Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth Read Free Book Online Page A

exaggerated.
    She saw Colonel Platov every now and then from a distance; he was the big brass of SMGU 449. He looked like a middleaged career soldier, no more and no less. He seemed to be a bug on spit and polish. People observed him bawling out sentries over buttons and shoelaces and suchlike. There were always plenty of K.P.s in the mess tent on the high school campus.
    What else was new? Well, there was a twenty-four-hour guard on each of the town’s two liquor shops to keep soldiers from looting or trying to purchase. There seemed to be movies every evening in the school auditorium. There was a ferocious physical-fitness program going on; SMGU 449 started the day with fifty knee bends, fifty straddle hops, and fifty pushups, from Platov on down, rain or shine, on the athletic field. They also played soccer when off duty and they sang interminably. Wherever there were more than two Russians gathered with nothing to do, out came a concertina or a uke-sized balalaika and they were off.
    A big, fat cook shopped in town for the officers’ mess, which must be located in the school cafeteria. The enlisted men lived on tea, breakfast slop called kasha , black bread, jam, and various powerful soups involving beef, cabbage, potatoes, and beets. The ingredients came in red-star trucks from the South.
    Rumors? Well, she had a few and she was passing them on just for entertainment. The Russians would shortly be joined by their wives. They would close all the churches in Chiunga Center. They would not close any of the churches but instead would forcibly baptize everybody as Greek Orthodox. Demobilization of the United States Army would be completed by next week. Demobilization of the United States Army would be begun next month. The United States Army was being shipped in cattle boats to Siberia. The United States Army had disintegrated and the boys and girls were finding their way home on foot. The United States Army Atomic Service had made off with two tons of plutonium from Los Alamos before the surrender—
    As that one ran through his mind, Justin suddenly straightened up from the tangled wire.
    Two tons of plutonium was enough for eighty atomic bombs. It seems that in any machine shop you could put the bombs together if you had the plutonium.
    Two tons of plutonium adrift somewhere in the United States, scattered but in the hands of men who knew what they were doing, might explain quite a few things that had recently puzzled him.
    And the thought gave him a stab of painful hope. It let him feel at last the full anguish of the defeat, the reality of it. He burned with shame suddenly for his lick-spittle acceptance of firm-but-fair Lieutenant Zoloty and his gratitude, his disgusting gratitude that they had raised his norm no higher, his pleasure at Captain Kirilov’s bored compliment about the pigs.
    Suddenly the defeat was real and agonizing. Two tons of plutonium had made it so.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “Good drying weather,” the radio had been saying for days. Justin, breaking clods and weeding in his cornfield, reflected that once you would have called it the beginning of a serious drought. The passage of two months, however, had made pessimism unfashionable—almost dangerous. Not that he was afraid. Nobody had anything on Billy Justin; he met his quota and he had been left alone…
    Until now. A jeep was tooting impatiently for him in front of his house. More foolishness, he supposed, with Kirilov and his interpreter. At least it would be a break in the weeding.
    There was only one Russian there, however; some kind of sergeant. He said: “Fermer Yoostin?”
    “I guess so,” Justin said.
    The sergeant handed him a sheet of ugly two-column printing on flimsy paper; Russian on the left, English on the right. Readjustment of Agricultural Norm—W. Justin . Good! Now, how much were they going to cut from—He hauled up short at the words filled in, “increase 1 cwt per 2 wks.”
    He said angrily to the sergeant: “In this