Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

one of his sarcastic speeches but was unable to continue it. The announcer said that

he had been seized with a heart attack, and substituted some recordings of patriotic

music. The station cut off in the middle of the “Horst Wessel” song. After that

there was silence.

I managed to promote an Army car and a driver at the Baltimore field which

made short work of the Annapolis speedway. We almost overran the turnoff to the

laboratory.

Manning was in his office. He looked up as I came in, said, “Hello, John,”

in a dispirited voice, and dropped

his eyes again to the blotter pad. He went back drawing doodles.

I looked him over and realized for the first time th the chief was an old

man. His face was gray and flabF deep furrows framed his mouth in a triangle. F

clothes did not fit.

I went up to him and put a hand on his should~ “Don’t take it so hard,

chief. It’s not your fault. \ gave them all the warning in the world.”

He looked up again. “Estelle Karst suicided this morning. Anybody could have

anticipated it, but nobody d And somehow I felt harder hit by her death than by t

death of all those strangers in Berlin. “How did she it?” I asked.

“Dust. She went into the canning room, and took off her armor.”

I could picture her-head held high, eyes snappir and that set look on her

mouth which she got wh people did something she disapproved of. One lit old woman

whose lifetime work had been turn against her.

“I wish,” Manning added slowly, “that I could explain to her why we had to

do it.”

Page 52

We buried her in a lead-lined coffin, then Manning and I went on to

Washington.

While we were there, we saw the motion pictui that had been made of the

death of Berlin. You ha not seen them; they never were made public, but th were of

great use in convincing the other nations oft world that peace was a good idea. I

saw them wh Congress did, being allowed in because I was Ma ning’s assistant.

They had been made by a pair of R. A. F. pilots, w had dodged the Luftwaffe

to get them. The first sh showed some of the main streets the morning after t raid.

There was not much to see that would show up telephoto shots, just busy and crowded

streets, but if you looked closely you could see that there had been an excessive

number of automobile accidents.

The second day showed the attempt to evacuate. The inner squares of the city were

practically deserted save for bodies and wrecked cars, but the streets leading out

of town were boiling with people, mostly on foot, for the trams were out of service.

The pitiful creatures were fleeing, not knowing that death was already lodged inside

them. The plane swooped down at one point and the cinematographer had his telephoto

lens pointed directly into the face of a young woman for several seconds. She stared

back at it with a look too woebegone to forget, then stumbled and fell.

She may have been trampled. I hope so. One of those six horses had looked like that

when the stuff was beginning to hit his vitals.

The last sequence showed Berlin and the roads around it a week after the

raid. The city was dead; there was not a man, a woman, a child-nor cats, nor dogs,

not even a pigeon. Bodies were all around, but they were safe from rats. There were

norats.

The roads around Berlin were quiet now. Scattered carelessly on shoulders

and in ditches, and to a lesser extent on the pavement itself, like coal shaken off

a train, were the quiet heaps that had been the citizens of the capital of the

Reich. There is no use in talking about it.

But, so far as I am concerned, I left what soul I had in that projection

room and I have not had one since. The two pilots who made the pictures eventually

died-systemic, cumulative infection, dust in the air over Berlin. With precautions