Not This August (12 page)

A panel truck pulled into the driveway while they were eating spanish rice, the main dish. It proceeded on to the back of the house, but Justin had time to read the lettering on it as it passed the window.

“ ‘Department of Agriculture,’ ” he said to Betsy. “And in smaller letters, ‘Fish and Wild Life Survey.’ ”

She was blank-faced. “Go into the library when you’ve finished,” she said. “Mrs. Norse and I will clear things up.” He found he was gobbling his spanish rice and deliberately slowed down. Then the stuff balled in his mouth so he couldn’t swallow.

“Excuse me,” he said, gulping coffee and standing. He went into the library.

There were three men, all strangers, all middle-aged. One was the lean little gnome type, one was heavy and spectacularly bald, one was a placid ox.

Mr. Ox said, “Put up your hands,” and searched him. Mr. Egg said, “I hope you don’t mind. We have to ask you some questions,” and Justin knew at once who he was—The Honorable James Buchanan Wagner, junior senator from Michigan, nicknamed “Curly.” He had shaved his head, and for safety’s sake really ought to do something about his superb voice. Though perhaps, Justin thought, he as a commercial artist was a lot quicker than most to fill in the outlines of that bushy head.

Mr. Gnome said, “Sit down, please,” and opened a brief case. He laid a light tray and variously colored tiles before Justin and said: “Put them in the tray any way you like.” Justin built up a nice design for the man in about a minute and sat back.

Mr. Gnome said: “Look at this picture and tell me what it’s about.” The picture was very confusing, but after a moment Justin realized that it was a drawing of one man telling another man something, apparently a secret from their furtive expressions. He said so.

“Now what about this one?”

“Two men fighting. The big one’s losing the fight.”

“This one?”

“A horse—just a horse.”

There were about fifty pictures. When they were run through, Mr. Gnome switched to ink-blot cards, which Justin identified as spiders, women, mirrors, and whatever else they looked like to him.

Every now and then Justin heard Senator Wagner distinctly mutter, “Fiddle-faddle,” which did not surprise him. The senator, known as a man who saw his duty to the United States and did it, was nevertheless not distinguished for broad-gaged, liberal leadership.

There followed word-association lists. Not only did the gnome hold a stop watch, but Mr. Ox calmly donned a stethoscope and put the button on Justin’s wrist.

Then they seemed to be finished. The gnome told the senator: “I guess he’s all right. Yes—he’s either smarter than I am or he’s all right. Sincere, not too neurotic, a reasonably effective person. For what it’s worth, Senator, I vouch for—”

The senator said angrily: “No names!”

Mr. Gnome shrugged. “His reaction time on ‘Congress,’ ‘hair,’ ‘wagon’—he recognized you all right.”

“Very well, Doctor,” rumbled the celebrated voice. “Mr. Justin, I wish to show you something.” The senator turned down his collar on the right. He was still bitterly hostile—fundamentally scared, Justin realized, with two kinds of fear. There was the built-in animal fear of pain, mutilation, death. There was the abstract fear that one wrong decision at any stage of this dangerous game would blow sky-high any hope that America would rise again.

The senator was showing Justin a razor blade taped inside his collar. “You can seem merely to be easing your collar, Mr. Justin. With one swift move, however—
so
—you can slash your carotid artery beyond repair. Within seconds you will be dead. Your orders are not to be taken alive,” the senator said. And he added grimly: “My psychologist friend indicates that you have sufficient moral fiber to carry them out.” He tossed a blade and an inch of tape at Justin. “Put them on. Then tell your story. General Hollerith assures us through Miss Cardew that it is of the utmost importance.”

“Is Hollerith Rawson?” Justin demanded.

“I don’t recall his cover name. No legs,” said the psychologist.

His friend Rawson a general after all. Then what might not be true? The psychologist slipped out while Justin told Senator Wagner and Mr. Ox—of the FBI?—about his bombardment satellite.

The senator was apoplectic. He fizzed for minutes about abuse of the executive power; apparently Congress had been told as little about the bombardment satellite as an earlier Congress had been told about the atomic bomb. Well—sigh—what’s done is done. Now the problem is to integrate the windfall into existing plans.

Mr. Gnome returned and said: “Miss Cardew will brief you, Mr. Justin. We have to be on our way now.”

They left and Justin heard the Fish and Wild Life Survey panel truck move out of the driveway and down the road.

Back in the dining room Miss Norse was dozing in a corner.

“Well?” asked Betsy Cardew.

He turned down his collar and showed her the blade.

“The man said you were in and I was to brief you. What do you want to know about us?”

“What’s there to know? How many. What you plan. Whether you think you can get away with it. Who’s the boss.”

“I don’t know how many there are. I don’t really
know
whether there’s anybody in it except a couple of local people and those three. They came around a month ago—I used to know the senator. I don’t know who’s in charge, if anybody.

“They told me it’s a war plan, one of those things that lies in the files until it’s needed. Well, it was needed when the collapse came at El Paso. The orders were for as many atomic-service officers as possible to grab all the fissionable material they could lay their hands on and go underground. The same for psychological-warfare personnel. Then start recruiting civilians into the organization.”

“And what do we
do
?”

“They’ve mentioned a winter uprising. They hope by then to have a large part of the civilian population alerted. There should be food caches, caches of winter clothing, weapons, and ammunition stolen from Red supply dumps. Then you wait for real socked-in, no-see flying weather and fire your suitcase A-bombs. Washington, of course, to behead the Administration. Ports to prevent reinforcement. Tank parks. Roads and railways. Simultaneously a scorched-earth guerrilla war against the garrisons while they’re cut off.

“Oh, and you asked me whether I think we can get away with it, didn’t you? The answer is no. I don’t think so. I don’t see anything coming out of it except defeat and retaliation. But is there anything else to do?”

“No,” he said gravely. Nor was there.

“What did you tell General Hollerith, anyway?” she asked. “Something to do with Gribble, wasn’t it?”

“Sorry. They asked me not to say.” He fished for a change of subject. “How did you arrange the meeting, get in touch with them? If it’s all right for me to know.”

“I suppose so. Believe it or not, our conspiracy has a complete secret telegraphic network covering most of the United States. I didn’t believe them when they told me, but it’s true. Like finding out that you don’t have to dig a tunnel under the English Channel; there’s one already dug. The senator found out about the wires when he was on the crime commission. They call them ‘dry wires.’ They’re the old Postal Telegraph network from before your time and mine. Public clocks in all sorts of places used to get correcting pulses over the wires. When Western Union absorbed Postal Telegraph, they just blanked off their clock wires because radio had come along by then and any disk jockey could give you Naval Observatory time. I located one of the painted-over terminals in the Lackawanna station. Ticket clerk there’s in with us. All you need to activate a link of the circuit are a battery, a key, and a buzzer. He covers the wire for us. A brave man, Billy…”

“We’re all heroes,” he said bitterly.

“Yes, I suppose we are. Would you like a drink?”

“I ought to start for home. Maybe I can hitch a ride.”

“Nonsense. Stay the night and take the Keoka bus. If you stay for breakfast it’ll improve your cover story. I think I told you—there’s a lot of it going on.”

“I think what you said was, ‘It isn’t love, but there’s a lot of it going on.’ ”

“Something like that. There isn’t much love around these days. A lot of loneliness, a lot of monotony, a lot of shattered pride.”

“I’ll take that drink, please,” he said.

They walked together down Chiunga Hill toward the town, savoring the still cool morning. The reservoir off to the north was a sheet of blue glass and the pumping station a toy fort in the clear air.

“I’m glad they never bombed us,” Betsy said. “I really like this place.”

He thought of reminding her what a scorched-earth guerrilla campaign meant, but did not speak.

“Convoy,” Betsy said, pointing down at the highway. The buglike trucks must be hauling supplies—but the tanks? “Maneuvers somewhere,” she said.

They walked on in silence, and Chiunga Hill Road became Elm Street and they joined other morning walkers to work. A letter carrier in gray said: “Morning, Miss Cardew. What do you suppose those trucks are up to?”

He meant the convoy. Instead of by-passing the town they had turned off the highway and were rolling down High Street, three blocks farther on.

“Maybe they’re going across the bridge to the Tunkhannock road, Mr. Selwin. Mr. Selwin, do you know Mr. Justin?”

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” the old man said. “You a farmer, Mr. Justin?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a lucky man, then, I can tell you that. At least you get all you want to eat. Say, Mr. Justin, I hear that sometimes you people up in the hills have a few eggs or maybe a chicken or some butter left over and I happen to know a family with a little girl that’s real sick with anemia. Blood needs building up. Now if I could fix it up with you—”

Justin shook his head. “I can’t get away with it, Mr. Selwin. I’m very sorry. And by the way, the farmers may be eating better than the city people, but they’re sweating it right out again making milk. The norm’s always moving up, you know. Soon as you catch up, it jumps again.”

“He’s telling the truth, Mr. Selwin,” Betsy said. “Ask any of the rural carriers. Surely those trucks aren’t stopping for our little traffic light, are they?”

“They never have before,” Mr. Selwin said. They were now only a block from High Street. The postman peered over his glasses at the standing trucks. “But then,” he said, “they don’t seem to be regular Red Army trucks. Instead of the red star they have—let’s see—MBA. What’s MBA mean?”

“In the first place,” Betsy said slowly, “it’s MVD.”

“Beats me, Miss Cardew. I don’t know how you and the other young people do it.” He winked at Justin privately.

“They’re the border guards. And the political police,” Betsy said.

Two trucks turned out of line on High Street and came roaring down their way along Elm. Justin got only a glimpse of young faces and special uniforms. Green, with polished leather.

They can’t have come for us
, thought Justin incredulously. There’s a
regiment
of them. Fifty personnel-carrier trucks, command cars, half a dozen medium tanks. They can’t have come for Betsy and me!

Walking in frozen silence, they reached High Street. The main body of the convoy was parked there, the young men in their special uniforms impassive under the eyes and whispers of five hundred work-bound men and women. At the far end of High Street, on the old bridge across the Susquehanna, stood two of the tanks. The four other tanks were crawling northeast from High along Seneca. Nothing was in that direction except the high school—the 449th SMGU garrison.

A fat man in a high-slung command car got up, looked at his watch, and blew a whistle three times. The convoy erupted into action. People laughed shrilly; it was comical to see almost one thousand young men who had been stock-still a moment ago begin to climb out of their trucks, hand down equipment, consult maps and lists, snap salutes, and pass low-toned commands and acknowledgments.

A pattern appeared. Justin knew it from Korea. There are only so many ways to occupy a town. This outfit was doing it the expensive, foolproof sledge-hammer way. The strings of sixteen burdened men in double column were machine-gun sections streaming out to the perimeter of the area; they would set up a pair of cross-firing guns at each main road into the Center. The squads double-timing ahead of them would be pickets linking the machine-gun points. And there was a mortar section, sagging under their bedplates and barrels and canvas vests stuffed with bombs; they were on their way to the Susquehanna bridge embankment to reinforce the pair of tanks. A cheap little mortar bomb would sink a rowboat unworthy of a 155-millimeter shell from the tank; a white phosphorus bomb would be more effective against forbidden swimmers than machine-gun fire.

And the specialist squads moved down to the railroad station to hold all trains, and into the small A.T. & T. building to take charge of communications, and into the Western Union office with its yellow and black hanging sign and varnished golden-oak counter and scared nineteen-year-old girl clerk.

And riflemen consulted maps and went and stood like traffic cops, a pair at every intersection, sweeping the crowded sidewalks with stony eyes.

Beside Justin, Mr. Selwin gibbered: “It must be some kind of drill, don’t you think? Just what you call a dry run, don’t it look like?”

A vast relief was blossoming inside Justin. “I think so,” he said. “I can’t imagine what else it could be. Just practice in case.”
In case of me—but not yet
.

A sound truck rolled down the street, stopping at each corner to make an announcement in Russian and one in English. They saw the crowds melt from the sidewalk and into shops as it approached; from three blocks away they caught the English: “All persons off the streets at once and await further inspections. Persons on the street in three minutes will be shot—”

They dived for a store the instant it sank in. The store happened to be Mr. Farish’s pharmacy. “Thank God,” said Betsy. “A place with coffee.” Her voice shook.

The sound truck stopped only a couple of yards away at the intersection and bellowed in Russian and English. The score or so of people crowded into the store debated on the Russian announcement. They more or less agreed at last that the announcement had been orders for all SMGU troops to report at once to the high school athletic field.