As I stepped back to the window, a piece of paper the size of a playing-card fluttered in. Across the top, in 24-point bold-face, were the words "Don't Be a Sucker, Buddy!", and below it one of the cleverly-worded appeals of Raiberti's gang proving that the Alliance really thought the world of us, but that we were misled by our scheming politicians.
There was no mystery about it. The Alliance had sent a radio-controlled rocket a couple of hundred feet long, with a mighty charge of explosive in its nose, across the Atlantic from the Alps. When it was almost over New York, a number of little auxiliary rockets full of these love-notes had been released to scatter their load, while the big one dove into the financial district.
The next day I got a pass to the scene of the explosion. Where the City Bank Farmers Trust Building had been was now a large hole, partly filled with steel beams twisted into pretzel shapes. The skeletons of the surrounding skyscrapers were mostly still standing, but all the masonry had been blown away. Because of the financial district's sparse night population, there had been less loss of life there than was caused by the fall of debris elsewhere. Some of it fell as far north as Times Square.
I was out at Fort Montauk the night the second—and last—of these visitors came. A battery of new guns had been put up so hurriedly that there were footprints in the emplacements where the crews had walked before the concrete was dry. The guns themselves looked incredibly large, but that was because of the water-jackets six feet in diameter (including the cooling-fins) around their barrels. A cooling-unit the size of a box-car, full of blowers and radiators, was required to dissipate the heat developed by their thirty-rounds-a-minute fire.
I descended into the fire-control room, which was full of men unconcernedly smoking while looking at indicators and oscillographs and pushing buttons and turning knobs. The main view-plate was a four-foot glass square, black except for a grid of green lines. The adjutant explained this and that to me, and a buzzer sounded. The operator in front of the main plate said over his shoulder, "Here she comes!" I saw the men tense themselves.
AT THE TOP of the plate a white dot appeared and moved slowly down the glass, leaving a thread of purple light behind it. I held my breath, but you can't do that for ten minutes, and the rocket was still far out of range. The minutes crawled by, the silence complete except for the breathing of the men and the tiny noises of their instruments.
The dot reached a line a little heavier than the others, and I knew that the rocket was fifty miles out and angling down from the stratosphere. The operator pressed another buzzer. Through the concrete, the firing of the guns came to us as a tattoo of thumps. I was glad I wasn't outside: of all guns, the six-inch is hardest on eardrums, but the eight-inch, which these were, is not far behind it.
Little dots of red appeared on the plate, closer and closer to the white dot until they looked like a cluster of gems. The white dot seemed to swerve slightly, and turned red, meaning that it was dropping out of the plane represented by the plate. The operator spun a handwheel and brought it back to white again. He kept turning, turning, until his altitude dial showed zero. The white dot flickered and disappeared. Somewhere out on the Atlantic a column of steam marked the end of the rocket. It was all over. The defense had caught up with the offense again.
It had caught up elsewhere, too. The main cities of Europe were buried in sandbags and sheathed with explosion-mats, and ringed with guns that could in a twinkling blast out of the sky any hostile aircraft, regardless of its speed or the weather conditions. On the battlefields, long lines of concealed gun-emplacements peered at each other from behind barbed-wire, concealed pits, fences of railroad-irons stuck upright in the ground, land mines, and every other defense that desperate men could devise. No-man's land was sprinkled with the remains of men and of tanks that had tried to cross the space. The gun-crews groped for each other with sound-detectors, infra-red detectors, and seismographic detectors and fired. When a shot went home, the gun and its crew were replaced, and the war went on.
Our Turkish friends drove through Thrace for a few miles, and were stopped by the Balkan army under Vacarescu. The Indians were slowly pinched back into Begal by the vast Japanese-officered Chinese armies of the Alliance, with the help of a few Siamese divisions. Things went against us in Uruguay.
As the battlefields became more littered and shell-pitted, and as the contestants dug themselves in deeper, the snail-like pace of the war asymptotically approached a dead stop. But in the minds of men another kind of war was being fought. You bought a pack of cigarettes; the third one that you took out suddenly unrolled into a strip of paper bearing a propaganda message. You called the police, who arrested the clerk, the delivery-man, the dealer, and everybody at the cigarette-factory through whose hands the smoke might have passed. Their unanimous denial of knowing anything stood up under the lie-detectors. You couldn't shoot them all in the hope of getting the hostile agent; you'd have to kill too large a proportion of the population, and besides that was the sort of barbarity practiced by the Alliance, whereas our side was supposed to be more humane.
YOU bought a head of lettuce, and the grocer made out your receipted bill. The bill was normal enough when he stuffed it in the paper bag of provisions, but by the time you got home it had changed into one of Raiberti's billet doux. You had the grocer arrested, again without result.
Admiral Dahlgren, looking in civilian clothes more than ever like a Minnesota farmer, was in my apartment one evening when I turned on the radio. I set it for a commercial station, but when I threw the switch a hearty voice said: "... statement by Senator James. Now, folks, we don't like to doubt a senator's word, but when you consider that in 1956 he was held for mental observation in the Des Moines City Hospital, we think it should be taken with a grain of salt. I'm afraid you're being taken for a little ride, folks. If you want to know how he got his dough, I'd suggest you look into the matter of the Oregon timber leases of 1959, and compare that with..." The voice was drowned in a blare of dance-music. The commercial station, no doubt in response to frantic official telephone calls, had changed their wave-form to blanket the Alliance station.
"The swine!" barked the Admiral."I get a lot of inside dope, and I know James had nothing to do with that scandal. But they're so damned clever that their biggest lies are of a kind you can't absolutely disprove. Remember the last time they pulled that insanity gag? They said President McRae had been in the looney-bin at White Plains. Then it turned out that a small fire had destroyed that hospital's records, so that no matter what McRae said there was always a shade of doubt in people's minds. Hmp."
Another time he brought up an individual who looked like a neo-vorticist poet, whom he introduced as Dr. Quentin Hoyle, the psychologist. I was surprised: I'd met many psychiatrists, but most of them were men of conservative appearance designed to give confidence to their patients.
The Admiral spoke gloomily of the war."Same old story, hmp. Trouble on the Ukrainian front. Trouble on the Chinese front—morale. They had a little mutiny in the Chinese Soviet's 52nd Division. Propaganda, of course. Anybody who can beat the Communists at that game is good. You probably haven't heard about it; the mutiny story should have been censored out before it got to you."
"No," I replied, "I haven't, but I have heard about our own morale troubles in the South and the Midlands. Raiberti's song-and-dance has been making headway in the Chicago area."
The Admiral was going through his usual motions of hunting for a match."Damn, damn, where'd I put them? You know, Hasbrook, our technics are easily as good as the Alliance's, but in this 'public enlightenment' business they make our best advertising men and psychologists—with due apologies, Hoyle—look like children."