Tomorrow! (25 page)

Jim went into the front hall and soon returned. He looked unhappy. “For you, Hank. Man who sounds upset.”

Henry Conner lumbered into the hall and said cheerfully, half playfully, “Merry Christmas. This is Henry.”

A very shaky voice came to his ears. “Henry Conner?”

“That’s right. Who is it? What’s the—”

“Been trying to reach you for half an hour! This is headquarters. Brock speaking.

Condition Yellow.”

Henry felt as if he’d been hit with a forty-five slug. His knees wobbled and he sat down hard on the hall chair. Then he realized it must be either a gag or some crazy test. If it was a test, it was a terrible time for one. Next, he realized that this sort of situation had been envisaged, and a code designed to cover it, so that only those who knew the code could check back on the announcement. For a moment, the proper words were swept out of his mind. He cudgeled his brain and said, in a voice that was nothing like his own, “How many sacks of potatoes?”

“Maine potatoes,” the voice replied. “And Idahos. I’ve got to break off.”

That was the question. That was the answer. It wasn’t a grim practical joke. It wasn’t a test.

It was Condition Yellow.
Real.

So many things happened in his mind that he was astonished by the mere capacity to think of them all.

He would have to leave and so would Ted. Chuck could stay—no—Chuck was “military personnel” and entitled to the information.

It was going to ruin the pre-Christmas party.

And—What in God’s name am
I
thinking about a party, for?
Hashed in his head.

“Condition Yellow,” in its latest construction, meant that enemy airplanes had been recognized over continental U.S.A. It was an alert, currently confidential, which was intended to reach and mobilize all Civil Defense people, police, firemen and other city employees, as well as

“key” technicians in industry. For years, for many tedious years of drill, the inhabitants of big cities had planned for Condition Yellow. Henry thought, in the tumbling, muscle-weakening scramble of his mind, that all over America, men like himself, and women, would be reacting the same way to the identical two words.

Condition Yellow.

At the time they’d dreamed up a code to check alerts, Henry had thought the idea absurd.

He was glad now they’d done it. Green Prairie people like himself could at least be sure that CD

headquarters—and that meant the military—believed the risk was great enough to warrant the shock and disturbance of a complete but quiet official turnout, on the Saturday before Christmas.

Next Henry thought of the Air Force “exercises” which had been going on for a month.

The probabilities were a hundred to one that some flight of our own bombers, off course somewhere, over California or New York or Alaska—anywhere—had been mistaken for enemy planes. It was a thought that immediately, or soon, Hashed through the minds of some millions of city dwellers who picked up telephones all over U.S.A. and heard the two words:
Condition Yellow.

With the skies above the continent crossed and crisscrossed by American flights, how could they be sure? Why wouldn’t spotters be liable to error? After all, there hadn’t been any sign of hostility whatever on the enemy’s part.

Even men at the top of military and Government intelligence agencies—men “cleared” to know all the known facts—hesitated. There had been nothing from behind the Iron Curtain to indicate the assembly of long-range planes, the gassing up, the bombing up, the vast number of activities required to launch a “surprise” attack. If this was “it,” the experts thought almost as one man, the Soviets had outdone the Japs in their surprise onslaught on Pearl.

The experts, however, reacted dutifully. Others did not.

In cities on the West Coast, the East Coast, and in the South and the Middle West, hundreds of thousands of ordinary persons, men and women, ready for Christmas, thinking the world on the verge of assured and eternal peace, decided for themselves. They were not as well indoctrinated in the meaning of duty as the professionals. It
had
to be an error, these myriads thought-and went back to lunch, to the TV set, to mowing the lawn in Miami and shoveling snow in Detroit.

Not Henry.

When his brother-in-law came into the hall and said, “Something wrong? You’re ghost-white!” Henry smiled and nodded.

“Maybe, Jim.
Look.
Don’t say anything to the women.

Ask Chuck to step in, willya?”

Charles came.
“Lord,
Dad! What’s
wrong?”

Henry motioned. Charles shut the hall door. His father said, “Just reached me from CD.

Condition Yellow, Chuck.”

The soldier, in the dark blue suit, lost color also. Fear jumped into his eyes and was mastered. His pale lips moved. “That’s—what—I’ve been scared of.”

“You think it could be the McCoy? Or some
error
. . . ?”

Chuck strode to the phone, snatched it up, thought a moment and dialed. He waited, then set the phone down. “I called Hink Field—on a special number. Busy. So I can’t say. But we can’t take chances now.”

“On the other hand, I’d hate like the devil to scare Beth and Ruth and the kids half to death-and find it was a bloomer.”

“That’s true. Suppose you take our car, and Ted—he’s due to report, isn’t he?—and go.

I’ll try the phone awhile. We can tell the folks it’s a practice-for the moment. I’ll come along—

on Willowgrove, to keep clear of the Christmas crowds—right after dinner.”

“That’ll do,” Henry decided. He bellowed up the stairs, “Hey, Ted! Hurry down! The fools have called a practice alert and you and I have to make tracks!”

The door from the hall into the kitchen flew open. Two indignant women stood there.

“Henry,” Beth said, firmly, “this is
really
too much!”

“Of all the idiotic ideas, on a Saturday, at dinnertime!” Huth added.

Jim Williams came through the living-room door. “You two stay right here, Hank. This damn fool defense thing has gone too far.”

“Long as I’m in it, I have no choice.” Henry was shrugging into his coat, the blue one with the velvet collar. He threw a meaningful glance at his older son. “I’ll rely on you, Chuck, for everything. Come on, Ted; get cracking.”

Below West Broad Street, the mammoth tile in which Nora walked became steadily darker. She had grown accustomed to the short spaces of darkness between the streets; each one, though inky enough to hide her feet from her own view, showed ahead the ever-brightening illumination from the next street. As she walked on from Broad, however, she remembered what a long distance it was to the Washington Avenue intersection. She couldn’t see any light at all. Yet she went ahead, believing the darkness would yield in the next few steps to at least the dim evidence of light from the manhole at Broad.

No such thing happened. The curved walls closed over her head, at a point about half again as high as she was. The darkness thickened, deepened, and the echoing sound of her arctic-shod feet came back in a muffled fashion from the distances. She looked back. The light from Broad was dim and far behind. A sense of compression, and with it a gnawing anxiousness, began to replace her eager determination. Still she went on, and steadily she lost the confidence that her progress had established.

Suppose, she thought, it suddenly
drops.
She went ahead cautiously after that notion, feeling with her foot before she stepped.

Traffic bumbled and shook the place. She put a hand out, touched the damp side of the tube, moved slower, slower. The tunnel was curving now, but the curve was so gradual that she could not discern it in the dark. She did not notice any change until she looked back-for the wan comfort of the distant light—and saw it had vanished.

Panic touched her for the first time.

Yet it was not absolute panic. Had it been, she would have turned, fled whence she had come, screaming, perhaps. Instead, she stopped, shivered, and listened to her own hard breathing.

By an act of will, of self-scolding, she brought hack a measure of composure. Surely, she thought, it would be shorter to go ahead than the long way back to Broad Street. She admitted she was scared, which helped. And she determined to come out at the very next manhole. No more sewer-walking for her.

She had gone perhaps another hundred feet when two things happened simultaneously.

She became conscious of light, dim and somehow different, up ahead. It showed the tubular walls faintly. The bend was also disclosed, and Nora realized why she had lost the Broad Street light to view. But, at the same time, the geography of the city below Broad leaped into her mind: River Avenue slanted straight through Restland Cemetery before it reached Washington and she, presumably, was
under
the graveyard right here! The thought caused her flesh to prickle and a sprinkling sweat to burst out on her body. She felt too weak to move, too scared to scream, and yet unwilling to slide down into the trickling water that marked the exact bottom of the great pipe.

But she felt the dead all around her, not reckoning that the sewer had curved for the very purpose of avoiding the graveyard. She also saw the light ahead was not the white glaze of day, but yellowish, and it seemed to
flicker
.

Then, as her horror mounted, she heard voices.

Nora screamed.

She screamed repeatedly and the voices were still. She, also, listened, and screamed again. For she heard ghostly feet running and the yellowish glow began to waver.

The dead, disturbed,
were coming for her.

Civil Defense headquarters for Green Prairie had been originally located in the midtown area, near City Hall. Its transference to an old high school building, on the east side of town, had followed the gradual realization that, if Civil Defense were taken earnestly, it followed that the midtown area was no place for headquarters: it would constitute the target area of any enemy attack. The present headquarters, unused by pupils after the construction of East High School, was a yellow brick structure set back from the intersection of Willowgrove and Adams.

Henry drove around the corner and into the parking yard on chattering tires. Other cars were ahead, others behind, and cars were waiting in line for space.

“Why don’t I drive on home and get my set going?” Ted asked.

“You’re too young to . . .” Henry grunted and turned from the line. “Take it home, son,”

he said gently. “And go easy, because if the cops pick you up, we won’t have any communications at all. I’ll hitch a ride from here to the South School to assemble my section. If you can, lemme know when the folks get home.”

Henry said that over his shoulder. Men were running, like himself, into the school building. A few spoke his name. One or two called, “Know anything?”

Then they were in the lobby, at the place where they’d learned in the many drills that sector wardens were to report, if possible in person, otherwise by proxy, in emergency.

Douglas McVeigh was standing at the top of the steps on something—a table, maybe. Men and women ran in, saw him and either ran on to their posts because they belonged in H.Q., or stopped for orders.

That plan was working, Henry observed. Thirty or forty volunteers had gathered where McVeigh stood above them in as many, or as few, seconds.

“All personnel to their posts,” McVeigh was saying as Henry rushed in and was recognized. “Hi, there, Hank.”

“How”—Hank struggled to phrase the burning question in every mind—“how
authentic
is it, Doug?” He realized, as he spoke, he needn’t have doubted any longer. Doug McVeigh was stone grim, for all the ease with which he spoke, waved, nodded. He was using every ounce of his Scotch steel to hold himself that way: easy-seeming.

McVeigh glanced around, waited for a half-dozen new arrivals. “This is
it,
folks. A very large flight of long-range bombers is somewhere over Canada, right now.”

A woman began to cry audibly.

“No time for
that!”
McVeigh said shortly. “Get going, everybody!”

“Thank God we’re only a Class-Two Target Area,” a man beside Henry said. Henry raised his voice. “Who’s for South School? Henry Conner here. Need fast transportation!”

“Come on, Hank.” Luke Walters ran through the growing crowd in the lobby. “Mollie and I were notified at the store.”

Hank was driven from the school yard toward Willowgrove at breakneck speed, in spite of Mrs. Walters’s angry protests, by the excited owner of Green Prairie’s largest stationery store.

“What about your clerks?” Henry asked.

“Eh?” Luke was somewhat deaf.

“In your store? The clerks? They okay?”

“Man—I
left
‘em! Didn’t say a
word.
Condition Yellow means we gotta streak. But
not
a
general
alert.
Right
?”

“Yeah. You fix up the store cellar, the way we recommended?”

Luke hated to have his driving interfered with by talk. And it was difficult driving: Willowgrove seemed to be filled, suddenly, with people who were trying to lose their lives—people going too fast, in both directions.

They made it safely, somewhat to Hank’s surprise, to his sector H.Q. Cars were assembling there, too, and people, moving quickly, were streaming into the building like ants, taking the places they had learned to take through the years.

Hank went to the principal’s office, shucked off his coat as he began giving orders, skimmed his hat at the rack and sat down. He rang a special number and reported himself at his post, his checkers at work, his people arriving in good numbers.

At the Walnut Street house, Ted drew up, his heart hammering and his ears crimson from the cold. It had been some drive, the way everyone was traveling. Looked as if quite a few were already making for the country. So it was evident that “security” about Condition Yellow was being partly violated.

He parked the car face out, in the drive, as it should be in a time of emergency. He was panting a little as he bounded up the porch steps: he’d never driven a car that far before, or anywhere near that fast—sixty, on one stretch.