Not This August (5 page)

He was planting onion sets and radish seed in his vegetable garden when Rawson came down the road—the legless veteran whom he had met on the day of defeat. Rawson turned up at the estate sale and he found out that he had indeed got work at the Shiptons’ farm, but for how long was anybody’s guess, with the Shiptons’ three boys and two girls due for demobilization.

Rawson seemed to be in a hell of a hurry to get to him. Justin straightened up and met him at the road. “What’s up?”

“Plenty, Billy. Couple of Red Army boys over at the Shiptons’. One’s a farm expert, the other’s an interpreter. They’re going over the place with a fine-tooth comb. Boils down to this: the Shiptons have to turn out 25 per cent more milk, 10 per cent more grain, and God knows what else. The old lady told me to pass the word around. Fake your books, hide one of your cows—whatever you can think of. Push me off, will you? I’ve got some more ground to cover.”

“Thanks,” Justin said thoughtfully, and pushed. The little cart went spinning down the road, Rawson pumping away. He called it “my muscle-mobile.”

Justin mechanically went back to his onion sets and radish seed, but the savor had gone out of the spring morning. He couldn’t think of one right, definite thing to do. He didn’t come from twenty generations of farmers consummately skilled at looking poor when they were rich. He didn’t know the thousand dodges farmers everywhere always used, almost instinctively, to cheat the tax man of his due for the tsar, the commissar, the emperor, the shereef, the zamindar, La République, the American Way of Life. Billy Justin, like a fool, kept books—and only one set of them. He was a sitting duck.

The jeep with the red star arrived in midafternoon while he was mending fence in the pasture with a sledge, block and tackle, nippers and pliers. In spite of his heavy gloves he had got a few rips from the rusted, snarled old wire. He was feeling savage. He heard them honk for him, deliberately finished driving a cedar post, and then slowly strolled toward the road.

Two privates were in the front seat, chauffeur and armed guard, two officers in the back, a captain and a lieutenant. Both young, both sweating in too-heavy wool dress uniforms with choker collars, both festooned with incomprehensible ribbons and decorations.

The lieutenant said, looking up from a typewritten list, “You’re Mr. William H. Justin, aren’t you?”

Justin gulped. To hear the flat, midwest American speech coming from this fellow in this uniform was a jolt. It made the whole thing seem like a fancy-dress party. “Yes,” he said. And then, inevitably, “You speak English very well.”

“Thanks, Mr. Justin. I worked hard at it. I’m Lieutenant Zoloty of the 449th Military Government Unit. Translator. And this is Captain Kirilov of the same command. He’s the head of our agronomy group.”

Kirilov, bored, jerked a nod at Justin.

“We’d like to look over your layout as part of a survey we’re running. I see you’re listed as primarily a dairy farmer, so let’s start with your cow barn and milkhouse.”

“Right this way,” Justin said flatly.

Captain Kirilov knew his stuff. He scowled at the unwashed milker, felt the bags of the eight Holsteins, kicked disapprovingly at a rotten board. Through it all he directed a stream of Russian at Zoloty, who nodded and took notes. Once the captain got angry. He was burrowing through the corncrib and found rat droppings. He shook them under Justin’s nose and yelled at him. After he disgustedly cast them aside and wiped his hands on a corn shuck, the lieutenant said in a undertone: “He was explaining that rodents are intolerable on a well-run farm, that grain should be raised for the people and not for parasites.”

“Uh-huh,” Justin said.

When the captain came across the six piglets, he was delighted. Zoloty said: “The captain is pleased that there are six. He says, ‘At last I see the famous American principle of mass production. Our peasants at home wastefully indulge in roast-pig feasts instead of letting all the young grow to maturity.’ ”

Finally the captain snapped something definite and final, left the barn, and headed for the jeep.

Zoloty said: “Captain Kirilov establishes your norm at twenty hundredweight of milk per week. Do you understand what that means?”

“I know what twenty hundredweight of milk is. I don’t know what a norm is.”

“It is your quota. If you fall below twenty hundredweight per week consistently, or if your production fails to average out to that, you will be subject to review.”

Zoloty started to turn away.

“Lieutenant, what does ‘review’ mean?”

“Your farming techniques will be studied. If you need a short course to improve your efficiency, you’ll be given an opportunity to take it. We’re organizing them up at Cornell. Or it may turn out that you’re just temperamentally unsuited to farming. In that case we may have to look for a slot where you’ll function more efficiently.”

“Road gang?” Justin asked quietly.

Zoloty was embarrassed. “Please don’t be truculent, Mr. Justin. Why should we put an intelligent person like you on a road gang? Now please come along to the jeep. Military Intelligence drafted us for another survey they’re running. It’ll only take a moment.”

Justin managed to conceal his relief. He could manage twenty hundredweight a week very easily. Just a little more care to the herd’s diet, get that rock-salt brick he’d been letting slide, promise the Shiptons a hog in the fall for some of their hoarded cottonseed cake. It would be a breeze, and Rawson had been unduly alarmed. But farmers had this habit of screaming bloody murder at the least little thing. He hated to admit it, but the red-star boys were being more than fair about it. He had drifted into sloppy farming.

At the jeep again Zoloty got out some papers and said: “Now, Mr. Justin, this is official. First, do you have any uranium, thorium, or other fissionable material in your possession?”

Astounded, Justin said: “Of course not!”

“A simple ‘No’ is sufficient. Sign here, please.” He held out one of the papers, his finger indicating the space. Justin read; it was simply a repeat of the statement that he did not have any fissionable materials in his possession. He signed with the lieutenant’s pen.

“Thank you. Do you know of any fissionable material that is held by any private parties? Sign here. Thank you. Would you recognize fissionable material if you saw it?”

“I don’t think so, Lieutenant.”

“Very well then. Please pay attention. Refined uranium, thorium, and plutonium look like lead, but are heavier. A spherical piece of uranium weighing fifty pounds, for instance, would be no larger than a soft ball. Please sign here—it is a simple statement that I have described the appearance of fissionable materials to you. Thank you. Now, would you recognize the components of an atomic bomb if you saw them?”

“No!”

“Very well then. Please pay attention. An atomic bomb is simply a fifty-pound mass of plutonium or uranium-235. Before exploding it consists of two or more pieces. These pieces are slammed together fast and the bomb then explodes. The slamming can be done by placing two pieces at opposite ends of a gun barrel and then blowing them together so they meet in the middle. Or it can be done by placing several chunks of plutonium on the inside of a sphere and then exploding what are called ‘shaped charges’ so the chunks are driven together into one mass and the atomic bomb proper explodes. Do you understand? Then sign here.

“Now, our Military Intelligence people would like you to swear or affirm that you will immediately report any evidence of fissionable material or atomic-bomb parts in private hands which you may encounter. Do you so swear?”

“I do,” Justin said automatically. Zoloty had for a moment grinned wryly—and there had been a sardonic inflection on “Military
Intelligence
.” Hell, no doubt about it—all armies were pretty much alike. Here these two serious people were going about the serious business of stabilizing the country’s food supply and some brass hat got a bright idea; saddle them with another job, even if it’s a crackpot search for A-bombs in Chiunga County.

He signed. Zoloty handed over a poster, a hastily printed job with hastily drawn line cuts. “Please put this up somewhere in your house, Mr. Justin, and that will be that. Good afternoon.”

He spoke to the captain in Russian, the captain spoke to the chauffeur, and away they drove.

Justin studied the poster; it conveyed the same information Zoloty had given him. Atomic bombs! He snorted and went back to his fence mending.

Yes, it seemed the Reds were determined to be firm but fair. Betsy told him there had been a near rape in Chiunga Center one night last week. By the next morning the attacker had been tried, found guilty, and shot against the handball court of the junior high school—a beetle-browed corporal from some eastern province of the U.S.S.R. It hadn’t healed the girl, but at least it showed that the Reds were being mighty touchy about their honor.

He chuckled suddenly. Without recording the fact he had noticed that all four of the soldiers in the jeep had wrist watches, good, big chronometer jobs, identical government issue. So the Russians were still sore about their reputation as snatchers of watches, and had taken the one measure that would keep their troops from living up to it:
giving
them all the watches they could use.

Betsy said she and most of the people in the Center were pleasantly surprised. She, in fact, wished that her father hadn’t run away. Nobody had even been around asking about him, National Committeeman though he was, yet he was hiding out now in some Canadian muskeg living on canned soup and possibly moose meat—though Betsy doubted that old T. C. was capable of bringing down a moose. She hoped he would drift back when the word got to him that the red-star boys’ ferocity had been greatly exaggerated.

She saw Colonel Platov every now and then from a distance; he was the big brass of SMGU 449. He looked like a middleaged career soldier, no more and no less. He seemed to be a bug on spit and polish. People observed him bawling out sentries over buttons and shoelaces and suchlike. There were always plenty of K.P.s in the mess tent on the high school campus.

What else was new? Well, there was a twenty-four-hour guard on each of the town’s two liquor shops to keep soldiers from looting or trying to purchase. There seemed to be movies every evening in the school auditorium. There was a ferocious physical-fitness program going on; SMGU 449 started the day with fifty knee bends, fifty straddle hops, and fifty pushups, from Platov on down, rain or shine, on the athletic field. They also played soccer when off duty and they sang interminably. Wherever there were more than two Russians gathered with nothing to do, out came a concertina or a uke-sized balalaika and they were off.

A big, fat cook shopped in town for the officers’ mess, which must be located in the school cafeteria. The enlisted men lived on tea, breakfast slop called
kasha
, black bread, jam, and various powerful soups involving beef, cabbage, potatoes, and beets. The ingredients came in red-star trucks from the South.

Rumors? Well, she had a few and she was passing them on just for entertainment. The Russians would shortly be joined by their wives. They would close all the churches in Chiunga Center. They would not close any of the churches but instead would forcibly baptize everybody as Greek Orthodox. Demobilization of the United States Army would be completed by next week. Demobilization of the United States Army would be begun next month. The United States Army was being shipped in cattle boats to Siberia. The United States Army had disintegrated and the boys and girls were finding their way home on foot. The United States Army Atomic Service had made off with two tons of plutonium from Los Alamos before the surrender—

As that one ran through his mind, Justin suddenly straightened up from the tangled wire.

Two tons of plutonium was enough for eighty atomic bombs. It seems that in any machine shop you could put the bombs together if you had the plutonium.

Two tons of plutonium adrift somewhere in the United States, scattered but in the hands of men who knew what they were doing, might explain quite a few things that had recently puzzled him.

And the thought gave him a stab of painful hope. It let him feel at last the full anguish of the defeat, the reality of it. He burned with shame suddenly for his lick-spittle acceptance of firm-but-fair Lieutenant Zoloty and his gratitude, his disgusting gratitude that they had raised his norm no higher, his pleasure at Captain Kirilov’s bored compliment about the pigs.

Suddenly the defeat was real and agonizing. Two tons of plutonium had made it so.

“Good drying weather,” the radio had been saying for days. Justin, breaking clods and weeding in his cornfield, reflected that once you would have called it the beginning of a serious drought. The passage of two months, however, had made pessimism unfashionable—almost dangerous. Not that he was afraid. Nobody had anything on Billy Justin; he met his quota and he had been left alone…

Until now. A jeep was tooting impatiently for him in front of his house. More foolishness, he supposed, with Kirilov and his interpreter. At least it would be a break in the weeding.

There was only one Russian there, however; some kind of sergeant. He said: “Fermer Yoostin?”

“I guess so,” Justin said.

The sergeant handed him a sheet of ugly two-column printing on flimsy paper; Russian on the left, English on the right.
Readjustment of Agricultural Norm—W. Justin
. Good! Now, how much were they going to cut from—He hauled up short at the words filled in, “increase 1 cwt per 2 wks.”

He said angrily to the sergeant: “In this weather? Kirilov’s—mistaken. It can’t be done. I’m hauling water for the cows now. And we haven’t got DDT. Flies cut down the production. I haven’t got a seed-cake quota; my herd’s too small. There must be some mistake. Can you take back word to the captain?”

The sergeant, bored, said: “
Ya nye ponimayoo vas
.” He held out a clipboard, a ruled form, and a pen. “
Podtverdeet poloocheneyeh
.”

Justin said uncertainly: “Speak English? Tell Captain Kirilov?”