Ted Conner was carrying a walkie-talkie with the mixed gang of firemen, cops and CD people who were trying to crash and beat their way back down James Street to Simmons Park. It was outside his father’s sector, in K. But the Sector K headquarters had been wrecked, and they were borrowing people from adjacent areas. The Wickley Heights section, near where they worked, had been hit hard. Most of the people, the ones who could move, had got out by way of the Golf Course, even people who ran clear across Simmons Park, farther in. But there were undoubtedly plenty more in the big houses, the luxury hotels, the fancy apartments, who couldn’t move, who were there, still—with fires breaking out and a wind that rushed toward the one, municipal flame, tearing loose cornices, ripping off roofs, bringing down walls. You couldn’t leave people there.
Besides, if they reached the park in spite of the fact that a comer of it was enveloped in fire storm (Ted knew that, from Hink Field, which already had planes in the air, reconnoitering and reporting back to the field and thence to CD), the men might be able to cut across the far side, go the long block east, on Jefferson, to the curve in the river and reach the two bridges there. They were the first ones standing, the planes said, and both of them were loaded with people, and mobs had backed into River City from these bridges. They seemed trapped—as well as the men in the planes could tell, flying in the heat, the smoke, the suction and draft and the down-fall of solids.
In fact, Hink Field relayed, River City’s organization had itself collapsed and nobody on that side of the river was doing much officially. The bulk of the population was already on the move, outside town.
The crew on James Street encountered another block: the façade of the Shelley Garden Apartments had slid into the highway. Bulldozers began raging at the mountains of bricks. That meant a wait before the next advance. So Ted walked over to the sidewalk and sat down on the curb.
A bank, with white marble walls, shielded him from the burning sky.
He unshipped his walkie-talkie because the straps were cutting into his thin shoulders. He got out a Hershey bar someone had handed him when they had mobilized for this job. It was limp from the heat but he ate it, wishing he had a drink of water to go with it.
The curb on which he sat trembled with the thunder of the fire. The wind that blew was cold and fresh, though, except for occasional surges of smoke from something left behind, burned and practically out, or safely doused down. Up ahead, dozers charged, bricks avalanched, dynamite let go and men yelled orders. When they had cleaned a lane through the cascaded apartment house they’d move on. Until then, he could rest—unless one of the chiefs or the wardens wanted to send a message. Then they’d start hollering, “Signals!” and he’d have to run up.
Ted took a dirty handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped sweat out of his eyes.
Because of his job, he knew a great many miscellaneous facts that he had passed on to nobody, for lack of time and owing to the concentration everywhere on the struggle at hand.
The diameter of the main fire was just over two miles. He knew that, from Hink Field.
It took in the whole business district, the shopping area, the skyscrapers and stores, the central half-circles of both cities and all of Swan Island on the east, the warehouse district on the west, nine bridges, the railroad yards, and various other “undetermined areas.” For the next mile out, in every direction, damage was severe and fires were numerous but would not, so Hink Field stated, “anucleate with the main fire storm.”
There was no estimate of the casualties. Owing to the delay in warning by siren, an
“undetermined but vast” number of persons had been caught by the bomb in the downtown area.
He knew things like that, miscellaneous scads of them, which had come deluging over the walkie-talkie, intended for others.
He knew more—most of it, too, from Hink Field.
New York was gone. H-bombed. The whole thing.
So were San Francisco and Los Angeles and Philadelphia. About twenty-five other cities had been hit by fission bombs like the one which had struck the Sister Cities, “probably a secondary target or target of expediency,” they asserted. Germ war had begun on some of the people around the edge of bombed areas, and elsewhere nerve gas had been used.
Every state had declared martial law.
Two vast waves of bombers had come in across Canada.
Two enemy aircraft carriers, the existence of which had not been known, had made their way into the waters south of the Gulf of Lower California and launched planes equipped with robot missiles which were armed with “unexpectedly powerful” plutonium bombs.
The bomb that had detonated over Green Prairie River was now estimated at approximately one hundred kilotons. The aiming point was thought to have been the Central Avenue-Market Street Bridge, and the actual Ground Zero, a few hundred yards west. The robot bomb had been launched at a distance of more than a hundred miles and apparently guided by TV-radar devices.
The launching plane had been brought down, in a suicide dive, by Captain Leo Cohen of Hink Field, only seconds after the discharge of its missile.
Ted knew (if he cared to think about it) that:
An all-out counterattack had been launched.
Moscow and Leningrad were gone.
Several other Soviet cities had been destroyed, the names of which he could not even pronounce, let alone remember. The Eastern seaboard of U.S.A. was in rout and panic. The whole state of Florida had been declared a hospital area and casualties from the rest of the nation, which could be transported there, would be accepted. Texas and the Gulf States also had “hospital reception” areas. (Who in hell could reach Florida or Texas when we can’t even get to River City, Ted thought?)
There was no longer a place that could be called either Washington or the District of Columbia. An H-bomb hurled by submarine had exploded there.
Above all else, Ted learned, fear of new raids drove the millions into the winter, the oncoming dark, the universal chaos.
The radio air was hot with speculation. Obviously, the enemy had used only a small part—so far—of his plutonium bombs. Possibly the enemy had now exhausted his supply of hydrogen weapons. But perhaps a rain of them was scheduled to fall later. More likely, the foe had launched his attack prematurely, in order to keep the United States from taking the little further time needed to build an immense arsenal of H-bombs. This was a Soviet “preventive war,” many thought, undertaken with whatever the Russians had—a genocidal, eleventh-hour gamble.
But even if the enemy had managed to prepare only five H-bombs for their blitz, it was enough to panic those who survived. Planes, scouting cautiously, were beginning to report….
The District of Columbia was a white-hot saucer, deep-hammered in the land. The Potomac, and the tides, rolling back over the depression, were turning into mountain ranges of live steam. Where Philadelphia had been was a similar cauldron. Manhattan Island was gone-demolished, vaporized, pressed beneath the Hudson—and the sea was already cooling over much of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and the Jersey marshes. That half of the “Golden Gate” which had supported San Francisco had also vanished: a peninsula with a city upon it. Los Angeles County was a bowl of white-hot gravel. Conditions like those in Green Prairie and River City prevailed only at a distance from the H-bombed cities, in suburbs and lesser metropolises, on perimeters circling for a hundred and fifty miles around each city.
Ted heard all that, and more—more than the mind could grasp.
The President was dead.
Martial law wasn’t working in many states because the National Guardsmen couldn’t reach mobilization points, or were too occupied dealing with situations right where they were to go anywhere else or, in some instances, had no mobilization point left to go to.
People, by millions, were streaming in their cars and on foot and by boat and train and rail and ferry and bridge from all the cities of U.S.A. Unhit cities feared that they would be next.
Nothing stopped these people. Word that no further waves of Red planes had appeared anywhere did nothing to stop them. Even shooting at them as they stampeded did no good. They just piled over the dead and went on.
These items had boiled up out of the babble on the walkie-talkie and out of gossip between parties using it and on the ham set to which Ted had at first been assigned duty. He thought about some of them for a while.
Finally, he got up from the curb, feeling more tired than when he’d sat down. Just around the comer, he saw a drugstore. It was dark inside, of course, not on fire, and without windows.
He hurried toward it, licking his lips thirstily. The soda fountain seemed intact, except for broken glass. The water spiggot didn’t produce, but the soda spiggot did. He got a wax paper cup and filled it and drank and filled it and drank until he was not thirsty any more.
When he came out, he saw, in the flickering semidark, somebody on the top steps of a red brick residence across the street. He thought it was a woman; he didn’t know why. Because she was sitting down, he went over to see. When he got near, he could see well enough, too well.
She must have been knocked out for a long time. But not so she couldn’t get up finally, and make it through her front door. Then—her insides must have popped. At least, she was sitting in a great puddle of blood, trying—his gelid eyes saw—to push things back inside her.
But what stopped Ted was the fact that her organs seemed to be moving with a convulsive, blood-camouflaged, separate life. She kept pushing them against the rent across her abdomen and all of a sudden the biggest object let out a blat and Ted knew what it was: a baby, unborn—
born, rather, right then, when she had stood up to run out—and the woman was trying to get it back within herself—probably it was too soon.
She looked up at him so he could see her eyes in the reflected glare and she sort of smiled as if she were embarrassed and he could tell she was stark, raving crazy. Then she flopped over, but the other thing went on blatting and blatting, its breath catching on every intake.
He was sorry he’d just drunk so much soda.
Back on the comer, they were yelling, “Signals! Signals!”
He hitched into the walkie-talkie and trotted toward the men. “Here I am!”
“For crissake, stay in the main drag, willya? We needya!”