It was the program to which Nina and Rick had devoted the labors of their youth and maturity. The same thing was true of Lanny; and while Laurel was a later convert, she was none the less ardent. Their jubilation was unbounded, and they held a brief celebration over the transatlantic telephone. Alfy was “in,” and by a large enough vote so that he could speak with authority. And Winnie was “out”—and immediately, by the marvelous system which they have on that tight little island, where statesmen can get to London quickly. There was a new man flying to Potsdam to help decide the fate of Europe, a man by the name of Attlee, of whom few outside of Britain had heard; a quiet, rather frail-looking man, with no booming voice and no polished periods; but he knew what he wanted and had most of the British working class and a good part of the middle class behind him.
So now it was possible to go ahead with the ending of war, and not merely in Potsdam but in London and New York. Nina and Rick had procured their passports and made application for visas; they were coming as visitors, which gave them six months, and then, if they wanted more time, they would make a new application. The land of the free and the home of the brave had become rather choosy in these later years. Lanny had to fly down to Washington to stir up the cookie-pushers in the State Department, assuring them that a British baronet was really a Socialist and not a Communist, and that he wasn’t going to advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.
V
A tense and exciting time in the world’s history, and nobody in his right mind could complain of being bored. The B-29S were keeping up their milk runs over Japanese cities, and the Navy’s task forces kept coming closer to Tokyo, shooting down the enemy’s suicide pilots and sending swarms of divebombers against ships and other targets. That was supposed to go on for a long time yet, perhaps a year or two; but Lanny kept waiting for the big news that was due any day. His imagination pictured those terrific new bombs being transported to a base on some island near Japan. Would they go by plane or by ship, and how long would it take? Only a few persons knew, and none of these had given Lanny a hint.
He developed the habit of turning on the radio every hour on the hour and looking at newspaper headlines whenever he passed a stand. He couldn’t give up the habit because, obviously, with each day that passed, A-day must be one day nearer. Everybody who knew anything about the A-bomb agreed that there wasn’t going to be any hesitation; the enemy was going to learn about the bomb in action. Of course after that there would be no keeping the secret—the enemy would tell even if we didn’t.
The Potsdam Conference came to an end on the 2nd of August and a summary of its results was released. Japan was called on to surrender, and warned of dreadful things to come. Germany was to be divided into four zones, each to be governed by one of the four nations, America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. To anyone who really wanted peace this arrangement was ominous, for it could mean only that the Big Four distrusted their ability to agree and had agreed upon a series of arguments and squabbles for an indefinite time. Each of the four would have its own idea of what Germany and the Germans ought to be and would proceed to make them over in its image: a Communist East Germany, a Socialist North-central Germany, a Big-Business, Private-Enterprise South-central Germany, and a Bourgeois Southwest Germany, hated, feared, and kept as poor as possible.
President Truman came back to Washington and put the best face possible on what he had done. Most people thought he had been hoodwinked, and this wouldn’t have been surprising, since he had had no previous experience with international affairs. America had the strange practice of putting its possible substitute President away on a shelf, as it were; he had no special way to learn what was going on, and when his Chief suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, all he could do was to wring his hands and say, “Look what’s fallen on me!”
VI
On the 6th of August, a day never to be forgotten, Lanny turned on his radio. It meant having to listen to odious commercials, and he loathed them, but in times like these he had no choice. His heart gave a leap as he heard the announcer say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt the program to give you a statement which has just been issued from the White House, signed by the President of the United States. Give it your close attention. The statement follows.”
He called to Laurel, who was pounding the typewriter in her room. She came running, and they listened to these portentous words: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam,’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare. The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid manyfold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our Armed Forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
So at last the secret was out, the secret that Lanny had been keeping from his family and friends for four years, the secret that had come near to burning a hole through his brain. Now at last he could tell Laurel where he had been in New Mexico and what he had seen there; why he had set out on a plane four years ago and come near to losing his life; what he had been doing in Germany, both before the war’s end and more recently. “Oh, what an awful thing!” she exclaimed. “What an awful thing we have done!” As usual, she thought about human beings and failed to take the military attitude. “It makes our task more urgent,” she said, and Lanny answered, “It also makes it more possible, perhaps.”
He telephoned his father. “Have you heard the news?”
“Someone in the office just told me,” was the reply. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all this time!”
“Don’t mention it to anyone else,” he said. “There are reasons.”
“This finishes Budd-Erling,” said the father. “They won’t need us any more.” He never failed to take the business point of view; but he would tell you it was the human point of view as well, for what was going to happen to those thousands of men and women he employed?
Laurel was so shocked it was hard for her to think. A paralyzing thing to know that such a horror was loose in the world, and that she had been living with it for the whole of her married life! Of course Lanny hadn’t been allowed to tell her; but what about those psychic gifts she thought she had discovered? They had failed her so utterly just when they had the most important material to work on.
Lanny brought her back to earth. “Don’t forget that you have an eyewitness story,” he remarked, and her writer’s instinct began to stir. She went in and sat by her typewriter, and Lanny stretched out on the bed and started to talk, sentence by sentence, while her fingers flew over the keys. They agreed that the way to handle this thing was as a straight reporting job, with no attempt to elaborate or philosophize. Said Mary Morrow, “This is an account of what happened at the first atomic-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, as told to me by a friend who was present.” Then came the story, and instead of what Mary Morrow thought about it, or what her friend thought, there was what the different scientists and military men had said.
When the job was done she wasn’t willing to entrust it to anybody else; she stayed up part of the night to make a set of clean copies, and in the morning she took one to a newspaper syndicate. At the same time Lanny took a plane to Washington to carry out his promise to the Army. He had put on his uniform again, and that helped; he had no trouble in seeing the right man. Since he was already familiar with what was called “Security,” there wasn’t much to object to; a couple of phrases which the censor thought might be questioned, and Lanny agreed to change them. The OK was given, and the husban
d went out and phoned his wife. She reported that the syndicate had grabbed the story and was ready to put it on the wires the moment it was released.
VII
Two days later a second bomb was dropped over Japan, this time on the great seaport of Nagasaki. No one could say how many lives were destroyed, but the airmen took photographs, and these appeared in the newspapers and showed nothing left standing except a few heavy concrete buildings and part of some steel frames. It was said that the second bomb was even more powerful than the first; Lanny could guess that the material of one was U-235 and came from the Oak Ridge plant, while the other was plutonium and came from the Hanford plant.
Everybody agreed that no civilized state could stand such punishment, and least of all Japan, whose cities were so largely of wood and paper. From Potsdam the United States, Britain, and China had issued a call to the last enemy to surrender, threatening “inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.” Now the Japanese knew what that meant better than anybody else in the world. The toad beneath the harrow knows exactly where each tooth point goes! The statesmen and their Emperor were also able to guess exactly where the next bomb would be dropped.
It was believed among the Allies that the Emperor desired to surrender, but there was a question whether the fanatical military clique would let him; they wanted to do what Hitler had done and go to their ancestors with glory. There was a plot to assassinate members of the cabinet and seize the person of the Emperor, but this was thwarted and the moderate party won out.
On the day after the bomb was dropped over Nagasaki a message came to the government of Switzerland, saying that “in obedience to the gracious command of His Majesty the Emperor” the Japanese government was ready to accept the Potsdam terms, “with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.”
To this the United States replied next day that the authority of the Emperor would be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. Four days later the Japanese government bowed to these terms, and on the second of September millions of Americans listened over the radio to the elaborate ceremony of signing the surrender document, which General MacArthur had arranged on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Such was the formal and dignified ending of World War II.
VIII
There was a new world, so everybody felt. Decent people could breathe freely again and turn their thoughts to whatever interested them. Everybody in the Army wanted to get out and come home by the first ship, no matter how crowded. The Army worked out a system of points, based on the period of service, and the great war forces began to melt away; the Queens brought double loads of men, one lot sleeping by night and the other by day, and nobody complained of the discomfort. Production would be shifted to civilian goods, rationing and price-fixing would be ended, taxes would be reduced, and everything would be the way it had been before the war, only much better. So the papers said.
Nina and Rick were on the way; and meantime Lanny went to work in the library of the Rand School of Social Science, learning about the history of American Socialism. He read old books and bound volumes of magazines and refreshed his memory as to facts which he had almost forgotten. In his youth his great-uncle Eli Budd, a Congregational clergyman and scholar, had told him a lot of things about the land of his forefathers. American labor didn’t have to go to Marx and Engels, to Fourier and Proudhon, for its ideas of social reconstruction; America had had its own thinkers from the earliest days, who had ideas in accord with American character and institutions.
That didn’t mean that students should be ignorant of European ideas; they were necessary to the understanding of European problems and events. But to understand American problems and events one had to know American ideas, and this meant a knowledge of the writings of Robert Owen and Albert Brisbane—not Arthur, but his great and noble-minded father; of Wendell Phillips and Horace Greeley, of Edward Bellamy and Henry George, of George D. Herron and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Gaylord Wilshire and J. A. Wayland and Eugene V. Debs. These writers and many others had put American ideas into circulation, had shaped the minds of several generations of Americans, and had become the wellspring of innumerable movements and programs. Practically everything in Roosevelt’s New Deal had been included in the “immediate demands” of the Socialist party of America for thirty years, and the Tennessee Valley Authority had been the dream of every home-grown utopian since the invention of hydroelectric power.
One of the formulas that Lanny had fixed in his mind was to “talk American.” This devastating war had left America the one country in the world that had money in quantity enough to speak and be heard. Whatever was going to be done to prevent the next war would have to be done with American support and under American guidance; the task was to help the American people to know what to do. Second in importance would be the British people, and Rick would know how to speak to them. As to the Russians, they had chosen to be an enigma, or rather their rulers had chosen that role for them; what part they would take in the organization of the new world was something which could not be foreseen but could be known only when the thirteen men of the Politburo revealed it in action.
IX
Lanny Budd had been watching wars since the age of fourteen, asking questions and reading what the world’s accepted authorities had to say on the subject. He had made note of the many factors involved: the natural belligerence of the human male, a quality which had come down from his animal past; the vast weight of ignorance and superstition brought from that same past; the hatreds and prejudices which had been acquired through the centuries and the memories of wrongs which the peoples had committed and had suffered—it being human nature to remember the latter and forget the former. All these had played their part in the past and must be dealt with in the future.
There were two other factors which in Lanny’s mind had come to assume predominance. The first was pressure of population, and for that there was but one permanent remedy, the universal knowledge and practice of birth control. Manifestly, if any species of living thing, animal or vegetable, were permitted to reproduce itself unchecked, it would in time cover the earth and leave no room to move about in. What had checked the human family was three things: pestilence, famine, and war. Modern techniques had suppressed the first two, and thus made the third the more inevitable and more deadly. Populations increased the faster, and the resort to the third remedy became more certain, quick, and extensive.
The other major factor was the private ownership of the means of production and their use for private profit. This meant the exaltation of greed into the most powerful motive in human society. The survival of the masses of any nation was dependent upon the ability of the private owners in that nation to find markets for their products; so each nation was organized as an instrument of private greed, seeking raw materials and markets where the products could be sold at a profit. Failure to find either of these meant unemployment and starvation at home, with the threat of revolution. Driven by these fears, international rivalry grew more intense and led inevitably to war, which relieved the pressure of population, the unemployment, and the threat of hard times. There was plenty of work until the damage had been repaired, and then the old troubles would loom over the land once more. Under the system of production for profit a world war every generation was automatic.
X
Rick and his wife arrived. Having been a successful playwright many years ago, and being now a baronet, he found the newspaper reporters on hand with their scratch paper and their questions. Had Sir Eric ever been to America before? What had he come for now? What did he think about the country? What would he say about the British elections? What hopes did he have for the United Nations?
The tall, slender Englishman, who had been dealing with newspapers all his mature life, revealed himself as a gracious and obliging person. He had decided that the future of the world lay in the keeping of the United
States of America, and he had come as a student to learn what he could about this great country. Everybody in Britain had been filled with awe at the demonstration of power America had given in the past four or five years. Britain was grateful for lend-lease—and so on. Yes, Sir Eric and his wife were members of the Labour party, and had campaigned in the recent elections; their eldest son, Colonel Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson of the Royal Air Force, had just been elected to Parliament on the Labour ticket. No, Sir Eric had no plans to lecture in America, but might be happy to do so if invited. He would deal, of course, only with British and European subjects; he would never feel himself competent to give advice to the people of any country but his own.
So it went, and next morning all the newspapers were respectful, and the four conspirators felt that their enterprise had got off to a good start. One of the papers stated that the visitors would be staying at the Chiswick Arms, and before the morning was over there came a telephone call from the Rand School inquiring if he would consent to give a talk in the school’s auditorium on the significance of the recent elections. Rick said he would be happy to do it, and he was, for this was the way to meet the intellectuals of Pinkish inclination and get started in the field of his endeavor.