10:55 PM, E.S.T.: Satellite stations observe great nuclear explosions in China and Tibet.
11:03 PM, E.S.T.: Heavily loaded munitions barges exploded near North Sea dikes of Holland; dikes breached, 1800 square miles of reclaimed land flooded out..
And so on. The incidents were countless. But before long, before even the C.I.A. had finished the first play-through of the tapes, before their successors in the task identified Disht dvornyet ilgt as a Ukrainian dialect rendering of, My God, it works! before all this, one fact was already apparent. There were many incidents scattered around the world, but not one of them took place in Russia itself.
Warsaw was ablaze, China pockmarked with blasts, East Berlin demolished along with its western sector, in eight rounds fired from a U.S. Army nuclear cannon. But the U.S.S.R. had not suffered at all, as far as could be told by the prying eyes in orbit; and that fact was reason enough for it to suffer very greatly very soon.
Within minutes of this discovery what remained of the military strength of the Western world was roaring through airless space toward the most likely targets of the East.
One unscathed missile base in Alaska completed a full shoot, seven missiles with fusion warheads. The three American bases that survived at all in the Mediterranean fired what they had. Even Britain, which had already watched the fire-tails of the American missiles departing on suicide missions, managed to resurrect its own two prototype Blue Streaks from their racks, where they had moldered since the cancellation of the British missile program.
One of these museum-pieces destroyed itself in launching, but the other chugged painfully across the sky, the tortoise following the flight of the hares. It arrived a full half-hour after the newer, hotter missiles. It might as well not have bothered. There was not much left to destroy.
It was fortunate for the Communists that most of the Western arsenal had already spent itself in suicide. What was left wiped out Moscow, Leningrad and nine other cities. It was even fortunate for the whole world, for this was the Apocalypse they had dreaded, every possible nuclear weapon committed. But the circumstances were such hasty orders, often at once recalled; confusion; panic that most were unfused, many others merely tore great craters in the quickly healing surface of the sea. The fallout was murderous but spotty.
And the conventional forces invading Russia found nothing to fight. The Russians were as confused as they. There were not many survivors of the very top brass, and no one seemed to know just what had happened.
Was the Secretary of the C.P., U.S.S.R. behind that terrible brief agony? As he was dead before it was over, there was no way to tell. More than a quarter of a billion lives went into mushroom-shaped clouds, and nearly half of them were Russian, Latvian, Tatar and Kalmuck. The Peace Commission squabbled for a month, until the breakdown of a communications cut them off from their governments and each other; and in that way, for a time, there was peace.
This was the sort of peace that was left, thought Chandler looking around at the queer faces and queerer surroundings, the peace of medieval baronies, cut off from the world, untouched where the rain of fallout had passed by but hardly civilized any more. Even his own home town, trying to take his life in a form of law, reduced at last to torture and exile to cast him out, was not the civilization he had grown up in but something new and ugly.
There was a great deal of talk he did not understand because he could not quite hear it, though they looked at him. Then Guy, with the gun, led him up to the front of the room. They had constructed an improvised platform out of plywood panels resting on squat, heavy boxes that looked like empty ammunition crates. On the dais was a dentist's chair, bolted to the plywood; and in the chair, strapped in, baby spotlights on steel-tube frames glaring on her, was a girl. She looked at Chandler with regretting eyes but did not speak.
"Stranger, get up there," said Guy, prodding him from behind, and Chandler took a plain wooden chair next to the girl.
"People of Orphalese," cried the teen-age cutie named Meggie, "we have two more brands to save from the imps!"
The men and women in the audience cackled or shrilled, "Save them. Save them!"
They all had a look of invisible uniforms. Chandler saw, like baseball players in the lobby of a hotel or soldiers in a diner outside the gate of their post; they were all of a type. Their type was something strange. Some were tall, some short; there were old, fat, lean and young among them; but they all wore about them a look of glowing excitement, muted by an aura of suffering and pain. They wore, in a word, the look of bigots.
The bound girl was not one of them. She might have been twenty years old or as much as thirty. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell; she wore no makeup, her hair strung raggedly to her neck, and her face was drawn into a tight, lean line. It was her eyes that were alive. She saw Chandler and she was sorry for him. And he saw, as he turned to look at her, that she was manacled to the dentist's chair.
"People of Orphalese," chanted Guy, standing behind Chandler with the muzzle of the gun against his neck, "the meeting of the Orphalese Self-Preservation Society will now come to order." There was an approving, hungry murmur from the audience.
"Well, people of Orphalese," Guy went on in his sing-song, "the agenda for the day is first the salvation of we Orphalese on McGuire's Mountain."
("All saved, all of us saved," rolled a murmur from the congregation.) A lean, red-headed man bounded to the platform and fussed with the stand of spotlights, turning one of them full on Chandler.
"People of Orphalese, as we are saved, do I have your consent to pass on and proceed to the next order of business?"
("Consent, consent, consent," rolled the echo.)
"And then the second item of business is to welcome and bring to grace these two newly found and adopted souls."
The congregation shouted variously: "Bring them to grace! Save them from the imps! Keep Orphalese from the taint of the beast!"
Evidently Guy was satisfied. He nodded and became more chatty. "Okay, people of Orphalese, let's get down to it. We got two new ones, like I say. Their spirits have gone wandering on the wind, or anyway one of them has, and you all know the et cetera. They have committed a wrong unto others and therefore unto themselves. Herself, I mean.
Course, the other one could have a flame spirit in him too." He stared severely at Chandler. "Boys, keep an eye on him, why don't you?" he said to two men in the front row, surrendering his gun. "Meggie, you tell about the female one."
The teen-aged girl stepped forward and said, in a conversational tone but with modest pride, "People of Orphalese, well, I was walking down the cut and I heard this car coming. Well, I was pretty surprised, you know. I had to figure what to do. You all know what the trouble is with cars."
"The imps!" cried a woman of forty with a face like a catfish.
The girl nodded. "Most prob'ly. Well, I mean, people of Orphalese, well, I was by the switchback where we keep the chewy-freeze hid, so I just waited till I saw it slowing down for the curve, me out of sight, you know and I rolled the chewy-freeze out nice and it caught the wheels. Right over!" she cried gleefully. "Off the shoulder, people of Orph'lese, and into the ditch and over, and I didn't give it a chance to bum. I cut the switch and I had her! I put a knife into her back, just a little, about a quarter of an inch, maybe. Her pain was the breakin' of the shell that enclosed her understanding, like it says. I figured she was all right then because she yelled but I brought her along that way. Then Guy took care of her until we got the synod. Oh," she remembered, "and her tongue staggered a little without purpose while he was putting it on, didn't it, Guy?" The bearded man nodded, grinning, and lifted up the girl's foot.