Charles nuetzel ed, p.5
Charles Nuetzel (ed), page 5
"The second charge," the judge advocate continued, "is more serious. It assumes that Captain Morlake did, in fact, see the bomb, as he has stated, but that he has deliberately falsified his report, or else was grossly negligent in failing to observe the direction from which the bomb was coming."
For Morlake, the deadly part was that he knew no one. He was not permitted to subpoena character witnesses from fields to which men he had known had been scattered. By the time the two rocket experts had testified, he recognized that he was doomed. Shortly after his arrest, when one of his guards had whispered that fully half the officers of the secret field had lost members of their families in the bombing, he realized what weight of emotion was against him. These men, twisted by disaster, could not feel, see, or think straight.
The crisis came swiftly after he himself was called to the stand.
"There is no doubt in your mind," the judge advocate said, "that what ypu saw was an atomic bomb?" "It was an atomic bomb." "And it was coming straight down?" "Yes, it was. Absolutely straight." "This was about how high above the ground?" "At least seventy-five miles." Pause; then, gravely:
"Captain Morlake, you have heard experts testify that any bomb accurately aimed from any point on the earth's surface would have been describing a parabolic curve of some kind at the height?" "I have heard the witnesses."
"And what do you conclude from their testimony?"
Morlake was firm. "A short time ago I was convinced that our rocket science was superior to that of any other country. Now, I know that we've been surpassed."
"That is your sole comment on the death of forty million Americans. We have been surpassed."
Morlake swallowed hard, but he controlled himself. "I did not say that. The bomb was coming straight down."
"Hadn't you better think that over, Captain?"
Insinuating words. He knew what they wanted. In the short time since the trial had been scheduled, the prosecution had had several bright ideas. The previous night they had come to him with drawings of hypothetical trajectories of bombs. Every drawing was on a map of the world, and there were three different points of origin illustrated. If he would agree that the bomb had been slanting slightly in any one of the three directions, he would be a hero.
"You still have an opportunity, Captain," said the judge advocate silkily, "of being of great service to your country."
Morlake hesitated miserably. "I'm sorry," he said at last, stiff with fear, "but I cannot change my testimony. It was coming straight down."
The sentence was thirty years, and he was lucky. Within a month of his trial men were being hanged from lamp posts, and sedition trials sprouted like weeds over a land that could not discover its attacker.
On the ninety-fourth morning, Morlake put on his fatigue suit as usual. He had only the vaguest sense of ever having done anything else, the routine was so much a part of him. On the way to breakfast he glanced at the bulletin board, where the day's work sheet had already been posted. Ploughing the east field. Planting potatoes in the valley. Repairing the east fence. Cleaning the stables. Transferring feed to a new barn.
It was the usual pattern, with only one thing missing.
His own name was not attached to any one of the details. Immediately after breakfast he reported the omission to the day sergeant.
"Okay, you go along with the potato planting detail."
Morlake went, telling himself that, if his name were ever again missing from the board, he would report to the office of the clerks who made up the work sheet.
It wasn't that the work hadn't been good for him. He had always been as hard as nails, and his internal muscles were so perfectly balanced and organized that, in all the army air forces, he had proved by actual test that he could withstand more acceleration than any other man.
And he felt better now, healthier, more awake, more alive, more appreciative of life. But he didn't like planting potatoes. The army farm used the old, primitive method of bending down to place each seed-spud by hand ... By noon, he was sweating and tired.
The mid-day dinner was eaten in the field. Men squatted on the grass with their plates and cups. And the chatter took exactly the same form as on the day before, and the day before that, and so on back into infinity.
"The bombs . . ." "Hey, did you hear what that new guy said the other day, about somebody staggering out of an undamaged basement in New York City?" "Some character in the Middle West is saying that bombs could only have come from the Moon . . ." ". . . It's the Chinese, or I'll be dipped in . . ." "I'll put my money in Russia . . ." "Hell, if I was General Wayne in Berlin, I'd—"
The detail sergeant climbed lazily to his feet. "Okay, generals, up and at those potatoes, before the bugs move in "
The afterncxm lengthened. About four o'clock a car detached itself from the haze that hid the farm buildings five miles to the north. It came lazily along a dirt road, disappearing behind trees and into gullies, but always it came into view again, each time nearer, and obviously as puzzling to the detail sergeant as to the prisoners. The sergeant and his corporal walked slowly towards the road as the car approached, and stood waiting for it.
Up, down, up, down—The remaining guards kept things moving. The ploughs whuffed and thudded through the soil folding the fresh dirt over the seed potatoes. The horses champed and swished their tails. One of them noisily passed water. Up down, up, down—Morlake, sweating and breathing hard, alternated the rhythmic movement with glances at the nearing car and with his own thoughts.
Of the various articles and newpaper editorials that he had read in the farm library, only one, it seemed to Morlake, contained a sensible idea: The purpose of the bombing had not been to destroy the nation or conquer it, but simply to change its political character. With the vociferous, noisy, highly-educated, politically conscious people of America's world-cities out of the way, power would revert to the isolationist agricultural communities. Every capitalistic state in the world would benefit from the markets from which American industry would have to withdraw. And the dozen Communist states had their own reasons for appreciating the end of American influence in Europe, Africa and Asia.
If the enemy were not discovered for several years, it was likely that the elected representatives of cautious farm states would not dare to retaliate. Already, old prejudices were showing. The South reinstituted Jim Crow-ism. And there was no one to stop them.
Only three facts were known about the aggressor: He existed. He had left no clues in his own countries. And he had dropped his bombs straight down onto at least one city.
Unfortunately, the one man who believed the third item was Robert Morlake, and so far his sole thought was that the bombs must have been launched from the Moon . . . Morlake smiled wryly. He could imagine himself trying to convince other men that they must go to the Moon to find out the name of their enemy.
"Morlake!"
Morlake straightened slowly and turned. It was the corporal who had gone with the sergeant to the car. In the near distance, the machine was turning noisily around. Morlake saluted.
"Yessir?"
"You're wanted at the office. You weren't supposed to come out on a detail this morning. "Come along."
Five minutes later, Morlake knew that he was being presented with an opportunity, to escape.
What had happened Morlake discovered gradually. On the East Coast, General Mahan Clark, ranking staff officer surviving, declared martial law on the afternoon of the bombing. For three months he worked eighteen to twenty hours a day, to integrate the shattered armed forces and to organize the country. Railway, telephone and telegraph lines were repaired, and postal services resumed. Priorities and rationings were instituted, and an industrial census taken.
At the end of seventy days he had a picture of the country's resources. By the eightieth day, industries that needed each other's products were being coordinated on a vast scale. Troops patrolled cities and towns; a national curfew was put into effect; severe penalties were invoked-against mobs and mob leaders. Mass hangings of known Communists ceased. People with foreign accents were still being molested, but the cases grew more isolated daily.
From the eighty-fifth to the eighty-eighth day, the general took a holiday, during which time he played dice, ate, rested and slept, and listened only to emergency reports. Back at his headquarters, he moved into a new office.
"From now on," he told reporters, "I'll delegate all except a minimum of administrative work. I will devote my attention to picking up technical matters at the highest level. I'nt^n engineer, not a politician. What I want to know is, what the hell happened to our advanced stuff on the day of the bombing? Where is it, and who's alive that knows something about it?"
Late in the afternoon of the ninety-first day, he looked up bleary-eyed from a mass of papers, and called in an adjutant.
"There's a report here that S29A was scheduled for a 53
test flight on B-day. Was the test made? If so, what happened?"
Nobody knew until the following morning, when a lieutenant produced a report form Field R3 in Texas that the S29A had landed there a few hours after the destruction of its base, Wayne Field, ninety-two days before.
"Who the hell," said Clark, "is the misbegotten incompetent in charge of R3? Herrold? Oh!"
He subsided. He had once been under Herrold's command, and one observed certain amenities with former superiors. Later, though, he remarked to a ranking officer: "Herrold is an old fool. If a man under him has twice as much sense as another, he can't tell the difference. Drive, ability, leadership—he can't see them." He scowled. "Well, the best bet, I suppose, is to have the machine brought here. Inform Herrold, will you?"
The order for the plane caused a turmoil in the upper officialdom of Field R3. No one there could fly the ship.
"It's a special plane," an air-force major explained to General Herrold. "I remember that the man who was to test it had to go to the factory and learn all kinds of preliminary things before he was even allowed to warm her jets. The difficulties, I understand, derive from an intricate combination of rocket and jet drives."
"Oh!" said General Herrold. He thought about it for some minutes, then, "It wouldn't take you long," he suggested, "to learn to fly it, would it?"
The big young man shrugged. "I've been flying jets for years—" he began.
He was interrupted. "Uh, Major Bates," Herrold said, "the officer in question, Captain Robert Morlake, is in prison for a most heinous offence. It would be a grave setback for discipline if he were freed merely because he can fly a plane. Accordingly, I shall have him brought here, and no doubt he can teach you to fly the plane in a day or so. I want you to hold no conversations with him except on purely technical matters. You will carry a gun, and remember that the plane is more valuable than the man."
Bates saluted. "I'll handle him, sir," he said confidently.
The moment the S29A was high enough, Morlake zipped her over into a power dive. Behind him, Major Bates clawed for the nearest handhold;-,
"Hey!" he yelled. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Morlake wasn't sure. He had decided at the moment he was sentenced to virtual life imprisonment that he would not accept the verdict of the court. But exactly what was going to happen now he didn't know.
"Now, look, Morlake," Bates said in a voice that trembled slightly, "this is not going to get you anywhere. There's hardly any fuel in the tanks."
That was why he had wasted no time. Morlake said nothing, but sat blank-brained, waiting events. The day was clear as glass, the earth below plainly visible. It looked closer than it was.
"For God's Sake, man!" he other's nerve was tottering badly. "You swore you still stood by your oath of allegiance to the United States."
Morlake broke his silence. "I do."
"Then what—"
"I happen to be the only man who knows how to find the enemy. If I let myself stay locked up, I'd be violating my oath."
It sounded wild even to Morlake. It probably seemed pure insanity to Bates. And Morlake did not fool himself. He felt emotional about this. It was not reasoned, objective, what he was doing. He had had a three-month's taste of a life sentence of hard labor, and the passionate beliefs he held, his justification for this, were rooted as much in horror of his fate as in patriotism.
The bomb had come straight down. If, as the experts maintained, jfcouldn't have come from Earth, then it had come from'Tab Moon. Since that was not an idea to which Americans would take easily, it was up to the one man who knew the facts to persuade them.
His thought ended. He jumped, as he saw that the ground was really rushing towards him now. Behind him:
"Morlake, for God's sake, what do you want?"
"Your gun."
"Do you intend to kill me?"
"Don't be a fool. Hurry."
The earth was a huge valley, with rearing hills no longer looking so flat. Morlake felt the gun shoved past his shoulder. He snatched at it, shouting:
"Get back! Back, away from me!"
He knew that would be hard, like climbing the side of a house. But he waited while the sweating officer fumbled away from his seat. He could hear the man cursing with fear. And his own heart was pounding, his body rigid, when at last he came out of his dive, and began to climb towards the black regions of the stratosphere.
The stars were as bright as jewels before he leveled off and began his race with the diminishing supply of fuel. At the machine's most economical speed, thirty-five miles a minute, he sped through the darkness above an ocean of light.
He had two intermingled hopes: That he would be able to reach Kane Field and that he would find it deserted. The first hope was realized as the field swam into view in the distance. The second ended in dismay, as he saw that the entire area swarmed with men, with tractors, cranes, trucks and piles of material.
Morlake came down from behind a low hill some distance from the nearest group of workers.
"Get out!" he said to Bates.
"I'll see you hanged for this!" the big man snarled. But he got out. He did not move off immediately nor did Morlake. There was a prolonged silence, then:
"Tell them," Morlake said, "that I'm taking the plane because—because—" He paused. He felt a desperate desire to justify himself. He went on, "Tell them the top speed of Sadie is 67 miles a minute, and that she can climb 80 miles in 7 minutes plus, but tell them—" He hesitated, for if his words were given publicity, the unknown enemy would read them also— "tell them not to waste any more time building duplicates of Sadie. She isn't fast enough, she can't go high enough to reach the men who dropped the atomic bombs. And that's why I'm taking her. Because she's only a second-rater, and therefore worthless. Goodby."
He waved his hand. The vertical jets hissed with power.
The machine reared slowly, then the rockets fired several bursts, and the ground began to flow below like a tremendously swift river. Morlake headed over the hills, straight towards a place where there had once been pipes leading up from an underground fuel tank. Men were working there amid a tangle of twisted metal, but some order had already been established. He landed.
A foreman, a slim, rugged-looking young man, came over, and said, "Sure, we've got all the fuel you want. None of the tanks were busted by the earthquakes. Roll her over this way."
He was in no hurry, but talkative, curious. While his men attached piping to the tanks Morlake indicated, he asked pointed questions, which Morlake answered or evaded with a laugh. He knew how to talk to this kind of man, and the only trouble was that out of the corner of one eye, he saw Bates come into sight over the hill, and flag down a truck. The truck headed swiftly toward Morlake. When it was a third of a mile away, Morlake climbed into the plane.
"Thanks," he said.
The foreman waved cheerfully. "Give my regards to the general."
The truck was tooting its horns madly as the S29A became airborne.
Morlake's sense of exultation did not last long. He had enough fuel to fly around the earth. But his problem was to convince the people in authority that only by continuing the abandoned moon project could they ever again hope to be free of danger. Where, how would he start? What ought his pattern of action to be?
When he came right down to it, he hadn't really given that much (fcyppjht,
m
NINE BULLET-PROOF cars drew up before General Clark's headquarters one day some ten months after the bombing. There was a scurrying of men from the first four and the last four. Everywhere guns showed prominently, as the guards drew a cordon around the center car. As soon as the maneuvers were completed, a flunkey hurried forward and graciously opened the door of the big machine. Then he moved back.
Senator Tormey stepped out. He frowned as he saw that no one had yet come out of the general's office to meet him. Then as the general himself appeared in the doorway, a smile wreathed the handsome though heavy face, and he walked over and shook hands with the officer.
"Got all the Morlake stuff ready to show me?" he asked.
"All ready," Clark nodded. "I'd have invited you to see it before if I'd known you were interested."
Tormey took that as an apology. He had come a long way in the past four months. On B-day he had called for martial law, to last for six months, and had then found that the army was not prepared to turn the government over to him at the specified time. The available press and radio echoed with the senator's protests. He had no ambitions himself, but it was time for the government to be returned to civilians. As the ranking survivor of the federal congress, it was his duty—and so on. And so on and so on.
That was the beginning. And as army ruthlessness, as personified by tens of thousands of officers, had as usual alienated ninety per cent of the population, the senator was soon riding a crest of protest meetings, of which the army, in the person of General Clark, finally took cognizance.
The senator was invited to headquarters, and taken into the confidence of the military. He became a habitual member of General Clark's dice club, and his advice was sought on every important administrative problem. It was the army's bid for civilian support, and it seemed to work.
