Not This August (Christmas Eve). Cyril M. Kornbluth

      CHAPTER THREE

       Table of Contents

      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."

      Her flow of chatter was almost hysterical and Justin thought he knew why. It was the hysteria of relief, the discovery that the Awful Thing, the thing you dreaded above all else, has happened and isn't too bad after all. Chiunga Center was occupied, taken, conquered, seized—and life went on after all, and you felt a little foolish over your earlier terror. The Russians were just G.I.s, and weren't you a fool to think they had horns?

      "You see?" Lew Braden said to nobody in particular.

      "What I think," Betsy chattered, "is that they're just as dumb as any army men anywhere. You know what the first poster they stuck up said? Turn in your uranium and plutonium at once. The dopes! The second notice covered pistols, rifles, shotguns, and bayonets. That touch of idiocy is almost cute. Bayonets!"

      They had reached State Highway 19 and stopped; Norton lay dead ahead and Chiunga Center was fourteen miles to the right on the highway. A convoy of trucks marked with the red star was rolling westward at maybe thirty-five. They were clean, well-maintained trucks and they were full of Russian soldiers in Class A uniforms. They caught a snatch of mournful harmony and the rhythmic nasal drone of a concertina.

      "My Lord!" Betsy said. "They really do sing all the time. And in minor fifths. I thought they were putting it on at the mess tent, impressing the Amerikanskis with their culture and soul, but there isn't any audience here."

      The last of the convoy, a couple of slum-guns, field kitchens like any army's field kitchens complete to the fat personnel, rolled past and Justin realized that they were waiting for him to get out and proceed on foot to Norton.

      "Take it easy," he said to the Bradens, and watched the car swing right and pick up highway speed. The Bradens were about to enter into their own peculiar version of the kingdom of heaven. He himself needed another pump rod. The one Croley sold him turned out to be a painted white metal casting instead of rolled steel. It had, of course snapped the first time he used it.

      Perce, Croley's literally half-witted assistant, waved gaily at him as he approached the store. Perce bubbled over: "Gee, you should of seen 'im, mister, I bet he was a general or maybe a major. Boy, he came right into the store and he looked just like anybody else on'y he was a Red! Right into the store. Boy!"

      Perce