by Philip Wylie
“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.
Some command centers had, themselves, been stricken and posts dependent upon them waited vainly for orders. Beyond that, some Air Force bases so concentrated upon defense activity that it was impossible to find wires for a steady alert service to near-by cities.
Here and there, over the entire continent, the sky was peopled with dying young Americans and their dying enemy. Many older officers, on the ground, followed the pattern of their training and decided that it was of greater import to attack the swiftly materializing foe than to keep the civil centers posted at the cost of time, energy, communications and frantically needed personnel.
It is always so. The beleaguerment is foreseen, on paper, and acted out in drills and games of war. The curve of crises, the links of possible catastrophe, are known ahead of time.
They are “possibilities.” Within their limits, a military effort is made to account for every circumstance. Friendly officers play the part of the “enemy” and plan every conceivable attack.
“X-Day” plans are drawn up, studied from every angle, stamped ‘‘Top Secret” and filed away.
To be sure, chains-of-command are notified concerning them; communications and alternate communications are established; and whatever else seems required for every emergency is fashioned and stockpiled, or learned by troops, or kept on hand—or, if the appropriations do not meet the dire extremes of military vision, at least exists on paper.
Surprise assault has rarely found the adversary ready. At Pearl Harbor, the radar worked, the in-flying enemy was seen in ample time to change that masterpiece of ruin, but a weak military link in the chain cut off fact from command. The nation then being attacked, the United States, believed many wrong things: that their planes were far superior; that the Japs had a congenital defect of eyesight which incapacitated them as pilots. Those Americans who thereupon died like flies before the guns of Zeroes had only a moment in which to see how mistaken they and their countrymen had been. The inferiorities then—as in this later case—and the defects, too, were American.
Faced by that ultimate martial calamity, inconceivable and majestic—invasion with atomic arms—most military men reverted (as their long discipline had made sure they should) to conventional means and ends. This was war; this, therefore, was not the affair of civilians. Their duty was to defend and defense spelled attack. Their ideology, their often logical position was this: that it mattered more in the flickering instants to bring down a grievously armed enemy plane than to keep any given city, only potentially menaced, in step-by-step contact with events which occurred so fast in any case that the best-informed staffs were soon far behind.
Much, of course, that was needed now and in a certain place was stored elsewhere, or existed in insufficient quantity, or could not be got ready in time, or it existed only in prototype, or on order—or merely in blueprints, as a dream might exist.
Much was expended in error. The rockets that ringed Detroit went up, after mistaken recognition signals, and destroyed seven American bombers two hours before the single Soviet plane launched its missile onto Detroit from a position far to the north, far beyond the range of the improved Nike, in Canada.
Of all the blunders, the most serious was that which derived not from military judgment (or any lack of it) but from the philosophy of domestic politics. Civil Defense had always been considered a matter for states to organize and administer. The Federal Government had advised, urged, supplied research and data—and left most practical decisions to the states. So the fact that any day, on the briefest notice, every city might go to war had been considered as each city’s own business, or as the business of the state in which it happened to be.
Some states had responded relatively well; others, as might be expected, where politics was the measure, hardly at all. Much had been done in Green Prairie for that reason; little, in its Sister City across the river. What had not been clearly observed in the Pentagon, or by any other branch of authority, was this: that in any “next” war, while the armed forces went forth to fight as one, the states and cities would be obliged to defend themselves as variously as a hundred different medieval principalities besieged by a single adversary.
In every other fashion, these cities were bound together, interdependent, and dependent upon the nation as well. Under atomic assault, they were obliged to react separately and according to the diverse provisions of the separate states. The situation, from the military point of view, was all but hopeless. There was no way to standardize procedure. What Maryland was ready to do, Ohio had not yet even thought of. When, in the space of a dozen hours, the actual onslaught took place, this disorganized, decentralized, variable whole soon lost every tenuous relationship. Wires went, tunnels blew, power stations became vapor in the sky, nothing worked that should have; the people at Pearl were paragons of preparedness by comparison.
The analogue—raised to some nth power—went further. For the enemy not only struck on a great shopping day, and during generally poor weather, but in a period of imminent holiday when the military itself, bone-cut by tightened budgets, was cut again by holiday leaves. In many areas, the blow fell before a commanding general got back on duty, before enough technical sergeants were at their proper posts. Pearl Harbor on Sunday was far readier than U.S.A., in that moment of hope concerning peace, that Christmas holiday.
Such thoughts passed through the mind of Charles Conner in the ensuing hour. They were characteristic of his sort of mind. For he had been one of the few who had seen beyond the pacifistic, international horizon and noted that the stepped-up reconnaissance of U.S.A. by the Soviet might be designed to cause clouds of search planes to take the air, filling it, confounding the imperfect radar screen, mixing up signals, and thereby facilitating attack. His imagination had such sweep, along with the constant ability to discount what other men were saying and what they believed.
He was, of course, like every sentient American that day, aghast and unable to weigh emotion. But unlike most, he could set emotion aside, in a single area of his mind, and use the rest for reason.
He thought, toward the middle of the afternoon, that the Sister Cities would probably escape. Many other city areas of equal size stood unscathed, unmenaced. The enemy planes had flown far; they’d been in the air a long while; they had faced every form of interception America could muster. It was considerable. And pilots of jets, after the first few quarter hours, did not bother to press the triggers of their guns and rocket-releases. Wherever they saw the Red Star on alien wings, they plunged headlong. As they died, they knew they had struck a target which no man, with but his one life, could afford to miss.
In the general’s Operations office, there was no true awareness of passing time.
Outdoors, planes came in, refueled, took off. The cups on the wind gauge kept turning, the sock streamed and the radar antenna swung in its interminable circle. The snow stopped; the clouds lifted but did not dissipate. And then, in the gilded brightness of a winter day, in the rise of light that so often is the first admonition of the day’s shortness and the imminent twilight, certain pins on the great map turned from their coursing far below, to the south. They turned in a direction that made the room so still Chuck heard breathing, and nothing else.
8
Lenore sat under the drier at Aubrey’s Beauty Salon, on the eleventh floor of the Manhattan Department Store. She could see a line of other Christmas—primping women, chic women, for Aubrey’s was the smart hairdresser of the Sister Cities, and she could see the magazine in her lap, Harper’s Bazaar for January. She could reflect, if she wanted to, on why she had been handed the latest issue of one of the most modish magazines. In years past, they’d given her an old copy of the Bazaar or Vogue to read under the drier. But the mixture of gossip and dynasty is potent and Aubrey�
��s was a center of both. The fact that Lenore was probably soon to be the bride of Kit Sloan gave her a high priority for everything, even magazines. Only Minerva herself, along with half a dozen other dowagers, a movie star who had married a River City tycoon, and three or four rather pushing career women, could have pre-empted the new copy of Harper’s Bazaar.
Amongst all persons and concerning all things, however trivial, there are pecking orders—showing how little good has been done mankind so far by reason and logic, by democracy and humanism, by liberty or faith or any other ideal. In all the main things, ants and dogs, jackals and people are still much closer together than any of them imagine.
Lenore, however, did not want to look at the priority magazine. She did not want to look at the overweight (or, rarely, underweight) wives of the Sister Cities’ socially elite. There they were, with Aubrey’s pastel kimonos covering underthings picked up in Paris, with their hair wet and nasty, with creams on their faces, with shampoo girls and manicurists working over them like operating-room nurses, with tongues a-clatter in a persistent effort to abet their own status at the expense of other reputations, with cigarette smoke curling through their jewel-weary fingers, with Aubrey’s special recordings playing an interminable litany of baritone mush and Aubrey’s special perfume making the air like a brothel or perhaps a harem.