He lighted a cigarette. “You think maybe we ought to go out and rally the kids and take ’em down cellar?”
“Let’s see what the radio says now.” She turned it on.
The siren burst into his brain as Coley stood in the outer offices on the editorial floor.
The effect was amazing. Everybody—secretaries and rewrite men, copy boys and stenographers, editors and subeditors—rose together and rushed at the place where Coley stood.
He flattened himself against the wall. As they streamed past, he could tell from disjointed phrases, and even better from the fear on their faces, that they’d been aware for some time of things unknown by the people on the street, the shoppers, the store clerks. Trust newspaper folks.
Some pushed buttons frantically, for elevators. Most started the long, spiral trek down the twenty-seven floors of staircase.
An elevator car came up, and was instantly packed. “No more,” the operator yelled, and the siren drowned him, but the door, dosing automatically, divided the people between those inside and those left standing.
It was a time, evidently, when being on the top floor was a benefit. Because every car came up there first, and when it left it was full, so full it would not be able to stop for any more passengers on the long way down.
There were some eighty people on the top tower floor. Coley knew. It took about three minutes for them all to go. He just stood there, bewildered by the confusion, unrecognized by persons who were united in one idea: getting to the ground, or under it.
Nobody, he observed glassily, was trampled. Nobody was even hurt much. The newspaper people were, perhaps, better used to crisis than others. But nobody helped anybody either. They just shoved into the elevator cars or stampeded down the stairs, letting the slow ones be last. Their feet sounded loud on the steel and cement steps, whenever the siren went low—mingled with the tramp of other feet getting into the same shaft of endless steps, from floors below.