"Heinlein, Robert A - Solution Unsatisfactory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

not a hard city to locate, since it has the largest squan mile area of aiiy modern city and is located on a broa flat alluvial plain. I could make out the River Spree a we approached it, and the Havel. The city was blacke out, but a city makes a different sort of black froi open country. Parachute flares hung over the city i many places, showing that the R. A. F. had been bus before we got there and the A. A. batteries on tli ground helped to pick out the city.
There was fighting below us, but not within fiftee thousand feet of our altitude as nearly as I could judg~ The pilot reported to the captain, “On line of bea:
ing!” The chap working the absolute altimeter stea ily fed his data into the fuse pots of the canister. Tli canisters were equipped with a light charge of blac powder, sufficient to explode them and scatter tF dust at a time after release predetermined by the fu5 pot setting. The method used was no more than an e ficient expedient. The dust would have been almost a effective had it simply been dumped out in paper bag although not as well distributed.
The Captain hung over the navigator’s board, slight frown on his thin sallow face. “Ready one!” r ported the bomber.
“Release!”
“Ready two!”
The Captain studied his wristwatch. “Release!” “Ready three!”
“Release!”
When the last of our ten little packages was out of the ship we turned tail and ran for home.

No arrangements had been made for me to get home; nobody had thought about it. But it was the one thing I wanted to do. I did not feel badly; I did not feel much of anything. I felt like a man who has at last screwed up his courage and undergone a serious operation; it’s over now, he is still numb from shock but his mind is relaxed. But I wanted to go home.
The British Commandant was quite decent about it; he serviced and manned my ship at once and gave me an escort for the offshore war zone. It was an expensive way to send one man home, but who cared? We had just expended some millions of lives in a desperate attempt to end the war; what was a money expense? He gave the necessary orders absentmindedly.
I took a double dose of nembutal and woke up in Canada. I tried to get some news while the plane was being serviced, but there was not much to be had. The government of the Reich had issued one official news bulletin shortly after the raid, sneering at the much vaunted “secret weapon” of the British and stating that a major air attack had been made on Berlin and several other cities, but that the raiders had been driven off with only minor damage. The current Lord Haw-Haw started one of his sarcastic speeches but was unable to continue it. The announcer said that he had been seized with a heart attack, and substituted some recordings of patriotic music. The station cut off in the middle of the “Horst Wessel” song. After that there was silence.
I managed to promote an Army car and a driver at the Baltimore field which made short work of the Annapolis speedway. We almost overran the turnoff to the laboratory.
Manning was in his office. He looked up as I came in, said, “Hello, John,” in a dispirited voice, and dropped
his eyes again to the blotter pad. He went back drawing doodles.
I looked him over and realized for the first time th the chief was an old man. His face was gray and flabF deep furrows framed his mouth in a triangle. F clothes did not fit.
I went up to him and put a hand on his should~ “Don’t take it so hard, chief. It’s not your fault. \ gave them all the warning in the world.”
He looked up again. “Estelle Karst suicided ti morning.
Anybody could have anticipated it, but nobody d And somehow I felt harder hit by her death than by t death of all those strangers in Berlin. “How did she it?” I asked.
“Dust. She went into the canning room, and took her armor.”
I could picture her—head held high, eyes snappir and that set look on her mouth which she got wh people did something she disapproved of. One lit old woman whose lifetime work had been turn against her.
“I wish,” Manning added slowly, “that I could plain to her why we had to do it.”
We buried her in a lead-lined coffin, then Manni and I went on to Washington.

While we were there, we saw the motion pictui that had been made of the death of Berlin. You ha not seen them; they never were made public, but th were of great use in convincing the other nations oft world that peace was a good idea. I saw them wh Congress did, being allowed in because I was Ma ning’s assistant.
They had been made by a pair of R. A. F. pilots, w had dodged the Luftwaffe to get them. The first sh showed some of the main streets the morning after t raid. There was not much to see that would show up telephoto shots, just busy and crowded streets, bul
you looked closely you could see that there had been an excessive number of automobile accidents.
The second day showed the attempt to evacuate. The inner squares of the city were practically deserted save for bodies and wrecked cars, but the streets leading out of town were boiling with people, mostly on foot, for the trams were out of service. The pitiful creatures were fleeing, not knowing that death was already lodged inside them. The plane swooped down at one point and the cinematographer had his telephoto lens pointed directly into the face of a young woman for several seconds. She stared back at it with a look too woebegone to forget, then stumbled and fell.
She may have been trampled. I hope so. One of those six horses had looked like that when the stuff was beginning to hit his vitals.
The last sequence showed Berlin and the roads around it a week after the raid. The city was dead; there was not a man, a woman, a child—nor cats, nor dogs, not even a pigeon. Bodies were all around, but they were safe from rats. There were norats.
The roads around Berlin were quiet now. Scattered carelessly on shoulders and in ditches, and to a lesser extent on the pavement itself, like coal shaken off a train, were the quiet heaps that had been the citizens of the capital of the Reich. There is no use in talking about it.
But, so far as I am concerned, I left what soul I had in that projection room and I have not had one since. The two pilots who made the pictures eventually died—systemic, cumulative infection, dust in the air over Berlin. With precautions it need not have happened, but the English did not believe, as yet, that our extreme precautions were necessary.

The Reich took about a week to fold up. It might have taken longer if the new Fuehrer had not gone to Berlin the day after the raid to “prove” that the British boasts had been hollow. There is no need to recount
the provisional governments that Germany had in t] following several months; the only one we are co cerned with is the so-called restored monarchy whh used a cousin of the old Kaiser as a symbol, the 01 that sued for peace.
Then the trouble started.
When the Prime Minister announced the terms the private agreement he had had with our Presider he was met with a silence that was broken only I cries of “Shame! Shame! Resign!” I suppose it was i evitable; the Commons reflected the spirit of a peop who had been unmercifully punished for four yeai They were in a mood to enforce a peace that wou have made the Versailles Treaty look like the Bea tudes.
The vote of no confidence left the Prime Minister i choice. Forty-eight hours later the King made a spee~ from the throne that violated all constitutional prec dent, for it had not been written by a Prime Minist In this greatest crisis in his reign, his voice was cle and unlabored; it sold the idea to England and a n tional coalition government was formed.
I don’t know whether we would have dusted Lond to enforce our terms or not; Manning thinks we wou have done so. I suppose it depended on the charact of the President of the United States, and there is i way of knowing about that since we did not have to
it.
The United States, and in particular the President the United States, was confronted by two inescapaL problems. First, we had to consolidate our position once, use our temporary advantage of an overwheli ingly powerful weapon to insure that such a weap~ would not be turned on us. Second, some means
to be worked out to stabilize American foreign poli so that it could handle the tremendous power we suddenly had thrust upon us.
The second was by far the most difficult and serioi. If we were to establish a reasonably permane
peace—say a century or so—through a monopoly on a weapon so powerful that no one dare fight us, it was imperative that the policy under which we acted be more lasting than passing political administrations. But more of that later-The first problem had to be attended to at once— time was the heart of it. The emergency lay in the very simplicity of the weapon. It required nothing but aircraft to scatter it and the dust itself, which was easily and quickly made by anyone possessing the secret of the Karst-Obre process and having access to a small supply of uranium-bearing ore.
But the Karst-Obre process was simple and might be independently developed at any time. Manning reported to the President that it was Ridpath’s opinion, concurred in by Manning, that the staff of any modern radiation laboratory should be able to work out an equivalent technique in six weeks, working from the hint given by the events in Berlin alone, and should then be able to produce enough dust to cause major destruction in another six weeks.
Ninety days—ninety days provided they started from scratch and were not already halfway to their goal. Less than ninety days—perhaps no time at all— By this time Manning was an unofficial member of the Cabinet; “Secretary of Dust,” the President called him in one of his rare jovial moods. As for me, well, I attended Cabinet meetings, too. As the only layman who had seen the whole show from beginning to end, the President wanted me there.
I am an ordinary sort of man who, by a concatenation of improbabilities, found himself shoved into the councils of the rulers. But I found that the rulers were ordinary men, too, and frequently as bewildered as I was.
But Manning was no ordinary man. In him ordinary hard sense had been raised to the level of genius. Oh, yes, I know that it is popular to blame everything on him and to call him everything from traitor to mad
dog, but I still think he was both wise and benevoler I don’t care how many second-guessing historians di agree with me.