I was startled but I answered, “Well, to tell the truth I rather enjoyed it—the selling end, at least.”
“Good. I’m out of a job where I was, of course—and I’ve been seriously considering going in on my own, a jobbing business and manufacturers” representative. I’ll need a partner. Eh?”
I thought it over. “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I haven’t thought ahead any further than Operation Strikeout. I might stay in the army-though soldiering does not have the appeal for me it once had . . . too many copies to make out and certify. But I don’t know. I think what I really want is simply to sit under my own vine and my own fig tree.”
“—and none shall make you afraid,” he finished. “A good thought. But there is no reason why you shouldn’t unroll a few bolts of cloth while you are sitting there. The fig crop might fail. Think it over.”
“I will. I surely will.”
CHAPTER 15
Maggie and I were married the day before the assault on New Jerusalem. We had a twenty-minute honeymoon, holding hands on the fire escape outside my office, then I flew Huxley to the jump-off area. I was in the flagship during the attack. I had asked permission to pilot a rocket-jet as my combat assignment but he had turned me down.
“What for, John?” he had asked. “This isn’t going to be won in the air; it will be settled on the ground.”
He was right, as usual. We had few ships and still fewer pilots who could be trusted. Some of the Prophet’s air force had been sabotaged on the ground; a goodly number had escaped to Canada and elsewhere and been interned. With what planes we had we had been bombing the Palace and Temple regularly, just to make them keep their heads down.
But we could not hurt them seriously that way and both sides knew it. The Palace, ornate as it was above ground, was probably the strongest bomb-proof ever built. It had been designed to stand direct impact of a fission bomb without damage to personnel in its deepest tunnels—and that was where the Prophet was spending his days, one could be sure. Even the part above ground was relatively immune to ordinary H.E. bombs such as we were using.
We weren’t using atomic bombs for three reasons: we didn’t have any; the United States was not known to have had any since the Johannesburg Treaty after World War III. We could not get any. We might have negotiated a couple of bombs from the Federation had we been conceded to be the legal government of the United States, but, while Canada had recognized us, Great Britain had not and neither had the North African Confederacy. Brazil was teetering; she had sent a chargй d'affaires to St Louis. But even if we had actually been admitted to the Federation, it is most unlikely that a mass weapon would have been granted for an internal disorder.
Lastly, we would not have used one if it had been laid in our laps. No, we weren’t chicken hearted. But an atom bomb, laid directly on the Palace, would certainly have killed around a hundred thousand or more of our fellow citizens in the surrounding city—and almost as certainly would not have killed the Prophet.
It was going to be necessary to go in and dig him out, like a holed-up badger.
Rendezvous was made on the east shore of the Delaware River. At one minute after midnight we moved east, thirty-four land cruisers, thirteen of them modern battlewagons, the rest light cruisers and obsolescent craft-all that remained of the Prophet’s mighty East Mississippi fleet; the rest had been blown up by their former commanders. The heavy ships would be used to breach the walls; the light craft were escort to ten armored transports carrying the shock troops—five thousand fighting men hand-picked from the whole country. Some of them had had some military training in addition to what we had been able to give them in the past few weeks; all of them had taken part in the street fighting.
We could hear the bombing at New Jerusalem as we started out, the dull Crrump!” the gooseflesh shiver of the concussion wave, the bass rumble of the ground sonic. The bombing had been continuous the last thirty-six hours; we hoped that no one in the Palace had had any sleep lately, whereas our troops had just finished twelve hours impressed sleep.
None of the battlewagons had been designed as a flagship, so we had improvised a flag plot just abaft the conning tower, tearing out the long-range televisor to make room for the battle tracker and concentration plot. I was sweating over my jury-rigged tracker, hoping to Heaven that the makeshift shock absorbers would be good enough when we opened up. Crowded in behind me was a psychoperator and his crew of sensitives, eight women and a neurotic fourteen-year-old boy. In a pinch, each would have to handle four circuits. I wondered if they could do it. One thin blonde girl had a dry, chronic cough and a big thyroid patch on her throat.
We lumbered along in approach zigzag. Huxley wandered from comm to plot and back again, calm as a snail, looking over my shoulder, reading despatches casually, watching the progress of the approach on the screens.
The pile of despatches at my elbow grew. The Cherub had fouled her starboard tread; she had dropped out of formation but would rejoin in thirty minutes. Penoyer reported his columns extended and ready to deploy. Because of the acute shortage of command talent, we were using broad-command organization; Penoyer commanded the left wing and his own battlewagon; Huxley was force commander, right wing commander, and skipper of his own flagship.
At 12:32 the televisors went out. The enemy had analyzed our frequency variation pattern, matched us and blown every tube in the circuits. It is theoretically impossible; they did it. At 12:37 radio went out.
Huxley seemed unperturbed. “shift to light-phone circuits,” was all he said.
The communications officer had anticipated him; our audio circuits were now on infra-red beams, ship to ship. Huxley hung over my shoulder most of the next hour, watching the position plot lines grow. Presently he said, “I think we will deploy now, John. Some of those pilots aren’t any too steady; I think we will give them time to settle down in their positions before anything more happens.”
I passed the order and cut my tracker out of circuit for fifteen minutes; it wasn’t built for so many variables at such high speeds and there was no sense in overloading it. Nineteen minutes later the last transport had checked in by phone, I made a preliminary set up, threw the starting switch and let the correction data feed in. For a couple of minutes I was very busy balancing data, my hands moving among knobs and keys; then the machine was satisfied with its own predictions and I reported, “Tracking, sir.”
Huxley leaned over my shoulder. The line was a little ragged but I was proud of them-some of those pilots had been freighter jacks not four weeks earlier.
At three a.m. we made the precautionary signal, “Coming on the range,” and our own turret rumbled as they loaded it.
At 3:31 Huxley gave the command, “Concentration Plan III, open fire.”
Our own big fellow let go. The first shot shook loose a lot of dust and made my eyes water. The craft rolled back on her treads to the recoil and I nearly fell out of my saddle. I had never ridden one of the big booster guns before and I hadn’t expected the long recoil. Our big rifle had secondary firing chambers up the barrel, electronically synchronized with the progress of the shell; it maintained max pressure all the way up and gave a much higher muzzle velocity and striking power. It also gave a bone-shaking recoil. But the second time I was ready for it.
Huxley was at the periscope between shots, trying to observe the effects of our fire. New Jerusalem had answered our fire but did not yet have us ranged. We had the advantage of firing at a stationary target whose range we knew to the meter; on the other hand even a heavy land cruiser could not show the weight of armor that underlay the Palace’s ginger-bread.
Huxley turned from the scope and remarked, “smoke, John.” I turned to the communications officer. “stand by, sensitives; all craft!”