“Stranger, go in,” repeated the man, and it was only then that Chandler noticed the man was holding a pistol, pointed at him.
CHANDLER SAT in the rear of the room, watching. There must be thousands of little colonies like this, he reflected; with the breakdown of long-distance communication the world had been atomized. There was a real fear, well justified, of living in large groups, for they too were lightning rods for possession. The world was stumbling along, but it was lame in all its members; a planetary lobotomy had stolen from it its wisdom and plan. If, he reflected dryly, it had ever had any.
But of course things were better in the old days. The world had seemed on the brink of blowing itself up, but at least it was by its own hand. Then came Christmas.
It had happened at Christmas, and the first sign was on nationwide television. The old President, balding, grave and plump, was making a special address to the nation, urging good will to men and, please, let’s everyone remember to use artificial trees because of the fire danger in the event of H-bomb raids. In the middle of a sentence twenty million viewers had seen him stop, look dazedly around and say, in a breathless mumble, what sounded like: “Disht dvornyet itgt.” He had then picked up the Bible on the desk before him and thrown it at the camera.
The last the televiewers had seen was the fluttering pages of the Book, growing larger as it crashed against the lens, then a flicker and blinding shot of the studio lights as the cameraman jumped away and the instrument swiveled to stare mindlessly upward. Twenty minutes later the President was dead, as his Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, hurrying with him back to the White House, calmly took a hand grenade from a Marine guard at the gate and blew the President’s party to fragments.
For the President’s seizure was only the first and most conspicuous. “Disht dvornyet ilgt.” C.I.A. specialists were playing the tapes of the broadcast feverishly, electronically cleaning the mumble and stir from the studio away from the words to try to learn, first, the language and second what the devil it meant; but the President who ordered it was dead before the first reel spun, and his successor was not quite sworn in when it became his time to die. The ceremony was interrupted for an emergency call from the War Room, where a very nearly hysterical four-star general was trying to explain why he had ordered the immediate firing of every live missile in his command against Wash-ington, D.C.
Over five hundred missiles were involved. In most of the sites the order was disobeyed, but in six of them, unfortunately, unquestioning discipline won out, thus ending not only the swearing in, the general’s weeping explanation, the spinning of tapes, but also some two million lives in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and (through malfunctioning guidance relays on two missiles) Pennsylva-nia and Vermont. But it was only the beginning.
These were the first cases of possession seen by the world in some five hundred years, since the great casting out of devils of the Middle Ages. A thousand more occurred in the next few days, a hundred in the next hours.
The timetable was made up out of scattered reports in the wireservice newsrooms, while they still had facilities for spot coverage in any part of the world. (That lasted afmost a week.) They identified 237 cases of possession by noon of the next day. Disregarding the dubious itemsthe Van-kee pitcher who leaped from the Manhattan bridge -(he had Bright’s disease), the warden of San Quentin w,ho seated himself in the gas chamber and, literally, kicked the bucket (did he know the Grand Jury was subpoenaing hLs books?)disregarding these, the chronology of major cases that evening was:
8:27 PM, E.S.T.: President has attack on television.
8:28 PM, E.S.T.: Prime Minister of England orders bombing raid against Israel, alleging secret plot (not yet carried out).
8:28 PM, E.S.T.: Captain of USN Ethan Alien, surfaced near Montauk Point, orders crash dive and course change, proceeding submerged at flank speed to New York Harbor.
9:10 PM, E.S.T.: Eastern Airlines four-engine jet makes wheels-up landing on roof of Pentagon, breaking some 1500 windows but causing no other major damage (except to the people aboard the jet); record of this incident fragmentary because entire site charred black in fusion attack two hours later.
9:23 PM, E.S.T.: Rosalie Pan, musical comedy star, jumps off stage, runs up center aisle and vanishes in cab, wearing beaded bra, G-string and $2500 headdress. Her movements are traced to Newark airport where she boards TWA jetliner, which is never seen again.
9:50 PM, E.S.T.: Entire S.A.C. fleet of 1200 jet bombers takes off for rendezvous over Newfoundland, where 72% are compelled to ditch as tankers fail to keep re-fueling rendezvous. (Orders committing the aircraft origi-nate with S.A.C commander, found to be a suicide.) 10:14 PM, E.S.T.: Submarine fusion explosion destroys 40% of New York City. Analysis of fallout indicates U.S.
Navy Polaris missiles were detonated underwater in bay; by elimination it is deduced that the submarine was the Ethan Alien.
10:50 PM, E.S.T.: President’s party assassinated by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; Secretary then dies on bayonet of Marine guard who furnished the grenade.
10:55 PM, E.S.T.: Satellite stations observe great nuclear explosions in China and Tibet.
11:03 PM, E.S.T.: Heavily loaded munitions barges exploded near North Sea dikes of Holland; dikes breached, 1800 square miles of reclaimed land flooded out.. .
And so on. The incidents were countless. But before long, before even the C.I.A. had finished the first play-through of the tapes, before their successors in the task identified Disht dvornyet ilgt as a Ukrainian dialect rendering of, My God, it works!before all this, one fact was already apparent. There were many incidents scattered around the world, but not one of them took place in Russia itself.
Warsaw was ablaze, China pockmarked with blasts, East Berlin demolished along with its western sector, in eight rounds fired from a U.S. Army nuclear cannon. But the U.S.S.R.had not suffered at all, as far as could be told by the prying eyes in orbit; and that fact was reason enough for it to suffer very greatly very soon.
Within minutes of this discovery what remained of the military strength of the Western world was roaring through airless space toward the most likely targets of the East.
One unscathed missile base in Alaska completed a full shoot, seven missiles with fusion warheads. The three American bases that survived at all in the Mediterranean fired what they had. Even Britain, which had already watched the fire-tails of the American missiles departing on suicide missions, managed to resurrect its own two proto-type Blue Streaks from their racks, where they had mold-ered since the cancellation of the British missile program.
One of these museum-pieces destroyed itself in launching, but the other chugged painfully across the sky, the tortoise following the flight of the hares. It arrived a full half-hour after the newer, hotter missiles. It might as well not have bothered. There was not much left to destroy.
It was fortunate for the Communists that most of the Western arsenal had already spent itself in suicide. What was left wiped out Moscow, Leningrad and nine other cities. It was even fortunate for the whole world, for this was the Apocalypse they had dreaded, every possible nuclear weapon committed. But the circumstances were suchhasty orders, often at once recalled; confusion; panicthat most were unfused, many others merely tore great craters in the quickly healing surface of the sea. The fallout was murderous but spotty.
And the conventional forces invading Russia found nothing to fight. The Russians were as confused as they.
There were not many survivors of the very top brass, and no one seemed to know just what had happened.
Was the Secretary of the C.P., U.S.S.R. behind that terrible brief agony? As he was dead before it was over, there was no way to tell. More than a quarter of a billion lives went into mushroom-shaped clouds, and nearly half of them were Russian, Latvian, Tatar and Kalmuck. The Peace Commission squabbled for a month, until the breakdown of a communications cut them off from their govern-ments and each other; and in that way, for a time, there was peace.
This was the sort of peace that was left, thought Chandler looking around at the queer faces and queerer sur-roundings, the peace of medieval baronies, cut off from the world, untouched where the rain of fallout had passed by but hardly civilized any more. Even his own home town, trying to take his life in a form of law, reduced at last to torture and exile to cast him out, was not the civilization he had grown up in but something new and ugly.
There was a great deal of talk he did not understand because he could not quite hear it, though they looked at him. Then Guy, with the gun, led him up to the front of the room. They had constructed an improvised platform out of plywood panels resting on squat, heavy boxes that looked like empty ammunition crates. On the dais was a dentist’s chair, bolted to the plywood; and in the chair, strapped in, baby spotlights on steel-tube frames glaring on her, was a girl. She looked at Chandler with regretting eyes but did not speak.