Philip Wylie - The Answer: A Fable for Our Times

PHILIP WYLIE

RINEHART & COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK TORONTO

BOOKS BY PHILIP WYLIE

HEAVY LADEN

BABES AND SUCKLINGS

GLADIATOR

THE MURDERER INVISIBLE

FOOTPRINT OF CINDERELLA

THE SAVAGE GENTLEMAN FINNLEY WREN: HIS NOTIONS AND OPINIONS

AS THEY REVELED

TOO MUCH OF EVERYTHING AN APRIL AFTERNOON

THE BIG ONES GET AWAY

SALT WATER DAFFY

THE OTHER HORSEMAN

GENERATION OF VIPERS

CORPSES AT INDIAN STONES FISH AND TIN FISH NIGHT UNTO NIGHT

AN ESSAY ON MORALS

CRUNCH AND DES: STORIES OF FLORIDA FISHING

OPUS 21

THE DISAPPEARANCE

THREE TO BE READ

DENIZENS OF THE DEEP

TOMORROWI

TREASURE CRUISE AND OTHER CRUNCH AND DES STORIES

THE ANSWER

and THE ARMY WAY by Philip Wylie and William W. Muir Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd., Toronto Copyright 1955 by The Curtis Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 567006

For

MARY TAY and SAM PRYOR

FIFTEEN minutes!... The loudspeakers blared on the Bight deck, boomed below, and murmured on the bridge where the brass was assembling. The length of the carrier was great. Consonants from distant horns came belatedly to every ear, and metal fabric set up echoes besides. So the phrase stuttered through the ship and over the sea.

Fifteen minutes to the bomb test.

Major General Marcus Scott walked to the cable railing around the deck and looked at the very blue morning. The ships engines had stopped and she lay still, aimed west toward the target island like an arrow in a drawn bow.

Men passing saluted. The general returned the salutes, bringing a weathered hand to a lofty forehead, to straight, coal-black hair above gray eyes and the hawk nose of an Indian.

His thoughts veered to the weather. The far surface of the Pacific was lavender; the nearby water, seen deeper, a lucent violet. White clouds passed graduallyclouds much of a size and shapewith cobalt avenues between. The general, to whom the sky was more familiar than the sea, marveled at that mechanized appearance. It was as if some cosmic weather engineeast, and below the Equatorpuffed clouds from Brobdingnagian stacks and sent them rolling over the earth, as regular and even-spaced as the white snorts of a climbing locomotive.

He put away the image. Such fantasy belonged in another era, when he had been a young man at West Point, a brilliant young man, more literary than military, a young man fascinated by the soldier poets of the first World War. The second, which he had helped to command in the air, produced no romanticists. Here a third war was in the making, perhaps, a third that might put an end to poetry forever.

Ten minutes! All personnel complete checks, take assigned stations for test!

General Scott went across the iron deck on scissoring legs that seemed to hurry the tall man without themselves hurrying. Sailors had finished stringing the temporary cables which, should a freak buffet from the H-bomb reach the area, would prevent them from being tossed overboard. They were gathering, now, to watch. Marc Scott entered the carriers island and hastened to the bridge on turning steps of metal, not using the shined brass rail.

Admiral Stanforth was thereanvil shoulders, marble hair, feldspar complexion.

Pouring coffee for Senator Blaine with a good-host chuckle and that tiger look in the corners of his eyes. Morning, Marc! Get any sleep at all? He gave the general no time to answer. This is General Scott, gentlemen. In charge of todays drop. Commands base on Sangre Islands. Senator Blaine

The senator had the trappings of office: the embonpoint and shrewd eyes, the pince-nez on a ribbon, the hat with the wide brim that meant a Western or Southern senator. He had the William Jennings Bryan voice. But these were for his constituents.

The man who used the voice said genuinely, General, Im honored. Your record in the Eighth Air Force is one were almost too proud of to mention in front of you.

Thank you, Sir.

You know Doctor Trumbul?

Trumbul was thin and thirty, an all-brown scholar whose brown eyes were so vivid the rest seemed but a background for his eyes. His hand clasped Scotts. All too well! I flew with Marc Scott when we dropped Thermonuclear Number Elevenon a parachute!

There was some laughter; they knew about that near-disastrous test. Hows everybody at Los Alamos? the general asked.

The physicist shrugged. Same. Theyll feel better later todayif this one comes up to expectations.

The admiral was introducing again. Doctor Antheim, general. Antheims from MIT. Hes also the best amateur magician I ever saw perform. Too bad you came aboard so late last night.

Antheim was as quietly composed as a family physiciana big man in a gray suit.

Five minutes! the loud-speaker proclaimed.

You could see the lonely open ocean, the sky, the cumulus clouds. But the target islandfive miles long and jungle-paintedlay over the horizon. An island created by volcanic cataclysm millions of years ago and destined this day to vanish in a man-patented calamity. Somewhere a hundred thousand feet above, Scotts own ship, a B-111, was moving at more than seven hundred miles an hour, closing on an imaginary point from which, along an imaginary line, a big bomb would curve earthward, never to hit, but utterly to devastate. You could not see his B-111 and you would probably not even see the high, far-off tornadoes of smoke when, the bomb away, she let go with her rockets to hurtle off even faster from the expanding sphere of blast.

Personally, Antheim, the MIT scientist, was saying to General Larsen, its my feeling that whether or not your cocker is a fawning type depends on your attitude as a dog owner. I agree, all cockers have Saint Bernard appetites. Nevertheless, Im sold on spaniels. In all the field trials last autumn

Talking about dogs. Well, why not? Random talk was the best antidote for tension, for the electrically counted minutes that stretched unbearably because of their measurement. Scott had a doghis kids had one, rather: Pompey, the mutt, whose field trials took place in the yards and playgrounds of Baltimore, Maryland, in the vicinity of Millbrook Road. He wondered what would be happening at homewhere Ellen would be athe calculated time belts, the hour-wide, orange-peel-shaped sections into which man had carved his planet. Be evening on Millbrook Road

John Farrier arrivedFarrier, of the great Farrier Corporation. His pale blue eyes looked out over the ships flat deck toward the west, the target. But he was saying to somebody, in his crisp yet not uncourteous voice, I consider myself something of a connoisseur in the matter of honey. We have our own apiary at Hobe Sound. Did you ever taste antidesma honey? Or the honey gathered from palmetto flowers?

Two minutes!

The count-down was the hardest part of a weapons test. What went before was worksheer work, detailed, exhausting. But what came after had excitements, real and potential, like hazardous exploring, the general thought; you never knew precisely what would ensue. Not precisely.

Tension, Scott repeated to himself. And he thought, Why do I feel sad? Is itprescience of failure? Will we finally manage to produce a dud?

Fatigue, he answered himself. Setting up this one had been a colossal chore. They called it BugabooOperation Bugaboo in Test Series Avalanche. Suddenly he wished Bugaboo wouldnt go off.

One minute! All goggles in place! Exposed personnel without goggles, sit down, turn backs toward west, cover eyes with hands!

Before he blacked out the world, he took a last look at the sky, the seaand the sailors, wheeling, sitting, covering their eyes. Then he put on the goggles. The obsidian lenses brought absolute dark. From habit, he cut his eyes back and forth to make certain there was no leak of lightlight that could damage the retina.