Not This August Read online

  But what wheels had worn the twin ruts up the Hill?

  Justin kicked at an angle of crushed rock. It should have flown up and away from the loose gravel it was embedded in and Justin should have strode on feeling infinitesimally better for the release of tension. It didn’t happen that way at all. The rock stayed where it was and blinding pain shot through Justin’s foot. While he stopped and swore, Gribble turned. “Wasting time,” he said mildly.

  “In a minute,” Justin said. The pain was dying down, but he wasn’t ready to go on walking. He stooped and tried to wiggle the fang of rock protruding from the gravel, work it loose, and throw it away. It had wounded him and it must surely die.

  The rock wouldn’t wiggle. Evidently it was a protruding corner of a really big chunk. He pawed at the loose gravel to investigate. It wasn’t loose gravel. His fingers skidded over the surface without disordering a single one of the round and oval glacier-ground stones.

  “Come on,” Gribble said impatiently, and resumed climbing. Justin followed thoughtfully. The rutted, worn secondary road, this road that was clearly on the very verge of breaking up, was a very remarkable road indeed. It looked bad. It was bad. It would give the springs of a truck a very hard time.

  But it would never get worse. It would never break up. It was a good road disguised as a bad one. Reinforced concrete a yard down, no doubt. On top of that the crushed rock and gravel mortared into position. A heavy-duty highway that would pass air reconnaissance and even a ground patrol.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Gribble was muttering ahead of him.

  A heavy-duty highway to where?

  “Gribble,” he said.

  The small man turned on him in fury. His voice was an almost womanish screech. “Leave me alone, Justin! Don’t distract me. This thing’s hard enough without you yammering and yipping at my heels. I’m fighting with myself to keep from turning around and running down the hill. I could break down right now if I let go. I could have a fine time crying and kicking and screaming and letting the clouds close in on what I have to do. But—I—won’t. Shut up and follow me!”

  Justin followed, confused and burning with resentment. He had been in contact with psychopaths before and, as now, it was never pleasant. A girl in the ad agency, years ago, at the next drawing table to his, took six months to go thoroughly insane, a little more each day. Toward the end there were worried conferences behind her back, long wrangles about when eccentricity slips over into mania, and always the stolid, unimaginative conferee who spoke what was in everybody’s mind: “All she has to do is get hold of herself; she doesn’t have to act like a nut.” Naturally in the age of Freud no really informed person spoke those words; naturally you were shocked to hear them. But oh, the resentment that filled you when you had to humor and defer to and make your life miserable because of a crackpot!

  A faded sign nailed to a tree pointed up the peculiar road: PROSPECT VISTA, it said, which made no sense at all. A prospect is a vista and a vista is a prospect. Justin could have said something about it but dared not, bullied into silence by the little man who wouldn’t control himself.

  The road shot suddenly upward and ended at a big, littered clearing. The litter was the debris of a housing development that had never come to pass. Justin never knew it was there. This was Prospect Vista, a big rain-dimmed sign said. Below, in smaller letters, the sign announced split-level homes, no down payment, seventy dollars a month, pay like rent.

  Bulldozers had been at work tearing out trees and piling them like jackstraws. Dirt streaks had been hoed out of the forest duff long ago—long enough for underbrush and scrub to spring up again in barbed-wire tangles. The bulldozed roads-to-be were now more impassable than they had been before the bulldozers came. But hopeful signs marked them: Onondaga Avenue intersected Seneca Street where they stood on the clearing’s edge.

  Sewer trenches were dug clear down to hardpan, an elephantine checkerboard converging on the principal landmark of Prospect Vista, which was a huge hole, obviously the excavation for a treatment plant. And that was as far as things had got. Here and there was a load of rusty pipe or pencil rod to reinforce concrete that had never been poured. Gravel and sand stood in low cones dotted through the clearing. In the years that passed, they had found their angle of repose and would slump no lower. It occurred to Justin that one pile of gravel may be alive and another dead. These were dead.

  Gribble was saying suddenly in a tone of sweet reasonableness: “Of course, I wasn’t in on the planning end. I came in fairly late, after Clardy turned me down for a command. But you can guess how they put it together. The techniques the Scandinavians developed, plus the brute-force Manhattan District idea plus a security plan borrowed from the Japanese and improved on by the supply system of the Czarist Army. The one that kept losing them all their wars.”

  As he spoke, he moved up and down a few yards of the steeply inclined end of the road like a hound trying to pick up a scent. Now and then he knelt and fingered a stone.

  “All that planning,” he chattered, “and then in a weak moment they turned it over to me. A fuzzy-faced West Point second-classman would have been better, of course. I was supposed to be a hard guy. Once I signed orders for a 20 per cent firing effective Christmas Eve. Deliberately, to make the surviving 80 per cent cringe a little. But there’s a difference—”

  He had found whatever he was looking for. “Lift here,” he told Justin, indicating two shards of concrete that projected from the good-bad road. His face was deathly pale.

  Justin hadn’t been listening. He had been thinking: A total breakdown. He’s completely irresponsible, in a dream world. He’s likely to say anything to anybody. Perhaps I ought to pick up one of those reinforcing rods over there and—

  “What’s that?” he asked the little man.

  Gribble patiently repeated, “Lift here,” and showed him the hunks of concrete.

  Murder was on Justin’s mind. “Stand over there,” he said sharply. He wasn’t to be caught bending over with the lunatic behind him and reinforcing rods conveniently near. Gribble, pale and exhausted, stood where he pointed, yards away, and nevertheless, Justin watched him as he heaved on the shards. Because of that he missed seeing the miracle, but he felt its weight through his back and shoulder muscles and heard its creak and hum.

  A great slab of the good-bad road came up like a door, twelve feet wide, easily twenty feet long. He crazily thought at first that he had pried it up with his fingers, and then he heard a motor and the whine of a gearbox.

  Justin leaped back and the hinged slab continued to rise. It was a yard thick, supported on I beams.

  To where?

  The good-bad road ended at the gateway to a tunnel angling sharply down. At the gateway the masquerade ended. The tunnel flooring was plain concrete. Lights had gone on, one every couple of yards along the ceiling. He had a confused impression of huge counterweights moving down as the slab moved up, and then motion stopped; the tunnel lay open.

  Gribble’s voice penetrated his stupor. “Come on, Justin. Inside.” He stepped in and let Gribble show him a lever, which he pulled, and which lowered the ponderous slab down on them again. He let Gribble, stammering and sweating, lead him a hundred feet down the inclined tunnel to a huge door, to Justin’s eyes exactly like that of a bank vault.

  “That’s it,” Gribble said, his voice charged with poisonous self-hatred. “Open it, Justin.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The artist stammered a question about the combination. Gribble whispered: “No combination. Just that lever.”

  No—it wasn’t like a bank vault’s door after all. There was just the one lever. This door was meant to open easily. From the outside.

  Justin turned the lever and pulled. The door glided open and starved concentration-camp corpses tumbled out into the tunnel. Justin leaped back; his own scream of horror yelled back at him, reverberating along the tunnel’s smooth walls.

  He was turning to run blindly back when Gribble took his arm. �
��Look at them,” Gribble said softly. “There was no pain. I was never sure of that. Naturally I was told it would be painless, but they’d tell me that anyway. But it was true. They never knew what hit them, Justin. I feel just a little better now.”

  Justin finally forced himself to look. There was no distortion of agony on the faces; they were people who had gone to sleep and never wakened. He became conscious of a cool, dry, gentle draft from the open doorway. “Pseudo mummies,” Gribble said. “You find them in high, dry places. The Andes, the Iranian upland.” He looked earnestly into one of the calm faces. “Dr. Swenson. A very good man. I suppose he guessed what had happened, got a few people together, and went to work on the door. Quietly—no panic.”

  The dry, brown hand of the man he looked down at was cramped around the twin pipe of an oxyacetylene torch. Another pair of dry brown arms held cylinders of gas. Another had been straightening a kinked tube when time became eternity.

  “No panic,” Gribble mused. “His watchword used to be ‘Step back and take a long, calm look.’ He kept us together after the polio epidemic. I for one was ready to yell for help. ‘Step back,’ he said, and I did and we decided we could swing it as we were. That Swenson. He felt the air go cold and dry, he figured it out, he got his men together, they got to work on the door. And then the gas came. Without pain.”

  All Justin could make of it was that Gribble had killed—or thought he had killed—some people beyond the door. “Tell me about it,” he said calmly.

  “I’ll show you,” said the little man. “After all, it’s your baby now. I couldn’t be expected to go on with it now, could I? Could I?” His eyes were wild.

  “Of course not,” Justin said very steadily. “You just show me what you have to and don’t worry. I’ll see that the right thing’s done.”

  “Come on,” Gribble said.

  They stepped around the bodies and through the door. Into a garage. The little man absently went from wall to wall turning on lights. It was quite a place, and it was crowded with servicing equipment and trucks. No two trucks were built alike, painted alike, or marked alike. Some of them Justin vaguely recognized. There was the two-ton stake-bed job, very battered, marked P. DiPumpo & Sons, Contractors. He had absent-mindedly registered the odd name a few times during the past few years. The battered truck of P. DiPumpo & Sons had intersected his orbit on the highway, or in town, or perhaps during the early months of the war passing his farm. Trucks came and went.

  A half-ton cab-over-engine job: Hornell Florists.

  A huge, ordinary, bright-red gas truck: Supeco Refining Company.

  A tractor-trailer job, special trailer with the bed sunk between the axles: U. S. Bridge Building Corporation. He had seen that one, noticing the odd profile of a bulky load covered with roped tarpaulins.

  Thirty more of them, reefers, pickups, vans, dumpers, tow cars—you name it and it was there. Two hundred feet under Prospect Hill was a haunted garage with dry, brown people sprawled here and there, as they would fall from timing an engine, cleaning spark plugs, turning down brake drums, and—in one small corner—stamping out counterfeit license plates for 1966.

  “Come on,” Gribble said again.

  He led Justin from the garage into a bewildering underground industrial complex. There were drafting rooms, with dry brown draftsmen slumped forward on their tables. Offices, foundries, machine shops, welding bays, sheet-metal shops, laboratories, and desiccated corpses everywhere. Gribble kept pausing to look into faces. Sometimes he would name a name; usually he would turn to Justin and ask shrilly whether it wasn’t obvious that they had died painlessly and in peace. Justin assured him over and over again.

  The living quarters, below the working level, were the same. Spartan cubicles tunneling deep into the hill—Justin guessed dazedly that there might be five thousand of them strung along twenty corridors radiating from a plaza. The library, the cafeterias, the gymnasium. Sun lamps there, of course. And brown figures sprawled on the board track that circled it.

  “What was it?” he had been asking for some time now of the unhearing little man. “I can’t help if I don’t know what it was, Gribble.”

  The little man led the way up from the living quarters to a freight elevator on the manufacturing level. He jerked the starting cable and the platform rose slowly with them to a square of blackness in the roof. “The satellite,” Gribble said. “The super gadget, the ultimate doohickey that was going to win the war and keep it won.”

  “The satellite’s lost, Gribble,” Justin said evenly. “They overran it in the sweep North. Betsy Cardew told me about it.”

  Gribble looked at him scornfully. “Not that one, you bloody fool,” he said. “This one. The real one.”

  The freight elevator passed through the square of blackness and lights went on in a huge domed chamber of rock. In the center of the chamber stood a towering, spidery structure. Even Justin’s untrained eye could see that it was a three-step rocket. Even he could see that the third step was designed to circle the Earth as an artificial satellite. And that it was heavily armed with bomb-launching racks.

  CHAPTER TEN

  You’re a well-read average man, thought Billy Justin, so you’re aware that the human race is about to take its next giant step. It’s a pity that it takes a war to do it, but that seems to be the way people are. British imperial greed long ago caused a Mr. John Harrison to fuse metallurgy, physics, and genius into the first marine chronometer, by means of which the captains of His Britannic Majesty’s Navy was able to find a not yet plundered island twice in succession. Before that Signor Tartaglia, under the necessity of battering down medieval walls sheltering medieval thugs for the benefit of Renaissance thugs with Renaissance cannon, stole sine, cosine, and tangent from the philosophers’ toy chest and gave them to the world for tools. You know it was war that put jigs and fixtures on our machine tools, which is to say mass production: muskets to sewing machines, washers, kitchenware, Grand Rapids furniture, and the American standard of living. And another put planes in the air. And another avalanched radar, atomic bombs, and the first crude spaceships on us. You knew, therefore, like everybody else, that the current war was going to bring space flight, particularly the bombardment satellite Yankee Doodle a-building in the Southwest somewhere on the Colorado plateau. The marvelous satellite would circle the Earth like the eye of God, but improved by American ingenuity; its more than Jovian thunderbolts were to strike down not one sinner at a time but whole sinful cities and—if they didn’t disperse into ineffectiveness—sinful army groups. It was going to be a harsh, just world for sinners when the satellite Yankee Doodle roared up to begin its swift circling of the heavens, troubled though the progress of its construction was by sabotage. Troubled though it was by paratroopers. And there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the radio told you how Yankee Doodle was steam-rollered by the fifty thousand death-or-glory Chinese fanatics, hopped up to the eyebrows, of Task Force Tsing. The announcer brokenly announced: “Our men and women fought to the end against the human sea that engulfed them. The last weak radio communication from the site announced that thermite and demolition bombs had been fired to utterly destroy all components of Yankee Doodle so that the fanatical barbarian invaders—”

  “Not that one, you bloody fool. This one. The real one.”

  Billy Justin craned his neck to study the monster. Its nose was lost in the upper gloom of the chamber. He emitted a sound like a nervous giggle. “I never thought we were that smart,” he breathed.

  Gribble was very happy. This was the ultimate in the pleasurable game of giving away confidences. “It’s nothing new,” he said with elaborate casualness. “We suckered the Germans this way when we invaded Europe the last time. There was this army group, see, waiting in England to make the real attack on the pas de Calais. The Germans knew it; they knew Patton was in command, they intercepted the radio traffic of the army group every day. Orders, acknowledgments, rations, troop movements, supplies, personnel transfers. So they almos
t ignored the feint by Bradley on the Cotentin Peninsula; they held forty divisions ready to meet the real thrust by Patton’s army group. When it was too late, they found out that Patton’s army group consisted of Patton and a couple of hundred radio operators. By then Bradley had broken out and was chewing his way across France.”

  “It is—ready?” asked Justin.

  “No.” The little man squatted on the concrete. “I’ll begin at the beginning. You’ve got to know it all anyway.”

  “Why?” Justin asked sharply.

  Gribble screwed up his face and his eyes began to leak tears. “I thought you agreed,” he said miserably. “Didn’t you say you’d handle it? I’m shot, Justin! I can’t take any more—” His voice was soaring into childish shrillness.

  “All right,” Justin said hastily. “All right. Don’t worry about a thing. If I’ve got to, I’ve got to. Just tell me.”

  Gribble blew his nose and shuddered. Shrilly at first, then more easily, he said: “It hasn’t got any name. It’s a three-step hydrazine-fueled bombardment satellite. It has a fish-bowl reactor for housekeeping current. It has a hydrophonics room in action now under sun lamps. It’s built for two. The TV tape and film library includes fifty thousand movies and books. An all-transistor radio sending and receiving set will function for an estimated seventy-five years without requiring servicing. Efficient waste and water regenerators are patterned after those aboard our long-cruise atomic submarines. Up there you can see the bomb deck, which accounts for half the weight of the third stage, neglecting fuel. A radar-computer bomb sight is capable of directing missiles to any point on the Earth’s surface; delivery within five square miles is guaranteed. The satellite is armed with thirty-six hydrogen bombs and two special cobalt-jacketed bombs. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You must have been reading about it since 1950.”