Tomorrow! (7 page)

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.”