Frederic 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

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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.

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

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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 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.

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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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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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

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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. 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

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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

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

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