Tomorrow! (27 page)

There were the crowds to watch also, and Steeplejack Sam, as long as he was up high on the fancy stonework around the top of the building, though she lost sight of him on the street, right away. There was a lot to hear—the different kinds of music, including the Muzak in the restaurant, and what the nurses said. When Nora finished eating, they asked her if she would like ice cream, but she said not, politely. Then they told her they were going to Toyland in Marker’s store and she could accompany them and they would put her on a bus for home later.

On the way to Marker’s, one of the nurses, Evangeline Treely, decided to go into Vance’s and send her mother some fancy stationery, so they went there, and it look over an hour to push through the customers and find what Evangeline wanted and locate a clerk and pay and get change. Then they did start for Toyland.

Nora had forgotten all about the giant automaton Santa Claus in Simmons Park. The nurses were wonderful people to be with, she thought, and there wasn’t any great hurry about getting home because the clouds had lifted a little and the snow had stopped, and if her family carne home and worried about her any, it would serve them right for leaving her behind.

Ted Conner was alone on Walnut Street. He was in the attic. A little snow was falling, but the paper had said it would probably clear in the late afternoon. He hoped so. Reception would be better if it cleared up.

At first he had wished someone was there. The news was tearing in—the unbelievable news which he’d been trained to handle. Its effect on most of the older people in Green Prairie, or any other city, would have been horrifying in the extreme. Some of them, after hearing the broken bits of conversation and the news from the neighboring states, wouldn’t have been able to go on listening. You couldn’t exactly tell what was happening from the reports, direct and relayed, that Ted tuned in on. But you could guess.

Denver had said somebody farther west had said they couldn’t raise anybody in San Francisco. Or Los Angeles either.

A guy he had often talked with in Omaha, an old gaffer named Butts, who had a sender with plenty of oomph, came in laconically. “Hello, Green Prairie. . . . Hi, Ted, son! . . . Seen anything?”

“Not here, not yet. Over.”

“You will—and maybe we will, looks like. Dallas got it.”

“Big Eddie? Over.” The Omaha voice, venerable, quavering with age rather than alarm, came dryly across the winter-swept plains: “Big Eddie among other things.”

“Big Eddie” was the term CD ham operators in the region had come to use for “atom bomb.”

Mr. Butts went on. “That, we’re sure of here. Otherwise, conditions normal. Yellow, of course. Evidently nothing headed this way—yet anyhow.” The old man actually sounded disappointed.

Ted cut back one time more: “Is that all you have on Dallas?”

“That’s all, son. Station W5CED reported. He’s outside the city some twenty miles. The blast wave bent his aerial, he claimed. One big flame is all he can actually see. Where Dallas is.

Or was. As the case may be.”

At that point Ted wished the family was at home. It was an awful thing, he thought, to be sitting up there alone in the kind of dim attic room, with tubes glowing and word of practically the end of the world pouring in. But nobody to tell it to.

He considered running over to the Baileys’ and getting Nora. She was darn good company at a time like this, and she would sure like to take the extra headset and listen with him.

However, Nora would be an unauthorized person. That observation reminded him of duty. In Condition Yellow, he was supposed to get on the CD network with other locals and stand by for orders and relays.

He sighed heavily and tuned according to regulations.

The whole air around Green Prairie and Hiver City was on fire with communication, all right. Somebody at headquarters—Al Tully, it turned out—soon was saying, “Station W Double Zero CDJ. Come in, Ted Conner. Over.”

Ted’s hands moved swiftly. His voice said in a businesslike way, “Conner, here. W

Double Zero TKC. Come in, please.”

“Where the hell you been?”

“On the way. Driving myself—alone—in Dad’s car!”

That any person should still be able to get a thrill from so minor a matter seemed to stun Albert Tully. “Nothing from your district at all.
Why?”
he asked.

“Dunno.” At that moment, at Ted’s side, an illegal phone, which he had installed himself and plugged in as he sat down, began to ring. “Here it is! Stand by. . . .”

He grabbed the instrument, thanking his stars he’d violated the law, for otherwise he would probably make about a thousand trips up—and downstairs in the hours ahead. To his surprise, he heard his father’s voice. “That you, son?”

“Yes, Dad. Say!
Dallas
was hit! Frisco and LA don’t answer.”

“Good God!” Henry Conner was shocked to brief silence. His son, listening in on a ham radio set,
knew.
All Henry knew, in the principal’s office in South High, was what came from State CD. Not much, nothing as appalling as the information Ted had tersely stated. “Mother home yet?” he finally asked, and Ted heard him swallow, it was so loud.

“Nope. Not yet. Nobody here.” Henry’s voice was tighter, more brusque. “Okay. It’s just as we figured. Phone lines swamped downtown. Can’t raise H.Q. We ought to have paid for a direct line, like I said, and the phone company’s supposed to put us through. Try and do it. The whole thing’s a mess.”

“I got H.Q. here,” Ted answered. “They want your report.”

“Good kid! Tell ‘em—in general—we’re doing all right. We’re about forty-five per cent mustered, at a guess. I’d say the doctors and surgeons are worst. Not reporting they’ve followed the plan and gone outside town, most of them. But we’re quietly getting all movable people out of Jenkins Hospital, into the homes around, with the homeowners mad as spit, even though they volunteered for it.”

“Why,” Ted passionately asked a question that had been burning in his mind, “don’t they let go with the
sirens
?”

“You forget!” his father said. “Condition Red is only for the direct attack. Planes actually
headed toward us
.”

“I don’t forget,” Ted answered. “I just suspect planes are headed for
everybody!”
He heard the slam of the front door and stood up, looking out a window. “I guess Mom just came in,” he said. “I see Chuck in Uncle Jim’s car.”

Henry said, “Thank God! Shoot in the report, son—and I’ll send you a runner soon, if I can’t get a wire.”

When Charles Conner approached Hink Field he brought and received an assortment of impressions:

On the streets and the open highway, he had passed, and even been passed by, thirty or forty vehicles, mostly private cars, bearing families, outward bound and going like hell’s chased bats. These obviously were people who reacted to the confidential news about Condition Yellow by packing up and getting out of town. Or they were people who had been told by somebody who ought not to have told them. Perhaps they’d had short-wave receivers of their own and begun to pick up news from police channels and the like. Anyhow, they were getting away from the city.

Like his father and brother, Chuck had skirted the busiest section of the two cities, following Willowgrove clear to Walnut. Willowgrove was residential for the most part, wide, and it had fewer traffic lights than the north-south streets closer in. But even at that distance from the center of the Sister Cities, a distance at which the proud skylines of both merged, he’d seen enough to realize that Condition Yellow had not fazed most people. Certainly the mob downtown didn’t know of it yet, or the people would have started home and Willowgrove itself would have been a bumper-to-bumper proposition. He had made home easily, changed, and gone on.

Beyond the tan fence and gates of Hink Field, a crescendo of noise told Chuck that the base, at least, was reacting. As he approached, accelerator on the floor, six jet planes came in low, cut around, and climbed at full power. His pass put him through the gates and he parked in the section reserved for junior officers. He went into Flight Operations, not because that was where hastily assembling servicemen were expected to report, but because he had already officially visited the Hink Field command and his orders were special.

Nobody stopped him or questioned him, which was unusual. The W AAF secretaries and stenographers, the sergeants and corporals, seemed just to be sitting around the big rooms, rather stiffly. Hardly a typewriter was going. Outside, beyond the windows, a jet took off, shaking the building. Up above the building, he knew, the radar antenna was circling, the sock was flying in a moderate breeze, the anemometer cups were whirling and the men behind the great blue-glass windows were vigilant. At the door of Control Ops, he was stopped by two soldiers with rifles in their hands and bayonets on the rifles, which was anything but usual. He wouldn’t have got farther if Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, the general’s aide, hadn’t come out to the water cooler while Chuck was arguing with the guard.

“Oh,” the lieutenant colonel said, “Connel. It’s you.”

“Conner, sir.” Chuck smiled a little.

“You’re the Intelligence they sent over from Eames’ outfit?” The Lily cup from which he drank trembled minutely.

“Yes, sir.”

“Your colonel’s notion was sure solid! Might as well come in and watch the shambles.”

In the Operations room, on the left-hand wall, was a huge map of the United States, Canada and Mexico. On the right wall was a large-scale map of the Hink Field region, showing all of two states and parts of four more. Around the big map. in a cluster, between the American flag on one side and the hat rack on the other, were perhaps forty officers. Two of them were moving colored pins and colored flags on the big map. Another was advising them, according to messages he received from headphones.

The group was absolutely silent. Men smoked. One man even blew his nose. But nobody said anything for a long while. The flags moved toward Chicago, Chuck saw, and Indianapolis, Detroit and Toledo. There were scarlet flags on four cities—all of them, Chuck observed, coastal cities and big ones: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia.

Finally General Boyce spoke. Chuck couldn’t see him because he was shorter than most of the other officers and stood closest to the map.

“It appears that the assault from the south is a small wave. Note it seems to have broken into three parts. Nothing coming this way. The northern waves, both of them, split east and west.

It would seem, gentlemen, that we aren’t on the target list.”

Those words were followed by a quiet but ubiquitous murmur as the men addressed each other. That gave Charles a chance to say to the lieutenant colonel, who stood beside him, “What are the scarlet flags?”

“H-bombs.”

Chuck felt sick. He didn’t answer.

Now, to his astonishment, a civilian pushed out from the crowd. Chuck recognized him, though he was ash-pale, almost blue-lipped and his features were screwed up with the torture of his fears and his determination. It was River City’s Mayor Clyde. “I repeat, General,” he said almost in a shout, “if we are not yet threatened, we must maintain Condition Yellow! You start those sirens and you sign the death warrant of maybe a thousand people. Great God! The whole population and the county around is jammed downtown, and they’d panic!”

The general followed the mayor and the men parted to make a clear path. “I know. I
know.
And decision here depends only on emergency. Nothing has come through from the Second Army. Zinsner!” he called.

The man with the headphones heard and removed them. ‘‘Yes, sir?”

“Anything from Colorado Springs?”

Zinsner spoke, inaudibly, into a mouthpiece he held in his hand, waited-while the room waited-and shook his head. “No word, sir.”

“But you have contact?”

“Certainly, sir. That is—we
still
do.”

General Boyce, Major General Boyce, paced in front of a desk, on the thick carpeting.

Mayor Clyde followed him for a little while, gave up, leaned against the desk and wiped his face with a big linen handkerchief. He got out a cigar and lit it. The general faced the room abruptly.

“What’s your opinion, Berdich?”

A man wearing eagles, a man with a thin face, very white skin, pale gray eyes and an Adam’s apple that traveled up and down above his collar when he talked, said, “Can we properly call this an emergency? Our radar has a range of better than two hundred miles. So far, we have accounted for every blip—”

General Boyce lost his patience. “Good
God,
Berdich, I don’t want a
résumé
! Just, ‘Yes’

or ‘No.’”

“No,” Colonel Berdich said.

The mayor looked at him in a gratified but still-frantic fashion.

“Tetley?” asked the general. A tall, dark man, who looked more like a college professor than a soldier, stepped forward through the group. He was a major.. He said, “I say Yes.”

“Why?”

“From what we can gather, the little coming in, I suspect some of the attacks are by guided missiles, homing on the cities, launched from the air. Range could easily outreach our radar and the speed would be supersonic. Even two hundred miles might not give us a Red Condition time of even ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes is still ten minutes,” the mayor muttered.

Boyce whirled. “Ever try to empty a thirty-story building in ten minutes?” He began to pace again. “Trouble is, there’s no official operational plan for
precisely
this situation!”

Another officer said, in a remarkably calm tone, “We’ve got the area ringed with search.

No report. That gives us about
five hundred
miles.”

“We’ll wait,” the general finally said.

As if that were a command, the men clustered around the map again, watching to see what changes were made according to reports relayed in a near-whisper by Zinsner to the men who moved the pins and Hags.

The difficulty at Hink Field was the difficulty experienced in those same hours at many other military installations. Stations that should have given reports had vanished. Cities close to command areas, like Denver, had been hit and the news had not yet reached the right information centers: what had happened in Colorado’s capital was unknown for seventy-six minutes at the military communications heart in Colorado Springs. The knowledge then arrived—as a rumor.