Tomorrow! (32 page)

It was like looking down at ants in an anthill calamity. He could see what was happening, both in the mass and to individuals. He saw a woman in purple clothes fall flat and he saw a man use her body, an instant later, as a steppingstone to cross the radiator of a truck.

Then, suddenly, the siren was still. It dropped its brazen voice, rattled death in its own throat and fell silent. But silence did not follow.

From the streets below came the most bloodcurdling sound Coley had ever heard or dreamed of, the sound of thousands upon thousands of people—men and women and children—

in absolute panic, in total fear, in headless flight, being trampled, being squeezed to death, having ribs caved in and legs broken, screaming, trying to escape. The combined tumult of that agony came up the building sides, up the concrete cavern walls, to Coley’s ears, as one sound.

He could not reckon with it in his mind.

It was so awful he wanted to stop up his cars.

It was such a shriek, wild and incessant, as made him want to end it by some act of mass assassination—or to plunge into it, down the long stories, so as to perish with it, simply to avoid hearing it more. He jerked his eyes away from that inhuman scene.

And thus he was one of the few, one of the very few, to see it coming. He would not even have seen it, so tremendous was its speed, had it not approached almost straight toward him, though at a higher level.

There it is,
he thought strangely.

It was quite long, dark, but with a flare of fire at the tail end that shone palely against the winter sky. It had a place to go to, he supposed, and it must be near its place. The nose end was thin and very sharp.

Then, where it had been, almost overhead by that time, a Light appeared.

It was a Light of such intensity that Coley could see nothing except its lightness and its expanding dimensions. It swelled over the sky above and burst down toward him. He felt, at the same time, a strange physical sensation—just a brief start of a sensation—as if gravity had vanished and he, too, were a rushing thing, and a prickling through his body, and a heat.

And he was no more.

In a part of a second, he was a gas, incandescent, hotter than the interior of any furnace.

In that same part of a second the proud skyline of River City and Green Prairie smoked briefly, steamed a little, and no shadows were thrown anywhere in the glare. The façades—stone, concrete, brick—glazed, crinkled, and began to slip as they melted. But the heat penetrated, too.

The steel frames commenced to sag and buckle; metal, turned molten, ceased to sustain the floors upon many floors. Peaks of skyscrapers, domes, steeples, square roofs, tilted sideways and would have toppled or crashed down, but gravity was not fast enough, not strong enough; it was only for that part of a second.

The great region, built so slowly, at such cost, by men, for a second liquefied and stood suspended above the ground: it could fall only sixteen feet in that time. Then, in the ensuing portion of a second, the liquid state was terminated. The white in the sky bellied down, growing big and globular, a thousand feet across and more. The liquids gasified: stone and cement, steel and plaster, brick and bronze and aluminum. In the street—if anyone could have seen at all, as no man could in the blind solar whiteness—there were no howling people at all. None.

On the sidewalks, for a part of a second, on sidewalks boiling like forgotten tea, were dark stains that had been people, tens of thousands of people. The Light went over the whole great area, like a thing switched on, and people miles away, hundreds of people looking at it, lost their sight. The air, of a sudden, for a long way became hotter than boiling water, hotter than melted lead, hotter than steel coming white from electric furnaces.

Clothing caught fire, the beggar’s rags, the dowager’s sables, the baby’s diapers, the minister’s robe. Paper in the gutter burst into flame. Trees. Clapboards. Outdoor advertising signs. Pastry behind bakery windows. In that second, it burned.

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.

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!”