Not This August (3 page)

The lean old man came into the living room eating bread and cheese. “Buck up, m’ boy,” Sparhawk said cheerily. “All this is only a Trial, you know. You should regard it as a magnificent opportunity. Here’s your chance to play the man, acquire merit, and get a leg up on your next incarnation.”

“Oh, shut up,” Justin said.

“Natural reaction, very. I don’t blame you a bit, m’ boy. But sober reflection on the great events of this day will show you their spiritual meaning. How else would you haughty Americans get the chance to humble yourselves and practice asceticism if there were no Red occupation?”

Justin studied Sparhawk’s neatly pressed garb, a collection of donated items in good repair. He snapped: “If you’re so damned ascetic, why don’t you go around in a jockstrap like your beloved yogis?”

Sparhawk stiffened ever so slightly. “My dear young man,” he said, “Anybody who wore only a loincloth in your atrocious climate might or might not be a saint, but he’d certainly be a bloody fool. I see you’re in no mood for serious discussion, sir. I’ll bid you good day.”

“Good riddance,” Justin muttered, but only after Sparhawk had shouldered his rucksack again and was going down the kitchen steps.

At about seven in the evening Justin decided to visit his friends the Bradens a mile and a half up the battered road. He hadn’t seen much of them during the winter; his meager gas allotment had been cut to zero in the general reduction of November 1964. He had missed them personally, missed their off-beat chatter and Amy’s generously shared home brew. The only other liquor in the area was a vicious grape brandy illegally distilled by old Mr. Konreid on Ash Hill Road. It put you under fast. The next morning you wished you could die.

Lew Braden had a weird profession. He was a maker of fine hand-laid papers for bookbinders and etchers. Before the war it was his custom to tour the country each summer in a battered Ford offering picayune prices to farm wives for their soft old linen tablecloths and napkins, washed thousands of times, worn to rags, and stored thriftily in an attic trunk. He would finish his tour with bales of the inimitable material and spend the winter turning it, with the aid of simple tools, dexterity, and a great deal of know-how, into inimitable special-purpose papers. The Braden watermark was internationally famous—to about five hundred bookbinders and etchers—and he cleared perhaps three thousand dollars in an average year. It was, he often said nostalgically, a very easy buck. Under the Farm-or-Fight Law he and Amy had elected to start a piggery and truck farm for the reason that it required less effort than dairying or field crops. They turned out to be right. They had sailed through three years of war without much trouble, with time to read, paint, play violin-piano duets, and drink. Justin, chained to the twice-daily milking and the niggling hygiene of the milk-house, envied their good sense.

Good sense, he thought, picking his way around the chuck-holes in the moonlit road—maybe they can explain to me what the devil has happened and what happens next.

The countryside was winking on and off in the dusk like a Christmas tree. The Horbath farm up the hill, the Parry farm to the south with its big yard light, his own house behind him alternately flared with lights in every window and then went out. He hoped the current would steady down by nine—time for “the further announcement.”

Lew Braden prudently called as he entered their dark yard: “Who’s there? I’ve got a shotgun!”

“It’s Justin,” he called back.

The yard light went on and stayed on. Braden studied him with mild perplexity. “Darned if you aren’t,” he said. “Come in, Billy. We were hoping somebody’d drop by. What’s going on with the lights and the phone?”

“
You haven’t heard?
”

“Obviously not. Come in and tell us about it, whatever it is. Nobody’s been by and the radio won’t go since Amy fixed it.”

The radio was indeed roaring unintelligibly on an end table.

“It’s over,” Justin said. “That’s what it’s all about. Fraley surrendered at El Paso. The President capitulated through the embassies in Switzerland. They’ve been broadcasting it since noon. Let me see that damned radio. It sounds as if you just haven’t got it on a station.”

He pulled the chassis out of the plastic case and saw the trouble. The cord from the tuning-knob pulley to the variable condenser was slack instead of taut; the radio worked but you couldn’t tune it from the knob. He picked up a stub of pencil and shoved the condenser over to one of the CONELRAD stations.

“… in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States I now order all officers and enlisted men to cease fire. Maintain discipline, hold your ranks…”

They listened to it twice through and then turned it down. Between each of the replays now the woman’s voice announced that a further statement would be made at nine.

Lew and Amy were looking at each other. The expression on their faces was unreadable. At last Lew turned to Justin and said softly: “Don’t worry about a thing, Billy. You’re going to have to make a big readjustment in your thinking, but so will almost everybody. You’ll find out you’ve been fed a pack of lies. You’ll fight the truth at first, but finally we’ll prove to you—”

“
We?
Who’s
we
?” Justin demanded.

“Shut up, Lew,” Amy said briefly.

He turned his kindly, round bespectacled face to her. “No, Amy. You, too, are having difficulty in readjusting. Conditions have changed now; we’re suddenly no longer conspirators but the voice and leadership of America. A new America.”

Guilelessly he turned again to Justin. “We’re Communists, Billy. Have been for twenty years. This is the grandest day of my life.”

Justin felt an impulse to back away. “You’re kidding. Or crazy!”

“Neither one, Billy. You see, this is the first of the readjustments you will have to make. You think a Communist must necessarily be a fiend, a savage, a foreigner. You couldn’t conceive of a Communist being a soft-spoken, reasonable, mannerly person. But Amy and I are, aren’t we? And we’re Communists. When I was on those linen-buying trips, I was doubling as a courier. I was in the Party category you call ‘floaters’ then. Since the war I’ve been what you call a ‘sleeper.’ No conspiratorial activity, no connection with the activist branch. I have merely been under orders to hold myself in readiness for this day. I know who lives hereabouts, I know their sentiments. I am, I think, almost everybody’s friend. My job will be to educate the people of this area.

“You see? Your education is beginning already. There will be no brutal, foreign tyrants around here. There will be Amy and me—friends and neighbors—just the way we always were, explaining to you the new America.

“And what an America it will be! Freed from the shackles of capitalist exploitation and racial hatred! Purged of the warmongers who imposed a crushing armament burden on the workers and finally goaded the U.S.S.R. and the C.P.R. into attacking! An America freed from bondage to ancient superstition!”

There were tears of joy in his eyes.

Justin asked slowly: “Have you spied? Have you been traitors?”

Lew said with dignity:

“You’re thinking of cloak-and-dagger stuff, Billy. Assassination. Break open the locked drawer and steal the great atomic secret for godless Russia. Well, there was a little melodrama, but I never liked it. I’ve risked my life more than once and I was glad to. Amy and I were couriers in the Rosenbergs’ apparatus; drawings from Los Alamos passed through our hands. It was only by a fluke that the FBI didn’t stumble onto us. If they had, I suppose we would have fried with the Rosenbergs. Gladly. For America, Billy. Because I did not spy against the people. I did not commit treason against the people.”

Justin said: “Good night, Lew. Good night, Amy. I don’t know what to think…”

Lew said confidently to his back: “You’ll readjust. It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”

He walked home and found that the current was on again, apparently for good. He climbed to the attic and brought down a half-full gallon of old Mr. Konreid’s popskull. He filled a tumbler and sipped at it until nine, when the radio said:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary of State.”

“Fellow citizens, I have been ordered to communicate to you the Articles of Surrender which were signed in Washington, D.C., today by the President on behalf of the United States, by Marshal Ilya Novikov on behalf of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and by Marshal Feng Chu-tsai on behalf of the Chinese People’s Republic.

“One. The United States surrenders without conditions to the Soviet Union and the C.P.R. Acts of violence against troops of the Soviet Union and the C.P.R. on or after April 17, 1965, are recognized by the high contracting parties as criminal banditry and terrorism, subject to summary and condign punishment.

“Two. The high contracting parties recognize and admit the criminal guilt of the United States in provoking the late war and recognize and admit the principle that the United States is liable to the Soviet Union and the C.P.R. for indemnities in
valuta
and kind.

“Three. The high contracting parties recognize and admit the
personal
criminal war guilt of certain civilians and soldiers of the United States and recognize and admit that these persons are subject to condign punishment.”

The Secretary’s voice shook. “I have been further asked to announce that the central functions of the United States Federal Government were assumed today by Soviet Military Government Unit 101, which today arrived by air in Washington, D.C., under the escort of two Russian and two Chinese airborne divisions.

“I have been further asked to announce that under Article Three of the Articles of Surrender I read you the President and Vice-President of the United States were shot to death at eight o’clock, P.M., by a mixed Russian and Chinese firing squad.”

That was all.

Justin’s hand was trembling so the raw brandy slopped over the tumbler’s edge.

April 23, 1965, seventh day of the defeat…

Justin leaned on his mailbox waiting for Betsy Cardew, his morning chores behind him, and reflected that things had gone with amazing smoothness. Nor was there any particular reason why they shouldn’t. Soviet Military Government Unit 101 had certainly planned and practiced for twenty years. The Baltic states, the Balkans, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, West Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and England—they had been priceless rehearsals for the main event.

And what a main event! Half the world’s steel, coal, and oil. All the world’s free helium gas. Midwest grain, northwest timber, and the magnificent road net to haul them to magnificent ports. Industrial New England, shabby streets and dingy factories, but in the dingy factories the world’s biggest assemblage of the world’s finest precision tools. Detroit! South Bend! Prizes that made all the loot of all the conquerors of history flashy junk. SMGU 101 would not let the plunder slip through its fingers. It was moving fast, moving smoothly.

For the greatest part of the loot, the part without which the materials would be worthless, consisted of 180 million Americans. They knew how to extract that steel, coal, oil and gas, harvest the grain, log the forests, drive the trucks, load the freighters, run the lathes and punch presses.

Betsy Cardew had yesterday delivered to him—and to everybody on her route—SMGU Announcement Number One, so Gus Feinblatt was right. They turned over a carload of SMGU announcements to the Postmaster, D.C., with the note “one to each address,” and it was automatic from there. The carload was broken down by regions, states, counties, towns, rural routes, and three days later everybody had one in his hand.

They hadn’t been using radio. When current was on, and it was on more and more frequently as the days went by, all you heard were light-classical music, station breaks, and the time.

The SMGU announcement didn’t come to much. It was simply a slanted recap of the military situation, larded with praise of General Fraley and his troops, expressing gentle regret that so many fine young men and women had been lost to both sides. As an afterthought it stated: “The nationalization of all fissionable material is hereby proclaimed, and all Americans are notified that they must turn in any private stores of uranium, thorium, or plutonium, either elemental or combined, to the nearest representative of the U.S.S.R. or C.P.R. at once.”

Justin decided the first announcement must have been a test shot to find out how well the distribution would work. Its message certainly was pointless.

Betsy Cardew pulled up in the battered car. Lew and Amy Braden were in the back. She said: “No mail today, Billy. Do you want a ride in? Mr. and Mrs. Braden here were first, but there’s room.”

“Thanks,” he said, and got in. He couldn’t think of one word to say to his former friends, but they had no such trouble.

“I’ve been called to Chiunga Center,” Lew said importantly. Chiunga Center was
the
town thereabouts: twenty thousand people in a bend of the Susquehanna, served by the Lehigh and the Lackawanna. “Advance units have reached the town.”

“Yesterday,” Betsy said. “A regiment, I guess, in trucks. Very G.I., very Russian, very much on their good behavior. They’re barracked in the junior high. They set up a mess tent on the campus and strung barbed wire. Nine-o’clock curfew in town and patrols with tommy guns. So far everything’s quiet. A couple of kids threw rocks.” She laughed abruptly. “I saw it. I thought the sergeant was going to cut them in half with his tommy gun but he didn’t. He took down their pants and
spanked
them.”

“Smart cooky,” Lew said gravely from the back of the car. “He played it exactly right.”

“So,” said Betsy, “there I am in the post-office sorting room busy sorting and in march six of them, polite as you please, and say through the window, ‘Ve vish to see the postmahster,’ and old Flanahan comes tottering out ready to die like a man. So they hand him six letters. ‘Pliss to expedite delivery of these, Mr. Postmahster,’ they say, and
salute
him and go away. And one of the letters is for Mr. and Mrs. Braden here and they won’t tell me what it’s all about, but they don’t look like a couple going to their doom and I’m too well-trained a postal employee to pry.”