The Past Through Tomorrow Page 67

  “May I speak now?”

  “You have the floor.”

  The old man drew himself up and seemed to swell up. “I shall! Gentlemen… ladies… comrades! I have been in this for more than forty years—more years than that young pup has been alive. I have a brother, as good a man as I am, but we haven’t spoken in many years—because he is honestly devout in the established faith and he suspects me of heresy. Now this cub, with his bulging forehead and his whirling lights, would ‘condition’ my brother to make him ‘politically reliable.’”

  He stopped to gasp asthmatically and went on. “Free men aren’t ‘conditioned!’ Free men are free because they are ornery and cussed and prefer to arrive at their own prejudices in their own way—not have them spoonfed by a self-appointed mind tinkerer! We haven’t fought, our brethren haven’t bled and died, fust to change bosses, no matter how sweet their motives. I tell you, we got into the mess we are in through the efforts of those same mind tinkerers. They’ve studied for years how to saddle a man and ride him. They started with advertising and propaganda and things like that, and they perfected it to the point where what used to be simple, honest swindling such as any salesman might use became a mathematical science that left the ordinary man helpless.” He pointed his finger at Stokes. “I tell you that the American citizen needs no protection from anything—except the likes of him.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Stokes snapped, his voice rather high. “You wouldn’t turn high explosives over to children. That is what the franchise would be now.”

  “The American people are not children.”

  “They might as well be!—most of them.”

  Winters turned his eyes around the hall. “You see what I mean, friends? He’s as ready to play God as the Prophet was. I say give ‘em their freedom, give ’em their clear rights as men and free men and children under God. If they mess it up again, that’s their doing—but we have no right to operate on their minds.” He stopped and labored again to catch his breath; Stokes looked contemptuous. “We can’t make the world safe for children, nor for men either—and God didn’t appoint us to do it.”

  Novak said gently, “Are you through, Mr. Winters?”

  “I’m through.”

  “And you’ve had your say, too, Stokes. Sit down.”

  Then I had to leave, so I slipped out—and missed what must have been a really dramatic event if you care for that sort of thing; I don’t. Old Mr. Winters dropped dead about the time I must have been reaching the outer steps.

  Novak did not let them recess on that account. They passed two resolutions; that no citizen should be subjected to hypnosis or other psychomanipulative technique without his written consent, and that no religious or political test should be used for franchise in the first elections.

  I don’t know who was right. It certainly would have made life easier in the next few weeks if we had known that the people were solidly behind us. Temporarily rulers we might be, but we hardly dared go down a street in uniform at night in groups of less than six.

  Oh yes, we had uniforms now—almost enough for one for each of us, of the cheapest materials possible and in the standard army sizes, either too large or too small. Mine was too tight. They had been stockpiled across the Canadian border and we got our own people into uniform as quickly as possible. A handkerchief tied around the arm is not enough.

  Besides our own simple powder-blue dungarees there were several other uniforms around, volunteer brigades from outside the country and some native American outfits. The Mormon Battalions had their own togs and they were all growing beards as well—they went into action singing the long-forbidden “Come, Come, Ye Saints!” Utah was one state we didn’t have to worry about, now that the Saints had their beloved temple back. The Catholic Legion had its distinctive uniform, which was just as well since hardly any of them spoke English. The Onward Christian Soldiers dressed differently from us because they were a rival underground and rather resented our coup d’état—we should have waited. Joshua’s Army from the pariah reservations in the northwest (plus volunteers from all over the world) had a get-up that can only be described as outlandish.

  Huxley was in tactical command of them all. But it wasn’t an army; it was a rabble.

  The only thing that was hopeful about it was that the Prophet’s army had not been large, less than two hundred thousand, more of an internal police than an army, and of that number only a few had managed to make their way back to New Jerusalem to augment the Palace garrison. Besides that, since the United States had not had an external war for more than a century, the Prophet could not recruit veteran soldiers from the remaining devout.

  Neither could we. Most of our effectives were fit only to guard communication stations and other key installations around the country and we were hard put to find enough of them to do that. Mounting an assault on New Jerusalem called for scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  Which we did, while smothering under a load of paperwork that made the days in the old GHQ seem quiet and untroubled. I had thirty clerks under me now and I don’t know what half of them did. I spent a lot of my time just keeping Very Important Citizens who Wanted to Help from getting in to see Huxley.

  I recall one incident which, while not important, was not exactly routine and was important to me. My chief secretary came in with a very odd look on her face. “Colonel,” she said, “your twin brother is out there.”

  “Eh? I have no brothers.”

  “A Sergeant Reeves,” she amplified.

  He came in, we shook hands, and exchanged inanities. I really was glad to see him and told him about all the orders I had sold and then lost for him. I apologized, pled exigency of war and added, “I landed one new account in K.C.—Emery, Bird, Thayer. You might pick it up some day.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “I didn’t know you were a soldier.”

  “I’m not, really. But I’ve been practicing at it ever since my travel permit, uh—got itself lost.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. I’ve learned to handle a blaster and I’m pretty good with a grenade now. I’ve been okayed for Operation Strikeout.”

  “Eh? That code word is supposed to be confo.”

  “It is? Better tell the boys; they don’t seem to realize it. Anyhow, I’m in. Are you? Or shouldn’t I ask that?”

  I changed the subject. “How do you like soldiering? Planning to make a career of it?”

  “Oh, it’s all right—but not that all right. But what I came in to ask you, Colonel, are you?”

  “Eh?”

  “Are you staying in the army afterwards? I suppose you can make a good thing out of it, with your background—whereas they wouldn’t let me shine brightwork, once the fun is over. But if by any chance you aren’t, what do you think of the textile business?”

  I was startled but I answered, “Well, to tell the truth I rather enjoyed it—the selling end, at least.”

  “Good. I’m out of a job where I was, of course—and I’ve been seriously considering going in on my own, a jobbing business and manufacturers’ representative. I’ll need a partner. Eh?”

  I thought it over. “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I haven’t thought ahead any farther than Operation Strikeout. I might stay in the army—though soldiering does not have the appeal for me it once had… too many copies to make out and certify. But I don’t know. I think what I really want is simply to sit under my own vine and my own fig tree.”

  “ ‘—and none shall make you afraid,’” he finished. “A good thought. But there is no reason why you shouldn’t unroll a few bolts of cloth while you are sitting there. The fig crop might fail. Think it over.”

  “I will. I surely will.”

  15

  MAGGIE AND I were married the day before the assault on New Jerusalem. We had a twenty-minute honeymoon, holding hands on the fire escape outside my office, then I flew Huxley to the jump-off area. I was in the flagship during the attack. I had
asked permission to pilot a rocket-jet as my combat assignment but he had turned me down.

  “What for, John?” he had asked. “This isn’t going to be won in the air; it will be settled on the ground.”

  He was right, as usual. We had few ships and still fewer pilots who could be trusted. Some of the Prophet’s air force had been sabotaged on the ground; a goodly number had escaped to Canada and elsewhere and been interned. With what planes we had we had been bombing the Palace and Temple regularly, just to make them keep their heads down.

  But we could not hurt them seriously that way and both sides knew it. The Palace, ornate as it was above ground, was probably the strongest bombproof ever built. It had been designed to stand direct impact of a fission bomb without damage to personnel in its deepest tunnels—and that was where the Prophet was spending his days, one could be sure. Even the part above ground was relatively immune to ordinary HE bombs such as we were using.

  We weren’t using atomic bombs for three reasons: we didn’t have any; the United States was not known to have had any since the Johannesburg Treaty after World War III. We could not get any. We might have negotiated a couple of bombs from the Federation had we been conceded to be the legal government of the United States, but, while Canada had recognized us, Great Britain had not and neither had the North African Confederacy. Brazil was teetering; she had sent a charge d’affaires to St. Louis. But even if we had actually been admitted to the Federation, it is most unlikely that a mass weapon would have been granted for an internal disorder.

  Lastly, we would not have used one if it had been laid in our laps. No, we weren’t chicken hearted. But an atom bomb, laid directly on the Palace, would certainly have killed around a hundred thousand or more of our fellow citizens in the surrounding city—and almost as certainly would not have killed the Prophet.

  It was going to be necessary to go in and dig him out, like a holed-up badger.

  Rendezvous was made on the east shore of the Delaware River. At one minute after midnight we moved east, thirty-four land cruisers, thirteen of them modern battlewagons, the rest light cruisers and obsolescent craft—all that remained of the Prophet’s mighty East Mississippi fleet; the rest had been blown up by their former commanders. The heavy ships would be used to breach the walls; the light craft were escort to ten armored transports carrying the shock troops—five thousand fighting men hand-picked from the whole country. Some of them had had some military training in addition to what we had been able to give them in the past few weeks; all of them had taken part in the street fighting.

  We could hear the bombing at New Jerusalem as we started out, the dull Crrump!, the gooseflesh shiver of the concussion wave, the bass rumble of the ground sonic. The bombing had been continuous the last thirty-six hours; we hoped that no one in the Palace had had any sleep lately, whereas our troops had just finished twelve hours impressed sleep.

  None of the battlewagons had been designed as a flagship, so we had improvised a flag plot just abaft the conning tower, tearing out the long-range televisor to make room for the battle tracker and concentration plot. I was sweating over my jury-rigged tracker, hoping to Heaven that the makeshift shock absorbers would be good enough when we opened up. Crowded in behind me was a psychoperator and his crew of sensitives, eight women and a neurotic fourteen-year-old boy. In a pinch, each would have to handle four circuits. I wondered if they could do it. One thin blonde girl had a dry, chronic cough and a big thyroid patch on her throat.

  We lumbered along in approach zigzag. Huxley wandered from comm to plot and back again, calm as a snail, looking over my shoulder, reading despatches casually, watching the progress of the approach on the screens.

  The pile of despatches at my elbow grew. The Cherub had fouled her starboard tread; she had dropped out of formation but would rejoin in thirty minutes. Penoyer reported his columns extended and ready to deploy. Because of the acute shortage of command talent, we were using broad-command organization; Penoyer commanded the left wing and his own battlewagon; Huxley was force commander, right wing commander, and skipper of his own flagship.

  At 12:32 the televisors went out. The enemy had analyzed our frequency variation pattern, matched us and blown every tube in the circuits. It is theoretically impossible; they did it. At 12:37 radio went out.

  Huxley seemed unperturbed. “Shift to light-phone circuits,” was all he said.

  The communications officer had anticipated him; our audio circuits were now on infra-red beams, ship to ship. Huxley hung over my shoulder most of the next hour, watching the position plot lines grow. Presently he said, “I think we will deploy now, John. Some of those pilots aren’t any too steady; I think we will give them time to settle down in their positions before anything more happens.”

  I passed the order and cut my tracker out of circuit for fifteen minutes; it wasn’t built for so many variables at such high speeds and there was no sense in overloading it. Nineteen minutes later the last transport had checked in by phone, I made a preliminary set up, threw the starting switch and let the correction data feed in. For a couple of minutes I was very busy balancing data, my hands moving among knobs and keys; then the machine was satisfied with its own predictions and I reported, “Tracking, sir.”

  Huxley leaned over my shoulder. The line was a little ragged but I was proud of them—some of those pilots had been freighter jacks not four weeks earlier.

  At three a.m. we made the precautionary signal, “Coming on the range,” and our own turret rumbled as they loaded it.

  At 3:31 Huxley gave the command, “Concentration Plan III, open fire.”

  Our own big fellow let go. The first shot shook loose a lot of dust and made my eyes water. The craft rolled back on her treads to the recoil and I nearly fell out of my saddle. I had never ridden one of the big booster guns before and I hadn’t expected the long recoil. Our big rifle had secondary firing chambers up the barrel, electronically synchronized with the progress of the shell; it maintained max pressure all the way up and gave a much higher muzzle velocity and striking power. It also gave a bone-shaking recoil. But the second time I was ready for it.

  Huxley was at the periscope between shots, trying to observe the effects of our fire. New Jerusalem had answered our fire but did not yet have us ranged. We had the advantage of firing at a stationary target whose range we knew to the meter; on the other hand even a heavy land cruiser could not show the weight of armor that underlay the Palace’s gingerbread.

  Huxley turned from the scope and remarked, “Smoke, John.”

  I turned to the communications officer. “Stand by, sensitives; all craft!”

  The order never got through. Even as I gave it the comm officer reported loss of contact. But the psychoperator was already busy and I knew the same thing was happening in all the ships; it was normal casualty routine.

  Of our nine sensitives, three—the boy and two women—were wide-awakes; the other six were hypnos. The technician hooked the boy first to one in Penoyer’s craft. The kid established rapport almost at once and Penoyer got through a report:

  “BLANKETED BY SMOKE. HAVE SHIFTED LEFT WING TO PSYCHO. WHAT HOOK-UP? —PENOYER.”

  I answered, “Pass down the line.” Doctrine permitted two types of telepathic hook-up: relay, in which a message would be passed along until it reached its destination; and command mesh, in which there was direct hookup from flag to each ship under that flag, plus ship-to-ship for adjacent units. In the first case each sensitive carries just one circuit, that is, is in rapport with just one other telepath; in the second they might have to handle as many as four circuits. I wanted to hold off overloading them as long as possible.

  The technician tied the other two wide-awakes into our flanking craft in the battle line, then turned his attention to the hypnos. Four of them required hypodermics; the other two went under in response to suggestion. Shortly we were hooked up with the transports and second-line craft, as well as with the bombers and the rocket-jet spotting the fall of shot. Th
e jet reported visibility zero and complained that he wasn’t getting anything intelligible by radar. I told him to stand by; the morning breeze might clear the smoke away presently.

  We weren’t dependent on him anyway; we knew our positions almost to the inch. We had taken departure from a benchmark and our deadreckoning was checked for the whole battle line every time any skipper identified a map-shown landmark. In addition, the deadreckoners of a tread-driven cruiser are surprisingly accurate; the treads literally measure every yard of ground as they pass over it and a little differential gadget compares the treads and keeps just as careful track of direction. The smoke did not really bother us and we could keep on firing accurately even if radar failed. On the other hand, if the Palace commander kept us in smoke he himself was entirely dependent on radar.

  His radar was apparently working; shot was falling all around us. We hadn’t been hit yet but we could feel the concussions when shells struck near us and some of the reports were not cheerful. Penoyer reported the Martyr hit; the shell had ruptured her starboard engine room. The skipper had tried to cross connect and proceed at half speed, but the gear train was jammed; she was definitely out of action. The Archangel had overheated her gun. She was in formation but would be harmless until the turret captain got her straightened out.

  Huxley ordered them to shift to Formation E, a plan which used changing speeds and apparently random courses—carefully planned to avoid collision between ships, however. It was intended to confuse the fire control of the enemy.

  At 4:11 Huxley sent the bombers back to base. We were inside the city now and the walls of the Palace lay just beyond—too close to target for comfort; we didn’t want to lose ships to our own bombs.

  At 4:17 we were struck. The port upper tread casing was split, the barbette was damaged so that the gun would no longer train, and the conning tower was cracked along its after surface. The pilot was killed at his controls.

  I helped the psychoperator get gas helmets over the heads of the hypnos. Huxley picked himself up off the floor plates, put on his own helmet, and studied the set-up on my battle tracker, frozen at the instant the shell hit us.