“I got H.Q. here,” Ted answered. “They want your report.”
“Good kid! Tell ’em—in general—we’re doing all right. We’re about forty-five per cent mustered, at a guess. I’d say the doctors and surgeons are worst. Not reporting they’ve followed the plan and gone outside town, most of them. But we’re quietly getting all movable people out of Jenkins Hospital, into the homes around, with the homeowners mad as spit, even though they volunteered for it.”
“Why,” Ted passionately asked a question that had been burning in his mind, “don’t they let go with the sirens?”
“You forget!” his father said. “Condition Red is only for the direct attack. Planes actually headed toward us.”
“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.