A Town Is Drowning

by Frederik Pohl

  Chief Brayer was looking a little ashamed of himself, but he recovered quickly. All the men from the other side of the river had guns; all of them were personally vouched for by the Civil Defense man; they made valuable reinforcements for the exhausted deputies Brayer had been swearing in.

  They found dry clothes for Groff, and Brayer put him in charge of the dispatcher’s desk to give him a chance to warm up. It had turned windy with nightfall.

  There was a commotion outside, and a couple of state troopers came in. Groff looked past them; there was a dignified-looking old man, somebody of importance, by the way the troopers stood by him.

  And with him were Artie Chesbro and Sharon Froman.

  Groff stood up to get a better look. Chesbro glanced around the room, caught Groff’s eye, looked away, gave him a fishy smile, spoke to the dignified-looking old man, and shepherded him out of the room, along with Chief Brayer and a couple of other top men.

  Something didn’t smell good. Groff called another deputy over and asked him to take care of the desk. He walked over to one of the troopers and said: “Who’s that you came in with?”

  The trooper said, “Congressman Akslund, that’s the old guy. The other fellow’s some kind of local big shot, I guess. You ought to know him better than me.”

  Local big shot.

  Mickey Groff looked thoughtfully at the door Chesbro and the congressman and the village elders had gone out through.

  Back at the filling station. The night Zehedi had died. What was Sharon Froman selling Chesbro? “A big regional organization to fight back against the inroads of the South. You and me, Mr. Chesbro.’

  ‘

  You and me—and Congressman Akslund, it looked like.

  Mickey Groff shook his head, half-enraged, half-admiring. You had to hand it to Chesbro; he always kept his eye on the ball.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By midnight the United States Army was working one of its accustomed miracles.

  It involved a number of things, starting with a phone call at noon from the White House to Fort Lowder, New Jersey. A major general commanding a division in training there said to the phone call, “Yes sir,” and after he hung up, to his one-star assistant commander, “Excellent training for the 432nd, Jim. Get it done/’ The brigadier made some calls and then he and the C.G. finished their lunch serenely. The calls whipped Fort Lowder to a froth of activity that looked senseless at first; an engineer officer took off like a bat out of hell in one of the division’s light planes and soared over the flood valley 175 miles away, swooped low over promising field after field, and returned. Leaves were canceled for the division’s quartermaster battalion of two-and-a-half-ton, six-by-six trucks. Ordnance mechanics of the division’s heavy maintenance company swarmed like maggots around a dozen red-lined vehicles under orders to get them rolling at any cost. Warehouses were skillfully looted of parts by ordnance sergeants while ordnance lieutenants engaged guards in casual conversations that ended when they got the high sign that all was well. And the cause of all the activity, the 432nd field-hospital battalion, which had almost forgotten that it was a field-hospital battalion, got the pitch by early afternoon. Long broken up into their training-camp formation, scattered through dispensaries and the base hospital, they were abruptly reminded of their battle mission by an announcement over the base PA system by the division surgeon, their commander.

  Wonderingly, the six hundred officers and men formed on the parade ground, many still in hospital whites. They were young M.D. first lieutenants grinding out their drafted service wearily. They were male R.N.’s with their big perennial bitch that they were lucky to get a rocker while a woman of equal training automatically got a gold bar. They were corporals who knew one end of a hypodermic needle from another, pharmacists who ached to inventory their own stock of trusses, penicillin, candy bars, yo-yo’s and bulk vanilla ice cream in their own corner stores again, privates and recruits who could swing a sledge or mop a corridor. They were a handful of majors and lieutenant colonels who were honest-to-God career military surgeons passionately interested in the problems and possibilities of their work. On the parade ground the division surgeon reminded them of something. It was that they were trained to move into a given bare field and turn it, in two hours, into a functioning, five-hundred-bed hospital.

  They dispersed to almost-forgotten warehouses where they broke out field medical chests of instruments and medicine. They found again the long coiled snakes of green treated canvas, tons of it, the 500 litters, and the thousand tent pegs, big and small, and the jointed tent poles and the miles of rope, each piece in its place, and the sledges to drive the pegs, and the Coleman lanterns to hang on the poles. The trucks of the quartermaster battalion backed up and the tiny handful of field-grade officers buzzed everywhere, yelling and cajoling and consulting loading lists, and trucks were unloaded and reloaded a dozen times in some cases to get the right load in its right place in the line of convoy.

  The engineers had finished an overlay strip map of the route by then, and mimeographs began to spin out copies for the quartermaster drivers. An MP platoon moved out in a truck and one man was dropped at each tricky intersection to wave the convoy through. Each MP had a couple of K rations with him, because he’d be busy long into the night; as the convoy went past the rearmost men they’d be picked up in the truck and leapfrogged ahead of the foremost men to the next tricky intersections.

  The water trucks went as a matter of course, but it took a flash of genius for somebody to realize that the area would be short of gas, and this got the infantry into it. A puzzled rifle company found itself yanked off the firing range and assigned to the mysterious chore of filling five-gallon jerry cans with gas from the pumps of the division motor pool and stacking them solid in three six-by-sixes.

  It took a flash of West Point tradition for the division band to be massed at the camp gate when the 432nd rolled off shortly before sunset. The division commander was there; the band oompahed and he impassively took the salute from the startled doctors in the command cars. A few of the enlisted men of the battalion rolling past remembered vaguely about crossing the arms and sitting at attention. There wasn’t a man there who was not, though they’d hoot at the word, inspired by the ancient tradition of the field music and the ancient greeting they were exchanging with the tough old pro who was sending them on their way.

  They rolled for six hours, until their tailbones were bruised and their bladders ready to burst, along highway and detour and miserable blacktop. It was dark soon, but the sound of some of the bridges they rumbled over scared them silly. K-rations and canteen water staved off the boredom, and so did banter when they crept through the towns.

  They arrived eventually at the field the engineer officer had spotted from his division plane and stiffly went about turning the field into a five-hundred-bed hospital. It took cursing and coaxing, and five men, utterly out of condition, doubled up clutching at brand-new hernias while they manhandled the tons of canvas and pegs and poles. Another was doping off in the dark and a truck backed over him, killing him. The casualty rate for the operation was one per cent, which was not bad.

  While the tents rose in the headlights’ glare the officers in their jeeps and command cars were spreading out to the stricken communities. One of them found Hebertown, two miles away.

  The young lieutenant, for a few hours not wearily grinding through his period of drafted service, said to Chief Brayer, “We’re prepared to take over your entire medical load. Who’s in charge on the medical side?’

  ‘

  The police chief said to one of his men wearily, “Get Dr. Soames. Good news for him.”

  But Soames had seen the jeep and medics in it. He burst in and roared: “Tench-hut!” Automatically the lieutenant popped to. “Suck in that gut!” Soames snarled, and then broke into relieved, hysterical laughter. “My God, you looked funny as hell,” he wheezed at the officer. “Haven’t had so much fun since we bribed the cooks to serve the division sur
geon fricassee of haemoangioma!”

  The lieutenant looked a little green and asked stiffly, “How many cases have you, doctor?”

  “Ninety-five, shavetail. Take ‘em away. We’re all beat to our socks here. The town medics, the emergency people they flew in—we’re beat.” Dr. Soames sagged into a chair and seemed to lose interest.

  The lieutenant went outside to his jeep and told the signal corps man with the SCR 6300: “Ambulance-fitted trucks for ninety-five cases. I’ll check ‘em over and get them classified.”

  Mrs. Goudeket and Polly Chesbro had, semi-automatically, fallen into the routine of the improvised hospital. For hours they had been doling out rationed water, mopping brows, jumping to the “Here-you” of the handful of nurses and doctors, cleaning up vomit and blood, dumping and washing ducks and bedpans. Mrs. Goudeket first saw the brisk new lieutenant talking crisply to an exhausted nurse.

  “That one,” she said. “He isn’t tired.”

  Polly said wanly, “That’s nice.” She wasn’t listening, particularly. She’d come to the hospital in the first place to keep an eye on the burgess, but he was off in an upper room, what they humorously called the “quiet” ward because there was, in fact, fractionally less noise and confusion there than on the lower level. She hadn’t seen him for hours.

  Mrs. Goudeket insisted, “Look, darling. There’s another one. Maybe another ambulance came in?”

  “That’s nice,” said Polly, escaping. They were moving two of the patients again, and it was her sector of the floor. The patients were carried off in litters—new green ones, Polly noticed wearily; maybe there was another ambulance in. Strip the cots, bundle the bedding, scrounge through the stacks of afghans and torn sheets and quilted comforters for something to make a new bed with, turn down the covers and help the new patient in.

  But there wasn’t any new; patient, not for either of the beds.

  Two pink-faced kids in clean green fatigues brushed by her and set a litter down next to the bed with the eleven-year-old boy in it. Polly started to warn them about his probable fractured ribs; he had been under most of a frame dwelling for eight hours before he was found. But they seemed to know what they were doing; they rolled him gently to one side, slipped the litter under, rolled him gently back.

  She watched them carrying him away. Funny. A lot of the patients were going away, carried by these frighteningly expert, incredibly fresh new people.

  It had to be true. Help had arrived—help in quantities, enough to meet the need.

  Polly stood up straight. “That’s nice,” she said dizzily, and pitched headfirst across the bed she was stripping down.

  Dick McCue, young and healthy and very tired after toting the burgess in, had slept twelve hours, awakening in darkness in the school gymnasium. A child was crying on one of the other litters and a weary mother was trying to soothe it. McCue was enormously hungry; his last “meal” had been a cup of syrupy coffee before he staggered into the improvised dormitory and passed out; his last before that had been breakfast on cheese crackers in the gas station. His stomach was actively growling.

  He headed for a dim door, stumbling over litters and bundles of personal possessions; he was cursed a couple of times.

  The dark corridor outside was lighted at its end, and he emerged into the school lobby full of men with home-, made armbands. From somewhere came a tantalizing smell of coffee.

  He asked one of the brassarded men. “Just coffee here,” the man said. “Nearest food’s the diner up the hill. Can’t miss it; it’s lit.”

  And the diner did stand out like a bonfire by virtue of one pressure lamp. He found a cop there to keep order and a chipper waitress who looked at him, grinned and set out a bowl of breakfast food, crunched open a can of condensed milk with the corner of a cleaver and poured the whole can into the bowl. “Sugar,” she said, and shoved the dispenser at him.

  “Thanks.” He poured sugar on and began to spoon down the cloying mixture as fast as he could.

  “Another?” the waitress asked when he was done.

  He patted his stomach experimentally. “I guess not,” he said. “You have any coffee?”

  “Coming up.” She slapped a mugful at him and he sipped it down.

  “Better,” he said. “How much?”

  “For free,” she said. She assumed a Greek accent. “Mr. Padopolous says, America’s so good to him this is his chance to say thank you.”

  “Well, thank Mr. Padopolous for me when he gets back.”

  He walked out into the dark and bummed a cigarette from the cop. After a deep drag he told him, “I’m a transient. In town by accident.”

  “You’re lucky,” the cop said sourly. “I live here.”

  “Yeah. Well—I mean, is there anything I can do?”

  The cop shrugged. “Not much. Help’s getting here, lots of it. The army rolled in a hospital and the governor sent a battalion of National Guards. One of them’s supposed to show up here and relieve me so I can get some sleep.” He yawned tremendously and sat down on the diner steps. “My advice to you, get some sleep and in the morning they’ll have something fixed up for you. Maybe those army trucks’ll get you where you want to go.”

  Dick said, “Thanks,” and walked off. Well, he’d missed it. Slept right through it.

  The cop called after him, “Hey, kid. Not toward River Street. The Guard sent a sound truck around. Unsafe buildings, wide-open warehouses and stores. They’re patrolling with guns. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said the too-late hero. “Thanks.” He turned right and walked on. He’d be able to find the school again; it was the only place in town, maybe the only place for miles, with two lights in front, one shining through the door and the other hung to a spike in a phone pole outside where the motor-pool man guarded a weird collection of vehicles.

  He rambled down one dark street cursing inwardly. He was sure the big, dynamic Mickey Groff hadn’t slept through it, had seized the chance for leadership and heroism.

  Quite suddenly his chance arrived and he almost walked right past it. Two writhing figures in a doorway, a woman and a man in a silent, deadly struggle. He had one arm around her head and his paw over her mouth; her dress was torn down the front.

  It flashed through his head. He was about to Defend the Virtue of a Maiden against the assault of a Lust-Maddened, Drink-Crazed Human Beast. Chivalry stuff.

  He grabbed the man’s shoulder and heaved, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  A fist flailed from nowhere and smashed him high on the right cheek, hard enough to make an icy area of numbness for a moment and then—hell’s own pain. From that moment his heart was in it. While the woman, shoved aside, lay on the ground panting, he waded into the man. After the first few blows it was no longer a fight but first-degree assault. He battered the man to the ground and stood over him grimly, his chest heaving. “You want any more?’

  ’ he croaked.

  The man mumbled something. It could have been no.

  He looked around for the woman; she was reeling down the street, one arm propping her against the wall. A couple came scurrying past, stared at her and gave her a wide berth. He hastened after her. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  She said sluggishly, “Went to see if my sister was—no. Jus’ go away. Thanks, and everything. But leave me alone. Please.”

  He backed off and watched her slowly make her way down the street. She turned a corner and he crossed the street to see. She painfully climbed the steps of a frame house with a porch, went inside and the great adventure was over.

  Except for the damnable aching of his cheekbone.

  In Hollywood, he thought sourly, it would have been just the beginning. The boy and the girl meet cute and you take it from there. In real life you save them from rape and they don’t want to have anything to do with you. She was probably embarrassed, horribly so, and wanted no part of anybody who had seen her with her dress tom, about to be violated.

  As he walked he constructed a face-saving fant
asy about another maiden who might be less preoccupied and more grateful, but it was uphill work. His cheek was very bad, and it occurred to him that it might be more than a bruise; people did get fractures there. Also he seemed to have broken a knuckle.

  The hero business didn’t pay very well.

  He turned around and headed back for the school. Maybe he could find a doctor there to take a look at his face; he was by then almost sure he could feel bones grating when he worked his jaw.

  It was a panel truck, like any other panel truck you might see except for the name on the side and the thirty-meter whip antenna sticking up from the roof. It parked out in front of the schoolhouse and Mickey Groff stepped outside to see what was going on. Federal Broadcasting System Mobile Unit Four, he read. One of the men in the front seat wore headphones, was talking into a hand microphone.

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. Hell of a fat audience they’ll have to listen to them now, thought Groff. It didn’t occur to him that all over the country listeners were staying up past their bedtimes for just such eyewitness, on-the-spot accounts as this.

  Chief Brayer came out and said, “You still here? Get some sleep.”

  It was good advice for the chief too, Groff thought. He was too old a man for this sort of carrying-on. The national guardsmen had taken over the problems of patrolling the flooded-out, burned-out areas, and most of the temporary deputies had turned in their guns and armbands. But Groff wasn’t sleepy. He was tired, dead-sick tired, but he wasn’t sleepy.

  He said, “Chief, what was Artie Chesbro doing with the congressman?”

  Brayer rubbed his chin. “I forgot you and him were competitors,” he said, almost apologetically.