The Brink

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Ed Carter, a New York reporter on his way to his home town in Omaha for a short vacation, saw the missile in the last moments in its journey back to earth. A sweller on the brink, like all of us, he had no doubt about what it was; Oh God, he thought, this is it. The blast of the impact flung him some distance, and when he regained consciousness, his first reaction was one of surprised to find himself still alive, and not, it seemed, even badly hurt. Presumably the missile had been directed at the big Air Force base nearby, and should have destroyed everything and everyone within a radius of miles. Could it have failed to explode? Carter sees the remains of part of the missile in an adjacent field and hobbles over to it. A minute or two later several Air Force officers arrive. They examine the remains, and find the burned-up body of a pilot. In other worlds, the missile was not Russia's first shot in the Third World War, but a failure to launch a man into space. But Carter knows that the Distant Early Warning line will have reported the missile; that the senior Air Force officers, in accordance with plan, will have taken to the air - in the country's interest, their lives must, of course, be preserved if possible; that by now the retaliatory American bombers will have passed the point of no recall; and that the Third World War has begun. Not so, Colonel Ben Goldwater tells him: "I called the bombers back." Goldwater, the man who had been left in command, has saved the world - for at least a little longer. So he becomes a world hero? Not a bit of it. On the contrary: a nightmare looms ahead both for him and for Ed Carter, and the reader watches it all with growing fury...

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

ED CARTER SAW IT just as he was turning down the road for Woodlawn on his way from Omaha. He was listening to a news bulletin from a local radio station when he happened to glance up; a recent assignment had taken him to Cape Canaveral, and when the first shock had passed he had no doubt what he was looking at.

Three thoughts chased one another through his mind. The first was: oh God, this is it. The second was: how fast can I get under cover? The third was: hell, what’s the use of trying to hide from one of them?

But by that time he had already snatched open the door of his car and was running across the road. The blast picked him up and threw him fifteen feet.

He was Edward Ramsey Carter, age 32, height five feet ten, brown-haired, blue-eyed, and a newspaperman by profession.

Probably, no one in the Tottle household saw it at all. But they felt the effects. The violence of the explosion literally knocked their house down, and everyone in it was crushed to death.

The head of the household was Roy Value Tottle, age 44, height five feet eight, dark hair going grey, brown eyes, a lawyer and prominent and popular local citizen. The dead included his wife, his mother-in-law, his twin sons of whom he was very proud, and a widow named Adeline Carver who was his cook and housekeeper.

Claus Nielsen saw it, but his eyesight wasn’t so good any more, and he thought it was an aircraft coming down in flames. He was driving home after a delivery, and immediately turned to head for the point at which he judged the crash would occur, but the actual blast distracted his attention and his car ran into a phone pole at fifty m.p.h. He was forced to sit cursing in his driving seat for more than two hours before someone found him; he had a fractured leg and chest injuries.

He was Claus (for Nikolas) Nielsen, age 60, height five feet five, bald, blue-grey eyes, a doctor still in practice.

Al Langton saw it in company with his wife; they were returning from a visit to friends of Mrs Langton’s. Langton himself was bored and in a bad temper. He recognised the thing a few seconds before it hit, managed to control the car under the impact of the blast, and knocked up the occupant of the nearest house in order to telephone the police department. Within a few minutes the affair had ceased to concern only the thriving town of Woodlawn, Nebraska, population 41,453, and had become national.

He was Albert Eugene Langton, age 52, height five feet seven, brown hair thin on top, brown eyes, owner and proprietor of the County Clarion, a newspaper of purely regional circulation, and also Woodlawn and district representative of two major newspapers and correspondent for an important agency. (None of the local stories he had filed had ever been used.) His wife was Winnie (for Winsome) Fulbright Langton, age about 45, height five feet two, blonde, grey-green eyes.

Because the time was 12.15 a.m. and the night was cold, no one else in Woodlawn saw it in flight at all, barring Humphrey Bogart Griessler, age 9, and he dared not mention the fact. He was supposed to be in bed asleep. Miscellaneous people had seen it en route from the Arctic, without knowing what it was; rather fewer people had seen it who did know and were terrified. A larger number of people knew of its existence who had not seen it with their own eyes, among them the general commanding, Strategic Air Command, and the President of the United States.

Among this last group also was Ben (for Benjamin) Stade Goldwater, age 38, height six feet one and one-half, black hair and eyes, colonel, United States Air Force.

The citizens of Woodlawn did not see it in flight, except for a chance few. But they all heard the explosion when it came down, and many of them suffered from the effects of the crash. Windows were broken, and flying glass caused cuts; flaming debris crashed through roofs and started about ten serious fires; every building in the precincts of a motel and trailer park on the northern outskirts of Woodlawn was laid low, but since the walls were prefabricated of timber no one was killed. The exact point of impact was one point seven miles from the geographical centre of Woodlawn, a trifle west of north from that point, on land belonging to the Tottle family.

And uncomfortably close to the headquarters of Strategic Air Command.

About sixty-six people managed to reach the scene of the disaster before the official rescue workers, the police, the fire department and the local contingent of the National Guard. These first arrivals consisted of persons genuinely anxious to be of assistance and of empty-headed sensation-seekers in roughly equal proportions. One hour after the crash there were some four hundred persons within a radius of half a mile from the point of impact, including the sheriff of the county, the senior fire department and police officers, and the first man on the spot who understood the situation at all clearly, who was a major from the Air Force base. The area was cordoned off by National Guardsmen and citizens sworn in as deputies to the sheriff.

Two hours after the crash there were about two hundred and ten persons inside the cordon, but by this time they included the State Governor, a lieutenant-general, U.S.A.F., and Colonel Ben Goldwater.

All these people saw the thing lying in broken fragments like the carcase of a rotting whale. But the fires all about it had concealed the wreckage for some time, and after two hours the shell was still too hot to touch. Besides, there was a little radiation, so that taking all these factors into account no one had already gone close enough to make certain what it was that had plunged out of the sky.

By that time, however, they had a very clear idea.

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED TO Ed Carter like a stream of water pouring through a dam that has been breached—with geometrically increasing rapidity. He lay beside the road for a few seconds feeling chiefly puzzlement.

He should have been dead. No one could expect to live when a missile had come down so close.

Slowly and logically, thinking out each movement, he got to his feet. He could see out of only one eye at first, but when he put up his hand to his face, he found that blood from a cut on his forehead had sealed the other eyelid shut with a crusting scab. Aside from that and other cuts, a lot of bruises which ached cruelly around his kidneys, and a twisted ankle, he was unharmed.

He scraped the blood from his closed eye and looked about him. It was dark; the lights of his car on the other side of the road had gone out. But he could vaguely discern the curve of its roof.

Above his head the clear sharp stars shone brilliantly.

He opened his mouth and found that the blast had distended his ear-drums, muffling the night sounds. As soon as his Eustachian tubes were clear, sirens and the roar of engines came to him—not very far away.

What happened?

Shivering, his mind dull with cold and shock, he started limping across the road to his car.

That was a missile I saw, he told himself, verbalising his blurred knowledge. A big one. Aimed for the Air Force base—must have been. A dud? Can’t have gone off …

Then he thought a little more deeply. But they can’t have known it was going to fail. And there’ll be another one—won’t there?

Sequence of events: a missile is spotted coming from the north. The computers say it will strike near the heart of the defence network. Therefore the patrolling bombers will be told off, by twos and threes, to counter-attack before it is too late to give the order, before their headquarters is reduced to radioactive rubble.

Everyone knew this. Everyone knew about massive retaliation. But Ed Carter was a newspaperman; he knew it because it was part of his work, and that made it more vivid. So the bombers would have gone on their way.

It strikes; it fails to explode—the missile. But could they be sure it wasn’t perhaps time-fused? Designed to cause a panicky recall signal to the bombers?

No, by now the bombers must surely have passed the point of no return. And this was World War Three.

Carter’s mind was still too dazed for him to be able to think of more than one thing at a time. His eyes were blinded by the infinitely brighter images in his imagination—images of bombers over Moscow.

Slowly the dark reality forced the imagined reality aside, and he found he had been mistaken in thinking that he had seen the curve of his car’s roof. He had seen the curve of something which had come to rest against the far side of his car after ploughing fifty feet through the earth which was now piled up all around it.

It had been broken open like an eggshell by the impact. But before the crash it would have been twenty-five feet long, and shaped like an artillery shell. Roughly.

He stood and looked at it for a minute or more. It had crushed the body of his car to half its normal width, and had filled most of the ripped-open interior with a pile of soil. It radiated warmth.

Still not thinking lucidly, he went up to it and tried to see through the gash in its side. A wave of used air, laden with the stink of burnt rubber, made him cough and his eyes watered blindingly.

Now what?

There had been a flashlight in the car, a powerful one. He plodded through the heaped-up piles of muddy winter dirt to look for it; it was easily enough got at, for he only had to put his arm in through the broken windscreen. When he tried it, it still worked.

Holding his handkerchief to his mouth against the fumes, he again looked into the thing which had fallen, expecting to see——

He didn’t know what he expected to see. Only, later, he realised it had been something different from what he actually found.

He could make out practically no details. Fire had painted everything inside the shell with matt blackness. A few pieces of crushed equipment jutted up surrealistically from the ruins; white-grey smoke still crept up from a few points. Otherwise—chaos.

Then something which was not wholly sooted over caught the light; shiny. He fumbled towards it, finding a cord and tugging. The cord proved to be attached to the object; the object was round, metallic and light, with a flat plate—the glass which had caught the reflection of his flashlight—let into one side. Vaguely and dimly he identified it: a bone-dome, a helmet such as jet pilots wear. He turned it over in his hands, and the motion dislodged its contents.

A human head, baked—roasted—in the helmet as if in an oven, dropped between Ed Carter’s feet.

When he had got into the air again, he vomited twice. A car’s engine, slowing, broke in on his mind, and he saw that the vehicle was making the turn off the highway into the Woodlawn road on which he stood. He stepped into the beam of its headlights and flagged it down.

The driver stamped on the brakes, barely in time, and belatedly Carter made out Air Force insignia on the car. Then a window was thrust down, and a man’s head—an officer’s—poked out. The officer said, “Bother somebody else! We can’t waste time picking people out of wrecked cars!”

“Just a moment, Phil,” said a quieter voice from the dark rear seat. “Look over there. Driver, swing your spot, would you?”

The driver reached up and turned on and turned round a lamp mounted beside the windshield. The narrow sword of light from it played over the shattered carcase of the thing that had fallen, and there was a muffled exclamation from the officer who had bawled at Carter. The doors of the car were thrust open, and three men—two majors and a colonel—got out. They didn’t say anything to Carter, but crossed the road and stood staring at what they had found.

Carter followed them numbly, his flashlight still in his hand.

“Well, Phil?” said the colonel to the major who had previously spoken.

“I couldn’t make out what Marty was talking about,” the major said wonderingly. “But it looks like we’ve got his missing third stage, all right! Say, colonel, this is what I call luck—to have a dud delivered right into our hands like this.”

“Colonel, there’s something peculiar,” said the other major. He held a radiation detector, and was playing the shielded extension from end to end of the shattered shell. “Radiation is on the high side, but there’s no—no central point. This is a warhead?”

“No!” said Carter suddenly and violently. “Look—look, I’ll show you. Here!”

He scrambled back to the gash through which he had gone before, and swung the circle of his flashlight down so that it centred on the ruined human head he had let fall.

The colonel came up behind him, slipped past him, and picked it up in his bare hands. “Poor brave bastard,” he said softly. “Poor brave bastard …”

“Well I’ll be god-damned!” said the major called Phil. “But this means——”

“This means you’d better call Marty Gotobed at the crash site and tell him we’ve found what he thought was missing,” said the colonel abstractedly. He cradled the head in the crook of his arm and came back into the open air. “But call the base first and tell ’em what we’ve got. Get some men out here immediately. Joe, would you take the car up to the turn and block off the entrance to this road? Fewer people we have nosing about, the better I’ll be pleased.”

The major with the radiation detector nodded and went back to the vehicle. Phil had already picked up the handset of the car radio and was speaking urgently in low tones; as . . .