It was victory.
There was no doubt about it.
Jack Tighe called for a day of national rejoicing.
6
What a feast it was! What a celebration!
Jack Tighe was glowing with triumph and with joy. He was old and stern and powerful, but his hawk’s face was the face of a delighted boy.
‘Eat, my friends,’ he boomed, his voice rolling through the amplifiers. ‘Enjoy yourselves! A new day has dawned for all of us, and here are the glorious three who made it possible!’
He swept a generous arm towards those who sat beside him on the dais. Applause thundered.
The three heroes were all there. Major Commaigne sat erect, tunic crisp, buttons gleaming, a bright new scarlet ribbon over all the other ribbons on his chest, where Jack Tighe had impulsively created a new decoration on the spot. Marlene Groshawk sat beside him, radiant. Bill Cossett was stiff, grinning uncomfortably as he sat next to his wife (who was staring thoughtfully at Marlene Groshawk).
Jack Tighe bawled: ‘Eat, while the Marine Band plays us a march! And then we will have a few words from the heroes who have saved us all!’
It was a glorious picnic. Hail to the Chief bounced brassily off the bright blue sky. Cossett sat miserably, no longer stiff, wondering what the devil he would find to say, when he noticed that the brassy bugles of the Marine Corps Band faded ringingly away.
A uniformed Officer had dashed breathlessly through the crowd to the rostrum. He was whispering up to Jack Tighe, a look of tense excitement on his face.
After a moment, Tighe stood up, hands raised, a smile on his face.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, friends,’ he called, ‘nothing at all! But there’s a little life in the cavern factory yet. The colonel here tells me that another truck is coming out of the ramp, that’s all. So please just stay where you are and watch our boys knock it off!’
Panic? No, there wasn’t any panic - why should the crowd have panicked? It was a kind of circus, an extra added attraction, as risk-free as the bear-baiting at a Sussex village fair.
Let the obstinate old factory send its trucks out, thought the assembled thousands with a joy of anticipation, it’ll be fun to watch our boys smash them up! And it surely can’t mean anything. The battle is won. The factories can go on plotting underground as long as they like, but you can’t make toasters without copper and steel, and there hasn’t been any of that going in for weeks. No, pure fun, that’s all it is!
And so they took advantage of the spectacle, climbing on chairs to see better, the fathers lifting the youngest to their shoulders. And the truck came whooping out. Rattle, rattle, the machine-guns roared. Wush went the rocket launchers. The truck didn’t have a chance. In convoys, in the old days, a few always got through; but here was only one, and it got clobbered for fair.
Bill Cossett, hand in hand with his wife, went over to look at the smouldering ruins. The crowd fell back respectfully.
Essie Cossett said gladly: ‘Serves them right! Those darn machines, they think they own us. I just wish I could get down there to watch them starving and suffering, like Mr. Tighe said. What are those things, dear?’
Cossett said absently: ‘What things?’ His attention was fixed on what the bazooka charge had done to the truck’s armoured radiator grill, and he was thinking of how handily a rocket launcher belonging to the factory might have done the same to him.
‘Those shiny things.’
‘What shiny - Oh.’ In the yawning flank of the truck, its steel plates sprung by half a dozen shells, a sort of metallic crate hung its edge over the lip of the hole. It was stencilled:
NATIONAL
Electro-Mech Appliances
I ½ Gross Cigarette Lighters
And from a dangling flap of the crate, small, shiny globules were oozing out - dripping out, but it was odd, because the confounded things were dripping up. They squeezed out like water from a leaky tap, bright, striated things, and, plop, they were free and floated away.
‘Funny,’ said Bill Cossett to his wife, vaguely apprehensive. ‘But it can’t be anything to worry about Cigarette lighters! I never saw any like that.’
Wonderingly he took his own cigarette case-and-lighter combination from his pocket.
He opened it.
He held it in his hand to read the name stamped on the bottom, to see if by chance it was a National Electro-Mech.
Pflut. One of the shiny things swooped down on him, danced above the case, came towards his face. He felt a harsh, urgent thrusting at his lips, ducked, coughed, choked, nearly strangled.
Cossett scrambled to his feet, tore the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, threw it to the ground.
‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘But how can they? We closed them down!’
And all over the enormous crowd, others were making the same discovery, and the same error of deduction. From a smashed crate labelled Perc-o-Matics, S-Cup, a shimmering series of little globes of light was whisking its way out into the air and around the crowd.
Coffee makers? Yes, they were coffee makers.
‘Help!’ yelled a woman whose jug of icewater was snatched out of her hands; and ‘Stop!’ shrilled another, attempting to open a can of Maxwell House.
Coffee grounds and water swam around in the air, like the jets at Versailles drowning the brown sands of Coney Island. Then the soggy used grounds neatly burrowed into the ground out of sight and the shimmering globe towed a sphere twice larger than itself from cup to cup, dispensing perfect coffee every time.
A four-year-old, watching with his mouth agape, absently let his ham sandwich dangle. ‘Ouch!’ he yelled, rubbing suddenly reddened fingers as another little sphere, this one emerald green, took the bread from his hand, toasted it a golden brown, expertly caught the falling ham and restored it to him before the ham had a chance to touch the ground.
‘Bill!’ shrieked Essie Cossett. ‘What is this? I thought you stopped the factory.’
‘I thought so too,’ muttered her husband blankly, watching the frightened crowd with eyes bright with horror.
‘But didn’t you cut off their raw materials? Isn’t that how you stopped it?’
Bill Cossett sighed. ‘We cut off the raw materials,’ he admitted. ‘But evidently that won’t stop the factories. They’re learning to do without. Force fields, magnetic flux - I don’t know! But that truck was full of appliances that didn’t use any raw materials at all!’
He licked dry lips. ‘And that’s not the worst part of it,’ he said, so softly that his wife could hardly hear. ‘I can face it if the bad old days come back again. I can stand it if every three months a whole new model comes out, and we have to sell, sell, sell and buy, buy, buy. But -
‘But these things,’ he said sickly, ‘don’t look as though they’ll ever wear out. How can they? They aren’t made of matter at all! And when the new models keep coming out - how are we ever going to get rid of the old ones?’
Survival Kit
Mooney looked out of his window, and the sky was white.
It was a sudden, bright, cold flare and it was gone again. It had no more features than a fog, at least not through the window that was showered with snow and patterned with spray from the windy sea.