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1.
Major Walther Tonsonby had a pit of foreboding in his stomach as he speeded through rainy, nighttime city streets in a staff car. The unexpected summons to see Leader Moss had come in the middle of the night, ordering Tonsonby to appear before the fatherland's leader by dawn. Tonsonby had an inkling it was about the doomsday rocket, and it couldn't be good.
Wearing a gray uniform with gleaming black boots and blue-edged riding trousers, Tonsonby ran from the car up the steps to the cathedral vastness of the West Gotha State Chancellery. He was a big man, but fast, and two aides hurried to catch up with him.
It was so early in the morning that night still gripped the city with its rain, its sirens, and its search lights while enemy bombers probed and growled in the clouds far above. Tonsonby glanced up, with raindrops on his troubled expression, and guessed that the enemy in East Gotha were not aware of the horrific weapon being readied across town to destroy them.
Tonsonby entered the building, dripping rain water, and stopped to let his aides catch up. His chauffeur (a fat man in charcoal Uniformed Civil Service uniform) took his dripping coat, while his secretary (a slim woman with mousy hair and steely eyes) handed him his briefcase. Nodding curtly, Major Tonsonby left the two at the service entrances and hurried into the main hall. He tucked his peaked cap under one arm, and carried the briefcase by its handle.
Tonsonby had been summoned by none other than Leader Moss—top man in the rulership of wartime West Gotha. It was only Tonsonby's fourth or fifth visit to the headquarters of fifty million patriotic West Gothans. Tonsonby, like all West Gothans, had pilgrimaged through these halls as a school child and considered it the national cathedral.
The summons had come tinged with ominous hints, Tonsonby thought as he clattered across the vast marble floor where the paths of hundreds of central government functionaries crossed his own.
The main hall was a basilica, with ornately scrolled ceilings edged in gold. Buttresses and heavy square pillars framed high, narrow stained glass windows. The windows glowed in the endlessly rainy ambient gray light from outside. Night and day, kaleidoscope fragments of weak, cool color spattered across the porphyry-tomato floor expanse. The windows revealed patriotic themes, built from disciplined quadrilles of red, blue, yellow, and green glass. Silvered scrolls etched into the glass bore black words in Gothic alphabet. The scenes were sentimental: Victory waving aloft a sword, standing knee-deep in naked corpses on a battlefield, looking back with urgent eyes to send more troops against the enemy; Motherhood, pinching a full, stiff breast to nurture wounded men with agonized expressions, who crawl to her on their knees as one of them continues to hold aloft the West Gotha battle flag; Fatherhood, in the form of a huge grim figure handing a sword to one son and a rifle to the other, while they bow their heads and the enemy sends in yet another violent light-show barrage; and so on, sixteen windows in all in this cathedral of state and duty; each scene much like the others with a huge central figure holding some object while being served by multitudes of tiny men suffering for their nation.
Going up the central staircase, itself a marvel of grandeur, Tonsonby barely noticed the crowning image: Nation, consisting of a huge father image whose face is characteristically of the Moss clan: round, with fierce little black eyes that inspire men and women to sacrifice themselves for the Nation and the Leader; against a huge tapestry of war and sacrifice, filled with little scenarios populated by gigantic, muscular men and women. The muscled giants of West Gotha lift hammers over anvils, raise torches to light beacons, bear children, send children to war, received the glorious dead back from battle, and on and on.
Tonsonby's path took him briefly outside on a passageway that wrapped like a slender concrete thread around the skin of the administrative headquarters. Like shadows in a hurry, couriers and secretaries and military officers hurried back and forth this windy deck, with only a glass wall to keep one from falling off. As preoccupied as he was, Tonsonby couldn't help but gaze across the magnificent vista.
Anti-aircraft lights, sweeping their cones back and forth under mottled rain clouds, illuminated the night sky above West Gotha. Sirens wailed in a slowly rising and falling chorus.
On the city's outer defensive perimeters, particularly facing the enemy city of East Gotha, force curtains rippled in the air like artifical green auroras. Sometimes, East Gotha bombers made it through to the innermost defenses, and ak-ak would begin pounding the skies until one or two burning bombers would slowly keel over and disappear to crash in the far countryside.
The city looked lovely from a distance: mountains of hazy light from thousands of windows piled into skyscrapers, one behind the other, in a soft,huge pyramid of buildings rising toward the center. Here, where Tonsonby walked, the central administration building rose like a magnificent basilica of stained glass windows and creamy Deco towers.
Closer up, the city had that wartime shabbiness characteristic of the grinding nightmare of wars seeming to go on forever. A sign atop a high-rise might be missing a letter. A wall might be peeling and long overdue for a paint job. A street might be potholed. Despite a million such inconveniences, the patriotic and dutiful people of West Gotha put on a brave face and soldiered on. The survival of the fatherland depended on their support of the Leader, and Tonsonby was heading to that Leader's office at this very moment with fear lining his stomach.
Tonsonby was unaware of a small but important drama that had played out only hours ago, yesterday evening, elsewhere in the city, between a baroness and a spy. The union of those two was about to start having a frightening impact on Tonsonby's career and in fact on his very life.
?
The citizens of West Gotha valued whatever time they could steal from the grind of work and fightning, to pursue love or pleasure. Behind the thick blackout curtains of a luxurious industrial executive suite, such a drama played itself out tonight. The hereditary executive of one of West Gotha's top wartime industries, a beautiful young baroness, had been working alone at her huge desk. As the evening wore on, she often stopped to chew her stylus and look up at the clock. She was expecting someone, and he was late. Or was he coming at all? She put her stylus down, closed her laptop, and rose. Sensually fingering her delicate wrist in its lace ruffle, she strode across the marble floor to the wet bar. There, she poured two crystal glasses of a premium sec champagne from a bottle leaning in an ice bucket draped with linen hand towels. She loosened the kerchief around her neck, and fluffed her blouse open a button or two. Holding one of the glasses, she sauntered over to the entertainment bar and twisted a few knobs. The room filled with the seductive rhythms of recorded big band music. The atmosphere dimmed a bit she switched off the working lights. The ambience in the room, already seductive with her light perfume, turned amber, at the edges verging on rouge.
The tall double doors opened at the other end of the hall, and a man stood in the high rectangle of light. She clutched her bare neck, fearing for a moment that the servants had intruded at a compromising moment. "Alton!" she said, recognizing Captain Hedrock's handsome features despite the shadows. He had to be the most charming, reckless man she'd ever known, but she would throw her sizeable share of West Gotha's wealth at his feet if must be. He closed the doors, locked them, and strode confidently toward her, taking off his jacket and tie. He wore the uniform of an officer in the West Gotha Guards, but she knew he worked for East Gotha. Her hope was to turn him—to help her overturn both wartime governments and restore peace to a newly unified city that ruled the world. As he approached, he grinned in his seductive, irresponsible manner and opened his arms to take her. They flew together, kissing hard in an embrace that could not be enough. They refilled the champagne glasses and toasted each other. Outside, in a grim and different reality, bombs fell on the city's force shields and exploded with deafening echoes. Inside the muffled executive suite, there was only sinuous Latin dance music and the sound of their laughter and heels as he spun her around on the marble floor. Only gradually did she notice the lipstick on his shirt, and smell the other woman about him—and thus another kind of war was about to begin.
?
As Tonsonby came to the end of the dizzying walkway above West Gotha City, the first tendrils of daylight streaked the horizon from black to gray. Glad to get back into shelter, he entered the far half of the administration building.
He entered a wood-paneled lobby where uniformed figures with hard mouths and suspiciously swiveling glances stood smoking and exchanging conspiracies. Up Tonsonby went, two steps at a time on a wood staircase with blood-red carpet runners. He dodged between streamlined staff officers, and one-armed or one-legged infantry officers retired to administrative duties.
Hugging his tan leather briefcase under one arm, and holding his cap in his teeth while he pulled his black gloves off, Tonsonby came to the third floor. As he hurried along the mezzanines overlooking the grand hall. The passages up here seemed claustrophobic and overpopulated. They smelled of paper and ink, of wet coats and soggy leather boots, of harsh coffee and thick cigarette smoke that cast a pall resembling that of the battlefield. Tonsonby had both arms and legs intact, a fact of which he was exquisitely aware in this retirement farm of blinded, limping, amputated combat veterans. Tonsonby, however, was not a paper pusher. He was an important cog in the Strategic Information Group (SIG), a central intelligence service attached directly to the Leader's offices. He was also a distant Moss cousin, which explained much to anyone who cared or dared to ask.
As he hurried into the increasingly plush, quiet, and sparsely populated mahogany row area, male and female desk clerks rose and snapped to attention like a series of dominoes rising rather than falling, and each held a telephone receiver to one ear to announce his arrival. For that reason, the double padded doors of Chancellor Moss' office suite seemed to swing open without need of a knock.
"Come in!" said the round-faced man in brown suit. He had a harp of thin black hairs combed meticulously over a round skull gleaming like aged cheese in yellow wax. "Just in time." He offered a cigar from a silver etui, but Tonsonby politely refused. This was Leader Moss, a grandson of the Original Leader. Leader Moss did not look happy as he stuck the huge brown rod in his thin mouth. Immediately an aide snapped forth with a lighter.
"Did you bring the device?" Leader Moss said as he puffed on the cigar, and dry acrid smoke filled the air. Dawn was breaking, and its harsh light etched itself on the already harsh figures of Leader Moss. The office was wide, with oriental carpeting and rich antique furniture. The windows were framed in dark wood, and part of an edge-down orange-slice effect running across six irregularly shaped double panes of heavy glass. From here, Leader Moss had a panoramic view. The city, with its domes and rectangles under gunmetal-gray roofs, glowered under charcoal clouds that looked smokier than Leader Moss's cigar smoke.
"Bring in the detector dock," Leader Moss ordered. Three corpsmen in drab fatigues wheeled the refrigerator-sized electronic unit across the thickly piled carpets. Moss asked Tonsonby: "Is the latest upgrade fully functional?"
"Yes, Leader." Tonsonby addressed his cousin in the prescribed manner.
Laying the briefcase open on the glass-topped desk by the window, Tonsonby donned clean white gloves. He extracted a flat, rectangular container of creamy factory porcelain from the briefcase. Opening this, he carefully removed from its padding a wide green circuit board etched with myriad gleaming silver patterns. Gingerly, he lifted this into the cold gray light so that its silver lines glowed like molten, flowing chrome. Tonsonby wondered if the day would become any brighter than this as morning wore on. The dozen or so orderlies in the room, hovering in the shadows until bidden to light a cigar or fetch a brandy, let out a barely audible gasp. Tonsonby stepped up to the tall, rectangular electronics closet and offered the circuit board to a wide mouth-slot. He heard whirring inside the unit, and felt the circuit board pulled away from his fingers and into the maw of the machine. It would travel on rails through a sort of digestive system until it came to rest in the unit's functioning core brain area. The newly added component would raise the unit's artificial intelligence by several exponential factors.
"Readings are normal," said a technician nearby after a moment of silence.
"Good," Moss said. "Now we wait. Brandy?"
It was too early in the morning, but Tonsonby nodded. Nervously licking his lips, and feeling his hands suddenly cold and trembling, he stepped beside Leader Moss. Brandies arrived (smooth, sweet, tangy, nutty—not the cheap, harsh fluid of average little citizens).
Out in the distance, a rocket nose cone stood out like a needle above a forest of supporting gear. Gantries hemmed it in on either side, and many lights glared with a harsh bluish-white intensity almost like arc welders. Tonsonby saw the first major sign of activity before launch: a vast white cloud of steam grew over the launch area, so that only the nose cone and a few bluish-harsh lights were visible anymore.
"Launch time is minus 35 minutes and the clock is running," a female technician's crisp voice announced in the office where Tonsonby and Leader Moss stood looking out over the city.
"Patch into the tower chatter for us," Leader Moss commanded with quiet authority. A minute later, there was a constant chain of quiet, efficient conversation as the launch engineers talked among each other and the final countdown sequences began.
Tonsonby stole a glance sidelong at his cousin. The older Moss had a veiled, unreadable look as he smoked quietly and regarded the city with slightly red, smoke-rasped eyes. Far off in the distance, past a faintly shimmering force field, Tonsonby could see mountains in East Gotha, in enemy territory. Far away, when the clouds shifted, one could see the defensive domes and turrets of the massive fortress that was the equal and the deadly enemy of Tonsonby's motherland.
The nose cone atop the rocket contained sixteen MIRVed antimatter warheads, each with the ability to dig a crater a mile deep—and one would impact the central headquarters of East Gotha within the hour—hopefully ending the generations-long war of the sister states once and for all, with total defeat for the Eastern upstarts, and a great victory for the glorious West.
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