“What’s the answer, Joe?”
“Is there any? Is there any answer at all? We had the best ships and the best planes and the best bombs and the biggest guns. But we’re laughing ourselves out of them.”
He stood up abruptly, grabbed his jacket off the hook and went out onto the long porch of the camp overlooking the dark lake. Porch and lake that were a part of his childhood, and now a part of his defeat.
There was only a faint trace of irony left in him. He grieved for his nation and he felt the helpless stir of anger at this thing which had been so skillfully done, so carefully done, so adequately done.
She came out and stood beside him and he put his arm around her waist.
“Don’t leave me, Joe,” she whispered. “Not for a minute.”
His voice hoarse, he took the massive seal ring off his finger, slipped it over hers, saying, “With this ring I thee wed. Fugitives get cheated out of the pageantry, angel.”
She shivered against the night, said; “Dandy proposal. I’m wearing the ring before I can open my mouth to say no.”
“Then give it back.”
“A valuable ring like this! Don’t be silly.”
He laughed softly. She moved away from him. Her face was pale against the darkness. “Please don’t laugh, Joe. Ever. I never want to hear laughter again.”
Her hands were like ice and her lips were tender flame.
VII
FOURTH BULLETIN OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT, NOV. 12: “Remnants of the 11th and 14th Army Corps, fighting without air cover, today bent the left prong of the pincer movement of the two enemy columns converging on the provisional capital at Herkimer, Idaho. In spite of determined resistance, eventual capture of the provisional capital seems imminent. All troops and irregulars isolated by enemy columns will endeavor to make their way through enemy lines to bolster our position. Live off the land. Conserve ammunition. Make each shot mean the death of an invader. All troops and irregulars who did not undergo adjustment under the auspices of the invader’s Trojan Horse, miscalled Happiness, Incorporated, will be careful to stay away from the cities. All commanders will discover which men under their command have been ‘adjusted’ and will mark these men unfit for further duty.”
PAMPHLET AIR-DROPPED BY BOMBERS OF THE INVADER EXPEDITIONARY FORCES: “Americans! Lay down your arms. Further resistance is useless. Your active army is outnumbered five to one and virtually without equipment. You have lost the war. Help to make the peace as easy on you as possible. For each day of ten-tinned resistance your eventual food ration will be cut a certain percentage. Lay down, your arms!”
“Drop it!” Joe Morgan snapped. He held the rifle leveled. The two men in ragged field uniform, swaying with weariness dropped their weapons, a carbine and a submachine gun. They were dirty and unshaven and one of them had a bandage, dark-stained with blued across his left hand.
“Move over to the side!” he ordered. The men obeyed meekly. Alice went down the steps and picked up the weapons, staying well out of the line of fire.
“Who are you?” Joe demanded.
The older of the two said, deep weariness in his voice: “Baker Company, Five oh eight battalion, Eighty-third.” Then he added, with a note of ironic humor, “I think maybe Harry and me are the whole company.”
“You’ve given up, eh? You’re looking for a hole to hide in.”
The younger one took two heavy steps toward the porch. He said: “Put down that pop-gun, junior, and we’ll talk this over. I don’t like what you said.”
“Shut up, Harry,” the older one said. “Mister, yesterday we picked us a nice spot and kept our heads down until they come along with a high-speed motor convoy. They were too close together. We killed the driver in the lead truck and piled up the convoy. We sprayed ’em real nice and got away up the hill. As long as we got a few rounds we’re not through?”
Joe grinned. “Then welcome to the Morgan Irregulars. Come on in. We’ve got food and hot water and some bandages for that hand. How close do you guess they are?”
“Fifteen miles, maybe. But they’re not headed this way. They’re using the main road as a supply line, I think.”
The men came up on the porch. Joe stood his rifle beside the door. The older man said: “What makes you think we won’t bust you one and take your food and take over your nest, mister?”
“Because,” Joe said, “you have a hunch that maybe I can help you be a little more effective. You don’t know what I got up my sleeve. And besides, you’re not the first guys to get here, you know. If you’d made a move toward that rifle, you would have caught a surprise from the brush out there.” He turned and said, “O.K., guys. These two will do.”
By twos and threes about fifteen well-armed men sauntered out of the brush.
America in turmoil. Not a man but who, at some time in his life, had speculated on how the country would behave under the iron heel of an invader. Had the softness of life in this big lush country destroyed the hidden focus of resistance? Where was the heart of the country?
Gaunt and bearded men, with nothing left but fury, rushed the armored columns with home-made bombs of rags and gasoline. The jacketed bullets smashed them down hut always a few got dose enough to throw the bomb and die. And black greasy smoke wound up into the fall sky and the blackened hull of a vehicle was towed off onto the shoulder, sentinel of death, monument to valor.
In the night an absurdly young man wormed on his belly behind the hangars, killed the guard with a knife, crawled into the cockpit of the jet fighter, ripped off into the pink dawn. They climbed after him. He went around in a screaming arc, leveled out twenty feet above the ground, and smashed himself and the alien ship into whining fragments — but he took with him six of the enormous bombers.
A destroyer, the last of the fuel almost gone, cut all lights, drifted like a wraith through the night, drifted with the tide into a vast harbor where the enormous supplies of invasion were being unloaded under the floodlights.
Erupting with all weapons, with the boiling wake of torpedoes, the can fought and smashed its way down the line of freighters, drifting at last, a flaming ruin into one last supply ship, blanketing it in the suicide flame.
In the Sangre de Cristo Mountaintains three full divisions hide, and at night the patrols in strength smash invader communications, blow up ammunition dumps. When the bombers sail out at dawn to punish such insolence, nothing can be seen but the raw real rock of the mountains.
The Invader, taunted and stung from every side, lashes in fury, destroying without cause, forsaking all plans of gentle administration to rule by flame and by the firing squad and with machine guns aimed down the descried streets of the silent towns.
The common denominator is fury, and the pain of loss. But thirty-five millions, the city dwellers, are yet hostage to the new weapon of emotional resonance, and as the long days go by, the empty and hopeless days, once again within them builds up the cretin joy, the mechanical gaiety, the vacuous death-dance, threatening to explode once more into crazy violence.
Thirty-five millions, tied, one to another, by a life-rhythm so carefully adjusted as to be the final indignity meted out to the human spirit.
They have not left their cities and neither the attacks of the Invader nor the destructive joy of the adjusted has served to destroy those cities.
The Invader, wise in the ways of his own weapon, evacuates his troops from the afflicted cities during the week before the emotional peak is reached.