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|Transcriber's Note: |
| |
|This etext was produced from "Astounding Stories", |
|December 1931. Extensive research did not uncover any |
|evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was|
|renewed. |
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Morale
_A Story of the War of 1941-43_
By Murray Leinster
[Illustration]
PART I
"... The profound influence of civilian morale upon the
course of modern war is nowhere more clearly shown than
in the case of that monstrous war-engine popularly
known as a 'Wabbly.' It landed in New Jersey Aug. 16,
1942, and threw the whole Eastern Coast into a frenzy.
In six hours the population of three States was in a
panic. Industry was paralyzed. The military effect was
comparable only to a huge modern army landed in our
rear...." (_Strategic Lessons of the War of
1941-43._--U. S. War College. Pp. 79-80.)
Sergeant Walpole made his daily report at 2:15. He used a dinky
telephone that should have been in a museum, and a rural Central put him
on the Area Officer's tight beam. The Area Officer listened drearily as
the Sergeant said in a military manner:
[Illustration: _It spouted a flash of bluish flame._]
"Sergeant Walpole, sir, Post Fourteen, reports that he has nothing of
importance to report."
+--------------------------------------------------+
|The Wabbly, uncombatable engine of war, spreads |
|unparalleled death and destruction--until Sergeant|
|Walpole "strikes at the morale" of its crew. |
+--------------------------------------------------+
The Area Officer's acknowledgment was curt; embittered. For he was an
energetic young man, and he loathed his job. He wanted to be in the
west, where fighting of a highly unconventional nature was taking place
daily. He did not enjoy this business of watching an unthreatened
coast-line simply for the maintenance of civilian confidence and morale.
He preferred fighting.
Sergeant Walpole, though, exhaled a lungful of smoke at the telephone
transmitter and waited. Presently the rural Central said:
"All through?"
"Sure, sweetie," said Sergeant Walpole. "How about the talkies tonight?"
That was at 2:20 P. M. There was coy conversation, while the civilian
telephone-service suffered. Then Sergeant Walpole went back to his post
of duty with a date for the evening. He never kept that date, as it
turned out. The rural Central was dead an hour after the first and only
Wabbly landed, and as everybody knows, that happened at 2:45.
* * * * *
But Sergeant Walpole had no premonitions as he went back to his hammock
on the porch. This was Post Number Fourteen, Sixth Area, Eastern Coast
Observation Force. There was a war on, to be sure. There had been a war
on since the fall of 1941, but it was two thousand miles away. Even
lone-wolf bombing planes, flying forty thousand feet up, never came this
far to drop their eggs upon inviting targets or upon those utterly
blank, innocent-seeming places where munitions of war were now
manufactured underground.
Here was peace and quiet and good rations and a paradise for
gold-brickers. Here was a summer bungalow taken over for military
purposes, quartering six men who watched a certain section of coast-line
for a quite impossible enemy. Three miles to the south there was another
post. Three miles to the north another one still. They stretched all
along the Atlantic Coast, those observation-posts, and the men in them
watched the sea, languidly observed the television broadcasts, and slept
in the sun. That was all they were supposed to do. In doing it they
helped to maintain civilian morale. And therefore the Eastern Coast
Observation Force was enviously said to be "just attached to the Army
for rations," by the other services, and its members rated with M. P.'s
and other low forms of animal life.
Sergeant Walpole reclined in his hammock, inhaling comfortably. The
ocean glittered blue before him in the sun. There was a plume of smoke
out at sea indicating an old-style coal-burner, its hull down below the
horizon. Anything that would float was being used since the war began,
though a coal-burning ship was almost a museum piece. A trim Diesel
tramp was lazing northward well inshore. A pack of gulls were squabbling
noisily over some unpleasantness floating a hundred yards from the
beach. The Diesel tramp edged closer inshore still. It was all very
peaceful and placid. There are few softer jobs on earth than being a
member of a "force in being" for the sake of civilian morale.
* * * * *
But at 2:32 P. M. the softness of that job departed, as far as Sergeant
Walpole was concerned. At that moment he heard a thin wailing sound high
aloft. It was well enough known nearer the front, but the Eastern Coast
Observation Force had had no need to become unduly familiar with it.
With incredible swiftness the wailing rose to the shrillest of shrieks,
descending as lightning might be imagined to descend. Then there was a
shattering concussion. It was monstrous. It was ear-splitting. Windows
crashed in the cottage and tinkled to the sandy earth outside. There was
a pause of seconds' duration only, during which Sergeant Walpole stared
blankly and gasped, "What the hell?" Then there was a second thin
wailing which rose to a scream....
Sergeant Walpole was in motion before the second explosion came. He was
diving off the veranda of Post Number Fourteen. He saw someone else
coming through a window. He had a photographic glimpse of one of his men
emerging through a doorway. Then he struck earth and began to run. Like
everybody else in America, he knew what the explosions and the
screamings meant.
But he had covered no more than fifty yards when the third bomb fell
from that plane so far aloft that it was not even a mote in the sky. Up
there the sky was not even blue, but a dull leaden gray because of the
thinness of the atmosphere yet above it. The men in that high-flight
bomber could see the ground only as a mass of vaguely blending colors.
They were aiming their bombs by filtered light, through telescopes which
used infra-red rays only, as aerial cameras did back in the 1920's. And
they were sighting their eggs with beautifully exact knowledge of their
velocity and height. By the time the bombs had dropped eight miles they
were traveling faster than the sound of their coming. The first two had
wiped out Posts Thirteen and Fifteen. The third made no sound before it
landed, except to an observer at a distance. Sergeant Walpole heard
neither the scream of fall nor the sound of its explosion.
* * * * *
He was running madly, and suddenly the earth bucked violently beneath
his feet, and he had a momentary sensation of things flying madly by
over his head, and then he knew nothing at all for a very long time.
Then his head ached horribly and someone was popping at something
valorously with a rifle, and he heard the nasty sharp explosions of the
hexynitrate bullets which have remodeled older ideas of warfare, and
Sergeant Walpole was aware of an urgent necessity to do something, but
he could not at all imagine what it was. Then a shell went off, the
earth-concussion banged his nose against the sand, and the rifle-fire
stopped.
"For Gawd's sake!" said Sergeant Walpole dizzily.
He staggered to his feet and looked behind him. Where the cottage had
been there was a hole. Quite a large hole. It was probably a hundred
yards across and all of twenty deep, but sea-water was seeping in to
fill it through the sand. Its edge was forty or fifty feet from where he
stood. He had been knocked down by the heaving earth, and the sand and
mud blown out of the crater had gone clean over him. Twenty feet back,
the top part of his body would have been cut neatly off by the blast. As
it was....
* * * * *
He found his nose bleeding and plugged it with his handkerchief. He was
still rather dazed, and he still had the feeling that there was
something extremely important that he must do. He stood rocking on his
feet, trying to clear his head, when two men came along the sand-dunes
behind the beach. One of them carried two automatic rifles. The other
was trying to bandage a limp and flapping arm as he ran. They saw the
Sergeant and ran to him.
"Hell, Sarge, I thought y'were blown to little egg-shells."
"I ain't," said Sergeant Walpole. He looked again at the hole in the
ground and swore painedly.
"Look at that," said the man with the flapping arm. "Hell's goin' to pop
around here, Sarge."
The sergeant swung around. Then his mouth dropped open. Just half a mile
away and hardly more than two hundred yards from the shore-line, the
Diesel tramp was ramming the beach. A wake still foamed behind it. A
monstrous bow-wave spread out on either hand, over-topping even the
combers that came rolling in. It was being deliberately run ashore. It
struck, and its fore-mast crumpled up and fell forward, carrying its
derrick-booms with it. There was the squeal of crumpled metal plates.
"Flyin' a yeller flag just now," panted one of the two privates. "We
started poppin' hexynitrate bullets at her an' she flung a shell at us.
She's a enemy ship. But what the hell?"
Smoke spurted up from the beached ship. Her stern broke off and settled
in the deeper water out from the shore. More smoke spurted out. Her bow
split wide. There were the deep rumbles of black-powder explosions.
Sergeant Walpole and his two followers stared blankly. More explosions,
and the ship was hidden in smoke, and when it blew away her funnel was
down and half or more of her upper works was sliding into the sea, and
she had listed suddenly.
* * * * *
Sergeant Walpole gazed upward. Futilely, of course; there was nothing in
sight overhead. But these explosions did look like the hexynitrate stuff
they put in small-arm bullets nowadays. A thirty-caliber bullet had the
explosive effect of an old-style six-pound T.N.T. shell. Only,
hexynitrate goes off with a crack instead of a boom. It wasn't an
American plane opening up with a machine-gun.
Then the beached ship seemed to blow up. A mass of thick smoke covered
her from stem to stern, and bits of plating flew heavily through the
air, and there were a few lurid bursts of flame. Sergeant Walpole
suddenly remembered that there ought to be survivors, only he hadn't
seen anybody diving overboard to try to get ashore. He half-started
forward....
Then the sea-breeze blew this smoke, too, away from the wreckage. And
the tramp was gone, but there was something else left in its place--so
that Sergeant Walpole took one look, and swallowed a non-existent
something that came up instantly into his throat again, and remembered
the urgent thing he had to do.
"Pete," he said calmly, "you hunt up the Area Officer an' tell him what
you seen. Here! I'll give you a report that'll keep 'em from slammin'
you in clink for bein' drunk. Grab a monocycle somewheres. It's faster
than a car, the way you'll be travelin'. First telephone you come to
that's workin', make Central put you in the tight beam to head-quarters.
Then go on an' report, y'self. See?"
Pete started, and automatically fumbled with his limp and useless arm.
Then he carefully tucked the unmanageable hand in the pocket of his
uniform blouse.
"That don't matter now," he said absurdly.
He was looking at the thing left in place of the tramp, as Sergeant
Walpole scribbled on one of the regulation report-forms of the Eastern
Coast Observation Force. And the thing he saw was enough to upset
anybody.
* * * * *
Where the tramp had been there was a single bit of bow-plating sticking
up out of the surf, and a bunch of miscellaneous floating wreckage
drifting sluggishly toward the beach. And there was a solid, rounded,
metallic shape apparently quite as long as the original tramp had been.
There was a huge armored tube across its upper part, with vision-slits
in two bulbous sections at its end. There were gun-ports visible here
and there, and already a monstrous protuberance was coming into view
midway along its back, as if forced into position from within. Where the
bow of the tramp had been there were colossal treads now visible. There
was a sort of conning-tower, armored and grim. There was a ghastly
steel beak. The thing was a war-machine of monstrous size. It emitted a
sudden roaring sound, as of internal-combustion engines operating at
full power, and lurched heavily. The steel plates of the tramp still
visible above water, crumpled up like paper and were trodden under. The
thing came toward the shore. It slithered through the shallow sea, with
waves breaking against its bulging sides. It came out upon the beach,
its wet sides glittering. It was two hundred feet long, and it looked
somehow like a gigantic centipede.
It was a tank, of sorts, but like no tank ever seen on earth before. It
was the great-grandfather of all tanks. It was so monstrous that for its
conveyance a ship's hull and superstructure had been built about it, and
its own engines had been the engines of that ship. It was so huge that
it could only be landed by blasting away a beached ship from about
itself, so it could run under its own power over the fragments to the
shore.
Now it stopped smoothly on the sandy beach, in which its eight-foot-wide
steel treads sank almost a yard. Men dropped down from ports in its
swelling sides. They made swift, careful inspections of predetermined
points. They darted back up the ladders again. The thing roared once
more. Then it swung about, headed for the sand-dunes, and with an
extraordinary smoothness and celerity disappeared inland.