Coley could imagine what it would he like, on those stairs, farther down, where the numbers of fleeing people became too great for the width of the stairs, for the interminable, rectilinear turns.
By and by, he went through the city room to his old office.
There were papers on his successor’s desk. There was copy and proof. There were cigarette stubs, thick in the big ashtray. There was a phone left off its cradle. Coley put it back.
The very walls, when the siren rose to its top pitch, seemed to vibrate. He looked out over his long-time command, the city room. Blue streams of cigarette smoke rose above places at the copy desk where, brief moments before, men had sat. The chairs would still be warm. The smoke flattened under the hanging, hooded lights and became stratified. The place seemed vaguely alive, yet it was empty; probably some of its recent inhabitants were already dead, or dying, down there below in the terrible stair well.
Coley went back into the managing editor’s sanctum. He walked to its familiar windows.
He opened one and leaned out and looked up. The clouds were high and thin. It was going to be a clear night—clear, and very cold. Here and there toward the west, blue sky showed through in slits and streaks, blue tinged with pearly colors. He could only see one airplane—a jet, from the speed—and it was going away, north and west, across River City.
A scarf of light fell down every skyscraper. The day was still bright, but waning; indoors, the twilight effect would be noticeable everywhere. Coley wondered, as he stared at the infinitely familiar vista, what was happening elsewhere. He regretted, momentarily, that he would probably never know. Then, with the siren penetrating his very skull, he looked down.
“Great God,” he whispered softly.
The cars in Court Avenue and on Madison were packed solid and standing still. The sidewalks were black with people. People who hadn’t obeyed the shelter signs. People who wouldn’t stay in the jam-packed stores. Coley supposed others, other tens of thousands, were following the advice of frantic section managers and floorwalkers disporting sudden air-raid-warden brassards—huddling in fear where the arrows indicated shelter.
But the ones on the street were desperate. The streets themselves were already packed with cars and trucks. The sidewalks wouldn’t hold the humanity that gushed from the big buildings. The people, driven by the siren, gripped now by stark terror, rendered of sanity, were trying to make progress over the vehicles. They swarmed up like ants—slid off—climbed again—some going toward ‘the river, some toward the south, some east, some west—all merely going, for motion’s sake. Thinking, escape!