speaking quite a long period of time, he intended to begin with a serial bombardment of Dis with as many of his remaining nuclear weapons as he could use up just short of making the surrounding territory radiologically lethal to his own men. These warheads might not do the city or the demons any damage – a proposition which he still regarded with some incredulity – but if they would again disorganize the enemy and keep him from reforming that would be no mean advantage in itself.

  Phase Two was designed to take advantage of the fact that the battleground from his point of view was all downhill, the devils with stunning disregard of elementary strategy having located their fortress at the lowest point in the valley, on the site of what had previously been Badwater, which was actually two hundred and eighty-two feet below sea level. When the nuclear bombardment ended, it would be succeeded immediately by a continued hammering with conventional explosives, by artillery, missiles and planes. These would include phosphorus bombs, again probably harmless to devils, but which would in any event produce immense clouds of dense white smoke, which might impair visibility for the enemy; his own troops could see through it handily enough by radar, and would always be able to see the main target through the infra-red telescope or ‘sniperscope’, since even under normal conditions it was always obligingly kept red hot. Under cover of this bombardment. McKnight planned a rush of armour upon the city, spearheaded by halftrack-mounted laser projectors. It was McKnight’s theory, supported neither by his civilian advisers nor by the computer, that the thermonuclear fireball had failed to vaporize the iron walls because its heat had been too generalized and diffuse, and that the concentrated heat of four or five or a dozen laser beams, all focused on one spot, might punch its way through like a rapier going through cheese. This onslaught was to be aimed directly at the gates of course these would be better defended than any other part of the perimeter, but a significant number of the defenders might still be flapping wildly around in the air amidst the smoke, and in any event, when one is trying to breach a wall, it is only common sense to begin at a point which already has a hole in it.

  If such a breach was actually effected, an attempt would be made to enlarge it with land torpedoes, particularly burrowing ones of the Hess type which would have been started on their way at the beginning of Phase One. These had never seen use before in actual combat and were supposed to be graveyard secret – though with profusion of spies and traitors with which America had been swarming, in McKnight’s view, before all this had begun, he doubted that the secret had been very well kept. (After all, if even Baines …) He was curious also about the actual effectiveness of another secret, the product of an almost incestuous union of chemistry and nucleonics called TDX, a compound as unstable as TNT, which was made of gravity-polarized atoms. McKnight had only the vaguest idea of what this jargon was supposed to signify, but what he did know was its action; TDX was supposed; to have the property of exploding in a flat plane, instead of expanding evenly in all directions like any Christian explosive.

  Were the gate forced, the bombardment would stop and Phase Three would follow. This would be an infantry assault, supported by individually airborne troops in their rocket-powered flying harness, and supplemented by an attempted paratroop landing inside the city. If on the other hand the gate did not go down, there would be a most unwelcome Phase Four – a general, and hopefully orderly retreat.

  The whole operation could be watched both safely and conveniently from the SAC’s Command Room under Denver, and as the name implied, directed in the same way; there was a multitude of television screens, some of which were at the individual command consoles provided for each participating general. The whole complex closely resembled the now extinct Space Center at Houston, which had in fact been modelled after it; technically, space flight and modem warfare are almost identical operations from the command point of view. At the front of this cavern and quite dominating it was a master screen of Cinerama proportions; at its rear was something very like a sponsor’s booth, giving McKnight and his guests an overview of the whole, as well as access to a bank of small screens on which he could call into being any individual detail of the action that was within access of a camera.

  McKnight did not bother to occupy the booth until the nuclear bombardment was over, knowing well enough that the immense amount of ionization it would produce would make non-cable television reception impossible for quite some time. (The fallout was going to be hell, too-but almost all of it would miss Denver, the East Coast was dead, and the fish and the Europeans would have to look out for themselves.) When he finally took over, the conventional bombardment was just beginning. With him were Baines, Buelg, Chief Hay and Šatvje; Jack Ginsberg had expressed no particular interest in watching, and since Baines did not need him here, he had been excused to go below, presumably to resume his lubricous pursuit of Chief Hay’s comely runner.

  Vision on the great master screen was just beginning to clear as they took their seats, although there was still considerable static. Weather Control reported that it was a clear, brightly moonlit night over all of the Southwest, but in point of fact the top of the great multiple nuclear mushroom, shot through with constant lightning, now completely covered the southern third of California and all of the two states immediately to the east of it. The units and crews crouching in their bivouacs and emplacements along the sides of the mountains facing away from the valley clung grimly to the rocks against hurricane updrafts in temperatures that began at a hundred and fifty degrees and went on up from there. No unit which had been staked out on any of the inside faces of any of the ranges reported anything, then or ever; even the first missiles and shells to come screaming in towards Dis exploded incontinently in mid-air the moment they rose above the sheltering shadows of the mountain peaks. No thermo-couple existed which would express in degrees the temperature at the heart of the target itself; spectographs taken from the air showed it to be cooling from a level of about two and a half million electron volts, a figure as utterly impossible to relate to human experiences as are the distances in miles
between the stars.

  Nevertheless, the valley cooled with astonishing rapidity, and once visibility was restored, it was easy to see why. More than two hundred square miles of it had been baked and annealed into a shallow, even dish, still glowing whitely but shot through with the gorgeous colours of impurities, like a borax bead in the flame of a blowpipe; and this was acting like the reflector of a searchlight, throwing the heat outward through the atmosphere into space in an almost solidly visible column. At its centre, as at the Cassegranian focus of a telescope mirror, was a circular black hole.

  McKnight leaned forward, grasping the arms of his chair in a death grip, and shouted for a close-up. Had the job been done already? Perhaps Buelg had been right about there being a possible limit to the number of transformations the enemy could go through before final dissolution. After all, Badwater had just received a nuclear saturation which had previously been contemplatedd only in terms of the overkill of whole countries–

  But as the glass darkened, the citadel brightened, until at last it showed once more as a red-hot ring. Nothing could be seen inside it but a roiling mass of explosions – the conventional bombardment was now getting home, and with great accuracy – from which a mushroom stem continued to rise in the very centre of the millennial updraft; but the walls – the walls, the walls, the walls were still there.

  ‘Give it up, General.’ Buelg said, his voice gravelly. ‘No matter what the spectroscope shows, if those walk were really iron –’ He paused and swallowed heavily. ‘They must be only symbologically iron, perhaps in some alchemical sense. Otherwise the atoms would not only have been scattered to the four winds, but would have had all the electron shells stripped off them. You can do nothing more but lose more lives.’

  ‘The bombardment is till going on.’ McKnight pointed out stiffly, ‘and we’ve had no report yet of what it’s done to the enemy’s organization and manpower. For all we know, there’s nobody left down that hole at all – and the laser squadrons haven’t even arrived yet, let alone the Hess torpedoes.’

  ‘Neither of which are going to work a damn,’ Baines said brutally. ‘I know what the Hess torpedo will do. Have you forgotten that they were invented by my own chief scientist? Who just incidentally was taken by PUT SATANACHII this Easter, so that the demons now know all about the gadget, if they didn’t before. And after what’s been dropped on that town already, expecting anything of it is like Eying to kill a dinosaur by kissing it.’

  ‘It is in the American tradition,’ McKnight said, ‘to do things the hard way if there is no other way. Phase Four is a last-ditch measure, and it is good generalship – which I do not expect you to understand – to remain flexible until the last moment. As Clausewitz remarks, most battles are lost by generals who failed to have the courage of their own convictions in the clutch.’

  Baines, who had read extensively in both military and political theoreticians in five languages, and had sampled them in several more, as a necessary adjunct to his business, knew very well that Clausewitz had never said any such damn fool thing, and that McKnight was only covering with an invented quotation a hope which was last-ditch indeed. But even had elementary Machiavellianism given him any reason to suppose that charging McKnight with this would change the General mind in the slightest, he could see from the master screen that it was already too late. While they had been talking, the armoured divisions had been charging down into the valley, their diesel-electric engines snarling and snorting, the cleats of their treads cracking the slippery glass and leaving sluggishly glowing, still quasi-molten trails behind. Watching them in the small screens, Baines began to think that he must be wrong. He knew these monsters well – they were part of his stock in trade – and to believe that they were resistible went against the selling habits of an entire adult lifetime.

  Yet some of them were bogging down already; as they descended deeper into the valley, with the small rockets whistling over their hunched heads, the hot glass under their treads worked into the joints like glue, and then, carried by the groaning engines up over the top trunnions, cooled and fell into the bearings in a shower of many-sized abrasive granules. The monsters slewed and sidled, losing traction and with it, steerage; and then the lead half-track with the laser cannon jammed immovably and began to sink like the Titanic into the glass, the screams of its boiling crew tearing the cool air of the command booth like a ripsaw until McKnight impatiently cut the sound off.

  The other beasts lumbered on regardless – they had no orders to do otherwise – and a view from the air showed that three or four units of the laser squadron were now within striking distance of the gates of Dis. Like driver ants, black streams of infantry were crawling down the inner sides of the mountains behind the last wave of the armoured divisions. They too had had no orders to turn back. Even in their immensely clumsy asbestos firemen’s suits and helmets, they were already fainting and falling over each other in the foothills, their carefully oiled automatic weapons falling into the sand, the tanks of their flame throwers slitting and dumping jellied gasoline on the hot rocks, the very air of the valley sucking all of the moisture out of their lungs through the tiniest cracks in their uniforms.

  Baines was not easily horrified – that would have been bad for business – but also he had never before seen any actual combat but the snippets of the Vietnam war, which had been shown on American television. This senseless advance of expensively trained and equipped men to certain and complete slaughter – men who as usual not only had no idea of what they were dying for, but had been actively misled about it – made about as much military sense as the Siege of Sevastopol or the Battle of the Mame. Certainly it was spectacular, but intellectually it was not even very interesting.

  Four of the laser buggies – all that had survived – were now halted before the gates, two to each side to allow a heavy howitzer to fire between them. From them lanced out four pencil-thin beams of intensely pure red light, all of which met at the same spot on the almost invisible seam between the glowing doors. Had that barrier been real iron, they would have holed through it in a matter of seconds in a tremendous shower of sparks, but in actuality they were not even raising its temperature, as far as Baines could see. The beams winked out; then struck again.

  Above the buggies, on the barbican, there seemed to be scores of black, indistinct, misshapen figures. They were very active, but their action did not seem to be directed against the buggies; Baines had the mad impression, which he was afraid was all too accurate, that they were dancing.

  Again the beams lashed out. Beside him, McKnight muttered:

  ‘If they don’t hurry it up–’

  Even before he was able to finish the sentence, the ground in front of the gates erupted. The first of the Hess torpedoes had arrived. One of the half-tracks simply vanished, while the one next to it went slowly skyward, and as slowly fell back. in a fountain of armour plate, small parts, and human limbs and torsos. Another, on the very edge of the crater, toppled equally slowly into it. The fourth sat for a long minute as if stunned by the concussion, and then began to back slowly away.

  Another torpedo went off directly under the gates, and then another. The gates remained obdurately unharmed, but after a fourth such blast, light could be seen under them – the crater was growing.

  ‘Halt all armoured vehicles!’ McKnight shouted into his intercom, pounding the arm of his chair in excitement. ‘Infantry advance on the double! We’re going under!’

  Another Hess torpedo went off in the same gap. Baines was fascinated now, and even feeling a faint glow of pride. Really. the things worked very well indeed; too bad He£ couldn’t be here to see it… but maybe he was seeing it, from inside. That hole was already big enough to accommodate a small car, and while he watched another torpedo blew it still wider and deeper.

  ‘Paratroops! Advance drop by ten minutes!’

  But why was Hess’s invention working when the nuclear devices hadn’t? Maybe Dis had only sunk lower as a whole, as the desert aro
und and beneath it had been vaporized, but the demons could not defend the purely mundane geology of the valley itself? Another explosion. How many of those torpedoes had the Corps of Engineers had available? Consolidated Warfare Service had supplied only ten prototypes with the plans at the time of the sale, and there hadn’t been time to put more into production. McKnight’s suddenly advanced timetable seemed nevertheless to be allowing for the arrival of all ten.

  This proved to be the case, except that the ninth got caught in a fault before it had completed its burrowing and blew up in the middle of one of the advancing columns of troops. Hess had always frankly admitted that the machine would be subject to this kind of failure, and that the flaw was inherent in the principle rather than the design. But it probably wouldn’t be missed; the gap under the gates of Dis now looked quite as big as the New Jersey entrance to the original two Lincoln Tunnels. And the infantry was arriving at speed.

  And at that moment, the vast unscarred gates slowly began to swing inward. McKnight gaped in astonishment and Baines could feel his own jaw dropping. Was the citadel going to surrender before it had even been properly stormed? Or worse, had it been ready all along to open to the first polite knock, so that all this colossal and bloody effort had been unnecessary?

  But that, at least, they were spared. As the first patrols charged, tumbled, scrambled and clambered into the crater, there appeared in the now fully opened gateway, silhouetted against the murky flames behind, the same three huge naked snaky-haired women that McKnight and his crew had seen in the very first aerial photographs. They were all three carrying among them what appeared to be the head of an immense decapitated statue of something much like one of themselves. The asbestos-clad soldiers climbing up the far wall of the crater could not turn any greyer than they were, but they froze instantaneously like the overwhelmed inhabitants of Pompeii, and fell, and as they fell, they broke. Within minutes, the pit was being refilled from the bottom with shattered sculpture.