“Or there won’t be any crews,” Vavilov replied. “Think of a big rocket, one like a V-2’s big brother. It’ll fly thousands of kilometers, not hundreds. It’ll be powerful enough to do that with an A-bomb on the head of its dick. And it’ll land within a hundred meters of where somebody aims it. As soon as they build it, you’ll be out of work.”
Boris hadn’t thought of the future of war in those terms till now. As soon as he did, he realized the submarine skipper was bound to be right. “Your job won’t last much longer than mine,” he said.
“You never can tell,” Vavilov said. “Mount those rockets on a submarine, and it’d pop up and launch them before the enemy realized it was in the neighborhood.”
“You could do that, couldn’t you?” Now the bomber pilot saw what might be the future of war spread out for him, almost as if in a religious vision. He shuddered. That future held even more deaths than he’d already dealt out.
The current state of the art faced them the next day. Alexei Vavilov had explained that the S-71, like its Type XXI ancestors, ran much quieter than earlier models. Enemy ships detected the boat anyhow, and attacked. Vavilov dove deep and sneaked away. Depth charges burst in the sea above the boat, close enough to be alarming but not to put it in serious peril.
“How’s this stack up against antiaircraft guns?” the skipper asked Boris in a low voice-silence was literally a matter of life and death.
“As far as I’m concerned, you can keep them both,” he whispered back.
Vavilov nodded. “About what I figured. This, this isn’t too bad. They don’t really know where we are, and the charges foul up their sonar something fierce. Slow and steady, and we’ll get away. Once we slide through the gap between Britain and Iceland, we’re just about home free.”
“I used that gap flying south to strike Washington,” Boris said.
“I’m not surprised. It’s there to be used,” Vavilov said. “We’ll get you back, and they can pin some more medals on you.”
“Who cares about medals? I just want to live through the war.”
“Well, so do I. Who doesn’t?” Vavilov said. “But when you serve the Soviet Union, you get what the rodina needs, not what you want.” It was Boris Gribkov’s turn to nod. He’d already worked that out for himself.
–
Whenever Aaron Finch wasn’t at work or asleep-and he slept as little as he could get away with, or rather less than that-he sat staring at the television set in his living room. TV in and around Los Angeles had gone cattywumpus when the A-bomb leveled downtown: it took out most of the local studios.
TV here was back in business now, and relayed from the East Coast to the West more horrific images of what atomic war did to great cities. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building both wrecked and toppled, Old Ironsides burnt to the waterline in Boston harbor, the glassy wasteland that had been the White House…
Seeing the damage to what had been national monuments was bad. Seeing and hearing about the damage to what had been people was worse. It had a horrid fascination to it, though. Aaron found he couldn’t look away.
The television reporters understood that only too well. A man with a jacket and tie would go up to a scorched or bandaged woman who’d somehow been pulled alive from a ravaged Manhattan apartment house and stick a microphone in her face. “Excuse me, Mrs. Torres,” he’d go, or it might be Mrs. Lombardi or Mrs. Callahan or Mrs. Rabinowicz, “but could you tell me what happened to you and what you’re feeling now?”
And Mrs. Torres or Mrs. Lombardi or Mrs. Callahan or Mrs. Rabinowicz would break down and sob and say something about her parents or husband or children or all of the above who hadn’t escaped or who had but who were hurt worse than she was.
Every so often, whichever network Aaron was watching at the moment would cut away to a makeshift headquarters in Philadelphia. A tired-looking reporter-sometimes a tired-looking reporter with a cigarette in his mouth-would give the latest estimates on numbers of the dead and amount of damage. Those amounted to hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars. Once Aaron knew that much, he knew everything he needed to know. Precision hardly mattered, though the reporters kept trying to provide it.
They also kept posting lists of Senators and Representatives known to be dead. Most Congressmen and -women had Washington digs not far from the gutted Capitol. Most of the time, that meant they could easily get to work. Now it meant that large numbers of them would never run for reelection, or for anything else, again.
Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy were both on the lists. So were Hubert Humphrey and Estes Kefauver. Averell Harriman was known to be dead, too; he’d been at a hotel in Manhattan that the falling Empire State Building drove into the ground like a sledgehammer hitting a railroad spike. George Marshall had been working late at the Pentagon. His diligence meant only that nothing of him was left to bury.
Of the Federal government’s leading organs, the Supreme Court came through best. Seven of the nine Justices were at a lawyers’ conclave in St. Louis when doom fell on the capital. Naturally, that was the branch of government with the least to do with setting policy or carrying it through.
Harry Truman still lived, too, but the more Aaron saw him the more he thought the President wished he didn’t. Truman looked suddenly, cruelly, old. Some of that might have been that he wasn’t bothering with makeup any more before he came in front of the cameras. More, though, had to come from the loss of his wife and daughter.
“I brought the United States into this war. God has given me my own full measure of the nation’s grief. The Psalms tell us that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. I bow before those judgments. I see nothing else that I can do. The Bible also says that vengeance is the Lord’s. There I must respectfully disagree with the Good Book.”
Listening to the way Truman came out with that, Aaron felt a chill run up his back. “I wouldn’t want to be in Joe Stalin’s shoes right this minute,” he said to Ruth.
“I wouldn’t want to be in Stalin’s shoes any time at all,” she answered. “They’d probably steal my toes.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Aaron said. “Or else paint ’em red. But you do that yourself, at least with the nails.”
“You’re crazier than I am,” Ruth said, not without admiration.
“I try,” Aaron said. But with the stricken President on the screen in front of him, he couldn’t stay lighthearted. “That poor man. He’s lost his family, and Pearl Harbor looks like a pinprick next to this. And somehow he’s got to go on.”
“We face a crisis in our system of government,” Truman said. “Neither house of Congress has enough members for a quorum. Governors may appoint Representatives, but Senators must be elected. All of that will take time, time we don’t have in the middle of a war. I’ve spoken by telephone with Chief Justice Vinson, who was in St. Louis when Washington was attacked. He assures me that I may continue carrying out policies I find necessary, both at home and abroad, even without Congressional approval, because of the national emergency. ‘We have to move forward,’ was the way he put it. He’s right-we do. And we will, with God’s help and with the help of the American people.”
His face disappeared from the TV. Ruth said, “He sounds like he wants to cry but won’t let himself, not where anybody can hear him do it.”
Aaron nodded. “You’re right. That’s just what he sounds like. I heard something in his voice was odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.” He sent her an admiring glance. “You’re as smart as you are pretty.”
“Break out the shovels, boys!” Ruth said. “It’s getting pretty deep tonight.” Aaron laughed, very fond of her in that moment.
Again, though, laughter couldn’t last. The picture cut away to a field-the reporter at the edge of the field said it was five miles west of New Egypt, New Jersey. Aaron had never heard of New Egypt, New Jersey, till that moment.