"There is no excuse for an egghead in your position not knowing what it means." Her voice was strained and tense. "If you had any perception whatever, you would understand what the Moraddy has to give the American people. It's our only hope. And you've got to take sides. You're either for the Moraddy or the Wistick—you can't take the middle way."
I felt completely isolated. "Wait! I don't know what it means—"
"Forget it," she broke in. "I should have known. You were born, you have lived, and you will die an egghead in an ivory tower. Just remember—the Moraddy dufels the Wistick!" And she swept on upstairs to pack. And out of my life.
And that's the way it was. Whatever malignant poison had seeped into the collective brain of the nation, it was certainly a devastating leveler of all sorts of institutions and values. Wives left husbands and husbands left wives. Joint bank accounts vanished. Families disintegrated. Wall street crumpled.
Developments were swift and ominous. The Army split up into various groups. Most of the enlisted men favored the Moraddy, but the officers and older non-coms pledged the Wistickian faith. Their power was sufficient to hold many in line, but a considerable number in the lower ranks deserted and joined forces with the Moraddians, who held the eastern half of the country.
The Wisticks ruled the western half with an iron hand, and all signs pointed toward civil war. Labor and military authorities conscripted the entire population regardless of age, sex or religious convictions.
For my own part, I slipped away from the campus and fled north into the Oregon mountains. It was not that I was afraid to fight, but I rebelled at the absolute stupidity of the whole thing. The idea—fighting because of a few words!
But they did.
The destruction was frightful. However, it was not as bad as many had thought it would be. The forces of the Wistick leveled the city of New York, true, but it took three H-bombs to do the job, instead of one, as the Air Force had claimed. In retaliation, San Francisco and Los Angeles were destroyed in a single night by cleverly placed atom bombs smuggled in by a number of fifth-columnist wives who gained access to the cities under the pretext of returning to their husbands. This was a great victory for the Moraddians, even though the women had to blow themselves up to accomplish their mission.
The Moraddian forces were slowly beaten back toward the Atlantic shores. They were very cunning fighters and they had youthful courage to implement that cunning. But their overall policy lacked the stability and long-range thinking necessary to the prosecution of total war. One day they might overrun many populous areas and the next day, due to the constant bickering and quarreling among their own armies, they would lose all they had won, and more, too.