Expanded Universe Part 12

"Have I?"

''Vcsc_tn lroon t1n~. ru i ~ C ni ir nn;n ccsrrat ,yn ni ir nfl way, and let the rest of the world look out for itself. That is the only program that fits our traditions." The Secretary of State was really a fine old gentleman, and not stupid, but he was slow to a.s.similate new ideas.

"Mr. Secretary," said Manning respectfully, "I wish we could afford to mind our own business. I do wish we could. But it is the best opinion of all the experts that we can't maintain control of this secret except by rigid policing. The Germans were close on our heels in nuclear research; it was sheer luck that we got there first. I ask you to imagine Germany a year hence-with a supply of dust."

The Secretary did not answer, but I saw his lips form the word Berlin.

They came around. The President had deliberately let Manning bear the brunt of the argument, conserving his own stock of goodwill to coax the obdurate. He decided against putting it up to Congress; the dusters would have been overhead before each senator had finished his say. What he intended to do might be unconst.i.tutional, but if he failed to act there might not be any Const.i.tution shortly. There was precedent- the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, the Monroe Doctrine, the Louisiana Purchase, suspension of habeas corpus in the War between the States, the Destroyer Deal.

On February 22nd the President declared a state of full emergency internally and sent his Peace Proclamation to the head of every sovereign state. Divested of its diplomatic surplusage, it said: The United States is prepared to defeat any power, or combination of powers, in jig time. Accordingly, we are outlawing war and are calling on every nation to disarm completely at once. In other words, "Throw down your guns, boys; we've got the drop on you!"

A supplement set forth the procedure: All aircraft capable of flying the Atlantic were to be delivered in one week's time to a field, or rather a great stretch of prairie, just west of Fort Riley, Kansas. For lesser aircraft, a spot near Shanghai and a rendezvous in Wales were designated. Memoranda would be issued lat with respect to other war equipment. Uranium and i ores were not mentioned; that would come later.

No excuses. Failure to disarm would be construe as an act of war against the United States.

There were no cases of apoplexy in the Senate; wF not, I don't know.

There were only three powers to be seriously wo ned about, England, j.a.pan, and the Eurasian Unio: England had been forewarned, we had pulled her oi of a war she was losing, and she-or rather her men i power-knew accurately what we could and wou] do.

j.a.pan was another matter. They had not seen Berli and they did not really believe it. Besides, they ha been telling each other for so many years that th were unbeatable, they believed it. It does not do to gi too tough with a j.a.panese too quickly, for they will d rather than lose face. The negotiations were coi ducted very quietly indeed, but our fleet was halfw~ from Pearl Harbor to Kobe, loaded with enough du to sterilize their six biggest cities, before they we~ concluded. Do you know what did it? This never h the newspapers but it was the wording of the par phlets we proposed to scatter before dusting.

The Emperor was pleased to declare a New Order Peace. The official version, built up for home co sumption, made the whole matter one of collaboratic between two great and friendly powers, with j.a.pa taking the initiative.

The Eurasian Union was a puzzle. After Stalin's ui expected death in 1941, no western nation knew vei much about what went on in there. Our own dipl matic relations had atrophied through failure to r place men called home nearly four years befor Everybody knew, of course, that the new group power called themselves Fifth Internationalists, bi what that meant, aside from ceasing to display ti pictures of Lenin and Stalin, n.o.body knew.

But they agreed to our terms and offered to cooperate in every way. They pointed out that the Union had never been warlike and had kept out of the recent world struggle. It was fitting that the two remaining great powers should use their greatness to insure a lasting peace.

I was delighted; I had been worried about the E. U. They commenced delivery of some of their smaller planes to the receiving station near Shanghai at once. The reports on the number and quality of the planes seemed to indicate that they had stayed out of the war through necessity; the planes were mostly of German make and in poor condition, types that Germany had abandoned early in the war.

Manning went west to supervise certain details in connection with immobilizing the big planes, the transoceanic planes, which were to gather near Fort Riley. We planned to spray them with oil, then dust from a low alt.i.tude, as in crop dusting, with a low concentration of one-year dust. Then we could turn our backs on them and forget them, while attending to other matters.

But there were hazards. The dust must not be allowed to reach Kansas City, Lincoln, Wichita-any of the nearby cities. The smaller towns roundabout had been temporarily evacuated. Testing stations needed to be set up in all directions in order that accurate tab on the dust might be kept. Manning felt personally responsible to make sure that no bystander was poisoned.

We circled the receiving station before landing at Fort Riley. I could pick out the three landing fields which had hurriedly been graded. Their runways were white in the sun, the twenty-four-hour cement as yet undirtied. Around each of the landing fields were crowded dozens of parking fields, less perfectly graded. Tractors and bulldozers were still at work on some of them. In the eastemnmost fields, the German and British ships were already in place, jammed wing to body as tightly as planes on the flight deck of a carrier-save for a few that were still being towed mt position, the tiny tractors looking from the air lil~ ants dragging pieces of leaf many times larger tha themselves.

Only three flying fortresses had arrived from tli Eurasian Union. Their representatives had asked for short delay in order that a supply of high-test aviatio gasoline might be delivered to them. They claimed shortage of fuel necessary to make the long flight ov the Arctic safe. There was no way to check the claii and the delay was granted while a shipment wa routed from England.

We were about to leave, Manning having satisfie himself as to safety precautions, when a dispatc came in announcing that a flight of E. U. bombei might be expected before the day was out. Mannini wanted to see them arrive; we waited around for for hours. When it was finally reported that our escort fighters had picked them up at the Canadian borde Manning appeared to have grown fidgety and state that he would watch them from the air. We took of gained alt.i.tude and waited.

There were nine of them in the flight, cruising in co umn of echelons and looking so huge that our littl fighters were hardly noticeable. They circled the fiel and I was admiring the stately dignity of them whe Manning's pilot, Lieutenant Rafferty, exclaimed "What the devil! They are preparing to land dowi wind!"

I still did not tumble, but Manning shouted to ti copilot, "Get the field!"

He fiddled with his instruments and announced "Got 'em, sir!"

"General alarm! Armor!"

We could not hear the sirens, naturally, but I cou] see the white plumes rise from the big steam whist on the roof of the Administration Building-three br blasts, then three short ones. It seemed almost at tI same time that the first cloud broke from the E. I planes.

Instead of landing, they pa.s.sed low over the receiving station, jampacked now with ships from all over the world. Each echelon picked one of three groups centered around the three landing fields and streamers of heavy brown smoke poured from the bellies of the E. U. ships. I saw a tiny black figure jump from a tractor and run toward the nearest building. Then the smoke screen obscured the field.

"Do you still have the field?" demanded Manning. "Yes, sir."

"Cross connect to the chief safety technician. Hurry!"

The copilot cut in the amplifier so that Manning could talk directly. "Saunders? This is Manning. How about it?"

"Radioactive, chief. Intensity seven point four." They had paralleled the Karst-Obre research.

Manning cut him off and demanded that the communication office at the field raise the Chief of Staff.

There was nerve-stretching delay, for it had to be routed over land wire to Kansas City, and some chief operator had to be convinced that she should commandeer a trunk line that was in commercial use. But we got through at last and Manning made his report. "It stands to reason," I heard him say, "that other flights are approaching the border by this time. New York, of course, and Washington. Probably Detroit and Chicago as well. No way of knowing."

The Chief of Staff cut off abruptly, without comment. I knew that the U.S. air fleets, in a state of alert for weeks past, would have their orders in a few seconds, and would be on their way to hunt out and down the attackers, if possible before they could reach the cities.

I glanced back at the field. The formations were broken up. One of the E. U. bombers was down, crashed, half a mile beyond the station. While I watched, one of our midget dive bombers screamed down on a behemoth E. U. ship and unloaded his eggs. It was a center hit, but the American pilot had cut it too fine, could not pull out, and crashed before his vi tim.

There is no point in rehashing the newspaper storh of the Four-Days War. The point is that we should ha's lost it, and we would have, had it not been for an ui likely combination of luck, foresight, and good mai agement. Apparently, the nuclear physicists of tF Eurasian Union were almost as far along as Ridpath crew when the destruction of Berlin gave them the ti they needed. But we had rushed them, forced them 1 move before they were ready, because of the dea( line for disarmament set forth in our Peace Proclam~ tion.

If the President had waited to fight it out with Co gress before issuing the proclamation, there would n be any United States.

Manning never got credit for it, but it is evident me that he antic.i.p.ated the possibility of somethii like the Four-Days War and prepared for it in a doz different devious ways. I don't mean military prep ration; the Army and the Navy saw to that. But it w no accident that Congress was adjourned at the tim I had something to do with the vote-swapping am compromising that led up to it, and I know.

But I put it to you-would he have maneuvered get Congress out of Washington at a time when I feared that Washington might be attacked if he he had dictatorial ambitions?

Of course, it was the President who was back of t] ten-day leaves that had been granted to most of t] civil-service personnel in Washington and he hims must have made the decision to take a swing throuf the South at that time, but it must have been Mannii who put the idea in his head. It is inconceivable th the President would have left Washington to esca~ personal danger.

And then, there was the plague scare. I don't kno how or when Manning could have started that-it ce tainly did not go through my notebook-but I simply do not believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded rumor of bubonic plaguc~ caused New York City to be semideserted at the time the E. U.

bombers struck.

At that, we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.

Of course, the government was blamed for the lives that were lost and the papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to antic.i.p.ate and force an evacuation of all the major cities.

If Manning antic.i.p.ated trouble, why did he not ask for evacuation?

Well, as I see it, for this reason: A big city will not be, never has been, evacuated in response to rational argument. London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened to the thought.

But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.

And don't forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow-those were innocent people, too. War isn't pretty.

I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our ships to dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military madioactives in the Eurasian Union. Suppose the mistake had been the other way around-suppose that one of the E. U. ships in attacking Washington, D.C., by mistake had included Ridpath's shop forty-five miles away in Maryland?

Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis, and the American Pacification Expedition started the job of pulling the fangs of the Eurasian Union. It was not a military occupation in the usual sense; there were two simple objectives: to search out and dust all aircraft, aircraft plants, and fields, and locate and dust radiation laboratories, uranium su plies, and bodes of carnot.i.te and pitchblende. No a tempt was made to interfere with, or to replace, ci~ government.

We used a two-year dust, which gave a breathir spell in which to consolidate our position. Liberal r wards were offered to informers, a technique whh worked remarkably well not only in the E. U., but most parts of the world.

The "weasel," an instrument to smell out radiatio based on the electroscope-discharge principle and r fined by Ridpath's staff, greatly facilitated the work locating uranium and uranium ores. A grid of wease]

properly s.p.a.ced over a suspect area, could locate ai important ma.s.s of uranium almost as handily as a c rection-finder can spot a radio station.

But, notwithstanding the excellent work of Gener Bulfinch and the Pacification Expedition as a whole, was the original mistake of dusting Ryazan that ma the job possible of accomplishment.

Anyone interested in the details of the pacificati work done in 1945-6 should see the "Proceedings the American Foundation for Social Research" for paper ent.i.tled A Study of the Execution of the Americ Peace Policy from February, 1945. The de facto soluti of the problem of policing the world against war k the United States with the much greater problem perfecting a policy that would insure that the dead power of the dust would never fall into unfit hand: The problem is as easy to state as the problem squaring the circle and almost as impossible of a complishment. Both Manning and the President b lieved that the United States must of necessity ke~ the power for the time being, until some permane inst.i.tution could be developed fit to retain it. The ha and was this: Foreign policy is lodged jointly in ti hands of the President and the Congress. We were fc tunate at the time in having a good President and adequate Congress, but that was no guarantee for the future.

We have had unfit Presidents and power-hungry Congresses-oh, yes! Read the history of the Mexican War.

We were about to hand over to future governments of the United States the power to turn the entire globe into an empire, our empire. And it was the sober opinion of the President that our characteristic and beloved democratic culture would not stand up under the temptation. Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed.

The President was determined that our sudden power should be used for the absolute minimum of maintaining peace in the world-the simple purpose of outlawing war and nothing else. It must not be used to protect American investments abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the simple abolition of ma.s.s killing.

There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about sociology and politics. Sometime around the year 5000 A. D., maybe-if the human race does not commit suicide before then.

Until then, there is only horse sense and rule of thumb and observational knowledge of probabilities.

Manning and the President played by ear.

The treaties with Great Britain, Germany and the Eurasian Union, whereby we a.s.sumed the responsibility for world peace and at the same time guaranteed the contracting nations against our own misuse of power, were rushed through in the period of relief and goodwill that immediately followed the termination of the Four-Days War. We followed the precedents established by the Panama Ca.n.a.l treaties, the Suez Ca.n.a.l agreements, and the Philippine Independence policy.

But the purpose underneath was to commit future governments of the United States to an irrevocable benevolent policy.

The act to implement the treaties by creating tF Commission of World Safety followed soon after, an Colonel Manning became Mr. Commissioner Mai ning. Commissioners had a life tenure and the intei tion was to create a body with the integrit permanence and freedom from outside pressure p0sessed by the Supreme Court of the United State Since the treaties contemplated an eventual join trust, commissioners need not be American citizensand the oath they took was to preserve the peace of t1~ world.

There was trouble getting the clause past the Coi gress! Every other similar oath had been to the Const tution of the United States.

Nevertheless the Commission was formed. It toc charge of world aircraft, a.s.sumed jurisdiction over r~ dioactives, natural and artificial, and commenced tF long slow task of building up the Peace Patrol.

Manning envisioned a corps of world policemen, a aristocracy which, through selection and indoctrim tion, could be trusted with unlimited power over life of every man, every woman, every child on the fa( of the globe. For the power would be unlimited; ti precautions necessary to insure the unbeatab weapon from getting loose in the world again made axiomatic that its custodians would wield power th~ is safe only in the hands of Deity. There would be r one to guard those selfsame guardians. Their o~ characters and the watch they kept on each oth would be all that stood between the race and disaste For the first time in history, supreme political pow was to be exerted with no possibility of checks an balances from the outside. Manning took up the ta~ of perfecting it with a dragging subconscious convi tion that it was too much for human nature.

The rest of the Commission was appointed sbowl the names being sent to the Senate after long joint coi sideration by the President and Manning. The direct of the Red Cross, an obscure little professor of history from Switzerland, Dr. Igor Rimski who had developed the Karst-Obre technique indepen'dently and whom the A. P. F. had discovered in prison after the dusting of Moscow-those three were the only foreigners. The rest of the list is well known.

Ridpath and his staff were of necessity the original technical crew of the Commission; United States Army and Navy pilots its first patrolmen. Not all of the pilots available were needed; their records were searched, their habits and a.s.sociates investigated, their mental processes and emotional att.i.tudes examined by the best psychological research methods available-which weren't good enough. Their final acceptance for the Patrol depended on two personal interviews, one with Manning, one with the President.

Manning told me that he depended more on the President's feeling for character than he did on all the a.s.sociation and reaction tests the psychologists could think up. "It's like the nose of a bloodhound," he said. "In his forty years of practical politics he has seen more phonies than you and I will ever see and each one was trying to sell him something. He can tell one in the dark."

The long-distance plan included the schools for the indoctrination of cadet patrolmen, schools that were to be open to youths of any race, color, or nationality, and from which they would go forth to guard the peace of every country but their own. To that country a man would never return during his service.

They were to be a deliberately expatriated band of Janizanies, with an obligation only to the Commission and to the race, and welded together with a carefully nurtured esprit de corps.

It stood a chance of working. Had Manning been allowed twenty years without interruption, the original plan might have worked.

The President's running mate for reelection was the result of a political compromise. The candidate for Vice President was a confirmed isolationist who ha opposed the Peace Commission from the first, but was he or a party split in a year when the oppositio was strong. The President sneaked back in but with greatly weakened Congress; only his power of vet twice prevented the repeal of the Peace Act. The Vic President did nothing to help him, although he did n publicly lead the insurrection. Manning revised h plans to complete the essential program by the end 1952, there being no way to predict the temper of tF next administration.

We were both overworked and I was beginning 1 realize that my health was gone. The cause was not fi to seek; a photographic film strapped next to my ski would cloud in twenty minutes. I was suffering froi c.u.mulative minimal radioactive poisoning. No wel defined cancer that could be operated on, but a sy temic deterioration of function and tissue. There w~ no help for it, and there was work to be done. I've a ways attributed it mainly to the week I spent sittir on those canisters before the raid on Berlin.

February 17, 1951. I missed the televue flash aboi the plane crash that killed the President because I w~ lying down in my apartment. Manning, by that tim was requiring me to rest every afternoon after lunc though I was still on duty. I first heard about it from my secretary when I returned to my office, and at om hurried into Manning's office.

There was a curious unreality to that meeting. seemed to me that we had slipped back to that d~ when I returned from England, the day that Estel Karst died. He looked up. "h.e.l.lo, John," he said.

I put my hand on his shoulder. "Don't take it hard, chief," was all I could think of to say.

Forty-eight hours later came the message from ti newly sworn-in President for Manning to report him. I took it in to him, an official despatch which decoded. Manning read it, face impa.s.sive.

"Are you going, chief?" I asked.

"Eh? Why, certainly."

I went back into my office, and got my topcoat, gloves, and briefcase.

Manning looked up when I came back in. "Never mind, John," he said. "You're not going." I guess I must have looked stubborn, for he added, "You're not to go because there is work to do here. Wait a minute." He went to his safe, twiddled the dials, opened it and removed a sealed envelope which he threw on the desk between us. "Here are your orders. Get busy."

He went out as I was opening them. I read them through and got busy. There was little enough time.

The new President received Manning standing and in the company of several of his bodyguards and intimates. Manning recognized the senator who had led the movement to use the Patrol to recover expropriated holdings in South America and Rhodesia, as well as the chairman of the committee on aviation with whom he had had several unsatisfactory conferences in an attempt to work out a modus operandi for.reinst.i.tuting commercial airlines.

"You're prompt, I see," said the President. "Good." Manning bowed.

"We might as well come straight to the point," the Chief Executive went on. "There are going to be some changes of policy in the administration. I want your resignation."

"I am sorry to have to refuse, sir."

"We'll see about that. In the meantime, Colonel Manning, you are relieved from duty."

"Mr. Commissioner Manning, if you please."

The new President shrugged. "One or the other, as you please. You are relieved, either way."

"I am sorry to disagree again. My appointment is for life."

"That's enough," was the answer. "This is the United States of America. There can be no higher authority. You are under arrest."

I can visualize Manning staring steadily at him for a long moment, then answering slowly, "You a physically able to arrest me, I will concede, but I a vise you to wait a few minutes." He stepped to the wi dow. "Look up into the sky."

Six bombers of the Peace Commission patrolh over the Capitol. "None of those pilots is Americ~ born,"

Manning added slowly. "If you confine ni none of us here in this room will live out the day.' There were incidents thereafter, such as the unfc tunate affair at Fort Benning three days later, and t] outbreak in the wing of the Patrol based in Lisbon au its resultant wholesale dismissals, but for practic purposes, that was all there was to the coup d'etat. Manning was the undisputed military dictator the world.