Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth - Critical Mass

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CRITICAL MASS

A Bantam Book I October 1977

Publications, Inc.

Corporation

D. Publications, Inc.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or In part, by

mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

ISBN 0-553-10948-0 Published simultaneously in the Vnited States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trade' mark, consisting of the words "Bantam

Books" and the portrayal of a bantam, is registered in the United States Patent Office and in

other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

INTRODUCTION by Frederik Pohl vii

THE QUAKER CANNON 1

MUTE INGLORIOUS TAM 31 THE WORLD OF MYRION FLOWERS 45

THE GIFT OF GARIGOLLI 53

A GENTLE DYING 83

A HINT OF HENBANE 93

THE MEETING 101

THE ENGINEER 117

NIGHTMARE WITH ZEPPELINS 127

CRITICAL MASS 137

AFTERWORD by Frederik Pohl 179

INTRODUCTION by Frederik Pohl

During World War III was an Air Force weatherman, mostly in Italy. My friend and collaborator

Cyril Kornbluth had a varied career. He started out as a machinist with the artillery, a safe and

reasonably satisfying job, as well as one pretty useful to the war effort. Along came ASTP. ASTP

was a marvelously do-good-ing program whereby certain soldiers could effectively drop out of the

war entirely, attending college in uniform instead of fighting or holding down posts in the United

States. I have never really understood what it had to do with the job of defeating Germany, Italy

and Japan, but it surely was a dream of delight to every GI, and Cyril signed up for it at once.

Catch-22 came along in 1944. The Army perceived that what it really needed was not so much well-

rounded officer material as warm bodies to throw against the enemy. ASTP was canceled without

warning, and everyone in it was immediately reassigned to the infantry, as a private. The rest of

us in uniform-even the rest of us-could not help feeling some compassion. When I went overseas it

was on a troop transport that had once been a fruit-company freighter, called the Cristobal. About

a hundred of the troops on board were weathermen like myself. The other 1,800 were former ASTP

students, now about to join the Fifth Army's infantry divisions at Cassino. Some of them were

still in their teens. Some of them had not been in the Army more than a few weeks. And some never

walked away from Cassino.

At about the same time, in a different troop transport headed for England, Cyril was in a very

similar convoy. He became a heavy machine-gunner, fought through the Battle of the Bulge and

received a Bronze Star therefore. At least on paper he did. He never got the medal itself from the

Army. I, on the other hand, had been given one, but it had never been made official; so a year or

two after the war I gave him mine.

We both survived the war and returned to civilian life around the end of 1945. I went into the

advertising business for a tune in New York. Cyril went to the University of Chicago on the GI

Bill of Rights.

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Old fellow-Futurian Richard Wilson was also in Chicago in those years, getting into news work with

Trans-Radio Press wire service. He soon became head of their Chicago bureau, and recruited Cyril

to work in the newsroom. When Dick moved on to higher things, first in the Washington bureau and

then to the central headquarters office in New York, Cyril replaced him as Chicago bureau chief,

quitting college to make time for that eighteen-hour-a-day job.

A few years of that turned out to be enough. In 1951 Cyril came east, determined to go back to

writing science fiction.

I had just bought the house I still live in, thirteen ancient rooms on the Jersey shore, and Cyril

and his pregnant wife came to stay with us while they sorted out their plans. I had begun a

science-fiction novel about the future of the advertising business, and invited Cyril to

collaborate on finishing it. It became the first bit of science fiction to be published under the

joint by-line "by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth" (all our previous collaborations had appeared

under a variety of pseudonyms) when Horace Gold serialized it in Galaxy, under the title of Gravy

Planet. We were delighted. Horace paid us $1,400 for it, which was about as much money as either

of us had ever seen in one lump before. A while later we managed to get lan Ballantine to bring it

out in book form, and, actually,

it hasn't really done badly at all: something over ten million copies, in something like forty

languages, earning something like a hundred tunes the price we wrote it for, as of even date. The

book title was The Space Merchants.

Over the next half-dozen years we wrote six other novels together, three which were science

fiction- Gladiator-at-Law, Search the Sky and Wolfbane-a.nd three which were not. Presidential

Year was about, well, about a presidential year: about a man who sought the nomination, and what

he had to go through to get nominated. It appeared in 1956 and was well enough received

critically, but not very exciting hi sales. We sold the film rights, but the movie was never made;

and one of the many reasons why I wish Cyril-, were still alive is that I would like it if we

could have revised and reissued it in the new post-Watergate political scene. A Town Is Drowning

was a topical novel about a hurricane hitting the East Coast. A couple of them had, not long

before/One of them had taken part, of my roof off and another had flooded Cyril's upstate New York

house out, and we viewed the novel as an attempt to get even with the elements. Sorority House was

a semisexy ripoff novel published under a pseudonym to complete a contract Cyril had come to

regret having made. All of these non-sf novels had things in them which I like and wish we had

used in better books, but we didn't.

At the same tune we were going on with our own individual writing.

Cyril's own novels-Takeoff, Not This August and The Syndic-were appearing and doing very well (not

to mention the half-dozen or so other novels, not science fiction, rather like Sorority House,

which were appearing as paperback originals under pen names). We were both doing about as well as

we had any reason to expect. I remember having a cup of coffee with Cyril when he had just had an

editorial in the New York Daily News plugging one of his books, and I had been

mentioned by Time in connection with one of mine. This sort of mass-media publicity for science

fiction was not common hi the fifties, and we were agreeably expectant of great things. We

undertook to check with each other six months later to see what they had done for us in sales. (As

it turned out, nothing we could detect.)

There was a certain amount of mutual assistance between us even on some of the stories which did

not appear as collaborations. I remember specifically Cyril bogging down on his novel Takeoff,

which he had originally intended to call something like The Martians Upstairs, with actual

Martians in it. This proved complex and difficult to write, and we spent one long night replotting

it into the published form, omitting the Martians. And I remember showing Mm the rough draft of my

novella The Midas Plague, and getting from him some first-rate ideas on plotting and bits of

business.

I think if Cyril had lived he would have become one of the all-tune greats of the field. He was

just hitting his stride when his health began to falter.

Cyril had always been a little plumper than was strictly good for him. When the Army made him a

machine-gunner, lugging a 50-calibre-heavy MG around the Ardennes forest, they shortened his life.

Exertions damaged his heart, and hi his midthirties his doctor told hun that he had a clear

choice. He could give up smoking, drinking, spices in his food, a lot of the food itself,

irregular hours and excitement; or he could die of hypertension.

For a while Cyril tried doing what the doctor told him. He took his medicine: tranquilizers,

mostly, the not-quite-perfected tranquilizers of the fifties, which had such side-effects as

making him a little confused and a little intellectually sluggish. He followed his diet

rigorously. He came out to visit us during that period, and my wife cooked salt-free meals and

baked salt-free bread. We couldn't do much writing. He was not up to it. But I showed him a novel

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I was having problems

with. He read the pages of the first draft and handed it back to me. "Needs salt," he said, and

that was all.

So I suppose Cyril made his choice. In his place, I think I might have made the same one. He went

back to coffee and cigarettes, gave up the medication, went back to writing, finished the

revisions on Woljbane, wrote two or three of his best novelettes, signed on as an editor for The

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -his first experiment with editing, rather than writing,

science fiction, and one which he enjoyed enormously. ... And then on a snowy March morning I had

a phone call from Mary, his wife, to say that Cyril had shoveled out their driveway to free his

car, run to catch a train and dropped dead on the station platform.

He left a bundle of incomplete manuscripts and fragments, some of which I was later able to revise

and complete. Most of the stories in this volume came out of that bale of paper, and were

published after his death.

THE QUAKER CANNON

This story is about 12,000 words long. I see by my notes that the fragment Cyril left incomplete

amounted to only about 3,000 words, which means that 9,000 of the words in the story are mine. And

yet, reading it over, I can find no major plot element and only a few incidents that I remember

contributing to it, This explains why I have trouble when someone asks me how much each of us

contributed to our collaborations, and why my usual answer is, "I don't know."

LIEUTENANT JOHN KRAMER did crossword puzzles during at least eighty per cent of his waking hours.

His cubicle in Bachelor Officers Quarters was untidy; one wall was stacked solid with newspapers

and magazines to which he subscribed for their puzzle pages. He meant, from week to week, to clean

them out but somehow never found time. The ern, or erne, a sea eagle, soared vertically through

his days and by night the ai, a three-toed sloth, crept horizontally. In edes, or Dutch communes,

dyers retted ecru, quaffing ades by the tun and thought was postponed.

John Kramer was in disgrace and, at thirty-eight, well on his way to becoming the oldest first

lieutenant in the North American (and Allied) Army. He had been captured in '82 as an aftermath of

the confused fighting around Tsingtao. A few exquisitely unpleasant months passed and he then

delivered three TV lectures

for the yutes. In them he announced his total conversion to Neo-Utilitarianism, denounced the

North American (and Allied) military command as a loathesome pack of war-waging, anti-utilitarian

mad dogs, and personally admitted the waging of viral warfare against the United Utilitarian

Republics.

The yutes, or Utilitarians, had been faithful to their principles. They had wanted Kramer only for

what he could do for them, not for his own sweet self, and when they had got the juice out of him

they exchanged him. In '83 he came out of his fog at Fort Bradley, Utah, to find himself being

court-martialed.

He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to a reprimand. The lightness of the sentence was

something to be a little proud of, if not very much. It stood as a grudging tribute to the months

he had held out against involutional melancholia in the yute Blank Tanks. For exchanged PW's, the

severity of their courts-martial was hi inverse proportion to the duration of their ordeal in

Utilitarian hands. Soldiers who caved in after a couple of days of sense-starvation could look

forward only to a firing squad. Presumably a returned soldier dogged (or rigid) enough to be

driven into hopeless insanity without cooperating would have been honorably acquitted by his

court, but such a case had not yet come up.

Kramer's "reprimand" was not the face-to-face bawling-out suggested to a civilian by the word. It

was a short letter with numbered paragraphs which said (1) you are reprimanded, (2) a copy of this

reprimand will be punched on your profile card. This tagged him forever as a foul ball, destined

to spend the rest of his military life shuffling from one dreary assignment to another, without

hope of promotion or reward.

He no longer cared. Or thought he did not; which came to the same thing.

He was not liked in the Officers Club. He was bad company. Young officers passing through Bradley

on their way to glory might ask him, "What's it redly

Jto

like in a Blank Tank, Kramer?" But beyond answering, "You go nuts," what was there to talk about?

Also he did not drink, because when he drank he went on to become drunk, and if he became drunk he

would cry.

So he did a crossword puzzle in bed before breakfast, dressed, went to his office, signed papers,

did puzzles until lunch, and so on until the last one in bed at night. Nominally he was Commanding

Officer of the 561st Provisional Reception Battalion. Actually he was (with a few military

overtones) the straw boss of a gang of clerks in uniform who saw to the arrival, bedding, feeding,

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equipping, inoculation and transfer to a training unit of one thousand scared kids per week.

On a drizzle-swept afternoon in the spring of '85 Kramer was sounding one of those military

overtones. It was his appointed day for a "surprise" inspection of Company D of his battalion.

Impeccable in dress blues, he was supposed to descend like a thunderbolt on this company or that,

catching them all unaware, striding arrogantly down the barracks aisle between bunks, white-gloved

and eagle-eyed for dust, maddened at the sight of disarray, vengeful against such contraband as

playing cards or light reading matter. Kramer knew, quite well, that one of his orderly room

clerks always telephoned the doomed company to warn that he was on his way. He did not

particularly mind it. What he minded was unfair definitions of key words, and ridiculously variant

spellings.

The permanent-party sergeant of D Company bawled "Tench-/z"tf" when Kramer snapped the door open

and stepped crisply into the 'barracks. Kramer froze his face into its approved expression of

controlled annoyance and opened his mouth to give the noncom his orders. But the sergeant had

miscalculated. One of the scared kids was still frantically mopping the aisle.

Kramer halted. The kid spun around in horror, made some kind of attempt to present arms with the

mop and failed. The mop shot from his soapy hands like a slung baseball bat, and its soggy gray

head schlooped against the lieutenant's dress-blue chest.

The kid turned white and seemed about to faint on the damp board floor. The other kids waited to

see him destroyed.

Kramer was mildly irritated. "At ease," he said. "Pick up that mop. Sergeant, confound it, next

time they buzz you from the orderly room don't cut it so close."

The kids sighed perceptibly and glanced covertly at each other in the big bare room, beginning to

suspect it might not be too bad after all. Lieutenant Kramer then resumed the expression of a

nettled bird of prey and strode down the aisle. Long ago he had worked out a "random" selection of

bunks for special attention and now followed it through habit. If he had thought about it any

more, he would have supposed that it was still spy-proof; but every noncom in his cadre had long

since discovered that Kramer stopped at either every second bunk on the right and every third on

the left, or every third bunk on the right and every second on the left-depending on whether the

day of the month was odd or even. This would not have worried Kramer if he had known it; but he

never even noticed that the men beside the bunks he stopped at were always the best-shaved, best-

policed and healthiest looking in each barracks.

Regardless, he delivered a certain quota of meaningless demerits which were gravely recorded by

the sergeant. Of blue-eyed men on the left and brown-eyed men on the right (this, at least, had

not been penetrated by the noncoms) he went on to ask their names and home towns. Before

discovering crossword puzzles he had memorized atlases, and so he had something to say about every

home town he had yet encountered. In this respect at least he considered himself an above-average

officer, and indeed he was.

It wasn't the Old Army, not by a long shot, but when the draft age went down to fifteen some of

the Old Army's little ways had to go. One experimental reception station in Virginia was trying

out a Barracks Mother system. Kramer, thankful for small favors, was glad they hadn't put him on

that project. Even here he was expected, at the end of the inspection, to call the "men" around

him and ask if anything was bothering them. Something always was. Some gangling kid would scare up

the nerve to ask, gee, lieutenant, I know what the Morale Officer said, but exactly why didn't we

ever use the megaton-head missiles, and another would want to know how come Lunar Base was such a

washout, tactically speaking, sir. And then he would have to rehearse the dry "recommended

discussion themes" from the briefing books; and then, finally, one of them, nudged on by others,

would pipe up, "Lieutenant, what's it like in the Blank Tanks?" And he would know that already,

forty-eight hours after induction, the kids all knew about what Lieutenant John Kramer had done.

But today he was spared. When he was halfway through the rigmarole the barracks phone rang and the

sergeant apologetically answered it.

He returned from his office-cubicle on the double, looking vaguely frightened. "Compliments of

General Grote's secretary, sir, and will you please report to him at G-l as soon as possible."

"Thank you, sergeant. Step outside with me a moment." Out on the duckboard walk, with the drizzle

trickling down his neck, he asked: "Sergeant, who is General Grote?"

"Never heard of him, sir."

Neither had Lieutenant Kramer.

He hurried to Bachelor Officers Quarters to change his sullied blue jacket, not even pausing to

glance at the puzzle page of the Times, which had arrived while

he was at "work." Generals were special. He hurried out again into the drizzle.

Around him and unnoticed were the artifacts of an Army base at war. Sky-eye'search radars popped

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from their silos to scan the horizons for a moment and then retreat, the burden of search taken up

by the next in line. Helicopter sentries on guard duty prowled the barbed-wire perimeter of the

camp. Fort Bradley was not all reception center. Above-ground were the barracks, warehouses and

rail and highway termini for processing recruits-ninety thousand men and all their goods-but they

were only the skin over the fort itself. They were, as the scared kids told each other in the

dayrooms, naked to the air. If the yutes ever did spring a megaton attack, they would become a

thin coating of charcoal on the parade ground, but they would not affect the operation of the real

Fort Bradley a bit.

The real Fort Bradley was a hardened installation beneath meters of reinforced concrete, some

miles of rambling warrens that held the North American (and Allied) Army's G-l. Its business was

people: the past, present and future of every soul in the Army.

G-l decided that a fifteen-year-old in Duluth was unlikely to succeed in civilian schools and

drafted him. G-l punched his Army tests and civilian records on cards, consulted its card-punched

tables of military requirements and assigned him, perhaps, to Machinist Training rather than

Telemetering School. G-l yanked a platoon leader halfway around the world from Formosa and handed

him a commando for a raid on the yutes' Polar Station Seven. G-l put foulball Kramer at the "head"

of the 561st PRB. G-l promoted and allocated and staffed and rewarded and punished.

Foulball Kramer approached the guardbox at the elevators to the warrens and instinctively squared

his shoulders and smoothed his tie.

General Grote, he thought. He hadn't seen a general officer since he'd been commissioned. Not

close up.

Colonels and majors had court-martialed him. He didn't know who Grote was, whether he had one star

or six, whether he was Assignment, Qualifications, Training, Evaluation, Psychological-or

Disciplinary.

Military Police looked him over at the elevator head. They read him like a book. Kramer wore his

record on his chest and sleeves. Dull gold bars spelled out the overseas months-for his age and

arm-, the Infantry, not enough. "Formosa," said a green ribbon, and "the storming of the beach"

said a small bronze spearpoint on it. A brown ribbon told them "Chinese Mainland," and the stars

on it meant that he had engaged hi three of the five mainland campaigns-presumably Canton, Mukden

and Tsingtao, since they were the first. After that, nothing. Especially not the purple ribbon

that might indicate a wound serious enough to keep him out of further fighting.

The ribbons, his age and the fact that he was still a first lieutenant were grounds enough for the

MP's to despise him. An officer of thirty-eight should be a captain at least. Many were majors and

some were colonels. "You can go down, Lieutenant," they told the patent foulball, and he went down

to the interminable concrete tunnels of G-l.

A display machine considered the name General Grote when he typed it on its keyboard, and told him

with a map where the general was to be found. It was a longjsh walk through the tunnels. While he

walked past banks of clicking card-sorters and their servants he pondered other information the

machine had gratuitously supplied: GROTE, Lawrence W, Lt Gen, 0-459732, Unassigned.

It did not lessen any of Kramer's puzzles. A three-star general, then. He couldn't possibly have

anything to do with disciplining a lousy first-John. Lieutenant generals ran Army Groups, gigantic

ad hoc assemblages of up to a hundred divisions, complete with air forces, missile groups,

amphibious assault teams, even

carrier and missile-sub task forces. The fact of Ms rank indicated that, whoever he was, he was an

immensely able and tenacious person. He had gone through at least a twenty-year threshing of the

wheat from the chaff, all up the screening and evaluation boards from second lieutenant to, say,

lieutenant colonel, and then the murderous grind of accelerated courses at Command and General

Staff School, the fanatically rigid selection for the War College, an obstacle course designed not

to tram the substandard up to competence but to keep them out. It was just this side of impossible

for a human being to become a lieutenant general. And yet a few human beings in every generation

did bulldoze their way through that h'ttle gap between the impossible and the almost impossible.

And such a man was unassigned?

Kramer found the office at last. A motherly, but sharp-eyed, WAC major told him to go right in.

John Kramer studied his three-star general while going through the ancient rituals of reporting-as-

or-dered. General Grote was an old man, straight, spare, white-haired, tanned. He wore no overseas

bars. On his chest were all the meritorious service ribbons his country could bestow, but none of

the decorations of the combat soldier. This was explained by a modest sunburst centered over the

ribbons. General Grote was, had always been, General Staff Corps. A desk man.

"Sit down, Lieutenant," Grote said, eyeing him casually. "You've never heard of me, I assume."

"I'm afraid not, sir."

"As I expected," said Grote complacently. "I'm not a dashing tank commander or one of those flying

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generals who leads his own raids. I'm one of the people who moves the dashing tank commanders and

flying generals around the board like chess pieces. And now, confound it, I'm going to be a

dashing combat leader at last. You may smoke if you like."

Kramer obediently lit up.

"Dan Medway," said the general, "wants me to start from scratch, build up a striking force and hit

the Asian mainland across the Bering Strait."

Kramer was horrified twice-first by the reference to The Supreme Commander as "Dan" and second by

the fact that he, a lieutenant, was being told about high strategy.

"Relax," the general said. "Why you're here, now. You're going to be my aide."

Kramer was horrified again. The general grinned.

"Your card popped out of the machinery," he said, and that was all there was to say about that,

"and so you're going to be a highly privileged character and everybody will detest you. That's the

way it is with aides. You'll know everything I know. And vice versa; that's the important part.

You'll run errands for me, do investigations, serve as hatchet man, see that my pajamas are

pressed without starch and make coffee the way I like it-coarse grind, brought to the boil for

just a moment hi an old-fashioned coffee pot. Actually what you'll do is what I want you to do

from day to day. For these privileges you get to wear a blue fourragere around your left shoulder

which marks you as a man not to be trifled with by colonels, brigadiers or MP's. That's the way it

is with aides. And, I don't know if you have any outside interests, women or chess or drinking.

The machinery didn't mention any. But you'll have to give them up if you do."

"Yes, sir," said Kramer. And it seemed wildly possible that he might never touch pencil to puzzle

again. With something to do-

"We're Operation Ripsaw," said the general. "So far, that's me, Margaret out there hi the office

and you. In addition to other duties, you'll keep a diary of Ripsaw, by the way, and I want you to

have a summary with you at all times in case I need it. Now call in Margaret, make a pot of

coffee, there's a little stove

thing in the washroom there, and I'll start putting together my general staff."

It started as small and as quietly as that.

It was a week before Kramer got back to the 561st long enough to pick up his possessions, and then

he left the stacks of Timeses and Saturday Reviews where they lay, puzzles and all. No time. The

first person to hate him was Margaret, the motherly major. For all her rank over him, she was a

secretary and he was an aide with a fourragere who had the general's willing ear. She began a

policy of nonresistance that was noncooperation, too; she would not deliberately obstruct him, but

she would allow him to poke through the files for ten minutes before volunteering the information

that the folder he wanted was already on the general's desk. This interfered with the smooth

performance of Kramer's duties, and of course the general spotted it at once.

"It's nothing," said Kramer when the general called him on it. "I don't like to say anything."

"Go on," General Grote urged. "You're not a soldier any more; you're a rat."

"I think I can handle it, sir."

The general motioned silently to the coffee pot and waited while Kramer fixed him a cup, two

sugars, no cream. He said: "Tell me everything, always. All the dirty rumors about inefficiency

and favoritism. Your suspicions and hunches. Anybody that gets in your way-or more important, in

mine. In the underworld they shoot stool-pigeons, but here we give them blue cords for their

shoulders. Do you understand?"

Kramer did. He did not ask the general to intercede with the motherly major, or transfer her; but

he did handle it himself. He discovered it was very easy. He simply threatened to have her sent to

Narvik.

With the others it was easier. Margaret had resented him because she was senior in Operation

Ripsaw to him, but as the others were sucked hi they found him there already. Instead of

resentment, their attitude toward him was purely fear.

The next people to hate him were the aides of Grote's general staff because he was a wild card in

the deck. The five members of the staff-Chief, Personnel, Intelligence, Plans & Training and

Operations-proceeded with their orderly, systematic jobs day by day, building Ripsaw . . . until

the inevitable moment when Kramer would breeze in with, "Fine job, but the general suggests-" and

the unhorsing of many assumptions, and the undoing of many days' work. That was his job also. He

was a bird of ill omen, a coiled snake in fair grass, a hired killer and a professional betrayer

of confidences-though it was not long before there were no confidences to betray, except from an

occasional young, new officer who hadn't learned his way around, and those not worth betraying.

That, as the general had said, was the way it was with aides. Kramer wondered sometimes if he

liked what he was doing, or liked himself for doing it. But he never carried the thought through.

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No time.

Troops completed basic training or were redeployed from rest areas and entrained, emplaned, em-

bussed or embarked for the scattered staging areas of Ripsaw. Great forty-wheeled trucks bore

nuclear cannon up the Alcan Highway at a snail's pace. Air groups and missile sections launched on

training exercises over Canadian wasteland that closely resembled tundra, with grid maps that bore

names like Maina Pylgin and Kamenskoe. Yet these were not Ripsaw, not yet, only the separate tools

that Ripsaw would someday pick up and use.

Ripsaw itself moved to Wichita and a base of its own when its headquarters staff swelled to

fifteen hundred men and women. Most of them hated Kramer.

It was never perfectly clear to Kramer what his boss had to do with the show. Kramer made his

coffee, carried his briefcase, locked and unlocked his files, delivered to him those destructive

tales and delivered for him those devastating suggestions, but never understood just why there had

to be a Commanding General of Ripsaw.

The time they went to Washington to argue an allocation of seventy rather than sixty armored

divisions for Ripsaw, for instance, General Grote just sat, smiled and smoked his pipe. It was his

chief of staff, the young and brilliant major general Cartmill, who passionately argued the case

before D. Beauregard Medway, though when Grote addressed his superior it still was as "Dan." (They

did get the ten extra divisions, of course.)

Back in Wichita, it was Cartmill who toiled around, the clock coordinating. A security lid was

clamped down early in the game. The fifteen hundred men and women in the Wichita camp stayed hi

the Wichita camp. Commerce with the outside world, except via coded messages to other elements of

Ripsaw, was a capital offense-as three privates learned the hard way. But through those coded

channels Cartmill reached out to every area of the North American (and Allied) world. Personnel

scoured the globe for human components that might be fitted into Ripsaw. Intelligence gathered

information about that tract of Siberia which they were to invade, and the waters they were to

cross. Plans & Training slaved at methods of effecting the crossing and invasion efficiently, with

the least (or at any rate the optimum least, consistent with requirements of speed, security and

so on) losses in men and materiel. Operations studied and restudied the various ways the crossing

and invasion might go right or wrong, and how a good turn of fortune could be exploited, a bad

turn minimized. General Cartmill was in constant touch with all of them, his fingers on every cord

hi the web. So was John Kramer.

Grote ambled about all this with an air of pleased surprise.

Kramer discovered one day that there had been books written about his boss-not best sellers with

titles like "Bloody Lorry" Grote, Sword of Freedom, but thick, gray mimeographed staff documents,

in Chinese and Russian, for top-level circulation among yute commanders. He surprised Grote

reading one of them -in Chinese.

The general was not embarrassed. "Just refreshing my memory of what the yutes think I'm like so I

can cross them up by doing something different. Listen: 'Characteristic of this officer's

philosophy of attack is varied tactics. Reference his lecture, Lee's 1862 Campaigns, delivered at

Fort Leavenworth Command & General Staff School, attached. Opposing commanders should not expect a

force under him to do the same-' Hmm. Tsueng, water radical.'-under him to press the advance the

same way twice.' Now all I have to do is make sure we attack by the book, like Grant instead of

Lee, slug it out without any brilliant variations. See how easy it is, John? How's the message

center?"

Kramer had been snooping around the message center at Grote's request. It was a matter of feeding

out cigarettes and smiles in return for an occasional incautious word or a hint; gumshoe work. The

message center was an underground complex of encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers and

switchboards. It was staffed by a Signal Corps WAC battalion in three shifts around lie clock. The

girls were worked hard-though a battalion should have been enough for the job. Messages went from

and to the message center linking the Wichita brain with those seventy divisions training now from

Capetown to Manitoba, a carrier task force conducting exercises in the Antarctic, a fleet of

landing craft growing every day on the Gulf of California. The average time-lag between receipt of

messages and delivery to the Wichita personnel at destination was 12.25 minutes. The average

number of erroneous transmis-

sions detected per day was three. Both figures General Grote considered intolerable.

"It's Colonel Bucknell that's lousing it up, General. She's trying too hard. No give. Physical

training twice a day, for instance, and a very hard policy on excuses. A stern attitude's filtered

down from her to the detachments. Everybody's chewing out subordinates to keep themselves covered.

The working girls call Bucknell 'the monster.' Their feeling is the Army's impossible to please,

so what the hell."

"Relieve her," Grote said amiably. "Make her mess officer; Ripsaw chow's rotten anyway." He went

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back to his Chinese text.

And suddenly it all began to seem as if it really might someday rise and strike out across the

Strait. From Lieutenant Kramer's Ripsaw Diary:

At AM staff meeting CG RIPSAW xmitted order CG NAAARMY designating RIPSAW D day 15 May 1986. Gen

CARTMILL observed this date allowed 45 days to form troops in final staging areas assuming RIPSAW

could be staged in 10 days. CG RIPSAW stated that a 10-day staging seemed feasible. Staff

concurred. CG RIPSAW so ordered. At 1357 hours CG NAAARMY concurrence received.

They were on the way.

As the days grew shorter Grote seemed to have less and less to do, and curiously so did Kramer. He

had not expected this. He had been aide-de-camp to the general for nearly a year now, and he

fretted when he could find no fresh treason to bring to the general's ears. He redoubled his

prowling tours of the kitchens, the BOQ, the motor pools, the message center, but not even the

guard mounts or the shine on the shoes of the soldiers at Retreat parade was in any way at fault.

Kramer could only imagine that he was missing things. It did not occur to him that, as at last

they

should be, the affairs of Ripsaw had gathered enough speed to keep them straight and clean, until

the general called him hi one night and ordered him to pack. Grote put on his spectacles and

looked over them at Kramer. "D plus five," he said, "assuming all goes well, we're moving this

headquarters to Kiska. I want you to take a look-see. Arrange a plane. You can leave tomorrow."

It was, Kramer realized that night as he undressed, Just Something to Do. Evidently the hard part

of his job was at an end. It was now only a question of fighting the battle, and for that the

field commanders were much more important than he. For the first time in many months he thought it

would be nice to do a crossword puzzle, but instead fell asleep.

It was an hour before leaving the next day that Kramer met Ripsaw's "cover."

The "cover" was another lieutenant general, a bristling and wiry man named Clough, with a

brilliant combat record staked out on his chest and sleeves for the world to read. Kramer came in

when his buzzer sounded, made coffee for the two generals and was aware that Grote and Clough were

old pals and that the Ripsaw general was kidding the pants off his guest.

"You always were a great admirer of Georgie Patton," Grote teased. "You should be glad to follow

in his footsteps. Your operation will go down in history as big and important as his historic

cross-Channel smash into Le Havre."

Kramer's thoughts were full of himself-he did not much like getting even so close to the yutes as

Kiska, where he would be before the sun set that night -but his ears pricked up. He could not

remember any cross-Channel smash into Le Havre. By Patton or anybody else.

"Just because I came to visit your show doesn't mean you have to rib me, Larry," Clough grumbled.

"But it's such a pleasure, Mick."

Clough opened his eyes wide and looked at Grote. "I've generated against Novotny before. If you

want to know what I think of him, I'll tell you,"

Pause. Then Grote, gently: "Take it easy, Mick. Look at my boy there. See him quivering with

curiosity?"

Kramer's back was turned. He hoped his blush would subside before he had to turn around with the

coffee. It did not.

"Caught red-faced," Grote said happily, and winked at the other general. Clough looked stonily

back. "Shall we put him out of his misery, Mick? Shall we fill him in on the big picture?"

"Might as well get it over with."

"I accept your gracious assent." Grote waved for Kramer to help himself to coffee and to sit down.

Clearly he was unusually cheerful today, Kramer thought. Grote said: "Lieutenant Kramer, General

Clough is the gun-captain of a Quaker cannon which covers Ripsaw. He looks like a cannon. He acts

like a cannpn. But he isn't loaded. Like his late idol George Patton at one point in his career,

General Clough is the commander of a vast force which exists on paper and in radio transmissions

alone."

Clough stirred uneasily, so Grote became more serious. "We're brainwashing Continental Defense

Commissar Novotny by serving up to him his old enemy as the man he'll have to fight. The yute

radio intercepts are getting a perfect picture of an assault on Polar Nine being prepared under

old Mick here. That's what they'll prepare to counter, of course. Ripsaw will catch them

flatfooted."

Clough stirred again but did not speak.

Grote grinned. "All right. We hope," he conceded. "But there's a lot of planning in this thing. Of

course, it's a waste of the talent of a rather remarkably able general-" Clough gave him a lifted-

eyebrow look- "but you've got to have a real man at the head of the fake army group or they won't

believe it. Anyway, it

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worked with Patton and the Nazis. Some unkind people have suggested that Patton never did a better

bit of work than sitting on his knapsack in England and letting his name be used."

"All full of beans with a combat command, aren't you?" Clough said sourly. "Wait'11 the shooting

starts."

"Ike never commanded a battalion before the day he invaded North Africa, Mick. He did all right."

"Ike wasn't up against Novotny," Clough said heavily. "I can talk better while I'm eating, Larry.

Want to buy me a lunch?"

General Grote nodded. "Lieutenant, see what you can charm out of Colonel Bucknell for us to eat,

will you? We'll have it sent in here, of course, and the best girls she's got to serve it." Then,

unusually, he stood up and looked appraisingly at Kramer.

"Have a nice flight," he said.

• ••

111

Kramer's blue fourragere won him cold handshakes but a seat at the first table in the Hq Officers

Mess in Kiska. He didn't have quite enough appetite to appreciate it.

Approaching the island from the air had taken appetite away from him, as the GCA autocontroller

rocked the plane in a carefully calculated zigzag in its approach. They were, Kramer discovered,

under direct visual observation from any chance-met bird from yute eyries across the Strait until

they got below five hundred feet. Sometimes the yutes sent over a flight of birds to knock down a

transport. Hence the zigzags.

Captain Mabry, a dark, tall Georgian who had been designated to make the general's aide feel at

home, noticed Kramer wasn't eating, pushed his own tray into the center strip and, as it sailed

away, stood up. "Get it off the pad, shall we? Can't keep the Old Man waiting."

The captain took Mabry through clanging com-

dors to an elevator and then up to the eyrie. It was only a room. From it the spy-bird missiles-

rockets, they were really, but the services like to think of them as having a punch, even though

the punch was only a television camera-were controlled. To it the birds returned the pictures

their eyes saw.

Brigadier Spiegelhauer shook Kramer's hand. "Make yourself at home, Lieutenant," he boomed. He was

short and almost skeletally thin, but his voice was enormous. "Everything satisfactory for the

general, I

hope?"

"Why, yes, sir. I'm just looking around."

"Of course," Spiegelhauer shouted. "Care to monitor a ride?"

"Yes, sir." Mabry was looking at him with amusement, Kramer saw. Confound him, what right did he

have to think Kramer was scared-even if he was? Not a physical fear; he was not insane. But . . .

scared.

The service life of a spy-bird over yute territory was something under twenty minutes, by then the

homing heads on the ground-to-air birds would have sniffed out its special fragrance and knocked

it out. In that twenty-minute period it would see what it could see. Through its eyes the

observers in the eyrie would learn just that much more about yute dispositions-so long as it

remained in direct line-of-sight to the eyrie, so long as everything in its instrumentation

worked, so long as yute jamming did not penetrate its microwave control.

Captain Mabry took Kramer's arm. "Take 'er off the pad," Mabry said negligently to the launch

officer. He conducted Kramer to a pair of monitors and sat

before them.

On both eight-inch screens the officers saw a diamond-sharp scan of the inside of a silo plug.

There was no sound. The plug lifted off its lip without a whisper, dividing into two semicircles

of steel. A two-inch circle of sky showed. Then, abruptly, the circle widened; the lip irised out

and disappeared; the gray surrounded the screen and blanked it out, and then it was bright blue,

and a curl of cirrocumulus in one quadrant of the screen.

Metro had promised no cloud over the tactical area, but there was cloud there. Captain Mabry

frowned and tapped a tune on the buttons before him; the cirrocumulus disappeared and a line of

gray-white appeared at an angle on the screen. "Horizon," said Mabry. "Labble to make you seasick,

Lootenant."' He tapped some more and the image righted itself. A faint yellowish stain, not bright

against the bright cloud, curved up before them and burst into spidery black smoke. "Oh, they are

anxious," said Mabry, sounding nettled. "General, weather has busted it again. Cain't see a

thing."

Spiegelhauer bawled angrily, "I'm going to the weather station," and stamped out. Kramer knew what

he was angry about. It was not the waste of a bird; it was that he had been made to lose face

before the general's aide-de-camp. There would be a bad tune for the Weather Officer because

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Kramer had been there that day.

The telemetering crew turned off their instruments. The whining eighteen-inch reel that was

flinging tape across a row of fifteen magnetic heads, recording the picture the spy-bird took,

slowed and droned and stopped. Out of instinct and habit Kramer pulled out his rough diary and

jotted down Brig. Spiegelhauer- Permits bad wea. sta. situation? But it was little enough to have

learned on a flight to Kiska, and everything else seemed going well.

Captain Mabry fetched over two mugs of hot cocoa. "Sorry," he said. "Cain't be helped, I guess."

Kramer put his notebook away and accepted the cocoa.

"Beats U-2in'," Mabry went on. "Course, you don't get to see as much of the country."

Kramer could not help a small, involuntary tremor. For just a moment there, looking out of the spy-

bird's eyes, he had imagined himself actually in the air above

yute territory and conceived the possibility of being shot down, parachuting, internment, the

Blank Tanks, "Yankee! Why not be good fellow? You proud you murderer?"

"No," Kramer said, "you don't get to see as much of the country." But he had already seen all the

yute country he ever wanted.

Kramer got back hi the elevator and descended rapidly, his mind full. Perhaps a psychopath, a

hungry cat or a child would have noticed that the ride downward lasted a second or two less than

the ride up. Kramer did not. If the sound echoing from the tunnel he walked out into was a bit

more clangorous than the one he had entered from, he didn't notice that either.

Kramer's mind was occupied with the thought that, all in all, he was pleased to find that he had

approached this close to yute territory, 'and to yute Blank Tanks, without feeling particularly

afraid. Even though he recognized that there was nothing to be afraid of, since of course the

yutes could not get hold of him

here.

Then he observed that the door Mabry opened for him led to a chamber he knew he had never seen

before.

They were standing on an approach stage and below them forty-foot rockets extended downward into

their pit. A gantry-bridge hung across space from the stage to the nearest rocket, which lay open,

showing a clumsily padded compartment where there should have been a warhead or an instrument

capsule.

Kramer turned around and was not surprised to find that Mabry was pointing a gun at him. He had

almost expected it. He started to speak. But there was someone else in the shadowed chamber, and

the first he knew of that was when the sap struck him just behind the ear.

It was all coming true: "Yankee! Why not be honest man? You like murder babies?" Kramer only

shook his head. He knew it did no good to answer. Three years before he had answered. He knew it

also did no good to keep quiet; because he had done that too. What he knew most of all was that

nothing was going to do him any good because the yutes had him now, and who would have thought

Mabry would have been the one to do him in?

They did not beat him at this point, but then they did not need to. The nose capsule Mabry had

thrust him into had never been designed for carrying passengers. With ingenuity Kramer could only

guess at Mabry had contrived to fit it with parachutes and watertight seals and flares so the yute

gunboat could find it in the water and pull out their captive alive. But he had taken 15- and 20-G

accelerations, however briefly. He seemed to have no serious broken bones, but he was bruised all

over. Secretly he found that almost amusing. In the preliminary softening up, the yutes did not

expect their captives to be in physical pain. By being in pain he was in some measure upsetting

their schedule. It was not much of a victory but it was all he had.

Phase Two was direct questioning: What was Ripsaw exactly? HOW many divisions? Where located? Why

had Lieutenarit-General Grote spent so much time with Lieutenant-General Clough? When Mary

Elizabeth Grote, before her death, entertained the Vietnamese UNESCO delegate's aunt in Sag

Harbor, had she known her husband had just been passed over for promotion to brigadier? And was

resentment over that the reason she had subsequently donated twenty-five dollars to a mission

hospital in Laos? What were the Bering Straits rendezvous points for missile submarines supporting

Ripsaw? Was the transfer of Lieutenant Colonel • Carolyn S. Bucknell from Message Center Battalion

C.O. to Mess Officer a cover for some CIC complexity? What air support was planned for D plus one?

D plus two? Did Major Somebody-or-other's secret drinking account for the curious radio intercept

in clear logged at 0834 on 6 October 1985? Or was "Omo-

*. *M

bray for my eadhay" the code designation for some nefarious scheme to be launched against the

gallant, the ever-victorious forces of Neo-Utilitarianism?

Kramer was alternately cast into despondency by the amount of knowledge his captors displayed and

puzzled by the psychotic irrelevance of some of the questions they asked him. But most of all he

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