Lenore said nothing. Her eyes filled and overflowed. She didn’t look at her mother or her father. She just sat still, crying silently. Her anguish was a source of satisfaction to her mother, an intolerable spectacle for her father.
“ Don’t baby.” he kept saying. “ Don’t cry. Net and I will find a way out of it. We always have.” But she kept on crying. After a while she rose and went to her room and left her parents sitting together, not talking. Beau had a drink.
3
The Green Prairie Civil Defense “practice alert” had repercussions.
These repercussions had long heralded their approach, in complaints and criticisms, gripes and threatened suits. To be sure, Green Prairie took pride in its Civil Defense outfit for the reason that its state was one of the “top-ranking five” in the “National Ready Contest”—and the Green Prairie organization was the best in the state. The perpetual competition between the Sister Cities, like every eternal war between siblings, furnished a further motive for local pride and support: for the six hundred thousand inhabitants of River City, being citizens of another state, shared the views of its thrice-elected governor, Joseph Barston, that Civil Defense was “a waste of money, a squandering of public energy, a meddlesome civil intrusion into military spheres and, all in all, just one more Washington-spawned interference with the rights of common man.”
Governor Barston had made the statement at a private banquet and off the record years before. Somehow it had found its way into print and it keyed a near-universal attitude in his bailiwick. Gentlemen in the state legislature, loath to enter into the costly, intricate affairs of Civil Defense, had been only too glad to follow the governor’s lead and table as many bills referring to “CD” as possible.
As for the politicians of River City, though it was obviously the only worthy “enemy target” in the state, and though a hit across the river would damage them, their feeling was that for once they were off the hook. Competition with Green Prairie was a standing plank in the platform of every one of them. Here was a chance to compete by doing nothing. Instead of laboring mightily to construct a CD outfit equal or superior to that in Green Prairie, they had only to relax—and make jokes about the earnestly rehearsing citizens across the river.
The truth was that after a number of years (and even though Green Prairie had rescue teams, hordes of auxiliary fire-fighters and police, tons of medical supplies and the like) almost nobody believed there was any danger. Few had believed it to begin with. The passage of many years of “cold war,” “border war,” satellite seizure, international tension, international relaxation, deals made and broken, peace offers, peace hopes, peace arrangements—along with the corresponding variations in American sentiment, national economy, draft laws and a thousand other domestic matters—had convinced most people everywhere that Russia” and China were without the technical means to wage a large scale war, would never undertake one, relied wholly on prickly politicking and small grabs to exhibit power, and did not warrant the anxiety of those few citizens who continued to predict that Armageddon was forever around the corner.
Long before, Harry Truman, speaking as if still in the White House, had said that in his opinion the Soviet probably did not have even one real atomic bomb. The Sister Cities thought that kind of information, passed on to the people at the close of his Administration and thus having the sound of a “last-word” confidence, represented “one of the few good things Truman had done.” They were, after all, inland Americans. They had been “neutral” in spirit before the First World War and isolationist until the hour of Pearl Harbor. With the opening years of the Atomic Age, they returned to their habitual attitude.
People for the most part have little imagination and less will to use it. The prairie cities were far away from the border of the sea; its level suggestion of distance and otherness beyond was not present before their landlocked minds. The air ocean over their heads they regarded as a kind of property; they thought, indeed, it differed wherever they were, so that a special blueness canopied the Sister Cities and their sovereign states. Everyone in the region felt that same way and talked about “Missouri skies” and “Kansas skies” as if the atmosphere had taken cognizance of political boundaries.