now with ships from all over the world. Each echelon picked one of three
groups centered around the three landing fields and streamers of heavy
brown smoke poured from the bellies of the E. U. ships. I saw a tiny black
figure jump from a tractor and run toward the nearest building. Then the
smoke screen obscured the field.
“Do you still have the field?” demanded Manning.
“Yes, sir.”
“Cross connect to the chief safety technician. Hurry!”
The copilot cut in the amplifier so that Manning could talk directly.
“Saunders? This is Manning. How about it?”
“Radioactive, chief. Intensity seven point four.”
They had paralleled the Karst-Obre research.
Manning cut him off and demanded that the communication office at the field
raise the Chief of Staff. There was nerve-stretching delay, for it had to
be routed over land—wire to Kansas City, and some chief operator had to be
convinced that she should commandeer a trunk line that was in commercial
use. But we got through at last and Manning made his report. “It stands to
reason,” I heard him say, that other flights are approaching the border by
this time. New York, of course, and Washington. Probably Detroit and
Chicago as well. No way of knowing.”
The Chief of Staff cut off abruptly, without comment. I knew that the U.S.
air fleets, in a state of alert for weeks past, would have their orders in
a few seconds and would be on their way to hunt out and down the attackers,
if possible before they could reach the cities.
I glanced back at the field. The formations were broken up. One of the E.
U. bombers was down, crashed, half a mile beyond the station. While I
watched, one of our midget dive-bombers screamed down on a behemoth E. U.
ship and unloaded his eggs. It was a center hit, but the American pilot had
cut it too fine, could not pull out, crashed before his victim.
There is no point in rehashing the newspaper stories of the Four-days War.
The point is that we should have lost it, and we would have, had it not
been for an unlikely combination of luck, foresight and good management.
Apparently the nuclear physicists of the Eurasian Union were almost as far
along as Ridpath’s crew when the destruction of Berlin gave them the tip
they needed. But we had rushed them, forced them to move before they were
ready, because of the deadline for disarmament set forth in our Peace
Proclamation.
If the President had waited to fight it out with Congress before issuing
the proclamation, there would not be any United States.
Manning never got credit for it, but it is evident to me that he
anticipated the possibility of something like the Four-days War and
prepared for it in a dozen different devious ways. I don’t mean military
preparation; the Army and the Navy saw to that. But it was no accident that
Congress was adjourned at the time. I had something to do with the
vote-swapping and compromising that led up to it, and I know.
But I put it to you—would he have maneuvered to get Congress out of
Washington at a time when he feared that Washington might be attacked if he
had had dictatorial ambitions?
Of course, it was the President who was back of the ten-day leaves that had
been granted to most of the civil-service personnel in Washington and he
himself must have made the decision to take a swing through the South at
that time, but it must have been Manning who put the idea in his head. It
is inconceivable that the President would have left Washington to escape
personal danger.
And then, there was the plague scare. I don’t know how or when Manning
could have started that—it certainly did not go through my notebook—but I
simply do not believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded
rumor or bubonic plaque caused New York City to be semi-deserted 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