Free The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley Page A

were, to summon the naming sun down upon our enemies. It will, in its present size, devastate an area of two million square miles. There is no limit to the power of destruction which is now in our hands.
    “Needless to say,” he added, “we will never use the Q-bomb unless we are compelled to do so.”
    “What would compel us to use it?” a reporter asked.
    “I can conceive of no circumstance other than its use first by some other nation,” the Senator replied. And immediately he realized he was guilty of a gross error.
    “Does that mean that other nations have the Q-bomb?” the reporter asked.
    “Not to our knowledge,” the Senator parried, and he had hardly uttered the reply than he realized that he had now sown the suspicion that other nations might have this weapon. He hurriedly closed the Press conference before any more damage was done. He did so with the reiteration that with the Q-bomb in its possession, no one would dare attack the
    United States. But he was uncomfortably conscious that the point had not gone over and the Press conference had been a failure. His suspicions proved correct.
    In the midst of the reports, printed over the nation’s front pages, that the United States was the possessor of the frightful weapon, was the hint that others either had the same weapon or were likely to develop it shortly. And hardly had this news been absorbed by the public, than the great alert was sounded.
    It commenced at six in the morning of May 13 with a wail from a thousand sirens in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington. The wail rose to such a crescendo that it seemed all the potentialities of mere sound had been exhausted and some new kind of sensation, a combination of sound, pain, and physical pressure, had been developed. Then the sirens slipped dolefully from their peak down and down and then up again, and then down again. And when they were quiet, they left behind such a silence that it seemed as if there were not in the whole of America as much noise as would be caused by the snapping of a twig. It was as if the sirens themselves had slain all living matter.
    In every part of the east coast, those in the streets, at the first moan of the alert, had stood paralysed by fright, and then flung themselves into doorways and into houses, down cellar steps and into subways and air-raid shelters; some sobbing, some laughing, some with their breath coming in hard little gasps, and others quite incapable of breathing for the while.
    On the New York waterfront, there was a scurrying from ships as longshoremen, stevedores, and crews deserted vessels which had no steam up, and scampered to safety. One ship alone cleared the docks and that under her own power. The R.M.S. Queen Mary swung slowly out to midstream, turned around and headed down the Hudson.
    The captain, after describing the time of the air-raid alarm and the sailing of his vessel, made the following notation in his log:
    Sighted 300-ton brig Endeavour ten miles off Ambrose light. Called her on loud hailer and told her to put about as vessels were forbidden to enter Port of New York. No reply to first message. On repeating warning second time was met with flight of arrows from brig. Vessel undamaged. Continued on course.
     
     

CHAPTER VII
     
    The brig Endeavour, the double-headed eagle banner of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick broken out at her main peak, swept up the deserted Hudson before a brisk easterly. Tully Bascomb and the captain were the only men aboard who knew precisely where they were and both were puzzled that they had not, since firing upon the Queen Mary and hoisting their colours, sighted as much as a tug or a coast-guard cutter. It was a dancing May morning, the sun sparkling on the greenish water, glanced off the skyscrapers that stood like the spears of a vast host gathered on the island of Manhattan. The air was so clear that Tully felt it might be drunk as well as breathed. And yet over all there lay an appalling and ghostly