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their flying equipment according to the traditions of only a few months before. They were sadly
disillusioned. The best bargain most of them could make was simply a promise that they wouldn't be
sent back home and they took that.
It was all rather anticlimactic, and it got worse. Russia was still legally at war with everybody, even after
its flying infantry sat down and made friends. And Russia was still too big to invade. On the other hand,
it had to keep its air force in hand to fight off attempts at invasion. Just to maintain that defensive frame
of mind, Allied bombers occasionally smashed some Russian airfields, and some railroads, and
probably at the instigation of decadent capitalists they did blow up the Aviation Production factories,
even away off in the Urals. Those Ural raids, by the way, were made by the United States Air Force,
flying over the North Pole to prove that it could deliver something besides condensed milk at long
distances.
* * *
But the war never really amounted to much. The Allies had all the flying infantry they wanted to use, but
they didn't want to use it. The Russians worked frantically, suborning treason and developing black
marketeers and so on, to get personal fliers for defense, but Russian civilians would pay more than even
the Soviet government for them, so the Army hardly got any at all. To correct this situation the Supreme
Soviet declared private possession of a personal flier a capital offense, and shot several hundred citizens
to prove it. Among the victims of this purge, by the way, was the Nuclear-Fission man who had worked
out the personal flier from Professor Rojestvensky's figures. But people wanted personal fliers. When
owning one became a reason for getting shot, almost half the Russian government's minor officials piled
out of the nearest window and went somewhere else, and the bigger officials kept their personal fliers
where they could grab them at any instant and take off. And the smuggling kept on. Before long
practically everybody had private fliers but the army and flier-equipped soldiers tended to disappear
over the horizon if left alone after nightfall.
So the Soviet Union simply fell to pieces. The Supreme Soviet couldn't govern when anybody who
disagreed with it could go up the nearest chimney and stay gone. It lost the enthusiastic support of the
population as soon as it became unable to shoot the unenthusiastic. And when it was committed to the
policy of shooting every Russian citizen who possessed proof of the supreme splendor of Russian science
a personal flier why public discipline disappeared. Party discipline went with it. All discipline
followed. And when there wasn't any discipline there simply wasn't any Soviet Union and therefore
there wasn't any war, and everybody might as well stop fooling around and cook dinner. The world, in
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Give Me Liberty
fact, was remade.
Undoubtedly the world is a good deal happier since Professor Rojestvensky thought of an interesting
inference to be drawn from the Bramwell-Weems Equation while at his breakfast of red-cabbage soup
and black bread. There are no longer any iron-bound national boundaries, and therefore no wars or
rumors of wars. There are no longer any particular reasons for cities to be crowded, and a reasonably
equitable social system has to exist or people will go fishing or down to the South Seas, or somewhere
where they won't be bothered.
But in some ways the change has not been as great as one might have expected. About a year after the
world was remade, an American engineer thought up a twist on Professor Rojestvensky's figures. He
interested the American continental government and they got ready to build a spaceship. The idea was
that if a variation of that brass-sodium-nickel bar was curled around a hundred-foot-long tube, and
metallic sodium vapor was introduced into one end of the tube, it would be pushed out of the other end
with some speed. Calculation proved, indeed, that with all the acceleration possible, the metallic vapor
would emerge with a velocity of ninety-eight point seven percent of the speed of light. Using Einstein's
formula for the relationship of mass to speed, that meant that the tube would propel a rocketship that
could go to the Moon or Mars or anywhere else. The American government started to build the ship, and
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