“Three possibilities face the United States of America. The first is—surrender.”
A heart-rending “No!” was wreathed in low-toned murmurs of rejection.
“The enemy,” the President went on grimly, “has offered terms.”
That, too, stirred the audience.
“We have learned the terms by radio, through neutrals. They are quite simple. We are to surrender all atomic weapons, to dismantle all atomic plants and works, to allow enough of the enemy free access within this nation to ensure that the status is permanent. There will be no occupation, no tribute.”
His eyes went over the room. Some of the haggard faces were stony. But some glowed with hope.
“A great predecessor of mine, in an hour of trial, once called an example of wanton assault ‘a day that will live in infamy.’ No phrase, in any language, can be made to speak the evil now done to this nation. I shall not try to give you any condemnatory words. But, let me point out, the offered terms seem reasonable. It is only a seeming. If we grant those terms, nothing—ever afterward—can prevent the enemy from working upon us whatever his further will may be.
We know his philosophy. We bleed now under his treachery. Disarmed, we shall surely soon be enslaved. But surrender is one possibility.
“Another—is to continue the assault we are making. I assure you, the foe is suffering grievously. But his cities are so few, his dispersion of populace is so great, that our gallant Air Force cannot readily drive his people into the general panic that has uprooted this nation and destroyed its social organization. In time our effort might be equally effective. We must inquire if we have the time. The bombs, the planes, the determined men to fly them, we do have. But let us suppose the effort took thirty days. Meanwhile, other assaults would probably be launched against us. Our citizens would continue to battle one another, freeze, soon die of hunger, go mad.
In the end, there might remain in both nations that utter wreckage of civilization which the few predicted for so long, and the many refused to believe. But that is a second possibility.”
“The third?” a woman’s voice called. “What’s the third?”
For a moment, the new President reverted to his old habit as Speaker of the House. “The lady from Massachusetts asks the third. I’ll explain as best I am able. I am not a scientist. The military will amplify.”
He frowned, cleared his throat. “First, I must state that my late, great predecessor, though he worked hopefully for peace, somewhat feared a situation like this. He feared, as did his Chiefs of Staff, the very danger we have encountered. He, with them, prepared a threat of their own—of our own—a dreadful threat, intended only for use as a menace. You are familiar with the Nautilus….”
The silence in the old room was absolute.
“…the first of the atomic-powered submarines. As the ‘peace’ negotiations reached a high degree of intensity, it was felt in the—the”—he stumbled—“White House that the enemy was probably sincere. But the possibility remained that such negotiations might be the immediate precursor to the disaster that now is fact. Or to the threat of it. Consequently the Nautilus was drydocked and secretly reconverted. She is still a ship, still a submarine, still atomically driven, but she is also a bomb. She contains, now, the largest hydrogen bomb ever assembled, and around it and in her sides, replacing armor, and in her keel, for ballast, is the element cobalt with other readily radioactivated elements. She stands, this day, in the North Sea, awaiting orders. She could be sent swiftly into the Baltic. She could approach the ways to the enemy, dive to bottom, and explode herself.”
“The crew…?” someone interrupted.
Gates said nothing. His long, thin face turned toward the questioner and his hazel eyes burned into the man. Then, at last, he spoke again.
“This is one of the greater-than-super weapons mentioned at least as far back as the Truman Administration. Its exact effect is not known and cannot be calculated. A few scientists fear its detonation at sea bottom might actually set up the planetary chain reaction. Most say not.
I believe the latter. It would, however, unquestionably devastate the enemy’s nation, obliterate perhaps two-thirds of his people and leave hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of square miles of enemy land radioactive, deadly even to vegetation. It might, according to the uncertain vicissitudes of weather, of high-altitude winds, of the so-called jet of air which waveringly girdles our planet, transport a large amount of this lethal material across the Pacific and conceivably leave here a lesser but real train of death and sickness, sterility, misery and additional fear. That is an indeterminate risk involved in the weapon’s use. It is our third possibility—the only alternative I can offer to a surrender that would surely become unconditional with passing time, or to a continuation of the existing holocaust with present weapons. I shall have a few of the military men and scientists speak to you….”
An hour and a quarter later, it was voted to order the Nautilus to proceed—and to demolish herself, and the foe.
16
They could have seen it from the planets.
On Mars, if there are naked eyes, they could have seen it without other aid.
On that Christmas night, the Baltic Sea erupted. There was no warning. The faint signals the Nautilus received were not intercepted by the beleaguered but seemingly victorious Reds.
She penetrated the Gulf of Finland, dove to bottom and her skipper, summoning the men, prayed, Bashed a last word, and touched a small button installed some hours before on the table directly below the periscope. The rays, the temperatures, vaporized Finland’s Gulf in a split part of an instant. The sea’s bottom was melted. The Light reached out into the Universe.
Finland was not. Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, they were not. Kronstadt melted, Leningrad.
The blast kicked up the ashes that once had been Moscow, collected the burning environs and pulverized them and hurled their dust at the Urals. In the ensuing dark, a Thing swelled above the western edge of Russia, alight, alive, of a size to bulge beyond the last particles of earth’s air.
On the wind currents it came forward, forward across the north-sloping plains, a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles, and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land that night, and the day after, and the next. It thinned, over Siberia, thinned and spread until it was no longer blinding, till men could no longer see it or smell it or taste it. But still, where it rolled, day or night, they died.
The farther it surged from the reshaped Finnish Gulf, where the sea had come sparkling back, the longer men took to perish. But they perished. The radiation-emitting particles filled their lungs, they contaminated their food, they polluted . their water and could not be filtered out.
Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened and perished in a day, a week, two weeks—men and women and children, all of them, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. Wherever they took refuge, men still perished. On the high Urals in the terrible cold. In the deepest mines, the steam-spitting darkness. There was no refuge from the death; it took them all, the birds of arctic winter, the persistent insects which had survived geological ages, the bacteria—all.
Surrender of those who survived, the southern dwellers of the nation, was delayed because they could not find who should make the offer; they did not care how abject the terms might be. But days passed. A week. Two weeks. And the message winged from Tiflis. It was over. The last war was finished.