Although the normal means of national communication were under tight censorship and control, a changing attitude became visible throughout the whole country. Without fanfare or announcement, Marc Orberg recordings quietly disappeared from the market. Where it had once been impossible to walk through Times Square without hearing his voice projected at the passersby from at least a half dozen record stores, now there was no indication that he had ever appeared on the scene. The blow-up posters of him, life size and larger, were no longer to be found. A single Village shop, owned by a heteroclite young man tightly shrouded in his own ideas, displayed a window streamer that read: want orberg records? we got ’em. The banner had been up only two days when the store was broken into at night by persons unknown and the stock was badly vandalized. Less than two weeks after that unpublicized event no Orberg songs could be found on the market, performed by himself or anyone else. None were played on the air.
In the Negro areas of many of the major cities the common sign free wattles became much less conspicuous. Negro Americans ranging from the affluent to those on welfare gradually shifted the focus of their interest from their own problems to those of the nation as a whole. Militants who had prophesied that the coming of the enemy would mean a new stature and dignity for the black man were faced with a reality that did not conform to their predictions. In sharp contrast the rural areas, particularly in the Midwest, were hard hit by the abrupt ending of the farm programs which had been in operation for many years. Price supports and many other government aids to agriculture were terminated without notice, and with the termination went a hard warning that no excuses would be accepted in lieu of full production.
Not much more than three months after the President’s capitulation there werq, more than a million of the enemy within the continental United States; one for every two hundred Americans. The long-held private lands in Hawaii, which had been controlled with great determination by the five pioneer families, were taken over, but none of the acreage was made available to the land-hungry residents who had long hoped to have the monopoly broken.
Many announcements were made; rules were laid down and enforcement became arbitrary. There was no avenue of appeal, no recourse except obedience — immediate and complete. Of all of the pronouncements made, the one which caused the greatest stir concerned the change of language. As soon as enough teachers could be brought over, the American public was told, instruction would begin immediately in the enemy’s language. Five years would be allowed for the transition; after that all use of the English language would cease except for authorized scholastic programs and necessary research projects. All newspapers, magazines, books, and other means of printed communication would have to be changed over. No one, regardless of age, would be excused from studying the new required language. “It must be now remembered,” the official announcement had said, “that currently and henceforth we own the United States by right of conquest. It will soon cease to exist as a separate nation.”
An additional problem appeared, this one without any announcement whatever, when it was discovered that the supply of major household appliances was rapidly diminishing. Increasingly urgent calls from wholesalers to their sources of supply revealed that almost all of the available production was being shipped overseas. The cost was paid and no more, but production was ordered kept at a maximum level. One of the largest national manufacturers finally got a statement from the controlling enemy office: it said tersely that there was a greater need for comforts in the victorious nation which had sacrificed so much in order to make military triumph possible. America had too much already, and the situation could be expected to last for some years.
The weeks of the occupation progressed without any sign that complete surrender had left any resource out of the enemy’s hands. There was not a family which did not feel the pressure, or inwardly cringe under the steady progression of pieces of bad news, one after the other, without any mitigation or evidence of even a ray of hope. The massacre of the college students was known everywhere, and in many areas hopeful little groups who had planned to establish an opposition framework realized the hopelessness of their position. There were millions who cursed the men in Washington who had allowed this to come about; a prime target of this invective was Senator Solomon Fitzhugh, the renowned dove who more than any other single individual had cut the ground out from under the armed forces and sapped the morale of the entire country. A famous sentence was quoted uncounted times in bitter hindsight; it became the password of those who hoped that someday they could do something. It appeared on handbills printed and distributed under the noses of the occupying forces by men who knew that capture meant immediate certain death. Long forgotten in the wave of isolationism brought on by the unpopular Vietnam war, it came back too late to help in the existing crisis. It became instead a bitter reminder to be recalled again if freedom ever returned, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
The sun had been in the sky for only an hour or so when a nondescript car turned off the highway in western Colorado and headed up a dirt road toward the open country. The two hunters it carried had little to say to each other as the car went up one grade and down another; instead they kept a careful watch looking for evidences of wildlife and for any signs of movement in their range of vision. After they had driven a quarter hour over the steadily narrowing road, they saw on their left the boarded-up entrance to an old mine shaft. Someone had taken the trouble to string a few strands of used barbed wire around the barricade to prevent stray cattle from falling to their deaths down the abandoned opening. A badly weather-beaten sign warned any human passersby that the site was dangerous. The hunter who was driving took careful note of the old mine, but said nothing; he continued on up the road until it terminated, for all practical purposes, a half mile farther on. There he pulled the car off into the brush and set the parking brake.
The security personnel who guarded the underground headquarters of Thomas Jefferson had had the car under observation almost from the time that it had left the highway. As the vehicle had passed the concealed entrance the occupants had been photographed by precision automatic equipment utilizing a classified film which yielded ultra-sharp images almost totally devoid of grain. As the two hunters, rifles in hand, began to walk back down the road toward the old mine shaft, their progress was followed. At the same time other sensitive equipment in nearby concealed locations swept the area to determine if any other persons were within visual or audible range. The findings were negative.
When the first of the hunters reached the barbed wire at the head of the shaft, he laid his left hand on one strand and took hold of another, three feet from it, with his right. Almost at once he felt a slight tingle of electricity, the invisible acknowledgment that he had passed surveillance and that the surrounding area was clear. A half minute later there was no sign of the hunters; the old car that they had been driving was all but invisible in the brush where it had been left.
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Prichard, the search and rescue pilot, received them in his office and immediately offered coffee. His manner was cordial but preoccupied; all of the members of the First Team were under heavy strain as the action date for Low Blow drew closer. It was necessary to provide for every possible contingency well in advance, because everything had to go on the first try. If it did not, for any reason whatsoever, the whole Thomas Jefferson operation would be dealt a body blow. The possibility of an oversight, no matter how slight, haunted everyone concerned and kept them rechecking and re-rechecking until the tension became almost intolerable.