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Read Ebook: Minor Detail by Sharkey Jack
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Ebook has 98 lines and 6217 words, and 2 pages
MINOR DETAIL
The Secretary of Defense, flown in by special plane from the new Capitol Building in Denver, trotted down the ramp with his right hand outstretched before him.
At the base of the ramp his hand was touched, clutched and hidden by the right hand of General "Smiley" Webb in a hearty parody of a casual handshake. General Webb did everything in a big way, and that included even little things like handshakes.
Retrieving his hand once more, James Whitlow, the Secretary of Defense, smiled nervously with his tiny mouth, and said,
"Well, here I am."
This statement was taken down by a hovering circle of news reporters, dispatched by wireless and telephone to every town in the forty-nine states, expanded, contracted, quoted and misquoted, ignored and misconstrued, and then forgotten; all this in a matter of hours.
The nation, hearing it, put aside its wonted trepidations, took an extra tranquilizer or two, and felt secure once more. The government was in good hands.
Leaving the reporters in a disgruntled group beyond the cyclone-fence-and-barbed-wire barriers surrounding Project W, General Webb, seated beside Whitlow in the back of his private car, sighed and folded his arms.
"You'll be amazed!" he chortled, nudging his companion with a bony elbow.
"I--I expect so," said Whitlow, clinging to his brief case with both hands. It contained, among other things, a volume of mystery stories and a ham sandwich, neatly packaged in aluminum foil. Whitlow didn't want to chance losing it. Not, at least, until he'd eaten the sandwich.
"Of course, you're wondering where I got the idea for my project," said "Smiley" Webb, adding, for the benefit of his driver, "Keep your eyes on the road, Sergeant! The WAC barracks will still be there when you get off duty!"
"Yes, sir," came a hollow grunt from the front seat.
"Weren't you?" asked General Webb, gleaming a toothy smile in Whitlow's direction.
"Wondering about the project!" snapped the general.
"To be sure. To be sure," General Webb muttered. He didn't much like tartness in responses, but the Secretary of Defense, unfortunately, was hardly a subordinate, and therefore not subject to the general's choler. Silly little ass! he said to himself. Rather liking the sound of the words--albeit in his mind--he repeated them over again, adding embellishments like "pompous" and "mousy" and "squirrel-eyed." After three or four such thoughts, the general felt much better.
They drove onward, then, in silence, until they passed by a large field, in the center of which Whitlow could discern the outlines of an immense bull's-eye, in front of a tall, somewhat rickety khaki-colored reviewing stand, draped in tired bunting.
"What's that?" asked Whitlow, relinquishing his grip on his brief case long enough to point toward the field.
"Many hours?" Whitlow asked, thinking of the ham sandwich.
General Webb consulted a magnificent platinum timepiece anchored to his thick hairy wrist by a stout leather strap.
"In exactly one hour, thirty-seven minutes, and forty-three-point-oh-oh-nine seconds!" he said, proudly.
"Thank you," Whitlow sighed. "You're certainly running this thing--whatever it is--in an efficient manner."
Passwords, signs, countersigns, combination-locks and electronic recognition signals were negotiated one by one, until Whitlow was despairing of ever getting into the heart of Project W. He said as much to General Webb, who merely flashed the grin which gave him his nickname, and opened a final door.
For a moment, Whitlow thought he was going deaf. The shrill roar of screeching metal and throbbing dynamos that pounded at his eardrums began to fuddle his mind, until General Webb handed him a small cardboard box--also stamped, like every door and wall in the place, "Top Secret"--in which his trembling fingers located two ordinary rubber earplugs, which he instantly put to good use.
"There she is!" said General Webb, proudly, gesturing over the railing of the small balcony upon which they stood. "The Whirligig!"
"What?" called Secretary of Defense Whitlow, shaking his head to indicate he hadn't heard a word.
Somewhat piqued, but resigned, General Webb leaned his wide mouth nearly up against Whitlow's small pink plugged ear, and roared the same information at the top of his lungs.
Whitlow, a little stunned by the volume despite the plugs, nodded wearily, to indicate that he'd heard, then asked, in a high, piping voice, "What's it for?"
Whitlow strained his eyes to divine anything that might give a clue as to just what the government had been pouring money into for the past eight months. All he saw was what appeared to be a sort of ferris-wheel, except that it was revolving in a horizontal plane. The structure was completely enclosed in metal, and was whirling too fast for even the central shaft to be anything but a hazy, silver-blue blur.
"I see it," he shouted, squeakily. "But I don't understand it!"
"Come with me," said General Webb, re-opening the door at their backs. He was just about to step through when, with a quick blush of mortification, he remembered the "Top Secret" earplugs. Hastily, averting his face lest the other man see his embarrassment, he returned his plugs to their box, and did the same with Whitlow's.
Whitlow was glad when the door closed behind them.
"My office is this way," said Webb, striding off in a stiff military manner.
Whitlow, with a forlorn shrug, could do nothing but clutch his brief case and follow.
"It's this way," General Webb began, once they were seated uncomfortably in his office. From a pocket in his khaki jacket, Webb had produced a big-bowled calabash pipe, and was puffing its noxious gray fumes in all directions while he spoke. "Up until the late fifties, war was a simple thing ..."
Oh, not the March of Science Speech! said Whitlow to himself. He knew it by heart. It was the talk of the Capitol, and the nightmare of military strategists. As the general's voice droned on and on, Whitlow barely listened. The general, Top Secret or no Top Secret, was divulging nothing that wasn't common knowledge from the ruins of Philadelphia to the great Hollywood crater ...
In order to win a war, a country must be vanquished. In order to vanquish a country, soldiers must be landed. And that was precisely wherein the difficulty lay: landing the soldiers.
Ships were nearly obsolete in this respect. Landing barges could be blown out of the water as fast as they were let down into it.
Paratroops were likewise hopeless. The slow-moving troop-carrying planes daren't even peek above the enemy's horizon without chancing an onslaught of "thinking" rockets that would stay on their trail until they were molten cinders falling into the sea.
So someone invented the supersonic carrier. This was pretty good, allowing the planes to come in high and fast over the enemy's territory, as fast as the land-to-air missiles themselves. The only drawback was that the first men to try parachuting at that speed were battered to confetti by the slipstream of their own carriers. That would not do.
Next, someone thought of the capsules. Each man was packed into a break-proof, shock-proof, water-proof, wind-proof plastic capsule, and ejected safely beyond the slipstream area of the carriers, at which point, each capsule sprouted a silken chute that lowered the enclosed men gently down into range of the enemy's rocket-fire ...
This plan was scrapped like the others.
And so, things were at a stalemate. There hadn't been a really good skirmish for nearly five years. War was hardly anything but a memory, what with both sides practically omnipotent. Unless troops could be landed, war was downright impossible. And, no one could land troops, so there was no war.
But the Capitol, under the relentless lobbying of the munitions interests, was trying to find a way to get a war started.
This plan had been scrapped as too dangerous.
And then, just when all seemed lost, when it looked as though mankind was doomed to eternal peace ...
Along came General "Smiley" Webb.
"Land troops?" he'd said, confidently, "nothing easier. With the government's cooperation, I can have our troops in any country in the world, safely landed, within the space of one year!"
There'd been swift phone-calls from Denver to Project W, and, General Webb informed them, not only was all the money to be accounted for, but so was all the time and effort: the project was completed, and about to be tested. Would someone like to come down and watch?
Someone would.
And thus it was that James Whitlow, with mystery stories and ham sandwich, had taken the first plane from the Capitol ...
"I beg your pardon?" said the Secretary of Defense.
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