[Pulpmeister]

THERE is a sub-genre of thriller, really a basic plot, that can be described as the ticking time bomb. The bomb is set to go off at a certain time. The time becomes known but where the bomb is constitutes the problem, and of course the hero or heroes finally track it down and cut the red wire at the last minute.

You've see it a hundred times on TV.

In one memorable MacGyver episode, the bomb was in a mail truck, and MacGyver managed to coax a concrete mixer truckie to empty his load into the mail truck, so the bomb went off with nothing more than a loud "gloop" and wet cement squirting out of the cracks.

It's one of those plots which transcends background; it can be set on Mars, in downtown New York, or Victorian London, and work just as well, provided of course the writer comes to grips with it properly.

One such author is Pat Frank, best remembered today for his post-apocalyptic novel Alas Babylon (1959).

Until recently I had never read Alas Babylon; but many years ago I read Seven Days to Never, (1956), which turns out to be the UK title. The original US title was the rather dull Prohibited Area.

I must have read Seven Days to Never some time in the late 1960s. I certainly owned the UK Pan paperback for several years before, no doubt, losing it or giving it away during one of my house moves. I specially remembered the hero, an ex-SAC pilot with an eye patch.

I have just stumbled across a copy of the same Pan paperback, It was published in the mid-50s in the days of the Cold War, but the Cold War is just the background: it's definitely the ticking time bomb plot. The UK paperback, by the way, has a great cover by "Peff" (Sam Peffer, an outstanding UK cover artist) and, gosh, it then sold for two shillings and sixpence (25 cents).

The centre of the story is a unit in the Pentagon called "Enemy Intentions", an eclectic mix of academics and intelligence types whose role is to analyse and predict what the Soviet Union is up to next.

And they come up with a horrifying scenario: a nuclear attack on the USA on the coming Christmas Day.

The evidence comes from various sources, including the sudden radio silence and disappearance from contact of a whole fleet of Soviet nuke subs; a spate of accidents to the latest Strategic Air Command long range bomber the B99, which are blowing up for no known reason, and sundry other matters.

We, the readers, know that something sinister is definitely going on; specially as the novel opens with a mysterious midnight landing on a remote Floriday beach of an American sedan car from something lurking out to sea; and observed only by two teenagers in the dunes.

The Enemy Intentions group scenario, worked out in convincing detail, is presented up the chain of command, to a senior officer who thinks it is dangerous, destabilising trash and orders all five copies to be destroyed immediately.

And so the race is on. Somehow, the team must work around the roadblock as Christmas approaches rapidly, unravel the mystery of the exploding B99s, grasp the significance of the belated report of the mysterious landing at Florida, and short circuit the Soviet attack.

I remembered it as a hell of a good high-tension, high-speed read, and it still stacks up very well. It is reasonably short (85,000 words), right in the 1950s sweet spot for popular novel length, and Pat Frank's grip of military procedures and Pentagon politics seems authentic. Certainly authentic enough for the novel.

The only odd thing that I noticed at the time was there was no such thing as B99s, but I had no trouble imagining them as B52s on steroids.

If it pops up for you and you like a brisk action thriller, give it a go.