Trojan Horse Laugh

VIII

Winter war. December has blanketed the cast with a thin wet curtain of snow. Winter is hard on the irregulars, but works no hardship on the troops of the Invader. The vast food stocks of the nation are his, as are the warm barracks, the heated vehicles, the splendid medical care.

A guerrilla with a shattered ankle dies miserably in the cold brush, near the blasted fragments of the house in which he took shelter.

The cities are thinned of people. For the first time it is noticeable. The last emotional debauch took five millions. Now there are thirty millions left. They have a breathing spell.

Invader troops are given leave in the cities. They go armed. They sample the wines, flirt with the women and sing their barbaric songs and gawp at the huge trenches which were dug to bury the dead of the cities.

Once again there is light arid heat in the cities. The winter is cruel, but there is heat. And there is foodstuffs in the markets, though not enough. Not nearly enough.

Were it warm summer, possibly the adjusted would leave their cities, would go into the countryside to be away from the places of horror. In the south and in California they try to leave, are roughly herded back by the Invader who seems to say, “Stay in the traps I have prepared for you and die there.”

This is a policy decreed by a man named Lewsto who, high in the councils of the Invader, walks with pigeon tread and squared shoulders, the new and highest medal of his country shining on the left breast of the drab uniform.

Cyclical nightmare. The slow upward climb toward crescendo has begun once again, and no man looks squarely into the face of his neighbor, knowing that he will see there some of the fear and horror that has coldly touched his heart. And yet, each man and woman has a secret place which revels in the thought of the nightmare to come. It is like an addiction to a strange drug. Nightmare there must be, and death there must be, but with guttural shouts of animal joy, with a wild, unheeding passion of insane laughter, when consequences are not considered, nor are the customary mores and folkways.

Each adjusted person in the city feels shame in his heart because, though he knows that pure nightmare lies ahead, nightmare which he may not survive, he yet anticipates it with a certain warm and soiled sense of expectancy.

This, then, is the conquered country, the proud race, the men who know defeat, and yet cling to the manner of their defeat, an overripe fruit, plucked once each month.

In a silent cabin Alice sits at the rude table and the glow of the lantern highlights the strong cheekbones, the limpid mouth, and she is beautiful indeed.

Dr. Montclair sits opposite her. Quickly he touches her hand. “He will make it, Alice. I know he made it.”

“He’s gone. That’s all I know. Somebody else could have gone. But he had to go?”

In the brush there is the quick and angry spat of a rifle, the answering sound of an automatic weapon, like some vast fabric being torn, the fabric of the night.

As Montclair takes the weapon propped against his chair, she quickly blows out the lantern and, together in the darkness, they listen.

Hoarse shouts from the brush, the authoritative crump of a mortar, alarmingly close, a scarlet blossom against which each bare twig stands out with the bland clarity of death.

“They’re coming in from both sides,” she whispers.

The rifle fire fades and slugs grind against the cabin walls, throwing splinters that whine.

Montclair is on his belly on the porch, Alice behind him in the doorway. As they come running across the slope toward the porch, running with the heavy thump of men in full equipment, Montclair sprays a line of fire across them. Many fall, but the others rush the porch. She fires again and again, seeing Montclair die suddenly, firing until the hand slaps the rifle away.

She is thrust into a corner and there are six of them in the room, seeming to fill the cabin. The lantern is lit and they look at her and talk among themselves and she knows that she should have saved one of the rifle bullets.

Two of them advance toward her slowly. They spin and snap to attention as the officer enters. He looks at her, snaps something at the men. Then, with surprising gentleness be lifts her to her feet. He leads her up through the brush to the waiting vehicle. She turns and whimpers in her throat as she sees through the black lace work of trees, the flower of flame that grows from the cabin.

Every remaining plane is committed to the venture. Every last one.

Brave men have managed, somehow, to set up the short wave radios behind the Invader lines.

The teams are carefully instructed. And there are several teams for each portion of the venture, as losses will be high.

At last the word conies. The great emotional springs are once again winding taut. The word comes. “Today the Invader moved all personnel out of the cities.”

Joe Morgan, burdened with sixty pounds of equipment, climbed laboriously into the belly of the transport. The interior of the aircraft was dark. Cigarette ends glowed and the men laughed with the calculated steadiness of men who are gambling life itself.

The officer stood in the doorway and said: “Team Eighty-two?”

Joe answered, “Eighty-two, Morgan commanding. All present and accounted for.”

The officer jumped down and the big door slammed. The huge cavern in the side of the mountain reverberated to the roar of many motors. The very air shook and quivered with the vibration. Outside the dozers were dragging the rocks off the runway.

At last the cave doors were rolled back. The first transports rumbled awkwardly to the doorway, gaining speed, gaining agility, moving out, roaring along the runway, lifting off into the night.

Team Eighty-two was airborne and Joe, squinting through the side window saw the streaked jets of the fighter cover.

The scene was duplicated at other hidden fields.

Ten minutes before interception on the basis of radar watch over the mountains.

Interception came. Invader pursuit ships were dark lances in the night. Distant flames, like weak candles, blossomed briefly and were gone in a red line of fire toward the sleeping earth.

The lumbering transport weaved heavily through the night, and Joe Morgan sat in a cold agony of fear.

From time to time he glanced at the illuminated dial of his watch. At last he said loudly, over the motor roar: “Fasten static lines.”

He reached up and snapped his own, tugged on it to test it.

Ten minutes, twelve, fifteen. The wing lifted and the transport slipped down, down, to where the city lights glimmered through the overcast. Spiraling down.

The plane seemed to brake in the air as the flaps caught hold, seemed to waver on the very edge of instability.

The wind was a shrill blast through the open door. “What are you doing here, Morgan?” Joe asked himself softly.

He braced his hands against the sides of the door, saw the target area below. The man behind him had a hand on Joe’s shoulder.

Joe stepped out into the night, into the cold, tumbling night, and the flatness of the city spun around him like a vast wheel. The sharp jolt caught him and he swung pendulum-wise toward the darkened earth, swinging under the pale flower of silk.

Then he was tumbling on the frozen ground of the park of the big city, grasping the shroud lines, bracing his feet, fumbling with the buckles. The chute collapsed and he stepped dear of the harness.

“Over here,” he yelled. “Over here.”

Roll call. “Peterson, Barnik, Stuyvessant, Simlon, Garrit, Reed, Walke, Punch, Norris, Humboldt, Crues, Riley, Renelli, Post, Charnevak.”

All but one. One was imbedded to half his thickness in the frozen earth.

They were in a silent circle around hint

He said: “You all know this town like the palm of your hand. You each have your sectors and your instructions. You know the plan and you know that it has to work.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “After it goes off, it’s every man for himself. We meet back here. Good luck.”

At base headquarters of the Invader, the commanding general listened gravely to the report of his Air Intelligence,

After listening, he made his decision. “Apparently they desire to set up, within the cities, focal points of resistance. You believe that men were airdropped into every one of the major cities and most of the smaller cities which are infected. It is obvious to me that they underestimate the extent of hysteria which will hit the cities within four days. We will wait until after the hysteria, until after the suicide period, and then we will go in and eliminate the men who were airdropped.”

The reporting officer saluted, turned smartly and left the office.

Joe Morgan stood in the cold gray morning and looked at Daylon. He had found and taken over one of the many empty rooms in the city. The city had suffered greatly.

He carried a heavy suitcase. As he walked down the morning street he looked carefully at the houses. Whenever he saw an empty one he broke in quickly, opened the suitcase, took out a small package the size of a cigarette package.

In each house be left the package in a different place. But the favorite spot was in the cellar, wired to the rafters overhead.

He saw a few people that he knew. They looked blankly at him, smiled and went vaguely about their business.

The people of Daylon were lean and ragged and their eyes were hollow. But they smiled constantly.

In mid-morning, a smiling policeman in a dirty torn uniform asked him what he was doing. Joe said: “Come in here and I’ll show you.” The policeman followed Joe through the door Joe had forced.

Joe pivoted, hit the man on the chin with all his strength, walked back out of the house carrying the suitcase.

Carefully he covered the sector he had allotted to himself. Public buildings, houses, garages, stores. In many places he had to be extremely cautious. In stores lie hid the packages among slow-moving merchandise. The city went through the motions of existence, but on every face was the look of expectancy.

Four days before the explosion of emotions, before the laughing orgy of death. Three days. Two days. The last of the packages has been placed. But there are four much larger packages to be delivered.

And these are delivered at night.

At night he found a stout iron bar, used it to pry up the manhole covers. The large packages nestled comfortably against the welter of cables and pipes.

This is the day before the tight spring will snap. Already there is empty laughter in the streets of the city, in the streets of all the vast cities.

The armies of the Invader, well removed from the focal points of contagious hysteria, clamp severe restrictions on all areas to prevent the curious from sneaking off to the cities.

At eleven o’clock on the morning of the day before pandemonium will reign, the streets of the cities vibrate to the massive thump of subterranean explosions. Steel manhole covers sail up into the air, turning lazily, smashing pedestrians as they full. The underground caverns roar with burning gas and then the roaring is gone as the severed water pipes spill the contents underground.

All electricity ceases to flow.

One hundred and seventy-one teams won through. Sixteen men to a team. Four bombs and one thousand of the deadly half-ounce packages to each man. Ten thousand nine hundred and forty-four explosions in the bowels of the great cities. Two million, seven hundred and thirty-seven thousand of the deadly packages distributed.

For this is a kind of suicide, oil a vast and generous scale.

The packages are closely co-ordinated. A few sputter prematurely, but within a few minutes after the explosions, the acid has eaten through the lead shields within more than half of them. They flame into life, burning with a white dazzling flame that has an intensity of twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit and a duration of twenty minutes. All of the fading resources of an almost-conquered nation has gone into the preparation of these packages of death.

With the water supply crippled, there is no possibility of fighting the fires.

Whole streets erupt into flame and the melted glass of the windows runs across the pavement.

It is almost too successful. The densely populated eastern seaboard is one vast pall of smoke drifting in the crisp December air.

Too many die in the flames. Far too many.

But from the roaring furnaces of the cities nearly thirty millions wind like sluggish worms into the countryside.

They have fear of the flames, fear of death, fear of pain — but it is not until tomorrow that they will be unable to feel fear.

And so, with empty idle smiles, with vacuous eyes, they move toward the vast camps of the Invader.

The Invader is outnumbered by the victims of his satanic adjustment — twenty-five to one.

Too late, the danger is seen.

The camps of the Invader are near the cities. They straddle the main, roads. Machine guns are manned and white-lipped men fire prolonged bursts into the crowds that move so slowly. And at last they are revolted by the slaughter of these who smile, even in death, and they refuse to obey orders.

The day darkens and in the night the cities are vast pyres that redden the sky. The cities of America burn with a brave flame and the sound of the roaring can be heard for many miles. The fire is behind them and the guns, unmanned by now, are ahead of them.

At dawn the Invader orders the armies to retreat away from these mad ones, to retreat to the fastness of the hills.

But already the infection is at work. Already the spirit of spontaneous hysteria has begun to infect the troops of the Invader.

Massive tanks sit empty while men shout hoarsely and dance in the street. The planes are idle, the guns unmanned, the officers joining their men in a frenzied rapport with the victims of disaster.

Suddenly the spirit grows among them that they are celebrating victory. Victor and vanquished revel until they fall exhausted, sleep, rise to bellow with laughter, to stare with glazed eyes at the winter sky, howl with the voices of wolves.

It is a party of death, lasting for day after day, with all thought of food forgotten, and the cities burn brightly every night and the winter sun by day is shrouded with the drifting black smoke of utter destruction.

Joe Morgan held tightly to the trunk of a small tree halfway up the slope six miles from Daylon. Even at this distance he could feel the intermittent waves of heat against his face.

But five men were left of his group. They wire scorched, blackened, drugged with weariness.

“Listen!” he said.

The six men stood, listening intently. They heard the rising sound of battle, the hammer blows of artillery, the distant thin crackling of small-arms fire.

The crescendo of battle rose sharply, faded, subsided, until they could hear nothing.

“Five bucks says we took them,” Joe said.