by Philip Wylie
Lenore saw them talking briefly, a two-man pantomime against the flames. Then the chief tapped some men, piled into his car, and it turned. Its red eyes glowed as it headed for River Avenue—and a manhole: there were manholes near Restland, too, and emergency exits; if necessary, they could also dynamite a hole.
Lenore stepped carefully on the stub of her cigarette, thought how crazy that was and hurried back to her car, carrying the heavy counter.
Half an hour later, the first of more than three thousand men, women and children began climbing from ladders along River Avenue, from the new sewer where earlier that day Nora had walked. It was the biggest single mass exodus from the fire area.
The people who managed to reach Simmons Park got away easily along Willowgrove.
The people who made it to the reservoir, were safe.
Lenore didn’t, of course, stay to see the hordes clamber out of manholes. By the time the first of them drew breaths of clean air, she was on the top of an apartment building, over on James Street, not far from the Golf Course.
The CD rescue men were using the roof to get people out of a burning hospital building beyond, a hospital for chronics who could not be moved (until now) and the mentally disturbed.
They were coming over on ropes to the apartment; but the roof there, broad and Bat, had been covered two inches deep with a curious dust, a fall-out from the bomb-cloud. The men working wanted to know if the dust was—as usual, Lenore thought—“killing them.”
It showed only twenty mr’s—very weak radiation.
She went down by the freight elevator—with men wearing miners’ lights on their hats and CD brassards who were obliged to keep fighting with two women maniacs—down to the ground, out to the yard, into her Ford and on to the next call.
6
Toward eight o’clock they brought food to Henry. He had not left the room, had scarcely moved from his desk.
He had been aware for some time, subconsciously, of the smell of hot food. In his mind, he had ticked that off as one more thing going according to plan. Plenty was not. But the mobile kitchen, earmarked for his headquarters, had evidently come up; the women volunteers were heating beans in cauldrons, firing up the coffee makers, opening stacks of gallon fruit cans, running bread through the slicer.
The high school’s windows had been boarded up with plywood. A large kerosene stove was shedding heat and smoking slightly in the corner. Canvas had been nailed temporarily across the big crack in the roof. An engineer had made his inspection and assured everybody the high school wouldn’t collapse. There were plenty of kerosene lamps. For people in other rooms who didn’t have heaters, there had been an issue of coats and sweaters, collected from God knew where by God knew whom. A bevy of determined housewives, wearing arm bands and having nothing better to do, had come in with brooms and dustpans, raised a fearful dust, and cleaned out the plaster and loose debris.
At a desk pushed up to face his, Eve Sanders, acting as secretary, kept typing out notes-summaries of word that came over the walkie-talkies, and from the few ham radio stations still operable; and from runners from all parts of the area: boys on bikes, mostly. But the Motorcycle Club, having cleaned up the preliminary search and police auxiliary work in Henry’s sector, was checking in now in numbers, for message work.
On blackboard stands, beyond Mrs. Sanders, three men kept writing and erasing. Henry, just by looking up, could tell where his main crews were working. The Fire Department companies, after a two-hour fumble and an effort to run things their own way, were in direct liaison with him now, and some of the phone company linesmen were already making emergency connections on standing, usable lines that crisscrossed the sector.
Henry felt lucky, fantastically lucky.
Only a small arc of the area of very severe damage intruded his sector. And the fires were being handled. He had plenty of casualties—glass, mainly—burns, next—shock—and miscellaneous. He also had approximately nine thousand very badly hurt people from the area closer in. There had been some panics, at first. They had blockaded Dumond, Arkansas, River, Sedmon, Ames, VanNess, Bigelow and Cold Spring avenues. That had stopped the cars mostly, though an undetermined number of people—“thousands” they said out along Decatur, exaggerating, no doubt—had got beyond the city limits, during the long span of Condition Yellow and later, before they’d set up the blockades.
Where traffic piled up, the loud-speaker trucks had sailed in. Many fugitives, of course, had trudged ahead on foot. But the speakers had brought most of the panicky groups back toward town, toward the high flame, the radioactivity, the horror—by argument, cajolery and threat.
There was no guarantee of a way to live in the countryside; but in the city, the loud-speakers bellowed ceaselessly—there was food, shelter, clothing, medical aid, all that people required.
A great many of the doctors and nurses in Henry’s sector had followed the plan for Condition Yellow, but many had not. The ones who had packed the prescribed medical and surgical equipment in cars, and driven with their families to outlying areas, were now back in town at work. The doctors and nurses and other “key personnel” who had refused to respond properly to Condition Yellow were now dead, or among the casualties themselves, or trapped behind the irregular rim of fire that circled the fire storm proper.
Thousands of people had been rescued from homes, stores, apartments, factories, lofts, buses, trolleys, other spots suddenly rendered perilous. Thousands remained, even in Henry’s area, in distress and danger. But the trained hundreds in his groups, with growing numbers of volunteer helpers from the unhurt, were tearing into every problem as they came to it, dousing fires, removing the injured, streaking them to Crystal Lake. They were carting bulldozers and cranes on fiat truckbeds around the perimeter of ruin, smashing fire lanes, crumpling fire hazards, sweeping debris from trunk thoroughfares. They were performing prodigies shoulder to shoulder with the regular firemen. They were standing fire watch on the rickety tops of once-handsome buildings. They were pacing, armed and alert, in every street, looking out for looters.
They were sweating with the Water Supply people over emergency means to divert Crystal Lake down its overflow to a hastily dammed gulley above Broad, where the lire hoses could feed.
They were commandeering the contents of damaged stores, especially food stores and clothing stores, and bringing truckloads to Hobart Park where a vast “dump” of supplies was accumulating. They were—the women—tending the hurt, the shocked, the frightened, helping the surgeons, assisting the nurses, corralling the hundreds of lost children, making out tickets of identification, making out cards for withdrawals of food, clothes, shoes, whatever was required.
All that and more was happening when the food came for Henry. He took a big bite of a hot corned beef sandwich. He swigged coffee and picked up a plate of beans. “Why don’t you come over to the other side,” one of his assistants said, “and take a look.”
Henry surveyed his assistants. They were working efficiently. Things, at the moment, were comparatively quiet. He said, “All right,” and carried his plate and his sandwich into the corridor as he went.
From an opposite, unshielded window, he could see. Between this top-floor vantage point and the fire storm, nothing remained that stood higher.
The single flame of the burning city-heart could not be followed to its summit. It disappeared in smoke, in smoke so thick and dark, so folded and contoured it looked like a range of hills in the sky, upside down, illuminated by fire. The flame itself was yellow-white and solid, a curving wall that slanted in toward the center and could be followed for a thousand feet or more to the place where smoke screened it. Silhouetted against it, for a mile and a half, were the intervening buildings and homes, many burning with separate fires.
The city roared like a volcano and the night shook.
Henry stood still. He stopped eating. It was his city, his life, his boyhood and manhood and it had died and this was its funeral pyre—this tremendous thing.
The heart and significance of the city was gone. Only its people, the majority of its human contents, could be saved. But they had raised it up.
The city, he thought, transfixed by the magnificence of its dying, was the people. It was an extension of their bodies.
When they had been primitive men, they had added the hides of beasts to their own insufficient body hair and the protection of caves to that, and then huts, and now a city. The railroads and all the cars and the motors and engines had been added to their muscles. To their ears, telephones, radios, communications. To their eyes, TV. The very pavement of the streets and the traffic it bore were extensions of the bare feet of men.
It was all, Henry thought, just a big human body—all that city of his and the city beyond it. All part of man. If his blood did not actually flow through it, his mind did. If his cells did not actually develop the intricacies of it, his brain cells had contrived every bit. It moved and had life and function and meaning and purpose only when, and only because, the nerves of man moved first, commanding his giant self-extension, his city.
It was dying, Henry thought, the huge superbody of man. But not man.
“Okay,” Henry said. “I’ve seen it.”
He went back.
“The goddamndest thing!” a runner reported breathlessly, as Henry came back,
“happened out Bigelow, beyond Decatur. A train, loaded with people, pulled from downtown and got all the way out there before it smacked a freight. The whole shebang went off the rails.
And nobody even noticed until an hour or so ago! Hardly anyone lived. It was going about ninety when it hit.”
Henry merely nodded.
7
Ted Conner was carrying a walkie-talkie with the mixed gang of firemen, cops and CD people who were trying to crash and beat their way back down James Street to Simmons Park. It was outside his father’s sector, in K. But the Sector K headquarters had been wrecked, and they were borrowing people from adjacent areas. The Wickley Heights section, near where they worked, had been hit hard. Most of the people, the ones who could move, had got out by way of the Golf Course, even people who ran clear across Simmons Park, farther in. But there were undoubtedly plenty more in the big houses, the luxury hotels, the fancy apartments, who couldn’t move, who were there, still—with fires breaking out and a wind that rushed toward the one, municipal flame, tearing loose cornices, ripping off roofs, bringing down walls. You couldn’t leave people there.
Besides, if they reached the park in spite of the fact that a comer of it was enveloped in fire storm (Ted knew that, from Hink Field, which already had planes in the air, reconnoitering and reporting back to the field and thence to CD), the men might be able to cut across the far side, go the long block east, on Jefferson, to the curve in the river and reach the two bridges there. They were the first ones standing, the planes said, and both of them were loaded with people, and mobs had backed into River City from these bridges. They seemed trapped—as well as the men in the planes could tell, flying in the heat, the smoke, the suction and draft and the down-fall of solids.
In fact, Hink Field relayed, River City’s organization had itself collapsed and nobody on that side of the river was doing much officially. The bulk of the population was already on the move, outside town.
The crew on James Street encountered another block: the façade of the Shelley Garden Apartments had slid into the highway. Bulldozers began raging at the mountains of bricks. That meant a wait before the next advance. So Ted walked over to the sidewalk and sat down on the curb.
A bank, with white marble walls, shielded him from the burning sky.
He unshipped his walkie-talkie because the straps were cutting into his thin shoulders. He got out a Hershey bar someone had handed him when they had mobilized for this job. It was limp from the heat but he ate it, wishing he had a drink of water to go with it.
The curb on which he sat trembled with the thunder of the fire. The wind that blew was cold and fresh, though, except for occasional surges of smoke from something left behind, burned and practically out, or safely doused down. Up ahead, dozers charged, bricks avalanched, dynamite let go and men yelled orders. When they had cleaned a lane through the cascaded apartment house they’d move on. Until then, he could rest—unless one of the chiefs or the wardens wanted to send a message. Then they’d start hollering, “Signals!” and he’d have to run up.
Ted took a dirty handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped sweat out of his eyes.
Because of his job, he knew a great many miscellaneous facts that he had passed on to nobody, for lack of time and owing to the concentration everywhere on the struggle at hand.
The diameter of the main fire was just over two miles. He knew that, from Hink Field.
It took in the whole business district, the shopping area, the skyscrapers and stores, the central half-circles of both cities and all of Swan Island on the east, the warehouse district on the west, nine bridges, the railroad yards, and various other “undetermined areas.” For the next mile out, in every direction, damage was severe and fires were numerous but would not, so Hink Field stated,
“anucleate with the main fire storm.”
There was no estimate of the casualties. Owing to the delay in warning by siren, an
“undetermined but vast” number of persons had been caught by the bomb in the downtown area.
He knew things like that, miscellaneous scads of them, which had come deluging over the walkie-talkie, intended for others.
He knew more—most of it, too, from Hink Field.
New York was gone. H-bombed. The whole thing.
So were San Francisco and Los Angeles and Philadelphia. About twenty-five other cities had been hit by fission bombs like the one which had struck the Sister Cities, “probably a secondary target or target of expediency,” they asserted. Germ war had begun on some of the people around the edge of bombed areas, and elsewhere nerve gas had been used.
Every state had declared martial law.
Two vast waves of bombers had come in across Canada.
Two enemy aircraft carriers, the existence of which had not been known, had made their way into the waters south of the Gulf of Lower California and launched planes equipped with robot missiles which were armed with “unexpectedly powerful” plutonium bombs.
The bomb that had detonated over Green Prairie River was now estimated at approximately one hundred kilotons. The aiming point was thought to have been the Central Avenue-Market Street Bridge, and the actual Ground Zero, a few hundred yards west. The robot bomb had been launched at a distance of more than a hundred miles and apparently guided by TV-radar devices.
The launching plane had been brought down, in a suicide dive, by Captain Leo Cohen of Hink Field, only seconds after the discharge of its missile.
Ted knew (if he cared to think about it) that:
An all-out counterattack had been launched.
Moscow and Leningrad were gone.
Several other Soviet cities had been destroyed, the names of which he could not even pronounce, let alone remember. The Eastern seaboard of U.S.A. was in rout and panic. The whole state of Florida had been declared a hospital area and casualties from the rest of the nation, which could be transported there, would be accepted. Texas and the Gulf States also had
“hospital reception” areas. (Who in hell could reach Florida or Texas when we can’t even get to River City, Ted thought?)
There was no longer a place that could be called either Washington or the District of Columbia. An H-bomb hurled by submarine had exploded there.
Above all else, Ted learned, fear of new raids drove the millions into the winter, the oncoming dark, the universal chaos.
The radio air was hot with speculation. Obviously, the enemy had used only a small part—so far—of his plutonium bombs. Possibly the enemy had now exhausted his supply of hydrogen weapons. But perhaps a rain of them was scheduled to fall later. More likely, the foe had launched his attack prematurely,
in order to keep the United States from taking the little further time needed to build an immense arsenal of H-bombs. This was a Soviet “preventive war,” many thought, undertaken with whatever the Russians had—a genocidal, eleventh-hour gamble.
But even if the enemy had managed to prepare only five H-bombs for their blitz, it was enough to panic those who survived. Planes, scouting cautiously, were beginning to report. . . .
The District of Columbia was a white-hot saucer, deep-hammered in the land. The Potomac, and the tides, rolling back over the depression, were turning into mountain ranges of live steam. Where Philadelphia had been was a similar cauldron. Manhattan Island was gone-demolished, vaporized, pressed beneath the Hudson—and the sea was already cooling over much of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and the Jersey marshes. That half of the “Golden Gate” which had supported San Francisco had also vanished: a peninsula with a city upon it. Los Angeles County was a bowl of white-hot gravel. Conditions like those in Green Prairie and River City prevailed only at a distance from the H-bombed cities, in suburbs and lesser metropolises, on perimeters circling for a hundred and fifty miles around each city.