But his customary opponents hadn’t been on hand. There was a rumor going, about an air-raid drill; and the three best players in the club, Green Prairie men, were in Civil Defense.
He’d been obliged to bat balls around by himself for an hour, curtly refusing to “give a game” to inferior challengers.
His cabinet bath, plunge and rub after the disappointment had failed to restore his well-being. So he drove vexedly in the Christmas crowds. It wasn’t far from the club to Pearson Square, but the waits for lights, the bumper-to-bumper pace between lights, made it seem a long way.
When at last he reached the southeast corner of the square, he saw that traffic along the south side was so badly jammed he decided it would be quicker to run the Jaguar beyond the side opposite, cut through an alley, and drive across the interior park itself, on a paved path meant for hikes and baby carriages. He doubted if the cops would bother him; he’d done it before, as a gag, at night. He figured he could blast a hole in the stalled traffic with his horn, thus getting into the Sloan driveway long before the log jam could be broken.
The decision saved him from swift death.
The siren caught him in the alley. He had to wait even there for three huge trucks, unloading behind the supermarket, to disentangle themselves and move down to the square. He followed. By then, a group of teen-age boys, attracted by the red car, were begging him to give them a ride. He ground up his windows in fury.
When the Light came, he didn’t think at all. He shot to the Boor of the car and covered his head with his arms: whatever it was, it was that kind of thing—a war kind, deadly. His reflexes so interpreted it. The blast followed.
The supermarket behind him disintegrated. The three-story brick houses beside him turned into brick piles. The cars and trucks across the square were pushed, lifted, rolled, skidded, mauled.
He did not see that; bricks roared down upon his car, bricks mounded in front of it, barricading the view; bricks buried his car. He lay in sudden dark and the choking dust of mortar.
People in the winter-locked square felt the heat of the bomb first. Their clothes smoldered, flamed. They screamed and fell. They wallowed and writhed. Yet a worse thing had befallen them in that chip of time: from the fireball which towered and expanded hideously in the near distance, they soaked up neutrons and gamma rays and were dead although to themselves alive-seeming still. The rays pierced every truck, every car, the thick wood, the thin steel, and the men and the women and the children inside, though they should live awhile, were doomed. Many perished then and there of blast and concussion and bashing; the rest, who thought they had escaped, were left with only a little while to live.