Only three flying fortresses had arrived from the Eurasian Union. Their representatives had asked for short delay in order that a supply of high - test aviation gasoline might be delivered to them. They claimed shortage of fuel necessary to make the long flight over the Arctic safe. There was no way to check the claim and the delay was granted while a shipment wad routed from England. We were about to leave, Manning having satisfied himself as to safety precautions, when a dispatch came in announcing that a flight of E. U. bomber might be expected before the day was out. Manning wanted to see them arrive; we waited around for four hours. When it was finally reported that our escort fighters had picked them up at the Canadian border Manning appeared to have grown fidgety and state that he would watch them from the air. We took of gained altitude and waited.
There were nine of them in the flight, cruising in column of echelons and looking so huge that our little fighters were hardly noticeable. They circled the field and I was admiring the stately dignity of them when Manning's pilot, Lieutenant Rafferty, exclaimed "What the devil! They are preparing to land down wind!"
I still did not tumble, but Manning shouted to the copilot, "Get the field!"
He fiddled with his instruments and announced "Got them, sir!"
"General alarm! Armor!"
We could not hear the sirens, naturally, but I could see the white plumes rise from the big steam whist on the roof of the Administration Building - three long blasts, then three short ones. It seemed almost at the same time that the first cloud broke from the E. I planes.
Instead of landing, they passed low over the receiving station, jam - packed 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 victim.
There is no point in rehashing the newspaper story of the Four - Days War. The point is that we should have lost it, and we would have, had it not been for an unlikely combination of luck, foresight, and good management. Apparently, the nuclear physicists of the Eurasian Union were almost as far along as Ridpath crew when the destruction of Berlin gave them the time they needed. But we had rushed them, forced them to move before they were ready, because of the deadline for disarmament set forth in our Peace Proclamation.
If the President had waited to fight it out with Congress before issuing the proclamation, there would n be any United States.
Manning never got credit for it, but it is evident me that he anticipated the possibility of something like the Four - Days War and prepared for it in a dozen 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 time 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 to get Congress out of Washington at a time when I feared that Washington might be attacked if he had dictatorial ambitions?
Of course, it was the President who was back of the ten - day leaves that had been granted to most of the civil - service personnel in Washington and he himself must have made the decision to take a swing through the South at that time, but it must have been Manning who put the idea in his head. It is inconceivable that the President would have left Washington to escape personal danger.
And then, there was the plague scare. I don't know how or when Manning could have started that - it certainly did not go through my notebook - but I simply do not believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded rumor of bubonic plague caused New York City to be semi - deserted 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 anticipate and force an evacuation of all the major cities.
If Manning anticipated 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 radioactives 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 supplies, and bodes of carnotite and pitchblende. No attempt was made to interfere with, or to replace, the government.
We used a two - year dust, which gave a breathing spell in which to consolidate our position. Liberal r wards were offered to informers, a technique that worked remarkably well not only in the E. U., but most parts of the world.