"Col. Gascoigne, sir--"
Gascoigne jerked around and returned the salute. "What's your name?" he
snapped.
"Sweeney, sir," the corporal said. Actually it didn't sound very much
like Sweeney, or like anything else; it was just a noise. Yet the man's
face looked familiar. "Ready with bomb two, sir."
The corporal saluted, turned, took two steps, and faded. He did not
vanish, but he did not go out the door, either. He simply receded,
became darker and harder to distinguish, and was no longer there. It
was as though he and Gascoigne had disagreed about the effects of
perspective in the glowing Earthlight, and Gascoigne had turned out to
be wrong.
Numbly, he finished rewinding the paper. There was no doubt about it.
There the order stood, black on yellow, as plain as plain. Bomb the
capital of your own country at 1700 hours. Just incidentally, bomb
your own home in the process, but don't give that a second thought. Be
thorough, drop two bombs; don't worry about missing by a few seconds of
arc and hitting Baltimore instead, or Silver Spring, or Milford, Del.
CIG will give you the coordinates, but plaster the area anyhow. That's
S.O.P.
With rubbery fingers, Gascoigne began to work the keys of the teletype.
Sending on the frequency of Civilian Intelligence Group, he typed:
HELP SHOUT SERIOUS REPEAT SERIOUS PERSONNEL TROUBLE HERE STOP DON'T
KNOW HOW LONG I CAN KEEP IT DOWN STOP URGENT GASCOIGNE SV ONE STOP
Behind him, the oscillator peeped rhythmically, timing the drive on the
launching rack trunnion.
"Radar room. On target."
Gascoigne did not turn. He sat before the bombardier board and sweated
in the perfectly balanced air. Inside his skull, his own voice was
shouting: