The Worlds Of Robert A Heinlein

by Robert A. Heinlein

that Germany had abandoned early in the war.

  Manning went west to supervise certain details in connection with

  immobilizing the big planes, the trans-oceanic planes, which were to gather

  near Fort Riley. We planned to spray them with oil, then dust from a low

  altitude, as in crop dusting, with a low concentration of one-year dust.

  Then we could turn our backs on them and forget them, while attending to

  other matters.

  But there were hazards. The dust must not be allowed to reach Kansas City,

  Lincoln, Wichita�any of the nearby cities. The smaller towns roundabout had

  been temporarily evacuated. Testing stations needed to be set up in all

  directions in order that accurate tab on the dust might be kept. Manning

  felt personally responsible to make sure that no bystander was poisoned.

  We circled the receiving station before landing at Fort Riley. I could pick

  out the three landing fields which had hurriedly been graded. Their runways

  were white in the sun, the twenty-four-hour cement as yet undirtied. Around

  each of the landing fields were crowded dozens of parking fields, less

  perfectly graded. Tractors and bulldozers were still at work on some of

  them. In the eastern-most fields, the German and British ships were already

  in place, jammed wing to body as tightly as planes on the flight deck of a

  carrier�save for a few that were still being towed into position, the tiny

  tractors looking from the air like ants dragging pieces of leaf many times

  larger than themselves.

  Only three flying fortresses had arrived from the Eurasian Union. Their

  representatives had asked for a short delay in order that a supply of

  high-test aviation gasoline might be delivered to them. They claimed a

  shortage of fuel necessary to make the long flight over the Arctic safe.

  There was no way to check the claim and the delay was granted while a

  shipment was routed from England.

  We were about to leave, Manning having satisfied himself as to safety

  precautions, when a dispatch came in announcing that a flight of E. U.

  bombers might be expected before the day was out. Manning wanted to see

  them arrive; we waited around for four hours. When it was finally reported

  that our escort of fighters had picked them up at the Canadian border,

  Manning appeared to have grown fidgety and stated that he would watch them

  from the air. We took off, gained altitude and waited.

  There were nine of them in the flight, cruising in column of echelons and

  looking so huge that our little fighters were hardly noticeable. They

  circled the field and I was admiring the stately dignity of them when

  Manning's pilot, Lieutenant Rafferty, exclaimed, "What the devil! They are

  preparing to land downwind!"

  I still did not tumble, but Manning shouted to the copilot, "Get the

  field!"

  He fiddled with his instruments and announced, "Got 'em, sir!"

  "General alarm! Armor!"

  We could not hear the sirens, naturally, but I could see the white plumes

  rise from the big steam whistle on the roof of the Administration

  Building�three long blasts, then three short ones. It seemed almost at the

  same time that the first cloud broke from the E. U. planes.

  Instead of landing, they passed low over the receiving station, jam-packed

  now with ships from all over the world. Each echelon picked one of three

  groups centered around the three landing fields and streamers of heavy

  brown smoke poured from the bellies of the E. U. ships. I saw a tiny black

  figure jump from a tractor and run toward the nearest building. Then the

  smoke screen obscured the field.

  "Do you still have the field?" demanded Manning.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Cross connect to the chief safety technician. Hurry!"

  The copilot cut in the amplifier so that Manning could talk directly.

  "Saunders? This is Manning. How about it?"

  "Radioactive, chief. Intensity seven point four."

  They had paralleled the Karst-Obre research.

  Manning cut him off and demanded that the communication office at the field

  raise the Chief of Staff. There was nerve-stretching delay, for it had to

  be routed over land�wire to Kansas City, and some chief operator had to be

  convinced that she should commandeer a trunk line that was in commercial

  use. But we got through at last and Manning made his report. "It stands to

  reason," I heard him say, that other flights are approaching the border by

  this time. New York, of course, and Washington. Probably Detroit and

  Chicago as well. No way of knowing."

  The Chief of Staff cut off abruptly, without comment. I knew that the U.S.

  air fleets, in a state of alert for weeks past, would have their orders in

  a few seconds and would be on their way to hunt out and down the attackers,

  if possible before they could reach the cities.

  I glanced back at the field. The formations were broken up. One of the E.

  U. bombers was down, crashed, half a mile beyond the station. While I

  watched, one of our midget dive-bombers screamed down on a behemoth E. U.

  ship and unloaded his eggs. It was a center hit, but the American pilot had

  cut it too fine, could not pull out, crashed before his victim.

  There is no point in rehashing the newspaper stories of the Four-days War.

  The point is that we should have lost it, and we would have, had it not

  been for an unlikely combination of luck, foresight and good management.

  Apparently the nuclear physicists of the Eurasian Union were almost as far

  along as Ridpath's crew when the destruction of Berlin gave them the tip

  they needed. But we had rushed them, forced them to move before they were

  ready, because of the deadline for disarmament set forth in our Peace

  Proclamation.

  If the President had waited to fight it out with Congress before issuing

  the proclamation, there would not be any United States.

  Manning never got credit for it, but it is evident to me that he

  anticipated the possibility of something like the Four-days War and

  prepared for it in a dozen different devious ways. I don't mean military

  preparation; the Army and the Navy saw to that. But it was no accident that

  Congress was adjourned at the time. I had something to do with the

  vote-swapping and compromising that led up to it, and I know.

  But I put it to you�would he have maneuvered to get Congress out of

  Washington at a time when he feared that Washington might be attacked if he

  had had dictatorial ambitions?

  Of course, it was the President who was back of the ten-day leaves that had

  been granted to most of the civil-service personnel in Washington and he

  himself must have made the decision to take a swing through the South at

  that time, but it must have been Manning who put the idea in his head. It

  is inconceivable that the President would have left Washington to escape

  personal danger.

  And then, there was the plague scare. I don't know how or when Manning

  could have started that�it certainly did not go through my notebook�but I

  simply do not believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded

  rumor or bubonic plaque caused New York City to be semi-deserted at the

  time the E. U. bom
bers struck.

  At that, we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.

  Of course, the government was blamed for the lives that were lost and the

  papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to anticipate and

  force an evacuation of all the major cities.

  If Manning anticipated trouble, why did he not ask for evacuation?

  Well, as I see it, for this reason:

  A big city will not, never has, evacuated in response to rational argument.

  London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our

  attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had

  considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened

  to the thought.

  But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly

  complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.

  And don't forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow�those

  were innocent people, too. War isn't pretty.

  I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our

  ships to dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the

  laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military

  radio-actives in the Erasian Union. Suppose the mistake had been the other

  way around�suppose that one of the E. U. ships in attacking Washington,

  D.C., by mistake, had included Ridpath's shop forty-five miles away in

  Maryland?

  Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis, and the American

  Pacification Expedition started the job of pulling the fangs of the

  Eurasian Union. It was not a military occupation in the usual sense; there

  were two simple objectives: to search out and dust all aircraft, aircraft

  plants, and fields, and to locate and dust radiation laboratories, uranium

  supplies, find lodes of carnotite and pitchblende. No attempt was made to

  interfere with, or to replace, civil government.

  We used a two-year dust, which gave a breathing spell in which to

  consolidate our position. Liberal rewards were offered to informers, a

  technique which worked remarkably well not only in the E. U., but in most

  parts of the world.

  The "weasel," an instrument to smell out radiation based on the

  electroscope-discharge principle and refined by Ridpath's staff, greatly

  facilitated the work of locating uranium and uranium ores. A grid of

  weasels, properly spaced over a suspect area, could locate any important

  mass of uranium almost as handily as a direction-finder can spot a radio

  station.

  But, notwithstanding the excellent work of General Bulfinch and the

  Pacification Expedition as a whole, it was the original mistake of dusting

  Ryazan that made the job possible of accomplishment.

  Anyone interested in the details of the pacification work done in l945-6

  should see the "Proceedings of the American Foundation for Social Research"

  for a paper entitled, A Study of the Execution of the American Peace Policy

  from February, 1945. The de facto solution of the problem of policing the

  world against war left the United States with the much greater problem of

  perfecting a policy that would insure that the deadly power of the dust

  would never fall into unfit hands.

  The problem is as easy to state as the problem of squaring the circle and

  almost as impossible of accomplishment. Both Manning and the President

  believed that the United States must of necessity keep the power for the

  time being until some permanent institution could be developed fit to

  retain it. The hazard was this: Foreign policy is lodged jointly in the

  hands of the President and the Congress. We were fortunate at the time in

  having a good President and an adequate Congress, but that was no guarantee

  for the future. We have had unfit Presidents and power-hungry

  Congresses�oh, yes! Read the history of the Mexican War.

  We were about to hand over to future governments of the United States the

  power to turn the entire globe into an empire, our empire, and it was the

  sober opinion of the President that our characteristic and beloved

  democratic culture would not stand up under the temptation. Imperialism

  degrades both oppressor and oppressed.

  The President was determined that our sudden power should be used for the

  absolute minimum of maintaining peace in the world�the simple purpose of

  outlawing war and nothing else. It must not be used to protect American

  investments abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the

  simple abolition of mass killing.

  There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a

  rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that

  leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a

  definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about

  sociology and politics. Something around the year 5,000 A.D., maybe�if the

  human race does not commit suicide before then.

  Until then, there is only horse sense and rule of thumb and observational

  knowledge of probabilities. Manning and the President played by ear.

  The treaties with Great Britain, Germany and the Eurasian Union, whereby we

  assumed the responsibility for world peace and at the same time guaranteed

  the contracting nations against our own misuse of power were rushed through

  in the period of relief and goodwill that immediately followed the

  termination of the Four-days War. We followed the precedents established by

  the Panama Canal treaties, the Suez Canal agreements, and the Philippine

  Independence policy.

  But the purpose underneath was to commit future governments of the United

  States to an irrevocable benevolent policy.

  The act to implement the treaties by creating the Commission of World

  Safety followed soon after, and Colonel Manning became Mr. Commissioner

  Manning. Commissioners had a life tenure and the intention was to create a

  body with the integrity, permanence and freedom from outside pressure

  possessed by the supreme court of the United States. Since the treaties

  contemplated an eventual joint trust, commissioners need not be American

  citizens�and the oath they took was to preserve the peace of the world.

  There was trouble getting that clause past the Congress! Every other

  similar oath had been to the Constitution of the United States.

  Nevertheless the Commission was formed. It took charge of world aircraft,

  assumed jurisdiction over radio-actives, natural and artificial, and

  commenced the long slow task of building up the Peace Patrol.

  Manning envisioned a corps of world policemen, an aristocracy which through

  selection and indoctrination, could be trusted with unlimited power over

  the life of every man, every woman, every child on the face of the globe.

  For the power would be unlimited, the precautions necessary to insure the

  unbeatable weapon from getting loose in the world again made it axiomatic

  that its custodians would wield power that is safe only in the hands of

  Deity. There would be no one to guard those self same guardians. Their own

  characters and the watch they kept on each other would be all that stood

  betwe
en the race and disaster.

  For the first time in history, supreme political power was to be exerted

  with no possibility of checks and balances from the outside. Manning took

  up the task of perfecting it was a dragging subconscious conviction that it

  was too much for human nature.

  The rest of the Commission was appointed slowly, the names being sent to

  the Senate after long joint consideration by the President and Manning. The

  director of the Red Cross, an obscure little professor of history from

  Switzerland, Dr. Igor Rimski who had developed the Karst-Obre technique

  independently and whom the A. P. F. had discovered in prison after the

  dusting of Moscow�those three were the only foreigners. The rest of the

  list is well known.

  Ridpath and his staff were of necessity the original technical crew of the

  Commission; United States Army and Navy pilots its first patrolmen. Not all

  of the pilots available were needed; their records were searched, their

  habits and associates investigated, their mental processes and emotional

  attitudes examined by the best psychological research methods

  available�which weren't good enough. Their final acceptance for the Patrol

  depended on two personal interviews, one with Manning, one with the

  President.

  Manning told me that he depended more on the President's feeling for

  character than he did on all the association and reaction tests the

  psychologists could think up. "It's like the nose of a bloodhound," he

  said. "In his forty years of practical politics he has seen more phonies

  than you and I will ever see and each one was trying to sell him something.

  He can tell one in the dark."

  The long-distance plan included the schools for the indoctrination of cadet

  patrolmen, schools that were to be open to youths of any race, color, or

  nationality, and from which they would go forth to guard the peace of every

  country but their own. To that country a man would never return during his

  service. They were to be a deliberately expatriated band of Janizaries,

  with an obligation only to the Commission and to the race, and welded

  together with a carefully nurtured esprit de corps.

  It stood a chance of working. Had Manning been allowed twenty years without

  interruption, the original plan might have worked.

  The President's running mate for re-election was the result of a political

  compromise. The candidate for Vice President was a confirmed isolationist

  who had opposed the Peace Commission from the first, but it was he or a

  party split in a year when the opposition was strong. The President sneaked

  back in but with a greatly weakened Congress; only his power of veto twice

  prevented the repeal of the Peace Act. The Vice President did nothing to

  help him, although he did not publicly lead the insurrection. Manning

  revised his plans to complete the essential program by the end of 1952,

  there being no way to predict the temper of the next administration.

  We were both over worked and I was beginning to realize that my health was

  gone. The cause was not far to seek; R photographic film strapped next to

  my skin would cloud in twenty minutes. I was suffering from cumulative

  minimal radioactive poisoning. No well defined cancer that could be

  operated on, but a systemic deterioration of function and tissue. There was

  no help for it, and there was work to be done. I've always attributed it

  mainly to the week I spent sitting on those canisters before the raid on

  Berlin.

  February 17, 1951. I missed the televue flash about the plane crash that

  killed the President because I was lying down in my apartment. Manning, by

  that time, was requiring me to rest every afternoon after lunch, though I