He braced his hands against the sides of the door, saw the target area below. The man behind him had a hand on Joe’s shoulder.
Joe stepped out into the night, into the cold, tumbling night, and the flatness of the city spun around him like a vast wheel. The sharp jolt caught him and he swung pendulum-wise toward the darkened earth, swinging under the pale flower of silk.
Then he was tumbling on the frozen ground of the park of the big city, grasping the shroud lines, bracing his feet, fumbling with the buckles. The chute collapsed and he stepped dear of the harness.
“Over here,” he yelled. “Over here.”
Roll call. “Peterson, Barnik, Stuyvessant, Simlon, Garrit, Reed, Walke, Punch, Norris, Humboldt, Crues, Riley, Renelli, Post, Charnevak.”
All but one. One was imbedded to half his thickness in the frozen earth.
They were in a silent circle around hint
He said: “You all know this town like the palm of your hand. You each have your sectors and your instructions. You know the plan and you know that it has to work.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “After it goes off, it’s every man for himself. We meet back here. Good luck.”
At base headquarters of the Invader, the commanding general listened gravely to the report of his Air Intelligence,
After listening, he made his decision. “Apparently they desire to set up, within the cities, focal points of resistance. You believe that men were airdropped into every one of the major cities and most of the smaller cities which are infected. It is obvious to me that they underestimate the extent of hysteria which will hit the cities within four days. We will wait until after the hysteria, until after the suicide period, and then we will go in and eliminate the men who were airdropped.”
The reporting officer saluted, turned smartly and left the office.
Joe Morgan stood in the cold gray morning and looked at Daylon. He had found and taken over one of the many empty rooms in the city. The city had suffered greatly.
He carried a heavy suitcase. As he walked down the morning street he looked carefully at the houses. Whenever he saw an empty one he broke in quickly, opened the suitcase, took out a small package the size of a cigarette package.
In each house be left the package in a different place. But the favorite spot was in the cellar, wired to the rafters overhead.
He saw a few people that he knew. They looked blankly at him, smiled and went vaguely about their business.
The people of Daylon were lean and ragged and their eyes were hollow. But they smiled constantly.
In mid-morning, a smiling policeman in a dirty torn uniform asked him what he was doing. Joe said: “Come in here and I’ll show you.” The policeman followed Joe through the door Joe had forced.
Joe pivoted, hit the man on the chin with all his strength, walked back out of the house carrying the suitcase.
Carefully he covered the sector he had allotted to himself. Public buildings, houses, garages, stores. In many places he had to be extremely cautious. In stores lie hid the packages among slow-moving merchandise. The city went through the motions of existence, but on every face was the look of expectancy.
Four days before the explosion of emotions, before the laughing orgy of death. Three days. Two days. The last of the packages has been placed. But there are four much larger packages to be delivered.
And these are delivered at night.
At night he found a stout iron bar, used it to pry up the manhole covers. The large packages nestled comfortably against the welter of cables and pipes.
This is the day before the tight spring will snap. Already there is empty laughter in the streets of the city, in the streets of all the vast cities.
The armies of the Invader, well removed from the focal points of contagious hysteria, clamp severe restrictions on all areas to prevent the curious from sneaking off to the cities.
At eleven o’clock on the morning of the day before pandemonium will reign, the streets of the cities vibrate to the massive thump of subterranean explosions. Steel manhole covers sail up into the air, turning lazily, smashing pedestrians as they full. The underground caverns roar with burning gas and then the roaring is gone as the severed water pipes spill the contents underground.
All electricity ceases to flow.
One hundred and seventy-one teams won through. Sixteen men to a team. Four bombs and one thousand of the deadly half-ounce packages to each man. Ten thousand nine hundred and forty-four explosions in the bowels of the great cities. Two million, seven hundred and thirty-seven thousand of the deadly packages distributed.
For this is a kind of suicide, oil a vast and generous scale.
The packages are closely co-ordinated. A few sputter prematurely, but within a few minutes after the explosions, the acid has eaten through the lead shields within more than half of them. They flame into life, burning with a white dazzling flame that has an intensity of twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit and a duration of twenty minutes. All of the fading resources of an almost-conquered nation has gone into the preparation of these packages of death.
With the water supply crippled, there is no possibility of fighting the fires.
Whole streets erupt into flame and the melted glass of the windows runs across the pavement.
It is almost too successful. The densely populated eastern seaboard is one vast pall of smoke drifting in the crisp December air.
Too many die in the flames. Far too many.
But from the roaring furnaces of the cities nearly thirty millions wind like sluggish worms into the countryside.
They have fear of the flames, fear of death, fear of pain — but it is not until tomorrow that they will be unable to feel fear.
And so, with empty idle smiles, with vacuous eyes, they move toward the vast camps of the Invader.
The Invader is outnumbered by the victims of his satanic adjustment — twenty-five to one.
Too late, the danger is seen.
The camps of the Invader are near the cities. They straddle the main, roads. Machine guns are manned and white-lipped men fire prolonged bursts into the crowds that move so slowly. And at last they are revolted by the slaughter of these who smile, even in death, and they refuse to obey orders.
The day darkens and in the night the cities are vast pyres that redden the sky. The cities of America burn with a brave flame and the sound of the roaring can be heard for many miles. The fire is behind them and the guns, unmanned by now, are ahead of them.
At dawn the Invader orders the armies to retreat away from these mad ones, to retreat to the fastness of the hills.
But already the infection is at work. Already the spirit of spontaneous hysteria has begun to infect the troops of the Invader.
Massive tanks sit empty while men shout hoarsely and dance in the street. The planes are idle, the guns unmanned, the officers joining their men in a frenzied rapport with the victims of disaster.
Suddenly the spirit grows among them that they are celebrating victory. Victor and vanquished revel until they fall exhausted, sleep, rise to bellow with laughter, to stare with glazed eyes at the winter sky, howl with the voices of wolves.
It is a party of death, lasting for day after day, with all thought of food forgotten, and the cities burn brightly every night and the winter sun by day is shrouded with the drifting black smoke of utter destruction.
STATUS REPORT, HQ, ARMIES OF DEFENSE: Al dawn today all columns were within striking distance of all corps headquarters of the Invader forces. Scouts report utter exhaustion in enemy ranks, black depression among individuals, a constant sound of small-arms fire indicating a high incidence of suicide among the Invader troops. All personnel has strict instructions about the destruction of equipment. The attack will begin at dusk.