The Green Prairie Civil Defense “practice alert” had repercussions.
These repercussions had long heralded their approach, in complaints and criticisms, gripes and threatened suits. To be sure, Green Prairie took pride in its Civil Defense outfit for the reason that its state was one of the “top-ranking five” in the “National Ready Contest”—and the Green Prairie organization was the best in the state. The perpetual competition between the Sister Cities, like every eternal war between siblings, furnished a further motive for local pride and support: for the six hundred thousand inhabitants of River City, being citizens of another state, shared the views of its thrice-elected governor, Joseph Barston, that Civil Defense was “a waste of money, a squandering of public energy, a meddlesome civil intrusion into military spheres and, all in all, just one more Washington-spawned interference with the rights of common man.”
Governor Barston had made the statement at a private banquet and off the record years before. Somehow it had found its way into print and it keyed a near-universal attitude in his bailiwick. Gentlemen in the state legislature, loath to enter into the costly, intricate affairs of Civil Defense, had been only too glad to follow the governor’s lead and table as many bills referring to “CD” as possible.
As for the politicians of River City, though it was obviously the only worthy “enemy target” in the state, and though a hit across the river would damage them, their feeling was that for once they were off the hook. Competition with Green Prairie was a standing plank in the platform of every one of them. Here was a chance to compete by doing nothing. Instead of laboring mightily to construct a CD outfit equal or superior to that in Green Prairie, they had only to relax—and make jokes about the earnestly rehearsing citizens across the river.
The truth was that after a number of years (and even though Green Prairie had rescue teams, hordes of auxiliary fire-fighters and police, tons of medical supplies and the like) almost nobody believed there was any danger. Few had believed it to begin with. The passage of many years of “cold war,” “border war,” satellite seizure, international tension, international relaxation, deals made and broken, peace offers, peace hopes, peace arrangements—along with the corresponding variations in American sentiment, national economy, draft laws and a thousand other domestic matters—had convinced most people everywhere that Russia” and China were without the technical means to wage a large scale war, would never undertake one, relied wholly on prickly politicking and small grabs to exhibit power, and did not warrant the anxiety of those few citizens who continued to predict that Armageddon was forever around the corner.
Long before, Harry Truman, speaking as if still in the White House, had said that in his opinion the Soviet probably did not have even one real atomic bomb. The Sister Cities thought that kind of information, passed on to the people at the close of his Administration and thus having the sound of a “last-word” confidence, represented “one of the few good things Truman had done.” They were, after all, inland Americans. They had been “neutral” in spirit before the First World War and isolationist until the hour of Pearl Harbor. With the opening years of the Atomic Age, they returned to their habitual attitude.
People for the most part have little imagination and less will to use it. The prairie cities were far away from the border of the sea; its level suggestion of distance and otherness beyond was not present before their landlocked minds. The air ocean over their heads they regarded as a kind of property; they thought, indeed, it differed wherever they were, so that a special blueness canopied the Sister Cities and their sovereign states. Everyone in the region felt that same way and talked about “Missouri skies” and “Kansas skies” as if the atmosphere had taken cognizance of political boundaries.
Every day, many times over, planes left the local airports to fly nonstop hops longer than the distance from the Sisler Cities to the closest potential “enemy” air bases. But, such facts, determined by the simple shape of the planet, were dismissed with a single popular word: globaloney. It may be that people who live on flatlands retain the Biblical belief that the earth is Bat. Or perhaps people who live between great mountain ranges feel specially secure. At any rate, the River City citizens eschewed Civil Defense and the people of Green Prairie embraced it out of pride and for fun.
Both groups felt that the “domestic Communists,” interminably quizzed by Congressional committees, were more a menace than all the Communists in Russia together with their weapons and intentions—an attitude which possibly had its basis in the unconscious fears of Americans during that long period. It was a time when Americans once again refused to face certain realities that glared at them with an ever-increasing balefulness.
What actually precipitated the “Civil Defense scandal” was a trifle. When the snow’s right, however, a cap pistol can bring down an avalanche.
Minerva Sloan, on the afternoon of the practice alert, attended a directors meeting in the Mercantile Trust Company which lasted until six o’clock. When she left the bank, she could not immediately find her limousine. A large, a very large woman-tall and fleshy, imposing, heavy-jowled and bemoled—an English bulldog of a woman—she paced the wide sidewalk angrily and at length. Because dinner at her home would not begin until eight-thirty (when ten guests would sit down to one of her famed repasts, followed by a musicale), Minerva went into the near-by White Elephant Restaurant and took a table at the windows, to watch for her delinquent chauffeur.
Outside, heavy traffic poured south on Central Avenue between the towering skyscrapers of downtown Green Prairie, south toward the residential sections: during afternoon rush hour, Central Avenue was a one-way thoroughfare. Minerva ordered coffee and a doughnut and kept watching. Traffic—four lanes wide wherever trucks were not parked to unload goods, wherever buses were not loading people and wherever other chauffeurs, double-parked, were not waiting for homing businessmen—moved slowly and clamorously. Minerva scowled at this stasis of the big artery and thought poorly of Green Prairie’s city fathers, though traffic in her own city across the river was at least as loud, as slow, as frustrate. She dunked her doughnut angrily and not furtively because, being Minerva Sloan, she could do as she damn pleased.
Finally, she saw her car and ran out peremptorily—also because she was Minerva Sloan and the waitress knew it and would collect from the bank. She held up her pocket-book to bring traffic to a stop and took her time about getting into her car.
She sat back, unrelaxed. “Willis,” she said, “where were you?”
“The police,” he answered, “made me move from Adams Avenue.”
“Didn’t you tell them whose car…?”
“They were very apologetic, ma’am.” Willis’s gray head faced forward and his outspread ears reddened. His corded hands tightened a little on the wheel. He had expected her indignation but, even after thirty years, its majesty alarmed him.
“Then, why did you move?” This inquiry was interrupted, suddenly, by the beginning growl of sirens. The limousine had gone less than a block meanwhile. One of the largest sirens was on top of the Sloan Building, which Minerva owned. It was a double-horn, revolving type, with a ten-horsepower motor. This was its first test. Officials hoped it would serve for the entire skyscraper section, penetrating every ferroconcrete tower in the municipal thicket, thrusting its noisy way through them to the warehouses on the bluffs above the river, and perhaps even traversing Simmons Park, to serve in the same harsh breath as a warning for the dwellers in hotels, apartments and apartment hotels along Wickley Heights Boulevard, which was the “gold coast” of Green Prairie. It subsequently proved that the horns were inadequate: they could be heard better in parts of River City than in Wickley Heights and not in the warehouse district at all. But their effect on Central Avenue was astonishing.
As the beginning growl of the siren intensified, traffic stopped dead. Minerva had time to say, “What on earth is that?”
Willis had time to shout back, “Air-raid practice.”
Minerva’s infuriated rejoinder was lost in a crescendo of pitch and volume that yodeled through the streets, the vertical valleys, the stone labyrinths. Car doors, truck doors popped open.
People ran toward the vaulted entries of the tall buildings, following instructions printed in the papers bidding them, if caught in their cars by the surprise alert, to pull to the curb, park and take cover. It was, of course, impossible to pull to the curb in the rush hour on Central Avenue: the whole street was a solid flux of molasses-slow vehicles. So people just stopped where they were, piled out, and entered those doors and arches marked “Shelter Area”—a designation which included virtually all the buildings and arcades for some blocks in every direction.
The first sound-apex of the siren was not its best effort. Even so, Minerva was obliged to wait till the head-splitting scream diminished before she could make herself audible. “Willis,” she bawled, “get us out of this!”
He seemed ready to oblige. “I’ll find an officer,” he said ·and jumped out with alacrity, considering his age.
Minerva leaned back on the cushions of the car. The siren went up again and this time the noise, surging through the canyons of the city, was literally painful. Her ears ached. One of her fillings seemed to vibrate, hurting her tooth. She snatched the hand tassel and hung on as if she were bucking the sound while riding at a fast pace.
The scream held until she thought she could not bear it and then descended the scale.
Around her, now, was a sea of cars and trucks and buses, all untenanted. For a moment, she couldn’t see a soul. Then she caught sight of two men approaching, men with brassards and helmets.
“Wardens,” she said with the utmost disdain. “Oh, the idiots! The meddlesome fools!”
The wardens were looking into the cars. They spotted Minerva and swung through the stalled cars toward her—young fellows, strangers. They opened the door politely enough, if it could be called polite when rank invasion of privacy was involved. “Madam,” one of them said, “you’ll have to take cover.”
Minerva sat like a she-Buddha. “I will not.”
They were obliged to wait-wardens and the obdurate woman—for another crescendo of the siren. “Rules,” the spokesman of the paired youths then said. “If you’ll step into the Farm Industries Building here, it’ll all be over in twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes! I haven’t got twenty minutes. I’m Minerva Sloan.”
They looked blank. She supposed there were people in Green Prairie, newcomers and illiterates, who didn’t know her name. She waved brightly at the thirty-five-story stone edifice on the corner behind the limousine. “Sloan Building,” she bellowed. And then, because the tearing sound was rising again, she pointed at herself-at the center of her full-rounded bosom where a bunch of violets reposed between the much-lifted lapels of her beige gabardine suit.
It didn’t mean anything to them. They in turn pointed to the entry of the Farm Industries Building, which was newer—and loftier—than her own structure. She shook her head and covered her ears with gloved hands. It helped. The pressure of sound finally waned.
“We’ll have to call the police, if you refuse,” the warden said.
“I wish to God you would!” she answered.
They went away.
The siren didn’t stop.
Stopping it became a sort of willed goal for Minerva. She was shaken by it, physically, and emotionally also. If a thing like that went on very long, she thought, it would drive a person mad.
It went on and on, and she sat alternately raging and cowering, growing desperate at first with the thought that she might be late for her dinner party, and soon becoming a little hysterical with the thought of nothing but the siren and its interminable, buzz-saw effect on her nerves.
Willis, her chauffeur, seeking police, was approached by two burly air-raid wardens who promptly thrust him into a shelter, paying not the slightest attention to his protests. They then took up guarding positions among the late shoppers, early diners, truck drivers and motorists who were by and large enjoying this change from regular habits.
The paired wardens, who Minerva was later to claim had “forcibly restrained” her, found two policemen sitting in a squad car, smoking, gazing with rapt amazement at a city jam-packed with cars in which there was nobody at all. “Big fat woman in a limousine up the line won’t take shelter.”
The cops eyed the wardens. “Carry her into a building,” one cop suggested.
“Says she’s Minerva Sloan.”
The cops both lost their grins. “Let her sit,” one said.
The warden protested in an eager-beaver tone, “We’re supposed to get everybody —but everybody!—off the streets. And the police are supposed to help —if people refuse….”
The older cop batted his cap back on his head and blew smoke. “Look, bud. In this territory, if Mrs. Sloan says she won’t co-operate, there will be no co-operation, believe me.”
The two young men wearing brassards went slowly away from the squad car, their confidence in the law’s majesty somewhat shaken.
Fuming impotence ill suited Minerva—unless it did suit her; unless, that is, it had an object or an objective. Now it could not. She was alone.
The fact gradually engraved itself through the levels of her mind until she noticed it in a new, abnormal way. And she was immediately discomfited. In her life, solitude occurred only while one slept. For the rest, there were people to bid and to do—or, at least, people available at a bell-touch. Now there was nobody. Nobody she could summon, nobody she could even observe. The streets, packed with still traffic, held no human form; even the wardens had rounded some corner or other. The police were out of sight. Bending, looking up the infinite-windowed façades of the skyscrapers, she saw no one. Nothing moved, except high birds, the Rags on the building summits, and the somehow unnerving rise and drop of the red and green traffic lights. Her discomfiture became anxiety.
Anxiety redoubled as she thought how awful, how truly awful it would be to enter a totally untenanted city. Then he thought how much more frightful to succumb to any such idea—to scream hysterically, for example, when one knew all the screaming in time wouldn’t summon a servant or a policeman or anybody. For perhaps ten seconds, incipient panic held her heart still and slacked away the brick red of her broad cheeks. Then she brought to bear her tremendous will. By sheer inward violence, she banished dread and its accompanying fantasy. Her kindled rage flowed back to fill the vacuum. Someone would pay for this infamous trick. She sat back firmly, snugly, in the limousine, studying out possible victims and suitable means, with her vivid, rapid brain.
Minerva was obliged to wait the full twenty minutes. The sirens stopped, but nobody came. Then the hideous horns tootled at broken intervals and people swarmed back, including Willis.
But it was forty minutes before the stream of traffic downtown moved at all. It took forty minutes on Central Avenue to get stalled cars going blocks ahead, a mile ahead, two miles ahead, and to get the drivers of cars back behind the wheels. On some other streets, it took longer to restore traffic flow. Mothers were caught with young children in toilets by the “All Clear.” They took their time about returning to their cars. Two or three stolen cars were abandoned by culprits afraid to return to them. Half a hundred people, startled by the alarm, had failed to take note of precisely where they stopped; after the “All Clear” they were unable to locate their cars. Several people couldn’t identify their own models in an arrested parade of vehicles that suddenly all looked alike.
Willis listened to one of the longest and most vituperative tirades he could remember until finally traffic moved. He drove cautiously south on Central, swung over Washington, and on down James Street, creeping along the edge of Simmons Park toward the bridge. Traffic was fouled again, four blocks short of the bridge.
“Go investigate!” Minerva bellowed.
It was now nearing eight o’clock and darkness had fallen. She would definitely be too late to dress for dinner but with luck she would be at home in time to greet her arriving guests.
When Willis returned, that hope expired.
“The bridge,” he said deferentially, opening the rear door, “is destroyed.”
“Whatever…? Oh! For heaven’s sake! You mean this—this moronic game is still going on?”
Willis peered through the car and across the eastern edge of Simmons Park to the curving façade of the “gold coast” hotels which glittered above the silhouettes of park trees. “The whole area is supposed to be totally destroyed, ma’am. Vaporized.
Minerva abruptly perceived that her aging chauffeur was not altogether sympathetic with her plight and mood. That awareness might have sent a lesser woman into a new spasm of invective; Minerva had scant tolerance for life’s negative experiences, less for impudence and none at all for frustration. Now, however, she saw that she faced total, if temporary, defeat. The next bridge over to River City was at Willowgrove Road which became Route 401 to Kansas City. At the rate traffic was moving, it would take an hour to get there, to cross, and to come back through the slums of her city to her residence on Pearson Square. For all she knew, Route 401 might also be in the area of imagined total destruction and they would have to proceeded east to the Ferndale Street Bridge.
So she did not rant or upbraid any longer. She thought.
“Willis,” she said presently, using the speaking tube, as the car budged along in fifty-foot starts and stops, “we won’t go home. Instead, I’ll phone. My guests will have to make the best of it with Kit for host. Drive to the Ritz-Hadley.”
Around and beyond Simmons Park, tall and resplendent on the proudest stretch of Wickley Heights Boulevard stood the Ritz-Hadley. Traffic along the boulevard was already hemming normal. The hotel doorman greeted Mrs. Sloan wit It a soothing word. She swept under the modernistic marquee, up the marble steps, across the red-carpeted foyer and into a phone booth. She had to come out again for dimes.
She dialed her home, grimly relieved to find the phone system had not been “vaporized.”
She told Jeffrey Fahlstead, her butler, to do the best he could with her guests, the dinner, the musicale. “After all,” she said, “they’ve been corning to my place for years. Maybe they’ll enjoy it once without me!”
“They’ll be greatly disappointed, ma’am. Very unfortunate mishap—”
“The unfortunate part,” she shouted back, “hasn’t begun!”
She spoke briefly with her son.
She then dialed the offices of the Green Prairie Transcript, in which she was a majority stockholder. She asked for Coley Borden, the managing editor, and soon heard his crisp, “Yes, Minerva? How’s things?”
“Things,” he learned, even before she finished a preliminary clearing of her throat, were not good. “This business has got to stop, at once,” she began.
“What business?”
“This Civil Defense nonsense!” She began to talk.
She was angry. She was very angry. It was not unusual.
He argued, but to less than no avail. He pointed out that it was Transcript policy to back up CD in Green Prairie, that she had her River City paper in which to condemn it.
Minerva was not moved, not moved at all. He had never heard her more furious, more determined, or more irrational:
“Two of the biggest cities in America,” she thundered, “blocked up for hours!” Green Prairie and River City, together, added up to one of the largest twenty or thirty American municipal areas. Minerva always spoke of them, however, as if they were aligned just behind New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. “You know what it is, Coley? It amounts to sabotage! Sabotage left over from the imbecilities of Harry Truman’s Administration! It wastes millions. It squanders billions of man-hours. For what? Absolutely nothing whatsoever! Do you know what I suspect about Civil Defense, actually?”
“No, Minerva.” His tone was wary.
“That it’s Communist-inspired. All it does is frighten people.” She warmed to the idea.
“Terrorize them by making them react to weapons the Reds probably don’t even own.
Meanwhile they are completely diverted and weakened in their attempt to wipe out dangerous radicals at home. The last thing a sane government would do would he to get its citizens playing war games in the streets…!”
Coley said, “Hey! Wait up!” because he was extremely well acquainted with the old lady.
“Doesn’t it go the other way around? Doesn’t the failure of the American people to get ready for atomic warfare reflect lack of realism and guts? Isn’t Green Prairie rather exceptional—because it is sort of ready, after all these years? If you were the Soviets, wouldn’t you rather America neglected atomic defense and wasted its muscle chasing college professors and persecuting a few writers? You bet you would!”
There was quite a long pause. Minerva’s voice came again, as quiet but as taut as a muted fiddlestring. “Coley. Am I going to have to replace you?”
Sitting in his office, high above Green Prairie, sitting in the new Transcript Tower which he’d help build by building up the newspaper, Coley felt the familiar whip. “No,” he said. “No, Minerva.”
“All right, then! Stop arguing—and get to work on the kind of job you know how to do!”
She swept from the phone booth into the main dining mom of the Ritz-Hadley and ordered a meal of banquet proportions.
Coley Borden hung up and dropped his head onto the desk blotter. He struggled with his rage. After a few minutes, he sent out the night boy for a ham sandwich and a carton of coffee.
Coley was, simply, a good man—with all the strengths inherent in the two words. He had weaknesses, also; his capitulation to Minerva exhibited weakness. But his courage and love of humanity outweighed lesser qualities. He had, in his life, deeply loved four persons: his mother, his wife, his son and his elder brother. His mother had died at forty-eight after a long agony of cancer. His wife had been killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1952. His son had died in the polio epidemic of 1954. And his brother had become a hopeless alcoholic who (though Coley had tried everything to save him) had disappeared in the skid rows of unknown cities.
In spite of that, Coley maintained unaltered a snappish yet tenderhearted steadfastness.
Every year, his shoulders had stooped a bit more, his retreating hair had moved farther from his arched, inquisitive brows, and his hands had trembled more as he smoked his incessant cigarettes. But his smile never slackened; the directness of his eyes never wavered and his newspaper acumen seemed to increase. The Green Prairie Transcript was read everywhere in its home city, and almost everywhere in the city across the river; it had an immense circulation in the state and a fairly large one throughout the Middle West.
Coley was the man responsible. A liberal, an agnostic, a lover of mankind, a great editor.
He looked out now, through the evening, at the other skyscrapers—some glittering from top to bottom, others splashed with the bingo-board patterns of offices being cleaned at night. To the north, half a mile away beyond the bluffs and the river, rose a second thicket of ferroconcrete, of sandstone, brick and steel: the lofty architecture of the River City downtown section. He went to the window and looked out. Traffic torrents were flowing freshet-fast again, paced by the red-green lights. All four lanes on the Central Avenue Bridge (the “Market Street Bridge” at its River City end) were crowded, tail lamps crimson on one side, white headlights like advancing fireflies on the other. Between, in uncertain shafts of light, were the roofs and escarpments of ten- and fifteen-story buildings.
At all this he looked fondly and he looked out across the flat, winking expanses of residential areas, across the night-hooded hulks of the warehouses, up and down the river where he could see the running beads of traffic on many other bridges and out toward the dark, toward the rich reach of the plains. Gradually his whimsical mouth drew tight and two sharp wrinkles appeared, running from his big nose to the resolved lips like anchor lines. He turned from the spectacular view of the double metropolis and walked into the city room.
Most of the leg men were out on assignments having to do with the air-raid drill. Some were at dinner. Around the horseshoe of the rewrite desk a half-dozen men worked, separated by twice the number of empty chairs. They were in shirt sleeves; some wore green visors. Coley Borden walked toward them, beckoning to others, who looked up from their typewriters. He sat on the end of the horseshoe. “How’s the drill going?”
The night city editor grinned. “Dandy! About an eighty per cent turnout. That means, over thirty-five thousand volunteers actually participated.”
“We’re going to crap on it.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then the city editor said, ‘Why?”
“Minerva’s mad.”
“You can’t do it!” Grieg, a reporter, a man of forty with graying red hair, made the assertion flatly. “The whole town’s proud—except for the usual naysayers. It’s the best CD blowout ever staged in the middle west. About the least popular thing you could do would be crap on it.”
“Civil Defense,” Coley answered, with nothing but intonation to indicate his scorn, “is Communist-inspired.”
“ What!”
“So Mrs. Sloan claims.”
“I always predicted,” Grieg moodily murmured, “they’d come for that moneybag with nets someday. Men in white.”
Payton, the city editor, said, “Just what do you want, Coley?”
The managing editor sighed. “I merely want to undo the work of about forty thousand damned good citizens-not to mention a like number of school kids—over the last years.” He considered. “Every day in Green Prairie, people get hurt in car crashes. All people hurt this afternoon will be victims of our crazed Civil Defense policies. Any dogs run over will be run over because of the air-raid rehearsal. Any fires started. All people delayed will be delayed unnecessarily. If anybody died in the hospitals, it will be—because the traffic jam held up some doctor.”
Grieg whistled. “The works, eh? Jesus! She must be mad!”
“She didn’t get home for dinner,” Coley answered quietly, “and she had guests.”
“Has she got a fiddle?” the reporter enquired.
“Fiddle?” someone echoed.
“—in case Rome burns?”
Coley looked out over the big room. “I was thinking that. Now look, you guys. Payton, spread this. No clowning. You could overdo CD criticism in such a way as to make everybody realize it was orders, and that the staff disagreed. I don’t want it! When we obey orders of that kind, we really obey ’em. Run only stuff that actually seems to indict CD.”
“A lot of pretty devoted people are going to hate it. Have you considered mutiny?”
Payton asked.
Coley said, “Yes.”
Grieg muttered, “Sometimes, boss, even I get the old lady’s feeling. Why the hell drive yourself nuts getting set for a thing that probably never will happen and a thing you can’t do much about, if it does.”
“I know. It’s just the alternative that annoys you: do nothing; lie down; quit; take a cockeyed chance. That, in my opinion, is totally un-American. However…” His head shook. “A lot of Americans these days, a lot I used to respect, are doing and saying things I call un-American. Anyway, gentlemen, as of tonight the Transcript is anti-CD.”
Coley Borden went back to his office, back to the windows, back to staring silently at the area, beautiful in its garment of colored electric lights.
Later he approved the morning lead:
SIXTEEN HURT IN CD ALERT
Sister Cities Paralyzed
“Outrageous and Unnecessary”—Says Mayor GREEN PRAIRIE. September 21: Air-raid sirens, sending the population of this great metropolis cowering into “shelters,” keynoted at six P.M. yesterday the onset of a great fiasco in which sixteen persons were injured and large but unestimated damage was sustained by property.
He was still standing at the window, still staring at the same scene and thinking thoughts grown familiar over the years, thoughts he usually kept to himself, strange, grim and yet honest thoughts, when the early editions hit the streets and angry citizens began to set the Transcript phones jangling.