So, too, it was in the old days-
THE MORNING OF THE DAY THEY DID IT.
by E. B. White
MY PURPOSE is to tell how it happened and to set down a few impressions of that morning while it is fresh in memory. I was in a plane that was in radio communication with the men on the platform. To put the matter briefly, what was intended as a military expedient turned suddenly into a holocaust. The explanation was plain enough to me, for, like millions of others, I was listening to the conversation between the two men and was instantly aware of the quick shift it took. That part is clear. What is not so clear is how I myself survived, but I am beginning to understand that, too. I shall not burden the reader with an explanation, however, as the facts are tedious and implausible. I am now in good health and fair spirits, among friendly people on an inferior planet, at a very great distance from the sun. Even the move from one planet to another has not relieved me of the nagging curse that besets writing men-the feeling that they must produce some sort of record of their times.
The thing happened shortly before twelve noon. I came out of my house on East Harding Boulevard at quarter of eight that morning swinging my newspaper and feeling pretty good. The March day was mild and springlike, the warmth and the smells doubly welcome after the rotten weather we"d been having. A gentle wind met me on the Boulevard, frisked me, and went on. A man in a leather cap was loading bedsprings into a van in front of No. 220. I remember that as I walked along I worked my tongue around the roof of my mouth, trying to dislodge a prune skin. (These details have no significance; why write them down?) A few blocks from home there was a Contakt plane station and I hurried in, caught the 8:10 plane, and was soon aloft. I always hated a jet-a.s.sist takeoff right after breakfast, but it was one of the discomforts that went with my job. At ten thousand feet our small plane made contact with the big one, we pa.s.sengers were transferred, and the big ship went on up to fifty Copyright 1950 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Originally published in The New Yorker.
From: The Second Tree from the Corner, by E. B. White.
Reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers.
thousand, which was the height television planes flew at. I was a script writer for one of the programs.
My tour of duty was supposed to be eight hours.
I should probably explain here that at the period of which I am writing, the last days of the planet earth, telecasting was done from planes circling the stratosphere.This eliminated the coaxial cable, a form of relay that had given endless trouble. Coaxials worked well enough for a while, but eventually they were abandoned, largely because of the extraordinary depredations of earwigs. These insects had developed an alarming resistance to bugspray and were out of control most of the time. Earwigs increased in size and in numbers, and the forceps at the end of their abdomen developed so that they could cut through a steel sh.e.l.l. They seemed to go unerringly for coaxials. Whether the signals carried by the cables hadanything to do with it I don"t know, but the bugs fed on these things and were enormously stimulated.
Not only did they feast on the cables, causing the cables to disintegrate, but they laid eggs in them in unimaginable quant.i.ties, and as the eggs hatched the television images suffered greatly, there was more and more flickering on the screen, more and more eyestrain and nervous tension among audiences, and of course a further debas.e.m.e.nt of taste and intellectual life in general. Finally the coaxials were given up, and after much experimenting by Westinghouse and the Glenn Martin people a satisfactory subst.i.tute was found in the high-flying planes. A few of these planes, spotted around the country, handled the whole television load nicely. Known as Stratovideo planes, they were equipped with studios; many programs originated in the air and were transmitted directly, others were beamed to the aircraft from ground stations and then relayed. The planes flew continuously, twenty-four hours a day, were refuelled in air, and dropped down to ten thousand feet every eight hours to meet the Contakt planes and take on new shifts of workers.
I remember that as I walked to my desk in the Stratoship that morning, the nine-o"clock news had just ended and a program called "Author, Please!" was going on, featuring Melonie Babson, a woman who had written a bestseller on the theme of euthanasia, called "Peace of Body." The program was sponsored by a dress-shield company.
I remember, too, that a young doctor had come aboard the plane with the rest of us. He was a newcomer, a fellow named Cathcart, slated to be the physician attached to the ship. He had introduced himself to me in the Contakt plane, had asked the date of my Tri-D shot, and had noted it down in his book. (I shall explain about these shots presently.) This doctor certainly had a brief life in our midst. He had hardly been introduced around and shown his office when our control room got a radio call asking if there was a doctor in the stratosphere above Earthpoint F-plus-6, and requesting medical a.s.sistance at the scene of an accident.
F-plus-6 was almost directly below us, so Dr. Cathcart felt he ought to respond, and our control man gave the word and asked for particulars and instructions. It seems there had been a low-alt.i.tude collision above F-plus-6 involving two small planes and killing three people. One plane was a Diaheliper, belonging to an aerial diaper service that flew diapers to rural homes by helicopter. The other was one of the familiar government-owned sprayplanes that worked at low alt.i.tudes over croplands, truck gardens, and commercial orchards, delivering a heavy mist of the deadly Tri-D solution, the pesticide that had revolutionized agriculture, eliminated the bee from nature, and given us fruits and vegetables of undreamed-of perfection but very high toxicity.
The two planes had tangled and fallen onto the observation tower of a whooping-crane sanctuary, scattering diapers over an area of half a mile and releasing a stream of Tri-D. Cathcart got his medical kit, put on his parachute, and paused a moment to adjust his pressurizer, preparatory to bailing out. Knowing that he wouldn"t be back for a while, he asked if anybody around the shop was due for a Tri-D shot that morning, and it turned out that Bill Foley was. So the Doctor told Folcy to come along, and explained that he would give him his injection on the way down. Bill threw me a quick look of mock anguish, and started climbing into his gear. This must have been six or seven minutes past nine.
It seems strange that I should feel obliged to explain Tri-D shots. They were a commonplace at this time-as much a part of a person"s life as his toothbrush. The correct name for them was Anti-Tri-D, but people soon shortened the name. They were simply injections that everyone had to receive at regular twenty-one-day intervals, to counteract the lethal effect of food, and the notable thing about them was the great importance of the twenty-one-day period. To miss one"s Tri-D shot by as much as a couple of hours might mean serious consequences, even death. Almost every day there were deaths reported in the papers from failure to get the injection at the proper time. The whole business was something like insulin control in diabetes. You can easily imagine the work it entailed for doctors in the United States, keepingthe entire population protected against death by poisoning.
As Dr. Cathcart and Bill eased themselves out of the plane through the chute exit, I paused briefly and listened to Miss Babson, our author of the day.
"It is a grand privilege," she was saying, "to appear before the television audience this morning and face this distinguished battery of critics, including my old sparring partner, Ralph Armstrong, of the Herald Tribune. I suppose after Mr. Armstrong finishes with me I will be a pretty good candidate for euthanasia myself. Ha. But seriously, ladies and gentlemen, I feel that a good book is its own defense."
The auth.o.r.ess had achieved a state of exaltation already. I knew that her book, which she truly believed to be great, had been suggested to her by an agent over a luncheon table and had been written largely by somebody else, whom the publisher had had to bring in to salvage the thing. The final result was a run-of-the-can piece of rubbish easily outselling its nearest compet.i.tor.
Miss Babson continued, her exaltation stained with cuteness: "I have heard my novel criticized on the ground that the theme of euthanasia is too daring, and even that it is anti-Catholic. Well, I can remember, way back in the dark ages, when a lot of things that are accepted as commonplace today were considered daring or absurd. My own father can recall the days when dairy cows were actually bred by natural methods. The farmers of those times felt that the artificial-breeding program developed by our marvellous experiment stations was highfalutin nonsense. Well, we all know what has happened to the dairy industry, with many of our best milch cows giving milk continuously right around the clock, in a steady stream. True, the cows do have to be propped up and held in position in special stanchions and fed intravenously, but I always say it isn"t the hubbub that counts, it"s the b.u.t.terfat.
And I doubt if even Mr. Armstrong here would want to return to the days when a cow just gave a bucket of milk and then stopped to rest."
Tiring of the literary life, I walked away and looked out a window. Below, near the layer of c.u.mulus, the two chutes were visible. With the help of binoculars I could see Bill manfully trying to slip his chute over next to the Doc, and could see Cathcart fumbling for his needle. Our telecandid man was at another window, filming the thing for the next newscast, as it was a new wrinkle in the Tri-D world to have somebody getting his shot while parachuting.
I had a few ch.o.r.es to do before our program came on, at eleven-five. "Town Meeting of the Upper Air"
was the name of it. "Town Meeting" was an unrehea.r.s.ed show, but I was supposed to brief the guests, distribute copies of whatever prepared scripts there were, explain the cuing, and make everybody happy generally. The program we were readying that morning had had heavy advance billing, and there was tremendous interest in it everywhere, not so much because of the topic ("Will the fear of retaliation stop aggression?") or even the cast of characters, which included Major General Artemus T. Recoil, but because of an incidental stunt we were planning to pull off. We had arranged a radio hookup with the s.p.a.ce platform, a gadget the Army had succeeded in establishing six hundred miles up, in the regions of the sky beyond the pull of gravity. The Army, after many years of experimenting with rockets, had not only got the platform established but had sent two fellows there in a s.p.a.ceship, and also a liberal supply of the New Weapon.
The whole civilized world had read about this achievement, which swung the balance of power so heavily in our favor, and everyone was aware that the d.a.m.ned platform was wandering around in its own orbit at a dizzy distance from the earth and not subject to gravitational pull. Every kid in America had become an astrophysicist overnight and talked knowingly of exhaust velocities, synergy curves, and Keplerian ellipses. Every subway rider knew that the two men on the platform were breathing oxygen thrown off from big squash vines that they had taken along. The Reader"s Digest had added to the fun by translatingand condensing several German treatises on rockets and s.p.a.ce travel, including the great Wege zur Raumschiffahrt. But to date, because of security regulations and technical difficulties, there had been no radio-television hookup. Finally we got clearance from Washington, and General Recoil agreed to interview the officers on the platform as part of the "Town Meeting" program.
This was big stuff-to hear directly from the s.p.a.ce Platform for Checking Aggression, known pretty generally as the SPCA.
I was keyed up about it myself, but I remember that all that morning in the plane I felt disaffected, and wished I were not a stratovideo man. There were often days like that in the air. The plane, with its queer cargo and its cheap goings on, would suddenly seem unaccountably remote from the world of things I admired. In a physical sense we were never very remote: the plane circled steadily in a fixed circle of about ten miles diameter, and I was never far from my own home on East Harding Boulevard. I could talk to Ann and the children, if I wished, by radiophone.
In many respects mine was a good job. It paid two hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, of which two hundred and ten was withheld. I should have felt well satisfied. Almost everything in the way of social benefits was provided by the government-medical care, hospitalization, education for the children, accident insurance, fire and theft, old-age retirement, Tri-D shots, vacation expense, amus.e.m.e.nt and recreation, welfare and well-being, Christmas and good will, rainy-day resource, staples and supplies, beverages and special occasions, babysitzfund-it had all been worked out. Any man who kept careful account of his pin money could get along all right, and I guess I should have been happy. Ann never complained much, except about one thing. She found that no matter how we saved and planned, we never could afford to buy flowers. One day, when she was a bit lathered up over household problems, she screamed, "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, I"d rather live dangerously and have one dozen yellow freesias!" It seemed to prey on her mind.
Anyway, this was one of those oppressive days in the air for me. Something about the plane"s undeviating course irritated me; the circle we flew seemed a monstrous excursion to nowhere. The engine noise (we flew at subsonic speed) was an unrelieved whine. Usually I didn"t notice the engines, but today the ship sounded in my ears every minute, reminding me of a radiotherapy chamber, and there was always the palpable impact of vulgar miracles-the very nature of television-that made me itchy and fretful.
Appearing with General Recoil on "Town Meeting of the Upper Air" were to be Mrs. Florence Gill, president of the Women"s Auxiliary of the Sons of Original Matrons; Amory Buxton, head of the Economics and Withholding Council of the United Nations; and a young man named Tollip, representing one of the small, ineffectual groups that advocated world federation. I rounded up this stable of intellects in the reception room, went over the procedure with them, gave the General a drink (which seemed to be what was on his mind), and then ducked out to catch the ten-o"clock news and to have a smoke.
I found Pete Everhardt in the control room. He looked bushed. "Quite a morning, Nuncle," he said. Pete not only had to keep his signal clean on the nine-o"clock show (Melonie Babson was a speaker who liked to range all over the place when she talked) but he had to keep kicking the ball around with the two Army officers on the s.p.a.ce platform, for fear he would lose them just as they were due to go on. And on top of that he felt obliged to stay in touch with Dr. Cathcart down below, as a matter of courtesy, and also to pick up incidental stuff for subsequent newscasts.
I sat down and lit a cigarette. In a few moments the day"s auth.o.r.ess wound up her remarks and the news started, with the big, tense face of Ed Peterson on the screen dishing it out. Ed was well equipped by nature for newscasting; he had the accents of destiny. When he spread the news, it penetrated in depth.
Each event not only seemed fraught with meaning, it seemed fraught with Ed. When he said "I predict..."you felt the full flow of his pipeline to G.o.d.
To the best of my recollection the ten-o"clock newscast on this awful morning went as follows: (Announcer) "Good morning. Tepky"s Hormone-Enriched Dental Floss brings you Ed Peterson and the news."
(Ed) "Flash! Three persons were killed and two others seriously injured a few minutes ago at Earthpoint F-plus-6 when a government sprayplane collided with a helicopter of the Diaheliper Company. Both pilots were thrown clear. They are at this moment being treated by a doctor released by parachute from Stratovideo Ship 3, from which I am now speaking. The sprayplane crashed into the observation tower of a whooping-crane sanctuary, releasing a deadly mist of Tri-D and instantly killing three wardens who were lounging there watching the love dance of the cranes. Diapers were scattered widely over the area, and these sterile garments proved invaluable to Dr. Herbert L. Cathcart in bandaging the wounds of the injured pilots, Roy T. Bliss and Homer Schenck. [Here followed a newsreel shot showing Cathcart winding a diaper around the head of one of the victims.] You are now at the scene of the disaster,"
droned Ed. "This is the first time in the history of television that an infant"s napkin has appeared in the role of emergency bandage. Another first for American Tel. & Vid.l "Washington! A Senate committee, with new facts at its disposal, will reopen the investigation to establish the blame for Pearl Harbor.
"Chicago! Two members of the Department of Sanitation were removed from the payroll today for refusal to take the loyalty oath. Both are members of New Brooms, one of the four hundred thousand organizations on the Attorney General"s subversive list.
"Hollywood! It"s a boy at the Roscoe Pews. Stay tuned to this channel for a closeup of the Caesarean section during the eleven-o"clock roundup!
"New York! Flash! The Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing has been awarded to Frederick A. Mildly, of the New York Times, for his nostalgic editorial "The Old Pumphandle."
"Flash! Donations to the Atlantic Community Chest now stand at a little over seven hundred billion dollars. Thanks for a wonderful job of giving-I mean that from my heart.
"New York! The vexing question of whether Greek athletes will be allowed to take part in next year"s Olympic Games still deadlocks the Security Council. In a stormy session yesterday the Russian delegate argued that the presence of Greek athletes at the games would be a threat to world peace. Most of the session was devoted to a discussion of whether the question was a procedural matter or a matter of substance, "Flash! Radio contact with the two United States Army officers on the s.p.a.ce Platform for Checking Aggression, known to millions of listeners as the SPCA, has definitely been established, despite rumors to the contrary. The television audience will hear their voices in a little more than one hour from this very moment. You will not see their faces. Stay tuned! This is history, ladies and gentlemen-the first time a human voice freed from the pull of gravity has been heard on earth. The s.p.a.cemen will be interviewed by Major General Artemus T. Recoil on the well-loved program "Town Meeting of the Upper Air."
"I predict: that because of SPCA and the Army"s Operation s.p.a.ce, the whole course of human destiny will be abruptly changed, and that the age-old vision of peace is now on the way to becoming a reality."
Ed finished and went into his commercial, which consisted of digging a piece of beef gristle out of his teeth with dental floss.I rubbed out my cigarette and walked back toward my cell. In the studio next ours, "The Bee" was on the air, and I paused for a while to watch. "The Bee" was a program sponsored by the Larry Cross Pollination Company, aimed princ.i.p.ally at big orchardists and growers-or rather at their wives. It was an interminable mystery-thriller sort of thing, with a character called the Bee, who always wore a green hood with two long black feelers. Standing there in the aisle of the plane, looking into the gla.s.s-enclosed studio, I could see the Bee about to strangle a red-haired girl in slinky pajamas. This was America"s pollination hour, an old standby, answer to the housewife"s dream. The Larry Cross outfit was immensely rich. I think they probably handled better than eighty per cent of all fertilization in the country. Bees, as I have said, had become extinct, thanks to the ma.s.sive doses of chemicals, and of course this had at first posed a serious agricultural problem, as vast areas were without natural pollination. The answer came when the Larry Cross firm was organized, with the slogan "We Carry the Torch for Nature." The business mushroomed, and branch offices sprang up all over the nation. During blossom time, field crews of highly trained men fanned out and pollinized everything by hand-a huge job and an arduous one. The only honey in the United States was synthetic-a blend of mineral oil and papaya juice. Ann hated it with a morbid pa.s.sion.
When I reached my studio I found everybody getting ready for the warm-up. The Town Crier, in his fusty costume, stood holding his bell by the clapper, while the makeup man touched up his face for him.
Mrs. Gill, the S.O.M. representative, sat gazing contemptuously at young Tollip. I had riffled through her script earlier, curious to find out what kind of punch she was going to throw. It was about what I expected. Her last paragraph contained the suggestion that all persons who advocated a revision of the Charter of the United Nations be automatically deprived of their citizenship. "If these well-meaning but misguided persons," ran the script, "with their Utopian plans for selling this nation down the river are so anxious to acquire world citizenship, I say let"s make it easy for them-let"s take away the citizenship they"ve already got and see how they like it. As a lineal descendant of one of the Sons of Original Matrons, I am sick and tired of these cuckoo notions of one world, which come dangerously close to simple treachery. We"ve enough to do right here at home without..."
And so on. In my mind"s ear I could already hear the moderator"s salutary and impartial voice saying, "Thank you, Mrs. Florence Gill."
At five past eleven, the Crier rang his bell. "Hear ye! See ye! Town Meetin" today! Listen to both sides and make up your own minds!" Then George Cahill, the moderator, started the ball rolling.
I glanced at Tollip. He looked as though his stomach were filling up with gas. As the program got under way, my own stomach began to inflate, too, the way it often did a few hours after breakfast. I remember very little of the early minutes of that morning"s Town Meeting. I recall that the U.N. man spoke first, then Mrs. Gill, then Tollip (who looked perfectly awful). Finally the moderator introduced General Recoil, whose stomach enjoyed the steadying effects of whiskey and who spoke in a loud, slow, confident voice, turning frequently to smile down on the three other guests.
"We in the Army," began the General, "don"t pretend that we know all the answers to these brave and wonderful questions. It is not the Army"s business to know whether aggression is going to occur or not.
Our business is to put on a good show if it does occur. The Army is content to leave to the United Nations and to idealists like Mr. Tollip the troublesome details of political progress. I certainly don"t know, ladies and gentlemen, whether the fear of retaliation is going to prevent aggression, but I do know that there is no moss growing on we of Operation s.p.a.ce. As for myself, I guess I am what you might call a retaliatin" fool. [Laughter in the upper air.] Our enemy is well aware that we are now in a most unusual position to retaliate. That knowledge on the part of our enemy is, in my humble opinion, a deterrent toaggression. If I didn"t believe that, I"d shed this uniform and get into a really well-paid line of work, like professional baseball."
Will this plane never quit circling? (I thought). Will the wards never quit going round and round?
Is there no end to this noisy carrousel of indigestible ideas? Will no one ever catch the bra.s.s ring?
"But essentially," continued the General, "our job is not to deal with the theoretical world of Mr. Tollip, who suggests that we merge in some vast superstate with every Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry, no matter what their color or race or how underprivileged they are, thus pulling down our standard of living to the level of the lowest common denominator. Our job is not to deal with the diplomatic world of Mr. Buxton, who hopes to find a peaceful solution around a conference table. No, the Army must face the world as it is.
We know the enemy is strong. In our dumb way, we think it is just horse sense for us to be stronger.
And I"m proud, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, proud to be at one end of the interplanetary conversation that is about to take place on this very, very historic morning. The achievement of the United States Army in establishing the s.p.a.ce platform-which is literally a man-made planet-is unparalleled in military history. We have led the way into s.p.a.ce. We have given Old Lady Gravity the slip. We have got there, and we have got there fustest with the mostest. [Applause.]
"I can state without qualification that the New Weapon, in the capable hands of the men stationed on our platform, brings the entire globe under our dominion. We can pinpoint any spot, anywhere, and sprinkle it with our particular brand of thunder. Mr. Moderator, I"m ready for this interview if the boys out there in s.p.a.ce are ready."
Everyone suspected that there might be a slipup in the proceedings at this point, that the mechanical diEculties might prove insuperable. I glanced at the studio clock. The red sweep hand was within a few jumps of eleven-thirty-the General had managed his timing all right. CahilFs face was tenser than I had ever seen it before. Because of the advance buildup, a collapse at this moment would put him in a nasty hole, even for an old experienced m.c. But at exactly eleven-thirty the interview started, smooth as silk.
Cahill picked it up from the General.
"And now, watchers of television everywhere, you will hear a conversation between Major General Artemus T. Recoil, who pioneered Operation s.p.a.ce, and two United States Army officers on the platform-Major James Ob-blington, formerly of Brooklyn, New York, now of s.p.a.ce, and Lieutenant n.o.ble Trett, formerly of Sioux City, Iowa, now of s.p.a.ce. Go ahead, General Recoil!"
"Come in, s.p.a.ce!" said the General, his tonsils struggling in whiskey"s undertow, his eyes bearing down hard on the script. "Can you hear me, Major Obblington and Lieutenant Trett?"
"I hear you," said a voice. "This is Trett." The voice, as I remember it, astonished me because of a certain laconic quality that I had not expected. I believe it astonished everyone. Trett"s voice was cool, and he sounded as though he were right in the studio.
"Lieutenant Trett," continued the General, "tell the listeners here on earth, tell us, in your position far out there in free s.p.a.ce, do you feel the pull of gravity?"
"No, sir, I don"t," answered Trett. In spite of the "sir," Trett sounded curiously listless, almost insubordinate.
"Yet you are perfectly comfortable, sitting there on the platform, with the whole of earth spread out before you like a vast target?"
"Sure I"m comfortable."The General waited a second, as though expecting amplification, but it failed to come. "Well, ah, how"s the weather up there?" he asked heartily.
"There isn"t any," said Trett.
"No weather? No weather in s.p.a.ce? That"s very interesting."
"The h.e.l.l it is," said Trett. "It"s G.o.d-d.a.m.n dull. This place is a dump. Worse than some of the islands in the Pacific."
"Well, I suppose it must get on your nerves a bit. That"s all part of the game. Tell us, Lieutenant, what"s it like to be actually a part of the solar system, with your own private orbit?"
"It"s all right, except I"d a d.a.m.n sight rather get drunk," said Trett.
I looked at Cahill. He was swallowing his spit. General Recoil took a new hold on his script.
"And you say you don"t feel the pull of gravity, not even a little?"
"I just told you I didn"t feel any pull," said Trett. His voice now had a surly quality.
"Well, ah," continued the General, who was beginning to tremble, "can you describe, briefly, for the television audience-" But it was at this point that Trett, on the platform, seemed to lose interest in talking with General Recoil and started chinning with Major Obblington, his sidekick in s.p.a.ce. At first the three voices clashed and blurred, but the General, on a signal from the moderator, quit talking, and the conversation that ensued between Trett and Obblington was audible and clear. Millions of listeners must have heard the dialogue.
"Hey, Obie," said Trett, "you want to know something else I don"t feel the pull of, besides gravity?"
"What?" asked his companion.
"Conscience," said Trett cheerfully. "I don"t feel my conscience pulling me around."
"Neither do I," said Obblington. "I ought to feel some pulls but I don"t."
"I also don"t feel the pull of duty."
"Check," said Obblington.
"And what is even more fantastic, I don"t feel the pull of dames."
Cahill made a sign to the General. Stunned and confused by the turn things had taken, Recoil tried to pick up the interview and get it back on the track. "Lieutenant Trett," he commanded, "you will limit your remarks to the-"
Cahill waved him quiet. The next voice was the Major"s.
"Jesus, now that you mention it, I don"t feel the pull of dames, either! Hey, Lieutenant-you suppose gravity has anything to do with s.e.x?"
"G.o.d d.a.m.n if / know," replied Trett. "I know I don"t weigh anything, and when you don"t weigh anything, you don"t seem to want anything."
The studio by this time was paralyzed with attention. The General"s face was swollen, his mouth was halfopen, and he struggled for speech that wouldn"t come.
Then Trett"s cool, even voice again: "See that continent down there, Obie? That"s where old Fatso Recoil lives. You feel drawn toward that continent in any special way?"
"Naa," said Obblington.
"You feel like doing a little shooting, Obie?"
"You"re rootin" tootin" I feel like shootin"."
"Then what are we waiting for?"
I am, of course, reconstructing this conversation from memory. I am trying to report it faithfully. When Trett said the words "Then what are we waiting for?" I quit listening and dashed for the phones in the corridor. As I was leaving the studio, I turned for a split second and looked back. The General had partially recovered his power of speech. He was mumbling something to Cahill. I caught the words "phone" and "Defense Department."
The corridor was already jammed. I had only one idea in my head-to speak to Ann. Pete Everhardt pushed past me. He said crisply, "This is it." I nodded. Then I glanced out of a window. High in the east a crazy ribbon of light was spreading upward. Lower down, in a terrible parabola, another streak began burning through. The first blast was felt only slightly in the plane. It must have been at a great distance. It was followed immediately by two more. I saw a piece of wing break up, saw one of the starboard engines shake itself loose from its fastenings and fall. Near the phone booths, the Bee, still in costume, fumbled awkwardly for a parachute. In the crush one of his feelers brushed my face. I never managed to reach a phone. All sorts of things flashed through my mind. I saw Ann and the children, their heads in diapers. I saw again the man in the leather cap, loading bedsprings. I heard again Pete"s words, "This is it," only I seemed to hear them in translation: "Until the whole wide world to nothingness do sink." (How durable the poets are!) As I say, I never managed the phone call. My last memory of the morning is of myriads of bright points of destruction where the Weapon was arriving, each pyre in the characteristic shape of an artichoke. Then a great gash, and the plane tumbling. Then I lost consciousness.
I cannot say how many minutes or hours after that the earth finally broke up. I do not know. There is, of course, a mild irony in the fact that it was the United States that was responsible. Insofar as it can be said of any country that it had human attributes, the United States was well-meaning. Of that I am convinced.
Even I, at this date and at this distance, cannot forget my country"s great heart and matchless ingenuity. I can"t in honesty say that I believe we were wrong to send the men to the platform-it"s just that in any matter involving love, or high explosives, one can never foresee all the factors. Certainly I can"t say with any a.s.surance that Tollip"s theory was right; it seems hardly likely that anyone who suffered so from stomach gas could have been on the right track. I did feel sympathetic toward some of his ideas, perhaps because I suffered from flatulence myself. Anyway, it was inevitable that it should have been the United States that developed the s.p.a.ce platform and the new weapon that made the H-bomb obsolete. It was inevitable that what happened, at last, was conceived in good will.
Those times-those last days of earth 1 I think about them a lot. A sort of creeping inept.i.tude had set in.