Dedicated to the gallant men and women of the Federal Civil Defense Administration and to those other true patriots, the volunteers, who are doing their best to save the sum of things.

MAPS

X-Day Minus Ninety

1

When the pioneers came across the plains to the place where the Little Bird River Bowed into the Abanakas, they halted. The tributary was clear and potable. In the muddy main stream, an island served them as a moated campground. It was called Swan Island owing to a shape which, it later proved, changed radically with the Hoods. They renamed the Abanakas the Green Prairie.

The Little Bird, as a town crept south along its banks, became Slossen’s Hun—thanks to a trapper who, in the early part of the nineteenth century, set his lines in the. headwaters of that creek.

The Abanakas, or Green Prairie, Bowed generally east through a flat and fertile land. But below Swan Island it made a wide turn toward the south and sank between low sandstone bluffs.

The water deepened there and a shingle beach served for a towpath. Above the bluffs, the river shallowed; they marked the most westerly local point to which barges could be drawn by mules in the seasons of deep water. This conjunction of navigability, good fresh water, game-filled woods and fertile prairie made an inevitable site for habitation.

Fort Abanakas, the first settlement, was often attacked by hard-riding Sioux. The Indian Trading Post was next—on the north bank, since it had a more gradual slope which made for easier unloading of the towboats. Farmers followed the trappers, and merchants came to deal with both. Long before a shot was fired at Fort Sumter, two sizable towns had come into being on the opposite banks. Their certain rivalry was soon redoubled. For when the territory was carved into states, the Green Prairie River became a boundary over a considerable stretch. Thus

“Green Prairie,” the southern town, and “River City” on the north bank, were loyal to different states though connected even then by bridges a few hundred feet long. The loyalty, and rivalry, grew after Sumter: River City’s state was free, Green Prairie’s, slave.

After the Civil War, lead and zinc were discovered beneath the prairie sod. In distant hills, at the century’s turn, a dam heaped up the river’s energy. Hydroelectric plants followed.

Oil was found in Bugle County and good coking coal in Tead. Smoke covered the prairies from then on. And the immigrants arrived.

They unpacked their carpetbags. They sold skills learned in the mills and mines of Europe. They created lichenlike slums, went to school, entered politics, became the gangsters of the twenties and some, the heroes of the Second World War.

By then the combined population of River City and Green Prairie approached a million.

Where the sullen, sweating mules had brought the barges to rest, where Sioux arrows had fired cottonwood logs in the fort, skyscrapers stood.

By then, there were families who could look back to four or five generations of unbroken residence in the region. Some of these “natives” were rich and powerful; some were poor; but most were ordinary people—prospering modestly, loving freedom, hating interference, intelligent by the lights of their society, fair citizens and superb neighbors. The Conner family in Green Prairie was such.

Their white frame house had been built in 1910, set back in a big lawn on Walnut Street in the “residential south section,” then a long trolley ride from the busy downtown district. The houses around were like the Conner house in atmosphere even though some were frame, some brick and some stucco. The people, too, were like the Conners: indistinguishable from millions in the nation, at first glance—yet, like the millions, on any second look more individualist than most other people of the earth. At the end of the Second War, during the great expansion, the Conners had thrived. But like all their fellow citizens, and more keenly than many, they shared the doubts and anxieties of the new age.

Its very voice influenced their lives, even their domestic lives, as the years chased each other swiftly, rewardingly, after the century’s mid-point. Green Prairie and River City were halves of a happy, urban world, separated by a river and a political boundary but united by bridges both actual and spiritual. Typically American, content, constructive, the Conners, too, were happy. And yet….

The sound came through the open windows of the dining room. Each of the five members of the Conner family was differently affected. Henry, the father, stopped all movement to listen.

The gravy spoon, which he had been about to plunge into his mashed potatoes, dripped midway between the bowl and his plate. His wife, Beth, looked out through the screened windows, frowning, as if she wished she had never heard a siren in her life.

Nora, who was eleven, exclaimed, “Brother! You can hear it this time, all right, all right!”

Ted Conner pushed back his chair, stood, started to go, and snatched a fresh roll, already buttered and spread with homemade jam, before his feet took the stairs with the noisy incoherence of a male high school student in a hurry.

Charles, the older son, smiled faintly. This was the first evening of his leave and the first time he’d worn home the proud silver bar of a first lieutenant. The dinner—especially the roast beef which had filled the kitchen with a hunger—begetting aroma all afternoon—was a celebration for him. Now the sound surging over the city would interfere with that homely ceremony. Charles’s smile expressed his regret. “Can I help?” he asked his father, who had risen.

“Guess not. This is a civilian party!” Henry Conner took the stairs in the wake of his younger son, but more deliberately.

“It’s a shame it had to be this evening,” Mrs. Conner said. “Still, Nora and you and I can at least eat.”

“Aren’t you in it?” Charles asked.

“I’m in the First Aid Group, yes. But we don’t have to answer this call.”

Nora, always ready to amplify any subject, her mobile mouth apparently unembarrassed by potatoes, said informatively, “This is just for air-raid-warden practice, and the rescue teams, and cops and firemen, and like that.”

“Nora! Don’t talk with your mouth full. And don’t say, ‘and like that!’ It’s bad grammar.”

Charles Conner, Lieutenant Conner, laughed a little.

It was good to be home, good to listen to the gentle reprimands that spelled home and were nothing like military correction. After dinner he would get out of uniform, enjoy the comfort of slacks and a sports coat. He would go next door and see if Lenore Bailey would like to take in a movie.

The siren gathered strength and volume. Its initial growl and its first crescendo had seemed far away; soon its slow rise and fall became pervasive and penetrating; when it slurred into each high warble, the human head was invaded not just by noise, but by what seemed a tangible substance. Nora reflected the fact. “This new one,” she yelled above it, “sure is a lulu!”

“They must have hung it on a tree in our back yard,” Charles replied loudly.

His mother shook her head. “It’s on the new TV tower, out on Sunset Parkway by the reservoir.”

Henry Conner came down the stairs two at a time. “Where the hell are my car keys, Beth?”

“Right on your dresser.”

“ I looked there—!”

“Behind Charles’s photograph.”

“Oh!” He bounded up the stairs, hurried back, opened the front door and yelled from the porch, “Ted, that moron, has left his jalopy in the drive! How many times do I have to…?”

“I’ll move it.” Charles pushed back his chair to go to the third floor, where his brother would be tuning in his ham radio as his part in the drill.

Beth stopped him. “Don’t bother. Your dad’s forgotten he’s sector warden, now. Ed McWade’s supposed to drive him.” She hurried out on the porch and repeated the fact to her husband.

“Just as well Ed is coming,” Mr. Conner said. “That monstrosity probably wouldn’t start.”

The automobile—without fenders, with a homemade engine hood—did not look operable. It had been repaired with wire and sticks and painted by hand in half a dozen different colors. These hues were superscribed with initials, emblems, symbols, slogans and wisecracks, so that it resembled a tourist attraction rather than a vehicle.

“Here comes Ed,” Mr. Conner cried, and raced down his driveway, waving. The effort caused his crimson arm band, on which the word “Warden” was stenciled in white, to slide off his unused arm. When he bent to retrieve it, his World War I helmet clattered on the sidewalk. At the same time, Mrs. Conner called, “You forgot your whistle!” and ran indoors to get it. The lieutenant hastened down the walk to help his father reassemble his gear.

At the dinner table, alone in the presence of a feast, Nora made a hasty survey and passed herself the jam. She piled an incredible amount on half a slice of bread, tossed her two braids clear for action, and contrived to crowd the mass into her mouth. She was still masticating when her mother and older brother, having dispatched the paterfamilias, returned to the table.

“Everything’s cold,” Mrs. Conner said ruefully.

“Far from it,” her son answered. “Best meal I’ve looked at in six months.” He sliced a square of thick and juicy beef. “Best I’ve ever tasted!”

Her rewarded look was warm, but it vanished as she noticed the diminished aspect of the jelly dish. “ Nora …!”

In the car as he sped down Walnut Street beside Ed, Henry Conner was thinking about the wild-strawberry jam and the roast beef, too. His companion had identical sentiments:

“Caught me,” he said, as he slowed to cross Lakeview Road, “just as we were sitting down to dinner.”

“Me, too. Guess they figured everybody would be doing the same. Ought to be a good turnout, on account of it.”

Ed slammed on the brakes in time to avoid the chemical engine of Hook and Ladder Company Number 17. It pounded across the intersection, its lights on in spite of the fact that the sun still shone, its clanging bell drowned by a whoop of the siren. “Something else to think about,” Henry yelled, letting his nerves down easy. “When those sirens are going, you can’t hear car horns or even fire-truck hells!”

Ed wiped a little diamond dust of sweat from his forehead. “Could have been closer, Hank.”

“Oh, sure.”

The sedan turned into South Hobson Street and slowed. The school was only four blocks distant and converging Civil Defense cars were piling up, even though volunteer “police” were blowing whistles urgently and urgently waving their arms, and even though Hobson Street was “one way” during this surprise drill. They could see, now, hundreds of cars parked and being parked in the playgrounds of the South High School. They could see the “wrecked” corner of the gymnasium where, later in the evening, the fire fighters and rescue squads would rehearse under conditions of simulated disaster, including real flames and chemical smoke. The very numbers of the congregating people stimulated them. That stimulus, added to a certain civic pride and the comparative verisimilitude of the occasion, helped Hank Conner and Ed McWade to forget they were middle-aged businessmen, middle-class householders, who for weary years had periodically and stubbornly pretended that their city in the middle of America was the target of an enemy air raid.

Before Ed parked the car, Henry leaped out and went to his post to assemble his block wardens. One of them, Jim Ellis, proprietor of the Maple Street Pharmacy, was incensed. “You know what, Hank? This is my druggist’s night off. I had to shut down the prescription department since I can’t be there to roll pills myself! Probably cost me twenty, twenty-five bucks. Maybe customers, even. People don’t like to come in a drugstore and not get a prescription filled on the dot. Next time we have one of these fool rehearsals—”

“You shouldn’t be here, anyway, Jim. How come?”

“I said that. I phoned headquarters when the letter about this new drill came. They told me whenever the sirens went to report here at the school—”

“Well, I’ll be responsible for that. You get your car and go back to the pharmacy. All the pharmacists in my area, by God, are going to stay in the stores. What zigzag chump ordered you here? In a real raid you’d be indispensable at the store.”

“That makes sense!”

Hank nodded and his easy voice rose to a pitch of command: “Sykes! Evans! Maretti!

Get Jim’s car cleared and see him around to Baker Avenue! Hold everything up till he’s out of the parking yard!”

A woman wearing a warden’s arm band rushed up from a knot of people gathered around a placard that said, “Station Forty-two.” She cried anxiously, “Mr. Collins! I left rolls in the oven!”

Henry drew a breath, expelled it. “How often do we have to go through the routine, Mrs.

Dace? You’re supposed to check all those things before you jump in a car and start for your post.

You’ll have to get a phone priority slip and tell your neighbors to turn off the gas—”

“It’s a coal range.”

“All right! To turn down the drafts and haul out the pans.” Hank began searching the school grounds for somebody connected with telephone priorities. He wondered with a kind of good-humored annoyance how in hell the citizens of Green Prairie would learn to save lives when they couldn’t remember to salvage biscuits.

In that segment of the attic which had long ago been converted into “the boys’ room,”

Ted Conner worked feverishly amidst a junklike jumble of wires, dimly glowing tubes, switches, dials, condensers, transformers and other paraphernalia with which gifted young men—specialists at the age of sixteen or so—are able to communicate with one another, often over distances of hundreds of miles. Ted Conner was a member in good standing of the American Radio Amateurs’ Society. He was also a volunteer member of Civil Defense, Communications Division.

To Ted, more than to any other person in the family (and partly because his function was the most realistic), the rise and fall of the siren spelled excitement. It was his instant duty to rush to his post, which meant his radio set. It was his assignment to get the set going and tune in headquarters. It was his additional assignment, every five minutes on the second, to listen for thirty seconds to his opposite number in Green Prairie’s “Sister City,” directly across the river.

Ted was going to be big like his grandfather Oakley, a blacksmith. He had his mother’s light-brown hair—as did Nora—and his father’s clear, blue eyes, as also did his sister. Only Chuck had the Oakley brown eyes; but Chuck hadn’t inherited the size, the big bones and the stature; Chuck was slender. Ted sat now with one leg hooked over the arm of a reconstructed swivel chair, his blue eyes shining, his usually clumsy hands turning the radio dials with delicacy. He was oblivious to everything in his environment: the pennants and banners on the wall; the stolen signs that said, “Danger,” and “Do Not Disturb,” and “Men”; the battered dresser and its slightly spotted mirror framed in snapshots-snapshots of girls in bathing suits and girls with ukuleles and a burning B-29.

He did not see any of it. Not the rafters over his head. Not the end-of-summer leaves on the treetops outside the window, where a setting sun cast ruddy light. Not the moraine of mixed garments which lay, contrary to familial orders, on his bed—not made up, contrary to the same rules. To Ted Conner, who was sixteen, a hideous danger now menaced Green Prairie and its sister metropolis, River City. To Ted, the theoretical enemy bombers were near. To him, brave men like his brother Chuck (though Chuck, actually, was a Ground Force officer) were even now climbing from near-by Hink Field into the stratosphere to engage atom-bomb-bearing planes that winged toward Green Prairie.

This stage setting was necessary to accompany the rest of the dream he had, every time there was a drill:

One enemy bomber was getting through. Man after man was trying for it and missing. Its bomb-bay doors were opening. The horrendous missile was falling. There was an earth-shaking explosion. Half of Green Prairie and even more of River City were blotted out. Now, Ted Conner was alone—alone at his post in the attic. His family had been evacuated. The place was a shambles and on fire. But there he sat, ice calm, sending and giving messages which were saving uncounted lives—to the last. They would put up a monument for him later—when they found his high school class ring, miraculously unmelted in the ashes of the Conner home.

His earphones spoke. “Headquarters. Condition Red! Condition Red! Stand by, all stations.”

Ted felt gooseflesh cascade down his back.

He stood by.

Headquarters had been saying that off and on for twenty minutes. And not much else.

Downstairs, Nora asked if she could have another piece of pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Mrs. Conner said, “Absolutely not.”

“Then I’ll go out and play till it’s dark.”

“You’ll do your homework, that’s what you’ll do! It’ll be dark in a quarter of an hour, anyhow.”

“Mother! It’s ridiculous to ask anybody to study during an air raid.”

“It is ridiculous,” her mother replied, “to think you can use a drill for an alibi. You go in the living room, Nora, and do your arithmetic.”

“I hate it!”

“Exactly. So—the sooner you do it “

Chuck grinned reminiscently and excused himself. He went through the kitchen to the back door. Queenie, the Conner tomcat, was meowing to be admitted. The lieutenant let him in, marveling briefly over the mistake in gender which had led to the original name and his young sister’s defense, which had permitted the misnomer to stick. “A cat,” Nora had said long ago, “can look at a queen. So, he’ll stay Queenie, even if he has got a man sex.”

He had stayed Queenie for five years though, Chuck thought fleetingly, and after a glance, the scars on the aging tom suggested he had overcompensated for what he must have considered a libel.

Dusk was gathering in the yard. On the high clouds there remained signs of where the sun had gone—purplish shadows, glints of orange. But the Olds was already hidden in the darkness of the open garage and the soldier could smell rather than see that his brother had recently mowed the lawn. He could see, however, that Ted hadn’t trimmed the grass along the privet hedge which separated the Conners’ yard from the Baileys’. Chuck reflected that in his boyhood he had been a precise trimmer and clipper. But then, he’d always wanted to be what he would be now, were it not for his uniform: an architect. And Ted was different: he wanted to be an inventor—at least right now. Inventors were probably not much interested in even lawns, while architects definitely were.

Chuck stood in the drive and looked uncertainly at the Bailey house. Time was when his family’s house and the residence next door had been quite similar—ordinary American homes—two-story-and-attic frame houses, white, with front porches and back porches, clapboard sides, scroll-work around the eaves, and big lawns. Both had been planted with spirea and forsythia, with tulips for spring, random crocuses, and, for fall, dahlias. Both had had vegetable gardens in the back and both had long ago lost barns and acquired garages.

But the Baileys had “modernized” their place in the years just after World War II. The sprangly shrubbery had been replaced by neat evergreens. The front porch had been carted away and the front façade remade with imitation adobe bricks and a picture window instead of the old comfortable curved bay. The vegetable garden had vanished entirely and in its place were a summerhouse and a barbecue pit where, wearing a chef’s hat and an apron with jokes printed on it, Beau Bailey, Lenore’s father, sometimes ruined good beefsteak while his guests drank martinis in the gloaming.

As a man with a degree in architecture (who had gone into uniform from the ROTC before he had professionally designed so much as a woodshed), Chuck now skirted the Bailey property, critically surveying the moderne effect and looking for any recent changes. The house didn’t seem right any more, he thought. Its proportions were wrong. There was nothing in Green Prairie to warrant the use of imitation adobe either. It might be “modernistic,” but it was suitable for the desert, not for a region where winter came in November and went away in May. All in all, Howard Bailey (who was called “Beau” even by the president of the bank where he worked as cashier) had spent a lot of money for his remodeling job, and failed to fool anybody. Such was Chuck’s professional opinion—and his human opinion was similar. Putting on “side” characterized not only Beau, but his wife.

Lenore was different.

At least, Chuck hoped she was different, still.

For Chuck could hardly recall a day in his life when he had not been in love with the Baileys’ only child. Propinquity might have explained that: there was no day when Chuck had not lived next door to Lenore. But propinquity was not needed to explain the attachment.

Lenore long ago had won a “Prettiest Grade School Girl” contest that had included River City as well as Green Prairie. At eighteen she had been May Princess at the South High School, which meant she was the most attractive girl in her senior class. And she had been voted the “Most Beautiful Coed” when she had graduated from State University.

Beauty, then, could have explained Chuck’s fealty—the simple fact that he had grown up next door to a girl who became one of the loveliest women in the city. But the matter of Lenore’s desirability involved more than the impelling forces set going by loveliness. She happened to be bright, and in addition she had been sweet and gracious, democratic and sincere.

Now, Chuck wasn’t so sure. Where Lenore was concerned, he’d had no lasting assurance anyhow.

They had always been “friends.” As “friends” they had enjoyed an intimacy of a particular sort. Chuck was sure, for example, that he was the first boy who had ever kissed Lenore; but it was not very impressive assurance. He had kissed her when they were both six years old. In fact, he had then carried a mixture of ardor and curiosity, which she had shared, considerably beyond mere kissing. The Baileys and the Conners were one day appalled to discover that their two six-year-olds were not merely kissing but that—in the elderberry thicket which had then existed in a then-vacant lot behind the Bailey premises—they were both stark naked, their small shoes, socks, overalls and underwear commingled in an untidy heap. Such findings perennially stun nearly all parents, and Lenore and Chuck had suffered the shocked, conventional punishments. But though Chuck recalled the episode with warmth and savor, his close amity with Lenore at six did little to bolster his confidence at twenty-four.

He hadn’t written her that he was coming home for his thirty days because, until the last moment at the base in Texas, he hadn’t been sure of the date on which his leave would begin.

He’d reached the house, by cab from the airport, just in time for dinner. He had wanted then to phone Lenore of his arrival. But he had felt it would slight his family, his mother especially, if he immediately sought out someone else. He had hoped all during the meal (which the siren had spoiled as a family reunion anyhow) that Lenore might step across for some reason or another and find him there. Maybe the Bailey phone would be out of order—or they’d need to borrow coffee-or something. He had known the hope was preposterous. He had also reflected during the meal (while he told his mother that life in the Air Force “wasn’t bad at all” and while he had watched with incredulity the amount of food Nora consumed) that in years past he had run over to the Bailey house freely, casually, while now he felt a definite constraint.

He still felt it as he walked along on the mowed grass between his driveway and the privet hedge, examining the Bailey house. There was a Buick parked at the curb—“a Buick,” his father often said, “trying to look like a Cadillac”—and a Ford in the back yard. That meant all three Baileys were probably at home: Beau, Netta and Lenore. But it didn’t mean Lenore had no date that evening or that Chuck, at twenty-four, could simply enter without even knocking as he’d done when he and Lenore had studied algebra together.

He had about decided to go back in the house and phone formally when a door opened and somebody came out. At first he couldn’t tell who the person was. Not Mrs. Bailey: too tall.

But it wasn’t Beau: no sign or his expanded waistline. It was somebody, he could see, in a kind of plastic jumper, yellow, with a hood that covered the head. The person was carrying a box with wires attached to it and a silvery gadget dangling from the wires. This figure turned toward the open door and called in a husky, pleasant voice, “Don’t wait up for me. I’ve got a date—after.”

It was Lenore’s voice. Chuck, completely bewildered, shouted, “Hey!”

The box with its attached gadgetry was set on the lawn. The voice now floated toward him. “Chuck! When did you get back?” Lenore ran toward him.

Had Charles Conner been more experienced in the behavior of women, had he even been of that temperament which is given to shrewd scrutiny of others, he would have noticed the impulsiveness with which the girl started toward him. It was emphasized by the fact that she remembered the outlandishness of her costume only later, when she had skirted a neat bed of tea roses, come up to him, held out both her hands and exclaimed, “What a wonderful surprise! Why didn’t you let me know?”

He was not such a person. He was a gentle and dreaming kind of young man, somewhat introverted, modest, in his opinion far from handsome. His head was long and narrow, his features somewhat ascetic; his hair had retreated a little way: he would soon be half-bald like his father; meantime, the effect was to make his forehead seem extraordinarily high. Lenore’s good looks invariably brought out his diffidence.

In addition, her regalia (astounding for any woman and all but unthinkable for Lenore) put him off. She was dressed as if she were going to crawl under the Buick and fix it-a chore of which she was capable; but it was not for that, he knew. He knew it if for no other reason than that neither her mother, whose social ambitions were limitless, nor her father, who had matching financial desires, would let their daughter play mechanic in the street.

It was only when they touched hands there in the gathering twilight, with a subconscious pulling—when they felt warmth and strength each in the other—that Chuck associated the girl’s costume and recent events. “Ye gods!” he cried, letting go of her, “a Geigerman!”

She nodded serenely, a little impishly. “Isn’t it becoming?” She pirouetted like a model.

“Yellow,” she went on, “is the fall color. The material is simply amazing. Not only weatherproof and mothproof, but fire-resistant too. Absolutely dustproof. No common chemicals can damage it. The hood”—she pulled it farther over her face and drew down a green, transparent visor which sealed her from view—” provides adequate protection from the elements, all the elements, including their radioactive isotopes!” She broke off, pulled down the hood, disclosed blue eyes, tumbling dark hair, raised, crimson lips. “Oh, Chuck! I’m so glad to see you! Kiss me.”

He tried to kiss her cheek and she made that impossible. She held the kiss, besides, for a long moment and when she settled on her heels she whispered, “Welcome home.”

He dissembled his feelings, pointed. “How come?”

“This?” she looked down at the radiation safety garment. “Spite.”

“Spite?”

“I’ll explain. I’ve got to take off in a sec—South High. Want to drive me there?”

“‘Whither…’ and so forth,” he answered.

She stared at him, shook her head as if she couldn’t quite believe him real. “Come on, then. We’ll take my Ford.”

“Just a mo!” Chuck reverted to a bygone period. He ran back toward the open kitchen window and shouted, “Hey, Mom!”

Beth Conner’s voice floated back from above the dishpan. “Yes, Charles? No need to yell so.”

“I’m going to run Lenore down to the school.”

“All right.” Mrs. Conner wiped a copper-bottomed pan and hung it up with her set, one of her many small sources of pride and joy. It was just like Charles, though now a man grown, to let her know where he was going. Teddy had reached an age when he preferred never to say, or else forgot. And Nora had never known a time, never would know one, probably, when she considered her private destinations any affair of her mother.

Chuck carried the Geiger counter to the car, climbed in, and backed down the driveway.

He switched on the headlights and started slowly along Walnut Street. The girl beside him began to turn the knobs on the radiation counter. “Let’s see if you’re radioactive,” she said. She held up the wandlike detector and frowned down at the dials. “Nope. Just overheated.”

“Warm day—for September.”

“Since when wasn’t September warm?”

“How are things?” he asked.

“Just the same.” She shrugged one shoulder somewhere under the coverall. “But absolutely, painfully the same. Possibly a shade worse. Dad seems to be drinking a little too much, a little too often, if you know what I mean. And Mother keeps crowding me a little harder all the time.”

“Why don’t you go away?”

“Away like where?” she asked. “Didn’t we kick that around till it got lost, the last time you were home on leave?”

“I kept thinking about it—at the base.”

“I didn’t need to. The family didn’t let me study what I wanted. Couldn’t afford graduate courses. You know that. They hate the very thought that their darling daughter has a knack for science instead of a knack for rich men. So why should I go away, to New York even, and work at something I’d detest, myself? Being a secretary. Or a model. Phooie!”

“Anyhow,” he said, not happily, “you’ll make a damned good Geigerman.”

She ignored the hurt tone. “Won’t I? And doesn’t it burn mother to the core!”

“Does it?” He could understand her relish. Lenore’s parents frightened him, in a sense: they were able to influence Lenore.

“About six weeks ago the Civil Defense people called at our house,” she began. “They gave Mother and Dad a long spiel about how this state is high up on the national list in preparedness and how everybody in Greek Prairie who could, ought to be in the organization.

You can imagine the fascination Mom and Dad had for that! The defense people didn’t stay long; they could see that the senior Baileys were a dry hole as far as public spirit and atomic war are concerned. But they left some pamphlets. And I got reading them one evening when Mother was chewing me out for refusing to go to some beastly Junior League thing, and I saw in the pamphlet that Green Prairie badly needed people who could handle electronic equipment. So I phoned up to see if they’d take women. Well, there is one other woman Geigerman, a schoolteacher, a Mrs. Phollen. So I signed for it.”

“Great. And now instead of going to beastly Junior League parties, you’re out playing air raid—”

“To the infinite annoyance of my parents! And they really can’t say anything about it.

When they try to, I just hang my pretty head and tell them the Baileys have to do something…”

She broke off with an abrupt mood change familiar to him. “Oh, all right, Chuck. You always do see through me. I got into this absurd Civil Defense thing on one of my impulses, and now I’m plenty sore because it takes a night a week. We’ve been briefed and briefed and briefed; some of the people have been at it for years—and the whole business is simply fantastic anyhow! Tell me about life in the army.”

He relaxed a little. “That’s even duller. You know. I’m not in the glamour department of the Air Force. I’d be, even in the highly unlikely event of a war, at some base probably, far from peril—attached to a Colonel who was attached to a good dugout—keeping track of the lubrication stock for B-47’s.”

She said, “You do think there’s no chance of a war, don’t you?”

“Are you asking me as a person? Or as a military man? Because, as the latter, I’m supposed to say we can’t afford to drop Uncle Sam’s big guard.”

“As you, Chuck.”

“I think the Reds want peace—need it—and mean to have it. They’ve conceded about everything lately, except letting the free world come in and inspect them. But I’d trust sharks quicker. I’m kind of glad you’re in something.”

He swung into South Hobson Street. It was solid with cars. From time to time they moved up a few inches. In the distance, the playgrounds of South High, floodlighted now, were swarming with people, most of whom wore brassards and helmets. Whistles blew. Teams of various sorts formed and marched together toward a place where flames licked around a huge heap of broken boxes, barrels, old lumber. Hoses played. The thrumming of a fire-engine pump could be heard. A searchlight snapped on somewhere and threw so much light on the simulated burning wreckage that the flames became invisible and only the smoke showed.

Chuck fixed an eye, half-humorous, half-melancholy, on the scene. It was just a little like basic training, when you crawled along under live bullets from real machine guns and when you ran through actual poison gas, wearing a mask. But, he thought, it was nothing whatever like a real city after the detonation of a real bomb—even a high-explosive bomb. “Terrific,” he said.

Lenore raised her eyebrows. “Ridiculous, too?”

“Just what do you do?”

“We form,” she answered, “exactly one hour after the siren. I’m late, but everybody in my section will be because they can’t get their counters working right, or can’t find where they put them, or took them over to the lab for repair. Then we approach the ‘simulated radioactive site.’ Tonight, they told us, they will actually have a small chunk of radiating metal somewhere.

We’re supposed to probe around till we find it.”

He shook his head, inched the car up, braked again and watched as she opened the door.

“Carryon!” he said, saluting her with mock solemnity.

She laughed a little. “I’ve got myself in this, and a date later, when all I want to do is go down with you to our spot by the river and neck.”

“I’ll be home,” he answered, “any evening for the next thirty.”

“And as soon as Mother knows it,” she answered, grimly picking up her instrument, “she’ll raise heaven and earth to make it as nearly impossible as she can for me to see you at all.”

“Still—you being twenty-four—”

“But jobless and dependent.” She slammed the door. “I can’t fight them to the point where I’m really kicked out.”

He wanted to ask why she couldn’t. He wanted to say, as he had said before, that there were young women, lovely ones, who managed to live on a lieutenant’s pay. But he knew what would follow any such suggestion. It began with the reminder that, when he ceased being a lieutenant in one more year, he wouldn’t have an income at all. When he was settled in civilian life, it would at first be on the minute income of a draftsman in some small architectural office in River City or Green Prairie. “Barely enough,” Lenore had said once in a bitter moment, “to pay my dry-cleaning bills.”

“Do I call back?” he asked.

“I’ll get a ride. This monkeyshine won’t break up till around eleven. Then we go to somebody’s house for what the older veterans of Civil Defense call refreshments and jollification.”

“Ducky.” She swore and stalked down South Hobson Street, making better time than the traffic.

He parked her car beside her house and saw, through the picture window, Beau Bailey sitting in a deep chair with the evening paper, a highball, and the top button, of his trousers undone. Hurriedly he crossed the lawn to: his own yard.

Nora and Ted were studying.

“I thought,” Chuck said to his brother, “you were supposed to be at the switch. One of the minute men?”

“Oh, heck. I am! But they just repeated the same old baloney over and over and it got sickening.” His imagination, vivid when the “attack” had begun, was now a faded thing.

Mrs. Conner had come from the hall with her darning basket. She smiled at her straight, thin son and sat down with a murmur of relief. “Ted’s been very faithful, really, Charles. And it is tiresome. This is your father’s fourth year. I don’t see how on earth he keeps up his enthusiasm.

Ted said with scorn, “He’s enthusiastic about everything!” his voice cracked on the last word and he repeated it with dignity: “Everything. Besides, afterward they have beers and they bowl. Also it’s political. He’s getting to be such a big shot in this part of town, the next thing you know, he’ll he elected dogcatcher. Then he’ll be away from home every night, looking for old ladies’ lost poodles.” He yacked mightily at that sally.

His mother laughed a little too.

Charles picked up the evening paper and took his father’s chair under the green-shaded drop-lamp. He reflected somberly that it was odd how homesick one could get at an Air Force base in Texas and how soon the feeling evaporated when one actually got home.

Nostalgia for home had been changed by some unwanted trick to nostalgia for the past.

He was thinking about Lenore, in a wordless stream of pictures.

Lenore in the days when he’d been younger than Ted, when he’d been given his own first jalopy by his father and learned to take care of it; Lenore, fifteen, half-tomboy and half-woman, more fascinated by machinery than he, adept, helping him, summer afternoons, when they sprawled together in overalls in the drive, under the car with wrenches, tightening bolts and swapping kisses that tasted faintly of engine oil, Lenore, taking the high school chemistry prize in her junior year, the physics award the year after, a pretty kid with a man’s aptitude for the sciences, encouraged by the teachers, who said she’d “go a long way.”

The times, the times that went back as far as he could remember, when usually at her instigation, they “collected”—birds’ eggs, moths and butterflies, insects, stamps, coins, J and shells from the distant ocean that neither one had ever seen, then….

And—Lenore when she’d won the first beauty contest—slender but mature-bodied, proud but vaguely ashamed, walking a runway at the Swan Island Amusement Park Beach, head high, breasts high, her dark, almost black hair perfectly curled down her back between tan shoulder blades, her blue eyes straight ahead, her smile too fixed—winning the cup and beginning to move away from him, not meaning or wanting to….

Her college years. She knew a little about the trouble with herself, by then; nobody, no intent professor or research graduate, expected to look up from some glass maze and see a dream girl working at the bench opposite; nobody could quite believe glamour and brains could live together. And her family: a mother openly outraged that she’d birthed a brainy daughter, publicly maintaining that beauty, by which she meant a body, was a woman’s one useful asset and brains were the certain road to inconspicuous poverty; Beau, the indulgent father, scared of his wife, happily awed by his child-scared and awed first by his own mother—indulging Lenore when he could but never making any assertion of family values, never leading, always either following Netta or pursuing Lenore like a nervous secretary….

It was a dilemma all right, and Chuck was accustomed to it. He didn’t exactly blame Lenore for reaching no decision, for drifting along, a lovely college girl, “back at home,” awaiting events, like myriads of other girls. Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was really lacking in initiative like her dad. Maybe she shared, deep beneath the intelligent mind, the realism and pert but warm aliveness that appeared to be her whole self, some taint of her mother’s infinite cupidity; perhaps she had caught some contagion from her mother’s striving to escape an inferior background. Maybe Lenore wasn’t the woman the girl had been. But maybe she was.

“I think she still loves you,” Chuck’s mother murmured across her sewing.

His brown eyes gleamed. ‘Wish I thought so.”

“If you’d only…” Beth Conner broke off. No use telling Charles to take any “bull by the horns,” any ‘‘bit in his teeth”; it wasn’t his way. He went at life, even when everything he valued was involved, slowly, quietly, in his steady fashion.

“If I’d only what?”

She bit a thread. “Lenore hasn’t changed a particle—so far,” she said. “But she’s getting worried about herself. Restless.”

“Keep quiet!” Nora expostulated. “I’m studying!” She sank her teeth into an apple, glued her eyes to a geography.

Concealed behind its brown covers was a paper-backed novel with a near-naked, huge-bosomed young woman printed on its sleek exterior and the title Sins in Seven Streets. A period of perhaps five minutes passed while Nora “studied,” Ted completed a math problem and Mrs.

Conner read. Charles turned the pages of the paper unseeingly, his mind steadfast on Lenore. But even he was startled when the alarm went off.

“What’s that?” he exclaimed. Mrs. Conner glanced swiftly at her two younger children, Nora first. Then she said drily, “What is it, Ted?”

“You’ll see.” Pride was commingled with misgiving in his tone. The room was suddenly flooded with hollow-sounding din as the TV set switched itself on. “Invention,” Ted explained modestly. “So we wouldn’t miss Tootlin’ Tim.”

Tootlin’ Tim was apparently on the air, for a studio audience laughed and the Conner household was filled with the lunging, sepulchral explosion which represents the combined efforts of hundreds of persons, with nothing to do· and no sense of humor, to express what they regard as amusement.

The same sound from the same source—radio laughter—was surging through millions of Middle Western homes at the same instant. It is an utterly savage sound, mirthless and cruel, usually inspired by the sadisms which constitute most popular humor. It is a sound that would stun to silence the predatory night noises of the wildest jungle, a sound of madness, more frightful than screaming.

2

The same sound from the same TV program intermittently belched through the Bailey living room where Beau, the evening paper in his lap, now slept. He snored lightly and he stirred from time to time. But whenever the TV set gave forth its collective guffaw, its mechanical replica of the mechanical mirth of morons who opened their mouths and chortled every time the emcee made sucking motions with his hands (and who slammed their mouths shut when the same all-pimple showed them his palms), whenever this rock-slide cacophony struck his ears, Beau’s belly jiggled in cadence, his snoring ceased and a miniature replica of the audience noise escaped him.

Indeed, in many homes and public places, where people had no idea what program was on the air or what jest occasioned the brickbat risibility of the unseen audience, the mere sound elicted that response—a chuckle, cackle or snort. For they were so slavishly conditioned to this style of diversion, so inertly used to, the inanities which push-buttoned their sport, that the mere noise of other nitwits being tickled elicited the reflex. They laughed without knowing why, or even that they laughed. They laughed while drying dishes and emptying garbage and adding columns of figures and shaving and defecating and picking their noses and reading Sunday-school lessons and swallowing pork pies and custards and beer. They chortled.

Beau, among them, though asleep and patently troubled in his slumber, nonetheless snored and snickered, tittered, nickered, nasalized and woke up with a start because Netta had spoken to him-yelled, rather, since her first words had been overridden by a fresh, oblong block of guffaw, and she detested above all else to be outshouted. All Beau heard, or needed to hear, was “Telephone!”

He got out of his chair and buttoned the top of his fly as if the telephone were going to be able to see. Then, as if it had the additional power to do harm to him, he snatched up his highball and gulped it down protectively.

He picked up the instrument and cleared his throat. His tone was suddenly buoyant and friendly, “Howard Bailey speaking.”

“This is Jake.”

If Netta had been in the hall she would have seen that Beau’s face lost all its color. The whisky, too, went out of his brain. Nothing was left but a pallid and wobbling man’s body, frantic eyes—but the voice intact, for Beau knew his wife would be listening though she could not look. She always listened.

He said, after a pause, “Oh, yes. How are you?”

A businessman, Netta decided upstairs. Somebody of whom Beau was slightly afraid, which didn’t mean much, since he was somewhat afraid of everybody. She looked down bitterly at the bedroom floor as if she could see through it and watch her husband standing below. She would have liked to listen in on an upstairs phone but Beau, six months before, with a remarkable show of determination had had the second-floor extension removed. It was an “economy measure” he had said, but she had known his true motive: to prevent her from eavesdropping on his calls.

The voice that reached Beau was level, a little too level and, though not foreign, it used English in a fashion alien to Green Prairie—in a way which anyone familiar with American dialects would have identified as related to Chicago, to the South Side, to the period of 1920-1930. “Shallcot Rove ran fifth today, Mr. Bailey.”

“Yes, I know. Of course.”

“It puts the total up to five thousand, even.”

Beau gave a little laugh. “As much as that, eh? I wouldn’t worry. I expect the market will take a turn for the better—”

“No more ‘market,’ Mr. Bailey, until you pay up.”

“I’ll come down and have a conference in a day or two…” Beau could feel the sweat forming and he could hear Netta on the stairs.

“Yes,” the voice of Jake said flatly. “You come down to The Block tomorrow, to the horse room, Mr. Bailey. And I think you better bring the five thousand. If not all, then at least half. And half later—but soon. And no more bets. Frankly, I told the Bun not to take bets from you last week, till you paid. I was sore at the boys for doing it against orders. He is home sick now because I was so sore. I made him sick.”

Jake hung up.

So did Beau. He hung up fast and found, by listening to his wife’s tread, there was time to get back through the archway into the living room (sunken two steps since the remodeling) with the appearance of casualness. The wall then hid him long enough so that he was able to whip out his handkerchief and wipe his face. He contracted his abdomen in an effort to flush up a little blood, for he could see in the mirror wall around the fireplace that he was pale. He tipped the Scotch bottle over his highball glass, with his free hand—and when Netta came through the archway he was apparently imbibing the weak dregs of a drink, prior to pouring a fresh one.

Even she did not realize he had just gulped four fingers of straight liquor.

Netta was forty-eight and, though she had never had the coloring which made Lenore so peculiarly beautiful, she hall once possessed the same perfect features and the same unusual, slightly slanted shape of eye. Netta was a Hiver City girl, the daughter of a railroad brakeman who had seven other children. As a child, she had learned all I here is to know about the flea-bitten ways of life. Her world had been a mean street seen through second-hand lace curtains darned not to show. She had worked her way through normal school in near-by Lummus Center and taught second grade for two years. But she had never entertained an intention of making a career of teaching. Normal school had been her only feasible way of acquiring something resembling education. She had not even wanted real erudition—general or specific—merely its sufficient facsimile.

Netta was pretty as a young woman; she was also durable and indomitable. Her personality was identical with her ambition which had been formed, delineated and defined to the utmost detail by American advertising. It is true, as advertising exponents hold, that advertising is educational and brings to millions a numberless bounty of cultivated benefits. It is also true, although the advertising exponents dislike to be reminded of the fact, that while their art creates a demand, often where demand did not thitherto exist, this same demand, in the case of multitudes, is greater than the fiscal capacity for its satisfaction or the cultural control for its employment. A struggle for additional revenue to satisfy cravings both synthetic and inordinate ensues everywhere in the land. Among persons whose morals are weak, the struggle becomes, ipso facto, unscrupulous.

Had she been reared in a strict, Presbyterian family, Netta’s ethics would have been mighty indeed: she would have become a moral Midas. Unfortunately, her father, the brakeman, had been nominally a Methodist but actually merely an alcoholic. Her mother, though sporadically pious, by a kind of heritage from a backslid Baptist grandparent, was a woman of negligent libido with a chronic weakness for receiving and returning affection due, perhaps, to the small amount she ever received from or gave to her husband.

The result was that Netta’s brothers and sisters, all younger, were in some hidden doubt concerning their true and probably several sires. Such circumstances obtain widely among the impoverished; they obtain at least quite often amongst the well-born and the well-heeled, too, though here they are differently regarded. In such latter circles, drunkenness may be known as

“temperament” or “sensitivity” and loose sex manners in a mother may be designated as anything from “feminist pioneering” to what the country-club set does for fun. Poverty is deprived of such pretty tissues to put between human pretensions, and the almost universally rejected fact that people are, after all, animals.

So Netta passed through childhood and into her early teens with one determination: to have nice things someday. The method was always apparent: marriage. In the Sister Cities it was easy for Netta to meet young men with money: they came to the dance halls, the saloons, the places of even more flagrant disrepute. They even came cruising in River City, through the gaslit district, driving large cars and looking for precisely what Netta was at sixteen.

She learned much from them—though at seventeen she barely escaped marrying a drummer of forty who had what she thought of at the time as “money.” She learned gradually that her end could be achieved only if she had adequate formal schooling, which was why she trained as a teacher. Tuition was free. She had found out, by the time she got her degree, that the style of man she wanted—rich, of course, important, social, urbane and worldly—would also have to be (if he were to marry her) weak and vain and somewhat gullible.

She marked down Howard Bailey within ten minutes of their first meeting, at a picnic on the banks of the Green Prairie River in 1928. They were married—rather hastily and to the infinite puzzlement of Beau—and there Netta’s luck failed. In 1929 Beau’s father (who had owned an automobile agency in River City) shot himself to death, two weeks after the historic Black Friday, which wiped out other thousands of millionaires. Beau was left with nothing but his job in the Sloan Mercantile Trust Company. Curiously enough, Netta discovered that, though the self-evident thing to do was to get divorced and find a new spouse whose bonds and stocks had not been touched by the market collapse, she was by then attached to Beau in a way she could not fathom. His very weakness, his dependency, made her postpone repeatedly even talk of divorce.

Those were home-brew days, bathtub-gin days. Lenore was a result of the overpowering quality of such anodynes, in the waning epoch of prohibition and jazz.

Years passed. Beau, the handsomest senior in his high school (where the nickname had attached), started to shed, one by one, the attributes of male beauty. His dark hair silvered, lost its curl, began to vanish. His skin reddened and his face became puffy. He skirmished with reducing for years and gave up. His mustache and eyebrows turned gray and he was obliged at first to touch them up. Later, dye and a toupee restored a sort of ghostly caricature of the “handsome Dan” he had been. He had flat feet, which exaggerated the out-toeing, ducklike walk he developed as a fattening man with no more musculature than that of a youth whose only sport had been the Charleston. At the same time, he was still full of a kind of eager and boyish affection; a willing listener, he was also popular at parties for having the largest fund of dirty jokes of any man in the two juxtaposed states. In addition, Beau was extremely good at figures.

Had he not been lazy, he might have been a mathematical prodigy. Lenore’s scientific aptitude came that way.

Emmet Sloan, board chairman of the Sloan Mercantile Trust, a far-seer and expert conniver, the richest man in the Sister Cities, had been Beau’s boss. When Mr. Sloan died in 1935, “of Roosevelt,” they said, his widow, Minerva, became the head not only of the bank but of the sundry factories, newspapers, mines, railroads and other interests her late spouse had collected, created and purloined.

Minerva Sloan, a size forty-four daughter of one of River City’s oldest and best families, was even shrewder and tougher than her husband. She knew Beau Bailey’s weaknesses the first time she saw him. But he had always been amiable, sedulous and amusing: Minerva liked rough jokes. She saw to it that he rose steadily in the bank, for his mathematical skill was exploitable.

She saw to it that men were put where they could watch his more important acts. She realized that he was useful for his brain and also might (someday in a pinch, and owing to his feeble sense of ethos) be made even more useful as the patsy before an embarrassing investigating committee, or on the occasion of a shaky lawsuit.

It did not occur to her, however, that he was stupid enough, as cashier of her largest bank, to bet on horses. The idea had never crossed Netta’s mind, either. She had not questioned the occasional “bonuses” and “little bonanzas” he had fetched home recently. (For at first, Beau had been extremely lucky.) Netta was used to taking cash unquestioningly; it was only its dearth that aroused her to sharp attention….

As Lenore entered her teens, as the Baileys struggled up the complex social ladders of River City and Green Prairie, Netta saw that her luck had potentially taken a swing for the better, after many hard years which she regarded, not , without a sort of reason, as loyal and sacrificing.

Lenore was going to be beautiful. Soon she was beautiful. To Netta, who had herself parlayed prettiness into a marriage that provided some, if not all, of the products recommended by class advertising, beauty could be stage-managed so as to open the grand cornucopia.

Unfortunately, Lenore proved to be a person in her own right. She early developed an interest in the boy next door, the Conner kid, which Netta regarded as mawkish and entirely inappropriate. This youngster wanted, even as a mere boy, to become nothing more remunerative than an architect. In addition, Lenore had inherited her father’s mathematical ability and in high school became greatly interested in science, especially physics. Netta felt that perhaps the most difficult operation of her life had been the one by which she had managed to hinder her daughter from becoming a teacher, a professor, a laboratory worker or a technician. The struggle involved had become a kind of stalemate. Lenore had gone to college and come dutifully back home. She had not taken the job the du Ponts offered her and had in fact allowed her science to rust; but she had not married a rich man either—and she was twenty-four.

There was one rich man, especially, whose name adorned Netta’s mind year after year.

The fact that Lenore had once attracted and then rejected him was, quite possibly, the largest thorn in Netta’s thorny life. He was eminently eligible, extremely handsome, socially so impeccable that his in-laws would automatically be lifted to the top strata, and destined to be very rich; he was Minerva’s son, Kittridge Sloan.

If Beau’s family background was average, Netta’s had been far below the American norm; hence, in a real sense, she had improved herself far more than he. Furthermore, though both had skeletons in their private closets, though indeed Netta’s young womanhood (a closed book from the day she saw Beau) was the kind which reformers wrongly imagine leads invariably to a wretched end in some such place as Buenos Aires, the Baileys had attained a complete “respectability.” They found pleasure in that estate.

They were, according to their lights, good to their one child and they furnished her with what they truly believed to be a splendid home environment. They were worthy members of the River City Episcopal Church and rose early every Sunday morning, often in spite of painful hangovers, to drive across the Central Avenue Bridge to services. Netta taught a Sunday-school class and Beau, who had a fair tenor voice, led the hymns in Sunday school. Minerva Sloan was the Sunday-school superintendent. But even that fact, which explained why they traveled so far to attend church when there were many handier places of worship in Green Prairie, did not mean their faith was entirely opportunistic. They did believe in God, childishly, as the source of pleasures and gifts and undue punishments.

One afternoon a week Netta sewed with the colored women at the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. It was, to be sure, a Sloan charity. But Netta enjoyed that afternoon sincerely: she liked colored people and felt, in a sense, completely at home with them. Moreover, Beau not only led Sunday-school singing out he contributed generously to the River City Boys Club, which was not a Sloan charitable concern, and he gave a certain amount of time to that rather sad American enterprise of “leading” boys. Beau was also a member of the Elks, Kiwanis, and the Society of Green Prairie Giraffes. He served as the perennial treasurer of all three. He was also an active Republican and had been a leading and early Eisenhower protagonist, after finding—surreptitiously and owing to his acquaintance with the accounts—that Minerva had made a large contribution to the Eisenhower campaign fund. The measure of Beau’s stance in such matters was this: that if he had discovered Minerva was backing Stevenson, he too would have paid lip service to the Democratic Party, but without enthusiasm, and he would doubtless have voted for Ike secretly, denying it afterward.

The Baileys, in sum, were not intentionally evil people. Like many, they were engaged in striving toward that place in life where their hypocrisies, small dishonesties, speculations and shady deals would become “unnecessary.” To them, as to millions of other American families, not only “keeping up” but “getting ahead” have priority over conscience; honor is a luxury they conceive of as desirable, even ideal, but possible only to those lucky few who somehow have run all the gantlets, crossed all the goals, and bought all the nationally advertised essentials, including airplane trips abroad, summer homes, large annuities and permanent vaults.

Theirs were the vices of ambition, which has come to be identified with progress, thus obscuring its other name—greed.

They were superficially much like their neighbors, the Conners, and only underneath unlike in certain ways. Neither Henry nor Beth Conner was greatly afflicted by the desire for things. Henry was content to stay forever the head of the accounting department of the J. Morse Company, the second largest hardware store chain in the state; Beth was not particularly interested in clothes, in country-club living, in “society,” in concerts or plays or lectures (doings regularly patronized by the Baileys), or even in modernizing her house or relandscaping her yard.

“She seems,” Beau once said perplexedly, “to like kind of beat-up housewares and sprangly bushes outdoors and old duds.”

In money contributed and time devoted, the good works of the Conners far outweighed the somewhat opportunistic benevolences of the Baileys. Henry Conner belonged to even more organizations—charitable, fraternal or merely sportive. Henry, indeed, was known to thousands of his fellow citizens, and his warmth and down-to-earth wisdom endeared him to them all. His younger son’s joke about his election to the office of dogcatcher was warranted: if he had desired office, Henry could have been elected to any of dozens. For that very reason he had been appointed a sector warden. Beau Bailey, on the other hand, while known to hundreds of the most prosperous citizens of his region, was not known to thousands—save perhaps as a dimly recalled face at a teller’s window, in the days before he had a desk and his own office.

Yet it was Beau who regarded himself as “important” in the community, a figurehead and social pillar. Netta shared that belief. Both Beth and Henry Conner would have deemed silly the suggestion that their family was “important.”

Such, in outline, was the background of Netta Bailey, née Meddes; such therefore was the etiology of her emotion when she carne downstairs while her husband was on the telephone, occupied by nothing more than a marriage-long habit of anxious inquisitiveness and a very slight feeling, not that the phone call was of a serious nature but that her husband had been a little quieter, a little more obsequious than usual. She saw now that Beau was frantically afraid. His swift effort to dissemble went to no purpose: She said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing whatever.”

“Beau. You can’t fool me.”

“I’m not trying to!”

Netta walked around the bleached mahogany table in the room’s center. Her eyes needled. She was somehow made more ominous, where it would have rendered most women ineffective, by the fact that she had been “experimenting” after supper with creams and lotions: her rusty-musty hair overtopped a towel and dangled from it and her face gleamed greasily.

“Okay,” she said steadily. “Who was it?”

“Netta, for God’s sake! It was a business call.”

“Your business, though. Not the bank’s.”

Beau made a tactical error. “How can you tell?”

The question allowed her to pretend the reality of a mere assumption. “So it was personal. Beau! What have you been up to?”

“Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”

Netta sat down on the arm of the huge, flower-print-covered divan the decorator had chosen for them. “You can tell me now or you can argue awhile. Either way, Beau, I’ll find out from you.”

His voice suddenly filled the room, taut, shrill, surprising him even more than Netta. “None of your goddamned business!”

“It’s really bad trouble, isn’t it?”

“Who said it was trouble?” His face had puckered like the face of a baby trying to decide whether to produce a tantrum or a spell of pitiable tears.

“How much is it going to cost us?”

“Netta—stop jumping to such crazy conclusions!”

She could tell, to a decibel, a hairbreadth, when he was lying and when he was not. She went on implacably, “If you’ve just hocked something—or borrowed on the cars….”

“What have we got to hock that isn’t already hocked, including the cars?” He stared at her with momentary self-righteousness.

She said, “Then it is money?” Her arms were folded now on the back of the divan and her uncorseted body sagged between the two supports of rump and elbows.

“Quit hounding me.” He reached for the bottle.

“No more drink until you explain.”

He put the bottle down. Another man might have continued the defense for hours, even for days. Beau himself might have gone on fencing for a time, in spite of an inner awareness of inevitable capitulation, save for the fact that he was now far more afraid of another person than of Netta. It was the first time in his life such a thing had happened to him. He took a chair. He lighted a cigarette. He looked at his intent wife and said, “Okay. You brought it on yourself. This time we really are in a jam.”

“I brought it on myself! We are in a jam! Speak for yourself, bright boy!”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “just how bad a jam it is. If I hadn’t borrowed up to the full value on my insurance…!” He pointed his forefinger at his temple, cocked his thumb in a pantomime of shooting himself.

“How much money?” she asked again, unimpressed by his drama.

“Five thousand dollars.”

Netta moaned softly, sagged, slid from the arm of the divan onto the cushions. “Five—

thousand—dollars.” She murmured the words, wept them. “Even one thousand the way we’re fixed…!” Then she screamed, “How in God’s earth do you owe that?”

Tears filled Beau’s eyes. “All my life,” he recited, “I’ve done just one thing and one thing only, scrimped and sweat and slaved and hit the old ball, so you and Lenore could have a fine life. I have no pleasures of my own, no vices, no indulgences—”

She was looking at him, white-faced, oblivious to his stale stock of good providing.

“Those—‘bonuses,’ you called them! The ‘little windfalls,’ you said! The fur coat you got Lenore! The new deep-freeze you made a little killing just in time to pay for! All that?”

“A man,” he responded in a ghastly tone, “can get so devoted to his family he’ll stop at nothing for their sake—”

Netta said a word she had learned in her childhood environs, monosyllabic and succulent-sounding. It was one of the first words she had ever known. She sat up. “You’ve been gambling!”

“How do you know?”

“Horses!”

“And I did all right.” Her guess seemed to release him. “And if I had some real dough to lay on the line, I could get back what I’m down—!”

“Where? What bookie. Jake! That was Jake on the phone!”

Now, for the first time, Netta was more frightened than angry. “Beau, do you really owe Jake Tanetti five thousand dollars?”

“I didn’t think it was that much. I thought—around three. But he says five.”

“Then it’s five.” Netta sat silent for a moment, her chest heaving. Once or twice she looked speculatively at Beau. Finally she smiled at him wanly. “Come over here. Sit beside me.”

“Net, I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”

She beckoned. Heavily, he rose and cautiously approached. He seated himself as gingerly as if the divan had been an electric chair. But Netta didn’t swat him or even yell at him. She just took his hand and held it in her own and stared at it and finally said, softly, “Beau, my boy, you’ve done some dumb things in your day, but—this is really Grade-A trouble. I’m not sore. I’m sorry.”

She meant it. Meant the compassion she displayed, the calm. Intellectually Netta knew that the only way to manage Beau now would be with gentleness. Anything harsh might easily snap the thin threads of his remaining pride and cause him to do something still more rash. Not suicide. But—he might confess to Minerva Sloan and throw himself (and her and Lenore, as incidentals) on the mercy of the old woman. There was no such thing as mercy in Minerva, Netta knew; she’d had a good deal of experience in the absence of mercy. So there was reason for her to hold her tongue and to treat Beau with restraint.

But something much deeper also moved Netta, something she did not understand. It was pity. She realized that she had never pitied Beau before; she had always, in fact, felt slightly inferior to him because of her background. Now, however, she suddenly felt equal. His descent to this level, his victimization by the bookmaker, even his gambling per se, as his way of trying to clamber from his eternally sticky finances, touched Netta in a familiar spot. Her mother, father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles had lived in this place, owing what they could not pay, guilty of merely taking a chance and losing, and faced in sudden consequence with the malignity of forces vastly mightier than themselves: rackets, unions, the law, the church, street gangs, hoods, noble powers that became suddenly evil and evil powers that were ceaselessly opposed to everybody, to life itself and letting live.

Netta came closer to loving Beau then than ever before.

“You’re the cashier of a big bank,” she said carefully, “so you can’t gamble. That means this business must not come out.”

“If I don’t pay Jake—”

“Sure. If you don’t—it will. That’s Jake.” She said it as if “Jake” were a force of nature, not a person. “So he has to get paid.”

“How?”

“That’s what we’ve got to figure. He’ll probably take something down….”

Beau brightened a little. “He said he would. Half now. Half later.”

“So, okay. All you need right off is two grand and a half.”

He shrugged. “Might as well be two million.”

“I’ve heard you say, Beau, you could lay your hands on fortunes, and nobody would be wiser for years.”

He pulled away from her. “The bank?”

“You said…?” she gestured casually.

“My God, Net! I said so, sure. Portfolios full of negotiable stuff that I check, sometimes.

You could slip out millions and borrow on it—cash it in—and nobody would know till somebody looked. Maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe longer. But that’s out!”

“You got any different inspirations? Or better ones?”

“That one isn’t even an idea. Look, Net. I appreciate the way you’re taking this. I-I-I guess I thought you’d just kick me out on the street if you got the facts. But I’m not borrowing from the bank without notice. No embezzlement. Defalcation. No. That would be strictly criminal. I could go to jail!”

“Have you thought just where you stand now, and what could happen if you didn’t pay up Jake?”

“I could lose my joh—”

“Lose your job, my eye! Jake has put men in the Green Prairie River in a barrel of cement for less. That’s the only way he can keep his books in the black: making his collections tough.”

“Maybe Hank Conner…?”

“Look, Beau. You borrowed five hundred from Hank last year. Remember? And eight hundred, two… three years before that.”

“Sure. But—”

“But what? Hank’s generous. He’s a damned good neighbor in a lot of ways. He’s come to your rescue five or six times. And you never paid him back a cent.”

“Sure, but he knows I’m good for it. Someday I’ll—”

“Someday you’ll—nothing! You don’t even know how much you’ve borrowed, over the years. Okay, go to Hank. If you get the twenty-five hundred, I’ll really think he’s crazy. If you don’t….” She broke off. She had already said enough about his access to inactive portfolios.

Enough for the moment. To Netta, raised in the wrongest part of that wretched territory on the wrong side of every track, being in trouble with Jake Tanetti was far more dangerous than lifting a few bonds from a bank—especially when one way or another you would make sure to get the bonds back before their absence was checked.

Beau drew a long breath, exhaled, picked up the bottle, saw that Netta was not going to forbid him, and poured a highball. He breathed again and said relievedly, casting the whole burden away from himself and toward the woman, “Brother! Are we in a mess!”

In the hall, the front door dosed with a click. Lenore came in, tiredly, her coverall over her arm. She set down the Geiger counter. “Is there anything unusual about the Baileys being in a mess?”

“This time,” her mother said, “it’s a real one. Beau…!”

His eyes implored. “Don’ t—Mother! Not to Len!”

Netta brought to an end her state of uncompromising sympathy. Beau deserved to be punished. And so, for that matter, did Lenore. Just for being intractable. Just for passing up her opportunities. Just for refusing to do what a daughter should in behalf of parents who had sacrificed everything. Netta thought that if Lenore had any sense of obligation they wouldn’t be sweating now over any measly five thousand dollars.

She said, “Your father, Lenore, has at last succeeded in making the priceless kind of horse’s behind of himself I always expected.”

The girl dropped on the end of the divan near her parents and ran her fingers into her hair, pulling out pins, letting it fall. “Now what?”

Netta told her in a few flat sentences.

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.

Every day, many times over, planes left the local airports to fly nonstop hops longer than the distance from the Sisler Cities to the closest potential “enemy” air bases. But, such facts, determined by the simple shape of the planet, were dismissed with a single popular word: globaloney. It may be that people who live on flatlands retain the Biblical belief that the earth is Bat. Or perhaps people who live between great mountain ranges feel specially secure. At any rate, the River City citizens eschewed Civil Defense and the people of Green Prairie embraced it out of pride and for fun.

Both groups felt that the “domestic Communists,” interminably quizzed by Congressional committees, were more a menace than all the Communists in Russia together with their weapons and intentions—an attitude which possibly had its basis in the unconscious fears of Americans during that long period. It was a time when Americans once again refused to face certain realities that glared at them with an ever-increasing balefulness.

What actually precipitated the “Civil Defense scandal” was a trifle. When the snow’s right, however, a cap pistol can bring down an avalanche.

Minerva Sloan, on the afternoon of the practice alert, attended a directors meeting in the Mercantile Trust Company which lasted until six o’clock. When she left the bank, she could not immediately find her limousine. A large, a very large woman-tall and fleshy, imposing, heavy-jowled and bemoled—an English bulldog of a woman—she paced the wide sidewalk angrily and at length. Because dinner at her home would not begin until eight-thirty (when ten guests would sit down to one of her famed repasts, followed by a musicale), Minerva went into the near-by White Elephant Restaurant and took a table at the windows, to watch for her delinquent chauffeur.

Outside, heavy traffic poured south on Central Avenue between the towering skyscrapers of downtown Green Prairie, south toward the residential sections: during afternoon rush hour, Central Avenue was a one-way thoroughfare. Minerva ordered coffee and a doughnut and kept watching. Traffic—four lanes wide wherever trucks were not parked to unload goods, wherever buses were not loading people and wherever other chauffeurs, double-parked, were not waiting for homing businessmen—moved slowly and clamorously. Minerva scowled at this stasis of the big artery and thought poorly of Green Prairie’s city fathers, though traffic in her own city across the river was at least as loud, as slow, as frustrate. She dunked her doughnut angrily and not furtively because, being Minerva Sloan, she could do as she damn pleased.

Finally, she saw her car and ran out peremptorily—also because she was Minerva Sloan and the waitress knew it and would collect from the bank. She held up her pocket-book to bring traffic to a stop and took her time about getting into her car.

She sat back, unrelaxed. “Willis,” she said, “where were you?”

“The police,” he answered, “made me move from Adams Avenue.”

“Didn’t you tell them whose car…?”

“They were very apologetic, ma’am.” Willis’s gray head faced forward and his outspread ears reddened. His corded hands tightened a little on the wheel. He had expected her indignation but, even after thirty years, its majesty alarmed him.

“Then, why did you move?” This inquiry was interrupted, suddenly, by the beginning growl of sirens. The limousine had gone less than a block meanwhile. One of the largest sirens was on top of the Sloan Building, which Minerva owned. It was a double-horn, revolving type, with a ten-horsepower motor. This was its first test. Officials hoped it would serve for the entire skyscraper section, penetrating every ferroconcrete tower in the municipal thicket, thrusting its noisy way through them to the warehouses on the bluffs above the river, and perhaps even traversing Simmons Park, to serve in the same harsh breath as a warning for the dwellers in hotels, apartments and apartment hotels along Wickley Heights Boulevard, which was the “gold coast” of Green Prairie. It subsequently proved that the horns were inadequate: they could be heard better in parts of River City than in Wickley Heights and not in the warehouse district at all. But their effect on Central Avenue was astonishing.

As the beginning growl of the siren intensified, traffic stopped dead. Minerva had time to say, “What on earth is that?”

Willis had time to shout back, “Air-raid practice.”

Minerva’s infuriated rejoinder was lost in a crescendo of pitch and volume that yodeled through the streets, the vertical valleys, the stone labyrinths. Car doors, truck doors popped open.

People ran toward the vaulted entries of the tall buildings, following instructions printed in the papers bidding them, if caught in their cars by the surprise alert, to pull to the curb, park and take cover. It was, of course, impossible to pull to the curb in the rush hour on Central Avenue: the whole street was a solid flux of molasses-slow vehicles. So people just stopped where they were, piled out, and entered those doors and arches marked “Shelter Area”—a designation which included virtually all the buildings and arcades for some blocks in every direction.

The first sound-apex of the siren was not its best effort. Even so, Minerva was obliged to wait till the head-splitting scream diminished before she could make herself audible. “Willis,” she bawled, “get us out of this!”

He seemed ready to oblige. “I’ll find an officer,” he said ·and jumped out with alacrity, considering his age.

Minerva leaned back on the cushions of the car. The siren went up again and this time the noise, surging through the canyons of the city, was literally painful. Her ears ached. One of her fillings seemed to vibrate, hurting her tooth. She snatched the hand tassel and hung on as if she were bucking the sound while riding at a fast pace.

The scream held until she thought she could not bear it and then descended the scale.

Around her, now, was a sea of cars and trucks and buses, all untenanted. For a moment, she couldn’t see a soul. Then she caught sight of two men approaching, men with brassards and helmets.

“Wardens,” she said with the utmost disdain. “Oh, the idiots! The meddlesome fools!”

The wardens were looking into the cars. They spotted Minerva and swung through the stalled cars toward her—young fellows, strangers. They opened the door politely enough, if it could be called polite when rank invasion of privacy was involved. “Madam,” one of them said, “you’ll have to take cover.”

Minerva sat like a she-Buddha. “I will not.”

They were obliged to wait-wardens and the obdurate woman—for another crescendo of the siren. “Rules,” the spokesman of the paired youths then said. “If you’ll step into the Farm Industries Building here, it’ll all be over in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes! I haven’t got twenty minutes. I’m Minerva Sloan.”

They looked blank. She supposed there were people in Green Prairie, newcomers and illiterates, who didn’t know her name. She waved brightly at the thirty-five-story stone edifice on the corner behind the limousine. “Sloan Building,” she bellowed. And then, because the tearing sound was rising again, she pointed at herself-at the center of her full-rounded bosom where a bunch of violets reposed between the much-lifted lapels of her beige gabardine suit.

It didn’t mean anything to them. They in turn pointed to the entry of the Farm Industries Building, which was newer—and loftier—than her own structure. She shook her head and covered her ears with gloved hands. It helped. The pressure of sound finally waned.

“We’ll have to call the police, if you refuse,” the warden said.

“I wish to God you would!” she answered.

They went away.

The siren didn’t stop.

Stopping it became a sort of willed goal for Minerva. She was shaken by it, physically, and emotionally also. If a thing like that went on very long, she thought, it would drive a person mad.

It went on and on, and she sat alternately raging and cowering, growing desperate at first with the thought that she might be late for her dinner party, and soon becoming a little hysterical with the thought of nothing but the siren and its interminable, buzz-saw effect on her nerves.

Willis, her chauffeur, seeking police, was approached by two burly air-raid wardens who promptly thrust him into a shelter, paying not the slightest attention to his protests. They then took up guarding positions among the late shoppers, early diners, truck drivers and motorists who were by and large enjoying this change from regular habits.

The paired wardens, who Minerva was later to claim had “forcibly restrained” her, found two policemen sitting in a squad car, smoking, gazing with rapt amazement at a city jam-packed with cars in which there was nobody at all. “Big fat woman in a limousine up the line won’t take shelter.”

The cops eyed the wardens. “Carry her into a building,” one cop suggested.

“Says she’s Minerva Sloan.”

The cops both lost their grins. “Let her sit,” one said.

The warden protested in an eager-beaver tone, “We’re supposed to get everybody —but everybody!—off the streets. And the police are supposed to help —if people refuse….”

The older cop batted his cap back on his head and blew smoke. “Look, bud. In this territory, if Mrs. Sloan says she won’t co-operate, there will be no co-operation, believe me.”

The two young men wearing brassards went slowly away from the squad car, their confidence in the law’s majesty somewhat shaken.

Fuming impotence ill suited Minerva—unless it did suit her; unless, that is, it had an object or an objective. Now it could not. She was alone.

The fact gradually engraved itself through the levels of her mind until she noticed it in a new, abnormal way. And she was immediately discomfited. In her life, solitude occurred only while one slept. For the rest, there were people to bid and to do—or, at least, people available at a bell-touch. Now there was nobody. Nobody she could summon, nobody she could even observe. The streets, packed with still traffic, held no human form; even the wardens had rounded some corner or other. The police were out of sight. Bending, looking up the infinite-windowed façades of the skyscrapers, she saw no one. Nothing moved, except high birds, the Rags on the building summits, and the somehow unnerving rise and drop of the red and green traffic lights. Her discomfiture became anxiety.

Anxiety redoubled as she thought how awful, how truly awful it would be to enter a totally untenanted city. Then he thought how much more frightful to succumb to any such idea—to scream hysterically, for example, when one knew all the screaming in time wouldn’t summon a servant or a policeman or anybody. For perhaps ten seconds, incipient panic held her heart still and slacked away the brick red of her broad cheeks. Then she brought to bear her tremendous will. By sheer inward violence, she banished dread and its accompanying fantasy. Her kindled rage flowed back to fill the vacuum. Someone would pay for this infamous trick. She sat back firmly, snugly, in the limousine, studying out possible victims and suitable means, with her vivid, rapid brain.

Minerva was obliged to wait the full twenty minutes. The sirens stopped, but nobody came. Then the hideous horns tootled at broken intervals and people swarmed back, including Willis.

But it was forty minutes before the stream of traffic downtown moved at all. It took forty minutes on Central Avenue to get stalled cars going blocks ahead, a mile ahead, two miles ahead, and to get the drivers of cars back behind the wheels. On some other streets, it took longer to restore traffic flow. Mothers were caught with young children in toilets by the “All Clear.” They took their time about returning to their cars. Two or three stolen cars were abandoned by culprits afraid to return to them. Half a hundred people, startled by the alarm, had failed to take note of precisely where they stopped; after the “All Clear” they were unable to locate their cars. Several people couldn’t identify their own models in an arrested parade of vehicles that suddenly all looked alike.

Willis listened to one of the longest and most vituperative tirades he could remember until finally traffic moved. He drove cautiously south on Central, swung over Washington, and on down James Street, creeping along the edge of Simmons Park toward the bridge. Traffic was fouled again, four blocks short of the bridge.

“Go investigate!” Minerva bellowed.

It was now nearing eight o’clock and darkness had fallen. She would definitely be too late to dress for dinner but with luck she would be at home in time to greet her arriving guests.

When Willis returned, that hope expired.

“The bridge,” he said deferentially, opening the rear door, “is destroyed.”

“Whatever…? Oh! For heaven’s sake! You mean this—this moronic game is still going on?”

Willis peered through the car and across the eastern edge of Simmons Park to the curving façade of the “gold coast” hotels which glittered above the silhouettes of park trees. “The whole area is supposed to be totally destroyed, ma’am. Vaporized.

Minerva abruptly perceived that her aging chauffeur was not altogether sympathetic with her plight and mood. That awareness might have sent a lesser woman into a new spasm of invective; Minerva had scant tolerance for life’s negative experiences, less for impudence and none at all for frustration. Now, however, she saw that she faced total, if temporary, defeat. The next bridge over to River City was at Willowgrove Road which became Route 401 to Kansas City. At the rate traffic was moving, it would take an hour to get there, to cross, and to come back through the slums of her city to her residence on Pearson Square. For all she knew, Route 401 might also be in the area of imagined total destruction and they would have to proceeded east to the Ferndale Street Bridge.

So she did not rant or upbraid any longer. She thought.

“Willis,” she said presently, using the speaking tube, as the car budged along in fifty-foot starts and stops, “we won’t go home. Instead, I’ll phone. My guests will have to make the best of it with Kit for host. Drive to the Ritz-Hadley.”

Around and beyond Simmons Park, tall and resplendent on the proudest stretch of Wickley Heights Boulevard stood the Ritz-Hadley. Traffic along the boulevard was already hemming normal. The hotel doorman greeted Mrs. Sloan wit It a soothing word. She swept under the modernistic marquee, up the marble steps, across the red-carpeted foyer and into a phone booth. She had to come out again for dimes.

She dialed her home, grimly relieved to find the phone system had not been “vaporized.”

She told Jeffrey Fahlstead, her butler, to do the best he could with her guests, the dinner, the musicale. “After all,” she said, “they’ve been corning to my place for years. Maybe they’ll enjoy it once without me!”

“They’ll be greatly disappointed, ma’am. Very unfortunate mishap—”

“The unfortunate part,” she shouted back, “hasn’t begun!”

She spoke briefly with her son.

She then dialed the offices of the Green Prairie Transcript, in which she was a majority stockholder. She asked for Coley Borden, the managing editor, and soon heard his crisp, “Yes, Minerva? How’s things?”

“Things,” he learned, even before she finished a preliminary clearing of her throat, were not good. “This business has got to stop, at once,” she began.

“What business?”

“This Civil Defense nonsense!” She began to talk.

She was angry. She was very angry. It was not unusual.

He argued, but to less than no avail. He pointed out that it was Transcript policy to back up CD in Green Prairie, that she had her River City paper in which to condemn it.

Minerva was not moved, not moved at all. He had never heard her more furious, more determined, or more irrational:

“Two of the biggest cities in America,” she thundered, “blocked up for hours!” Green Prairie and River City, together, added up to one of the largest twenty or thirty American municipal areas. Minerva always spoke of them, however, as if they were aligned just behind New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. “You know what it is, Coley? It amounts to sabotage! Sabotage left over from the imbecilities of Harry Truman’s Administration! It wastes millions. It squanders billions of man-hours. For what? Absolutely nothing whatsoever! Do you know what I suspect about Civil Defense, actually?”

“No, Minerva.” His tone was wary.

“That it’s Communist-inspired. All it does is frighten people.” She warmed to the idea.

“Terrorize them by making them react to weapons the Reds probably don’t even own.

Meanwhile they are completely diverted and weakened in their attempt to wipe out dangerous radicals at home. The last thing a sane government would do would he to get its citizens playing war games in the streets…!”

Coley said, “Hey! Wait up!” because he was extremely well acquainted with the old lady.

“Doesn’t it go the other way around? Doesn’t the failure of the American people to get ready for atomic warfare reflect lack of realism and guts? Isn’t Green Prairie rather exceptional—because it is sort of ready, after all these years? If you were the Soviets, wouldn’t you rather America neglected atomic defense and wasted its muscle chasing college professors and persecuting a few writers? You bet you would!”

There was quite a long pause. Minerva’s voice came again, as quiet but as taut as a muted fiddlestring. “Coley. Am I going to have to replace you?”

Sitting in his office, high above Green Prairie, sitting in the new Transcript Tower which he’d help build by building up the newspaper, Coley felt the familiar whip. “No,” he said. “No, Minerva.”

“All right, then! Stop arguing—and get to work on the kind of job you know how to do!”

She swept from the phone booth into the main dining mom of the Ritz-Hadley and ordered a meal of banquet proportions.

Coley Borden hung up and dropped his head onto the desk blotter. He struggled with his rage. After a few minutes, he sent out the night boy for a ham sandwich and a carton of coffee.

Coley was, simply, a good man—with all the strengths inherent in the two words. He had weaknesses, also; his capitulation to Minerva exhibited weakness. But his courage and love of humanity outweighed lesser qualities. He had, in his life, deeply loved four persons: his mother, his wife, his son and his elder brother. His mother had died at forty-eight after a long agony of cancer. His wife had been killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1952. His son had died in the polio epidemic of 1954. And his brother had become a hopeless alcoholic who (though Coley had tried everything to save him) had disappeared in the skid rows of unknown cities.

In spite of that, Coley maintained unaltered a snappish yet tenderhearted steadfastness.

Every year, his shoulders had stooped a bit more, his retreating hair had moved farther from his arched, inquisitive brows, and his hands had trembled more as he smoked his incessant cigarettes. But his smile never slackened; the directness of his eyes never wavered and his newspaper acumen seemed to increase. The Green Prairie Transcript was read everywhere in its home city, and almost everywhere in the city across the river; it had an immense circulation in the state and a fairly large one throughout the Middle West.

Coley was the man responsible. A liberal, an agnostic, a lover of mankind, a great editor.

He looked out now, through the evening, at the other skyscrapers—some glittering from top to bottom, others splashed with the bingo-board patterns of offices being cleaned at night. To the north, half a mile away beyond the bluffs and the river, rose a second thicket of ferroconcrete, of sandstone, brick and steel: the lofty architecture of the River City downtown section. He went to the window and looked out. Traffic torrents were flowing freshet-fast again, paced by the red-green lights. All four lanes on the Central Avenue Bridge (the “Market Street Bridge” at its River City end) were crowded, tail lamps crimson on one side, white headlights like advancing fireflies on the other. Between, in uncertain shafts of light, were the roofs and escarpments of ten- and fifteen-story buildings.

At all this he looked fondly and he looked out across the flat, winking expanses of residential areas, across the night-hooded hulks of the warehouses, up and down the river where he could see the running beads of traffic on many other bridges and out toward the dark, toward the rich reach of the plains. Gradually his whimsical mouth drew tight and two sharp wrinkles appeared, running from his big nose to the resolved lips like anchor lines. He turned from the spectacular view of the double metropolis and walked into the city room.

Most of the leg men were out on assignments having to do with the air-raid drill. Some were at dinner. Around the horseshoe of the rewrite desk a half-dozen men worked, separated by twice the number of empty chairs. They were in shirt sleeves; some wore green visors. Coley Borden walked toward them, beckoning to others, who looked up from their typewriters. He sat on the end of the horseshoe. “How’s the drill going?”

The night city editor grinned. “Dandy! About an eighty per cent turnout. That means, over thirty-five thousand volunteers actually participated.”

“We’re going to crap on it.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then the city editor said, ‘Why?”

“Minerva’s mad.”

“You can’t do it!” Grieg, a reporter, a man of forty with graying red hair, made the assertion flatly. “The whole town’s proud—except for the usual naysayers. It’s the best CD blowout ever staged in the middle west. About the least popular thing you could do would be crap on it.”

“Civil Defense,” Coley answered, with nothing but intonation to indicate his scorn, “is Communist-inspired.”

“ What!”

“So Mrs. Sloan claims.”

“I always predicted,” Grieg moodily murmured, “they’d come for that moneybag with nets someday. Men in white.”

Payton, the city editor, said, “Just what do you want, Coley?”

The managing editor sighed. “I merely want to undo the work of about forty thousand damned good citizens-not to mention a like number of school kids—over the last years.” He considered. “Every day in Green Prairie, people get hurt in car crashes. All people hurt this afternoon will be victims of our crazed Civil Defense policies. Any dogs run over will be run over because of the air-raid rehearsal. Any fires started. All people delayed will be delayed unnecessarily. If anybody died in the hospitals, it will be—because the traffic jam held up some doctor.”

Grieg whistled. “The works, eh? Jesus! She must be mad!”

“She didn’t get home for dinner,” Coley answered quietly, “and she had guests.”

“Has she got a fiddle?” the reporter enquired.

“Fiddle?” someone echoed.

“—in case Rome burns?”

Coley looked out over the big room. “I was thinking that. Now look, you guys. Payton, spread this. No clowning. You could overdo CD criticism in such a way as to make everybody realize it was orders, and that the staff disagreed. I don’t want it! When we obey orders of that kind, we really obey ’em. Run only stuff that actually seems to indict CD.”

“A lot of pretty devoted people are going to hate it. Have you considered mutiny?”

Payton asked.

Coley said, “Yes.”

Grieg muttered, “Sometimes, boss, even I get the old lady’s feeling. Why the hell drive yourself nuts getting set for a thing that probably never will happen and a thing you can’t do much about, if it does.”

“I know. It’s just the alternative that annoys you: do nothing; lie down; quit; take a cockeyed chance. That, in my opinion, is totally un-American. However…” His head shook. “A lot of Americans these days, a lot I used to respect, are doing and saying things I call un-American. Anyway, gentlemen, as of tonight the Transcript is anti-CD.”

Coley Borden went back to his office, back to the windows, back to staring silently at the area, beautiful in its garment of colored electric lights.

Later he approved the morning lead:

SIXTEEN HURT IN CD ALERT

Sister Cities Paralyzed

“Outrageous and Unnecessary”—Says Mayor GREEN PRAIRIE. September 21: Air-raid sirens, sending the population of this great metropolis cowering into “shelters,” keynoted at six P.M. yesterday the onset of a great fiasco in which sixteen persons were injured and large but unestimated damage was sustained by property.

He was still standing at the window, still staring at the same scene and thinking thoughts grown familiar over the years, thoughts he usually kept to himself, strange, grim and yet honest thoughts, when the early editions hit the streets and angry citizens began to set the Transcript phones jangling.

4

Nora Conner was a wonderful child. Unfortunately, she knew it. She was blessed with a remarkable intelligence; the blessing was accompanied by an overweening desire to put it to premature uses. The matter of studies was an example. The geography period had covered “Our Country,” and “Our State,” and was immersed in “Our Town.” There had been a homework assignment the day before. “Our own industries!” Mrs. Brock had breathed with enthusiasm.

“Just think, class! We’ve studied the imports and exports of dozens of foreign lands and of the nation and we’ve learned the principal industries of our state and now we’re going to memorize all we do right here in Green Prairie!”

“All we do in Green Prairie,” Nora had murmured, thinking of an overheard parental discussion of gambling, “won’t be in any musty old geography book.”

Mrs. Brock had diminished her smile—perfunctory, perhaps, from its long use in connection with local industry—and said with slight sharpness, “Nora. Did you speak?”

“Possibly,” Nora answered.

“What did you say, Nora?”

“I wasn’t aware,” Nora responded thoughtfully, “of saying it aloud. Pardon me.”

Mrs. Brock meditated, and pursued the matter no further. The last time she had persisted in probing Nora’s murmurings, Nora had reluctantly vouchsafed their subject: certain frank facts of natural history gleaned from idle reading in a book on pig breeding. Mrs. Brock resumed the mien of good will related to home industries—and myriad other subjects.

She would like, Nora thought judiciously, to teach us something; it’s just that the poor woman doesn’t know anything worth teaching.

It has been noted that Nora had evaded the study of geography on the previous evening.

She had, very honorably, opened the book. But she had pored over other matters than home industries and resources: matters contained in a hidden, paper-back volume entitled Sin in Seven Streets. This item, borrowed from a classmate in return for the use of one of Nora’s mother’s necklaces at a party, purported to be “a frank and factual account of the shocking international traffic in womanhood, written by a team of world-renowned journalists.”

So it happened the next day (which was sunny and very hot) that Nora found herself ill prepared for geography recitation. Bells, which regiment the lives of children, rang loudly.

Arithmetics had been put away and thirty-nine sixth graders had taken out geographies, setting them on their desks, closed. Blackboards were erased.

“Now, class,” Mrs. Brock began, “we have memorized the industries of Green Prairie and, though it’s not in ‘Our State,’ of River City, also. I’m going to call on one of you to start the list and when he—or she—thinks it’s complete, I’ll ask for hands. Nora Conner. How many—and what—industries did you memorize last night?”

Nora stood. It was her opinion that she was being picked on. Inasmuch as she had done no memorizing whatsoever, she could only regard her predicament in that light. It would not have occurred to her (under these circumstances) that very little in this wide world bored Mrs.

Brock more than the lists of what nations and cities made and shipped to each other. Nora was incapable of imagining—for all the yeastiness of her brain—that teachers even had such feelings, or to guess that Mrs. Brock had singled her out in the hope that her voluble memory would complete the dull circuit faster than any other pupil’s.

In her dilemma, however, Nora was not without resources. She had, to begin with, lived in Green Prairie for eleven years, the sum total of her life. She was observant. Her family was a lively one. She had also perceived early in her school career that where a long list is asked for—or a complex matter is to be discussed—and where the victim of such inquiry is unprepared, a very thorough exposition of some recollected or guessed—at portion of the unknown whole will satisfy a teacher, even fool one, and often lead to a good mark when Hat failure threatened.

“Green Prairie,” Nora therefore began, taking her time, “has a vast metals industry. Early settlers in the area noticed the peculiar color of some of the rocks. These rocks, occurring in sandstone hills, are much older than most of the Missouri Basin. They were pushed up by volcanoes before the dinosaurs came on the earth. They are called igneous intrusions. They contained lead and zinc and other ores—”

“Just the list,” Mrs. Brock munnured. “The geology is something from last week’s lesson we got from Life magazine. Now. Our industries. Metals smelting is one, of course.”

“Petroleum….”

Mrs. Brock nodded. “Green Prairie has a cracking plant.”

“…and, of course, agriculture and all that cities do with it. Sugar beets grow all around, wheat and corn, oats and barley. Green Prairie refines beet sugar and makes oatmeal. It—”

“Nora. Did you study last night?”

“Yes, Mrs. Brock.” Nora would have been happy to oblige with a detailed resume of harlotry in Buenos Aires, as noted by two American journalists who had made a three-day survey of the city. But she was not, she realized, on the beam in the matter of “industries.” Hands flew all around her.

Mrs. Brock sighed. “Sit down, Nora. Charles Williams.”

Charles stood. His small, marblelike eyes squinted, and his freckled face tipped back, his stomach mightily protruding. His voice shrilled and its every syllable was a wound to Nora’s self-esteem: “Steel, limestone, coking ovens, brick, brine, sulphuric acid, light metals including a large aluminum plant, airplane frames, farm machinery—this is the biggest business in the area—dairy products, furniture, pumps, hardware of all sorts, tools, dies, wool and flax fabrics, beet sugar”—his slitted eye rolled on Nora—“one of the least important industries—and also paint, dyes, wallpaper, plastics, patent medicines and varnish. Linoleum, soap, industrial resins and greases and potash. Doll carriages, cement—” his memory gave out.

“Very good—very good, indeed, Charles! Evelyn?”

A solemn child with a pale face, bangs and a surprisingly animated, even sassy voice said, “He forgot—toothpaste, synthetic flavorings, canned vegetables and a small but promising garment industry.”

“Excellent! Now, what does River City make and do besides these?”

Hands fluttered again, like confetti.

Roy Rich filled in: “River City has many of those industries, also.” His eyes did not squint, but shut, as he consulted memory and ripped off in a staccato: “World’s biggest built-in, tractor-plow factory, huge ceramics industry, lead and zinc smelters, electric-furnace reduction plants, nation’s eighth largest surgical aid and pros- pros- something—”

“Prosthetics.”

“Pros-thetics-whatever-that-is-plant, high-grade special oils, tungsten wire, nuts, bolts, screws and automatic screw machines, chicken and fence wire, and that’s all I remember.”

Mrs. Brock sighed. It hadn’t taken half the period, after all, to pull from her class the various items of the Sister Cities’ endless business and, she thought irrelevantly, the attendant smoke, fumes, slums, labor troubles and traffic congestion. She brightened. “Now, class, you’ve pretty well covered the lists in the book. We’ll turn to a more creative project. What industries can you yourselves list that are not in our geography book?”

Fewer hands rose. Nora thought poutily, She’s a sucker for anything she thinks is creative!

It was not far from the truth, though Nora’s momentarily low opinion of Mrs. Brock’s educational penchant was unjustified.

“Halleck?” Mrs. Brock beamed.

“Candy,” said Halleck Watrous, hardly rising and dropping back in his seat at once.

“Well-yes,” the teacher murmured dubiously.

“Mr. Papandrocopulis makes the best nougat in the West,” Halleck said defensively.

“It’s a small local business. Who else?” She looked. “Mary?”

A sleek, prettied-up sixth grader with very blonde hair said, “My own father is superintendent of the Acme Rubber Products Company.”

“Very good,” Mrs. Brock nodded. Then, catching a subdued snicker in the male section, she flushed faintly and hurried on. “I can think of dozens of things! John?”

“Slaughterhouses and sawmills.”

“Excellent! Manda?”

“Lace. Old ladies tat it.”

“Marvin?”

“The Teen-James Company makes police whistles.”

“I suppose they do—very good—novelty products, we should call it.”

Nora had an idea and put up her hand, thinking to recoup. Mrs. Brock, surprised, said,

“Yes, Nora?”

“Amusement rides—Swan Island’s the biggest amusement park in the whole area.”

Mrs. Brock’s reaction was less than delighted and the class giggled.

“It isn’t play —for the people that make money out of it!” Nora said defensively. “It’s a business. I bet they make more money than the banks!”

The teacher nodded happily. “ Banks! Now there is a big Sister City business. Finance, market trading, clearing houses, banks.” Horse dust, Nora thought to herself, with no clear image of a substance, but a sense that the phrase was appropriate.

Mrs. Brock went on. “Well, let me hint. What’s big, and mostly glass, that you see in the suburbs and the country…?”

They guessed it. Greenhouses, nurseries and a new hydroponics experiment in winter-vegetable raising.

It was not a good day for Nora. She was unable to define “commission government” in civics, and she got three dates wrong in the history test. Moreover, when she stopped beside the school fence to argue with Judy Martin on the meaning of “morphodite,” Billy Westcott crept up behind her, tied her two long pigtails together and hung them over an iron picket. The result was that, finding herself overwhelmed by Judy’s superiority in esoteric information and being told there was “no such word,” Nora decided to run—and did not. Instead, her head jerked back nastily, her neck-hair was painfully pulled, she bumped the iron fence, and only a fast, reflex scuffling of her feet saved her from falling, and from hanging ignominiously by her braids. She unhooked herself speedily. The same thing had already happened twice before that year: once on the iron cleat of a phone pole and once on a fire extinguisher. She threw four futile rocks at the hilarious, rapidly retreating Billy.

Her journey back to her home did little to improve things.

The way from Public School 44 led out Dumond A venue and over Walnut-a matter of some twelve blocks, or about a mile. Nora preferred, however, to come by less direct routes. She had several favorites, depending on the season. One, involving a long detour, took her past Restland Cemetery and a good third of the distance into town. Another followed Hickory—the school being on the corner of that street and Dumond Avenue—diagonally across Hobart Park, which placid preserve had been a bequest to Green Prairie by the long-deceased founder of Hobart Metal Products. The park, once the Hobart estate, contained a pond; Nora enjoyed ponds-ducks came to them, fish lived in them, rowboats tipped over in them, and you could wade, if the cop was trifling with some nursemaid. She also liked, when in the humor, to go clear over to Cold Spring Street, which was beyond her home, and watch trains go by on the Kansas and Southern Railroad.

This day, however, she went along Hickory merely to River Avenue and turned south.

River Avenue crossed Plum Street, Oak, Spruce, Pine and Maple, before reaching Walnut. It was a broad thoroughfare, much used by buses and trucks and, in this district, a minor shopping street besides. Now, however, River Avenue was dug up and new sewers were being laid. This enterprise involved noise, fire and big machinery, men, moraines of Green Prairie’s underlying clay, dynamite explosions and other interesting features.

Nora’s tour, however, was unlucky. She met two boys she’d never seen before who said they lived over Schneider’s Delicatessen, challenged her to penny-pitching and won eight cents, all she had on her at the time. Furthermore, a bus hit a puddle at the Spruce Street intersection and spattered her dress.

Her inner condition was mediocre when she reached home. She was about to open the front door and enter, which was her right, when her father drove into the yard with a sound of brakes that meant either he was mad or he had to go to the bathroom in haste. She looked and saw that he was mad. Very mad.

“Nora,” he said, “I want you to stay outdoors this afternoon! I’m having a meeting.”

“It’s impossible,” Nora responded.

Thus challenged, he took closer cognizance. “You sick? It’s a perfectly swell, hot day!”

“My dress is filthy—through the fault of the Green Prairie Street Transportation Company.”

“Well, go round the back way then. I expect a lot of people here shortly.”

“Where’s Mom?”

He went in. “How do I know? I just got here, too! Making sandwiches, I hope.”

“What’s the meeting for?”

“Civil Defense indignation meeting. My section. We may decide to cancel all our subscriptions to the Transcript.”

“ That old stuff!” Nora murmured. She brightened. “Anyhow—if it ever did happen—it would probably be a hydrogen bomb and there wouldn’t even be a stone standing in the uttermost corners of the County.”

He stared at her. “Sometimes,” he said gently, “I feel that would be best.”

He slammed the door. His daughter shrugged several times and tittered. Inasmuch as her mother was putatively making sandwiches, Nora went dutifully around back. She was given a cheese-and-jelly and a cold meat.

These she took into the yard, eating one and then the other, like Alice with the mushroom edges. She thought of climbing on the trunk and scrutinizing the objects her father kept in a locked garage closet. From the trunk, a dusty window gave a good view. But that had lost its shock. She saw Queenie, the cat, move furtively through the hedge into the Bailey yard. Queenie then bounded forward a number of times and flattened out again. Sneaking.

Nora went through the hedge also, skirted the summer-house and came to rest, kneeling, behind the chimney of the Bailey barbecue pit. What Queenie was after was a bird, Nora told herself interestedly—a small one with red on it. The cat looked at the girl with hate in his eyes until he saw Nora was positively rather than negatively engrossed in his stalking. Then, showing off a little perhaps, he made a pitch for the bird. He moved inchmeal, all but invisibly; when the bird moved he froze. The bird didn’t notice Nora, who ate thoughtfully, taking care to make no sudden movement. It was a fairly fascinating thing to see, and she hoped old Queenie would get the bird because she had never seen a cat eat up a bird and never even really got a good look at a bird’s insides.

Thus Nora was where she was with reason. She was not engaged in eavesdropping, hiding in bushes, or any other such furtive occupation. She was merely watching her own cat hunt, while she ate her own sandwiches. The fact that she was concealed had to do with the cat’s quarry, and nothing whatever to do with the descent upon the summer-house of Lenore and Kittridge Sloan.

Lenore came jouncing and hurrying and laughing in a sweater and a skirt but no bra, Nora observed. The man—Nora at that time did not know who he was—had a mustache, black, small, twisty. She failed to observe that he was more than six feet tall, about thirty years old, built like a first baseman and dressed in sports clothes. She did notice that he wore three gold rings, looked like a “Mexican movie actor,” and got out a little leather thing that had a file in it and dug his nails, when angry.

“I haven t got long,” Lenore said, “so let’s sit here—”

“The Jaguar would take us some place a lot better in about five minutes.”

“I told you, Kit, I have to go to a meeting…”

He looked across the lawn at the Conner house and said, “You really mean you intend to go?”

Certainly. I’m in Henry Conner’s sector.”

He laughed a long time. “And I’ve invited you to the club!”

“I know. But this is important. The Transcript was perfectly beastly, this morning and…” she broke off. There was a pause and she said, “I’m sorry.”

That made him laugh even more, and Nora could see the dark young woman was relieved. The man said, “That’s Mother’s doing. She was trapped downtown last night. Brother!

Did she ever boil, simmer, curdle and take fire!”

“She has a right to her opinion, but I don’t agree—”

The man took Lenore by the shoulder and shook her gently, so that her dark hair swung and her worried expression faded. “I certainly am glad I went shopping today. Ye gods! Imagine you being around town—and me not. knowing it! How long…?”

“I graduated over a year ago, Kit,” she said.

From behind the barbecue pit and sundry rose bushes Nora reflected that his name, anyhow, was Kit, like First Aid Kit.

“And I didn’t know!” He peered at her with what the adventitious but fascinated onlooker regarded as an oozy look. “You realize, don’t you, that you’ve turned into the most beautiful piece of stuff in two states?”

Lenore moved away from him and sat down. She said, “Nonsense!” She paused and went on, “Besides, you have seen me, or could have, when you were in town last winter—at the Semophore Hill Club Christmas party. Several places. Only—you were busy.”

That made him laugh, too. “Blondes?”

“Various shades,” Lenore answered.

Nora began to wonder what would not make him laugh or, at least, titter. He sat down very close to Lenore, offered her a cigarette, and put one, for himself, in some kind of holder. A gold one, extremely sissified. “I gave you up,” he said, “three years back because—”

“Because wouldn’t—give.”

“Still the same old Lenore.”

She nodded. “You bet. Untarnished. But with a gradually souring disposition perhaps.”

He shook his head in mock sorrow. “Naturellement,” he said, which Nora knew was French for “naturally.” Otherwise she didn’t know what he meant when he went on, “The end product of spinsterdom.”

“Are you going to be in River City long?”

“Living with Muzz,” he nodded. “For how long? Search me! You know, Lenore, you could have something to do with that!”

“I doubt it. Maybe a day or two’s difference.”

“I was pretty crazy about you.

“You were pretty crazy, period.”

“That’s really not up to your usual acid rejoinder, dear.”

“No.” She gazed at him, not happily. “Look, Kit. I was one more of the college girls back then who thought you were a young female’s dream, answered prayer—all that.”

“But I am!” His bright smile gleamed, his amused laugh sounded.

“Oh, sure. E very young girl’s—”

“Just a sign of broad taste.” He chortled. “And the curse of wealth. Let me ask you something.”

“All right.”

“Is your health good?”

“Why? Of course it is.”

“Grandparents long-lived? Have many children?”

“Just what?”

He grinned. “Tell me.”

“One had five and Dad’s family has four and they’re all living. Why?”

He leaned back, blew smoke. “Mother is getting very insistent these days. You know. The family line must be continued. I must find somebody steady, intelligent, healthy, good family, sound stock—you’d really fit the whole catalogue.”

“Did she say anything about the girl being willing?”

“Nope. Mother rarely does. Just that she be found by me. The presumption is that the rest can be managed. By her, I suppose, if not by me.” He sighed ever so slightly and Nora thought it was not an especially interesting change of mood from his mirth. “Seeing you this P.M. at the handkerchief counter did more than bring back memories, Lenore. It brought to mind Mother’s bill of particulars.”

“You didn’t have to pick up a display umbrella and open it over me and kiss me, in front of all those shoppers and clerks!”

Upon hearing that news, Nora peered at Kit with the first sign of any reaction save disdain.

“Ah, but I did!” he said. “Only kiss I ever got with no fear of reprisal. You didn’t dare—

in the store.”

“Not true.” He took her hand. “That’s what I mean, Lenore. Remember?”

“I remember our last date. I wished I had a Colt automatic.”

“I’ll send you one, and then phone you for a new date.”

Lenore nodded. “I really have to go.” She looked across toward the Conner house where cars were parked.

“What do you do in Civil Defense?”

“Radiation safety.”

“And what would that be?”

“You know. Monitoring. Seeing if it’s safe to go in places.”

“That’s my girl!” Kit Sloan was amused again. “Checking with instruments, for safety! All right. I’ll take a chance. Phone you tomorrow.”

She thought about it and nodded. They got up.

Kit grabbed her and gave her a long and large kiss. Nora edged up a little higher on her knees to evaluate it. You could tell, she felt, that Lenore wasn’t particularly keen about the kiss.

But it went on for so long that Lenore seemed to weaken a little. People do, Nora had observed.

Anyhow, Lenore sagged and when he let her go she just looked at him with a very odd expression and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He said, “See you!” and ran away…. Then his car started. Lenore just sat down.

By and large, Nora had nothing against the beautiful girl next door. In fact, Nora thought, she was one of the best types of grown-up people. She paid some attention to others. She could tell when a person was discouraged or being put upon and, if she wasn’t busy (the curse of maturity), she would do something about it. Buy you a sundae, maybe, or even take you to the movies. Right now, for instance, Lenore was on Nora’s side against Nora’s mother on the matter of braids. Lenore argued, sensibly, that braids were a bother to kids and hair would grow back when you wanted it. On the other hand, this business in the summerhouse, Nora felt, was definitely on the two-timing side. Lenore was Charles Conner’s girl and always had been and they would be married someday and, in Nora’s opinion, Lenore was about as good as her brother could be expected to do—though she had occasionally wondered why neither Charles nor Ted ever expressed any interest in exotic types. Nora thought if she were a man she would probably marry either a Polynesian or a gypsy, and there was some idea in her mind of adding Latin-American women, in general, to the list.

Letting herself be kissed limp by this Kit-Whoever was not Fair in Love. But Nora thought it might be Exotic. The man had a handsome-stranger look, though she had apparently known him for umpteen years. Nora felt she herself would like, someday, the type who put open umbrellas over you in stores and began osculation without caring about onlookers. She didn’t believe Charles would do a thing like that.

All in all, she decided to reserve judgment. A woman, she thought, who was soon going to settle down and marry her brother certainly had a right to a few harmless flirtations. Without them, according to Nora’s information from books, taken with her observation of her older brother, a handsome woman like Lenore would probably soon tum into a desiccated shrew with dishpan hands. But such things, Nora realized, shouldn’t go too far.

She wondered what would happen if they did, and it was quite an exciting thing to wonder about.

She was sitting in the grass, merely wondering, when Lenore lighted another cigarette and drifted away into the house. Nora kept trying to visualize the extremities involved in going “too far”—trying to associate the imaginary behavior of Lenore with the rather nebulously described activities of the ladies in Sin on Seven Streets, until Queenie made his pounce at the bird, and missed.

The bird merely gave a little squeak and flew away.

Queenie sat down and groomed his tail, glancing once at Nora with the look of a cat who was fooling anyhow and merely enjoyed scaring hell out of birds. Nora went home. She stopped at the dining-room doors, but they were drawn together. She listened to voices. “Henry, you’re the leader here! I say we need help from Washington and you ought to phone.”

“I say, let’s start a campaign to boycott all advertisers in the Transcript. We’ve given years, here, to this organization. It’s intended to save Green Prairie in case of an emergency. We cannot allow a newspaper to ridicule us, censure, blame…!”

Newspapers, Nora thought loftily, going away, do what they please.

She went upstairs slowly. Music drifted from Ted’s radio in the attic. The day, all of it, had blanked from Nora’s mind, save for one thing: her braids. She felt she was a neglected child and would have to take care of herself. She went to her mother’s sewing basket, found the big shears, and cut off both braids, hastily lest she change her mind.

They did not cut easily. She had to hack them off, one strand at a time. When she finished—when she held in her two hands the light-brown pigtails, still beribboned at the ends, tinged here and there with a slightly greenish cast from their contact with grubby hands—an expression of purest delight set Nora’s light-blue eyes dancing. Site had done it. They were done for. She had done it by herself, because it was her hair and it was unbearable, and nobody else but herself cared particularly what happened to her. She ran skipping to see the effect in the long mirror in her mother’s room.

And when she saw, she was devastated. In her mind’s eye, she had overlooked the present phase—the ragged, wrong-length hacked locks that were not a recognizable bob of any kind but merely the plain evidence of devastation. A long, low wail escaped Nora and rose to a penetrating wail of dismay.

Downstairs, Henry sat with some thirty men and women, block wardens, section heads, neighbors, old friends, most of them his own age, many of them people with whom he’d gone through grammar and high school in Green Prairie. They were angry, intent people, who felt themselves grossly abused and made ridiculous before their own community. Now, as they talked, they valiantly uttered what they had thitherto felt only a little, or fractionally, or not at all: that their work in Civil Defense was of critical importance because of its purpose.

Most of the men were employed in good positions, like Henry Conner; most of the women were housewives. But Ed Pratt, sitting in a kitchen chair (hastily transported for the meeting by Ted) with his hat still on the back of his head and a toothpick in his teeth, was a house painter. Joe Dennison, his broad backside propped on the window sill and his blue shirt open, owned and ran a bulldozer, contracting privately for its use. Ed and Joe were joint heads of the section’s demolition squad.

To nearly all these people, to nearly all other Civil Defense volunteers, the destruction of Green Prairie had not actually been thinkable. Good will, community spirit, conformity and a readiness to serve were far more responsible for their efforts than any acceptance of the reality of the booklets sent by the Federal Civil Defense Administration from Washington. Their special organization had long since became a proper enterprise in their town—just as it was an enterprise to scorn, in River City.

There was one further factor which abetted their association: a private pride in private occupations. Until Civil Defense had been established, each lived in a partial vacuum about the occupation of others. Now, rather surprisingly, everyone had learned much concerning the special skills of the community.

Thus Whedon Coles, a lean, lank, preoccupied man who was a Baptist deacon and had five daughters, was able to reveal to his fellow citizens that being “new lines superintendent of Sister Cities Consolidated Gas and Electric” meant he knew about what lay beneath the streets of Green Prairie and where the overhead wire mazes ran and what to do about a hundred hitherto bewildering household dilemmas involving leaks and short circuits. Thus it developed that Ed Pratt did not just paint houses; he was able to explain their construction. Joe Dennison could tell all about walls—brick, rock, cement—and what underlay everybody’s lawns and gardens. In the same way, Henry, who had come up through retail hardware to accounting, could show his community how to use all sorts of tools and small machines.

Civil Defense had been an interesting way to learn unknown things concerning a city, how it is put together, and what makes it run; it had been at the same time that humanly more valuable thing: an opportunity to demonstrate, private skills and special knowledge.

These people, angry, studying what steps to take to express their wrath and to revenge themselves upon the sudden “disloyalty” of the morning paper, were gradually interrupted, silenced, by a penetrating wail coming from somewhere in the house.

Beth Conner heard it first and hoped it would subside.

Henry heard it and went on for a moment: “… it’s my feeling that we shouldn’t appeal to Washington. Civil Defense, for better or for worse, is principally a state matter. We therefore ought to handle our problems at home. People always kicking about too much central government, I mean, hadn’t ought to yell for Federal help the minute anybody tramps on their toes….”

He stopped and smiled at his wife. “It’s Nora,” he said. “I guess you better go up.” He went on, “So I think we ought first to get hold of Coley Borden and ask him what in hell he’s doing. After all, there isn’t one of us here but knows and loves Coley Borden….”

Beth hurried up the stairs, following the steam-engine wail. She found Nora lying on the double bed, on her back, a braid in each hand.

For a moment, Beth nearly burst into laughter. She had liked the child’s long hair, but she had been on the verge of conceding to Nora’s demands that it be cut. Insistence that it not be had expressed mere sentiment on Beth’s part. But now, seeing the shaggy locks against the bedspread, hearing the agony in the voice, Beth lost her smile. She did not conceal it; a genuine, deep sympathy banished amusement. She picked up the girl bodily and hugged her. “Nora. You mustn’t cry. You’re just upset because it looks so funny at first. I’ll take you right straight over to Nellie’s. If she’s closed up, we’ll make her open the beauty parlor and we’ll have your hair fixed to look lovely!”

Hope and wonderment stirred in Nora. She checked her grief. “It’ll never look lovely!”

“Come along. My! Your dress is a mess. Never mind….”

Beth beckoned her husband to the front-hall door. “I’ve got to take Nora on an errand,” she said.

“Is she sick?”

“No. But—”

“Ye gods, Beth! This is an important meeting. And somebody has to serve the refreshments afterward.”

Beth shook her head. “Nora’s important, too! Lenore can serve. She knows where everything is, Henry. Tell her the refrigerator—and the plates are all stacked in the pantry. Oh, she’ll know …!”

5

Charles Conner, Lieutenant Conner, had always liked his mother’s sister and her family. Perhaps it was the kids he had particularly liked, for the father, Jim Williams, wasn’t actually much: an archetypal nobody, a draftsman, a little gray chap who would get lost in a crowd of two. And Beth’s sister Ruth, though she had been very blonde and very pretty at twenty, was careworn now. No wonder, with so small a salary and six kids.

Still he boarded the Central Avenue bus reluctantly. He’d been home for a week now, and he’d had only one real date with Lenore. The rest of the time she’d been busy—or had merely dropped in for an hour, or permitted him the same privilege. But there was a tension in the Bailey house he didn’t understand, though the Baileys had always been tense. And there was a kind of—distance—about Lenore: an attitude he’d never before seen in her. It made him feel with increased anxiety that growing up, entering the service, getting an architectural degree and a commission-doing the things men do—was steadily alienating him from the loyalties, affections and intimacies of his youth.

His mother had repeatedly reminded him he would have to pay a call on his aunt’s family while he was at home on leave. He had at first agreed gladly. But, now that he was on the way, he felt forlorn about the journey and the visit.

He caught the Central Avenue bus and sat on the back seat while it wormed its way north through the residential area, the business perimeter and the shops and tall buildings of the downtown section. He got out in front of the Olympic Theatre, already alight, with an early queue of moviegoers under its marquee. He walked to the terminal and caught a Ferndale bus.

It started across the river. On the way over, Charles observed how low the water was, September-shallow, with boulders showing and dry sandbanks. It forked around Swan Island to the west. Late bathers still dotted the waist-deep water. The Fun House was already bright for evening though roller-coaster cars caught the sun as they heaved up on the latticed curves and slowed before plunging. To his right, he saw the river going away east, the ruddy bluffs crossed by other bridges, the warehouses on the Green Prairie side and the disused, rotting docks below.

Across the way, slums whose colored people lived, and Italians, Greeks, Jews and Poles.

The lieutenant thought about the river a little, and perhaps only as men can think of rivers, remembering boyhood.

He remembered fishing in its muddy waters for suckers and catfish, and finally, one day, catching a big bass. He remembered camping with a scoutmaster, out where the airport was now.

The river then, and at that point, was gouged deeply into the level plains; there were miniature canyons where cottonwoods and willows grew, where deer lived, where tents could be pitched in summer and where in winter an ardent boy could trap a few muskrats, a skunk or two and maybe, once in a lifetime, an ermine or a mink. It was gone now; the mills had killed the fish and the airport was so close to the gorges (which once had been mysterious and remote-seeming) that nobody in his right mind would pitch a tent there. He reflected that no good places were left where boys on rafts could play Lewis and Clark, or Mark Twain steamboating. Subdivisions had replaced those primordial pockets on the river—or factories, or golf courses, or parallel highways, or airports. Something.

The bus plugged for half a mile, noisily, through a run-down section, competing with trolley cars, trucks, jalopies driven by Negroes and hordes of pedestrians. At last, turning on Willowgrove from Mechanic Street, it made better time and soon covered the distance between the slums and Ferndale, River City’s oldest suburb. Charles walked the short way to his aunt’s house.

He was sighted in the distance by twelve-year-old Marie. In a moment, four of the young Williamses came down the sidewalk under the catalpas, yelling, he thought affectionately, like Indians. (He found out presently, however, that they were yelling like inhabitants of Venus.) As the youngsters caught his hands and poured forth questions about his family, about the armed forces, about life on other planets as he walked toward the too-small frame house where they lived, Charles lost some of his feeling of forlornness.

He loved kids. He had liked being one, through all the wonderful epochs of childhood from the day of his first sled to the day his father had given him a fly-casting rod and thence to the magical evening when his dad had said, “Well, Chuck, looks like the ducks might be coming in around dawn tomorrow. Sam Phelps has that sprained ankle, and if you look in the broom closet, you may discover something resembling a brand-new, sixteen-gauge, over-and-under….”

What in the hell, Chuck thought, turning into the Williams’s walk, was life all for—if not this: kids to pass on kinship to?

When dinner was over, the plenteous dinner his aunt provided, in part from the big vegetable garden in the empty lot behind the house, they “relaxed in the parlor.” He had played with Irma, the new baby, blonder than the others, he’d said, practically silver-haired. He had thrilled the youngsters and their parents with an eyewitness account of the take-off of a guided missile. He’d shown Don the right way to hold his bow and arrow—and shot a hole through a diaper on the clothesline, accidentally. He’d arbitrated a quarrel between Marie and Tom and admired Sarah’s kindergarten art work.

Now, with a tumbler of elderberry wine, he sat with Ruth and Jim. Fireflies winked above the lawn and sounds of play told where the older kids were. The young ones already slept. It was peaceful.

His aunt and uncle asked, diffidently, about service. Did he hate it? Was it really rugged?

Jim, who had been deferred in the Second War because of his family, seemed to hide under the question a mixture of guilt and romantic expectation.

“It’s just dull,” Charles said. “Lord, the kids are growing! Marie’s really a young woman!”

Jim hitched a suspender and rubbed his Adam’s apple. “That’s what she tells us daily,”

he laughed. “She’s a year and a half older than Nora.”

“Nora,” said Charles, “is getting the same idea. She cut her own hair the other day….”

They laughed at the story.

“We haven’t seen much of Beth and Henry.” Ruth sounded apologetic. “Time was when Ferndale seemed practically next door to Walnut Street. But now”—she sighed—“by the time I get the kids organized, or a few hours of an afternoon, it seems a million miles off.”

“I know,” Chuck nodded. “Took me an hour and a quarter to get over here.”

“Mercy!”

“Both cities,” Jim said, speaking with professional assurance, “were horse-and-buggy designed. I read the other day in my drafting magazine that cities are strangling themselves.

Green Prairie and River City sure are!” Jim suddenly realized that, although his nephew was the younger man, he had a degree in architecture. “What do you think?” he asked, yielding his moment of pontification.

“You’d believe so, if you could hear Dad and his wardens talk! They jammed up Green Prairie, but good, last week.”

Ruth said, “I wish Hank Conner would get out of that thing!”

Charles lit a cigarette. “Why? He loves it. Dad’s a kind of natural leader of folks.”

“Think of the effect on Nora, though—and Ted—”

“ What effect?”

Jim put in anxiously, “You see, Chuck, we’re not allowed to mention atom bombs or anything having to do with them in this household.”

“It’s emotionally destructive,” Ruth Williams said emphatically.

Charles realized his aunt was serious. A stiffness had come into her comfortable, plump body. He laughed. “You mean harmful to the kids? I don’t know. They were having a war on Venus when I arrived. The carnage was fabulous, they told me. I don’t believe hearing a few useful facts about what to do in case of enemy aggression—”

“It’s the school,” Jim said.

“It is not merely the school,” Ruth said heatedly. “It’s scientific information.”

Charles grinned, yet frowned a little, too. “I don’t get it.”

“She always goes to the P.T.A.” Jim yawned a little in spite of himself. He covered up by taking a sip of elderberry wine.

Ruth appealed to her soldier-nephew. “I can show you the facts, in the Bulletin! Every time they run off a series of atomic tests anywhere, the kids of the United States show a marked rise of nervousness, of nightmares, of delinquency. The Rorschach Tests prove it!” she shuffled in a stack of papers, schoolbooks, bills, checkbooks, women’s magazines on the top of a radiator.

The heap made a bulge in the lace curtains.

“I suppose kids do,” Charles agreed. “They react to things. Nevertheless, we have to run the weapons tests, don’t we?”

“ Why?” Ruth turned, hot-eyed, from her search. Papers and magazines cascaded to the floor. She reminded Chuck of his mother when his mother was on the verge of administering “righteous” punishment. “Why do they have to go on forever scaring the daylights out of people?

You tell me why!”

“Just to try to keep ahead of the Reds,” he answered.

“I thought we were making peace with the Reds!”

“We’ve been ‘about to’ ever since I was in high school and maybe before that, for all I can remember.”

“Peace, peace, peace!” she said heatedly. “Why don’t we accept this last offer? The one they made in August?”

“We’re trying to, Mother.” Jim was obviously endeavoring to divert his wife. “The United Nations is trying.”

“Maybe they’re right,” she said. “Maybe our people—the military men and the big steel manufacturers—don’t really want peace.”

“It isn’t that, Aunt Ruth.” Charles tried to be lucid.

“Every time, every single time, we’ve thought we were on the verge of an understanding with the Kremlin—whammo! They broke loose somewhere else. Stop them there—get a deal set—and bingo! They hit in China again. Burma, the Balkans—”

“ So what? Are those people worth dying for? Worth trillions of dollars? Worth making permanent nervous wrecks of all the children in America and a lot of grownups, besides, like your father?”

Charles considered the idea of his father as a “nervous wreck”; it was such an unfamiliar thought that it fascinated him. He chuckled. “I know how you feel, Aunt Ruth. After all, it’s why I have to spend time in service. But look. There’s one thing the Soviets have never offered—offered and meant it. That’s to let the world come in and inspect them and make sure they aren’t stockpiling mass-destruction weapons. Right?”

“They’ve offered, time and again, to inspect themselves! I don’t see why, for the sake of ending all this crazy strain, we can’t try having just that much confidence in them.”

“You’ve shown a marked lack of confidence in the American citizens who have turned out to be Communists.”

“That’s different!”

“Why?”

“When an American citizen goes Communist, it shows that person is a moral leper and utterly untrustworthy, through and through.”

“But the Kremlin, with the same beliefs, can be trusted?”

Charles had felt a twinge of anger at his aunt and met it with vehemence.

“Oh, hell, let’s not argue,” Jim said unhappily. “Have some more wine, Chuck.”

“What would you feel,” Ruth asked, ignoring her husband, “if you were a whole government, and another government flatly refused to take your treaty oath and your word?”

“The Soviet Government,” Charles replied, “goes on the principle that its own word is no damned good whatsoever. That’s why we can’t trust their mere promise to disarm. That’s why we have to test A-bombs and keep up a draft army and remain powerful, until and unless Russia permits the world to see for itself that it is doing what it has promised to do. There’s no other way! Our Government would have found it long ago if there had been.”

“You’re wrong!” Ruth was shaking with anger.

Marie came in the front door and stood in the hall, holding the hand of six-year-old Don.

She looked very mature for not-yet-fourteen—and very pretty.

“See here,” Charles said, trying to restore the tone of good will, “suppose we do accept world peace under Soviet terms? Okay. We disarm. We destroy all our atomic weapons, as per the terms. We cut our army and air force and navy down to the bone. Do we feel better? That’s what you say you want, Aunt Ruth. But suppose you got it? Would you then quit worrying?

Would you then feel safe, knowing the Soviets had made a big promise, and knowing, at the same time, you didn’t have the faintest idea of what they were really doing behind an Iron Curtain that would still be down?” Charles shrugged. “I think you’d find yourself, in exactly no time at all, so terribly much more worried about A-bombs, you would really be a nervous wreck.

And you’d have a right good reason for being afraid, too. Because then you’d know the Russians could fly over us any time, and we couldn’t even hit back!”

At the doorway, Don began to whine. “Stop talking about atomic bombs.”

“Why?” Charles asked calmly. The little boy’s face twisted. “It scares me. I don’t want to hear about it. I hate talking about cities blowing up.”

“You see?” Ruth said. She said it as if every point she had brought up had been proven beyond further debate. Her job was the protection of her children. Whatever assailed them was evil and wrong; worry over world conditions and the dreadful advances of science upset the young; ergo: the world should be altered. Ruth obviously could not reason beyond that—to the theoretical possibilities, to the absolute need of protecting her young from something fantastically worse than nervousness.

This narrowness, this ingrained sense that River City would always be there because it had always been there, the emotional identification with the immediate here and the refusal even to look at the hard and horrible face of tomorrow yonder, annoyed Charles more than such things usually did. He did not realize that his private irritability was colored by the private disappointment in his leave. He would even have denied stoutly that his visit to his favorite relatives had been a second-choice manner of spending the evening.

He took up the challenge again. “I don’t see, Aunt Ruth. What I see— all I see—is the one fact we must never lose sight of! So long as even the potential threat of A-bombs on America exists, nothing we can do in the way of arming ourselves, of testing weapons, of civil defense, is too much. I think little Don here is jittery because you’ve made him jittery. I think—”

Jim said, firmly, “Cut it, son! Mother’s mad.”

She was “mad.” She controlled her temper long enough however, to order the wide-eyed, very blonde Marie to take her towheaded brother upstairs and put him in bed. Then she whirled on her nephew. “I know you’re a soldier. That’s no excuse for your coming to a quiet, peaceable, domestic scene and scaring hell out of mere children!”

“Somebody ought to be scared,” he answered.

“ You should be! People like you! People like your crazy father! Yes. People like my sister, stringing along with that everlasting playacting about sudden death! A fine way to bring up a whole generation, watching grown men and women make like they are dead and dying. I tell you, Charles Conner….”

“…and I tell you, Aunt Ruth, you ought to go get those ancient newspapers out, where they announced Russia had exploded an H-bomb, and sit on your broad backside and reflect what that means to your kids—”

“’Bout time,” Jim Williams said, mildly still, “for you to be running along, isn’t it, Chuck?”

He went.

He had walked a mile down Willowgrove Avenue before his vexation abated. Then he laughed a little. Most people took it the way Ruth did. They were frantic inside. Themselves and trying, somehow, to fight off the feeling, simply because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, nerve themselves to look squarely at the cause. Hysterical, that was the word. Hysteria was the thing that knocked out the brain when it refused to face fact and pretended something unreal was true instead. Ruth had got plenty mad and plenty active and mighty effective in the bargain—two years ago when she discovered the fourth-grade teacher once had belonged to a subversive organization. That teacher hadn’t lasted three days.

The trouble was, she couldn’t carry her fear of Communism into the realm of war. War wasn’t her department. She felt it wasn’t any civilian’s department. Most civilians couldn’t imagine that war might suddenly become their whole concern. Not American civilians: Europeans, maybe. So Ruth was living in a dream world, trying to compel the real world to match her dream, where there could be no civilian war. Trying to make a special peace—for her kids, she thought, but actually to assuage her own deep guilt for turning away from the big picture of a nation, her nation, in trouble.

Twelve blocks of walking took Charles well into River City. He decided he might as well walk the rest of the distance. It was only nine fifteen. He cut over to James Street and up the steep bank around the reservoir. The moon had come up, a harvest-sized moon, and the water in the reservoir was so clear he could see the brick-lined bottom—as well as pop and beer bottles, cartons, Kleenexes and picnic residue people had tossed in, despite the signs all along the fence saying, “You Drink It, Keep It Clean—River City Water Supply.”

The reservoir was in an old section of town, one much like the Pearson Square section to the west. Along one side were large mansions which had long ago been divided into small apartments and the one-room niches of boarding-houses. On the side opposite, the north, old familics who had kept their money and refused to move still maintained their mansions and grounds, mansions behind iron gates and brick walls, with apple trees and grape arbors in back, mansions where often the only relict would be one old lady, with aging memories and trunks full of vintage clothes, albums full of dated photographs.

To the west, the sky line of River City sharp and high, picket-thick, glittered against the aurora of the Amusement Park beyond on Swan Island. South were the lights of River City’s colored town—the streaming radiance of Mechanic Street—and beyond, the darkling shadows of Water Street, the river itself, and the less-visible thrust of Green Prairie’s business district.

He went around the reservoir and down to Mechanic Street, taking pleasure from the full-throated aliveness there—markets still open—kids still wide awake and playing on the street-fat colored women talking from window to tenement window in voices like velvet-radios shooting band music over the nocturnal streetscape-fruits, vegetables, hucksters, hock shops, saloons—a pretty, thin girl who walked toward him and enquired huskily, “Busy, good looking?”

He followed Mechanic Street. Its last four blocks led across back alleys and alongside commercial buildings that stepped up to Market’s tall structures. Here, trucks and cars went individually and people, too, hurrying alone under the spitting arc lights on errands connected with belated shipping orders, or other, less legitimate errands. For here, in small, brick-fronted buildings that once had been homes, the nefarious part of River City’s life was conducted.

Charles knew Pol Taylor’s place was somewhere here—and here was Jake’s.

It was here he saw Beau Bailey.

Chuck Conner did not know the precise location of Jake’s, any more than he knew which of the many grimed brick houses contained Pol Taylor’s high-class bordello. He knew only that some businessmen of the Sister Cities referred to this area as “The Block” and that it contained numerous centers of diversion frowned on by churches and right-thinking people. He saw Beau because Beau stumbled down three steps to the sidewalk, nearly fell—a man in conspicuous trouble.

Charles hurried. Beau, looking wildly up and down the street, rushed away, not recognizing Charles. He went totteringly, and the younger man stopped. Several things had become plain to him in that instant. Beau’s eye was cut and bleeding and his nose was bloody.

But he had not been looking for help. His face, in the arc light, had been tormented by fear; he had been furtive. The chance that the man he noted, in the shadows, but near enough to recognize him, would be somebody able to identify him did not even enter Beau’s head: most people he knew didn’t frequent The Block. Beau rushed on, lurching a little, toward Market Street, and Charles decided he had better not follow: Beau had probably been in a fight; the less said about which, the better.

When Charles reached the river he walked across the bridge slowly. But he was not thinking, this time, of his boyhood. He was thinking of a young woman whose father got in fights in River City hellholes. He was wondering if such a girl, after all, would make a mother for half a dozen kids like his nieces and nephews. Then he began wondering if their mother was any better for them than Lenore would be. Lenore, after all, was a realist. Even a Geigerman.

And not guiltily scared of any weapons—Russian, male, human or animal. A not-scarable girl.

He caught an Edgeplains bus, which meant he’d have to let himself out while a red light somewhere up toward Walnut Street stopped it. The company franchise didn’t allow conductors to drop passengers short of Windmere Parkway, except in rush hour—which showed, he thought, nodding into a half-sleep, that everybody was nuts.

He came over Walnut Street and saw a Jaguar parked in front of the Bailey house. He slowed to admire the red-leather upholstery, the complex controls panel. He wondered whose it was and saw the monogram: KLS.

Kit Sloan.

When Charles entered his house and his mother called, “You’re back pretty early!” he concealed an emptiness. “Yeah. Got in a bicker with Ruth about the world situation. Jim politely threw me out. Remind me to phone and make up in the morning.”

He started upstairs.

His mother, in the second-floor sitting room, spread a gingham dress on the sofa. “Poor Ruth! As if she didn’t have worries enough, with six kids and only thirty-two hundred!”

“Guess I’ll turn in.” But not to dream, he thought; not even to sleep. Kit Sloan.

Across the lawns, on the second floor of the Bailey house, Beau was daubing cotton soaked in ice water on his cuts and talking to his wife, who sat fully dressed, as if she expected a cocktail party to begin any minute, on the toilet seat, holding a basin.

“That’s what happened,” Beau repeated shakily. “I asked Jake for thirty days more and he told Toledo to ‘impress’ me with the situation.” He didn’t seem even aggrieved, merely resigned.

“I-I don’t understand, Beau.” She did—only too well.

“Look at me, then you will. Toledo slugged me. I tried to hold myself together, Netta, I really did. I told him nobody could assault an officer of the Sloan Bank and get away with it—”

“What’d he say?” Netta had to know every detail.

“He said he only wanted his five thousand. He said I wouldn’t be a bank officer—any day he wanted to lift a finger!”

“Don’t talk so loud, Beau! Kit might hear you.”

“I feel like going down and telling him—and be damned.”

“ Telling Kit!” The horror of that overpowered Netta for a moment. “Don’t you realize…?”

“Oh, sure! Sure,” Beau said, spitting a little blood. “I also realize 1 can’t go on being beaten up by hoods forever.” “I thought you had plans, Beau. I thought you were going to speak to Henry Conner—”

“I did.” Beau spat more scarlet in the porcelain wash bowl. “Yesterday. That’s why I saw Jake tonight. I thought old Hank would come through.”

“What happened?”

Beau’s face, pale save where blood reddened it, turned toward her piteously. “He offered me five hundred. Said, with taxes the way they are, it was all he could spare.”

“Skinflint!”

“Maybe it was the truth.”

“Henry Conner,” Netta said, with more rage than veracity, “probably still has the first dollar he ever made! Look at the cheap way they live. I bet he has a tidy sum stashed away.”

“Well—we haven’t. And Hank’s not parting with it. And I went to ask Jake for more time-and—” He shuddered. “Look at me! What’ll I say at the bank?”

Netta was bitter. “Oh, heavens. Say you fell down the cellar stairs. Say a mouse pushed you. We’ve got to plan, Beau!”

“How in hell can planning materialize five thousand?”

“Shhhh!” she whispered. “He’ll hear you!” She changed moods briefly. Her eyes became exultant. “They’re together on the big divan looking at TV—and necking. I peeked.” Her mood shifted back. “Go lie down in your bed. Take a towel, so you won’t stain anything. I’ll get you a drink. Thank God, you had the sense to sneak home the back way! If Kit Sloan had caught sight of the mess you’ve made of yourself—”

“ I’ve made—of myself?”

“You lost the money, didn’t you?”

It was not that he had bet.

It was that he had lost.

When she entered the beige and scarlet bedroom, the moderne creation of the best interior decorator in both cities, she carried a strong highball and a weak one. Beau was handed the latter.

He at once noticed the marked difference in color and, as his wife had anticipated, was too broken to protest. He flopped back on the pillow, spattering a little new blood on the leather bed-head.

“Now look!” Netta began, and he knew it was the peroration of something that would go on half the night, “we’re at the point where everything depends on playing our cards right. I couldn’t believe our luck when I learned Kit was interested in Lenore again.”

“He’s just interested in pretty girls. Some of the guys at the bank that play around with him tell tales that’d make your eyes stick out.”

She waved that fact away. “Lenore won’t be able to accomplish anything fast enough to help you in this Jake business—”

“She doesn’t even much like the guy.”

“That’s neither here nor there!” Mrs. Bailey talked on, persuasively. “A woman learns to like a man, Beau. Most women at first hate the men they marry, for a while. Though for a girl with all her looks and education to remain so innocent is something I don’t get!”

“You shouldn’t judge everybody by—”

“My background,” she cut in, “is something we do not discuss. Now, Beau—you’ve got—you’ve absolutely got to do something yourself about this gambling debt. We can’t possibly afford to have Lenore’s chances—with Kit Sloan, for Lord’s sake— ruined, because some petty racketeer disgraces you! All you need to do is something temporary. Something that would hold the fort, until Lenore could get—”

“Get what exactly? Disgraced herself?”

“Now, Beau. This is the twentieth century, not the Victorian Age. You’ve got to be realistic.”

“Listen, Net. I’m not going to let my daughter haul me out of this by making herself into a tramp.”

“What I’m asking is, are you going to stand in her way of making what might be a brilliant—and happy—marriage? A marriage that would move you into a real house in, maybe, the Cold Spring section, with five cars and half a dozen servants, able”—she was perfectly aware of his desires and weaknesses—” to run down to Miami in the winter, to take in the New Orleans Mardi Gras, to join the boys at every good convention, instead of going once in five years—”

“Fat chance!” he replied peevishly. “The last time I came home from a convention and you found that lipstick on my—That was my last convention!”

“Why, Beau? Ask yourself why? Because we can’t afford that sort of thing. We can’t afford luxury living. You can’t afford to date blondes! Your social position can’t stand it! Your job is endangered by it. Don’t you realize everything would be utterly different, if the Sloans and the Baileys had a hyphen between the two names, owing to Lenore?”

He was smiling a little. “Maybe it would at that!”

“I’ll get you another highball.”

“Yeah,” he said, absently. He returned from his day-dream. “Oh. Yes. Please do. My face hurts like hell.” He called after her, “And make it stronger than iced tea.”

It was going to go on all night.

But Beau began to think, began for the first time to let himself think, that life might not forever be a round of hard work, of figures and facts and statements, of miles of tape from adding machines, of coming and going in traffic that kept you on the verge of insanity, of the aching anxiety of home finance and stretched funds, of eternal self-sacrifice for a wife and daughter three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with only an hour snatched here and there for personal pleasures or recreation—a redhead kissed in the dim Cyclone Bar, a bet made on a pay telephone.

Things could be better. He deserved them better.

And a man, a self-respecting man, couldn’t take a slugging lying down.

X-Day Minus Sixty

1

It was a peculiar farewell. Chuck thought it was probably like thousands of farewells said by soldiers.

He had been raking leaves, the day before….

He raked and thought, Ted ought to be doing this. I’m going back to the base. Back to Texas. Tomorrow I’m going. I ought not to be raking up the yard. Officers don’t rake leaves.

It was a cold day—October. The wind came all the way from Canada, from Saskatchewan or Manitoba or Alberta, with polar cold and the raw smell of muskeg, of permafrost, of something arctic. He’d heard the Alaska-based people talk about that weather.

And it came down from the north to U.S.A., making the prairie states chilly in October.

He wondered why he pushed up the pungent leaf-heaps with the wooden rake and shoved them to the gutter, and he knew. To burn them. To make a sweet-smelling pile and add to the good ozone of Green Prairie his own private incense, his somber contribution. Maybe, also, as a symbol. Burning autumn leaves, like burning bridges.

He fished in a pocket of his slacks, thinking how unfamiliar some pockets became when you wore mufti, how unfamiliar the uniform would feel for a day or so. He lit a match and it blew out, so he found a piece of paper, cupped his hands, got the newsprint going, watched words about “strike threatened in River City plant” blacken and vanish. He thrust the paper into the middle of the breast-high pile, on the windward side, and there was streaming smoke, then a bright blaze and soon a soul-satisfying conflagration. It ate gray holes in the leaf pile and sent a soft-looking, slanted fountain of smoke down Walnut Street. Cars had to slow but the people in them came through the smoke laughing and they waved because they, too, would soon be burning their leaves, stopping cars—mulching roses, getting out storm windows, nailing weather stripping around doors, taking coal into their cellars.

She came.

Wearing an orange-red knitted suit. With her large beautiful eyes and with her black hair done up under a knitted hat. He could see her hips move and her breasts and the immobile “V” in front of her and feel his nerves jump.

“You’re going tomorrow, aren’t you, Chuck?”

“So Uncle says.”

She looked at the fire as if it were a work of art like a sand castle on a beach. “Nice and warm,” she said. “I’ve been over in Coverton, watching State play Wesleyan.”

“Who won?”

“We didn’t stay to see the end. State was ahead—thirty points—at the half. And Kit wanted a drink.”

“He didn’t bring you home,” Chuck said.

“We had a fight.” She kicked a spruce cone into the fire. “About you.”

“Me?” He leaned on the rake, slender, dark, smiling.

“I said—you and I had a date for tonight.”

“Do we?”

“Heck, Charles! You’re going back tomorrow. I sort of assumed we’d spend the evening together. Or with your family.”

“Swell.”

“And, anyhow, he doesn’t own me.”

The fight, then, had been a mere declaration of independence, not of special loyalty. “I’ll borrow Dad’s car.”

“ Don’t bother! I’ve got my Ford. And your old man needs his these days. Running around…”

Chuck nodded. “ He’s working hard. And to darn little purpose. People are deserting his organization like…”

“I know. Well, what time shall I call for you?” She laughed.

“Say, eight? Mother’s made a special dinner. Maybe…?”

She knew she was going to be invited. She didn’t want to be exposed to the calm, collective scrutiny of the Conners during a long meal. “Eight. I’ll be there.”

They drove down to Lee’s Chinese Inn and danced a while. But the place, in spite of the gloom in the booths, the oriental lighting, the orchestra and the waitresses in Chinese costumes, didn’t have the necromancy that had invested it when they had been high school kids, and then undergraduates. They were both restless.

“Let’s go,” she suggested, in the middle of a fox trot, “ on out the river, the way we used to, and park in that spot where the mill used to be.”

It was crisp and cool out there and bright with moonlight. The heater had warmed the car.

They pointed its nose so they could see the water shimmering in the ruined flume.

“Remember when we came here after the basketball game?” she asked. He said,

“Remember the night you and I—and Wally and Sylvia—went swimming?”

“If Dad had seen us down there, skinny, he’d have skinned me alive!”

The recollections bubbled up, glimmered, broke.

“How long will you be gone this time?” she asked.

His shoulders shrugged a little; she felt it, on the seat. “No telling. Six more months—but I’ll be out, all things equal, in eight more.”

“It seems a long time!” She picked up his hand. “A long, long time. Chuck. It is a long time, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish you weren’t going away.”

“See any beggars riding, these days?”

“If wishes were horses?” Lenore shook her head. “You know what I’m thinking about.”

“Guess I usually do, Lenore.”

“I guess you do. It’s Kit—of course. Partly.”

“And partly you?” Her head shook, and the small motion seemed to diffuse in the night an additional quantity of the perfume she wore. It came from her hair, he thought, her midnight, wavy hair. “Not me, exactly,” she said in a speculative tone, and added defensively, “Kit’s a lot of fun.”

“Why not? He’s never had experience in much else.”

“He has so! He was a star in lots of sports—”

“That isn’t fun?”

“I mean, he does plenty of difficult things. Climbs mountains. Flies. He was a war pilot.

He has a pound of medals.”

“Shall I try to get wounded?”

“No,” she smiled, uninjured by his sarcasm, familiar with it. “Not even—emotionally, Chuck. What I wanted to do, hoped to do, what I suggested we leave that Chink spot to do, was talk.”

“So okay. Talk.”

“Do you think you could put yourself in my place for a few minutes?”

Charles laughed. “I could come mighty close!”

“You sit still. I mean—look. You tell me what the score is. I’m twenty-four. Right?”

“Practically senile. Right.”

“You’re the same. You’ve got nearly another army year. Then, some architectural office, and maybe-maybe in ten years-you’d have enough to—”

“To what? I’ve got Dad and Mom. In a year, Lenore, I could have a house in Edgeplains, maybe, and enough money for a kid or two. And if I didn’t, the folks would see to things till I got started.”

“Would I like it?” He said soberly, “Don’t think I haven’t wondered. Some parts, you’d surely like.”

She murmured, “Let’s skip those parts, Chuck. I know about them. Like the poem. There is some corner of Lenore Bailey that is forever Chuck. The part of me that grew up with you. Skip that.”

“I don’t know about the rest of it, from your angle,” he said. “Being married, making your way in the world, having kids is one hell of a hard assignment, it looks like, from the visible record. Even my folks have had rugged periods—Dad walked out twice on Mom when they were younger—and Mom went three times to Ruth’s home. Once for a week. Taking me with her, though I was too little to recall it.”

“I can tell you.” Lenore listened to the ghostly, tinkling waterfall a moment. “For six months, maybe a year, I’d love it. We’d get the Edgeplains cottage. I’d fancy it all up. I’d make do with the clothes I have—plenty, God knows, for a long while. Then it would rain and snow and I’d catch colds and somebody would patronize me at church and so on. Next I’d see our cottage was just a lousy little bungalow, in a row, with dozens like it—and dozens of young women imprisoned there like me—breeding, probably—as I’d be. Then I’d start to hate it.

Mother and Dad, of course, would be completely off me, drinking too much, taking my marriage to you as their final, personal disaster.”

“It might—just might—serve them right,” he said grimly.

“Perhaps. Still, they are my father and mother. Mother’s unscrupulous, but I sometimes think it’s because she never had a chance to be anything better. And Dad’s weak. His mother spoiled him before he had a chance.”

“Is that any reason why you…?”

“No. It isn’t. But look at it another way. They spoiled me. They saw to it, all my life, I had absolutely everything a girl could want to look luxurious, feel luxurious, be luxurious—”

“You were going to throw it overboard in college to be a scientific research worker….”

“I talked about it. But I didn’t do it, did I, Chuck?”

“No. Marriage is important, too, though. Love is.”

“Look at it the other way. Suppose, just suppose, I married Kit.”

“Has he asked you?”

“No. He hasn’t.”

Chuck felt relieved—then alarmed. “Just what, then, has he asked for, all the time you’ve been spending with him?”

Lenore smiled a little. “That? He asked that immediately.”

He straightened. “The no-good, God-damned—”

“You stop, dope! Kit’s the kind of person who always asks that right off, of any girl. It’s just like manners with him. If she says ‘No,’ he accepts it.”

“I’ll bet!”

“I’m trying to tell you. You want to try to see how I feel? Or shall we go home?”

“I’ll listen,” he answered sullenly.

“All right. Then try to hear what I’m trying to say. Maybe my parents aren’t as sweet and loving and noble as yours. Maybe they’re climbers and kind of crumby at times. They are. But they are still my parents. Now, if Kit ever proposed and I said ‘Yes,’ a whole lot of very important and terrifying and real problems would come to an end forever. I wouldn’t love him—no. We wouldn’t have as many things in common as—other men I know. One other anyhow. But at least I’d never be in a spot where I’d wilt at the Sight of my own house and hate myself for working so hard and despise never getting ahead fast enough to keep up with the bills. Don’t you see, Chuck, either way it wouldn’t be a perfect deal?”

“Not if you keep it on a dollars-and-cents basis. No.”

“It keeps itself on that basis. Where might I be, either way, in ten more years? On one hand, with a lot of kids—probably bad-tempered, embittered, envious, and ready to slip out and have fun on the side if I got the chance. On the other hand, I’d have everything in the world, and so would my folks, and I wouldn’t be a physical wreck—”

“This is all a lot of nonsense,” he said.

“Women,” she answered, “shouldn’t ever try to tell men what they really think! What they have to consider —when men won’t!”

“Some men consider other matters are more important than living-room drapes.”

“Don’t you think I do, too!” Her voice was urgent. “What in hell, Charles Conner, do you think I’ve gotten to be twenty-four years old without marrying for? I’ll tell you. You. I’ve had hundreds of offers and chances to enlarge a friendship into a gold hoop. Rich men, bright men, men in college, men from Kansas City, New York-even. Only first you had to take another year for architecture. Architecture, of all the hard-to-learn, hard-to-rise-in things! Then, two years for the army. And now, who knows? What if they start a new little war someplace? Maybe I’ll be fifty when you can afford a wife.” She stopped very suddenly, caught her breath and stared in the dimness. “Charley,” she whispered, “you’re crying.”

He blew his nose. “Maybe I was,” he said unevenly. “It’s a little hard to take it-like that.

Brick by lousy brick. Maybe, Lenore, you better give up the marathon. Maybe you are right. It’s so damned hard for a guy to separate how he feels and what he wants-from the facts.”

She came close to him, familiarly, because she’d been close to him often before, in cars, on hayrides, on warm pine needles at picnics, in movie theaters. “It’s a rotten time for young people.”

“For people,” he agreed, putting back his handkerchief.

“Charles?”

“Right here.” He kissed her forehead.

“Tomorrow, you’ll be gone.”

“Don’t remind we.”

“Charles. Why do we have to do like this all our lives?”

“For freedom,” he said ironically. “For God, for Country, and for Yale.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You always do, Lenore.”

“Have you made love to other girls?”

“Some,” he admitted.

“I mean—really. Actually.”

“No.”

She hesitated. “Me—-either.”

“I know,” he nodded, his head moving against her dark hair. “That, I always knew.”

“With things like this, and you going away…”

He said, “Nix.”

“I always felt,” her voice faltered and went on, “I mean, if anybody else but you, Chuck—was—the first one—I’d hate that.”

“I’m agin it, myself.” She could feel his jaw set.

“Then….”

He let go of her. He leaned forward and started the engine. This, he said to himself, is the hardest goddam thing I hope I’ll ever have to do in this world! ‘We could go,” he said in a strained voice, “to one of the many pretty motels and spend the next few hours. And then Lenore would belong—spiritually—to Chuck. They call it spiritual when they mean anything but. I love you, gal. I always may. But if I start showing you how much, dear, it won’t be in some motel, and it won’t be a sample. Okay?”

“That’s okay, Chuck.” She exhaled a tremulous, relieved sigh. “I just wanted to be sure, Chuck.” He swung around suddenly and kissed her harshly on the lips. “Shut up, now, baby. I know what you wanted to be sure of! That’s one of the reasons I care for you. You’re a game dame.”

“I—I—wouldn’t want you to think I—cheated on you—I mean—held out—because of any reason you disagreed with.”

“Must I shout?” He managed to grin. “I know what you mean. And now, I’m taking you back home—before I forget what I mean.”

2

More and more, Coley Borden had taken to standing by the window, especially at night, or on dark afternoons, when the big buildings were lighted. Sometimes when he looked for a long while, he’d sit on the sill—twenty-seven stories above the street, above the people-ants, the car-beetles—watching the last thunderstorm of summer, for instance. When his secretary came into his office, to announce a visitor or to bring copy for the Transcript, he’d be there, while black clouds tumbled behind the silhouette of the two cities, while the dull light Battened them so they resembled cardboard cutouts of skyscrapers, and until shafts of storm-stabbing sun restored dimension to the soaring cityscape.

He’d be sitting there, or standing, when fog rolled in or when the wind picked up dry earth from between the myriad acre-miles of corn stubble and plunged the cities into the darkness of a duster.

He’d watch rain there.

Sometimes the men at the city desk would say, “Coley’s getting a bit odd.” Then, thinking how his family had perished one by one in ways which, to the lucky, are merely statistical, they’d add a kindly, “No wonder.”

Mrs. Berwyn, his secretary, would always say, “You’re crazy—not the boss. He’s just taken to doing his thinking looking out the window. Maybe some of you dumb journalists would improve your work by staring at something more than city-room walls.”

Coley was, one night, looking at the moon and its effect upon the spires and minarets of his homeland. A powdery light sifted over the region and picked out not just the loftiest buildings but lesser structures, objects that did not usually draw his daytime attention. Thus the tarred roof of the block-square produce market stood revealed across River Avenue. Out toward Rocky Glen, near the Country Club, he could see the glister of a greenhouse and guessed it was the Thomas Nursery. Slossen’s Run, a muddy tributary of the river, indistinguishable by day from a dusty road, now glinted to the west wherever the buildings left a space for it to show-a proper water course by night, however much the day defiled it. He saw, too, the distant spires of River City’s Roman Catholic Cathedral newly finished, up on the corner of Market and, appropriately, St. Paul.

He was thinking that there had been a time in America, not long before even by the brief calendar of human lives, when church spires had been the loftiest landmarks. Now, the steeples of commerce towered above, dwarfing and belittling man’s homage to God. It was not, Coley reflected, an accidental phenomenon. When men turned from inner values to those outside, to “getting and spending,” their tabernacles dwindled while trade places grew majestic.

He heard his door open and sighed, looking away from the moon-lacquered panorama.

“Mr. Conner’s here to see you,” his secretary said. “And it’s almost ten o’clock.”

“Conner?”

“Henry Conner.”

Borden smiled. “Oh. Hank. Tell him to come right in.”

“You haven’t had supper yet, Mr. Borden. Would you like…?”

“Later. Later.” He snapped on lights and sat down at his desk.

Coley Borden could tell, nine times out of ten, about how a man felt, just from a glance.

Seven times out of ten, with the same quick look he could guess what a man was thinking. With women, he wasn’t so sure. In the case of Hank Conner, Coley knew even without the seeing what his thoughts would be. He was astonished, however, when Hank came in. Hank was “dragging his shoulders.” His hair wasn’t iron-gray, any more; it was just plain gray, curly still, but he was getting bald. His homely, solid face was still good-humored, but in a patient way, not with his old exuberance. He looked like a man who would have a quiet chuckle ready for an ironic joke, not like a man who would yell louder than a Sioux and do a war dance in a bowling alley after six strikes in a row.

“Hello, Hank.”

And there was also a new, unwelcome diffidence about Henry Conner. He sat down uncomfortably in the walnut-armed, leather-upholstered chair beside the desk. “Good evening, Coley.” He didn’t add, “You old type-chewer,” or anything.

“Like a cigar?”

Hank’s head shook. “Brought my pipe. Mind?”

“This place has been perfumed by some of the vilest furnaces in the Middle West. Fire it up!” Hank did. “Came to talk about Civil Defense, Coley.”

“I know.”

“Kind of hate to. Always liked the Transcript. Respected it.” His big mouth spread with something like his old-time smile and when he rubbed his cheek, Coley could hear the bristles that had grown since morning. “You know, first time my name was in the paper, or my picture, it was the Transcript. High school graduation.”

Coley said, “Sure.”

“Tried to get you at your home. Mrs. Slant said you were still down here. So I hopped in the car.”

Coley didn’t say anything. Hank’s diffidence was real; so was the determination underneath. The best thing was to let Hank go about it in his own way. The editor felt sad. His instincts—and every syllable of his logic—were on the other man’s side.

“Of course,” Hank went on, after a sip of smoke, “I know Minerva Sloan was responsible for your policy change.”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s doing us bad harm. Real bad.” Hank mused a while, got up and lumbered across the room to the big map on the west wall. It was a street map of the two cities, their suburbs and the surrounding villages; there was a duplicate at CD headquarters. Hank used his pipestem for a pointer. “My district, Coley, is here—from West Broad on the north to Windmere Parkway. And from Bigelow to Chase Drive. Takes in a lot of territory—about four square miles, give you a few acres.” He smiled again. “It isn’t so full of folks as you’d think, on account of Crystal Lake and Hobart Park—about eleven thousand people is all. A little over three thousand homes and buildings. Stores in three small shopping centers. Libraries and schools and churches and hospitals and so on. You know it, about as well as I do.”

“Sure, Hank.”

“Out of my area, we had darn near a thousand volunteers, all told.” His eyes, clear and blue like Nora’s eyes, sparkled a little. “Three quarters of ’em roughly were just plain people, working people, running from masons and carpenters and delicatessen owners to the middle category, folks like us Conners. I wouldn’t say more than a quarter—if that, quite—came from the big places around Crystal Lake or up in the chichi district toward Cold Spring. Just a cross section of ordinary city people, you might say. And I’m tolerably sure that out of the thousand not every man-jack—or woman-jill—would show up set and ready, if my outfit ever got asked to do what it’s here for.

“The point is, Coley, these people are the backbone of not just Green Prairie or the Sister Cities, or a couple of states, but the whole doggoned country. Les Brown may just be a handyman. But if you were cast on a desert island for a few years, you’d be smart to take Les—for company and comforts. Alton Bowers may own ten acres of lawn and landscaped gardens and a big mansion, and he may own a pile of grain elevators, but he’s as close to Christian as Baptists ever get!” Hank, a Presbyterian, let the joke linger for a moment. Then the brightness left his eyes, he came back and sat down. “Called a meeting of the whole gang at the South High yesterday, Coley.” Hank looked at his pipe. “Forty-three people showed up.”

“Good Lord!”

Henry sighed. “We usually turned out around five, six hundred.”

“What do you want me to do, Henry?”

The bulky man stirred in his chair, frowned, rubbed his thorny cheek and said, “Talk, first of all. Get out from behind Minerva Sloan’s skirts and talk!” He reached around his neck and wrestled, one-handedly, with his vertebrae, disarranging his neat blue suit. “I’ve always had a good deal of respect for you. You’ve been right about things in this man’s town—sometimes when I was wrong. You’ve got a good mind, Coley. You’ve read a lot of history. You know a lot about this science stuff. Your paper’s been wide awake. Now, all of a sudden, because we jam up traffic—and it’s not the first time we’ve done it but maybe the tenth—you change tack on us.”

Coley Borden’s face wrinkled with intensity, glowed with a burning expression, like helpless sympathy. It was a brownish face, as if perennially suntanned; and the eyes were too big for it. Time, not very much time at that, for Borden was contemporary with Henry Conner, had bent and gnarled the editor. “I can imagine how you feel, Henry.”

“The point is—why I came here, is—what do you really think? I’ve talked to lots of people, last few weeks. People in CD and even people from River City who think the whole show is some kind of boondoggle. Those folks haven’t even got enough organization on paper. I talked to Reverend Bayson, he’s a fire fighter in my outfit. I talked to a couple of professors. I kept asking, ‘Should we go on? Is it worth it? Are we doing anything valuable? Or are we what they call us—a bunch of Boy Scouts’? I decided to put you on my list of people to talk to.”

“Thinking of quitting, yourself?”

Henry Conner looked squarely at the editor. “That’s it.” He recrossed his legs as if his body dissatisfied him. “Not right off. I don’t mind looking ridiculous to other people, so long as I don’t feel that way myself. Well. What about it?”

“If I were you,” Coley said, “I wouldn’t quit if hell itself froze over.”

Henry stared for a moment. “Be damned,” he breathed. “Why?”

“Because men like you, Hank, are the only life insurance left to the people of U.S.A. The other policies have all run out. First, Soviet friendship; then, our lead on the bombs; next, our superiority and our H-bomb. All gone.”

“They’re talking peace, hard. They made those deals and kept their word, so far.” It was almost a question.

“How many times have they jockeyed our politicians into a peace mood? Fifty? Then snatched something. It’s got so the people of the United States are scared to say or do anything that sounds hostile, even disagree, for fear they’ll spoil some new ‘chance’ at ‘world peace.’

Makes a man sick! Can you imagine, twenty years ago, Senators pussyfooting around, trying to stop free men from freely saying what they think for fear Russia would be ‘antagonized’ or made ‘suspicious’? I say—the more suspicious they are the better, and the more antagonized the better.”

“Then why print in the Transcript that Civil Defense preparations in America discourage honest peace desires in the Kremlin?”

“Minerva Sloan.”

“Who does she think she is,” Hank asked enragedly, “Mrs. God?”

“You’ve hit it. Yes. Mrs. God.”

“If I could only be sure,” Hank murmured. He got up, went to the window, saw the moonlight and murmured, “Pretty view.”

“I like it,” the editor said and switched out the fluorescent lamps in the office. That allowed Henry Conner to absorb, as his eyes grew accustomed to the soft silver outdoors, the same panorama that so frequently held Coley fixed at his window.

“Be a shame,” Henry said at last, in a quiet tone, “to wreck it.”

“Lot of lives. Lot of work.”

“You think they’ll ever try?”

“That,” Coley answered, coming around his desk in the dark and standing beside Hank, “is not the question. The question is, Could they if they tried. And the answer is, They could. So long as that’s the answer, Hank, we need you where you are.”

“That’s your opinion?” Henry stared. “It’s darn beautiful out there.”

“Darned congested, too, Hank. And darned inflammable, if you want to think of that.”

The square, firm head of the chief accountant of a chain of hardware stores, the head of a father of a family, a husband, a citizen and a good neighbor was fixed for a while so its eyes could drink in the view; then a hand scratched its grizzled hair. “I know. I know all that stuff. I know it so well it sounds sometimes like jibberish. As if the meaning had gone out. Blast, heat, radiation, fire storm—all that. Nuts.”

“Nuts is the perfect word. Insane. Completely mad.”

“You mean people?”

“I mean people.”

Henry hardly knew how to say all that was on his mind. His deep respect for Coley Borden made him prefer to appear the easy-going, almost “folksy” kind of individual for whom he was generally taken. Lacking much formal education, he hesitated even to display the insights he had gained through reading and observation. Finally he put a question. “Know much about psychology, Coley?”

“Read a lot of books. Seems the psychologists don’t know too much themselves! Keep arguing…”

Henry nodded, smiled a little. “Sure. You read much about the unconscious mind?

Subconscious? Whatever they call it?”

“Some, Henry. Why?”

“You believe in it?”

The editor laughed. “Have to. Can’t explain a single thing otherwise. Take you and Alton Bowers. You agree on every solitary fact taught in school. Comes to religion—you’re a Presbyterian, Alt’s a Baptist. Why? Something unconscious, something not faced fair and square by you both, right there.”

“Never thought of it that way,” Henry admitted. “I was only thinking about Civil Defense. Atom bombs. I get a lot of what the Government calls ‘Material.’ Even psychology stuff. It’s all about how people will act. It’s all based on studies of how they did act in other disasters. But if people have unconscious minds, how in Sam Hill can any psychologist figure what they’d do, facing utterly new terrors?”

“Some psychologists know a lot about how even the unconscious mind works—and why.”

“Not the ones the Government hires! All their birds are mighty chirky about the American people. Think they’d do fine if it rained brimstone. I’m not so sure. I’m far from sure!

I suspect the worst thing you can do, sometimes, is to keep patting people’s backs. Keep promising them they’re okay because they’ll do okay in a crisis. Makes ’em that much more liable to skittishness, to loss of confidence, if the crisis rolls around and they find they’re not doing letter perfect.”

Coley nodded. “I’ll buy that. It’s like the armed forces. Always calculating what’s going to happen on the basis of what happened before. Trying to convince themselves, even now, that an atom bomb is just another explosion—when it’s that, times a million, plus an infinite number of side effects, and not counting the human factor. The factor you call ‘unconscious’-and rightly.” The editor nodded. “They ought to look back over the military panics that have followed novel weapons. Next, they ought to reckon on how much less a civilian is set for uproar than troops. People go nuts, easy.”

“And then,” Henry went on slowly, “what about the people that are nuts? Seems to me I’ve read someplace that about a third of all the folks think they’re sick are merely upset in their heads. That’s a powerful lot of people, to begin with. Then, a tenth of us are more or less cracked. Neurotic, alcoholic, dope-takers, emotionally unstable, psycopaths, all that sort. Plus the fact that half the folks in hospital beds this very day are out-and-out nuts!”

“What’s your procedure with them?”

Henry shook his head. “What can it be? They’re uneducatable. Can’t teach ’em to behave properly in normal situations. How’n hell you teach ’em to face atom bombing? A tenth of the whole population is worse than a dead loss. It’s a dangerous handicap, come real trouble.”

The editor smiled. “ Only a tenth, Henry? More likely a third of the people are neurotic.

Already over-anxious, fearful, insecure. What about the have-not people? People with hate in their hearts? People who never were free, who never had an even and equal chance? What would they do, if things blew sky-high? Stand firm and co-operate? Like hell!”

“I know,” Henry murmured.

“And the merely poor people! With a feeling they’ve heen gypped. And look! Five per cent of the total population of River City and Green Prairie, like the people in every city, are folks with criminal records. Not just unpredictable. You can predict that—sure—a few will become noble in a disaster. lust as sure, you know the most of ’em will keep on being criminal and take advantage of every chance. Loot, for instance. Kill, if they’re that type. Rape, if they’re in that sex-offense category. Everything! What’s procedure there?”

“Green Prairie has a lot of volunteer auxiliary police and the cops train ’em. River City?

You tell me how they’d handle things. They’ve got nothing.”

“What’s Federal policy?” Coley persisted. “After all, the Government must realize that somewhere between a quarter and a half of your big-city people aren’t what could be called at all emotionally stable. They’re pushovers for panic and naturals for improper reaction.”

“No policy,” the other replied. “Except force. Police effort. How can there be?”

“And psychological contagion?”

“Meaning what?”

“If the nuts, the near-nuts, the neurotic, the criminal, the have-not people and the repressed minorities go haywire—why, how many of the rest will catch it? What’s more catching than panic?”

“You got me,” Henry said. He sighed and stood. “All I believe is, the more people face what might happen, ahead of time, without being deluded about how ‘firm’ they are, the fewer’ll go wild.” He glanced around the office as if it symbolized something he cherished and had reluctantly hurt. ‘‘I’m sorry to come up here with all this on my mind, Coley….”

“I know.”

“Guess you do. Well…!”

They shook hands warmly.

When the lights had been turned on, when Henry Conner had gone, saying it was past his bedtime, chuckling, walking out with square shoulders, Coley Borden sat a while and then buzzed for Mrs. Berwyn. She came in—red hair piled high, greenish eyes mapped out as usual with mascara, all her brains and kindness and unanchored tenderness concealed in the outlandish aspect of her homely face and big body. (After Nan died, he thought, I should have married Beatrice; she’d be terrific—you’d only have to have it dark.)

“Get your book, Bea,” he said over his shoulder. He was standing again, looking along shelves for a volume which, presently, he took down. When he turned, she was sitting; she had brought her pencils and stenographic notebook with the first buzz.

“How old are you, Bea?” he asked, opening the book and looking from page to page. “You never asked me that.” Her voice was clear and rather high.

“Asking now.”

“Fifty-three.”

“I’ll be damned!”

“Why? Didn’t a woman ever tell you her right age before?”

He gazed at her and his lips twitched. “Sure. Once. I thought it was going to land me in prison, too. She was seventeen.”

“Your dissolute ways!” the green eyes flickered.

“I was kind of surprised,” he said quietly, “because you’re a year older than me. That’s all.”

“Oh.” She looked at the Door. “From you, that’s a compliment.”

“Right. We’re going to do some work. An editorial.”

“For morning? The page is in.”

“Yeah. If it comes out right, it’ll be for morning. I’m kind of rusty, Bea. But I’ll take a crack at it and maybe I’ll run it. Ready?”

She nodded.

He began to walk in front of his desk and to dictate:

“Ten years ago and more, this nation hurled upon its Jap foe a new weapon, a weapon cunningly contrived from the secrets of the sun. Since that day the world has lived in terror.

“Every year, every month, every hour, terror has grown. It is terror compounded of every fear. Fear of War. Fear of Defeat. Fear of Slavery. These fears are great, but they are common to humanity. Man in his sorrow has sustained them hitherto. But there are other fears in the composition of man’s present terror. These are fears that his cities may be reduced to rubble, his civilization destroyed, humanity itself wiped out; in sum, fear that man’s world will end. And this last fear has been augmented through the long, hideous years by hints from the laboratories that, indeed, the death of life is possible—and even the incineration of the planet may soon be achievable, by scientific design or by careless accident.

“Fears of mortal aggression and human crimes are tolerable, however dreadsome. But men have never borne with sanity a fear that their world will end. To all who accept as likely that special idea, reason becomes inaccessible; their minds collapse; madness invades their sensibilities. What they then do no longer bears reasonably upon their peril, however apt they deem their crazed courses. They are then puppets of their terror. And it is as such puppets that we Americans have acted for ten years, and more.”

Coley paused. Bea looked up and nodded appreciatively at his rhetoric. But when he did not immediately continue, she said, “I think, if you asked the first hundred people on the street if they were terrified, they’d laugh.”

“That’s a fact,” he answered. “Good suggestion.” He went on:

“Man has always reacted with universal panic to notions of the world’s end. Time and again in the Dark Ages, some planetary conjunction, the appearance of a comet, or an eclipse led to general convulsion. Business stopped. Mobs Bed the cities. Cathedrals were thronged.