12

Where Chuck Conner stood, the news came abruptly, repeated by Zinsner, who had first signaled General Boyce:

“Three planes—four-engined turbo-prop bombers—now diverted from main wing—

Green-Prairie-River-City destination probable. Approach in Sector two-oh-nine. Repeat: two-zero-nine. Intercept at distance one hundred fifty miles minimum or combat probably ineffective.

Bomb carrier probably equipped to launch medium-range missile. That is all.”

General Boyce began giving orders which were swiftly relayed to all fighters aloft. Then he looked at the mayor of River City, but not with bitterness. “Condition Red,” the general said quietly, “and God pity them!”

The siren stiffened Henry Conner at his desk. He had put in a telephone call and now somebody—he could not remember who—was saying over and over in a faint voice, “Hello?

Hello? What do you want? Hello?”

The great wail of fright went over the city. It rose to a scream. Air raid wardens in Henry’s sector tightened their belts, pulled at their helmets, looked up at the still-bright sky and walked on. “Take cover!” they yelled at all other pedestrians. Men in the rescue squads in the high school playgrounds began rechecking equipment. The engines of bulldozers and cranes roared into trial life and were stilled. In the gymnasium, below Henry, the Radiation Safety volunteers anxiously examined their monitoring gauges. At the hospital on Crystal Lake, the last patients who could be moved safely were taken out. The returning ambulances poised them selves in the parking yard. Superintendents and head nurses began unlocking closets stacked to the ceiling with drugs, medicines, bandages.

At the Broad Street Police Station, all but three men had already reported and half had already been assigned by Lacey to street duties. In the near-by firehouse, the men listened in-credulously. They knew they were as ready as they could be under existing circumstances—and not ready at all.

Henry knew that. He went on with his work.

In the attic, on Walnut Street, the iron shriek hurt Ted’s listening eardrums. “There’s she goes!” he murmured. “Oh, boy!”

His mother came upstairs, again, gray-faced. “I haven’t found a trace of Nora,” she said, waiting for a lull in the sustained bellow. “Nothing. Netta said she just went.”

“She’ll be okay,” Ted answered, feeling frightened. “Trust old Nora!”

Mrs. Conner sat down on the bed, under the college pennants. Her eyes had tears in them.

She held her hands together and didn’t move all during the next crescendo of the siren. “It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said, then. “It really is!”

Ted got up, shucked off his phones, gripped his mother’s shoulders and said something, when the siren allowed it, which changed Beth. It was, under the circumstances, the right thing—and a remarkable thing for a sixteen-year-old boy to say. “Just about every other mother in America has a Nora, someplace, right now,” he told her.

The woman stood up then, looked intently at her son, nodded slowly. Her answer was blotted out by the siren; but Ted knew approximately what it was: “I’m supposed to go over to the church.”

He knew what she meant, because she smiled at him in a loving way and left the room.

He went back to his seat. His damned hands were getting slippery. The old sweat.

The limousine was moving through Pearson Square when the crescendo-diminuendo sound reached its chauffeur. He speeded up, ignoring Minerva’s rap on the glass partition. He swung the big car into the driveway. He leaped out nimbly for his age. “We better get in the cellar,” he said.

“ Nonsense!”

“I’ve kind of fixed it up, ma’am. With the help of Jeff and some other servants and the gardener. It’s right comfortable.”

Minerva listened to the faint and far-off rise and fall of River City’s inadequate warning devices. The sound of a police car, passing in the distance, its own siren going, was much plainer.

Willis was waiting, holding the door, and yet looking away and upward toward the winter lace of treetops and the glimmer of high buildings in the distance.

“If any ‘preparations’ were made in my cellar,” Minerva said, “I should have been told!”

“We thought you might object, ma’ am.”

“I would have! Insane…!”

“It was owing to the gardener’s brother, mostly. He went through the blitz in the last war.

Near London.” Willis coughed vaguely. “You see, ma’am, this house is pretty close in toward town, for so fine a place. The big buildings are only a little more than a mile away.”

Minerva, scornful but shaken, said, “Very well. Come on, Norma.”

“I’m Nora. Do you think there’ll be an A-bomb?”

“I think,” her august guardian replied, “there will be the biggest scandal in the history of this Government! But Willis thinks otherwise, so we’ll go to my cellar.”

Beau Bailey had just reached his door, too, when the sirens went. He rushed inside. “Turn off the gas!” he yelled. Netta, who had run upstairs, shouted back, “The last pamphlet told us to leave it on! Lenore made me read it.”

“Where in hell is she?”

“At the high school, naturally.”

“At the…? Oh. You mean, she really went—with all that junk?”

“She really did. A long time ago. Come up here, Beau, and help me pack!”

“ Pack? Ye Gods, woman, there’s no time to pack. That’s the Red alert! We’re going down by the furnace!”

“And leave all my new clothes up here? I should say not!”

Beau stood at the foot of the staircase, vacillating.

“Where’s that cleaninbg woman?”

“I sent her home an hour ago.” The siren rose and fell, rose and fell. Slowly.

On the radio the music stopped, and Jim Williams frowned. He did not know about Conelrad, the radio way of trying to baffle enemy bombers. But he turned dials and tuned in on the emergency wavelength:

“Repeat. This is a CONELRAD Radio Alert. Enemy bombers have attacked the United States. A condition of confidential alert has existed for some hours. This is not a practice. Not a drill. This is real. Enemy planes, possibly bearing atomic weapons, are said to be approaching Green Prairie and River City. Take cover immediately. Everybody. Take cover instantly!

Condition Red is in effect! Sirens are now blowing. Persons in cars draw to curb and wind up windows and get on the floor below the window glass. All persons near windows get below the level of the glass. Take refuge in cellars and basements, if possible. Instantly. Repeat—”

Jim switched off the radio. “Hey, Ruth,” he called, “you hear that?”

She came from the kitchen. “Yes, I did. I don’t believe it.”

“Neither do I,” Jim said. “Must be a walloping hoax.” He went to the window in contravention of the radioed orders. He looked out. “Some cars are stopping, though. Most aren’t. Maybe they haven’t got their radios on. Or radios in ’em at all.” He snickered. “Just like that Martian gag!”

Ruth’s hands were wet with dishwater. “What a day!” she said, “What a crazy day!”

Jim finished pouring the beer, and drank it rapidly. “All hell would have broken loose long since if there’d really been an attack, anywhere.”

“Not necessarily,” his wife argued. “They’re not supposed to give you that Condition Red warning unless planes are actually heading toward your town.”

He lighted a cigarette. “You think maybe we ought to go out and rally the kids and take ’em down cellar?”

“Let’s see what the radio says now.” She turned it on.

The siren burst into his brain as Coley stood in the outer offices on the editorial floor.

The effect was amazing. Everybody—secretaries and rewrite men, copy boys and stenographers, editors and subeditors—rose together and rushed at the place where Coley stood.

He flattened himself against the wall. As they streamed past, he could tell from disjointed phrases, and even better from the fear on their faces, that they’d been aware for some time of things unknown by the people on the street, the shoppers, the store clerks. Trust newspaper folks.

Some pushed buttons frantically, for elevators. Most started the long, spiral trek down the twenty-seven floors of staircase.

An elevator car came up, and was instantly packed. “No more,” the operator yelled, and the siren drowned him, but the door, dosing automatically, divided the people between those inside and those left standing.

It was a time, evidently, when being on the top floor was a benefit. Because every car came up there first, and when it left it was full, so full it would not be able to stop for any more passengers on the long way down.

There were some eighty people on the top tower floor. Coley knew. It took about three minutes for them all to go. He just stood there, bewildered by the confusion, unrecognized by persons who were united in one idea: getting to the ground, or under it.

Nobody, he observed glassily, was trampled. Nobody was even hurt much. The newspaper people were, perhaps, better used to crisis than others. But nobody helped anybody either. They just shoved into the elevator cars or stampeded down the stairs, letting the slow ones be last. Their feet sounded loud on the steel and cement steps, whenever the siren went low—mingled with the tramp of other feet getting into the same shaft of endless steps, from floors below.

Coley could imagine what it would he like, on those stairs, farther down, where the numbers of fleeing people became too great for the width of the stairs, for the interminable, rectilinear turns.

By and by, he went through the city room to his old office.

There were papers on his successor’s desk. There was copy and proof. There were cigarette stubs, thick in the big ashtray. There was a phone left off its cradle. Coley put it back.

The very walls, when the siren rose to its top pitch, seemed to vibrate. He looked out over his long-time command, the city room. Blue streams of cigarette smoke rose above places at the copy desk where, brief moments before, men had sat. The chairs would still be warm. The smoke flattened under the hanging, hooded lights and became stratified. The place seemed vaguely alive, yet it was empty; probably some of its recent inhabitants were already dead, or dying, down there below in the terrible stair well.

Coley went back into the managing editor’s sanctum. He walked to its familiar windows.

He opened one and leaned out and looked up. The clouds were high and thin. It was going to be a clear night—clear, and very cold. Here and there toward the west, blue sky showed through in slits and streaks, blue tinged with pearly colors. He could only see one airplane—a jet, from the speed—and it was going away, north and west, across River City.

A scarf of light fell down every skyscraper. The day was still bright, but waning; indoors, the twilight effect would be noticeable everywhere. Coley wondered, as he stared at the infinitely familiar vista, what was happening elsewhere. He regretted, momentarily, that he would probably never know. Then, with the siren penetrating his very skull, he looked down.

“Great God,” he whispered softly.

The cars in Court Avenue and on Madison were packed solid and standing still. The sidewalks were black with people. People who hadn’t obeyed the shelter signs. People who wouldn’t stay in the jam-packed stores. Coley supposed others, other tens of thousands, were following the advice of frantic section managers and floorwalkers disporting sudden air-raid-warden brassards—huddling in fear where the arrows indicated shelter.

But the ones on the street were desperate. The streets themselves were already packed with cars and trucks. The sidewalks wouldn’t hold the humanity that gushed from the big buildings. The people, driven by the siren, gripped now by stark terror, rendered of sanity, were trying to make progress over the vehicles. They swarmed up like ants—slid off—climbed again—some going toward ‘the river, some toward the south, some east, some west—all merely going, for motion’s sake. Thinking, escape!

It was like looking down at ants in an anthill calamity. He could see what was happening, both in the mass and to individuals. He saw a woman in purple clothes fall flat and he saw a man use her body, an instant later, as a steppingstone to cross the radiator of a truck.

Then, suddenly, the siren was still. It dropped its brazen voice, rattled death in its own throat and fell silent. But silence did not follow.

From the streets below came the most bloodcurdling sound Coley had ever heard or dreamed of, the sound of thousands upon thousands of people—men and women and children—

in absolute panic, in total fear, in headless flight, being trampled, being squeezed to death, having ribs caved in and legs broken, screaming, trying to escape. The combined tumult of that agony came up the building sides, up the concrete cavern walls, to Coley’s ears, as one sound.

He could not reckon with it in his mind.

It was so awful he wanted to stop up his cars.

It was such a shriek, wild and incessant, as made him want to end it by some act of mass assassination—or to plunge into it, down the long stories, so as to perish with it, simply to avoid hearing it more. He jerked his eyes away from that inhuman scene.

And thus he was one of the few, one of the very few, to see it coming. He would not even have seen it, so tremendous was its speed, had it not approached almost straight toward him, though at a higher level.

There it is, he thought strangely.

It was quite long, dark, but with a flare of fire at the tail end that shone palely against the winter sky. It had a place to go to, he supposed, and it must be near its place. The nose end was thin and very sharp.

Then, where it had been, almost overhead by that time, a Light appeared.

It was a Light of such intensity that Coley could see nothing except its lightness and its expanding dimensions. It swelled over the sky above and burst down toward him. He felt, at the same time, a strange physical sensation—just a brief start of a sensation—as if gravity had vanished and he, too, were a rushing thing, and a prickling through his body, and a heat.

And he was no more.

In a part of a second, he was a gas, incandescent, hotter than the interior of any furnace.

In that same part of a second the proud skyline of River City and Green Prairie smoked briefly, steamed a little, and no shadows were thrown anywhere in the glare. The façades—stone, concrete, brick—glazed, crinkled, and began to slip as they melted. But the heat penetrated, too.

The steel frames commenced to sag and buckle; metal, turned molten, ceased to sustain the floors upon many floors. Peaks of skyscrapers, domes, steeples, square roofs, tilted sideways and would have toppled or crashed down, but gravity was not fast enough, not strong enough; it was only for that part of a second.

The great region, built so slowly, at such cost, by men, for a second liquefied and stood suspended above the ground: it could fall only sixteen feet in that time. Then, in the ensuing portion of a second, the liquid state was terminated. The white in the sky bellied down, growing big and globular, a thousand feet across and more. The liquids gasified: stone and cement, steel and plaster, brick and bronze and aluminum. In the street—if anyone could have seen at all, as no man could in the blind solar whiteness—there were no howling people at all. None.

On the sidewalks, for a part of a second, on sidewalks boiling like forgotten tea, were dark stains that had been people, tens of thousands of people. The Light went over the whole great area, like a thing switched on, and people miles away, hundreds of people looking at it, lost their sight. The air, of a sudden, for a long way became hotter than boiling water, hotter than melted lead, hotter than steel coming white from electric furnaces.

Clothing caught fire, the beggar’s rags, the dowager’s sables, the baby’s diapers, the minister’s robe. Paper in the gutter burst into flame. Trees. Clapboards. Outdoor advertising signs. Pastry behind bakery windows. In that second, it burned.

Busses caught fire. Paint caught fire on the sides of trolley cars. Snow vanished and grass burned. Last year’s leaves caught, the garbage in open pails, shrubbery, tar-paper roofs, the asphalt in streets and wooden blocks, gasoline being poured from hoses, the paint in hardware stores, and the wires above ten thousand roofs—the TV antennae wires—glowed cherry red, then white, then fell apart while slate beneath melted.

Every wooden house for two miles began smoking. And tombstones in Restland glowed dully, as if to announce the awakening of those they memorialized. In that second part of a second.

The plutonium fist followed:

It hammered across Front Street, Madison, Adams, Jefferson and Washington, along Central Avenue and rushed forward. The blast extinguished a billion sudden flames and started a million in the debris it stacked in its wake.

Under the intense globe of light, meantime, for a mile in every direction the city disappeared. In the mile beyond, every building was bashed and buffeted. Homes fell by thousands on their inhabitants. Great institutions collapsed.

The fist swung on, weaker now, taking the lighter structures and all the glass, the windows everywhere, hurling them indoors, speed-slung fragments, ten million stabbing daggers, slashing scimitars, slicing guillotines.

Invisible, from the dangling body of light, the rays fell.

Men did not feel them.

But atoms responded, sucking up the particles of energy, storing them greedily to give them forth later, in a blind vengeance of the inanimate upon the yet—alive. Men felt the fist, the heat, but not the unseeable death that rode in swift consort with the explosion.

River City, from the Cathedral on St. Paul Street to the water, from Swan Island to Willowgrove Road, a mile-sized are, with all the great skyscrapers it contained, was nothing. A flat place, incandescent.

Green Prairie, from Washington to the river, from Slossen’s Run to the tip of Simmons Park, was gone. Forever gone. A vapor in the heavens. Plains restored, strewn with indecipherable rubble, with deadly fractions of nothing.

Beyond that, for a mile, each acre of land underwent such convulsions, such surges of heat and twisting avalanches of blast, as to leave little man might use.

The belly of the fireball flattened. An uprising dust column, assembled by the vacuum left behind the outracing blast, hoisted the diminishing white horror toward the heavens. It went out, leaving a glow of lavender and orange, ascending, spreading. Two great metropolises lay stricken below, as the mushroom formed and soared.

The heart of the cities was gone. A third of their people were dead or dying or grievously hurt. A million little fires were flickering, anucleating, to form a great holocaust. And this had required the time in which a pensive man might draw a breath, hold it reflectively and exhale.