So the sub-surface factories even designed for themselves, always on a rising curve:
Against an enemy presupposed to grow smarter and slicker and quicker with each advance, just as we and our machines do. Against our having fewer and fewer fighting men; pure logic that, as war continues, more and more are killed, fewer and fewer left to operate the killer engines. Against the destruction or capture of even the impregnable underground factories, guarded as no dragon of legend ever was - by all that Man could devise at first in the way of traps and cages, blast and ray - and then by the slipleashed invention of machines ordered always to speed up - more and more, deadlier and deadlier.
And the next stage - the fortress factories hooked to each other, so that the unthinkably defended plants, should they inconceivably fall, would in the dying message pass their responsibilities to the next of kin - survivor factories to split up their work, increase output, step up the lethal pace of invention and perfection, sill more murderous weapons to be operated by still fewer defenders.
And another, final plan - gear the machines to feed and house and clothe and transport a nation, a hemisphere, a world recovering from no one could know in advance what bombs and germs and poisons and - name it and it probably would happen if the war lasted long enough.
With a built-in signal of peace, of course: the air itself. Pure once more, the atmosphere, routinely tested moment by moment, would switch production from war to peace.
And so it did.
But who could have known beforehand that the machines might not know war from peace?
Here’s Detroit: a hundred thousand rat-inhabited manless acres, blind windows and shattered walls. From the air, it is dead. But underneath it - ah, the rapid pulse of life! The hammering systole and diastole of raw-material conduits sucking in fuel and ore, pumping out finished autos. Spidery passages stretched out to the taconite beds under the Lakes. Fleets of barges issued from concrete pens to match the U-boat nests at Lorient and, unmanned, swam the Lakes and the canals to their distribution points, bearing shiny new Buicks and Plymouths.
What made them new?
Why, industrial design! For the model years changed. The Dynaflow ‘61 gave place to the Super-Dynaflow Mark Eight of 1962; twin-beam headlights became triple; white-wall tyres turned to pastel and back to solid ebony black.
It was a matter of design efficiency.
What the Founding Fathers learned about production was essentially this: It doesn’t much matter what you build, it only matters that people should want to buy it. What they learned was: Never mind the judgmatical faculties of the human race. They are a frail breed. They move no merchandise. They boost no sales. Rely, instead, on the monkey trait of curiosity.
And curiosity, of course, feeds on secrecy.
So generations of automotivators reacted new cosmetic gimmicks for their cars in secret laboratories staffed by sworn mutes. No atomic device was half so classified! And all Detroit echoed their security measures; fleets of canvas-swathed mysteries swarmed the highways at new-model time each year; people talked. Oh, yes - they laughed; it was comic; but though they were amused, they were piqued; it was good to make a joke of the mystery, but the capper to the joke was to own one of the new models oneself.
The appliance manufacturers pricked up their ears. Ah, so. Curiosity, eh? So they leased concealed space to design new ice-tray compartments and brought them out with a flourish of trumpets. Their refrigerators sold like mad. Yes, like mad.
RCA brooded over the lesson and added a fillip of their own; there was the vinylite record, unbreakable, colourful, new. They designed it under wraps and then, the crowning touch, they leaked the secret; it was the trick that Manhattan Project hadn’t learned - a secret that concealed the real secret. For all the vinylite programme was only a façade; it was security in its highest manifestation; the vinylite programme was a mere cover for the submerged LP.
It moved goods. But there was a limit. The human race is a blabbermouth.
Very well, said some great unknown, eliminate the human race! Let a machine design the new models! Add a design unit. Set it, by means of wobblators and random-choice circuits, to make its changes in an unforeseeable way. Automate the factories; conceal them underground; programme the machine to programme itself. After all, why not? As Coglan had quoted Charles F. Kettering, ‘Our chief job in research is to keep the customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has,’ and proper machines can de that as well as any man. Better, if you really want to know.
And so the world was full of drusy caverns from which wonders constantly poured. The war had given industry its start by starting the dispersal pattern; bomb shelter had embedded the factories in rock; now industrial security made the factories independent. Goods flowed out in a variegated torrent.
But they couldn’t stop. And nobody could get inside to shut them off or even slow them down. And that torrent of goods, made for so many people who didn’t exist, had to be moved. The advertising men had to do the moving, and they were excellent at the job.
So that was the outside, a very, very busy place and a very, very big one. In spite of what happened in the big war.
I can’t begin to tell you how busy it was or how big; I can only tell you about a little bit of it. There was a building called the Pentagon and it covered acres of ground. It had five sides, of course; one for the Army, one for the Navy, one for the Air Force, one for the Marines, and one for the offices of Yust & Ruminant.
So here’s the Pentagon, this great big building, the nerve centre of the United States in every way that mattered. (There was also a ‘Capitol’, as they called it, but that doesn’t matter much. Didn’t then, in fact.)
And here’s Major Commaigne, in his scarlet dress uniform with his epaulettes and his little gilt sword. He’s waiting in the anteroom of the Director’s Office of Yust & Ruminant, nervously watching television. He’s been waiting there for an hour, and then at last they send for him.
He goes in.
Don’t try to imagine his emotions as he walks into that pigskin-panelled suite. You can’t. But understand that he believes that the key to all of his future lies in this room; he believes that with all his heart and in a way, as it develops, he is right.
‘Major,’ snaps an old man, a man very like Coglan and very like Jack Tighe, for they were all pretty much of a breed, those Ivy-League charcoal-greys, ‘Major, he’s coming through. It’s just as we feared. There has been trouble.’
‘Yes, sir!’
Major Commaigne is very erect and military in his bearing, because he has been an Army officer for fifteen years now and this is his first chance at combat. He missed the big war - well, the whole Army missed the big war; it was over too fast for moving troops - and fighting has pretty much stopped since then. It isn’t safe to fight, except under certain conditions. But maybe the conditions are right now, he thinks. And it can mean a lot to a major’s career, these days, if he gets an expeditionary force to lead and acquits himself well with it!
So he stands erect, alert, sharp-eyed. His braided cap is tucked in the corner of one arm, and his other hand rests on the hilt of his sword, and he looks fierce. Why, that’s natural enough, too. What comes in over the TV communicator in that pigskin-panelled office would make any honest Army officer look fierce. The authority of the United States has been flouted!
‘L.S.,’ gasps the image of a tall, dark old man in the picture tube, ‘they’ve turned against me! They’ve seized my transmitter, neutralized my drugs, confiscated my subsonic gear. All I have left is this transmitter!’