each of two apartment hotels, and the fact that over three thousand persons died meant
nothing to EastHem’s tyrant. His second move was to make Antonio Grimes the boss of
all WestHem. Whereupon Grimes called a general strike; every union man of the
Western Hemisphere walked out; and all hell was out for noon.
The union people, however, were not the only ones who walked out. Executives,
supervisors, engineers, and top bracket technicians did too, in droves, and disappeared
from Earth; and they did not go empty-handed. For instance, the top technical experts of
Communications Incorporated (a wholly-owned subsidiary of InStell) worked for an hour
or so apiece in the recesses of their switch-banks and packed big carrying-cases before
they left.
Grimes knew and counted upon the fact that WestHem’s economy, half automated
though it was, could not function without his union men and women at work. He must also
have known the obverse; that it could not function, either, without the brains that had
brought automation into being in the first place and that kept it running-the only brains
that understood what those piled-up masses of electronic gear were doing. He must also
have known that in any fight to the finish Labor would suffer with the rest; hence he did
not expect a finish fight. He was superbly confident that Capital, this time as always
before, would surrender. He was wrong.
When Grimes found every one of his own communications channels dead, he tried
frantically to restore enough service to handle Labor’s campaign, but there was nothing
he or his union operators could do. (They were still called “operators”, although there
were no longer any routine manual operations to be performed).
These operators, although highly skilled in the techniques of keeping the millions of calls
flowing smoothly through the fantastically complex mazes of their central exchanges,
were limited by their own unions’ rules to their own extremely narrow field of work. An
operator reported trouble, but she must not, under any conditions, try to fix it. Nor could if
she tried. No operator knew even the instrumentation necessary to locate any particular
failure, to say nothing of being able to interpret the esoteric signals of that
instrumentation.
There were independent experts, of course, and Grimes found them and put them to
work. These experts, however, could find nothing with which to work. The key codes, the
master diagrams, and the all-important frequency manuals had vanished. They could not
even find out what, or how much, of sabotage had been done. It would be quicker, they
reported, to jury-rig a few channels for Labor’s own use. They could do that in a day or
so; in just a little longer than it would take to fly technicians to the various cities he
wanted in his network. . Grimes told them to go ahead; but before the Labor leaders
could accomplish much of anything, EastHem launched every intercontinental ballistic
missile it had.
WestHem’s warning systems and defenses were very good indeed. The Department of
Defense had its own communications system, which of course was not affected by the
strike. In seconds, then, after the first Eastern missile left the ground, the retaliatory
monsters of the West began to climb their ladders.
And in minutes the Nameless One and hundreds of the hard core of the Party died; and
thousands of his lesser minions were in vehicles hurtling toward subspacers which had
for many months been ready to go and fully programmed for flight.
Chapter 15
THE UNIVERSITY OF PSIONICS
EARTH As such did not have a space navy; there was no danger of attack from space
and, as far as Earth was concerned, the outplanets could take care of themselves. Nor
did either WestHem or EastHem; with their ICBM’s they did not need or want any
subspace-going battleships. Nor did any of the planets. Newmars and Galmetia were
heavily armed, but their armament was strictly defensive.
Thus InStell had been forced, over the years, to develop a navy of its own, to protect its
far-flung network of merchant traffic lines against piracy; which had of course moved into
space along with the richly-laden merchantmen. As traffic increased, piracy increased; so
protection had to increase, too. Thus, over the years and gradually, there came about a
very peculiar situation:
The only real navy in all the reaches of explored space-the only law-enforcement agency
of all that space -was a private police force not responsible to any government!
It hunted down and destroyed pirate ships in space. It sought out and destroyed pirate
bases. Since no planetary court had jurisdiction, InStell set up a space-court, in which
such few marauders as were captured alive were tried, convicted, and sentenced to
death. For over a century there had been bitter criticism of these “highhanded tactics,”
particularly on Earth. However, InStell didn’t like it, either-it was expensive. Wherefore,
for the same hundred years or so, InStell had been trying to get rid of it; but no
planet-particularly Earth-or no Planetary League or whatever-would take it over. Every-
body wanted to run it, but nobody would pick up the tab. So InStell kept on being the only
Law in space.
This navy was small, numbering only a hundred capital ships; but each of those ships
was an up-to-the-minute and terribly efficient engine of destruction, bristling with the most
modem, most powerful weapons known to man.
High above Earth’s surface, precisely spaced both vertically and horizontally, hung poised
the weirdest, the motleyest fleet ever assembled. InStell’s entire navy was there, clear
down to tenders, scouts, and gigs; but they were scarcely a drop in the proverbial
bucket. InStell’s every liner, freighter, lofter, and shuttle that could be there was there;
MetEnge’s every ore-boat, tanker, scout and scow that could possibly be spared; all the
Galaxians every available vessel of every type and kind, from Hatfield’s palatial
subspace-going private yacht down to Maynard’s grandsons’ four-boy flit about. More,
every spaceyard of the planets had been combed; every clunker, and every junker not
yet cut completely up, was taken over. Drives and controls had been repaired or re-
placed. Hulls had been made air-tight. Many of these derelicts, however, were in such
bad shape that they could not be depended upon to stay air-tight; hence many of those
skeleton crews worked, ate, and slept in spacesuits complete except for helmets-and
with those helmets at belts at the ready.
But each unit of that vast and ridiculously nondescript fleet could carry men,
missile-killers, computer-coupled ! locators, and launchers, and that was all that
was necessary. Since there was so much area to cover, it was the number of control
stations that was important, not their size or quality. The Galaxians had had to use every
craft whose absence from its usual place would not point too directly at Maynard’s plan.
The fleet was not evenly distributed, of course. Admiral Dann knew the location of every
missile-launching base on Earth, and his coverage varied accordingly. Having made
formation, he waited. His flagship covered EastHem’s main base; he personally saw
EastHem’s first Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile streak upward. “This is it, boys, go to
work,” he said quietly into his microphone, and the counter-action began. A computer
whirred briefly and a leybyrdite missile-killer erupted from a launcher. Erupted, and
flashed away on collision course at an acceleration so appallingly high that it could not be
tracked effectively even by the radar of that age. That acceleration can be stated in
Tellurian gravities; but the figure, by itself, would be completely meaningless to the mind.
Everyone knows all about one Earthly gravity. Everyone has seen a full-color tri-di of
hard trained men undergoing ten and fifteen gees; has seen what it does to them. But ten
thousand gravs? Or a hundred thousand? Or two hundred thousand? Such figures are
entirely meaningless.
Consider instead the bullet in the barrel of a magnum rifle at, and immediately after, the
instant of ignition of the propellant charge. This concept is much more informative.
Starting from rest, in a time of a little over one millisecond and in a distance of less than
three feet, that bullet attains a velocity of more than four thousand feet per second.
Those missile-killers moved like that, except more so and continuously. They were the
highest acceleration things ever put into production by man.
The first killer struck its target and both killer and target vanished into nothingness; a
nothingness so inconceivably hot that the first thing to become visible was a fire-ball
some ten miles in diameter. But there was nothing of fission about that frightfulness;
GalFed’s warheads operated on the utterly incomprehensible heat generated by
dead-shorted Chaytor engines during the fractional microsecond each engine lasted
before being whiffed into subatomic vapor by the stark ferocity of its own performance.
Missiles by the hundreds were launched; from EastHem, from WestHem, from the poles
and from the oceans and from the air; and in their hundreds they were blown into
submolecular and subatomic vapor. Thus it made no difference what kind of a warhead