But it was a nice house, all the same. He fixed Andy Grammis a drink and sat him down. He phoned down-town and invited half a dozen people to come in to see them. He didn’t say what it was about, naturally. No sense in starting a panic.
But everyone pretty much knew. The first to arrive was Timmy Horan, the fellow from the television service, and he’d given Charley Frink a ride on the back of his bike. He said, breathless: ‘Mr. Tighe, they’re on our lines. I don’t know how he’s done it, but Coglan is transmitting on our wire TV circuit. And the stuff he’s transmitting, Mr. Tighe!’
‘Sure,’ said Tighe soothingly. ‘Don’t worry about it, Timothy. I imagine I know what sort of stuff it is, eh?’
He got up, humming pleasantly, and snapped on the television set. ‘Time for the afternoon movie, isn’t it? I suppose you left the tapes running.’
‘Of course, but he’s interfering with it!’
Tighe nodded. ‘Let’s see.’
The picture on the TV screen quavered, twisted into slanting lines of pale dark and snapped into shape.
‘I remember that one!’ Charley Frink exclaimed. ‘It’s one of my favourites, Timmy!’
On the screen, Number Two Son, a gun in his hand, was backing away from a hooded killer. Number Two Son tripped over a loose board and fell into a vat. he came up grotesquely comic, covered with plaster and mud.
Tighe stepped back a few paces. He spread the fingers of one hand and moved them rapidly up and down before his eyes.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘yes. See for yourself, gentlemen.’
Andy Grammis hesitatingly copied the older man. He spread his fingers and, clumsily at first, moved them before his eyes, as though shielding his vision from the cathode tube. Up and down he moved his hand, making a sort of stroboscope that stopped the invisible flicker of the racing electronic pencil.
And, yes, there it was!
Seen without the stroboscope, the screen showed bland-faced Charlie Chan in his white Panama hat. But the stroboscope showed something else. Between the consecutive images of the old movie there was another image - flashed for only a tiny fraction of a second, too quick for the conscious brain to comprehend, but, oh, how it struck into the subconscious!
Andy blushed.
‘That - that girl,’ he stammered, shocked. ‘She hasn’t got any-’
‘Of course she hasn’t,’ said Tighe pleasantly. ‘Subliminal compulsion, eh? The basic sex drive; you don’t know you’re seeing it, but the submerged mind doesn’t miss it. No. And notice the box of Prune-Bran Whippets in her hand.’
Charley Frink coughed. ‘Now that you mention it, Mr Tighe,’ he said, ‘I notice that I’ve just been thinking how tasty a dish of Prune-Bran Whippets would be right now.’
‘Naturally,’ agreed Jack Tighe. Then he frowned. ‘Naked women, yes. But the female audience should be appealed to also. I wonder.’ He was silent for a couple of minutes, and held the others silent with him, while tirelessly he moved the spread hand before his eyes.
Then he blushed.
‘Well,’ he said amiably, ‘that’s for the female audience. It’s all there. Subliminal advertising. A product, and a key to the basic drives, and all flashed so quickly that the brain can’t organize its defences. So when you think of Prune-Bran Whippets, you think of sex. Or more important, when you think of sex, you think of Prune-Bran Whippets.’
‘Gee, Mr. Tighe. I think about sex a lot.’
‘Everybody does,’ said Jack Tighe comfortingly, and he nodded.
There was a gallumphing sound from outside then and Wilbur LaFarge from the Shawanganunk National came trotting in. He was all out of breath and scared.
‘He’s done it again, he’s done it again, Mr. Tighe, sir! That Mr. Coglan, he came and demanded more money! Said he’s going to build a real TV network slave station here in Pung’s Corners. Said he’s opening up a branch agency for Yust and Ruminant, whoever they are. Said he was about to put Pung’s Corners back on the map and needed money to do it.’
‘And you gave it to him?’
‘I couldn’t help it.’
Jack Tighe nodded wisely. ‘No, you couldn’t. Even in my day, you couldn’t much help it, not when the agency had you in its sights and the finger squeezing down on the trigger. Neo-scop in the drinking water, to make every living soul in Pung’s Corners a little more suggestible, a little less stiff-backed. Even me, I suppose, though perhaps I don’t drink as much water as most. And subliminal advertising on the wired TV, and subsonic compulsives when it comes to man-to-man talk. Tell me, LaFarge, did you happen to hear a faint droning sound? I thought so; yes. They don’t miss a trick. Well,’ he said, looking somehow pleased, ‘there’s no help for it. We’ll have to fight.’
‘Fight?’ whispered Wilbur LaFarge, for he was no brave man, no, not even though he later became the Secretary of the Treasury.
‘Fight!’ boomed Jack Tighe.
Everybody looked at everybody else.
‘There are hundreds of us,’ said Jack Tighe, ‘and there’s only one of him. Yes, we’ll fight! We’ll distill the drinking water. We’ll rip Coglan’s little transmitter out of our TV circuit. Timmy can work up electronic sniffers to see what else he’s using; we’ll find all his gadgets, and we’ll destroy them. The subsonics? Why, he has to carry that gear with him. We’ll just take it away from him. It’s either that or we give up our heritage as free men!’
Wilbur LaFarge cleared his throat. ‘And then -’
‘Well you may say “and then”,’ agreed Jack Tighe. ‘And then the United States Cavalry comes charging over the hill to rescue him. Yes. But you must have realized by now, gentlemen, that this means war.’
And so they had, though you couldn’t have said that any of them seemed very happy about it.
5
Now I have to tell you what it was like outside in those days.
The face of the Moon is no more remote. Oh, you can’t imagine it, you really can’t. I don’t know if I can explain it to you, either, but it’s all in a book and you can read it if you want to ... a book that was written by somebody important, a major, who later on became a general (but that was much later and in another army) and whose name was T. Wallace Commaigne.
The book? Why, that was called The End of the Beginning, and it is Volume One of his twelve-volume set of memoirs entitled : I Served with Tighe: The Struggle to Win the World.
War had been coming, war that threatened more, until it threatened everything, as the horrors in its supersonic pouches grew beyond even the dreads of hysteria. But there was time to guesstimate, as Time Magazine used to call it.
The dispersal plan came first. Break up cities, spread them apart, diffuse population and industry to provide the smallest possible target for even the largest possible bomb.
But dispersal increased another vulnerability - more freight trains, more cargo ships, more boxcar planes carrying raw materials to and finished products from an infinity of production points. Harder, yes, to hit and destroy, easier to choke off coming and going.
Then dig in, the planners said. Not dispersal but bomb shelter. But more than bomb shelter - make the factories mine for their ores, drill for their fuels, pump for their coolants and steams - and make them independent of supplies that may never be delivered, of workers who could not live below ground for however long the unpredictable war may last, seconds or forever - even of brains that might not reach the drawing boards and research labs and directors’ boards, brains that might either be dead or concussed into something other than brains.