Tomorrow! (31 page)

No diamonds—but a good watch.

It had been a long trolley ride from Edgeplains and it was a long walk across town from the trolley line. On the way, he passed the Court Avenue entrance of the Transcript Tower and he stepped inside it, briefly, full of such recollections that he knew he should hurry on, before one of the boys came by and caught him red-eyed. It was worse than being caught red-handed, Coley thought.

He felt an arm on his shoulder just then and he heard a familiar voice:

“Hello, boss. Somebody tell you?”

Coley smiled and raised his head and there was Payton, the city editor, grinning, but looking odd, too. “Tell me
what
?”

“Thought that was why you’d come down here.” Payton glanced apprehensively at the streaming people and lowered his voice: “The whole country’s under air blitz, Coley. They’re holding it back here, to prevent panic, in the belief this area is not on the target list.”

“What is this?” Coley asked softly, “April Fool?”

“It’s
it,”
Payton answered.
“You
should know!”

Coley stepped back till he felt the firm stones of the skyscraper against his shoulders.

“God help us!” he whispered. “God help us all.” Then he snapped, “What’s the
Transcript
doing about it?”

“Standing by—for the story.”

“That maybe it’ll never print! Where
you
going?”

“Out to CD headquarters. Vilmer just ordered me there.”

“Well, get on, son. Don’t waste time with a broken-down old prophet!” Payton grinned, patted his former boss on the arm, and hurried into the crowds.

Coley stood awhile, without moving. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was merely summoning the strength to get going again.

He entered the building, finally. He took an elevator to the top. When he stepped out, the smell was familiar, the sounds were remembered and fond; the look of the place was home itself.

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!