Expanded Universe

Only three flying fortresses had arrived from the Eurasian Union. Their representatives had asked for short delay in order that a supply of high - test aviation gasoline might be delivered to them. They claimed shortage of fuel necessary to make the long flight over the Arctic safe. There was no way to check the claim and the delay was granted while a shipment wad routed from England. We were about to leave, Ma

There were nine of them in the flight, cruising in column of echelons and looking so huge that our little fighters were hardly noticeable. They circled the field and I was admiring the stately dignity of them when Ma

I still did not tumble, but Ma

He fiddled with his instruments and a

"General alarm! Armor!"

We could not hear the sirens, naturally, but I could see the white plumes rise from the big steam whist on the roof of the Administration Building - three long blasts, then three short ones. It seemed almost at the same time that the first cloud broke from the E. I planes.

Instead of landing, they passed low over the receiving station, jam - packed now with ships from all over the world. Each echelon picked one of three groups centered around the three landing fields and streamers of heavy brown smoke poured from the bellies of the E. U. ships. I saw a tiny black figure jump from a tractor and run toward the nearest building. Then the smoke screen obscured the field.

"Do you still have the field?" demanded Ma

"Cross co

The copilot cut in the amplifier so that Ma

"Radioactive, chief. Intensity seven point four." They had paralleled the Karst - Obre research.

Ma

The Chief of Staff cut off abruptly, without comment. I knew that the U.S. air fleets, in a state of alert for weeks past, would have their orders in a few seconds, and would be on their way to hunt out and down the attackers, if possible before they could reach the cities.

I glanced back at the field. The formations were broken up. One of the E. U. bombers was down, crashed, half a mile beyond the station. While I watched, one of our midget dive bombers screamed down on a behemoth E. U. ship and unloaded his eggs. It was a center hit, but the American pilot had cut it too fine, could not pull out, and crashed before his victim.

There is no point in rehashing the newspaper story of the Four - Days War. The point is that we should have lost it, and we would have, had it not been for an unlikely combination of luck, foresight, and good management. Apparently, the nuclear physicists of the Eurasian Union were almost as far along as Ridpath crew when the destruction of Berlin gave them the time they needed. But we had rushed them, forced them to move before they were ready, because of the deadline for disarmament set forth in our Peace Proclamation.

If the President had waited to fight it out with Congress before issuing the proclamation, there would n be any United States.

Ma

But I put it to you - would he have maneuvered to get Congress out of Washington at a time when I feared that Washington might be attacked if he had dictatorial ambitions?

Of course, it was the President who was back of the ten - day leaves that had been granted to most of the civil - service perso

And then, there was the plague scare. I don't know how or when Ma

At that, we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.

Of course, the government was blamed for the lives that were lost and the papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to anticipate and force an evacuation of all the major cities.

If Ma

Well, as I see it, for this reason:

A big city will not be, never has been, evacuated in response to rational argument. London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened to the thought.

But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.

And don't forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow - those were i

I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our ships to dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military radioactives in the Eurasian Union. Suppose the mistake had been the other way around - suppose that one of the E. U. ships in attacking Washington, D.C., by mistake had included Ridpath's shop forty - five miles away in Maryland?

Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis, and the American Pacification Expedition started the job of pulling the fangs of the Eurasian Union. It was not a military occupation in the usual sense; there were two simple objectives: to search out and dust all aircraft, aircraft plants, and fields, and locate and dust radiation laboratories, uranium supplies, and bodes of carnotite and pitchblende. No attempt was made to interfere with, or to replace, the government.

We used a two - year dust, which gave a breathing spell in which to consolidate our position. Liberal r wards were offered to informers, a technique that worked remarkably well not only in the E. U., but most parts of the world.

The "weasel," an instrument to smell out radiation based on the electroscope - discharge principle and r fined by Ridpath's staff, greatly facilitated the work locating uranium and uranium ores. A grid of weasel properly spaced over a suspect area, could locate an important mass of uranium almost as handily as a direction - finder can spot a radio station.