Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

to that. But it w no accident that Congress was adjourned at the tim I had something

to do with the vote-swapping am compromising that led up to it, and I know.

But I put it to you-would he have maneuvered get Congress out of Washington

at a time when I feared that Washington might be attacked if he he had dictatorial

ambitions?

Of course, it was the President who was back of t] ten-day leaves that had

been granted to most of t] civil-service personnel in Washington and he hims must

have made the decision to take a swing throuf the South at that time, but it must

have been Mannii who put the idea in his head. It is inconceivable th the President

would have left Washington to esca~ personal danger.

And then, there was the plague scare. I don’t kno how or when Manning could

have started that-it ce tainly did not go through my notebook-but I simply do not

believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded rumor of bubonic plaguc~

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caused New York City to be semideserted at the time the E. U. bombers struck.

At that, we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.

Of course, the government was blamed for the lives that were lost and the

papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to anticipate and force an

evacuation of all the major cities.

If Manning anticipated trouble, why did he not ask for evacuation?

Well, as I see it, for this reason:

A big city will not be, never has been, evacuated in response to rational

argument. London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our

attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had

considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened to the

thought.

But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly

complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.

And don’t forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow-those were

innocent people, too. War isn’t pretty.

I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our ships to

dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the laboratory and plant

which produced the only supply of military madioactives in the Eurasian Union.

Suppose the mistake had been the other way around-suppose that one of the E. U.

ships in attacking Washington, D.C., by mistake had included Ridpath’s shop

forty-five miles away in Maryland?

Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis, and the American

Pacification Expedition started the job of pulling the fangs of the Eurasian Union.

It was not a military occupation in the usual sense; there were two simple

objectives: to search out and dust all aircraft, aircraft plants, and fields, and

locate and dust radiation laboratories, uranium su plies, and bodes of carnotite and

pitchblende. No a tempt was made to interfere with, or to replace, ci~ government.

We used a two-year dust, which gave a breathir spell in which to consolidate

our position. Liberal r wards were offered to informers, a technique whh worked

remarkably well not only in the E. U., but most parts of the world.

The “weasel,” an instrument to smell out radiatio based on the

electroscope-discharge principle and r fined by Ridpath’s staff, greatly facilitated

the work locating uranium and uranium ores. A grid of wease] properly spaced over a

suspect area, could locate ai important mass of uranium almost as handily as a c

rection-finder can spot a radio station.

But, notwithstanding the excellent work of Gener Bulfinch and the

Pacification Expedition as a whole, was the original mistake of dusting Ryazan that

ma the job possible of accomplishment.

Anyone interested in the details of the pacificati work done in 1945-6

should see the “Proceedings the American Foundation for Social Research” for paper

entitled A Study of the Execution of the Americ Peace Policy from February, 1945.

The de facto soluti of the problem of policing the world against war k the United

States with the much greater problem perfecting a policy that would insure that the