by Philip Wylie
Busses caught fire. Paint caught fire on the sides of trolley cars. Snow vanished and grass burned. Last year’s leaves caught, the garbage in open pails, shrubbery, tar-paper roofs, the asphalt in streets and wooden blocks, gasoline being poured from hoses, the paint in hardware stores, and the wires above ten thousand roofs—the TV antennae wires—glowed cherry red, then white, then fell apart while slate beneath melted.
Every wooden house for two miles began smoking. And tombstones in Restland glowed dully, as if to announce the awakening of those they memorialized. In that second part of a second.
The plutonium fist followed:
It hammered across Front Street, Madison, Adams, Jefferson and Washington, along Central Avenue and rushed forward. The blast extinguished a billion sudden flames and started a million in the debris it stacked in its wake.
Under the intense globe of light, meantime, for a mile in every direction the city disappeared. In the mile beyond, every building was bashed and buffeted. Homes fell by thousands on their inhabitants. Great institutions collapsed.
The fist swung on, weaker now, taking the lighter structures and all the glass, the windows everywhere, hurling them indoors, speed-slung fragments, ten million stabbing daggers, slashing scimitars, slicing guillotines.
Invisible, from the dangling body of light, the rays fell.
Men did not feel them.
But atoms responded, sucking up the particles of energy, storing them greedily to give them forth later, in a blind vengeance of the inanimate upon the yet—alive. Men felt the fist, the heat, but not the unseeable death that rode in swift consort with the explosion.
River City, from the Cathedral on St. Paul Street to the water, from Swan Island to Willowgrove Road, a mile-sized are, with all the great skyscrapers it contained, was nothing. A flat place, incandescent.
Green Prairie, from Washington to the river, from Slossen’s Run to the tip of Simmons Park, was gone. Forever gone. A vapor in the heavens. Plains restored, strewn with indecipherable rubble, with deadly fractions of nothing.
Beyond that, for a mile, each acre of land underwent such convulsions, such surges of heat and twisting avalanches of blast, as to leave little man might use.
The belly of the fireball flattened. An uprising dust column, assembled by the vacuum left behind the outracing blast, hoisted the diminishing white horror toward the heavens. It went out, leaving a glow of lavender and orange, ascending, spreading. Two great metropolises lay stricken below, as the mushroom formed and soared.
The heart of the cities was gone. A third of their people were dead or dying or grievously hurt. A million little fires were flickering, anucleating, to form a great holocaust. And this had required the time in which a pensive man might draw a breath, hold it reflectively and exhale.
1
Even the siren’s tearing willawa—the announcement, hooted across the city, that Condition Yellow had become Condition Red—did not entirely convince Henry Conner’s inner self of reality. The long years of work were here to meet their meaning. Yet he thought of them as a dream. The committees and conversations, the drills and exercises, even the arguments seemed like neighborly games, pleasant habits. They had gone on and on, in crackling autumns and the sweat of remote Julies. He could not think of their significance, or that they might be of benefit.
It was the Light that changed him.
“Duck, everybody!” he bellowed, forgetting that, with the first siren notes, his trained staff had started automatically towards the school corridors to lie down on the cold floor, feeling, all of them at the same time, a new trepidation and the old, familiar self-consciousness, the incongruity.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he had called, almost apologetically, as they began to file through the doors. “Just want to finish this phone call. . . . Checking with the Parkway people about the road patrol.”
He wasn’t supposed to delay after that alarm. Not even he.
But he waited. The telephone soon told him the men were out on duty, the cars marked, all the necessary things done, and nearly three quarters of their assigned numbers on hand.
“Good,” he said.
His fingers drummed the table, his friendly eyes, narrowed with thought, looked unnoticing from his borrowed office on the top floor of the school.
Then his unseeing eyes were seeing, seeing too well, too much. The Light gushed over the trees. The view turned white; only degrees of whiteness existed anywhere outdoors. His retina beheld a scene like a positive negative lifted up to the naked sun, a scene of trees and roofs and the front of the tall hospital, Crystal Lake and more trees, more snow-clad grounds beyond, white, brilliant, one step from transparency.
“Duck, everybody!” he had bellowed at the empty room.
He shoved back his chair, fell on his face, crawled beneath the desk. The fist struck the building. It lurched. Steel-hard air ripped part of the roof away, went around walls, closed beyond and, driving and sucking, took the windows on one side across the schoolrooms to shatter and cascade along the walls, flung the rest out in the day, horizontally in the velocities, the temperatures, the glare.
Henry got up, looked at a crack through which the sky showed, watched plaster dribble, heard bricks cataract into the yard, stamped on a firebrand that dropped in the room, stared at the unglassed windows, noted by the scene beyond how the last flare of the fireball was vanishing.
Still it imbued with livid light a cityscape that seemed disorderly now and heaving, that had begun to show sudden smokes.
He was all right. And people, scared, moving weakly, were coming back from a corridor where every electric bulb had gone out.
“There’s a fire downstairs,” someone said.
“Two men,” someone else said, “are lying in the hall. Under bricks.”
“It was worse on the bomb side,” somebody murmured.
These voices came dimly, through the ringing of his cars.
They were looking at him and filing back, more all the time. “
Okay,” he heard his voice begin, “Trent and Dawson, see about the fire. The house crew’ll probably be on it soon, but check. The house medical’s in the gym. Send for them—start picking the bricks off the hurt men. Leete, inspect the other side and report back. Have the runners’ information collated downstairs from now on; just bring me the main points.”
Someone else said, “Maybe this building is no longer safe!”
Henry felt his lips turn into a grin, and the feeling buttressed him just when he needed support. “So what?” he replied. “It’s still here! That’s at least something.”
People began to move, to do things—slowly, Henry thought. . . .
Ted Conner went under his table. The Light came. The house bucked and screamed as if some cosmic claw hammer were trying to open it. A thud seemed to compress his body on all sides at once. His radio equipment, the precious store of instruments earned by hundreds of mowed lawns, was flung on the floor and smashed. Hundreds of hours or work done on the set by his father, too: smithereens.
He picked himself up. His leg was bruised and bleeding. He drew out a jagged piece of Bakelite.
He went downstairs. The house was battered, but it was a house and their house still. His mother’s china cupboard lay on its face; broken cut glass glistened on the carpet. The kitchen was a shambles of crocks and pots and pans.
He went out in the back yard, stupefied. The clapboards on that side of the house were scorched, but nothing was burning. The blast, he thought, had put out the fire. The building looked tilted a little and askew on its foundations.
Queenie came up to him, mewing. Beau Bailey bolted from his front door and ran, yelling something Ted didn’t catch. . . .
Netta had insisted on trying to get her clothes down to the cellar. She argued; Beau, increasingly panicked by the siren, had taken a reluctant armful down and stayed—in the warm company of the furnace.
For him, the Light was a stabbing bar that shot through the dirty
coal windows and turned the place to day.
For Netta, still upstairs, it was incomprehensible, an irritant. Her reaction was to run to the window and gaze obliquely north toward the perplexing source. She could not see it, quite.
But she did realize it was a phenomenon of some new, fantastic sort and, dimly, she began to feel horror.
The blast brought the window in on her. Her face, her breast, her abdomen were sliced to red meat; she was doll-flung to the opposite wall, mercifully knocked unconscious.
Beau, calling, coming up a step at a time, afterward, found her. He assumed she was dead and watched the pulsing blood for no more than a moment. Then he tiptoed down the suddenly treacherous stairs and entered his living room. “Need a drink,” he said quietly to himself.
He found a bottle finally that wasn’t broken. He drank from it and with it in his hand, without a coat, he went outdoors. He had a vague idea that somebody should do something about Netta.
As he left his house, not aware he was running, he kept calling, “Where’s a doctor?
Where’s a doctor?”
Those were the words Ted Conner heard and did not understand—before he went back indoors, checked the gas and the lighting circuits (there was no power) and got his coat and hat in preparation for making his scarey way over to the school to report.
It was what they had always planned he should do if his radio set was knocked out, or the power failed.
Mrs. Conner was on her way to the Presbyterian Church, a fairly long walk. She was, wearing her old winter coat—glad she hadn’t given it away—and carrying a heavy suitcase. The suitcase was her own idea and she hadn’t told Henry about it. In it were “odds and ends,”
assembled by Beth as she had listened over the years to Civil Defense talk about what might happen. She had slipped onto her arm the brassard of her volunteer corps: “Emergency Nurse,” it said, in red, white and blue felt letters.
The sirens were warbling like wounded demons and the only other people on foot were air-raid wardens, here and there, who hurried toward her to tell her to take cover, then saw the arm band and grinned and called, usually, “Hello, Mrs. Conner!” or, “Watch it!”
She answered mildly. She was thinking about Nora. And she was obliged, besides, to cross carefully at the intersections. There weren’t many cars about in this part of town; but the ones moving were hitting sixty or seventy and taking corners on two wheels, some headed away from town but most of them converging on South High where Henry would be.
The Light caught her on Ash Street, near Arkansas Avenue. Henry had told her to get down in the gutter with the curb between herself and the hot whiteness, but she was afraid of the cars. There were, however, small terraces in the Wister’s front lawn, where Maud had crocuses because of the southern slope. Beth dropped on her hands and knees, then flattened herself. The blast and the Wister windows and some of the tiles from the roof went over her and she was not hurt.
She got up and trudged on, carrying the suitcase still. When she reached Lake View Road she saw that the windows of the Jenkins Memorial Hospital had been blown away; and the steeple of the Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, her destination, a hospital itself in the event of emergency, had been broken off at the middle.
In Ferndale, Jim Williams’s family assembled while the sirens wailed unheard, and only the ultracalm radio voice gave a warning. Ruth, whoo-whooing, brought the older ones in. Jim hastily put some Coke in a pail—and some beers—and pulled out the screw driver which served as a bolt for the cellar door. The house was heated by oil stoves, so he’d had no occasion to go down to the cellar for some days.
When the door creaked open, he knew by the smell, however.
He switched on the light. Sure enough. Water had seeped in during the thaw, a week back. There was a dark pool of it on the floor.
“Wait up, you!” he called, and went down the cobwebby steps. He found the handle of an old shovel and probed gingerly.
“Water down here,” he reported disgustedly. “About a foot deep! We better stay upstairs after all.”
Relieved, the entire family went back to the parlor. They sat around uncertainly, the kids, for once, quiet. Ruth, alone, stood. When the Light came, she snatched the baby from its pen, where she’d just put her down. Irma began to sob irritatedly. Ruth patted her, feeling comforted because the little thing was in a mother’s arms, where all infants should be in moments of blinding, fearsome Light.
Jim said, or began to say, loudly and to all, but with a still-unconvinced tone, “Maybe we should do like they told us—duck—”
The blast wave struck. The Williams house, more than a thousand yards nearer the place of the fireball than the sturdier Conner home, had its top floor mashed as by a mallet. The windows screamed into the room. And that year they were double; Jim had put on storm windows. Don’s hand was amputated. Jim lost much of his face; it became scarlet stew. All the children fell, bleeding. But Irma, the baby, being kissed by her anxious mother, received a pound of glass in her back and lungs; she was tom almost apart.
Ruth was not hurt at all—the baby having shielded her—not hurt at all, physically.
Kit Sloan, on his way home from the River City Athletic Club, was in a temper even before the sirens started. The seasonal parties, dances, balls and festivities had given him an alcoholic nervousness. He’d decided that day to play squash early, get his rubdown, and come home to dress in time to make it over to the Ritz-Hadley for the Emerson cocktail thing.
But his customary opponents hadn’t been on hand. There was a rumor going, about an air-raid drill; and the three best players in the club, Green Prairie men, were in Civil Defense.
He’d been obliged to bat balls around by himself for an hour, curtly refusing to “give a game” to inferior challengers.
His cabinet bath, plunge and rub after the disappointment had failed to restore his well-being. So he drove vexedly in the Christmas crowds. It wasn’t far from the club to Pearson Square, but the waits for lights, the bumper-to-bumper pace between lights, made it seem a long way.
When at last he reached the southeast corner of the square, he saw that traffic along the south side was so badly jammed he decided it would be quicker to run the Jaguar beyond the side opposite, cut through an alley, and drive across the interior park itself, on a paved path meant for hikes and baby carriages. He doubted if the cops would bother him; he’d done it before, as a gag, at night. He figured he could blast a hole in the stalled traffic with his horn, thus getting into the Sloan driveway long before the log jam could be broken.
The decision saved him from swift death.
The siren caught him in the alley. He had to wait even there for three huge trucks, unloading behind the supermarket, to disentangle themselves and move down to the square. He followed. By then, a group of teen-age boys, attracted by the red car, were begging him to give them a ride. He ground up his windows in fury.
When the Light came, he didn’t think at all. He shot to the Boor of the car and covered his head with his arms: whatever it was, it was that kind of thing—a war kind, deadly. His reflexes so interpreted it. The blast followed.
The supermarket behind him disintegrated. The three-story brick houses beside him turned into brick piles. The cars and trucks across the square were pushed, lifted, rolled, skidded, mauled.
He did not see that; bricks roared down upon his car, bricks mounded in front of it, barricading the view; bricks buried his car. He lay in sudden dark and the choking dust of mortar.
People in the winter-locked square felt the heat of the bomb first. Their clothes smoldered, flamed. They screamed and fell. They wallowed and writhed. Yet a worse thing had befallen them in that chip of time: from the fireball which towered and expanded hideously in the near distance, they soaked up neutrons and gamma rays and were dead although to themselves alive-seeming still. The rays pierced every truck, every car, the thick wood, the thin steel, and the men and the women and the children inside, though they shoul
d live awhile, were doomed. Many perished then and there of blast and concussion and bashing; the rest, who thought they had escaped, were left with only a little while to live.
Trapped, hardly sensing as a special phenomenon the blast itself, Kit picked at the split glass of a window in his car. Bricks fell in on him but the illumination increased. Frantically, he pulled in more bricks. By and by he had a hole through which he could worm his way, hands first, tossing bricks aside.
Behind, he saw the supermarket. Smoking. Here and there, in the no-man’s-land look of it, things moved. He faced around and gazed up. The mushroom cloud, boiling with what seemed cubic miles of colored fires, was spreading out. Its edge was even with the far corner of the square.