The Day After Judgement (11 page)

McKnight did not bother to occupy the booth until the nuclear bombardment was over, knowing well enough that the immense amount
of ionization it would produce would make non-cable television reception impossible for quite some time. (The fallout was
going to be hell, too-but almost all of it would miss Denver, the East Coast was dead, and the fish and the Europeans would
have to look out for themselves.) When he finally took over, the conventional bombardment was just beginning. With him were
Baines, Buelg, Chief Hay and Šatvje; Jack Ginsberg had expressed no particular interest in watching, and since Baines did
not need him here, he had been excused to go below, presumably to resume his lubricous pursuit of Chief Hay’s comely runner.

Vision on the great master screen was just beginning to clear as they took their seats, although there was still considerable
static. Weather Control reported that it was a clear, brightly moonlit night over all of the Southwest, but in point of fact
the top of the great multiple nuclear mushroom, shot through with
constant lightning, now completely covered the southern third of California and all of the two states immediately to the east
of it. The units and crews crouching in their bivouacs and emplacements along the sides of the mountains facing away from
the valley clung grimly to the rocks against hurricane updrafts in temperatures that began at a hundred and fifty degrees
and went on up from there. No unit which had been staked out on any of the inside faces of any of the ranges reported anything,
then or ever; even the first missiles and shells to come screaming in towards Dis exploded incontinently in mid-air the moment
they rose above the sheltering shadows of the mountain peaks. No thermo-couple existed which would express in degrees the
temperature at the heart of the target itself; spectographs taken from the air showed it to be cooling from a level of about
two and a half million electron volts, a figure as utterly impossible to relate to human experiences as are the distances
in miles between the stars.

Nevertheless, the valley cooled with astonishing rapidity, and once visibility was restored, it was easy to see why. More
than two hundred square miles of it had been baked and annealed into a shallow, even dish, still glowing whitely but shot
through with the gorgeous colours of impurities, like a borax bead in the flame of a blowpipe; and this was acting like the
reflector of a searchlight, throwing the heat outward through the atmosphere into space in an almost solidly visible column.
At its centre, as at the Cassegranian focus of a telescope mirror, was a circular black hole.

McKnight leaned forward, grasping the arms of his chair in a death grip, and shouted for a close-up. Had the job been done
already? Perhaps Buelg had been right about there being a possible limit to the number of transformations the enemy could
go through before final dissolution. After all, Badwater had just received a nuclear saturation which had previously been
contemplatedd only in terms of the overkill of whole countries–

But as the glass darkened, the citadel brightened, until at last it showed once more as a red-hot ring. Nothing could be seen
inside it but a roiling mass of explosions – the conventional bombardment was now getting home, and with great
accuracy – from which a mushroom stem continued to rise in the very centre of the millennial updraft; but the walls – the
walls, the walls, the walls were still there.

‘Give it up, General.’ Buelg said, his voice gravelly. ‘No matter what the spectroscope shows, if those walk were really iron
–’ He paused and swallowed heavily. ‘They must be only symbologically iron, perhaps in some alchemical sense. Otherwise the
atoms would not only have been scattered to the four winds, but would have had all the electron shells stripped off them.
You can do nothing more but lose more lives.’

‘The bombardment is till going on.’ McKnight pointed out stiffly, ‘and we’ve had no report yet of what it’s done to the enemy’s
organization and manpower. For all we know, there’s nobody left down that hole at all – and the laser squadrons haven’t even
arrived yet, let alone the Hess torpedoes.’

‘Neither of which are going to work a damn,’ Baines said brutally. ‘I know what the Hess torpedo will do. Have you forgotten
that they were invented by my own chief scientist? Who just incidentally was taken by P
UT
S
ATANACHI
I this Easter, so that the demons now know all about the gadget, if they didn’t before. And after what’s been dropped on that
town already, expecting anything of it is like Eying to kill a dinosaur by kissing it.’

‘It is in the American tradition,’ McKnight said, ‘to do things the hard way if there is no other way. Phase Four is a last-ditch
measure, and it is good generalship – which I do not expect you to understand – to remain flexible until the last moment.
As Clausewitz remarks, most battles are lost by generals who failed to have the courage of their own convictions in the clutch.’

Baines, who had read extensively in both military and political theoreticians in five languages, and had sampled them in several
more, as a necessary adjunct to his business, knew very well that Clausewitz had never said any such damn fool thing, and
that McKnight was only covering with an invented quotation a hope which was last-ditch indeed. But even had elementary Machiavellianism
given him any reason to suppose that charging McKnight with this would change the General mind in the slightest, he could
see from the master screen that it was
already too late. While they had been talking, the armoured divisions had been charging down into the valley, their diesel-electric
engines snarling and snorting, the cleats of their treads cracking the slippery glass and leaving sluggishly glowing, still
quasi-molten trails behind. Watching them in the small screens, Baines began to think that he must be wrong. He knew these
monsters well – they were part of his stock in trade – and to believe that they were resistible went against the selling habits
of an entire adult lifetime.

Yet some of them were bogging down already; as they descended deeper into the valley, with the small rockets whistling over
their hunched heads, the hot glass under their treads worked into the joints like glue, and then, carried by the groaning
engines up over the top trunnions, cooled and fell into the bearings in a shower of many-sized abrasive granules. The monsters
slewed and sidled, losing traction and with it, steerage; and then the lead half-track with the laser cannon jammed immovably
and began to sink like the
Titanic
into the glass, the screams of its boiling crew tearing the cool air of the command booth like a ripsaw until McKnight impatiently
cut the sound off.

The other beasts lumbered on regardless – they had no orders to do otherwise – and a view from the air showed that three or
four units of the laser squadron were now within striking distance of the gates of Dis. Like driver ants, black streams of
infantry were crawling down the inner sides of the mountains behind the last wave of the armoured divisions. They too had
had no orders to turn back. Even in their immensely clumsy asbestos firemen’s suits and helmets, they were already fainting
and falling over each other in the foothills, their carefully oiled automatic weapons falling into the sand, the tanks of
their flame throwers slitting and dumping jellied gasoline on the hot rocks, the very air of the valley sucking all of the
moisture out of their lungs through the tiniest cracks in their uniforms.

Baines was not easily horrified – that would have been bad for business – but also he had never before seen any actual combat
but the snippets of the Vietnam war, which had been shown on American television. This senseless advance of
expensively trained and equipped men to certain and complete slaughter – men who as usual not only had no idea of what they were
dying for, but had been actively misled about it – made about as much military sense as the Siege of Sevastopol or the Battle
of the Mame. Certainly it was spectacular, but intellectually it was not even very interesting.

Four of the laser buggies – all that had survived – were now halted before the gates, two to each side to allow a heavy howitzer
to fire between them. From them lanced out four pencil-thin beams of intensely pure red light, all of which met at the same
spot on the almost invisible seam between the glowing doors. Had that barrier been real iron, they would have holed through
it in a matter of seconds in a tremendous shower of sparks, but in actuality they were not even raising its temperature, as
far as Baines could see. The beams winked out; then struck again.

Above the buggies, on the barbican, there seemed to be scores of black, indistinct, misshapen figures. They were very active,
but their action did not seem to be directed against the buggies; Baines had the mad impression, which he was afraid was all
too accurate, that they were dancing.

Again the beams lashed out. Beside him, McKnight muttered:

‘If they don’t hurry it up–’

Even before he was able to finish the sentence, the ground in front of the gates erupted. The first of the Hess torpedoes
had arrived. One of the half-tracks simply vanished, while the one next to it went slowly skyward, and as slowly fell back.
in a fountain of armour plate, small parts, and human limbs and torsos. Another, on the very edge of the crater, toppled equally
slowly into it. The fourth sat for a long minute as if stunned by the concussion, and then began to back slowly away.

Another torpedo went off directly under the gates, and then another. The gates remained obdurately unharmed, but after a fourth
such blast, light could be seen under them – the crater was growing.

‘Halt all armoured vehicles!’ McKnight shouted into his intercom, pounding the arm of his chair in excitement. ‘Infantry advance
on the double! We’re going under!’

Another Hess torpedo went off in the same gap. Baines was fascinated now, and even feeling a faint glow of pride. Really.
the things worked very well indeed; too bad He£ couldn’t be here to see it… but maybe he was seeing it, from inside. That
hole was already big enough to accommodate a small car, and while he watched another torpedo blew it still wider and deeper.

‘Paratroops! Advance drop by ten minutes!’

But why was Hess’s invention working when the nuclear devices hadn’t? Maybe Dis had only sunk lower as a whole, as the desert
around and beneath it had been vaporized, but the demons could not defend the purely mundane geology of the valley itself?
Another explosion. How many of those torpedoes had the Corps of Engineers had available? Consolidated Warfare Service had
supplied only ten prototypes with the plans at the time of the sale, and there hadn’t been time to put more into production.
McKnight’s suddenly advanced timetable seemed nevertheless to be allowing for the arrival of all ten.

This proved to be the case, except that the ninth got caught in a fault before it had completed
its
burrowing and blew up in the middle of one of the advancing columns of troops. Hess had always frankly admitted that the
machine would be subject to this kind of failure, and that the flaw was inherent in the principle rather than the design.
But it probably wouldn’t be missed; the gap under the gates of Dis now looked quite as big as the New Jersey entrance to the
original two Lincoln Tunnels. And the infantry was arriving at speed.

And at that moment, the vast unscarred gates slowly began to swing inward. McKnight gaped in astonishment and Baines could
feel his own jaw dropping. Was the citadel going to surrender before it had even been properly stormed? Or worse, had it been
ready all along to open to the first polite knock, so that all this colossal and bloody effort had been unnecessary?

But that, at least, they were spared. As the first patrols charged, tumbled, scrambled and clambered into the crater, there
appeared in the now fully opened gateway, silhouetted against the murky flames behind, the same three huge naked snaky-haired
women that McKnight and his crew had seen in
the very first aerial photographs. They were all three carrying among them what appeared to be the head of an immense decapitated
statue of something much like one of themselves. The asbestos-clad soldiers climbing up the far wall of the crater could not
turn any greyer than they were, but they froze instantaneously like the overwhelmed inhabitants of Pompeii, and fell, and
as they fell, they broke. Within minutes, the pit was being refilled from the bottom with shattered sculpture.

Overhead, the plane carrying the first contingent of paratroops was suddenly blurred by hundreds of tiny black dots Seconds
later, the fuselage alone was plunging towards the desert; the legions of B
EELZEBUB
, the Lord of the Flies, had torn the wings off men. Lower, in the middle of the air, rocket-borne Assault Infantry soldiers
were being plucked first of their harness, then of their clothing, and then of their hair, their fingernails and toenails
by jeering creatures with beasts’ heads, most of whom were flying without even wings. The bodies when there was anything left
of them at all, were being dropped unerringly into the heart of the Pit.

In summary, the Siege of Dis could more reasonably be described as a rout, except for one curious discrepancy: When Phase
Four began – without anyone’s ordering it, and otherwise not according to plan – the demons failed to follow up their advantage.
None of them, in fact, had ever left the city; even when they had taken to the air, they had never crossed its perimeter,
as though the moat represented some absolute boundary which ascended even into the sky.

But the slaughter had been bad enough already. The chances that the Army of the United States could ever reform again looked
very small indeed.

And at the end, there formed upon the master screen in the Denver cavern, superimposed upon the image of the burning triumphant
city, an immense Face. Baines knew it well; he had been expecting to see it again ever since the end of that Black Easter
back in Positano.