Bester, Alfred - Disappearing Act

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Disappearing Act

This one wasn’t the last war or a war to end war. They called it the War for the American Dream.

General Carpenter struck that note and sounded it constantly. There are fighting generals (vital

to an army), political generals (vital to an administration), and public relations generals (vital

to a war). General Carpenter was a master of public relations. Forthright and FourSquare, he had

ideals as high and as understandable as the mottoes on money. In the mind of America he was the

army, the administration, the nation’s shield and sword and stout right arm. His ideal was the

American Dream.

“We are not fighting for money, for power, or for

world domination,” General Carpenter announced at the Press Association dinner.

“We are fighting solely for the American Dream,” he said to the 137th Congress.

“Our aim is not aggression or the reduction of nations to slavery,” he said at the West

Point Annual Officer’s Dinner.

“We are fighting for the meaning of civilization,” he told the San Francisco Pioneers’

Club.

“We are struggling for the ideal of civilization; for culture, for poetry, for the Only

Things Worth Preserving,” he said at the Chicago Wheat Pit Festival.

“This is a war for survival,” he said. “We are not fighting for ourselves, but for our

dreams; for the Better Things in Life which must not disappear from the face of the earth.”

America fought. General Carpenter asked for one hundred million men. The army was given

one hundred million men. General Carpenter asked for ten thousand H-Bombs. Ten thousand H-Bombs

were delivered and dropped. The enemy also dropped ten thousand HBombs and destroyed most of

America’s cities.

“We must dig in against the hordes of barbarism,” General Carpenter said. “Give me a

thousand engineers.”

One thousand engineers were forthcoming, and a hundréd cities were dug and hollowed out

beneath the rubble.

“Give me five hundred sanitation experts, three hundred traffic managers, two hundred air-

conditioning experts, one hundred city managers, one thousand communication chiefs, seven hundred

personnel experts. . .“

The list of General Carpenter’s demand for technical experts was endless. America did not

know how to supply them.

“We must become a nation of experts,” General Carpenter informed the National Association

of American Universities. “Every man and woman must be a specific tool for a specific job,

hardened and sharpened by your training and education to win the fight for the American Dream.”

“Our Dream,” General Carpenter said at the Wall Street Bond Drive Breakfast, “is at one

with the gentle

Greeks of Athens, with the noble Romans of. . . er •

Rome. It is a dream of the Better Things in Life. Of music and art and poetry and culture. Money

is only a weapon to be used in the fight for this dream. Ambition is only a ladder to climb to

this dream. Ability is only a tool to shape this dream.”

Wall Street applauded. General Carpenter asked for one hundred and fifty billion dollars,

fifteen hundred ambitious dollar-a-year men, three thousand able experts in mineralogy, petrology,

mass production, chemical warfare and air-traffic time study. They were delivered. The country was

in high gear. General Carpenter had only to press a button and an expert would be delivered.

In March of A.D. 2112 the war came to a climax and the American Dream was resolved, not on

any one of the seven fronts where millions of men were locked in bitter combat, not in any of the

staff headquarters or any of the capitals of the warring nations, not in any of the production

centers spewing forth arms and supplies, but in Ward T of the United States Army Hospital buried

three hundred feet below what had once been St. Albans, New York.

Ward T was something of a mystery at St. Albans. Like any army hospital, St. Albans was

organized with specific wards reserved for specific injuries. All right arm amputees were gathered

in one ward, all left arm amputees in another. Radiation burns, head injuries, eviscerations,

secondary gamma poisonings and so on were each assigned their specific location in the hospital

organization. The Army Medical Corps had designated nineteen classes of combat injury which

included every possible kind of damage to brain and tissue. These used up letters A to S. What,

then, was in Ward T?

No one knew. The doors were double locked. No visitors were permitted to enter. No

patients were permitted to leave. Physicians were seen to arrive and depart. Their perplexed

expressions stimulated the wildest speculations but revealed nothing. The nurses who ministered to

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Bester, Alfred - Disappearing Act

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