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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 hav
e 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.