Vol. 7 No. 3		June 2008
-e*I*38- (Vol. 7 No. 3) June 2008, is published and © 2008 by Earl Kemp. All rights reserved. It is produced and distributed bi-monthly through efanzines.com by Bill Burns in an e-edition only.

Contents—eI38—June 2008

Cover: “The Dummy,” by Steve Stiles

…Return to sender, address unknown….28 [eI letter column], by Earl Kemp

Sympathy for the Devil, by Alexei Panshin

On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, by Pat Charnock

Loathing and Fear in Las Vegas, by Mike Hammer

Sleazy Sunday, by Jerry Murray

Skimmed Milk, by Frank M. Robinson

Whatever Lola Wants, by Victor J. Banis

Back cover: “WaterGateV,” by Ditmar [Martin James Ditmar Jenssen]

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.
                       -- Kurt Vonnegut, Inc. Technology No. 4, 1995

THIS ISSUE OF eI is for my old friend Alexei Panshin.

In the strictly science fiction world, it is also in memory of Will Elder.

#

As always, everything in this issue of eI beneath my byline is part of my in-progress rough-draft memoirs. As such, I would appreciate any corrections, revisions, extensions, anecdotes, photographs, jpegs, or what have you sent to me at earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you in advance for all your help.

Bill Burns is jefe around here. If it wasn’t for him, nothing would get done. He inspires activity. He deserves some really great rewards. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have him working with me to make eI whatever it is.

Other than Bill Burns, Dave Locke, and Robert Lichtman, these are the people who made this issue of eI possible: Victor J. Banis, Pat Charnock, Graham Charnock, Mike Hammer, Jacques Hamon, Frank Lunney, Gary Mattingly, Lynn Munroe, Jerry Murray, Suzann Murray, Alexei Panshin, Frank M. Robinson, Mark Schirmeister, Robert Speray, and Bud Webster.

ARTWORK: This issue of eI features original artwork by Ditmar, Mark Schirmeister, and Steve Stiles, and recycled artwork by William Rotsler.

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.
                       -- Kurt Vonnegut

…Return to sender, address unknown…. 28
The Official eI Letters to the Editor Column
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

We get letters. Some parts of some of them are printable. Your letter of comment is most wanted via email to earlkemp@citlink.net or by snail mail to P.O. Box 6642, Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 and thank you.

Also, please note, I observe DNQs and make arbitrary and capricious deletions from these letters in order to remain on topic.

This is the official Letter Column of eI, and following are a few quotes from a few of those letters concerning the last issue of eI. All this in an effort to get you to write letters of comment to eI so you can look for them when they appear here.

I got a letter from a sappy woman a while back - she knew I was sappy too, which is to say a lifelong Democrat.
                        --Kurt Vonnegut

Friday April 18, 2008:

Chris Garcia: Okay, there’s a whole lot to say about this issue, but I’ll open by noting that I loved the cover from Mr. Stiles. I picked up a bunch of old Trap Doors at Eastercon (only I would go to England and bring back American fanzines) and I think issue 10 was one of them. I like the colouring especially. I’m becoming a big fan of folks redoing their old stuff in colour. It just feels right.

Now, the Fanzine Research thingee. That’s a tough one. There’s been a lot written about fandom and there are long lists of various collections, but largely the scholarly study of fandom has been something done from those on the inside. I’ve done a lot of research into various areas, but nothing that would be considered scholarly. There’s a lot of great work done in the area of Zine Culture (hell, even ZineWiki is a great resource to keep up with non-SF zining) but there is little in the way of outside interest in SF zines. It’s odd, but understandable. We’ve closed ourselves off to a large degree and that leads others to think we’re not interesting. It happens. I do know a number of ethnographers who take a serious interest in SF fandom, though they are a small group compared to those who look at television and sports fandom. I’m currently working on an SF/Wrestling/Browncoats comparison article for a friend’s mag that looks at the way they influence each other. One thing that I’ve learned is that looking to fanzines for the feel of the greater world of SF isn’t a bad idea, but it’s far less effective than picking up all the issues of the pros and reading them. That probably wasn’t true for the 1960s and 70s, but it certainly is for the 1980s. If a future researcher wanted to discover everything about the rise and reaction to CyberPunk, as an example, the fanzines of the time would probably give you tastes, but if there were recordings of panels from cons between the years 1984 to 1998, you could have the complete spectrum of reaction to what CyberPunk was.

Now here is a Centennial I can get behind! Screw that Heinlein dude, Williamson is where it’s at! If I could make it to Pulpcon, I totally would. No dice, though. Well, more No cash. I really think the Cult of Heinlein has over-powered so many other authors who deserve a strong investigation. Williamson should be considered the pioneer and the worshipped master of the form. Hell, RAH petered out in the 1970s and Williamson was writing top-notch stuff into the 1990s!

I’m one of those people who thinks going into Iraq was a good idea, but not the way we did it. Take the shackles off the CIA, set up a few cells in the country, wait out a year or two and get rid of Saddam and that’s a good thing. Invade with the force of the Army, waste thousands of lives, spend billions of dollars, it’s all terrible. I don’t think that makes Bush worse than Hitler, but it does make him one of those figures who will never be remembered in history without blood on his sleeves.

I think I remember the Woman Chaser coming through the theatres. I remember Patrick Warburton in the trailer for it and I wanted to see it and never did. I’ll just have to Netflix it. I’d start by reading the book so I could properly complain about how they messed it up, but time allows not for this.

Great Ditmar piece to close the issue! His stuff has a quality to it that is so purely SF, so slick with an undercoat of something more gritty and raw. I hope we Americans get to see more of his stuff.

Wednesday April 23, 2008:

Lynn Munroe: Another great issue on your ezine, always great to read anything by Moorcock and my wife was very happy to see a photo of her friends Linda & Michael Moorcock.  The piece on Willeford was both scholarly and brilliant.  Keep going at this genius level, it’s working well for you. 

Tuesday May 6, 2008:

Mike Deckinger: Of course I remember The Smut Peddler. It was released at a time when the more innocent and carefree nudies (as exemplified by Russ Meyers’ early contributions), were beginning to fade from view, and ushered in the era of the “roughies”; B&W independent films that featured ample flesh displays and undue amounts of violence and misogyny.  The key developers of  “roughies” included the incredible husband and wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay, Barry Mahan (Errol Flynn’s drinking buddy), the delectable Audrey Campbell, star of the “Olga” series. and our very own William Rotsler.

The crusty character, in the still from The Smut Peddler also played the titular lead (adorned in scabby make-up and prosthetics), who, as noted, is only glimpsed in the trailer.  The trailer itself was a marvel of manipulative direction. Since one of the shadowy plot elements centered on the production of a girly magazine called Dream Girl, re-enactments of an S&M photo-shoot were presented as if they foreshadowed actual scenes within the final product.

However, the sweaty viewer was not totally deceived.  Additional unrelated scenes of European glamour girls rounded out the viewing experience.

Roughies only remained for a few years.  Once the envelope was pushed to the limit, with the advent of hard-core, non-simulations, the soft-core genre dwindled and then disappeared.

I can understand that The Smut Peddler has become a rarity, but a sought-after rarity?  Truly stunning.

I wonder if Rob Latham made any effort to investigate the efforts of Harold Palmer Piser.  Piser, a non-fan, undertook a vast bibliographic project, encompassing all fanzines at the time (the 60s).  His objective was to accurately catalogue EVERYTHING that had ever been published. As an elderly retiree, he had an abundance of free time to devote to his handiwork.  Unfortunately he died in the middle of the project, and nothing further was heard.   One final word; it was said at the time that all his notes were destroyed following his passing.  However, other reports seemed to suggest that his notes (covering some 90% of all fanzines under consideration) had survived and were being held for the benefit of anyone wishing to continue.  If this is indeed true (and considering the stretch of intervening years since his death, recovery may no longer be possible) they could serve Latham’s purpose.

Saturday May 10, 2008:

Elinor Busby: I enjoyed part of your ezine and parts were outside my field of interests, which is par for the course, really.  Anything that strikes me as “guy stuff” is not within.  That’s odd, isn’t it?  I like guys.  When I was young I would have been eager to broaden my field of interests, but at my age, I like what I like and let it go at that.  Except that I’ve gotten kind of interested in politics and history and so forth. 

Anyhow, I have two Sidney Coleman stories.  When we met him, at Midwestcon in 1957, Buz and I amused ourselves by quoting to Sidney some of the things he’d said in your SAPSzine.  He enjoyed having his wit quoted back to him.  He told us a little about his origins.  His father and uncle had been in business together during the Depression, as the Cohen Brothers.  They got a phone call asking if this was the Coleman Brothers.  Corrected, the caller hung up.  One of them said to the other, “If we’d been the Coleman Brothers, we would have GOT that business.”  And so they became so.

The last time I saw Sid was in Brighton in 1979.  We were at the Prince Regent’s Pavilion, which is ornately “Chinese” in decoration.  Sidney said, “This tells us nothing about Chinese decoration and everything about Chinese restaurants.”  My face probably fell, because I had been really getting off on it, and Sidney relented and said that it was joyous. 

I may have seen Sidney since that time, because I remember his sitting in the Busby living room drinking dandelion wine, but I don’t remember the year.

Sunday May 18, 2008:

Patrick Kearney: Greenleaf always interested me. I was particularly taken with those larger paperbacks, with two novels back-to-back similar to the Ace Double SF novels. I did a paperback catalogue for a bookseller friend devoted specifically to Greenleaf -- and thought the books looked pretty good. Indeed, Greenleaf published one of the great original erotic writers, C.J. Bradbury Robinson (not a pseudonym!) whose work, in the form of A Crocodile of Choirboys, I first encountered in the British Library. I was later able to secure a copy for myself, but his books are as rare as hen’s teeth on account of their theme. I have only one other, Young Thomas, which is not in the first bloom, condition-wise.

Monday May 26, 2008:

John Purcell: Once again, a fine publication. Rob Latham’s article on “Fanzine Research” not only whetted my appetite for visiting the Eaton Collection some day soon, but reminded me to get my butt down to the Science Fiction and Fanzine Collection here at Texas A&M University. Hal Hall, the curator of it and other special collections, has been acquiring newer goodies since I was last there, and I would like to see what Hal has managed to lay his claws on. Besides, I still need to dig through the Cepheid Variable boxes when I get to really working on that history article about the TAMU SF club. There is only so much I can learn on-line, and the two or three boxes in the SF & Fanzine collection devoted to the club have more information I could use.

Other than that, I just wanted to let you know that I once again enjoyed the zine. Keep them coming.

Sympathy For the Devil*
A story about Robert Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory”

By Alexei Panshin

We did the devil’s work.
                            --J. Robert Oppenheimer

A lie is no good if it's not believed -- unless it is told to be disbelieved.
                            --Mellrooney

Part One: Making K-O Dust

1. The Riddle of “Solution Unsatisfactory”

After World War II was brought to a sudden conclusion in August 1945 by the detonation of a new American superweapon over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a change in the status of science fiction.

Science fiction was the last pulp magazine genre, named as recently as 1929.  It was rarely published in hardcover book form.  It wasn’t reviewed by reputable newspapers and magazines.  And it wasn’t to be found on the shelves of most libraries, and only by people prepared to hunt to find it.

Now, with the appearance of atomic weapons in the world, it stood vindicated.  Its direst imaginings had come true.

In the new postwar climate of elation and dread, it was suddenly possible to present science fiction as a form of literature almost as serious and farseeing as its most ardent fans and boosters had always wanted to believe it was.

In February 1946, just six months after the United States dropped the Bomb, the first hardcover science fiction anthology, The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin, was published by Crown.  This was a fat book of forty stories intended to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the genre, from the near and infinitesimal to the most remote times and places – the far future, the stars and other dimensions.
           
As an acknowledgment of the major new concern of the day (as well as to stake science fiction’s claim to special regard) the initial seven stories were grouped under the heading “The Atom.”  

The lead story, a novelette entitled “Solution Unsatisfactory,” told of the end of war between England and Germany in 1945 after the dropping of an atomic superweapon made in America. 

That was close enough to what had just happened to get people’s attention.

The author of “Solution Unsatisfactory” was given as “Anson MacDonald.”  This was the byline the story had appeared under when it was originally published in the May 1941 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction.  But it had actually been written by Robert Heinlein the previous December.

A year before Pearl Harbor and four years prior to the termination of the war currently being fought in Europe, Heinlein had dared to imagine the conflict brought to a conclusion by an atomic weapon of unprecedented deadliness made at a US Army facility in Maryland.  In the story, the lab’s director, Col. Clyde Manning, then maneuvers to make himself dictator of the world in order to keep the overwhelming weapon he’s brought into existence in safe hands, namely his own.

The title Heinlein placed on the story was “Foreign Policy.”  This suggests that he saw its central subject not so much as the development of atomic weapons as the impact their existence would have on the international balance of power.

It was the editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell, Jr., who altered the title to “Solution Unsatisfactory” in order to make it clear to the readers of his magazine that in his view the story was a thought experiment which didn’t offer an adequate answer to the problem it posed of controlling this demonic weapon once it had been made and used.

Four years later, as the architect and chief promoter of modern science fiction, as well as the original editor of one-third of the stories included in The Best of Science Fiction, John Campbell would be asked to contribute a preface to this pioneering anthology to justify and explain science fiction to an audience presumed to be unfamiliar with it.

Campbell viewed himself as a practical engineer concerned with what works. So in his preface he took advantage of the moment to use “Solution Unsatisfactory” as an example of science fiction in action.  In the context of this book for a general readership he wouldn’t dwell on any inadequacy the story might have. Instead, he began by describing it as “uncannily accurate prophecy.”

This would be true, of course.  But it would also not be true, as he had reason to know. 

For one thing, Heinlein hadn’t been a very good predictor of the future course of the war.  Almost as soon as his novelette was published, it had been contradicted by events.  In this story neither the Soviet Union (here called the “Eurasian Union”) nor Japan nor the United States ever directly participates in World War II. 

On the timeline in which “Solution Unsatisfactory” was written and read however, just two months after the story appeared on the newsstand, in June 1941, Germany would invade the Soviet Union.  And before the end of the year, Germany’s ally Japan would launch a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet stationed in Hawaii and America would be brought into the war, as well.

Having not foreseen this radical expansion of World War II, Heinlein hadn’t envisioned that the cities attacked to bring the war to an end would be Japanese.  Instead, the metropolis atomically sterilized in his story was Berlin, the capital city of Germany.

There’d be another major difference between what had been written by Heinlein and what actually did take place.  The weapon he imagined was radioactive dust – what today would be called a radiological weapon or “dirty bomb.”  It wouldn’t be the brilliant humungous explosion capped by a roiling mushroom cloud that we’ve all become familiar with.

Writing in the immediate postwar moment, however, Campbell felt no inclination to linger on minor details like these.  Instead he wanted to establish the premise that the projections of science fiction deserved to be taken seriously, and for this it was sufficient that in “Solution Unsatisfactory” Heinlein had foreseen the United States developing an atomic weapon, which had then been used to end the war.  What’s more, he’d even gotten the year right.  That was close enough to pass for uncannily accurate prophecy.

By contrast, even though Groff Conklin, too, saw the story as possibly predictive, the editor of The Best of Science Fiction would regard this more negatively than Campbell did.  What concerned him about “Solution Unsatisfactory” wasn’t the part that had come true more or less, but the part, which hadn’t happened yet, but still might.    

In Conklin’s introduction to the anthology, printed after Campbell’s preface, he said:  “The story which leads off in this book, ‘Solution Unsatisfactory,’ is included here with the greatest reluctance.  It is one instance where science fiction has dangerously sinister overtones of possibility.”

What disturbed the editor was not the invention of atomic weapons or the prospect of atomic war.  What made him resist the story was its second half – the coming to power of a dictator who means to keep the Bomb under control by keeping the world in line.

The narrator of “Solution Unsatisfactory” says:  “…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 call him everything from traitor to mad dog, but I still think he was both wise and benevolent.  I don’t care how many second-guessing historians disagree with me.”

Conklin didn’t want to endorse anything like that.  He had no use for dictators.  If there’d ever been any doubt about the matter, World War II had just shown what dictators were like.  Yet the storyteller would end his account by inviting the reader to empathize with poor Clyde Manning, reluctant dictator of the world who is only doing what circumstances determine must be done.

The editor saw this as giving Manning far too much credence.  In his introduction, he wrote, “I do not agree … with the author’s political bias as it is exemplified in this tale.  It seems quite dangerous to me.”

The person who would ultimately be responsible for the inclusion and privileged placement of “Solution Unsatisfactory” in The Best of Science Fiction was Conklin’s editor at Crown, Edmund Fuller.  While working on this book, he’d developed so much of a taste for science fiction that Conklin sometimes suspected him of wanting to hijack the project and make it his own.

Fuller was particularly impressed by the stories of Robert Heinlein and Anson MacDonald.  Struck by the timeliness of “Solution Unsatisfactory,” he wanted to use it to lead off the book. 

But Conklin didn’t want the story in his collection at all.  He only gave in at last – “against my better judgment” – after seeing a headline in the Washington Post for November 2, 1945, which read:  “‘ATOMIC WAR THREAT MAY FORCE U.S. TO SELECT DICTATOR.’”

The story below the headline said that Harold Urey – a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who had helped develop the atomic bomb – had offered the opinion that the United States might have to establish a dictatorship in order to react to the threat of atomic war.

“’I do not see any way to keep our democratic form of government if everybody has atomic bombs,’ Urey said.  ‘If everyone has them, it will be necessary for our government to move quickly in a manner now not possible under our diffused form of government.’”

If an actual Bomb-maker of prominence was ready to suggest that with the Bomb on the loose, America might need to have a dictator in control, then, perhaps, distasteful though it might be, “Solution Unsatisfactory,” the story of a master Bomb-maker who carries out a coup d’etat and makes himself just such a dictator, should be in the book, if only as a cautionary tale.

Nevertheless, Conklin continued to harbor great reservations about this story, so that even though he may finally have given his assent to its inclusion, he still found it necessary to make it clear to everyone who read his book that he hadn’t wanted to do it.

So just what was “Solution Unsatisfactory” – this story that was both celebrated and condemned in The Best of Science Fiction even before it led the way in the first showcase anthology of science fiction? 

Was “Solution Unsatisfactory” an uncannily prescient anticipation of American invention of the Bomb, as John Campbell’s preface and Edmund Fuller’s premier placement of the story encouraged readers to perceive?  Or was it an ultimately unsatisfactory first attempt to solve the problem of how a horrendous superweapon might be brought under control, as its Campbell-chosen title declared? 
 
Was the story really about American foreign policy and how the existence of atomic weapons would force this policy to change, as indicated by Heinlein’s original title? Or was it a dangerously sinister story about power politics and how a man makes himself world dictator, as Groff Conklin thought?

A case may be made for each of these interpretations.  But objections can be raised to all of them, too.  And none of them explains everything in “Solution Unsatisfactory.”   Unless, of course, the story is really an elephant in the dark, giving the appearance of being any number of different things while actually being something of another kind.

2.  Manning Takes a Job

If for no other reason than because its narrator is not a reliable voice, it isn’t easy to be sure what Heinlein’s actual intention was when he wrote this story in December 1940.

If we believe the character who tells us the tale, Col. Manning never entertained any ambitions to make himself dictator.  It was all a kind of accidental inevitability, something that circumstances happened to make necessary.

Before the war Manning was a military officer – “one of the Army’s No. 1 experts in chemical warfare” – until a heart condition forced him into early retirement.  Then he became a first-term congressman, a liberal.

Manning may be a liberal, but he’s also said to be “tough-minded.”  Once he’s come to recognize the logical necessity of a dictator controlling atomic weapons, he’s not one to turn away from the job, even though he may find what he’s called upon to do personally distasteful.

We could even think of what happens to Manning as a tragic act of self-sacrifice and empathize with the pain he must be feeling as he does what is necessary, even though it goes against his nature.

The full name of the all-but-invisible man behind the narrative voice of “Solution Unsatisfactory” is never given in one place, but we can add it up as John DeFries.  As a high school teacher of sociology and economics, he was a member of the political search committee that chose Manning as an insurgent candidate for congress.  He becomes Manning’s campaign manager, and after that Congressman Manning’s executive secretary.  And then, when Manning is asked to rejoin the Army and head its atomic weapons program, at Manning’s insistence DeFries is instantly commissioned and brought along as his adjutant.

DeFries is no disinterested bystander.  He’s Manning’s main man.  And when it is Manning’s man who assures us that Manning is really wise and benevolent and a genius of hard sense, can his words be believed?

At times in the story, DeFries seems to be only half-aware.  Manning even calls him “downright stupid” to his face, and he accepts this as a compliment.  It’s possible that he is a bit dim and is kept around as a convenient tool when one is needed. Or perhaps he really knows more than he’s telling and is acting as a loyal mouthpiece, like a Presidential news secretary covering his boss’s ass and passing on to us what the boys upstairs think we should be told.  It’s even possible that DeFries is a secret spin doctor himself, actively seeking to manipulate our perceptions and sentiments from the outset.

Whatever the case may be, however, it’s apparent that DeFries is never frank with us.  There’s a great deal that he doesn’t bother to explain, there are crucial points of transition that he slides right past, and much of what he does tell us doesn’t stand up under examination.

If we persist in pursuing the questions that he fails to address, a very different picture of Manning begins to emerge.

At the outset, the narrator tells us that Manning is a strong liberal.   He ought to know since he helped select Manning as a candidate and then worked for him while he was in Congress.  But liberals, even of the tough-minded sort, are by definition dedicated to achieving gradual progress by working for changes in the system.  They don’t turn themselves into dictators.  You have to be an extremist of one kind or another to take over the system altogether and make all decisions yourself.

It seems highly doubtful, then, that Manning, whatever he may actually have been, could really have ever been a liberal – which ought to make us question both DeFries’s truthfulness and Manning’s sincerity from the start.

Then we learn that despite his bad heart, Manning was personally singled out to be called back to active duty by the Army to head its atomic research and development program.  And that seems unlikely, too.

In fact, this may have been the expression of a Robert Heinlein wish fulfillment.  He’d been a Lieutenant (jg) when he was involuntarily retired from the Navy in 1934 after he developed tuberculosis.  And he kept clinging to the hope that he would be recalled to duty when the US finally became an active participant in World War II.

However, this would never happen, even though Heinlein went knocking on a lot of doors after Pearl Harbor trying to make it happen.  The best that he’d been able to do was to have an old service friend take him on as a civilian engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia.

Life moves on.  And officers like Manning (or Heinlein) who’ve been retired from the service for a serious uncured ailment are seldom if ever unretired and called back to active duty, let alone singled out to be given crucial command assignments.

Moreover, Manning already has a job, and one of some significance, too.  He’s a Congressional Representative with a district and a party and his own strong liberal principles to stand up for.

So when the congressman is first called to come to the War Department for a chat about returning to duty, he tells his secretary,  “‘It’s impossible, of course.’”  He thereupon sets off for the meeting at so eager a pace that DeFries worries about his heart.

And, of course, it is every bit as impossible as Manning says it is.  Congressmen with bad hearts don’t jump ship in mid-stream to go off and be Army colonels, even important ones.

Sorry – I’m going to have to take that back, because DeFries goes on to say:  “But it was possible, and Manning agreed to it, after the Chief of Staff presented his case.”

A pretty impressive case it must have been, too, since the narrator tells us that no one has the power to make a congressman leave his post, and Manning had to be convinced.

But DeFries doesn’t share any details with us of how this was done – nor even what the exact nature of the task offered to Manning was.  These are points he goes gliding past, leaving us to try to figure out for ourselves what must have been said from what we see Manning do.

All we know for certain is that the general talked for a time and Manning, who’s declared that leaving Congress is impossible and who must have reason to change his mind, found what he was told so compelling and persuasive that he agreed to the proposal.  But, hey, if it was the Chief of Staff himself asking – I mean the top man in the whole damned Army – how could he say no?

We might not be permitted to hear the siren song that was sung for him, but we can hazard a guess as to what it may have been, since not much later the narrator says of Manning:

“…There was certainly no one else in the United States who could have done the job.  It required a man who could direct and suggest research in a highly esoteric field, but who saw the problem from the standpoint of urgent military necessity.”

DeFries can’t possibly be talking from his own knowledge here.  He’s just been sworn into the service himself and he isn’t any better qualified than the next former high school teacher to offer opinions about the Army or military necessity or who else other than Manning might be capable of carrying out this job.  What’s more, he admits that he knows no more about atomic physics than he’s read in the Sunday newspaper supplement.  He has to be repeating what he’s heard from someone else.

However, if the source he had it from was the Army Chief of Staff as he was making his case to Manning, then we can understand how Manning’s mind might have been changed.  It has to be pretty heady stuff for someone who was a career military officer retired before his time to have the person in command of the whole Army tell you that he has a critical job and you’re the only person who is capable of doing it.

But if indeed this was what convinced Manning, then he screwed up badly in allowing himself to be sweet talked into making such a disastrously wrong move.  If Manning ever had it in him to be wise, this was the moment for him to speak.

If he were farseeing, he might have said something like this:

“Sir, the offer you are making is very flattering, but I’m afraid I must refuse for a number of reasons any one of which would be sufficient.

“First, I have a previous obligation to my constituents that I must honor.  Having asked them to elect me to office, I can hardly turn my back on them now and walk away after serving for only a few months.

“Second, as you know, my heart isn’t in great shape.  I’m not sure it would withstand the stress of the work you’re asking me to undertake.  If I were to die along the way, or be forced to withdraw for reasons of health, and I’m as crucial to the task as you say, the program could be unnecessarily compromised.

“Third, as a human being and a liberal, I couldn’t possibly direct a project like this one.  I can see where it’s headed, and its end is a weapon that will kill every living thing it affects, and that can only be used on helpless civilians massed in cities.  In my opinion, to make and use that kind of weapon would be a crime.

“Lastly, speaking as a member of Congress, I have to tell you I think it would be a bad precedent and bad policy for us to introduce a weapon of indiscriminate terror.  We would likely frighten our allies as much as our enemies, set off an arms race and destabilize the world.  If you make an omelet, you have to eat it – you can’t turn it back into an egg.  With a weapon like this, we may find that we’ve won the war, but at the cost of the freedom for which we’re fighting.”

If indeed Manning is the only person in the country capable of directing this particular project – and he really were as wise and benevolent as DeFries says he is – then perhaps speaking out this way at this pivotal moment might have killed a bad idea at the very outset and spared both him and the world a lot of future grief.

But, of course, Manning doesn’t say no to the Chief of Staff’s offer.  Rather, he accepts immediately and the two of them begin to discuss how his job switch is to be accomplished.

As a matter of fact, the only thing Manning is reported to have said during this entire meeting is to be sure that he can have his man DeFries with him in his new post:

“There was talk of leaving me in Washington to handle the political details of Manning’s office, but Manning decided against it, judging that his other secretary could do that, and announced that I must go along as his adjutant.  The Chief of Staff demurred, but Manning was in a position to insist, and the Chief had to give in.”

How sweet to be needed so desperately that you can even make the top general in the Army jump through a hoop!

3.  The Invention of K-O Dust

So eager is Congressman Manning to get back into the familiar comfort of a pair of Army boots that he doesn’t linger in Washington long enough to make necessary phone calls and clear his desk.  By the very next day, he and DeFries – now an instant new-made Army officer – are off to Maryland to begin taking charge of the Federal nuclear research lab Manning’s been given to command.

He doesn’t pause at Walter Reed Army Hospital first for a routine physical checkup, either, just to be sure he’s fit for duty.  Nor, most strangely, does the Chief of Staff or anyone else in the Army bother to insist that Manning undergo an exam before he begins his new assignment, even though you would think the state of his health would be everybody’s first concern.

So why is everyone in such a hurry?  What’s so unique and pressing about this particular task that the Army would find it necessary to look outside its own ranks and reach into Congress for a one-time officer with heart problems to place in charge here?  And what military necessity could possibly be so urgent as to convince Manning to abandon his constituents and go rushing off to Maryland to assume this post?

We aren’t told.

It’s not because America is losing World War II and has its back to the wall.  In the world of the story, it’s as late as 1943, and the United States, while continuing to supply England with ships and planes to keep her fighting, still isn’t an active combatant in the war.

In fact, rather than being immediate and pressing, the research the lab is doing into an Atom Bomb seems prospective and hypothetical.  Things here at the lab are handled in a leisurely and informal way.  Ordinary military discipline isn’t observed.  And there doesn’t appear to be anyone from outside overseeing what they’re doing.

The narrator says:

“We were searching, there in the laboratory in Maryland, for a way to use U235 in a controlled explosion.  We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial center.  … 

“The problem was, strangely enough, to find an explosive which would be weak enough to blow up only one county at a time, and stable enough to blow up only on request.  If we could devise a really practical rocket fuel at the same time, one capable of driving a war rocket at a thousand miles an hour, or more, then we would be in a position to make most anybody say ‘uncle’ to Uncle Sam.”

But despite this happy dream of a war rocket armed with the Bomb and America with its foot on the neck of the world, the development of a reliable and controlled A-Bomb eludes them.  DeFries says:  “We fiddled around with it all the rest of 1943 and well into 1944.”

But if this is the case, what was the rush to get Manning on the job?

Eventually, however, the fiddling around has to come to an end.  They’re forced to conclude “that there existed not even a remote possibility at the time of utilizing U235 as an explosive,” and to abandon their quest for a convenient one-county-size nuclear Bomb.

All is not lost, however.  It isn’t necessary to close down the atomic weapons program with its unlimited budget and Manning doesn’t have to admit defeat and go back to Congress.  Instead, he’s able to recognize the potential for an even more awful weapon in another of the projects under his authority.

In taking command of the lab, Manning has inherited the ongoing research of a Dr. Estelle Karst into the medical application of radioactive isotopes.  Dr. Karst has no use for Manning and the work he’s doing and complains to him that her investigations have been hampered by lack of access to Dr. Obre, a spectroscopist whose services are being monopolized by the Bomb development project.  She declares to Manning that Manning is “a warmonger” because he cares more about killing than curing.

She could be right about that, too.  Manning was formerly one of the Army’s top experts in poison gas – the horror weapon of World War I, eventually banned – and when he familiarizes himself with her work, and sees the radioactive dust her program produces glistening in the air and hears of fish kills in Chesapeake Bay from her waste water, he gets a gleam in his eye.  Saying, “I think we may turn up a number of interesting things,” he takes over Dr. Karst’s research and pours men and resources into it.

Manning will demonstrate the gratitude he feels toward Dr. Karst for the preparatory work she’s done by naming the radiological weapon he develops “Karst-Obre dust.”  And after it has been used to kill every living thing in Berlin and Dr. Karst commits suicide, he’ll express his regret to DeFries.

“I wish,” Manning added slowly, “that I could explain to her why we had to do it.”

If Manning never lets Dr. Karst know why it’s necessary to commandeer her medical dust and alter it into a weapon of mass extermination, neither does he report to his superiors about what he’s up to.  The Army Chief of Staff may have set him up here in the atomic research lab, given him all the money and resources he could ask for, and put him to work making a Bomb, but when Manning closes the Bomb project down and begins making Karst-Obre dust instead, he neglects to inform anyone that he’s doing it.

Nobody keeping an eye on the program.  No limit on funds.  And a colonel with a secret weapon and no sense of obligation to follow the chain of command.  What an unusual way to run an army!

It isn’t that Manning entertains no doubts.  At one point, he declares, “John, I wish that radioactivity had never been discovered.”

And the narrator says, “Manning told me that he had once seriously considered, in the middle of the night, recommending that every single person, including himself, who knew the Karst-Obre technique, be put to death in the interests of all civilization.”

But DeFries can’t understand these apprehensions.  To him, the dust is just another weapon, only more potent, and we’re the ones who have it.

He says to Manning, “I still don’t see what you are fretting about, Colonel.  If the stuff is as good as you say it is, you’ve done just exactly what you set out to do – develop a weapon which would give the United States protection against aggression.”

Now, is that what DeFries thought they’ve been doing?  If it is, then why didn’t he just tell us so at the time Manning was given his assignment?  More to the point, if Manning’s goal all along has been to protect the United States from aggression, what on earth has he been doing trying to develop a one-ton A-Bomb capable of laying flat an entire industrial city?

It’s no wonder that Manning tells DeFries he’s stupid. 

Manning spells out for his typist, go-fer, and apologist that this weapon is a loaded gun held to the head of every man, woman, and child on the planet.  And if any nation should use it, every nation will have to have it, and nobody will be safe.

Manning says:  “Once the secret is out – and it will be out if we ever use the stuff! – the whole world will be comparable to a room full of men, each armed with a loaded .45.  They can’t get out of the room and each one is dependent on the good will of every other one to stay alive.  All offense and no defense.  See what I mean?”
                                                                        
So concerned is Manning that two weeks after this, he calls the Army Chief of Staff and tells him that he needs to speak to the President.  And he won’t tell his superior why.

If it should seem out of line for someone who’s only a colonel to insist on bypassing the chain of command to talk directly to the President of the United States, we have to understand that Manning is a special case.  He reminds the Chief of Staff:  “I took this job under the condition that I was to have a free hand.”

We’ve heard nothing of this previously.  It seems to mean that from the outset Manning has not only had no explicit orders, no one to report to, and no ceiling on expenses, but even a guarantee that he can do as he pleases.  No wonder he leaped to take the job.  Under those circumstances, it might almost make sense for him to think he could see the President alone if he should want to.

If this reminder of the autonomy he’s been given weren’t enough, Manning plays again on his personal dominance over the Chief of Staff.  He says:  “Don’t go brass hat on me.  I knew you when you were a plebe.”

This suggestion that the Chief of Staff should ignore the difference in their rank and do as Manning says is a reminder of the long-ago situation when Manning was an upperclassman at West Point and the Chief of Staff was a first-year man and Manning could make him snap to. 

We aren’t permitted to hear what the Chief of Staff has to say in response to this impertinence and insubordination.  But it doesn’t seem to be to inform Manning that he’s forthwith relieved of his command and should hold himself ready for court martial.

Rather, he responds by doing exactly as Manning desires, running his request for a personal meeting with the President upstairs to his own superior, who just might be able to arrange it.  And what he has to say to him is apparently so compelling that within the hour the Secretary of War himself is calling up Manning on the phone.

We never learn what the Secretary has to say, either.  We’re just allowed to overhear Manning telling him, “All I want is thirty minutes alone with the President.  If nothing comes of it, no harm has been done.  If I convince him, you will know all about it.”

This is really remarkable stuff – an Army colonel telling his ultimate superior, the Secretary of War, to get him an appointment with the President of the United States, but refusing to tell him what for.  If he can’t convince the President of what he has in mind, the Secretary doesn’t need to know any more about it.  And if he does convince the President, what it’s about will be revealed to the Secretary in good time.

Underlings don’t usually talk to their superiors this way and get away with it, yet somehow this wide-eyed insolence is enough to convince the Secretary of War to place himself at the service of his subordinate and use his influence to set up the appointment that Manning desires.  Even more marvelously, the White House is so responsive to the urgency and persuasiveness of the Secretary when he calls that it agrees to give this obscure congressman/colonel exactly what he’s seeking – a thirty-minute meeting alone with the President with no indication of what it might be for.  And as soon as tomorrow!

This readiness to cooperate with Manning is all the more extraordinary since he will later tell DeFries that the President has a nose like a bloodhound:  “In his forty years of practical politics he has seen more phonies than you or I will ever see and each one was trying to sell him something.  He can tell one in the dark.”

DeFries waits patiently outside the Oval Office while Manning’s half-hour one-on-one with the President stretches into two-and-a-half hours.  In view of the qualms Manning has expressed to DeFries, we can imagine that he’s been unburdening himself to the President, telling him about this horrible new weapon he’s made which is so awful in its consequence and so irrevocable that he hasn’t even dared to mention its existence to his superiors.

Instead, however, when DeFries is called within at last, it’s to be told that in keeping with Manning’s recommendation the dust is going to be given to the British to use to end their war with Germany.  And DeFries has been chosen to take it to them because he knows about it but understands nothing of how it was made.

It seems that far from working to convince the President that the dust must never be used, Manning has spent his time talking him into injecting this new super-weapon into the European conflict the United States still has no official part in.  The price of our intervention will be that we get to dictate the terms of peace to the Germans and British.

In short, it seems that Manning’s intent all along in insisting on speaking privately with the President hasn’t been to spare the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of War unnecessary and intolerable knowledge.  Rather, it’s been to evade any intervening authority, including theirs, which might be inclined to stand in the way of his determination to see K-O dust – this weapon he’s said he should be put to death for knowing how to make, this weapon he’s said must never be used – employed as an instrument of war.

And he’s right to anticipate that such opposition would have been forthcoming, since later the Secretary of Labor will declare:  “The dust must never be used again.  Had I known about it soon enough, it would never have been used on Berlin.”

But Manning has an uncanny ability to operate the system without ever being held to account for it by acting as though its structure and rules are going to be observed by everyone but him, while somehow convincing people in positions of authority to order the things he wants done. 

And whether it’s through the warmth of his smile or his possession of the secret power to cloud men’s minds, in the space of just two-and-a-half hours alone with a President of the United States who knows a phony with a dubious scheme when he sees one, he’s been able to mesmerize him into not only ignoring established governmental and military procedure and trashing the Constitution, but also, more practically, into foregoing the counsel of all his usual associates and advisors in order to introduce a hideous and destabilizing new weapon into someone else’s war and send Capt. John DeFries on a special mission to see that it’s done.

Part Two: Using the Dust

4.  The Death of Berlin

It might be possible to make a case that up until this point DeFries bears only limited responsibility for the events that have been taking place.  To be sure, he was the leading member of the political committee which, snowed by Manning’s charm, made the mistake of choosing him as a reform candidate for Congress.  DeFries has served as a minder of detail for Manning both in Congress and in the Army.  And he did stage manage Manning’s successful re-election campaign in 1944 from his Army office, even though Manning has come to think of his Congressional career as old hat and it is against the law for DeFries to have done it. 

Perhaps the most damning thing he’s done is to speak up at the right wrong moment about the fish kills in Chesapeake Bay and set Manning to thinking of Dr. Karst’s radioactive medical dust as a potential weapon of war.

Now, however, by agreeing to serve as the personal agent who carries the dust to England, DeFries compromises himself beyond all question.  He joins the conspiracy.  He becomes an active participant in an unconstitutional scheme.
        
It is a decision that will have fatal personal consequences.  While “sitting on that cargo of dust” in the course of delivering Manning’s weapon to the British, DeFries is exposed to “cumulative minimal radioactive poisoning” which in time is going to kill him.

It seems odd that something like that could be allowed to happen.  For one thing, it means that the scientists and technicians who’ve been manufacturing and storing the dust haven’t had sense enough to put it in shielded containers.  And neither have they kept DeFries from harm by issuing him a protective suit and armor of the sort they habitually wear when dealing with radioactive materials.  They haven’t so much as pinned a strip of film to his lapel to fog up and reveal exposure to radiation.

Who was asleep on the job?

It’s all the stranger since DeFries himself certainly ought to know better.  He’s told us over and over again just how toxic the stuff is and he’s fully aware of the need for safeguard against it.  We’ve seen him suiting up before entering Dr. Karst’s lab, and listened to him discussing protective gear as a possible defense against the dust with Manning.

So where was Manning in all this?  Why wasn’t he looking out for DeFries?

As it is, having been given responsibility for transporting the weapon to England, DeFries forgets everything he knows and doesn’t trouble himself to ask anyone what precautions he ought to observe in handling the dust.  Instead, he watches over it like a first-time babysitter.  If we take him literally, he actually spends a week sitting on top of the canisters.

He must really be stupid – and he will pay for it.

On the other hand, just like the Army Chief of Staff pushing Manning’s case with the Secretary of War, and then the Secretary of War working to convince the White House that it ought to give Manning a private meeting with the President as early as tomorrow, while DeFries is carrying out Manning’s mission, he’s temporarily granted something of Manning’s magical ability to turn the head of higher authority.

After he’s arrived safely in England with his cargo of dust, DeFries is commanded to appear at a Royal audience.  But he won’t go.  He won’t leave the dust.  Instead, he’s called upon by a Member of Parliament and a “Mr. Windsor” – whom we are to take as the Prime Minister and King.

They ask him questions and DeFries answers them as best he can considering that ignorance is one of his major credentials for being here.  Again, we aren’t told what either the questions or the answers are.  Nevertheless, this Army captain must have managed to be persuasive because the next thing we know the British are ready to use the diabolical new weapon, even though to do so means agreeing to American terms of settlement of the war. 

Surrender to the US, that is.

The Prime Minister’s government will fall over this.  And the King will violate constitutional precedent.  Nonetheless, it seems that both men must have agreed to the plan.  We just aren’t allowed to hear them doing it or why they do it.

After British warnings of direness-to-come and German failure to capitulate, thirteen British bombers – a strange and ill-omened number – leave England bound for Berlin armed with the dust.  At Manning’s request, DeFries is aboard one of them as an official observer, as though it were somehow possible for him to become neutral and objective once again after all he’s done to make the bombing happen.

The planes approach Berlin from different angles and slice the city like a pizza, dropping canister after canister of Karst-Obre dust as they go.  The canisters are armed with explosive devices to disperse the dust as widely as possible.

These prototype dirty bombs leave the streets and structures of the city standing intact.  But so lethal are they that every living thing in Berlin is killed:  Men, women, and children – guilty and innocent alike.  Dogs and cats.  Parakeets and pigeons.  Rats and mice.  Earthworms, ants, and butterflies.  All of them dead.

The narrator doesn’t tell us how many casualties this amounts to – but at the time that Heinlein wrote “Solution Unsatisfactory” in 1940, the human population of Berlin was nearly four-and-a-half million people.  And every last one of them imagined as dying from the dust.

As an index of the magnitude of the death toll resulting from this fictional bombing raid, when the United States dropped two Atomic Bombs on Japan in August 1945, the targets would be substantially smaller cities and the human deaths far fewer.  A sober latter-day estimate suggests that 66,000 people were killed in Hiroshima, and another 39,000 in Nagasaki.  In both cases, three-quarters of the population would survive, at least for the time being.  With more than forty times as many deaths as from both Atom Bombs put together, the radioactive sterilization of Berlin in this story has to rank as the greatest atrocity in human history.

DeFries may have transported the devil dust to England, helped persuade British leaders to use I, and borne witness to the dropping of the canisters over Berlin.  But he doesn’t immediately appreciate the overwhelming, disproportionate, and irrevocable nature of the human catastrophe he’s been party to.

In contrast, Dr. Estelle Karst understands as soon as the dust has been used that Col. Manning has abused her trust and perverted her research in the medical use of radioactive isotopes.  Her choice of the dust to commit suicide is not an accident or a convenience.  It’s an act of moral protest.

The awfulness of what has happened only becomes apparent to DeFries after he has seen films showing the death of Berlin.  He says, “You have not seen them; they never were made public, but they were of great use in convincing the other nations of the world that peace was a good idea.”

There’s a gaping hole in the narrative at this point, all the more significant for being completely unacknowledged.  What was American public reaction to the overnight death of four-and-a-half million people in Germany?

What did the newspapers and the radio pundits have to say about the British acting in such an overwhelming and barbaric fashion against the civilian population of an enemy city?   Did they criticize them for having done it?

When did the American public learn that the weapon was actually a US invention,  and England had only been given one-time use of it in order to test it on Berlin?  Did the President speak up then and take personal responsibility for having sent them the dust and talking them into using it?

How did the Secretary of War and the Army Chief of Staff react when they found out that they’d allowed themselves to be deceived, used, and outflanked by Col. Manning?

And was there protest when the public discovered that it wasn’t going to be allowed to see what this new American secret weapon had done to Berlin, but films were being shown to people in other countries as a warning not to get out of line?

We’re never told.

What we do learn from DeFries is that he himself is a changed man for having witnessed those reconnaissance films.  They make an impression on him that watching canisters of K-O dust being dropped one by one from a bomber at night had not.

In the language of Christian belief which Heinlein absorbed as a child but ordinarily didn’t use in his science fiction stories, he has DeFries say, “…So far as I am concerned, I left what soul I had in the projection room and I have not had one since.”

Heed what the man is telling us:  For all his superficial appearance of artless speaking, he has no soul.

If he had told us so at the outset, rather than at this late moment, it most certainly would have had an effect on what we’ve made of all he has to say.  As it is, his lack of a soul – or lack of a conscience – might go a way toward explaining all the gaps, contradictions and unlikelihoods we’ve taken note of in this narrative.

5.  Secretary of Dust

After the dusting of Berlin, Germany is ready to capitulate. 

Britain is slower to surrender.

The immediate assumption of the British people is that the weapon which has ended the war is their weapon, and they’re eager to make Germany pay for the years of bombing they’ve had to endure.  Consequently, when the Prime Minister reveals the private bargain he’s struck with the United States for its loan of the dust, his government falls.

However, British reaction turns around after the King, rather than uttering words that have been handed to him to read from the throne as is customary, speaks out on his own authority.

Once more we aren’t allowed to hear what someone actually has to say at a crucial turn, only to accept what takes place as a result, even though what happens may be unlikely.  In this case, the King advocates surrender.  And so persuasive is he that his voice “sold the idea to England and a national coalition government was formed” for the purpose of yielding British sovereignty.

Lucky thing for them, too.  Until the British unite in a national consensus to throw up their hands, Manning is prepared to convince them to do it by taking out London, with the prospective death of another eight-and-a-half million people, including his sometime allies, the Prime Minister and King.

Or, in the more delicate way in which DeFries puts it:

“I don’t know whether we would have dusted London to enforce our terms or not; Manning thinks we would have done so.”

What Manning thinks has now become significant.  After Berlin, his power is greatly increased.  Instead of being thanked for his services, given a retirement promotion to general, and sent back to Congress out of harm’s way, a place is made for him at the President’s side as a chief advisor and spokesman. 

Once again, his right-hand man is brought along with him.  Or, as DeFries tells us:

“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, I attended Cabinet meetings, too.”

Speaking in his new capacity, Manning completely dominates his first Cabinet meeting.  As “Secretary of Dust,” it’s his estimate that only a small window of time exists – ninety days or less – during which the United States has the advantage of sole possession of the new weapon.  He proposes that all aircraft around the world not in the service of the United States Army be grounded, including American commercial and civilian planes.

He says, “After that we can deal with complete world disarmament and permanent methods of control.”

When it is objected that this would be unconstitutional, he answers:  “The issue is sharp, gentlemen, and we might as well drag it out in the open.  We can be dead men, with everything in due order, constitutional, and technically correct; or we can do what has to be done, stay alive, and try to straighten out the legal aspects later.”

The Secretary of Labor –  the newest and least powerful Cabinet member, but the most vocal among them now in resisting Manning’s appeals to fear and urgency – concedes that control of the dust is going to be necessary.  However, he says:

“But where I differ from the Colonel is in the method.  What he proposes is a military dictatorship imposed by force on the whole world.  ‘Admit it, Colonel.  Isn’t that what you are proposing?’

“Manning did not dodge it.  ‘That is what I am proposing.’”

Let’s not dodge this one, either.  Instead of hurrying on just as though nothing remarkable has been said, the way the story does, let’s consider what is happening for a second.

This is yet another unlikely event we’re being asked to accept, another whopper like believing that an Army colonel could win a private appointment with the President of the United States for tomorrow while declining to tell anyone what it’s about.

Now we’re being asked to imagine that everyone at a Cabinet meeting has been told to shove over and an extra chair has been pulled up to the table so that this same Army colonel can sit in.  And not merely as a guest, either.  The President introduces him to the various Cabinet members by telling them to consider Manning a de facto Secretary on a par with themselves.

What’s more, this new unofficial Secretary is given the floor.  The President of the United States, apparently in complete agreement with everything he has to say, is content to sit back passively through the rest of the meeting and “let Manning bear the brunt of the argument.”

Speaking on behalf of the President, this colonel-who-is-more-than-a-colonel informs the Cabinet Secretaries that since the United States has sole possession of the dust for the moment, US policy, effective immediately, is going to be to violate the Constitution at home and to impose a military dictatorship on the world.

Even if we grant Manning all the unique privilege we’re told he now has in the story, the course he is indicating is such a radical break with the usual assumptions of American politics that we have to wonder at the temperate way in which his words are received.

As a reality check, imagine the reaction of the Cabinet in 1945 if Gen. Leslie Groves, the Army officer in charge of the actual development of the Atomic Bomb and a man not known for his modesty, had presumed to speak to the assembled Secretaries in such an arrogant, presumptuous, and authoritarian a manner as this.  At the very least, I think he’d have instantly lost all credibility and that the good sense, if not the sanity, of the President would have been called into question for sponsoring this kind of power trip.

Even within the much more accommodating confines of “Solution Unsatisfactory,” we have to wonder why the Secretary of War – whose equivalent today would be the Secretary of Defense – doesn’t speak up.

I mean, there he is, seated across the conference table from Manning at the left hand of the President.  The military is his area of responsibility.  This officer ought to be under his authority.  And not only has Col. Manning already broken the oath he’s sworn to support and defend the Constitution and is proposing to do it some more, he’s betrayed him personally.

Manning has developed a radiological weapon of unprecedented deadliness at the Army lab he commands without informing his superiors of what he is doing.  By some arcane means, he has managed to persuade the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of War to arrange an urgent private meeting for him with the President, while refusing to tell them why such a meeting is either necessary or appropriate.  Then, over their heads, he has convinced the President to introduce this horrendous new weapon into the ongoing war between Britain and Germany, with the slaughter of millions of civilians.

As his reward for this usurpation of power, Col. Manning has been granted informal Cabinet status, and now speaks on behalf of the President.  It’s his assertion that America’s enemies – and maybe its friends, as well – are on the verge of launching an attack on the United States with radioactive dust of their own.  The only way to be secure in this brave new world of Manning’s making is for the US to use its advantage while it has it and impose military dictatorship on the world.  Right now.

Under circumstances like these, you’d think that the Secretary of War would have a question or two for him.  As one possibility, he might ask Manning just who he has in mind for the job of world dictator?

But in telling about this crucial Cabinet meeting, the narrator doesn’t even so much as mention the Secretary of War.  Maybe he couldn’t make the meeting and they had to go on without him, or perhaps he just had nothing to say that day.

What DeFries does recall happening in the wake of Manning’s confirmation that he is advocating the imposition of a global military dictatorship is a counterproposal from the Secretary of Labor.  He suggests that the present moment of opportunity be used to establish a worldwide democratic commonwealth, and then control of the dust be turned over to the new world government.

But Manning replies that this isn’t feasible.  While he personally would lay down his life in order to accomplish global democracy, most of the world has no experience of democracy nor any love for it.

He says:

“It’s preposterous to talk about a world democracy for many years to come.  If you turn the secret of the dust over to such a body, you will be arming the world to commit suicide.”

Manning then sets forth a scenario of an inevitable series of back-and-forth dustings which will kill three-quarters of the world’s population and reduce human culture to the level of peasants living in villages.

If previously it has been the territory of the Secretary of War that Manning has usurped, it’s now the area of responsibility of the Secretary of State he’s attempting to muscle in on.  Up to this point, however, the Secretary of State has been silent, too.

DeFries tells us, somewhat patronizingly, that he was “really a fine old gentleman, and not stupid, but he was slow to assimilate new ideas.”

Now this sweet old fudd speaks up on behalf of a policy of isolation, as though he were an old-time backwoods politician addressing a bunch of yahoos from a stump rather than the man in charge of American foreign policy now faced with the diplomatic challenge of a lifetime.  He suggests that we just “keep the dust as our own secret, go our own way, and let the rest of the world look out for itself.  That is the only program that fits our traditions.”

But Manning dismisses this course of action, too.  The research that other countries are doing – or might do – into the new weapon won’t permit the luxury of going our own way.  What if it had been Germany who’d made and used the dust first instead of the US?  They might have done something awful with it.

He declares that “it is the best opinion of all the experts that we can’t maintain control of this secret except by rigid policing” – just as though there were no problems with the words “best opinion,” “all the experts,” “maintain control,” “secret,” and “rigid policing.”

In the event, neither the Secretary of Labor’s internationalism nor the Secretary of State’s isolationism has a chance.  The President’s mind is already made up in favor of Manning’s fear of Karst-Obre dust in the hands of others who might be as ready to use it as the two of them have been.
                                                           
With two more unconstitutional moves, the President declares martial law in the United States and, in what is called a “Peace Proposal,” informs the leaders of every other nation that they must disarm themselves.  As a start, all airplanes capable of crossing the Atlantic must be delivered into US hands and destroyed.  Failure to comply with this will be considered an act of war.

Or, as DeFries translates this diplomatic ultimatum, the American answer to the touchy problem of a roomful of men all armed with .45s is, “Throw down your guns, boys; we’ve got the drop on you’”

6.  The Four-Days War

There are three gunslingers in particular that the narrator singles out as posing potential threat to the United States – England, Japan, and the Eurasian Union.         

However, America’s friend and ally, England is no longer a problem.  It's already in the act of throwing down its guns, thanks to the King’s radio address.

(Unless, of course, like me you’re inclined to believe the persistent rumor that a canister of K-O dust went missing during the bombing raid on Berlin – I mean, all those planes, all those canisters, all that confusion – and only got found again afterward.  And the British, not wanting to cause a fuss over nothing, were too polite to mention they had it.)

As for the Japanese, they may dismiss the lethal power of the dust as just a story, and they may be convinced that they cannot be defeated, but it’s possible to bully them into submission by pressing the right psychological buttons.

DeFries tells us:

“The negotiations were conducted very quietly indeed, but our fleet was halfway from Pearl Harbor to Kobe, loaded with enough dust to sterilize their six biggest cities, before they were concluded.  Do you know what did it?  This never hit the newspapers but it was the wording of the pamphlets we proposed to scatter before dusting.”

Now, what do you suppose could have been said in those pamphlets – and, more important, with what spin? – that wouldn’t just anger the Japanese, but which having been shown to them would be sufficient to make them instantly acknowledge their inferiority and bow low in submission?  It must have been something devastating.

This leaves those unknown men who’ve been running the Eurasian Union since the death (on this alternate timeline) of Joseph Stalin in 1941.  They’ve put Lenin and Stalin behind them.  And they’ve held their country out of the war between England and Germany.  Now they’re quick to agree to American terms.  They declare themselves willing to cooperate in every way with the President’s ultimatum.

But they’re only trying to trick the United States.  Instead of delivering their long-range aircraft to a field in Kansas to be parked alongside the planes already surrendered by Germany and England, as they’ve been directed to do, they launch a series of bombing raids over the Arctic against New York, Washington, and other cities with dust of their own.

Exactly how successful these attacks were, we are never told.  DeFries says there’s no point in repeating what’s been in the newspapers.  But we’re assured that the Four-Days War was a near thing which America should have lost – “and we would have, had it not been for an unlikely combination of luck, foresight and good management.”

How close did the United States come to losing the Four-Days War?  At least some of the planes that failed to land in Kansas made it through to New York with radioactive dust.  DeFries tells us “we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.”  Enemy planes must also have been successful in dropping dust on Washington since he says in passing that “Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis.”

But the Eurasian Union is promptly paid back for what it’s done.  The US sterilizes the cities of Moscow, Vladivostok, and Irkutsk, with a combined population of another four-and-a-half million people.  And, just that fast, the war is over.

The part played by luck in America’s victory is that one of the planes sent to bomb Moscow went off course and arbitrarily picked the city of Ryazan as the place to drop its dust instead.  Completely by chance, this industrial center turned out to be the location of “the laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military radioactives in the Eurasian Union,” so the Eurasians are unable to make any more dust.

Very good fortune, that.  Like firing a gun randomly into the air and having the bullet fall to earth and kill a cat.  And not just any cat, either – the King of the Cats.  Right between the eyes.

As for foresight and good management, that’s Manning covertly at work.  It seems that one more time, in his role as Secretary of Dust, his authority has grown.

DeFries says:  “Manning never got credit for it, but it is evident to me that he anticipated the possibility of something like the Four-Days War and prepared for it in a dozen different devious ways.”

Manning or somebody ought to have been anticipating an attack on the US since once again, as on other occasions in America’s history, some of them alluded to in “Solution Unsatisfactory,” an incident has been deliberately provoked in order to provide justification for the United States to go to war.

The Eurasians were goaded into fighting.

Just consider:  One of the reasons America had for dropping the Bomb on Japan to end World War II was to make an impression on the Soviet Union.  And enough of an impression was made to set off the Cold War. 

Imagine if you will that in 1945 the United States had gone on to order the Russians either to disarm or suffer the consequences and called this a “peace proposal” as in this story.  An ultimatum like that would have immediately triggered a Hot War exactly as it does here.

Not only are the Eurasians deliberately pushed beyond their tolerance by the demand that they surrender all their long range aircraft to the US and then disarm themselves, the door for their attack has been left invitingly open.  Eurasia’s bombers aren’t collected and destroyed on Eurasian soil.  Instead, they’re pointed in the direction of Kansas and not inspected before they go.

No wonder the attack which follows has been anticipated.  Air traffic in the United States is at a halt and military planes are standing by ready to intercept the Eurasian bombers and shoot most of them down before they can reach their targets.

America is also poised to make a counterattack.  Vladivostok is a long way from anywhere; Irkutsk is off at the foot of Lake Baikal in Siberia; and it’s possible to get lost while trying to fly to Moscow and wind up in Ryazan.  In order to successfully launch immediate coordinated strikes on targets like these, distant from the continental United States and widely separated from each other, advance planning and logistical work must have been done.

If we call preparation to meet the Eurasian attack and then strike back decisively “foresight,” the “good management” part is the holding of American casualties to an acceptable minimum.

New York City is largely empty when it is hit.  A completely unfounded rumor of bubonic plague has been circulated and everybody able to do it has deserted the city.  DeFries has no idea how so effective a whispering campaign was organized and carried out, but he gives Manning credit for having arranged it.  And with such perfect timing that most people escape the Eurasian dust.

As for Washington, thanks to Manning’s doing, Congress has gone into recess.  The President has granted a ten-day leave of absence to the civil service (an authority I wasn’t aware he had) and then left town himself to make a sudden political jaunt through the South.  The only people who are still at home to receive the attack are the permanent population of the city.

DeFries suggests that it must have been Manning who put the thought of going off on a political swing in the President’s head.  He couldn’t have split the scene to save his own skin:  “It is inconceivable that the President would have left Washington to escape personal danger.”

That puts a nice face on it, but it’s bushwah.

Since the dusting of Berlin, international tensions have been running high.  The President has declared martial law in the US and told all other governments that they must surrender immediately or fight the United States.  As a precautionary measure, he’s closed down official Washington and sent it to visit the folks back home.  The American military is on alert, anticipating imminent war with Eurasia.

This is no time for kissing babies, and Manning hasn’t suddenly turned into the President’s chief political advisor.  He’s the Secretary of Dust.  And when it’s the Secretary of Dust who whispers in the President’s ear that now might be a good time to pay a visit to Florida, the President doesn’t need to hear it twice.  He’s on the next train south.

Anything else you may have been told is just a cover story.

It only takes four days for the war to be over – one day for the Eurasian attack, a day for assessment of the damage, American counterattack on the third day, and Eurasian surrender on the fourth.  Very shortly, the President can join the other survivors at the new temporary capital in St. Louis.

So, how great has the cost been to America from this invited catastrophe?

With no newspapers to consult to find out what DeFries doesn’t tell us because it’s been in the papers, it’s impossible to say with any certainty.  But the largest city in the United States, hub of its commerce and center of its publishing and broadcasting industries, is now uninhabitable, and the nation’s capital and all its buildings and records have been made inaccessible for years to come.  The focal points of American life have been attacked, normal existence has been shattered, and refugees are everywhere.

If eight hundred thousand people are dead in Manhattan alone, then at least several million Americans must have been killed in all the cities struck – 666 times as many as the three thousand people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Without luck, foresight, and good management, it would have been far worse.

Part Three: Manning and DeFries

7.  Mr. Commissioner Manning

World order has now been re-established, at least for the moment.

However, a horrific new weapon has been unleashed, the world is no longer the same, and the problem originally set forth by Manning to DeFries still remains to be answered:  How is Karst-Obre dust – which any nation can make, and which cannot be defended against – to be kept under control?

The Secretary of State’s suggestion that the US should hold the dust a secret and go its own way has been overleaped by events.  K-O dust has now been used and used again.  It’s no secret any more.

The immediate answer America arrives at to the problem of controlling other people’s use of the dust – “Throw down your guns, boys; we’ve got the drop on you” – is only a temporary expedient at best.  It can’t be relied on to work for very long, as the Eurasian attack demonstrates.

So, who or what is to be in charge of overseeing the monstrous and deadly Karst-Obre dust and protecting the population of the world from it?

The Secretary of Labor’s vision of a worldwide democratic commonwealth of nations controlling the weapon has been rejected.  Most of the world simply isn’t ready to handle that much self-responsibility.

Neither are the people of the United States.  The President rules out unilateral US possession of the weapon because he doesn’t think America is up to the strain.

As DeFries puts it:

“We were about to hand over to future governments of the United States the power to turn the entire globe into an empire, our empire.  And it was the sober opinion of the President that our characteristic and beloved democratic culture would not stand up under the temptation.  Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed.”

The solution that is arrived at is to establish a special body above and beyond all national governments – a “Commission of World Safety” – whose purpose is to control the dust benevolently.  The Commissioners receive lifetime appointments to their post and take an oath to “preserve the peace of the world.”

The Commissioners are to be backed up by a “Peace Patrol.”  The idea for this body – and perhaps for the Commission, as well, since one depends upon the other – is Manning’s:

“Manning envisioned a corps of world policemen, an aristocracy which, through selection and indoctrination, could be trusted with unlimited power over the life of every man, every woman, every child on the face of the globe.”

These patrolmen are to serve in any place except the country of their origin:  “They were to be a deliberately expatriated band of Janissaries, with an obligation only to the Commission and the race, and welded together with a carefully nurtured esprit de corps.”

Working together, the President and Manning personally select the Commissioners and the initial members of the Peace Patrol.  The very first Commissioner to be chosen, the chief amongst them, is (did you guess?) Clyde Manning.  In yet another effortless promotion, “Colonel Manning became Mr. Commissioner Manning” – yes, that Mr. Commissioner Manning.

As chutzpah goes, this might be compared to Dick Cheney being assigned the task of choosing the best candidate to run for Vice President of the United States, looking the country over and picking Richard B. Cheney for the job.

Were it not for his self-selection, Manning would be an unlikely choice for Commissioner.

It was, after all, Manning who conceived and developed Karst-Obre dust, and men who invent a weapon for the military aren’t ordinarily allowed a determining say in what happens to it after it leaves their hands.  They’re tech people not decision makers.

But Manning has gotten past this limit by inducing his superiors to aid him in circumventing themselves and then by putting the whammy on the President of the United States.  Though he says that if the dust is ever used the world will be destabilized, he’s insisted that dust be dropped on Berlin anyway and been given his wish.  The result is millions dead in Germany, millions more dead in the US, and still more millions dead in the Eurasian Union – as many as eleven million people in all.

Manning was prepared for the death toll to be much higher.

The casualties in New York would have been worse if that Black Death rumor hadn’t worked so well to empty Manhattan, and if the fleeing people hadn’t shown such admirable restraint while waiting in line to use the bridges and tunnels.  And had it not been for that lucky dusting of Ryazan, millions more Americans would have died and the US would have lost the war.
 
Another eight-and-a-half million people could have been killed if England hadn’t decided to surrender, and London had been taken out as an object lesson.  And if the Pacific Fleet had sailed on to Japan to dust its six largest cities, a further fifteen million people might have died. 

Apparently, Manning understood that the initial death toll from use of his weapon might be as many as forty million people or even more, and accepted the possibility.  What’s more, he’s foretold the death by dust of three-quarters of the population of the earth if his plan for a military dictatorship imposed by force isn’t adopted.

Not only is everybody in the world already suffering nightmares thanks to Manning, it seems that Manning is capable of killing every one of us in order to save us all from the genie he’s let out of the bottle.

True, in his new role as First Commissioner, he will be restrained by the oath he swears to preserve the peace of the world.  But such an oath is subject to interpretation.  He’s also a man who has been known to take an oath and then break it.

In view of Manning’s responsibility for the existence of Karst-Obre dust, his willingness to use it and indifference to how many casualties it causes, and his personal history of insubordination, we have to ask whether someone like him, who looks on the dust as a loaded gun held to the head of every man, woman, and child on the planet and is prepared to use it that way, is the best possible choice to be the person in charge of worldwide oversight of this weapon?

Would the US Senate be likely to confirm the nomination of this man to be Head Fox in Charge of All Chickens?  He’s stirred up some bad feelings.

Manning has double-crossed powerful people in the course of his rise to power. By ignoring standard operating procedure and the chain of command, he’s offended and angered others.  Because of him, millions of people are now dead and millions more like DeFries have been condemned to die a lingering death from cumulative minimal radiation poisoning if not from cancer.  Life as usual has been radically disrupted, untold numbers of people have been displaced from their homes, and billions of dollars have been lost.

Manning has to have made enemies along the way.

By this time, he must be a highly controversial figure, this Army officer detached from his command.  Or is he really a congressman?  This unofficial Cabinet officer.  This mysterious man who lurks in the President’s attic and creeps forth to whisper dire things in his ear.

Whether the colonel who invented the dust and then pressed for its first use has any business acting as Secretary of Dust, let alone being made World Czar of Dust, ought to be under question.  Manning may not have gotten the credit he deserves for the dozen devious things he did to prepare for the Four-Days War, but he’s in a perfect position now to be given the blame for anything and everything that’s gone wrong at home and abroad since the war between England and Germany suddenly got so out of hand.

Can he escape all responsibility for the actions he’s taken?

Under circumstances like these, it seems unlikely that Clyde “Devil Dust” Manning’s confirmation as the most powerful person on Earth could have been nearly as uneventful a matter as the narrator would have us believe. 

This is one more crucial transition that DeFries slides past.

When Manning moves on to his new post as Commissioner, DeFries goes with him yet again.

From his beginnings as just another high school teacher with an interest in politics, DeFries has now traveled to Congress with Manning to be his secretary, followed him into the Army to serve as his adjutant, and sat at his elbow in Cabinet meetings.  Each new place that Manning has gone, DeFries has been right there beside him. 

It’s not clear what special skills he possesses that make him so useful, but his continuing presence appears to somehow be essential to Manning.

Nothing is ever said in the story about the home lives of these two men.  Is either of them married?  With all the job changes they make, did their kids complain about being forced to switch schools again?

Or perhaps they’re bachelors, which would explain why both of them are able to pack up and move at a moment’s notice.  We might even imagine their living arrangement as resembling that of lifetime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his Assistant Director, Clyde Tolson, who shared a house together and were buried in adjoining graves when they died.

8.  Who’s on Top?

Even after the establishment of the new oversight agencies, it still remains an open question who actually controls the dust.

Is it the Commission of World Safety and that new aristocracy, the Peace Patrol?  Or are they just a front for the United States of America?

From the point of view of the rest of the world, it would be difficult not to think so.  For all their nominally international and disinterested nature, the Commission and the planetary police both wear a Made in America label:

They’re the result of an initiative put forth by the United States at a moment when the US has exclusive possession of the weapon and has demonstrated its readiness to use it.

The first Commissioner to be chosen is the US Army officer who invented the dust.  He and the President of the United States pick the rest of the Commission. 

The majority of the Commissioners are American.  And it’s the US Senate and not an independent international body which confirms their selection.

Even the arms, ammunition and aircraft of the Peace Patrol must be given to it by the United States.

Ultimate authority appears to remain with the US President.

That’s an illusion, however.

In fact, Manning is in charge, just as he has always been.  DeFries may keep suggesting that the President is a strong and savvy master of politics.  He may characterize him as “a good President.”  But what he actually shows us is somebody who is putty in Manning’s hands and does everything he wants him to.

The President falls under Manning’s spell from the moment the colonel is shown into the Oval Office for their first one-on-one meeting.  If Manning says dust should be dropped, the President drops dust.  If Manning suggests the President leave town, the President heads south.  And if Manning tells the President that he thinks it might be a good idea if he were to be placed in charge of overseeing the dust, the President names him First Commissioner.

It’s Manning who calls the tune, and it’s the President who dances.

Years pass with the President doing whatever he can to lend Manning assistance in the transfer of control over the dust from the United States to the new agencies that Manning directs.

The radioactivity in Washington was short term, and has abated, and the capital has been re-occupied.  However, the emergency controls that were established in the US prior to the Four-Days War have never been lifted.  Even after six years, commercial aviation still hasn’t been allowed to resume operation.
 
Given America’s privileged position, the economic and political restraint observed by the US has been remarkable.  DeFries says:

“The President was determined that our sudden power should be used for the absolute minimum of maintaining peace in the world – the simple purpose of outlawing war and nothing else.  It must not be used to protect American investment abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the simple abolition of mass killing.”

To every appearance, America continues to run the world.  In actuality, however, it’s been engaged in a gradual process of ceding all of its special advantage to the Commission of World Safety.  How this has been managed without active opposition within the US isn’t explained.

But then, before the shift of power can be made complete, the comfortable working relationship between Manning and the President comes to an abrupt conclusion.  On February 17, 1951 – a day that conceivably might be the sixth anniversary of the dusting of Berlin – the