Jetboy sighed. So many movies, so much of everything he'd missed during the war. He'd even missed V-E and V-J Days, stuck on that island, before he and his plane had been found by the crew of the U.S. S. Reluctant. The way the guys on the Reluctant talked, you'd have thought they missed most of the war and the movies, too.
He was looking forward to a lot of films this fall, and to seeing them when they came out, the way everybody else did, the way he'd used to do at the orphanage.
Jetboy sat back down at the typewriter. If I don't work, I'll never get this book done. I'll go to the movies tonight.
He began to type up all the exciting things he'd done on July 12,
1944.
In the courtyard, women were calling kids in for supper as their fathers came home from work. A topple of kids were still jumping rope out there, their voices thin in the afternoon air:
"Hitler, Hitler looks like this,
Mussolini bows like this,
Sonja Henie skates like this,
And Betty Grable misses like this!"
The Haberdasher in the White House was having a pissass of a day.
It had started with a phone call a little after six A. M.-the Nervous Nellies over at the State Department had some new hot rumors from Turkey. The Soviets were moving all their men around on that nation's edges.
"Well," the Plain-speaking Man from Missouri said, "call me when they cross the goddamn border and not until." Now this.
Independence's First Citizen watched the door close. The last thing he saw was Einstein's heel disappearing. It needed half-soling.
He sat back in his chair, lifted his thick glasses off his nose, rubbed vigorously. Then the President put his fingers together in a steeple, his elbows resting on his desk. He looked at the small model plow on the front of his desk (it had replaced the model of the M-1 Garand that had sat there from the day he took office until V-J Day). There were three books on the right corner of the desk-a Bible, a thumbed thesaurus, and a pictorial history of the United States. There were three buttons on his desk for calling various secretaries, but he never used them.
Now that peace has come, I'm fighting to keep ten wars from breaking out in twenty places, there's strikes looming in every industry and that's a damn shame, people are hollering for more cars and refrigerators, and they're as tired as I am of war and war's alarm.
And I have to kick the hornet's nest again, get everybody out looking for a damn germ bomb that might go off and infect the whole U. S. and kill half the people or more.
We'd have been better off still fighting with sticks and rocks.
The sooner I get my ass back to 219 North Delaware in Independence, the better off me and this whole damn country will be.
Unless that son of a bitch Dewey wants to run for President again. Like Lincoln said, I'd rather swallow a deerantler rocking chair than let that bastard be President.
That's the only thing that'll keep me here when I've finished out Mr. Roosevelt's term.
Sooner I get this snipe hunt under way, the faster we can put World War Number Two behind us.
He picked up the phone.
"Get me the Chiefs of Staff," he said. "Major Truman speaking."
"Major, this is the other Truman, your boss. Put General Ostrander on the horn, will you?"
While he was waiting he looked out past the window fan (he hated air-conditioning) into the trees. The sky was the kind of blue that quickly turns to brass in the summer.
He looked at the clock on the wall: 10:23 A.M., eastern daylight time. What a day. What a year. What a century. "General Ostrander here, sir."
"General, we just had another bale of hay dropped on us…"
A couple of weeks later, the note came:
Deposit 20 Million Dollars account # 43Z21, Credite Suisse, Berne, by 2300Z 14 Sept or lose a major city. You know of this weapon; your people have been searching for it. I have it; I will use half of it on the first city. The price goes to 30 Million Dollars to keep me from using it a second time. You have my word it will not be used if the first payment is made and instructions will be sent on where the weapon can be recovered.
The Plain-speaking Man from Missouri picked up the phone.
"Kick everything up to the top notch," he said. "Call the cabinet, get the joint Chiefs together. And Ostrander…"
"Yessir?"
"Better get ahold of that kid flier, what's his name?…"
"You mean Jetboy, sir? He's not on active duty anymore."
"The hell he's not. He is now!"
"Yessir."
It was 2:24 P. M. on the Tuesday of September 15, 1946, when the thing first showed up on the radar screens.
At 2:31 it was still moving slowly toward the city at an altitude of nearly sixty thousand feet.
At 2:41 they blew the first of the air-raid sirens, which had not been used in New York City since April of 1945 in a blackout drill.
By 2:48 there was panic.
Someone in the CD office hit the wrong set of switches. The power went off everywhere except hospitals and police and fire stations. Subways stopped. Things shut down, and traffic lights quit working. Half the emergency equipment, which hadn't been checked since the end of the war, failed to come up.
The streets were jammed with people. Cops rushed out to try to direct traffic. Some of the policemen panicked when they were issued gas masks. Telephones jammed. Fistfights broke out at intersections, people were trampled at subway exits and on the stairs of skyscrapers.
The bridges clogged up.
Conflicting orders came down. Get the people into bomb shelters. No, no, evacuate the island. Two cops on the same corner yelled conflicting orders at the crowds. Mostly people just stood around and looked.
Their attention was soon drawn to something in the southeastern sky. It was small and shiny.
Flak began to bloom ineffectually two miles below it. On and on it came.
When the guns over in Jersey began to fire, the panic really started.
It was 3 PM.
"It's really quite simple," said Dr. Tod. He looked down toward Manhattan, which lay before him like a treasure trove. He turned to Filmore and held up a long cylindrical device that looked like the offspring of a pipe bomb and a combination lock. "Should anything happen to me, simply insert this fuse in the holder in the explosives"-he indicated the taped-over portion with the opening in the canister covered with the Sanskrit-like lettering-"twist it to the number five hundred, then pull this lever." He indicated the bomb-bay door latch. "It'll fall of its own weight, and I was wrong about the bombsights. Pinpoint accuracy is not our goal."
He looked at Filmore through the grill of his diving helmet. They all wore diving suits with hoses leading back to a central oxygen supply.
"Make sure, of course, everyone's suited with their helmet on. Your blood would boil in this thin air. And these suits only have to hold pressure for the few seconds the bomb door's open."
"I don't expect no trouble, boss."
"Neither do I. After we bomb New York City, we go out to our rendezvous with the ship, rip the ballast, set down, and head for Europe. They'll be only too glad to pay us the money then. They have no way of knowing well be using the whole germ weapon. Seven million or so dead should quite convince them we mean business."
"Look at that," said Ed, from the copilot's seat. "Way down there. Flak("
"What's our altitude?" asked Dr. Tod.
"Right on fifty-eight thousand feet," said Fred. "Target?"
Ed sighted, checked a map. "Sixteen miles straight ahead. You sure called those wind currents just right, Dr. Tod."
They had sent him to an airfield outside Washington, D.C., to wait. That way he would be within range of most of the major East Coast cities.