The Mile Long Spaceship (16 page)

He nodded and emptied his coffee cup down the sink. Down the drain, he thought, like every idea we've had so far. Down the drain. He turned to his wife once more and began to talk. They walked arm in arm to the living room and he talked as he sorted papers from the wall safe behind the desk. Most of them he stuffed into various pockets. The remainder he burned in the fireplace.

"If only we could calm them down long enough to listen to us, we could prove that we're not killing them with radiation." Warren wondered briefly how many times the past week he had silently voiced that sentiment to himself. "But they won't even listen to us. They stormed the radio and television studios and tore up equipment until they can't even be repaired, even if the repairmen
had
the desire to fix them, which they don't. They ignore the President, and the soldiers, and the police. They know the soldiers won't fire on them. They're scared too. They're part of the figure."

"What figure?" Amy was sitting quietly by his side, letting him talk without interruption except for brief questions now and again.

"Seven out of ten. That's the figure the statisticians arrived at for the magic number believing that in one way or another atomic experiments are poisoning the atmosphere. Seven out of ten, including the army, excluding only avowed scientists. In a city of eight million that comes to about five and a half million against us." He grinned weakly at the thought of so many of them unwilling to believe the extensive campaign he had helped prepare for their benefit. The great American audience that fell for every new advertising gimmick that came along, not believing the simple truth.

Very quietly Amy asked, "And are they? Poisoning the atmosphere?" She didn't raise her eyes from her hands.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Warren stood up abruptly and started to pace the room angrily. "Do you think any scientist in his right mind would knowingly kill his own children?"

"You know I don't, Warren. But couldn't children be more immune to it than older people, or else get used to it?" She spread her hands helplessly, "I was thinking about what some of them were saying on the radio before it went off. That it was the middle-aged people who were getting it worst. That never had there been so much cancer causing deaths as in the past few years. And didn't my own mother die from it last year? She was only forty-eight. She shouldn't have died so soon." There were tears in her eyes that she tried to ignore, and failing, began to fumble for a handkerchief.

"Here, honey." Gently Warren held her until she was quiet again, then he said, "Look, Amy. You're doing what so many people are doing. You're blaming the death of a loved one on atomic research. Your mother had cancer, sure. But she also had a heart condition. She lived with it for the last twenty years of her life whereas a hundred years ago she could have lived one year at the most after the onset of it. You know that, but you're letting your emotions run away with you. That's the only major disease left that does kill anymore." He held her closer and knew that if he couldn't convince just one, the rest was hopeless.

After a short silence she pulled away from him, and turning, stared at him in wonder. "Darling, why don't you tell that to those mobs? I never thought of it that way. They can't destroy science now. Cancer might be the next to go on the list of past killers."

"Yeah, tell it to the people. We did, over and over Tuesday. And Wednesday, until they took over the radios. They won't listen. Five million people have gone insane all at once in New York. They have been scared for so long over the cold war and hot police actions, and the threat of being bombed, and of flying saucers, and of so many things that they are getting out of their systems now, that there is no way to reason with them. They want action. Not only here, but everywhere in the world. I heard that it's much worse in China. They have famine to protest on top of everything else. And Russia must be hell right now. Last report was that the whole country was on fire. They'll come to their senses, I suppose, but until then..." He closed his eyes and tried to remember what it had been like before all this. The memory was dim and unreal, not to be captured so readily.

He reported back to his chief in the morning with the assurance that his wife and children would be safe at least. The mob had tried to shoot down the helicopter twice, at take off, and again as it landed on the top of the Institute Building. Since that first tank incident, no more had been brought into town or they might have accomplished the purpose that rifles and shotguns failed. A tank-happy captain had ordered his men to guard the courthouse. Within minutes the army had been disposed of and the tank was being run by a husky looking butcher still wearing his smeared apron, looking very apropos as he turned the monster toward the street where the Institute was. A helicopter pilot had put it out of commission quickly, but had later cracked into the Empire State Building. Accident, everyone said, and no one believed.

The chief had aged more than seemed possible during the week, Warren thought. He merely sat there waiting, blocked at every turn, unable to communicate with the people, unable to make a concrete suggestion for stopping the riots that had grown to civil war proportions during the past three days. Warren quit his surreptitious study of his boss, and continued gathering what material would go with them. He went through the confidential files methodically, his face set in hard lines of protest. He felt drained inside now after a wild outburst against the action that was being taken.

"Leaving! We can't! You know what they'll do to the building and equipment!"

"Let's face it, Warren. We reached the decision last night while you were gone. Unanimously. We'll take the most important files, all the micro tape, and some of the smaller lab stuff. Period." The chief held Warren's gaze steadily until it fell. Then he sighed deeply, "Sorry, Warren. You're an idealist in a world of realists. They don't mix. That mob isn't going to settle for any more promises, and the President's message said explicitly that there was to be no open warfare over a building. Any building."

"Maybe they're right!" Warren shouted. "All you really care about is science after all. They're entitled to their opinion, and if we're menacing them in any way, they have a right to revolt. Man's first loyalty is to man, not to any government.
Don't
you see, Chief?" he pleaded "there has to be a way to get through to them. They have to be convinced that we are right." He watched the stony expression on his superior's face for a long moment, then shouted, "Why don't you admit that you can't handle it anymore and let someone else try?"

"Who, for God's sake, who?" The chief threw up his hands helplessly. "How many days have we sat here trying one way after another? For what? Do you have the answer?" When Warren remained silent, he said heavily "You're in charge of sorting the confidential files. Later we'll have a weinie roast with the extra stuff."

Several times Warren looked up and started to speak, but be didn't. The chief was suffering inwardly with a calmness that meant a storm was imminent, and he didn't want to precipitate it.

Someone brought him coffee and handed him a lighted cigarette. They didn't talk about it. The man's eyes were red and swollen, and Warren turned away in embarrassment. He had been crying. Weeping over a lifetime of work being destroyed. He knew there would be no recapturing most of it. Warren grunted his thanks and resumed his rapid sorting.

All the unfinished ideas and dreams of men too busy at present to finish them. How did one say which was important and which not? Warren had accepted without question his task. He was the impartial one, the one with knowledge of each department, its progress and aims and importance. He made the decisions about what was to be publicized, and how much of it, and what was to remain secret until an enemy struck, if ever. The chief was the grand overseer of all the facets of publicity, naturally, but he was more of an advertising man, less a scientist than Warren. Now he sat behind his useless desk, with its useless telephones, and stared into a past world that was withering and decaying even as he watched.

A super antibiotic, never produced, but kept in the files in case the supply of raw materials for the presently used stuff ran short. It would go. A formula to be perfected for an anti-gravity metal. Too fanciful, incomplete. It went into the growing pile for the fire. A newly discovered virus that produced instant undetectable death. Warren pondered it for an instant, and discarded it. There were enough ways to cause death without breeding viruses to do the job. He finished that file, and started the next one.

No need to take much time here, he told himself. This was completed work, most of it successfully. He leafed through the folders quickly. The Institute tested ideas from all over the world, had a complete staff of research scientists of its own working on independent ideas, and now and again let an outsider use its equipment. Each experiment was written up, with an impressive number of copies and filed.

Warren grinned suddenly at the folder he was holding. That little Japanese fellow. He had bustled about the corridors for six months never finding his own borrowed lab without help. He had constantly lost his interpreter, and was forever on the verge of being firmly but courteously ushered from the building. Warren glanced inside the folder wondering briefly whether or not the little guy had made it. Then his wandering eye became fixed and he rapidly read through the report. Nervously he lit a cigarette, and tucking the folder under his arm began to pace the office. It might work. It would be hard to get everything together in so short a time, but it might work.

He had forgotten his chief, still behind the desk, until he asked in a deceptively mild tone, "Finished already. Warren?"

"Huh? Chief, I think I might have found a way after all." Warren tossed the folder to the desk, "Are you familiar with this?"

"No. Who is this San Yietnam?" He flicked the pages of the report impatiently.

We called him Satchmo." Warren had scooped up the building phone, and getting no answer, raced to the door. "I'm going to find Elkins. He'll know if it will work."

All night a whole bevy of scientists worked, ignoring their tiredness, shoving aside anyone who chanced to get in their way, grunting unintelligible replies to queries on their progress. Warren shunted back and forth from the lab where he was treated as an intruder, to the radio room where the operator was sending the same coded message all over the world.

"Is he getting through, Chief?" Warren asked, trying to feel less useless.

"So far, so good. Other points are relaying the formula also by now. Did Elkins say it would do it?" At Warren's shrug he drew him to the tightly curtained and shaded windows. "It better. Look."

Cannons! Tanks! Warren's stomach registered the fact in a shivering tightening up action before his mind became aware of the meaning of them. Abruptly he said, "I'll get the files and anything eise salvageable to the basement just in case."

They crouched behind the barrier as another shell thudded dully above them and the vibrating message came through the thick concrete walls.

"Another part of the wall," one of them said soberly. "Why don't they just set the place on fire now?"

"They want it in a pile of sand and rocks," another said. He accompanied his remark with a dry cough. "God, I'm thirsty."

Waren fought the desire for water that they were all feeling, and wished for the millionth time that they had managed to save some. Who could have known that the mob would start their bombardment so soon? The army must have joined them wholeheartedly. He wondered again why there were no planes. No bombs. He sucked deeply on the cigarette he was smoking in spite of the knowledge that it would only make his mouth drier.

He watched gloomily as Stevens, the short-wave operator crept over to him, carefully avoiding the men stretched out sleeping on the basement floor. "Anything yet?" He knew from the other's expression that there wasn't, but he always asked.

"Nothing. Moscow's as dead as a doornail, and I'm getting London less and less. They are getting bombs as well as cannons there. No let up yet." Stevens looked at him beseechingly, "Warren, did Elkins say it would work?"

They asked over and over. "He said it might." Elkins had gone with the first direct shell hit. He had mixed the stuff, had made the substitution personally at any rate, and had sent it out with two men who looked like tramps, but weren't. He had told them to let him know. They hadn't come back. Three days, he had said. This was the fourth. But there had been a slight change, a necessary one, for all the ingredients weren't on hand. Warren waited for the next question Stevens would ask. They all did. He had been with Elkins at the end. They thought since it had been his find, and since he had been with Elkins that he ought to know. He waited.

"Warren," hesitantly, afraid of getting the wrong answer, "did Dr. Elkins say that the other stuff he put in it would make it weaker or anything?"

Elkins hadn't said. It would have to do, he'd said. And we'll pray, he'd said. But the men hadn't come back, and maybe hadn't got there, or hadn't been able to use it after they got there. There were too many maybes. He looked at Stevens' taut face, and remembered that he was the only one who could get the damaged radio to work. He said, "He said it might make it take a little longer to take effect, but no other change."

Stevens left, and Warren lapsed into a semi-sleep. In another few hours it wouldn't matter any longer anyway. The floor above them would soon collapse and they would all be buried under the tons of rubble that had once been the proud and beautiful Science Institute Building. Buried in their work. That struck him as funny, and he smiled to himself, as he dozed. The silence awakened him. He had gone to sleep amid the noise of shelling and rifle fire and falling stone and brickwork, and he awoke to silence.

Cautiously he raised his head. One or two of the others were doing the same. They nudged each other until all of them were awake.

"They've stopped."