Japan, Merlin-1, and Infinite Worlds

[oldgringo2001]

Hard Candy and Little Boys

Either inflict a Reality Quake on Merlin 1, or create a Merlin-4 this way:

A lighting strike damages the device on the morning of the Trinity test. The device will have to be completely rebuilt. A small nuclear reaction does take place, but only enough to open a small portal which closes minutes later.

(There was a big thunderstorm at the site on the morning of the test. John Toland used a lightning strike as a way to abort the test and allow an invasion of Japan to take place in a novel.)

Japan uses its two giant submarine aircraft carriers to launch strikes against the Los Angeles area using a particularly virulant strain of pneumonic plague developed by Unit 731 on October 31, Halloween night. Los Angeles is chosen as the target because it has no water barriers like Puget sound or San Francisco Bay, is judged by local observers (the Argentine Consulate) to have lax defenses, seems to be particularly prone to civil disorder after the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, and had very important military targets in the Lockheed and Douglas plants (one of them was right next to Walt Disney Studios.) And, yes, it had Hollywood, which was turning out despicable propaganda about the Japanese race, sometimes with the connivance of actual Japanese such as Hayakawa Sesue!!

The attack seems to end as a farce, at first. The pilots have been ordered not to kamikaze anything. They are not carrying bombs; instead, they have canisters built to scatter tiny hard candies with delicious syrup inside.

Five of the pilots are captured (one aircraft disappears.) The public is outraged that the wreckage of the planes proves they were painted with American markings, but since no one was killed and only one of the planes did any damage (it crashed into the Hollywood sign) the Fearless Five become the instant butt of jokes. Sensing the opportunity for some good publicity, J. Edgar Hoover personally takes custody of the prisoners for transport to Washington DC where they will appear before a joint House-Senate special committee including Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson and both Senators from Mississippi, John Rankin and Theodore Bilbo.

The pilots are also part of the delivery system. They have been injected with cultures just before takeoff. The strain usually takes a week to ten days for debilitating symptoms to appear, but it becomes contagious through skin contact within hours, and through breath in two or three days.

Little Boy is dropped not on Hiroshima but on Kyoto, where it can kill the maximum number of "those Jap bastards," in the words of the dying President. The Trinity test finally takes place later that day--with no news from the Kyoto strike as yet. Oppenheimer recited the same passage, and somehow the effects of the Kyoto detonation and the earlier undetected portal opening combined to merge with another Trinity shot on another parallel. The respective Oppenheimers and several other notables present "castled," exchanging places with their otherworld counterparts. It isn't known exactly what happened on the other world.