The Worlds Of Robert A Heinlein

over an area rendered that area uninhabitable for a length of time that

  depended on the half-life of the radioactivity.

  Period. Full stop.

  Once an area was dusted there was nothing that could be done about it until

  the radioactivity had fallen off to the point where it was no longer

  harmful. The dust could not be cleaned out; it was everywhere. There was no

  possible way to counteract it?burn it, combine it chemically; the

  radioactive isotope was still there, still radio-active, still deadly. Once

  used on a stretch of land, for a predetermined length of time that piece of

  earth would not tolerate life.

  It was extremely simple to use. No complicated bomb sights were needed, no

  care need be taken to hit "military objectives." Take it aloft in any sort

  of aircraft, attain a position more or less over the area you wish to

  sterilize, and drop the stuff. Those on the ground in the contaminated area

  are dead men, dead in an hour, a day, a week, a month, depending on the

  degree of the infection?but dead.

  Manning told me that he had once seriously considered, in the middle of the

  night, recommending that every single person, including himself, who knew

  the Karst-Obre technique be put to death, in the interests of all

  civilization. But he had realized the next day that it had been sheer funk;

  the technique was certain in time to be rediscovered by someone else.

  Furthermore, it would not do to wait, to refrain from using the grisly

  power, until someone else perfected it and used it. The only possible

  chance to keep the world from being turned into one huge morgue was for us

  to use the power first and drastically?get the upper hand and keep it.

  We were not at war, legally, yet we had been in the war up to our necks

  with our weight on the side of democracy since 1940. Manning had proposed

  to the President that we turn a supply of the dust over to Great Britain,

  under conditions we specified, and enable them thereby to force a peace.

  But the terms of the peace would be dictated by the United States?for we

  were not turning over the secret.

  After that, the Pax Americana.

  The United States was having power thrust on it, willy-nilly. We had to

  accept it and enforce a world-wide peace, ruthlessly and drastically, or it

  would be seized by some other nation. There could not be coequals in the

  possession of this weapon. The factor of time predominated.

  I was selected to handle the details in England because Manning insisted,

  and the President agreed with him, that every person technically acquainted

  with the Karst-Obre process should remain on the laboratory reservation in

  what amounted to protective custody?imprisonment. That included Manning

  himself. I could go because I did not have the secret?I could not even have

  acquired it without years of schooling?and what I did not know I could not

  tell, even under, well, drugs. We were determined to keep the secret as

  long as we could to consolidate the Pax; we did not distrust our English

  cousins, but they were Britishers, with a first loyalty to the British

  Empire. No need to tempt them.

  I was picked because I understood the background if not the science, and

  because Manning trusted me. I don't know why the President trusted me, too,

  but then my job was not complicated.

  We took off from the new field outside Baltimore on a cold, raw afternoon

  which matched my own feelings. I had an all-gone feeling in my stomach, a

  runny nose, and, buttoned inside my clothes, papers appointing me a special

  agent of the President of the United States. They were odd papers, papers

  without precedent; they did not simply give me the usual diplomatic

  immunity; they made my person very nearly as sacred as that of the

  President himself.

  At Nova Scotia we touched ground to refuel the F. B. I. men left us, we

  took off again, and the Canadian transfighters took their stations around

  us. All the dust we were sending was in my plane; if the President's

  representative were shot down, the dust would go to the bottom with him.

  No need to tell of the crossing. I was airsick and miserable, in spite of

  the steadiness of the new six-engined jobs. I felt like a hangman on the

  way to an execution, and wished to God that I were a boy again, with

  nothing more momentous than a debate contest, or a track meet, to worry me.

  There was some fighting around us as we neared Scotland, I know, but I

  could not see it, the cabin being shuttered. Our pilot?captain ignored it

  and brought his ship down on a totally dark field, using a beam, I suppose,

  though I did not know nor care. I would have welcomed a crash. Then the

  lights outside went on and I saw that we had come to rest in an underground

  hangar.

  I stayed in the ship. The commandant came to see me to his quarters as his

  guest. I shook my head. "I stay here," I said. "Orders. You are to treat

  this ship as United States soil, you know."

  He seemed miffed, but compromised by having dinner served for both of us in

  my ship.

  There was a really embarrassing situation the next day. I was commanded to

  appear for a royal audience. But I had my instructions and I stuck to them.

  I was sitting on that cargo of dust until the President told me what to do

  with it. Late in the day I was called on by a member of Parliament?nobody

  admitted out loud that it was the Prime Minister?and a Mr. Windsor. The M.

  P. did most of the talking and I answered his questions. My other guest

  said very little and spoke slowly with some difficulty. But I got a very

  favorable impression of him. He seemed to be a man who was carrying a load

  beyond human strength and carrying it heroically.

  There followed the longest period in my life. It was actually only a little

  longer than a week, but every minute of it had that split-second intensity

  of imminent disaster that comes just before a car crash. The President was

  using the time to try to avert the need to use the dust. He had two

  face-to-face television conferences with the new Fuehrer. The President

  spoke German fluently, which should have helped. He spoke three times to

  the warring peoples themselves, but it is doubtful if very many on the

  continent were able to listen, the police regulations there being what they

  were.

  The Ambassador for the Reich was given a special demonstration of the

  effect of the dust. He was flown out over a deserted stretch of Western

  prairie and allowed to see what a single dusting would do to a herd of

  steers. It should have impressed him and I think that it did?nobody could

  ignore a visual demonstration!?but what report he made to his leader we

  never knew.

  The British Isles were visited repeatedly during the wait by bombing

  attacks as heavy as any of the war. I was safe enough but I heard about

  them, and I could see the effect on the morale of the officers with whom I

  associated. Not that it frightened them?it made them coldly angry. The

  raids were not directed primarily at dockyards or factories, but were

  ruthless destruction of anything, particularly villages.

  "I don't see what you chaps are waiting for,
" a flight commander complained

  to me. "What the Jerries need is a dose of their own shrecklichkeit, a

  lesson in their own Aryan culture."

  I shook my head. "We'll have to do it our own way."

  He dropped the matter, but I knew how he and his brother officers felt.

  They had a standing toast, as sacred as the toast to the King: "Remember

  Coventry!"

  Our President had stipulated that the R. A. F. was not to bomb during the

  period of negotiation, but their bombers were busy nevertheless. The

  continent was showered, night after night, with bales of leaflets, prepared

  by our own propaganda agents. The first of these called on the people of

  the Reich to stop a useless war and promised that the terms of peace would

  not be vindictive. The second rain of pamphlets showed photographs of that

  herd of steers. The third was a simple direct warning to get out of cities

  and to stay out. As Manning put it, we were calling "Halt!" three times

  before firing. I do not think that he or the President expected it to work,

  but we were morally obligated to try.

  The Britishers had installed for me a televisor, of the Simonds-Yarley

  nonintercept type, the sort whereby the receiver must "trigger" the

  transmitter in order for transmission to take place at all. It made

  assurance of privacy in diplomatic rapid communication for the first time

  in history, and was a real help in the crisis. I had brought along my own

  technician, one of the F. B. I.'s new corps of specialists, to handle the

  scrambler and the trigger.

  He called to me one afternoon. "Washington signaling."

  I climbed tiredly out of the cabin and down to the booth on the hangar

  floor, wondering if it were another false alarm.

  It was the President. His lips were white. "Carry out your basic

  instructions, Mr. deFries."

  "Yes, Mr. President!"

  The details had been worked out in advance and, once I had accepted a

  receipt and token payment from the Commandant for the dust, my duties were

  finished. But, at our instance, the British had invited military observers

  from every independent nation and from the several provisional governments

  of occupied nations. The United States Ambassador designated me as one at

  the request of Manning.

  Our task group was thirteen bombers. One such bomber could have carried all

  the dust needed, but it was split up to insure most of it, at least,

  reaching its destination. I had fetched forty percent more dust than

  Ridpath calculated would be needed for the mission and my last job was to

  see to it that every canister actually went on board a plane of the flight.

  The extremely small weight of dust used was emphasized to each of the

  military observers.

  We took off just at dark, climbed to twenty-five thousand feet, refueled in

  the air, and climbed again. Our escort was waiting for us, having refueled

  thirty minutes before us. The flight split into thirteen groups, and cut

  the thin air for middle Europe. The bombers we rode had been stripped and

  hiked up to permit the utmost maximum of speed and altitude.

  Elsewhere in England, other flights had taken off shortly before us to act

  as a diversion. Their destinations were every part of Germany; it was the

  intention to create such confusion in the air above the Reich that our few

  planes actually engaged in the serious work might well escape attention

  entirely, flying so high in the stratosphere.

  The thirteen dust carriers approached Berlin from different directions,

  planning to cross Berlin as if following the spokes of a wheel. The night

  was appreciably clear and we had a low moon to help us. Berlin is not a

  hard city to locate, since it has the largest square-mile area of any

  modern city and is located on a broad flat alluvial plain. I could make out

  the River Spree as we approached it, and the Havel. The city was blacked

  out, but a city makes a different sort of black from open country.

  Parachute flares hung over the city in many places, showing that the R. A.

  F. had been busy before we got there and the A. A. batteries on the ground

  helped to pick out the city.

  There was fighting below us, but not within fifteen thousand feet of our

  altitude as nearly as I could judge.

  The pilot reported to the captain, "On line of bearing!"

  The chap working the absolute altimeter steadily fed his data into the fuse

  pots of the canister. The canisters were equipped with a light charge of

  black powder, sufficient to explode them and scatter the dust at a time

  after release predetermined by the fuse spot setting. The method used was

  no more than an ancient expedient. The dust would have been almost as

  effective had it simply been dumped out in paper bags, although not as well

  distributed.

  The Captain hung over the navigator's board, a slight frown on his thin

  sallow face. "Ready one!" reported the bomber.

  "Release!"

  "Ready two!"

  The Captain studied his wristwatch. "Release!"

  "Ready three!"

  "Release!"

  When the last of our ten little packages was out of the ship we turned tail

  and ran for home.

  No arrangements had been made for me to get home; nobody had thought about

  it. But it was the one thing I wanted to do. I did not feel badly; I did

  not feel much of anything. I felt like a man who has at last screwed up his

  courage and undergone a serious operation; it's over now, he is still numb

  from shock but his mind is relaxed. But I wanted to go home.

  The British Commandant was quite decent about it; he serviced and manned my

  ship at once and gave me an escort for the off shore war zone. It was an

  expensive way to send one man home, but who cared? We had just expended

  some millions of lives in a desperate attempt to end the war; what was a

  money expense? He gave the necessary orders absentmindedly.

  I took a double dose of Nembutal and woke up in Canada. I tried to get some

  news while the plane was being serviced, but there was not much to be had.

  The government of the Reich had issued one official news bulletin shortly

  after the raid, sneering at the much vaunted "secret weapon" of the British

  and stating that a major air attack had been made on Berlin and several

  other cities, but that the raiders had been driven off with only minor

  damage. The current Lord Haw-Haw started one of his sarcastic speeches but

  was unable to continue it. The announcer said that he had been seized with

  a heart attack, and substituted some recordings of patriotic music. The

  station cut off in the middle of the "Horst Wesser' song. After that there

  was silence.

  I managed to promote an Army car and a driver at the Baltimore field which

  made short work of the Annapolis speedway. We almost overran the turn to

  the laboratory.

  Manning was in his office. He looked up as I came in said, "Hello, John,"

  in a dispirited voice, and dropped his eyes again to the blotter pad. He

  went back to drawing doodles.

  I looked him over and realized for the first time that the chief was an old

  man. His face was gray and flabby, deep furrows framed his mouth in
a

  triangle. His clothes did not fit.

  I went up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't take it so hard,

  chief. It's not your fault. We gave them all the warning in the world."

  He looked up again. "Estelle Karst suicided this morning."

  Anybody could have anticipated it, but nobody did. And somehow I felt

  harder hit by her death than by the death of all those strangers in Berlin.

  "How did she do it?" I asked.

  "Dust. She went into the canning room, and took off her armor.

  I could picture her?head held high, eyes snapping, and that set look on her

  mouth which she got when people did something she disapproved of. One

  little old woman whose lifetime work had been turned against her.

  "I wish," Manning added slowly, "that I could explain to her why we had to

  do it."

  We buried her in a lead-lined coffin, then Manning and I went on to

  Washington.

  While we were there, we saw the motion pictures that had been made of the

  death of Berlin. You have not seen them; they never were made public, but

  they were of great use in convincing the other nations of the world that

  peace was a good idea. I saw them when Congress did, being allowed in

  because I was Manning's assistant.

  They had been made by a pair of R. A. F. pilots, who had dodged the

  Luftwaffle to get them. The first shots showed some of the main streets the

  morning after the raid. There was not much to see that would show up in

  tele-photo shots, just busy and crowded streets, but if you looked closely

  you could see that there had been an excessive number of automobile

  accidents.

  The second day showed the attempt to evacuate. The inner squares of the

  city were practically deserted save for bodies and wrecked cars, but the

  streets leading out of town were boiling with people, mostly on foot, for

  the trams where out of service. The pitiful creatures were fleeing, not

  knowing that death was already lodged inside them. The plane swooped down

  at one point and the cinematographer had his telephoto lens pointed

  directly into the face of a young woman for several seconds. She stared

  back at it with a look too woebegone to forget, then stumbled and fell.

  She may have been trampled. I hope so. One of those six horses had looked

  like that when the stuff was beginning to hit his vitals.

  The last sequence showed Berlin and the roads around it a week after the

  raid. The city was dead; there was not a man, a woman, a child?nor cats,

  nor dogs, not even a pigeon. Bodies were all around, but they were safe

  from rats. There were no rats.

  The roads around Berlin were quiet now. Scattered carelessly on shoulders

  and in ditches, and to a lesser extent on the pavement itself, like coal

  shaken off a train, were the quiet heaps that had been the citizens of the

  capital of the Reich. There is no use in talking about it.

  But, so far as I am concerned, I left what soul I had in that projection

  room and I have not had one since.

  The two pilots who made the pictures eventually died?systemic, cumulative

  infection, dust in the air over Berlin. With precautions it need not have

  happened, but the English did not believe, as yet, that our extreme

  precautions were necessary.

  The Reich took about a week to fold up. It might have taken longer if the

  new Fuehrer had not gone to Berlin the day after the raid to 'approve" that

  the British boasts had been hollow. There is no need to recount the

  provisional governments that Germany had in the following several months;

  the only one we are concerned with is the so called restored monarchy which