Then again, maybe it didn’t matter. American fighters-prop jobs, left over from the last war-screamed by at just above treetop height, pounding the place with rockets and heavy machine guns. Tibor had never faced a couple of trucks’ worth of Katyushas. He no longer felt he was missing anything.
Several of the trucks that had brought the Hungarians here were ablaze, sending their smoke screens up into the sky now that smoke screens didn’t matter any more. They’d gone under camouflage netting as soon as the soldiers piled out of them. The enemy flyers might not have seen them, but they’d hit them just the same. Tibor did hope the drivers had got out.
Someone behind him shouted something: guttural consonants mired in palatalized nouns. Tibor recognized Russian without being able to speak it. He looked around and found himself on the receiving end of a Red Army major’s glare. Saluting, he said, “Sorry, sir. I don’t speak your language”-in Magyar. That didn’t make the major any happier. Tibor called, “Sergeant, there’s a Soviet officer here.” He didn’t say what he thought of the Soviet officer. The bastard might understand more than he let on. Trusting Russians didn’t come naturally to their fraternal socialist allies.
Sergeant Gergely climbed out of his hole and walked over. Saluting the Russian, he said, “What do you need, sir?” He also used his own language. The major gave forth with something impassioned. Gergely only shrugged. Scowling, the Russian switched to German to order everyone into the front line at once. Tibor followed that only too well. Gergely also must have. But he just spread his hands and stuck to Magyar: “Sorry, sir. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
The Red Army major scorched him up one side and down the other. But he couldn’t prove the Hungarians were playing dumb. He stormed off, his face as red with rage as a baboon’s backside. “Good job, Sergeant!” Tibor exclaimed. “They won’t throw us into the sausage machine yet.”
“Yet. Yeah.” Gergely nodded. “Gimme a cigarette, will you? I stalled him this time, but they’ll use us up pretty damn quick any which way.”
–
During the Twenties and Thirties, Harry Truman had read a good deal of science fiction and fantasy. He’d enjoyed the stories; they’d kept his mind loose and elastic. When even ordinary reality could stretch and twist like taffy, a loose, elastic mind wasn’t the least useful thing to have. He sometimes wished he had time for that kind of reading now.
Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought sourly. Reports of the disaster the Russians had visited on the West Coast (and even on Maine) clogged his Oval Office desk. He hadn’t dreamt Stalin could hit that hard. Yes, the USSR had been paid back in spades, doubled and redoubled. That didn’t mean the United States was in anything like great shape.
But even as Truman was reading about the devastation in Los Angeles, science fiction and fantasy bubbled back into his thoughts. Somebody’d said Do not call up that which you cannot put down. He thought it was H.P. Lovecraft, but he wasn’t sure. Lovecraft hadn’t been one of his favorites.
That might have been because Lovecraft was a strange, gloomy New Englander, not at all in tune with Truman’s Midwestern optimism. Lovecraft’s style was overblown and ornate, too: out of step with the straightforward prose that flowed from Truman’s pen. But strange and gloomy or not, overblown and ornate or not, old H.P. had hit that particular nail square on the head.
Do not call up that which you cannot put down. In the Second World War, it hadn’t mattered. The USA could go ahead and incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki and lose no sleep afterwards. The Japanese were already on the ropes, even without the A-bombs. No matter how much they wanted to, they couldn’t hit back. All they could do was endure the unendurable and surrender.
Well, Red China couldn’t hit back, either, when the United States threw those Manchurian cities onto the pyre. The Red Chinese couldn’t, and neither Truman nor Douglas MacArthur had believed that Joe Stalin would. Didn’t he see he was in over his head against America?
Whether he did or not, he must have decided he didn’t care. If he couldn’t avenge his biggest and most important ally, who would want an alliance with him afterwards? He had an almost Oriental sense of face. So he’d dropped bombs in Europe, and so….
And so now his country and Truman’s, and Western Europe and his satellites and Red China as well, wouldn’t be the same for years, decades, maybe centuries to come. No matter who wound up dominating Korea, no matter how the European land war turned out, nobody would come out better off than he’d been going in. Nobody.
Do not call up that which you cannot put down. The really terrifying thing was, it could have been worse. And, had the war waited another few years-maybe two, maybe four-it would have been worse. Incalculably worse.
No, not quite incalculably. The physicists who were hard at work on the next generation of bombs worked those calculations as a matter of course. They had to. That was part of their job. Making the calculations mean anything to somebody who didn’t take a slide rule to bed instead of a Teddy bear, though…That was a different story.
The biggest ordinary bombs the limeys dropped from one of their Lancasters in the last war weighed ten tons. The A-bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended the last war packed the punch of ten or twenty thousand tons of TNT. So did the ones both sides were throwing around now. That was a hell of a big step up, the equivalent of putting on thousandfold boots.
And another step, every bit as big, lay right around the corner. So the boys with the high foreheads and the funny haircuts kept telling Truman, anyhow. The kinks lay in the engineering, not the physics. And the engineering, they assured him, was the easy part.
They’d convinced him. He believed them, even when believing them scared the living bejesus out of him. Because they talked glibly about bombs with blasts worth not thousands but millions of tons of high explosives.
What could you do with a few bombs like that? Blow not just a city but a medium-sized state clean off the map. Or, if you happened to drop them in Europe instead, the map might be missing a country or two.
Truman muttered to himself. He knew Senators who kept a bottle of bourbon-or, if they came from the Northeast, a bottle of scotch-in their desk drawers to lubricate the thought processes and shield them from the slings and arrows of outrageous constituents. He’d never been a teetotaler, not even during Prohibition. But he’d always been clear that he had hold of the bottle. The bottle didn’t have hold of him.
He’d always been clear about that, and he’d always been proud of it, too. Now he felt like getting blotto. He was presiding over a disaster, a catastrophe, a horror beyond the eldritch dreams of H.P. Lovecraft. The world wouldn’t recover for years and years, if it ever did.
And yet…And yet…The USA and the USSR were only doing the best, or the worst, they could with the halfway tools they had right this minute. Give them a few of the scientists’ new toys, and what would they come up with?
The end of the world. That was how it looked to the President. Life would go on after this war, however it turned out. After the next one, if they used the new goodies?
Einstein had said, or was supposed to have said, that he didn’t know what the weapons of World War III would be like, but that he did know what they would use to fight World War IV. Rocks. What worried Truman was, Einstein might have been looking on the bright side of things.
Had the bushy-haired physicist really said anything so cynical? It didn’t sound like him. Truman was tempted to pick up the phone, call the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and find out. When you were President of the United States, you could satisfy whatever whim you happened to have.