And he isn’t urbane any more, this man Coglan whose picture is being received in this room; he looks excited and he looks mad.
‘Funny,’ comments Mr. Maffity, called ‘L.S.’ by his intimate staff, ‘that they didn’t take the transmitter away too. They must have known you’d contact us and that there would be reprisals.’
‘But they wanted me to contact you!’ cries the voice from the picture tube. ‘I told them what it would mean. L.S., they’re going crazy. They’re spoiling for a fight.’
And after a little more talk, L.S. Maffity turns off the set.
‘We’ll give it to them, eh, Major?’ he says, as stern and straight as a ramrod himself.
‘We will, sir!’ says the major, and he salutes, spins around and leaves. Already he can feel the eagles on his shoulders -who knows, maybe even stars!
And that is how the punitive expedition came to be launched; and it was exactly what Pung’s Corners could have expected as a result of their actions - could have, and did.
Now I already told you that fighting had been out of fashion for some time, though getting ready to fight was a number-one preoccupation of a great many people. You must understand that there appeared to be no contradiction in these two contradictory facts, outside.
The big war had pretty much discouraged anybody from doing anything very violent. Fighting in the old-fashioned way - that is, with missiles and radio-dust and atomic cannon - had turned out to be expensive and for other reasons impractical. It was only the greatest of luck then that stopped things before the planet was wiped off, nice and clean, of everything more advanced than the notochord, ready for the one-celled beasts of the sea to start over again. Now things were different.
First place, all atomic explosives were under rigid interdiction. There were a couple of dozen countries in the world that owned A-bombs or better, and every one of them had men on duty, twenty-four hours a day, with their fingers held ready over buttons that would wipe out for once and all whichever one of them might first use an atomic weapon again. So that was out.
And aircraft, by the same token, lost a major part of their usefulness. The satellites with their beady little TV eyes scanned every place every second, so that you didn’t dare drop even an ordinary HE bomb as long as some nearsighted chap watching through a satellite relay might mistake it for something nuclear - and give the order to push one of those buttons.
This left, generally speaking, the infantry.
But what infantry it was! A platoon of riflemen was twenty-three men and it owned roughly the firepower of all of Napoleon’s legions. A company comprised some twelve hundred and fifty, and it could singlehanded have won World War one.
Hand weapons spat out literally sheets of metal, projectiles firing so rapidly one after another that you didn’t so much try to shoot a target as to slice it in half. As far as the eye could see, a rifle bullet could fly. And where the eye was blocked by darkness, by fog or by hills, the sniperscope, the radarscreen and the pulsebeam interferometer sights could locate the target as though it were ten yards away at broad noon.
They were, that is to say, very modern weapons. In fact, the weapons that this infantry carried were so modern that half of each company was in process of learning to operate weapons that the other half had already discarded as obsolete. Who wanted a Magic-Eye Self-Aiming All-Weather Gunsight, Mark XXII, when a Mark XXIII, with Dubl-Jewelled Bearings, was available?
For it was one of the triumphs of the age that at last the planned obsolescence and high turnover of, say, a TV set or a Detroit car had been extended to carbines and bazookas.
It was wonderful and frightening to see.
It was these heroes, then, who went off to war, or to whatever might come.
Major Commaigne (so he says in his book) took a full company of men, twelve hundred and fifty strong, and started out for Pung’s Corners. Air brought them to the plains of Lehigh County, burned black from radiation but no longer dangerous. From there, they journeyed by wheeled vehicles.
Major Commaigne was coldly confident. The radioactivity of the sands surrounding Pung’s Corners was no problem. Not with the massive and perfect equipment he had for his force. What old Mr. Coglan could do, the United States Army could do better; Coglan drove inside sheet lead, but the expeditionary force cruised in solid iridium steel, with gamma-ray baffles fixed in place.
Each platoon had its own half track personnel carrier. Not only did the men have their hand weapons, but each vehicle mounted a 105-mm explosive cannon, with Zip-Fire Auto-Load and Wizardtrol Safety Interlock. Fluid mountings sustained the gimbals of the cannon. Radar picked out its target. Automatic digital computers predicted and outguessed the flight of its prey.
In the lead personnel carrier. Major Commaigne barked a last word to his troops:
‘This is it, men! The chips are down! You have trained for this a long time and now you’re in the middle of it. I don’t know how we’re going to make out in there -’ and he swung an arm in the direction of Pung’s Corners, a gesture faithfully reproduced in living three-dimensional colour on the intercoms of each personnel carrier in his fleet – ‘but win or loose, and I know we’re going to win, I want every one of you to know that you belong to the best Company in the best Regiment of the best Combat Infantry Team of the best Division of -’
Crump went the 105-mm piece on the lead personnel carrier as radar range automatically sighted in and fired upon a moving object outside, thus drowning out the tributes he had intended to pay to Corps, to Army, to Group and to Command.
The battle for Pung’s Corners had begun.
6
Now that first target, it wasn’t any body.
It was only a milch cow, and one in need of freshening at that. She shouldn’t have been on the baseball field at all, but there she was, and since that was the direction from which the invader descended on the town, she made the supreme sacrifice. Without even knowing she’d done it, of course.
Major Commaigne snapped at his adjutant. ‘Lefferts! Have the ordnance sections put the one-oh-fives on safety. Can’t have this sort of thing.’ It had been a disagreeable sight, to see that poor old cow become hamburger, well ketchuped, so rapidly. Better chain the big guns until one saw, at any rate, whether Pung’s Comers was going to put up a fight.
So Major Commaigne stopped the personnel carriers and ordered everybody out. They were past the dangerous radio active area anyway.
The troops fell out in a handsome line of skirmish; it was very, very fast and very, very good. From the top of the Presbyterian Church steeple in Pung’s Corners, Jack Tighe and Andy Grammis watched through field glasses, and I can tell you that Grammis was pretty near hysterics. But Jack Tighe only hummed and nodded.
Major Commaigne gave an order and every man in the line of skirmish instantly dug in. Some were in marsh and some in mud; some had to tunnel into solid rock and some - nearest where that first target had been - through a thin film of beef. It didn’t much matter, because they didn’t use the entrenching spades of World War II; they had Powr-Pakt Diggers that clawed into anything in seconds, and, what’s more, lined the pits with a fine ceramic glaze. It was magnificent.
And yet, on the other hand -
Well, look. It was this way. Twenty-six personnel carriers had brought them here. Each carrier had its driver, its relief driver, its emergency alternate driver and its mechanic. It had its radar-and-electronics repairman, and its radar-and-electronics repairman’s assistant. It had its ordnance staff of four, and its liaison communications officer to man the intercom and keep in touch with the P.C. commander.