OPUS 21 (26 page)

The pilot of the leading bomber, a B-36, took evasive action too late, and Mr. Kully's light plane, shorn of a wing and set on fire, came spiraling to earth--a sight enormously exciting to the already enthralled Chicagoans.

This ended the main spectacle. Most of the planes descended to earth. The word--

awful, unprintable, unacknowledgable, obscene and illegal--which, as has been noted, many use in private and in public, and everybody sees constantly chalked on fences and carved into cement by rude boys--and which is pronounced "shucks" by the super-superstitious--now rode in the Chicago heavens. The breeze dropped. Surrounding cumulus clouds retreated as if to frame the sign; air movement died aloft; the four corrupt letters and their following exclamation point came to rest directly over the Loop. This was widely regarded as the supreme practical joke--until the extras began to appear.

These were in a way disappointing: photographers had spiraled vainly in the high blue, for not one newspaper made bold to print a picture of what all could see if they bent their necks.

But the published statement concerning the scientific investigation had a tendency to diminish the widespread mirth. Dr. A. B. Cummings, acting for a General Committee, wrote the report. It said, in part: ". . . a gross examination showed a special arrangement of clouds which cannot be accounted for by the laws of chance. Emphasis should be made of the fact that absolutely no clue to human agency, domestic, enemy, or other--

either in the air or on the ground--was found. There was no evidence of interference from the stratosphere above. No abnormal radiation was detected. No use of sonic devices may be presumed in view of the study. After the mass became stationary, it was found that currents of air were moving as they should (according to all known laws and principles of meteorology) above, below, and on both sides of the phenomenon.

". . . that last fact, taken by itself, is perhaps the most disturbing, although it is possibly equaled by one other. Viz--the mass is not subject to the known laws of dissipation. The slipstream of jets and the wash of huge propellers ought to have caused it to disintegrate in a few minutes. They made only a moderate and local effect which, again in violation of understandable principles, was offset by the reassemblage of the mass along its original contours. It has been proposed that if there is a repetition of this totally unprecedented and inexplicable effect, antiaircraft artillery with ordinary fused shells be used in an attempt to break it up. In such a case, citizens will have to be sheltered from falling fragments during the bombardment. This will probably be tried--

although the tendency of the mass to hold its shape, resembling as it does a similar tendency in plastics of special molecular structures, at least suggests that even artillery may not be effective. . . .

". . . the demand made by a committee of quite understandably outraged churchmen, led by Msgr. Loyola O'Tootle, of St. Plimsol's Roman Catholic Cathedral, that an atomic bomb be used to disperse the sacrilege is, of course, impractical, as such a bomb, in the caliber now being stored by our government, would destroy not only the cloud mass in question (presumably) but (predictably) the entire city of Chicago for a radius of four miles. Any smaller atomic bomb is no more to be thought of in connection with the riddance of this bizarre pest, as not only demolitional but genetic effects . . .

"To sum up, the mass seems to consist merely of cloud material, somewhat more densely packed than usual. Its formational aspects cannot be traced to any conceivable person or device. Its violation of certain simple physical laws is the great scientific puzzle of it. But it is definitely not poisonous or harmful. The only 'danger' to be expected from it, so far as the most elaborate examination and the most learned extrapolation can discern, is psychological. Until science explains the phenomenon, the layman should regard it without dismay--or other emotion, if possible. Doubtless when the formed-mass principle is unraveled the explanation will not only be quite simple, but of some currently unguessable great value to engineering, to industry, to the military, and hence to the whole people."

Dr. Cummings's job was detached, thorough--and satisfied nobody.

For it was a statement of absolute mystification.

Auburn-haired little Jeanne Sheets, aged seven, of Mallow Road Apartments, running into her yard that afternoon, cried, "Mummy, there's a dirty word in the sky!"

"Yes, dear."

"Who put it there?"

"Mummy doesn't know, dear."

"Can I say it? It's in the sky--real big."

"No, dear."

"Maybe God put it there?"

"You mustn't think things like that, you naughty child!"

Jeanne Sheets knew as much about it as Cummings, or any other physicist or any meteorologist, or anybody.

The next day, through unimpeachable sources in Sofia, a world that had been amused--and somewhat agog--learned that, over the city of Moscow had appeared:
МАЛАРХИ

The smile on the world's face faltered.

Why?

Here the subtleties of the human spirit are evinced. People were stunned for the obvious reason that the appearance of an expletive over the Soviet capital tended to indicate
human
enmity was not involved in the phenomenon. There was a deeper reason.

The Moscow affliction gave universality to what had been, thitherto, an ailment of the skies, over the guilty-feeling democracies. The profanation of the Soviets, in other words, eliminated all subconscious hope of escape into the Opposite, that natural area which the aware mind detests, or at least resists, but upon which the instincts depend. Laughter ceased and the world made up its mind that steps had to be taken instantly to solve, resolve, and dissolve the indecent chimera.

Then, on the morning of August 27th, in the city of New York, between the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, a great B took shape against a cloudless zenith. No Gorgon's head could have paralyzed the city more effectively. All traffic stopped and most persons who were physically able descended to the hot streets.

Amateurs' telescopes on Long Island and slot-machine viewers as far away as Eagle Rock Park in New Jersey were turned upon the pale sky in which Manhattan's buildings had for so long fastened their lean teeth.

New York's streets solidified. Even ambulances ceased to attempt to move--their drivers either helping patients out for a look or resigning themselves to the delivery of D.O.A.'s. Ministers of churches, priests, and rabbis now made some attempt at excoriation. A band of volunteer hymn singers fought against the steadily forming BAS

at Trinity Church; censors swung and holy water splashed about St. Pat's. Useless. The TARDS! filled itself out with no regard for fear or fury, lewd ripostes or prayers. And all could see that this new comment was less general than its precursors. Here the sky had not simply engraved an expletive upon itself but called the most numerous people of any city a vile name.

At the same time, moreover (9:12 in the morning when the first wraith of cloud was observed), strange events were occurring elsewhere on earth. An underling at the near deserted offices of the AUP, watching the clatter of a ticker, yelled to his superior some seconds after 9:30, "Hey, chief! They got it in Paris."

"What does it say?"

The youth perplexedly spelled it out. His chief, better educated and possessed of a greater imagination, envisioned the jam-packed Champs-Elyseés and the azure vault above the Arc de Triomphe inscribed

MERDE, ALORS!

New York was the first city to stampede.

Before the S in BASTARDS! was completed, a 10ft caught fire in Seventh Avenue. The engines were unable to reach it, the fire spread, a wall fell into the crowd, and horrified survivors pressed both north and south in the thoroughfare, screaming.

Their hysteria went ahead of them and, since the neck-craning throngs could not know the cause of it, they interpreted the oncoming roar in the wildest fashions. They, also, turned to run. Central Park furnished a place in which one-half of this tumultuous and trampling herd was able to spread out and regain some composure, though it had left the streets behind dotted with the maimed and slain. There was no sizable park to the south, however, and those who took that direction (save for a few thousands who sought shelter in the Pennsylvania Station) built up an avalanche of humanity which pelted and thundered clear to the Battery, itself its own Juggernaut.

The infection spread to side streets and to other avenues, inevitably. Within an hour, a great part of middle and lower Manhattan became such an abattoir as history has no record of. The show-windows along Fifth Avenue were burst in by the push of people who were then sliced and guillotined by the cascading glass. Wooden buildings were knocked askew in places.

Nobody could cope with such a situation but the mayor did his resourceful best.

He ordered airplanes equipped with loud-speakers of great power to fly over the self-beleaguered city and explain what the source of the great stampede had been. Every morgue and hospital in the city and in its environs was mobilized. All bridges and tunnels were instantly cleared for the transport of the injured, as Manhattan's hospitals could not handle five per cent of the casualties. Police, using pistols with little ceremony, brought to a partial halt the epidemic of looting that occurred in the early afternoon. People were commanded to take the equivalent of air-raid shelter and to stay there.

The military, acting with their usual belated but firm ineffectuality, again essayed the problem of the Word itself. Unveiling a new weapon--a rocket adapted for air-to-air combat, with a warhead of a secret explosive--the Army launched squadrons of fighters and bombers to the attack. A great cannonade over the city began near five o'clock. It was futile: the blasts disrupted edges and fringes of the letters in the sky but they mended themselves as fast as they were tattered. Army Ordinance then tried its supersecret, twenty-four-inch rockets. Careless fusing caused one of these to explode at a low level, destroying the upper stories of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building--but subsequent accurate salvos of the tremendous weapon merely caused the letters to undulate.

Shortly after six o'clock the Navy, carrying out a suggestion of Cardinal Bleatbier, tried a new tactic--the interposition of a smoke screen between the abomination and the desolated city. The idea was greeted by officers with enthusiasm. The effect of it was not.

For, after some fifty Navy planes had laid a great, brown carpet underneath the Word and above the buildings, there came new and hitherto unobserved eddyings of the air and the Navy smoke was drawn into the writing on the heavens--not only fortifying and clarifying what it had been intended to obscure but also giving the letters a phosphorescent glow which became visible as soon as twilight descended.

That night, as electricity began to fail in the city, the surviving people undertook to leave en masse. They had no stomach for another day such as they had passed through.

An additional factor urged them on. During the years of the Atomic Age they had been living--like people of every city--with keen, increasing queasiness. It is not conducive to urban content to know that any of a dozen foreign governments can, or potentially can, blot out you and yours in an eye-twinkling. Indeed, for many years, people had been trickling away from cities everywhere-either openly giving their reason or offering some excuse.

Finally, from the very onslaught of B Day, there had poured forth a succession of orders setting up various official hierocracies for the emergency--deputy police, wardens, and so on, along with the rationing of gasoline, restrictions on subway use, abrogation of power supply, and other such matters. Americans are not a patient people and of all Americans, New Yorkers are the most impatient. Unlike Britains, Russians, and Europeans, they had never accepted the brash contempt of the public exhibited continually both by government and industry after World War II. Nor had they become reconciled to bureaucratic rule. They had resented the multiplication of authorized agents and official personnel. Hence, not being schooled to such vicissitudes at the time of B

Day, they lost their tempers. They left town. By midnight, the tunnels, bridges, and ferries could no longer be held open for the evacuation of casualties. By three in the morning, every bridge and every tunnel and every boat was swarming with one-way, antlike movement as New Yorkers abandoned New York. All the next day the human tide welled into metropolitan environs.

The contagion spread to other cities as words began to form above them and in some instances even before their skies developed a C or a J or a P or an A or the like.

Terror begat terror. Various metropolises were soon without electricity, water, food, gasoline, and so on. Fires began to rage in them. In no time, Cleveland, Detroit, Birmingham, Boston, Los Angeles, and other centers were in a condition like that of cities over which a powerful enemy has gained absolute control of the air.

There is, of course, no general record of the total effect of this exodus. Towns, villages, hamlets, and lone farms were unprepared to house or to feed the scores of millions who descended upon them--rich refugees in limousines piled high with canned foods and guns--slum masses in rags and on foot, with nothing but fear and hunger to drive them ahead. Here and there some man of feudal abilities organized bands of the fugitives and these forcibly evacuated whole communities, taking possession of them--

only to be driven out by bands better armed and more ruthless. Theft and violence became the national way of life; and murder--murder that took the lives of millions--the means to obtain a meal or a woman or a bauble in some as yet unsmashed village store window. City people had become the sworn enemies of country people--and vice versa.

The Hindus and Mussulmans of India on the days after its liberation were more kindly disposed to one another than these--and dealt more mercifully.

So it went--fire, blood and turmoil, death, epidemic and ruin.