Alas, Babylon

Harry Hart Frank

Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13

Frank Pat
Alas, Babylon

Foreword

   I have an acquaintance, a retired manufacturer, a practical man, who has recently become worried about international tensions, intercontinental missiles, H-bombs, and such. One day, knowing that I had done some writing on military subjects, he asked: “What do you think would happen if the Russkies hit us when we weren’t looking—you know, like Pearl Harbor?” The subject was on my mind. I had recently returned from a magazine assignment at Offutt Field, Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, several SAC operational bases, and the Missile Test Center on Cape Canaveral. More to the point, I had been discussing just such a possibility with several astute British staff officers. The British have lived under the shadow of nuclear-armed rockets longer than we. Also, they have a vivid memory of cities devastated from the skies, as have the Germans and Japanese. A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame of reference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his own experience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times more powerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb’s fireball is something you see on television. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in the thousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination of all but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese can comprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personal understanding of atomic heat and radiation. It was a big question. I gave him a horseback opinion, which proved conservative compared with some of the official forecasts published later. I said, “Oh, I think they’d kill fifty or sixty million Americans—but I think we’d win the war.” He thought this over and said, “Wow! Fifty or sixty million dead! What a depression that would make!” I doubt if he realized the exact nature and extent of the depression—which is why I am writing this book.
   –Pat Frank

Chapter 1

   In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said that sending a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it over the combined networks. This was not entirely true. It was true that Florence Wechek, the manager, gossiped. Yet she judiciously classified the personal intelligence that flowed under her plump fingers, and maintained a prudent censorship over her tongue. The scandalous and the embarrassing she excised from her conversation. Sprightly, trivial, and harmless items she passed on to friends, thus enhancing her status and relieving the tedium of spinsterhood. If your sister was in trouble, and wired for money, the secret was safe with Florence Wechek. But if your sister bore a legitimate baby, its sex and weight would soon be known all over town.
   Florence awoke at six-thirty, as always, on a Friday in early December. Heavy, stiff and graceless, she pushed herself out of bed and padded through the living room into the kitchen. She stumbled onto the back porch, opened the screen door a crack, and fumbled for the milk carton on the stoop. Not until she straightened did her china-blue eyes begin to discern movement in the hushed gray world around her. A jerky-tailed squirrel darted out on the longest limb of her grapefruit tree. Sir Percy, her enormous yellow cat, rose from his burlap couch behind the hot water heater, arched his back, stretched, and rubbed his shoulders on her flannel robe. The African lovebirds rhythmically swayed, heads pressed together, on the swing in their cage. She addressed the lovebirds: “Good morning, Anthony. Good morning, Cleo.”
   Their eyes, spectacularly ringed in white, as if embedded in mint Life Savers, blinked at her. Anthony shook his green and yellow plumage and rasped a greeting. Cleo said nothing. Anthony was adventurous, Cleo timid. On occasion Anthony grew raucous and irascible and Florence released him into limitless freedom outside. But always, at dusk, Anthony waited in the Turk’s-cap, or atop the frangipani, eager to fly home. So long as Cleo preferred comfortable and sheltered imprisonment, Anthony would remain a domesticated parrot. That’s what they’d told her when she bought the birds in Miami a month before, and apparently it was true.
   Florence carried their cage into the kitchen and shook fresh sunflower seed into their feeder. She filled Sir Percy’s bowl with milk, and crumpled a bit of wafer for the goldfish in the bowl on the counter. She returned to the living room and fed the angelfish, mollies, guppies, and vivid peons in the aquarium. She noted that the two miniature catfish, useful scavengers, were active. She was checking the tank’s temperature, and its electric filter and heater, when the percolator chuckled its call to breakfast. At seven, exactly, Florence switched on the television, turned the knob to Channel 8, Tampa, and sat down to her orange juice and eggs. Her morning routine was unvaried and efficient. The only bad parts of it were cooking for one and eating alone. Yet breakfast was not her loneliest meal, not with Anthony ogling and gabbling, the six fat goldfish dancing a dreamy oriental ballet on diaphanous fins, Sir Percy rubbing against her legs under the table, and her cheery friends on the morning show, hired, at great expense, to inform and entertain her.
   As soon as she saw Dave’s face, Florence could sense whether the news was going to be good or bad. On this morning Dave looked troubled, and sure enough, when he began to give the news, it was bad. The Russians had sent up another Sputnik No. 23, and something sinister was going on in the Middle East. Sputnik No. 23 was the largest yet, according to the Smithsonian Institution, and was radioing continuous and elaborate coded signals. “There is reason to believe,” Frank said, “that Sputniks of this size are equipped to observe the terrain of the earth below.”
   Florence gathered her pink flannel robe closer to her neck. She glanced up, apprehensively, through the kitchen window. All she saw were hibiscus leaves dripping in the pre-dawn ground fog, and blank gray sky beyond. They had no right to put those Sputniks up there to spy on people. As if it were on his mind also, Frank continued:
   “Senator Holler, of the Armed Services Committee, yesterday joined others of a Midwest bloc in demanding that the Air Force shoot down Sputniks capable of military espionage if they violate U.S. air space. The Kremlin has already had something to say about this. Any such action, the Kremlin says, will be regarded the same as an attack on a Soviet vessel or aircraft. The Kremlin pointed out that the United States has traditionally championed the doctrine of Freedom of the Seas. The same freedom, says the Soviet statement, applies to outer space.”
   The newsman paused, looked up, and half-smiled in wry amusement at this complexity. He turned a page on his clipboard.
   “There is a new crisis in the Middle East. A report from Beirut, via Cairo, says that Syrian tanks of the most modern Russian design have crossed the Jordanian frontier. This is undoubtedly a threat to Israel. At the same time Damascus charges that Turkish troops are mobilizing. . . .”
   Florence flipped to Channel 6, Orlando, and country music. She did not understand, and could not become interested in, the politics of the Middle East. Sputniks seemed a closer and more personal menace. Her best friend Alice Cooksey, the librarian, claimed to have seen a Sputnik one evening at twilight. If you could see it, then it could see you. She stared up through the window again. No Sputnik. She rinsed the dishes and returned to her bedroom.
   As she wrestled with her girdle, Florence’s thought gravitated to the equally prying behavior of Randy Bragg. She adjusted the Venetian blinds until she could peer out. He was at it again. There he was, brazenly immodest in checked red and black pajamas, sitting on his front steps, knees akimbo and binoculars pressed to his eyes. Although he was perhaps seventy-five yards distant, she was certain he stared directly at her, and could see through the tilted louvers. She ducked back against the bedroom wall, hands protecting her breasts.
   Almost every evening for the past three weeks, and on a number of mornings, she had caught him at it. Sometimes he was on the piazza, as now, sometimes at a second-floor window, and sometimes high up on the captain’s walk. Sometimes he swept the whole of River Road with his glasses, pretending an interest elsewhere, but more often he focused on her bungalow. Randolph Rowzee Bragg a Peeping Tom! It was shocking!
   Long before Florence’s mother moved south and built the brown-shingle bungalow, the Braggs had lived in the big house, ungainly and monolithic, with tall Victorian windows and belly-ing bays and broad brick chimneys. Once it had been the show place of River Road. Now, it appeared shabby and outmoded compared with the long, low, antiseptic citadels of glass, metal, and tinted block constructed by rich Northerners who for the past fifteen years had been “discovering” the Timucuan River. Still, the Bragg house was planked and paneled with native cypress, and encased in pine clapboard, hard as iron, that might last another hundred years. Its grove, at this season like a full green cloak flecked with gold, trailed all the way from back yard to river bank, a quarter mile. And she would say this for Randy, his grounds were well kept, bright with poinsettias and bougainvillea, hibiscus, camellias, gardenias, and flame vine. Florence had known Randolph’s mother, Gertrude Bragg, well, and old Judge Bragg to speak to.

   She had watched Randolph graduate from bicycle to jalopy, vanish for a number of years in college and law school, reappear in a convertible, vanish again during the Korean War, and finally come home for good when Judge Bragg and Mrs. Bragg were taken in the same year. Now here was Randy, one of the best known and most eligible young men in Tumucuan County, even if he did run around with Pistolville girls and drink too much, a-what was it the French called it?– a voyeur. It was disgusting. The things that went on in small towns, people wouldn’t believe. Florence faced the bureau mirror, wondering how much he had seen.
   Many years ago a man had told her she looked something like Clara Bow. Thereafter, Florence wore her hair in bangs, and didn’t worry too much about her chubby figure. The man, an imaginative idealist, had gone to England in 1940, joined the Commandos, and got himself killed. She retained only a vague and inexact memory of his caresses, but she could never forget how he had compared her to Clara Bow, a movie star. She could still see a resemblance, provided she sucked in her stomach and lifted her chin high to erase the fleshy creases in her neck-except her hair was no longer like Clara’s. Her hair had thinned, and faded to mottled pink. She hurriedly sketched a Clara Bow pout on her lips, and finished dressing.
   When she stepped out of the front door, Florence didn’t know whether she should cut Randy dead or give him a piece of her mind. He was still there on the steps, the binoculars in his lap. He waved, grinned, and called across lawn and road, “Morning, Miss Florence.” His black hair was tousled, his teeth white, and he looked boyish, handsome, and inoffensive.
   “Good morning, Randy,” Florence said. Because of the distance, she had to shout, so her voice was not formal and frigid, as she had intended.
   “You look real pretty and chipper today,” he yelled.
   She walked to the car port, head averted as if avoiding a bad odor, her stiff carriage a reprimand, and did not answer. He really was nervy, sitting there in those vile pajamas, trying to sweet-talk her. All the way to town, she kept thinking of Randy. Who would ever guess that he was a deviate with a compulsion to watch women dress and undress? He ought to be arrested. But if she told the sheriff, or anybody, they would only laugh at her. Everybody knew that Randy dated lots of girls, and not all of them virgins. She herself had seen him take Rita Hernandez, that little Minorcan tart from Pistolville, into his house and, no doubt, up to his bedroom since the lights had gone on upstairs and off downstairs. And there had been others, recently a tall blonde who drove her own car, a new Imperial with Ohio plates, into the circular driveway and right up to the front steps as if she owned the place, and Randy.

   Nobody would believe that he found it necessary to absorb his sex at long range through optic nerves and binoculars. Yet it was strange that he had not married. It was strange that he lived alone in that wooden mausoleum. He even had his office in there, instead of in the Professional Building like the other lawyers. He was a hermit, and a snob, and a nigger lover, and no better than a pervert. God knows what he did with those girls upstairs. Maybe all he did was make them take off their clothes and put them on again while he watched. She had heard of such things. And yet she couldn’t make herself believe there was anything basically wrong with Randy. She had voted for him in the primaries and stood up for him at the meetings of the Frangipani Circle when those garden club biddies were pecking him to bits. After all, he was a Bragg, and a neighbor, and besides
   He obviously needed help and guidance. Randy’s age, she knew, was thirty-two. Florence was forty-seven. Between people in their thirties and forties there wasn’t too wide a gap. Perhaps all he needed, she decided, was a little understanding and tenderness from a mature woman.
   Randy watched Florence’s ten-year-old Chevy diminish and disappear down the tunnel of live oaks that arched River Road. He liked Florence. She might be a gossipy old maid but she was probably one of the few people on River Road who had voted for him. Now she was acting as if he were a stranger trying to cash a money order without credentials. He wondered why. Maybe she disapproved of Lib McGovern, who had been in and out of the house a good deal in the last few weeks. What Florence needed, he guessed, was the one thing she was unlikely to get, a man. He rose, stretched, and glanced up at the bronze weathercock on the garage steeple. Its beak pointed resolutely northeast. He checked the large, reliable marine barometer and its twin thermometer alongside the front door. Pressure 30.17, up twenty points in twelve hours. Temperature sixty-two. It would be clear and warm and the bass might start hitting off the end of the dock.

   He whistled, and shouted, “Graf! Hey, Graf!” Leaves rustled under the azalea bed and a long nose came out, followed by an interminable length of dachshund. Graf, his red coat glistening and tail whipping, bounded up the steps, supple as a seal. “Come on, my short-legged friend,” Randy said, and went inside, binoculars swinging from his neck, for his second cup of coffee, the cup with the bourbon in it.
   Except for the library, lined with his father’s law books, and the gameroom, Randy rarely used the first floor. He had converted one wing of the second floor into an apartment suitable in size to a bachelor, and to his own taste. His taste meant living with as little exertion and strain as possible. His wing contained an office, a living room, a combination bar and kitchen alcove, and bedroom and bath. The decor was haphazard, designed for his ease, not a guest’s eye. Thus he slept in an outsize mahogany sleigh bed imported from New England by some remote ancestor, but it was equipped with a foam rubber mattress and contour nylon sheets. When, in boredom, he wasted an evening preparing a full meal for himself, he ate from Staffordshire bearing the Bragg crest, and with silver from Paul Storr, and by candlelight; but he laid his place on the formica bar separating living room from efficient kitchen. Now he sat on a stool at this bar, half-filled a fat mug with steaming coffee, dropped two lumps of sugar into it, and laced it with an inch of bourbon. He sipped his mixture greedily. It warmed him, all the way down.
   Randy didn’t remember, exactly, when he had started taking a drink or two before breakfast. Dan Gunn, his best friend and probably the best medic north of Miami, said it was an unhealthy practice and the hallmark of an alcoholic. Not that Dan had reprimanded him. Dan had just advised him to be careful, and not let it become a habit. Randy knew he wasn’t an alcoholic because an alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter morning. Besides, when you took it with coffee that made it part of breakfast, and therefore not so depraved. He guessed he had started it during the campaign, when he had been forced to load his stomach with fried mullet, hush puppies, barbecued ribs dripping fat, chitlins, roasted oysters gritty with sand, and to wash all down with warm beer and raw rotgut. After such nights, only mellow bourbon could clear his head and launch him on another day. Bourbon had buoyed him during the campaign, and now bourbon mercifully clouded its memory. He could have beaten Porky Logan, certainly, except for one small tactical error. Randy had been making his first speech, at Pasco Creek, a cow town in the north end of the county, when somebody shouted, “Hey, Randy, where do y’ stand on the Supreme Court?”
   He had known this question must come, but he had not framed the right kind of answer: the moderate Southern quasi-liberal, semi-segregationist double-talk that would have satisfied everybody except the palmetto scrub woolhats, the loud-mouthed Kluxers and courthouse whittlers who would vote for Porky anyway, and the Georgia and Alabama riffraff crowding the Minorcans for living space in the shanties and three-room bungalows of Pistolville. The truth was that Randolph Bragg himself was torn by the problem, recognizing its dangers and complexities. He had certain convictions. He had served in Korea and Japan and he knew that the battle for Asia was being lost in counties like Timucuan. He also knew that Pasco Creek had no interest in Asia. He believed integration should start in Florida, but it must begin in the nursery schools and kindergartens and would take a generation. This was all difficult to explain, but he did voice his final conviction, inescapable because of his legal heritage and training, and the oaths he had taken as voter and soldier. He said: “I believe in the Constitution of the United States-all of it.”
   There had been snickers and snorts from the rim of the crowd, and his listeners, except for the reporters from Tampa, Orlando, and the county weekly, had drifted away. In later speeches, elsewhere, he attempted to explain his position, but it was hopeless. Behind his back he was called a fool and a traitor to his state and his race. Randolph Rowzee Bragg, whose great grandfather had been a United States Senator, whose grandfather had been chosen by President Wilson to represent his country as Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extrordinary in time of war, whose father had been elected, without opposition, to half a dozen offices, Randolph was beaten five-to-one in the Democratic primaries for nomination to the state legislature. It was worse than defeat. It was humiliation, and Randy knew he could never run for public office again. He refilled his mug, this time with more bourbon than coffee, and Missouri, his maid, shuffled in the hallway and knocked. He called, “Come in, Mizzoo.”
   Missouri opened the door, pushing a vacuum cleaner and carrying a pail filled with cans, bottles, and rags. Missouri was the wife of Two-Tone Henry, neighbor as well as maid. She was six inches shorter than Two-Tone, who was just Randy’s height, five-eleven, but Two-Tone claimed she outweighed him by a hundred pounds. If this was true, Missouri weighed around two-forty. But on this morning, it seemed to Randy that she had dwindled a bit. “You dieting, Mizzoo?” he said.
   “No, sir, I’m not dietin’. I got nerves.”
   “Nerves!” Missouri had always seemed nerveless, solid, and placid as a broad, deeply rooted tree. Two-Tone been giving you a bad time again?”
   “No. Two-Tone been behavin’. He down on the dock fishin’ right now. To tell you the truth, Mister Randy, it’s Mrs. McGovern. She follow me around with white gloves.”
   Missouri worked two hours each morning for Randy, and the rest of the day for the McGoverns, who lived half a mile closer to town. The McGoverns were the W. Foxworth McGoverns, the Central Tool and Plate McGoverns, formerly of Cleveland, and the parents of Lib McGovern, whose proper name was Elizabeth. “What do you mean, Mizzoo?” Randy asked, fascinated.
   “After I dust, she follow me around with white gloves to see has I dusted. I know I cleans clean, Mister Randy.”
   “You sure do, Mizzoo.”
   Missouri plugged in the vacuum cleaner, started it, and then shut it off She had more on her mind. “That ain’t all. You been in that house, Mister Randy. You ever seen so many ashtrays?” “What’s wrong with ashtrays?”
   “She don’t allow no ashes in ‘em. That poor Mister McGovern, he has to smoke his cigars outside. Then there was that roach. Big roach in the silver drawer. Mrs. McGovern opened that drawer yesterday and saw that roach and screeched like she’d been hit by a scorpion. She made me go through every drawer in the kitchen and dining room and put down fresh paper. Was that roach sent me to Doctor Gunn yesterday. Mrs. McGovern she can’t ‘bide bugs or little green lizards and she won’t go out of the house after dark for fear of snakes. I don’t think the McGoverns going to be with us long, Mister Randy, because what’s Florida except bugs and lizards and snakes? I think they leave around May, when bug season starts good. But Miss McGovern, she won’t want to leave. She stuck on you.”
   “What makes you think so?”
   Missouri smiled. “Questions she asks. Like what you eats for breakfast.” Missouri glanced at the decanter on the bar. “And who cooks for you. And does you have other girls.”
   Randy changed the subject. “You say you went to see Doctor Gunn. What’d he say?”
   “Doctor says I’m a complicated case. He says I got high blood, on account of I’m heavy. He says it’s good I’m losin’ weight, because that lowers the high blood, but frettin’ about Mrs. McGovern white-glovin’ me is the wrong way to do it. He says quit eatin’ grits, eat greens. Quit pork, eat fish. And he gives me tranquil pills to take, one each day before I go to work for Mrs. McGovern.”
   “You do that, Mizzoo,” Randy said, and, carrying his mug, walked out on to the screen upstairs porch overlooking grove and river. He then climbed the narrow ship’s ladder that led to the captain’s walk, a rectangle sixteen by eight feet, stoutly planked and railed, on the slate roof. Reputedly, this was the highest spot in Timucuan County. From it he could see all the riverfront estates, docks, and boats, and all of the town of Fort Repose, three miles downstream, held in a crook of sun-flecked silver where the Timucuan joined the broader St. Johns.
   This was his town, or had been. In 1838, during the Seminole Wars, a Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton, USN, a Virginian, had been dispatched to this river junction with a force of eighteen Marines and two small brass cannon. Lieutenant Peyton journeyed south from Cow’s Ford, its name patriotically changed to Jacksonville, by longboat. His orders from General Clinch were to throttle Indian communications on the rivers, thus protecting the flank of the troops moving down the east coast from St. Augustine. Lieutenant Peyton built a blockhouse of palm logs on the point, his guns covering the channel. In two years, except during one relief expedition overland to New Smyrna, he fought no battles or skirmishes. But he shot game and caught fish for the garrison pot, and studied botany and the culture of citrus. The balmy weather and idyllic life, described in a log now in a teak chest in Randy Braggs office, inspired the Lieutenant to name his outpost Fort Repose.
   When the wars subsided, the fort was decommissioned and Lieutenant Peyton was assigned to sea duty. Four years later he returned to Fort Repose with a wife, a daughter, and a grant from the government for one hundred acres. He had picked this precise spot for his homestead because it was the highest ground in the area, with a steep gradient to the river, ideal for planting the oranges just imported from Spain and the Far East. Peyton’s original house had burned. The present house had been built by his son-in-law, the first Marcus Bragg, a native of Philadelphia and a lawyer eventually sent to the Senate. The captain’s walk had been added for the aging Lieutenant Peyton, so that with his brass spyglass he could observe what happened at the junction of rivers.
   Now the Bragg holdings had dwindled to thirty-six acres, but thirty were planted in prime citrus-navels, mandarins, Valencias, and Temples– all tended and sold in season by the county co-operative. Each year Randy received checks totaling eight to ten thousand dollars from the co-operative. Half went to his older brother, Mark, an Air Force colonel stationed at Offutt Field, Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, near Omaha. With his share, plus dividends from a trust established by his father, and his occasional fees as an attorney, Randy lived comfortably. Since he drove a new car and paid his bills promptly, the trades people of Fort Repose thought him well-to-do. The rich newcomers classed him with the genteel poor.
   Randy heard music below, and knew that Missouri had started his record player and therefore was waxing the floor. Missouri’s method was to spread the wax, kick off her shoes, wrap her feet in rags, and then polish by dancing. This was probably as efficient, and certainly more fun, than using the electric waxer. He dropped into a deck chair and focused his binoculars on Preacher Henry’s place, looking for that damn bird in the hammock of pines, palmettos, and scrub oak. The Henrys had lived here as long as the Braggs, for the original Henry had come as slave and manservant to Lieutenant Peyton. Now the Henrys owned a four-acre enclave at the east boundary of the Bragg groves. Preacher Henry’s father had bought it from Randolph’s grandfather for fifty dollars an acre long before the first boom, when land was valued only for what it grew. Preacher was hitching his mule, Balaam– the last mule in Timucuan County so far as anyone knew– to the disk. In this month Preacher harrowed for his yam and corn planting, while his wife, Hannah, picked and sold tomatoes and put up kumquat preserves. He ought to go down and talk to Preacher about that damn bird, Randy thought. If anyone was likely to observe and recognize a Carolina parakeet floating around, it was Preacher, because Preacher knew all the birds and their calls and habits. He shifted his glasses to focus on the end of the Henrys’ rickety dock. Two-Tone had five bamboo poles out. Two-Tone himself reclined on his side, head resting on his hand, so he could watch the corks without effort. Preacher’s younger son, Malachai, who was Randy’s yardman, and reliable as Two-Tone was no-account, was not about.
   Randy heard the phone ringing in his office. The music stopped and he knew Missouri was answering. Presently she called from the piazza, “Mister Randy, it’s for you. It’s Western Union.”
   “Tell her I’ll be right down,” Randy said, lifted himself out of the deck chair, and backed down the ladder, wondering who would be sending him a telegram. It wasn’t his birthday. If some thing important happened, people phoned. Unless-he remembered that the Air Force sent telegrams when a man was hurt, or killed. But it wouldn’t be Mark, because for two years Mark had been flying a desk. Still, Mark would get in his flying time each month, if possible, for the extra pay.
   He took the phone from Missouri’s hand and braced himself. “Yes?” he said.
   “I have a telegram, Randy– it’s really a cable-from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s signed by Mark. It’s really very peculiar.” Randy let out his breath, relieved. If Mark had sent the message, then Mark was all right. A man can’t pick his relatives, only his friends, but Mark had always been Randy’s friend as well as brother. “What’s the message say?”
   “Well, I’ll read it to you,” Florence said, “and then if you want me to read it again I’ll be glad to. It says, `’Urgent you meet me at Base Ops McCoy noon today. Helen and children flying to Orlando tonight. Alas, Babylon.”‘ Florence paused. “That’s what it says, `Alas, Babylon.’ Do you want me to repeat the whole thing for you, Randy?”
   “No thanks.”
   “I wonder what `Alas, Babylon’ means? Isn’t it out of the Bible?”
   “I don’t know. I guess so.” He knew very well what it meant. He felt sick inside.
   “There’s something else, Randy.”
   “Yes?”
   “Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll tell you about it next time I see you and I hope not in those loud pajamas. Goodbye, Randy. You’re sure you have the message?”
   “I’m sure,” he said, hung up and dropped into the swivel chair. Alas, Babylon was a private, a family signal. When they were boys, he and Mark used to sneak up to the back of the First Afro-Repose Baptist Church on Sunday nights to hear Preacher Henry calling down hell-fire and damnation on the sinners in the big cities. Preacher Henry always took his text out of the Revelation of St. John. It seemed that he ended every lurid verse with, “Alas, Babylon!” in a voice so resonant you could feel it, if you rested your fingertips gently on the warped pine boards of the church. Randy and Mark would crouch under the rear window, behind the pulpit, fascinated and wide-eyed, while Preacher Henry described the Babylonian revels, including fornication. Sometimes Preacher Henry made Babylon sound like Miami, and sometimes like Tampa, for he condemned not only fornication—he read the word right out of the Bible-but also horse racing and the dog tracks. Randy could hear him yet: “And I’m telling you right now, all wife-swappers, whisky-drinkers, and crap-shooters are going to get it! And all them who come out of those sin palaces on the beach, whether they be called hotels or motels, wearing minks and jewels and not much else, they is goin’ to get it! And them fast-steppers in Cadillacs and yaller roadsters, they is going to get it! Just like it says here in the Good Book, that Great City that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, that Great City was burned off the face of the earth in an hour. Just one hour Alas, Babylon!”
   Either Preacher Henry was too old, or the Afro-Repose congregation had tired of his scolding and awful prophecies, for he no longer preached except on those Sundays when Afro-Repose’s new minister, a light-skinned college graduate, was out of town. Randy and Mark never forgot Preacher Henry’s thundering, and from it they borrowed their private synonym for disaster, real or comic, past or future. If one fell off the dock, or lost all his cash at poker, or failed to make time with a promising Pistolville piece, or announced that hurricane or freeze was on the way, the other commiserated with, “Alas, Babylon!”
   But in this telegram it had very special and exact meaning. Mark had secured leave at Christmas season last year, and flown down with Helen and the two children, Ben Franklin and Peyton, for a week. On their last evening at Fort Repose, after the others were in bed, Mark and Randy had sat here, in this office, peering into the bourbon decanter and the deep anxieties of their hearts, trying to divine the future. Christmas had been a time of troubles, a time of confusions at home and tensions abroad, but in his whole life, Randy could recall no other sort of time. There had always been depression, or war, or threat of war.
   Mark, who was in SAC Intelligence, had rolled the old fashioned globe, three feet through, from its place in the window bay, so that the desk lamp shone on it. It was a globe purchased by their grandfather, the diplomat, before the First World War, so that the countries, some with unfamiliar names, seemed oddly scrambled. The continents and seas were the same, which was all that mattered. As Mark talked, his face became grave, almost gaunt, and his index finger traced great circle routes across the cracking surface-missile and bomber trajectories. He then drew a rough chart, with two lines that intersected. The line that con—timed upward after the intersection belonged to the Soviet Union, and the time of the intersection was right then.
   “How did it happen?” Randy had asked. “Where did we slip?”
   “It wasn’t lack of money,” Mark had replied. “It was state of mind. Chevrolet mentalities shying away from a space-ship world. Nations are like people. When they grow old and rich and fat they get conservative. They exhaust their energy trying to keep things the way they are-and that’s against nature. Oh, the services were to blame too. Maybe even SAC. We designed the most beautiful bombers in the world, and built them by the thousands. We improved and modified them each year, like new model cars. We couldn’t bear the thought that jet bombers themselves might be out of style. Right now we’re in the position of the Federal Navy, with its wooden steam frigates, up against the Confederate iron-clad. It is a state of mind that money alone won’t cure.” “What will?” Randy asked.
   “Men. Men like John Ericsson to invent a Monitor to face the Merrimac. Bold men, audacious men, tenacious men. Impatient, odd-ball men like Rickover pounding desks for his atomic sub. Ruthless men who will fire the deadheads and ass-kissers. Rude men who will tell the unimaginative, business-as-usual, seven carbon sons of bitches to go take a jump at a galloping goose. Young men because we’ve got to be a young country again. If we get that kind of men we may hack it if the other side gives us time.”
   “Will they?”
   Mark had spun the globe and shrugged. “I don’t know. If I think the balloon is about to go up I’m going to send Helen and the kids down here. When a man dies, and his children die with him, then he is dead entirely, leaving nothing to show.”
   “Do you think they’d be safer here than in Omaha? After all, we’ve got the Jax Naval Air complex to the north of us, and Homestead and Miami to the south, and Eglin to the northwest, and MacDill and Tampa to the southwest, and the Missile Test Center on Canaveral to the east, and McCoy and Orlando right at the front door, only forty miles off. What about fallout?”
   “There isn’t any place that’ll be absolutely safe. With fallout and radiation, it’ll be luck-the size of configuration of the weapons, altitude of the fireball, direction of the wind. But I do know Helen and the children won’t have much chance in Omaha. SAC Headquarters has got to be the enemy’s number one target. I’ll bet they’ve programmed three five-megaton IC’s for Offutt, and since our house is eight miles from the base any kind of near-miss does it “—Mark snapped his fingers-”like that. Not that I think it’ll do the enemy any good-command automatically shifts to other combat control centers and anyway all our crews know their targets. But they’ll hit SAC Headquarters, hoping for temporary paralysis. A little delay is all they’d need. I’ll have to be there, at Offutt, in the Hole, but the least a man can do is give his children a chance to grow up, and I think they’d have a better chance in Fort Repose than Omaha. So if I see it’s coming, and there is time, I’ll send Helen and the kids down here. And I’ll try to give you a warning, so you can get set for it.”
   “How?”
   Mark smiled. “I won’t call you up and say, `Hey, Randy, the Russians are about to attack us.’ Phones aren’t secure, and I don’t think my C-in-C, or the Air Staff, would approve. But if you hear `Alas, Babylon,’ you’ll know that’s it.”
   Randy had forgotten none of this talk. A week or so later, thinking about Mark’s words, Randy had decided to go into politics. He would start in the state legislature, and in a few years be ready to run for Congress. He’d be the kind of leader Mark wanted.
   It hadn’t worked out that way. He couldn’t even beat Porky Logan, a gross man whose vote could be bought for fifty bucks, who bragged that he had not got beyond the seventh grade but that he could get more new roads and state money for Timucuan County than any half-baked radical, undoubtedly backed by the burrheads and the N.A.A.C.P., who didn’t even know that the
   Supreme Court was controlled by Moscow. So Randy’s fiasco had been inspired by that night, and now the night bore something worse.
   He wondered what Mark was doing in Puerto Rico, and why his warning had come from there. It should have come from Washington or London or Omaha or Colorado Springs rather than San Juan. It was true that SAC had a big base, Ramey, in Puerto Rico, but– It was no use guessing. He’d know at noon. Of one thing he was certain, if Mark expected it to come, it would probably come. His brother was no alarmist. Randy sometimes allowed emotions to distort logic, Mark never did. Mark was capable of calculating odds, in war or poker, to the final decimal, which was why he was a Deputy Chief of Intelligence at SAC, and soon would have his star.
   Randy knew there were a thousand things he should be doing, but he couldn’t think of any of them. He became aware of a rhumba rhythm in the living room, and presently Missouri skated into view, feet bundled with waxing cloths, shoulders moving and hips bouncing with elephantine elegance, intent on her polishing. He yelled, “Missouri!”
   “Yessir?” Her forward motion stopped, but her hips continued to wobble and feet shuffle.
   “Quit that struttin’ and make up the three bedrooms on the front. Colonel Bragg’s family will be here tomorrow.”
   “Oh, ain’t that nice! Just like last year.”
   “No, not like last year. The Colonel’s not coming with them. Just Mrs. Bragg and Ben Franklin and Peyton.”
   Missouri peered through the door at him. “Mister Randy, you don’t look good. Them telegrams are yellow death. You get bad news or something? Ain’t nuthin’ happen to Colonel Mark?”
   “No. I’m driving over to McCoy to meet him at noon.”
   “Oh, that’s good. How come the children up north get out of school so quick?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “I’ll dust good, and make up the beds, and put towels and soaps in the bathrooms just like last year.”
   “Thanks, Mizzoo. That’s fine.”
   “Caleb’s going to be happy to see Ben Franklin,” Missouri said. Caleb was Missouri’s son, and just Ben’s age, thirteen. Last year, Randy had let them take the boat out on the river, fishing, just as Randy, as a boy, had fished with Caleb’s uncle, Malachai, except that twenty years ago the boat was a skiff, powered by muscle and oars, instead of a sleek Fiberglas job with a thirty horse kicker.
   Missouri gathered up her cleaning materials and left Randy alone with his nightmare. He shook his head, but he didn’t wake up. The nightmare was real. Slowly, he forced his mind to function. Slowly, he forced himself to imagine the unimaginable. . . .
   He must make a list of the things Helen and the children would need. He recalled that there was nothing stocked in the big kitchen downstairs, and little in the utility room except some steaks in the freezer and a few canned staples. My God, if there was going to be a war they’d need stocks of everything! He looked at his watch. He had yet to shave and dress, and he must allow an hour and a half for the drive to McCoy, ten miles south of Orlando, when you considered the main highways clogged with tourists, and Orlando’s infuriating and hopeless traffic tangle on a sunny payday less than three weeks before Christmas. And there might be some delay at the McCoy gate. He decided to give himself two hours on the road.
   Still, he could start the list, and there was one thing he should do right away. Ben Franklin drank a quart of milk a day and Peyton, his eleven-year-old sister, even more. He telephoned Golden Dew Dairy and revised his delivery order drastically upward. This was Randy’s first act to meet the emergency, and it was to prove the least useful.

Chapter 2

   Randy left the house in time to see Missouri wedge herself under the wheel of the Henrys’ Model-A Ford, an antique—so certified with a “Q” tag issued by the state-but kept in perfect running order by Malachai’s mechanical ingenuity. “I haven’t finished but I got to go now,” she said. “Mrs. McGovern, she holds the clock on me. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
   The Model-A, listing to port with Missouri’s weight, bounced down the pebbled driveway. Randy got into his new Bonneville. It was a sweet car, a compromise between a sports job and a hardtop, long, low, very fast, .and a lot of fun, even though its high-compression engine drank premium fuel in quantity.
   At eleven, approaching Orlando on Route 50, he turned on the radio for the news. Turkey had appealed to the UN for an investigation of border penetrations by Syria. Syria charged Israel with planning a preventive war. Israel accused Egypt of sending snooper planes over its defenses. Egypt claimed its ships, bound from the Black Sea to Alexandria, were being delayed in the Straits, and charged Turkey with a breach of the Montreaux Convention.
   Russia accused Turkey and the United States of plotting to crush Syria, and warned France, Italy, Greece, and Spain that any nations harboring American bases would be involved in a general war, and erased from the earth.
   The Secretary of State was somewhere over the Atlantic, bound for conferences in London.
   The Soviet Ambassador to Washington had been recalled for consultation.
   There were riots in France.
   It all sounded bad, but familiar as an old, scratchy record. He had heard it all before, in almost the same words, back in ‘57 and ‘58. So why push the panic button? Mark could be wrong. He couldn’t know, for certain, that the balloon was going up. Unless he knew something fresh, something that had not appeared in the newspapers, or been broadcast.
   Shortly before noon Florence Wechek hung her “Back at One” sign on the office door and walked down Yulee Street to meet Alice Cooksey at the Pink Flamingo. Fridays, they always lunched together. Alice, tiny, drab in black and gray, an active, angry sparrow of a woman, arrived late. She hurried to Florence’s table and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve just had a squabble with Kitty Offenhaus.”
   “Oh, dear!” Florence said. “Again?” Kitty was secretary of the PTA, past-president of the Frangipani Circle, treasurer of the Women’s Club, and a member of the library board. Also, she was the wife of Luther “Bubba” Offenhaus, Chief Tail-Twister of the Lions Club, Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce, and Deputy Director of Civil Defense for the whole county. He owned the most prosperous business in town, the Offenhaus Mortuary, and a twin real estate development, Repose-in-Peace Park.
   Alice lifted the menu. It fluttered. She set it down quickly and said, “Yes, again. I guess I’ll have the tunafish salad.”
   “You should eat more, Alice,” Florence said, noticing how white and pinched her friend’s face looked. “What happened?” “Kitty came in and said she’d heard rumors that we had books by Carl Rowan and Walter White. I told her the rumors were true, and did she want to borrow one?”
   “What’d she say?” Florence put down her fork, no longer interested in her chicken patty.
   “Said they were subversive and anti-South—she’s a Daughter of the Confederacy—and ordered me to take them off the shelves. I told her that as long as I was librarian they would stay there. She said she was going to bring it before the board and if necessary take it up with Porky Logan. He’s on the investigating committee in Tallahassee.”
   “Alice, you’re going to lose your job!” Kitty Offenhaus was the most influential person in Fort Repose, with the exception of Edgar Quisenberry, who owned and ran the bank.
   “I don’t think so. I told her that if anything like that happened I’d call the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune and Miami Herald and they’d send reporters and photographers. I said, `Kitty, can’t you see your picture on the front page, and the headline—Undertaker’s Wife Cremates Books?”‘
   This was the most fascinating news Florence had heard in weeks. “What happened then?”
   “Nothing at all. If I may borrow an expression from one of my younger readers, she left in an eight-cylinder huff.”
   “You wouldn’t really call the papers, would you?”
   Alice spoke carefully, understanding fully that everything would soon be repeated. “I certainly would! But I don’t think I’ll have to. You see, publicity would hurt Bubba’s business. One third of Bubba’s customers are Negroes, and another third Yankees who come down here to live on their pensions and stay to die.” She lifted her bright, fiercely blue eyes and added, as if repeating one of the Commandments: “Censorship and thought control can exist only in secrecy and darkness.”
   “And that was all?”
   “That was all.” Alice tried her salad. “What’ve you been doing, Florence?”
   Florence could think of no adventure, or even any news culled from the wire, that could compete with telling off Kitty Offenhaus—except her experience with Randy Bragg. She had pledged herself not to say anything about Randy to anyone, but she could trust Alice, who was worldly-wise in spite of her appearance, and who might even, when younger, have encountered a Peeping Tom herself. So Florence told about Randy and his binoculars and how he had stared at her that morning. “It’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it?” she concluded.
   “It is unbelievable,” Alice said flatly. “But I saw him at it!”
   “I don’t care. I know the Bragg boys. Even before you came here, Florence, I knew them. I knew Judge Bragg well, very well.” Florence remembered vague reports, many years back, of Alice Cooksey having gone with Judge Bragg before the judge married Gertrude. But that made no difference to what went on in the Bragg house now. “You’ll have to admit that those Bragg boys are a little peculiar,” Florence said. “You should have seen the cable Randy got from Mark this morning. Urgent they meet at McCoy today. Helen and the children flying to Orlando tonight-you know those children can’t be out of school yet and the last two words didn’t make any sense at all. `Alas, Babylon.’ Isn’t that crazy?”
   “Those boys aren’t crazy,” Alice said. “They’ve always been bright boys. Full of hell, yes, but at least they could read, which is more than I can say for the children nowadays. Do you know that Randy read every history in the library before he was sixteen?”
   “I don’t think that has anything to do with his sex habits,” Florence said. She leaned across the table and touched Alice’s arm. “Alice, come out to my house tonight for the weekend. I want you to see for yourself.”
   “I can’t. I keep the library open Saturdays. That’s my only chance to get the young ones. Evenings and Sundays, they’re paralyzed by TV.”
   “I’m open Saturday mornings, too, so we can drive in together. I’ll pick you up when you’re through tomorrow evening. It’ll be a change for you, out in the country, away from that stuffy room.”
   Alice hesitated. It would be nice to visit with Florence, but she hated to accept favors she couldn’t repay. She said, “Well, we’ll see.”
   When Alice returned to the library, three old-timers, too old for shuffleboard or the Lawn Bowlers Club, were bent over the periodical table. Like mummies, she thought, partially unwrapped. One of the mummies leaned slowly over until his nose fell into the fold of Cosmopolitan. Alice walked over to the table and made certain he still breathed. She let him nap on, smiled at the other two, and darted into the reference room, with its towering, topheavy stacks. From the first stack, religious and spiritual works in steady demand, she brought down the King James Bible. She believed she would find the words in Revelation, and she did. She read two verses, lips moving, words murmuring in her throat:
   And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,
   Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
   Alice put the Bible back on its shelf and walked, head down, to her cracked oak desk, like a schoolmarm’s desk on a dais, in the main hallway. She sat there, staring at the green blotter, at the antiquated pen and the glass inkwell, at the wooden file filled with readers’ cards, at the stack of publishers’ spring lists. Alone of all the people in Fort Repose, Alice Cooksey knew Mark Bragg well enough, and had absorbed sufficient knowledge of the world’s illness through the printed word, to understand that the books she had ordered from those spring lists might never be delivered. She had small fear of death, and of man none at all, but the formlessness of what was to come overwhelmed her. She always associated Babylon with New York, and she wished, now, that she lived on Manhattan, where one could die in a bright millisecond, without suffering, without risking the indignity of panic.
   She picked up the telephone and called Florence. She would come out for the weekend, or even longer, if Florence was agreeable. When she set down the phone Alice felt steadier. If it came soon, she would have a friendly hand to hold. She would not be alone.
   The Air Police sergeant at McCoy’s main gate questioned Randy, and then allowed him to call Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hart, a squadron commander, and friend of Mark’s. Hart had been to Fort Repose to fish for bass, first as Mark’s guest, and later, on several occasions, as a guest of Randy, so he was something more than an acquaintance. Randy said he had had a wire from Mark to meet him at noon, and Hart said, “He whistled through here yesterday. Didn’t expect him back so soon. Anyway, drive to Base Ops. We’ll go out on the line and meet him together. Let me talk to the Air Police. I’ll clear you through.”
   Driving through the base, Randy sensed a change since his last visit, the year before. Physically, McCoy looked the same. It felt different. The Air Police questioning had been sharper, and more serious. That wasn’t the difference. He realized something was missing; and then he had it. Where were all the people? McCoy seemed almost deserted, with less activity, and fewer men and fewer cars than a year ago. He saw no other civilians. He saw no women, not even around the clubs and the BX. The most congested area on the base was the steps and lawn in front of the alert barracks opposite wing headquarters, where standby crewmen, rigid and stiff in pressure suits, talked and smoked. Trucks, tail gates down, were backed to the curb. Drivers slouched over their wheels as if they had been there a long time.
   He drove onto Base Operations and parked close to the flight-line fence. Last year he had seen B-47’s, tankers, and fat transports stretching their wings, tip to tip, the length of the line-miles. Now, their numbers had dwindled. He counted fewer than twenty B-47’s, and guessed that the wing was in Africa or Spain or England on ninety-day foreign duty. But this could not be so, because Paul Hart, winner of bombing and navigation trophies, a Select Crew Aircraft Commander, would have led the flight.
   Hart, a stocky, bandy-legged man with punched-in nose, a fighter’s chin, and an easy grin, met him at the door of Operations. “Hi, Randy,” he said. “Just checked the board. Mark will touch down in eight minutes. How’s the fishing?”
   “It’s been lousy.” He looked up at the wind sock. “But it’ll get better if this high sticks around and the wind holds from the east. What’s he flying?”
   “He’s not flying anything. He’s riding soft and plush in a C-One-thirty-five-that’s the transport version of our new jet tanker-with a lot of Offutt brass. Other brass, that is. I hear he gets his star soon. Only promotion I’ll ever get is to a B-Five eight.”
   “Penalty for being a hot pilot,” Randy said. “What’s going on around here? Looks like a ghost town. You boys shutting up shop?”
   “You haven’t heard about SAC’s interim dispersal?” “Vaguely, yes, on some of the commentaries.”
   “Well, we’re not shouting about it. We try to keep half the wing off this base, because where we’re standing right now is a primary target. We farm out our planes to fighter fields and Navy fields and even commercial airports. And we try to keep ten percent of the wing airborne at all times, and if you look down there in front of the jumbo hangar you’ll see four standby Forty-sevens, bombed up and ready to go. Damn expensive way to run an air force.”
   Randy looked. They were there, wings drooping with full tanks, bound to earth by slender umbilical cords, the starter cables. “I didn’t mean the planes so much as the people,” Randy said. “Where’s everybody?”
   “Oh, that.” Hart frowned, as if deciding how much could be said and what words to use. “The papers know about it but they aren’t printing it,” he said finally, “and the people around Orlando must know about it by now so it can’t be any great secret. We’ve been on sort of a modified alert for four or five weeks. Maybe I should call it a creeping evacuation. We’ve cleared the area of all civilian and nonessential personnel, and we’re encouraging everybody to move their families out of the blast zone. You see, Randy, we can’t expect three to six hours’ warning any more. If we’re lucky, we might get fifteen minutes.”
   Randy nodded. He noticed long red missiles slung under the wings of the standby B-47’s. He recognized them, from the newspaper photographs, as the Rascal, an air-to-ground H-bomb carrier. “Is that red baby much help?” he asked.
   “That red baby,” Hart said, “is what we call the crew-saver. The Russkies are no dopes. They’ll try to stop us with missiles air-to-air and ground-to-air, beam-riders, heat-seekers, sound finders, and, for all I know, smellers. It’ll be no milk run but with the Rascal-and some other gadgets-we don’t have to write ourselves off as a kamikaze corps. We won’t have to penetrate their inner defense zones. We can lay off target and let that red baby fly. It knows where to go. Do you know what?”
   “What?”
   Paul Hart’s smile had vanished, and he looked older, and when he spoke it was gravely. “When the whistle blows, I’ll have a better chance if I’m in my aircraft, headed for target, than if I’m sitting at home with my feet propped up, drinking a Scotch, and Martha rubbing the kinks out of my neck-and our little place on the lake is five miles from here. So I’m a man of peace. I wish Martha and the kids lived in Fort Repose.”
   Randy heard the low whine of jet engines at fractional power and saw a cigar-shaped C-135 line up with the runway in its swoop downward. Presently it wheeled into a taxi strip and braked in front of Operations. A flag, three white stars on a blue field, popped out of the cockpit, indicating that a lieutenant general was aboard, and alerting McCoy to provide the courtesies due such rank.
   The three-star general was first down the ramp, his pink cheeked aide scurrying about his heels like an anxious puppy. Mark was last off Randy waved and caught his eye and Mark waved back but did not smile. Coming down the ramp and across the concrete, knees bare in tropical uniform, Mark looked like a slightly larger edition of Randy, an inch taller, a shade broader. At thirty feet they looked like twins, with the same jet hair, white teeth behind mobile lips, quizzical eyes set deep, the same rakish walk and swing of shoulders, cleft in chin and emphatic nose with a bony bump on the bridge. At three feet, fine, deep lines showed around Mark’s eyes and mouth, gray appeared in his black thicket, his jaw thrust out an extra half-inch, his face was leaner. At three feet, they were entirely different, and it was apparent Mark was the older, harder, and probably wiser man.
   Mark put one hand on Hart’s shoulder and the other on Randy’s, and walked them toward the building. “Paul,” he told Hart, “you better get with General Heycock. He’s hungry and when he gets hungry he gets fierce. How about helping his aide dig up some transport and get him over to the O Club? We’re only here to gas up. Takeoff is in fifty minutes.”
   Hart looked up and saw three blue Air Force sedans swing up the driveway. “There’s the General’s transport right there,” he said, and then, realizing that Mark had tactfully implied he wanted to be alone with his brother, added, “But I’ll go along to the O Club, and get the mess officer on the ball.” He shook hands and said, “See you, Mark, next time around.”
   “Sure,” Mark said. He turned to Randy. “Where’s your car? I’ve got a lot to say and not much time to say it. We can talk in the car. But first let’s get some candy, or something, inside Ops. We didn’t load any flight lunches at Ramey.”
   The front seat of the Bonneville was like a sunny comfortable private office. Randy asked the essential question first: “What time do Helen and the children get in?”
   Mark brought a notebook out of his hip pocket. “Three thirty tomorrow morning, local time, at Orlando Municipal. Carmody—he’s Wing Commander at Ramey—has a friend in the Eastern office in San Juan. He ramrodded it through for me. The plane leaves Omaha at seven-ten tonight. One change, in Chicago.”
   “Isn’t that a little rough on Helen and the kids?”
   “They can sleep all the way from Chicago to Orlando. It’ll be just as tough on you, meeting them. The important thing is I got the reservation. This time of year, it took some doing.”
   “What’s the great rush?” Randy demanded. “What the hell’s going on?”
   “Contain yourself, son,” Mark said. “I’m going to give you a complete briefing.”
   “Have you told Helen yet?”
   “I sent her a cable from San Juan. Just told her I’d made reservations for tonight. She’ll understand.” He squinted at the gaudy dials and gleaming knobs on the dash. “Some buggy you’ve got here, Randy. Won’t be worth a damn to you. About Helen, she and I thrashed all this out long ago, but she won’t like it. Not at all will she like it, now that the time has come. But I’ll have her on that plane if I have to truss her up and send her air freight.”
   Randy said nothing. He simply tapped the car clock, a reminder.
   “Okay,” Mark said, “I’ll brief you. First strategic, then tactical.” He pushed a peanut-butter cracker into his mouth, found his pen, and began to sketch in his notebook. He drew a rough map, the Mediterranean.
   Mark doesn’t cerebrate until he has a pen in his hand, Randy thought, and can see a map. Probably makes him feel comfortable, like he’s holding a pointer in the SAC War Room.
   “The key is the Med,” Mark said. “For three hundred years the Russians have tried to pry open the Straits and debouch into the Mediterranean. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Czar
   Alexander, they all tried it. Now, more than ever, control of the Med means control of the world.”
   Randy nodded. Conquerors knew or sensed this. Caesar had done it, Xerxes, Napoleon, and Hitler failed. “If Xerxes had won at Salamis,” he said, “we’d all be speaking Persian-but that was a long time pre-Sputnik, and pre-ICBM. I thought the fight, now, was for control of space. Who controls space controls the world.” Mark smiled. “It can also happen just the other way around. We-by we I mean the NATO coalition-aren’t going to be allowed time to catch up with them in operational IC’s, much less control space. Now don’t argue with me. We have their War Plan.”
   Randy took a deep breath and sat up straight.
   “For the first time Russia has bridgeheads in the Mediterranean-here, here, and here-” Mark drew ovals on the map. “They have a fleet in the Med as powerful as ours when you match their submarine strength against our carriers. They have Turkey ringed on three sides, and if they could upset the Turkish government, and force capitulation of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, they would have won the war without fighting. The Med would be theirs, Africa cut off from Europe, NATO outflanked on the south, and one by one all our allies-except England-would fall into their laps or declare themselves neutral. SAC’s bases in Africa and Spain would be untenable and melt away. NATO would fold up, and the IR sites we’re planning never be finished.”
   “That was their gambit in ‘fifty-seven, wasn’t it?” Randy asked.
   “You have a good memory, Randy, and that’s a good simile. The Russians are great chess players. They rarely make the same mistake twice. Now, today, they’re making moves. It’s the same gambit-but with a tremendous difference. In ‘fifty-seven, when it looked like they were going to make another Korea out of Turkey, we warned the Kremlin that there’d be no sanctuary inside Russia. They took a look at the board and resigned the game. Then in ‘fifty-eight, after the Iraq king was assassinated, we grabbed the initiative and landed Marines in Lebanon. We got there fastest. They saw that we were ready, and could not be surprised. They were caught off balance, and didn’t dare move. This time it’s different. They’re ready to go through with it, because the odds have changed.”
   “How can you know this?”
   “Remember reading about the Russian General who came over, in Berlin? An air general, a shrewd character, a human being. He brought us their War Plan, in his head. This time, they’re not resigning the game. They’d still like to win the war without a war, but if we make any military countermove, we’re going to receive it.”
   For a moment, they were both silent. On the other side of the flight-line fence, three ground-crewmen were throwing a baseball. Two were pitching, an older sergeant, built like Yogi Berra, catching. The plate was a yellow parachute pack. The ball whirred and plopped sharply into mitt. “That tall boy has a lot of stuff,” Randy said. Again, he felt he moved in the miasma of a dream. Something was wrong. Either Mark shouldn’t be talking like this, or those airmen shouldn’t be throwing a baseball out there in the warm sunlight. When he lit a cigarette, his fingers were trembling again.
   “Have a bad night, Randy?”
   “Not particularly. I’m having a bad day.”
   “I’m afraid it’s going to get worse. Here’s the tactical part. They know that the only way they can do it is knock off our nuclear capability with one blow-or at least cripple us so badly that they can accept what retaliatory power we have left. They don’t mind losing ten or twenty million people, so long as they sweep the board, because people, per se, are only pawns, and expendable. So their plan-it was no surprise to us-calls for a T.O.T. on a worldwide scale. You get it?”
   “Sure. Time-on-target. You don’t fire everything at the same instant. You shoot it so it all arrives on target at the same instant.” Mark glanced at his watch, and then looked up at the big jet transport, still loading fuel through four hoses from the underground tanks. “That’s right. It won’t be Zero Hour, it’ll be Zero Minute. They’ll use no planes in the first wave, only missiles. They plan to kill every base and missile site in Europe and Africa and the U.K. with their T-2 and T-3 IR’s. They plan to kill every base on this continent, and in the Pacific, with their IC’s, plus missiles launched from subs. Then they use SUSAC – that’s what we call their Strategic Air Force-to mop up.”
   “Can they get away with it?”
   Three years ago they couldn’t. Three years hence, when we have our own ICBM batteries emplaced, a big fleet of missile toting subs, and Nike-Zeus and some other stuff perfected, they couldn’t. But right now we’re in what we call `the gap.’ Theoretically, they figure they can do it. I’m pretty sure they can’t we may have some surprises for them-but that’s not the point. Point is, if they think they can get away with it, then we have lost.”
   “I don’t understand.”
   “LeMay says the only way a general can win a modern war is not fight one. Our whole raison d’etre was deterrent force. When you don’t deter them any longer, you lose. I think we lost some time ago, because the last five Sputniks have been reconnaissance satellites. They’ve been mapping us, with infrared and transitor television, measuring us for the Sunday punch.”
   Randy felt angry. He felt cheated. “Why hasn’t anybody everybody been told about this?”
   Mark shrugged. “You know how it is-everything that comes in is stamped secret or top secret or cosmic or something and the only people who dare declassify anything are the big wheels right at the top, and the people at the top hold conferences and somebody says, `Now, let’s not be hasty. Let’s not alarm the public.’ So everything stays secret or cosmic. Personally, I think everybody ought to be digging or evacuating right this minute. Maybe if the other side knew we were digging, if they knew that we knew, they wouldn’t try to get away with it.”
   “You really think it’s that close?” Randy said. “Why?”
   “Two reasons. First, when I left Puerto Rico this morning
   Navy was trying to track three skunks-unidentified submarines-in the Caribbean, and one in the Gulf.”
   “Four subs doesn’t sound like enough force to cause a big flap,” Randy said.
   “Four subs is a lot of subs when there shouldn’t be any,” Mark said. “It’s like shaking a haystack and having four needles pop out at your feet. Chances are that haystack is stiff with needles.” He rubbed his hand across his eyes, as if the glare hurt, and when he spoke again his voice was strained. `they’ve got so blasted many! CIA thinks six hundred, Navy guesses maybe seven fift y. And they don’t need launchers any more. Just dump the bird, or pop it out while still submerged. The ocean itself is a perfectly good launching pad.”
   Randy said, “And the other reason?”
   “Because I’m on my way back to Offutt. We flew down yesterday on a pretty important job-figure out a way to disperse the wing on Ramey. There aren’t enough fields in Puerto Rico and anyway the island is rugged and not big enough. We’d just started our staff study when we got a zippo – that’s an operational priority message-to come home. And two thirds of the Ramey wing was scrambled with flyaway kits for-another place. I made my decision right then. I just had time to arrange Helen’s reservation and send the cables.”
   Mark spoke more of the Russian General, with whom he had talked at length, and whom apparently he liked. “He isn’t a traitor, either to his country or to civilization. He came over in desperation, hoping that somehow we could stop those power crazed bastards at the top. He doesn’t think their War Plan will work any more than I do. Too much chance for human or mechanical error.” Mark used phrases like “maximum capability,” and “calculated risk,” and “acceptance of any casualties except important people,” and “decentralization of industry and control, announced as an economic measure, but actually military.”
   Randy listened, fascinated, until he saw three blue sedans turn a corner near wing headquarters. “Here comes your party,” he said. “Anything else I ought to know?”
   Mark brushed cracker crumbs and slivers of chocolate from his shirt front. “Yes. Also, there’s something I have to give you.” He found a green slip of paper in his wallet and handed it to Randy. “Made out to you,” he said.
   Randy unfolded the check. It was for five thousand. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.
   “Cash it-today if you can. Don’t deposit it, cash it! It’s a reserve for Helen and Ben Franklin and Peyton. Buy stuff with it. I don’t know what to tell you to buy. You’ll think of what you’ll need as you go along.”
   “I did start a list, this morning.”
   Mark seemed pleased. “That’s fine. Show’s you’re looking ahead. I don’t know whether money will help Helen or not, but cash in hand, in Fort Repose, will be better than an account in an Omaha bank.”
   Randy kept on looking at the check, feeling uncomfortable. “But suppose nothing happens? Suppose-”
   “Spend some of it on a case of good liquor,” Mark said. “Then if nothing happens we’ll have a wonderful, expensive toot together, and you can laugh at me. I won’t care.”
   Randy slipped the check into his pocket. “Can I tip off anybody else? There are a few people-”
   “You’ve got a girl?”
   “I don’t know whether she’s my girl or not. I’ve been trying to find out. You don’t know her. New people from Cleveland. Her family built on River Road.”
   Mark hesitated. “I don’t see any objection. It is something Civil Defense should have done weeks-months ago. Use your own judgment. Be discreet.”
   Randy noticed that the jet transport’s wings were clear of hoses. He saw the three blue sedans pull up at Operations. He saw Lieutenant General Heycock get out of the first car. He felt Mark’s hand on his shoulder, and braced himself for the words he knew must come.
   Mark spoke very quietly. “You’ll take care of Helen?”
   “Certainly.”
   “I won’t say be a good father to the children. They love you and they think you’re swell and you couldn’t be anything but a good father to them. But I will say this, be kind to Helen. She’s-” Mark was having trouble with his voice.
   Randy tried to help him out. “She’s a wonderful, beautiful gal, and you don’t have to worry. Anyway, don’t sound so final. You’re not dead yet.”
   “She’s-more,” Mark said. “She’s my right arm. We’ve been married fourteen years and about half that time I’ve been up in the air or out of the country and I’ve never once worried about Helen. And she never had to worry about me. In fourteen years I never slept with another woman. I never even kissed another woman, not really, not even when I had duty in Tokyo or Manila or Hong Kong, and she was half a world away. She was all the woman I ever needed. She was like this: Back when I was a captain and we were moving from rented apartment to rented apartment every year or so, I got a terrific offer from Boeing. She knew what I wanted. I didn’t have to tell her. She said, `I want you to stay in SAC. I think you should. I think you ought to be a general and you’re going to be a general.’ There’s an old saying that anyone can make colonel on his own, but it takes a wife to make a general. I guess there wasn’t quite enough time, but had there been time, she would’ve had her star.”
   Randy saw Lieutenant General Heycock walk from the Operations building toward the plane. “It’s time, Mark,” he said. They got out of the car and walked quickly toward the gate, and Mark swung an arm around Randy’s shoulders. “What I mean is, she has tremendous energy and courage. If you let her, she’ll give you the same kind of loyalty she gave me. Let her, Randy. She’s all woman and that’s what she’s made for.”
   “Stop worrying,” Randy said. He didn’t quite understand and he didn’t know what else to say.
   Heycock’s aide fidgeted at the end of the ramp. “Everybody’s in, Colonel,” he said. “The General was looking for you at lunch.
   The General wondered what happened to you. He was most anxious-”
   “I’ll see the General as soon as we’re airborne,” Mark said sharply.
   The aide retreated two steps up the ramp, then waited stubbornly.
   They shook hands. Mark said, “Better try to catch a nap this evening.”
   “I will. When I get home shall I call Helen and tell her you’re on the way?”
   “No. Not much use. This aircraft cruises at five-fifty. By the time you get back to Fort Repose, we’ll be west of the Mississippi.” He glanced down at his bare knees. “Looks like I’ll have to change into a real uniform on the aircraft. I’d look awfully funny in Omaha.”
   “So long, Mark.”
   Without raising his head, Mark said, “Goodbye, Randy,” turned away, and climbed the ramp.
   Randy walked away from the transport, got into his car, and drove slowly through the base. At the main gate he surrendered his visitor’s pass. He turned into a lonely lane outside the base, near the village of Pinecastle, and stopped the car in a spot shielded by cabbage palms. When he was sure no one watched, and no car approached from either direction, he leaned his head on the wheel. He swallowed a sob and closed his eyes to forbid the tears.
   He heard wind rustle the palms, and the chirp of cardinals in the brush. He became aware that the clock on the dash, blurred, was staring at him. The clock said he had just time to make the bank before closing, if he pushed hard and had luck getting through Orlando traffic. He started the engine, backed out of the lane into the highway, and let the car run. He knew he should not have spared time for tears, and would not, ever again.

Chapter 3

   Edgar Quisenberry, president of the bank, never lost sight of his position and responsibilities as sole representative of the national financial community in Fort Repose. A monolithic structure of Indiana limestone built by his father in 1920, the bank stood like a gray fortress at the corner of Yulee and St. Johns. First National had weathered the collapse of the 1926 land boom, had been unshaken by the market crash of ‘twenty-nine and the depression that followed. “The only person who ever succeeded in closing First National,” Edgar often boasted, “was Franklin D. Roosevelt, in ‘thirty-three, and he had to shut down every other bank in the country to do it. It’ll never happen again, because we’ll never have another s.o.b. like him.”
   Edgar, at forty-five, had grown to look something like his bank, squat, solid, and forbidding. He was the only man in Fort Repose who always wore a vest, and he never wore sports clothes, even on the golf links. Each year, when he attended the branch Federal Reserve convention in Atlanta, two new suits were tailored, one double-breasted blue, one pin-stripe gray, both designed to minimize, or at least dignify, what he called “my corporation.”
   First National employed two vice presidents, a cashier, an assistant cashier, and four tellers, but it was a one-man bank. You could put it in at any window, but before you took it out on loan, or cashed an out-of-town check, you had to see Edgar. All Edgar’s loans were based on Character, and Character was based on cash balance, worth of unencumbered real estate, ownership of bonds, and blue-chip stocks. Since Edgar was the only person in town who could, and did, maintain a mental index of all these variables, he considered himself the sole accurate judge of Character. It was said you could gauge a grove owner’s crop by the way Edgar greeted him on Yulee Street. If Edgar shook his hand and chatted, then the man had just received a big price for his fruit. If Edgar spoke, cracked his face, and waved, the man was reasonably prosperous. If Edgar nodded but did not speak, nemotodes were in the citrus roots. If Edgar didn’t see him, his grove had been destroyed in a freeze.
   When Randolph Bragg burst into the bank at four minutes to three, Edgar pretended not to see him. His antipathy for Randy was more deeply rooted than if he had been a bankrupt. Bending over a desk as if examining a trust document, Edgar watched Randy scribble his name on the back of a check, smile at Mrs. Estes, the senior teller, and skid the check through the window. Randy’s manner, dress, and attitude all seemed an affront. Randy had no respect for institutions, persons, or even money. He would come bouncing in like this, at the last minute, and demand service as casually as if The Bank were a soda fountain. He was a lazy, insolent odd-ball, with dangerous political ideas, who never made any effort to invest or save. Twice in the past few years he had overdrawn his account. People called the Braggs “old family.” Well, so were the Minorcans old family-older, the descendants of Mediterranean islanders who had settled on the coast centuries ago. The Minorcans were shiftless no-goods and the Braggs no better. Edgar disliked Randy for all these, and another, secret reason.
   Edgar saw Mrs. Estes open her cash drawer, hesitate, and speak to Randy. He saw Randy shrug. Mrs. Estes stepped out of the cage and Edgar knew she was going to ask him to okay the check. When she reached his side he purposely ignored her for a moment, to let Randy know that The Bank considered him of little importance. Mrs. Estes said, “Will you initial this, please, Mr. Quisenberry?”
   Edgar held the check in both hands and at a distance, examining it through the bottom lens of his bifocals, as if it smelled of forgery. Five thousand, signed by Mark Bragg. If Randy irritated Edgar, Mark infuriated him. Mark Bragg invariably and openly called him by his school nickname, Fisheye. He was glad that Mark was in the Air Force and rarely in town. “Ask that young man to come here,” he told Mrs. Estes. Perhaps now he would have the opportunity to repay Judge Bragg for the humiliation of the poker game.
   Five years before, Edgar had been invited to sit in the regular Saturday night pot-limit game at the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, county seat and largest town of Timucuan. He had sat opposite Judge Bragg, a spare, straight, older man. Except for a small checking account, the Judge banked and did his business in Orlando and Tallahassee, so Edgar knew him hardly at all.
   Edgar prided himself on his cagey poker. The idea was to win, wasn’t it? Judge Bragg played an open, swashbuckling game, as if he enjoyed it. On occasion he bluffed, Edgar deduced, but he seemed to be lucky so it was difficult to tell whether he was bluffing or not. In the third hour a big pot came along-more than a thousand dollars. Edgar had opened with three aces and not bettered with his two-card draw, and the Judge had also drawn two cards. After the draw, Edgar bet a hundred and the men who had taken only one card dropped out and that left it up to the judge. The judge promptly raised the size of the pot. Edgar hesitated, looked into the Judge’s amused dark eyes, and folded. As the Judge embraced and drew in the hill of chips, Edgar reached across the table and exposed his hand-three sevens and nothing else. Judge Bragg had said, very quietly, “Don’t ever touch my cards again, you son of a bitch. If you do, I’ll break a chair over your head.”
   The five others in the game had waited for Edgar to do or say something, but Edgar only tried to laugh it off At midnight, the Judge cashed in his chips and said, “See you all next Saturday night-if this tub of rancid lard isn’t here. He’s a bore and a boor and he forgets to ante.” That was the first and last time Edgar played at the St. Johns Club. He had never forgotten it.
   Randy walked into the bank’s office enclosure, wondering why Edgar wanted to see him. Edgar knew perfectly well that Mark’s check was okay. “What’s the trouble, Edgar?” he asked.
   “Isn’t it a little late to bring in a big check like this, and ask us for cash?”
   The clock said 3:04. “It wasn’t late when I came in,” Randy said. He noticed other customers still in the bank-Eli Blaustein, who owned Tropical Clothing; Pete Hernandez, Rita’s older brother and manager of Ajax Super-Market; Jerry Kling, from the Standard station; Florence Wechek, with her Western Union checks and receipts. It was their custom to hurry to the bank just at three.
   “It’s all right for business people to make deposits after closing hour, but I think we ought to have more time to handle an item like this,” Edgar said.
   Randy noticed that Florence, finished at the teller’s window, had wandered within hearing. Florence didn’t miss much. “How much time do you need to cash a check for five thousand?” he asked. He was sure his face was reddening. He told himself he must not lose his temper.
   “That isn’t the point,” Edgar said. `”The point is that your brother doesn’t have an account here.”
   “You don’t doubt that my brother’s check is good, do you?” Randy was relieved to find that his voice, instead of rising, sounded lower and steadier.
   “Now, I didn’t say that. But it wouldn’t be good banking procedure for me to hand you five thousand dollars and wait four or five days for it to clear all the way from Omaha.”
   “I endorsed it, didn’t I?” Randy loosened his shoulders and flexed his toes and fingers and looked intently at Edgar’s face. It would squash, like a potato.
   “I doubt that your account would cover it.”
   Randy’s account stood below four hundred. This had been little to worry about, with his citrus checks due on the first of the year. Now, considering Mark’s urgency, it was dangerously low. He decided to probe Edgar’s weakness. He said, “Penny-wise, pound-foolish, that’s you, Edgar. You could have been in on a very good thing. Give me back the check. I’ll cash it in San Marco or Orlando in the morning.”
   Edgar realized he might have made an error. It was most unusual for anyone to want five thousand in cash. It indicated some sort of a quick, profitable deal. He should have found out why the cash was needed. “Now, let’s not be in a rush,” he said. Randy held out his hand. “Give me the check.”
   “Well, if I knew exactly why you had to have all this cash in such a hurry I might be able to make an exception to banking rules.”
   “Come on. I don’t have time to waste.”
   Edgar’s pale, protruding eyes shifted to Florence, frankly listening, and Eli Blaustein hovering nearby, interested. “Come into my office, Randolph,” he said.
   After Randy had the cash, in hundreds, twenties and tens, he said, “Now I’ll tell you why I wanted it, Edgar. Mark asked me to make a bet for him.”
   “Oh, the races!” Edgar said. “I very rarely play the races, but I know Mark wouldn’t be risking that much money unless he had a sure thing. Running in Miami, tomorrow, I suppose?”
   “No. Not the races. Mark is simply betting that checks won’t be worth anything, very shortly, but cash will. Good afternoon, Fish-eye.” He left the office and sauntered across the lobby. As Mrs. Estes unlocked the bank door she squeezed his arm and whispered, “Good for you!”
   Edgar rocked in his chair, furious. It wasn’t a reason. It was a riddle. He repeated Randy’s words. They made no sense at all, unless Mark expected some big cataclysm, like all the banks closing, and of course that was ridiculous. Whatever happened, the country’s financial structure was sound. Edgar reached a conclusion. He had been tricked and bluffed again. The Braggs were scoundrels, all of them.
   Randy’s first stop was Ajax Super-Market. It really wasn’t a supermarket, as it claimed. Fort Repose’s population was 3,422, according to the State Census, and this included Pistolville and the Negro district. The Chamber of Commerce claimed five thousand, but the Chamber admitted counting the winter residents of Riverside Inn, and people who technically were outside the town limits, like those who lived on River Road. So Fort Repose had not attracted the big chain stores. Still, Ajax imitated the supermarkets, inasmuch as you wheeled an aluminum cart around and served yourself, and Ajax sold the same brands at about the same prices.
   Randy hated grocery shopping. None of the elaborate surveys, and studies in depth of the buying habits of Americans had a classification for Randolph Bragg. Usually he grabbed a cart and sprinted for the meat counter, where he dropped a written order. Then he raced up and down the aisles, snatching cans and bottles and boxes and cartons from shelves and freezers apparently at random, running down small children and bumping old ladies and apologizing, until his final lap brought him past the meat counter again. The butchers had learned to give his order priority, for if his meat wasn’t cut he didn’t stop, simply made a violent U-turn and barreled off for the door. When the checker rang up his bill Randy looked at his watch. His record for a full basket was three minutes and forty-six seconds, portal to portal.
   But on this day it was entirely different, because of the length of his list to which he had been adding, the quantities, and the Friday afternoon shopping rush. After he’d filled three carts, and the meat order had already been carried to the car, he was still only halfway down the list, but physically and emotionally exhausted. His toes were mashed, and he had been shoved, buffeted, butted in the ribs, and rammed in the groin. His legs trembled, his hands shook, and a tic had developed in his left eye. Waiting in the check-out line, maneuvering two topheavy carts before and one behind, he cursed man’s scientific devilishness in inventing H-bombs and super-markets, cursed Mark, and swore he would rather starve than endure this again.
   At last he reached the counter. Pete Hernandez, acting as checker, gaped. “Good God, Randy!” he said. “What’re you going to do, feed a regiment?” Until the year before, Pete had always called him “Mr. Bragg,” but after Randy’s first date with Pete’s sister their relationship naturally had changed.
   “Mark’s wife and children are coming to stay with me a while,” he explained.
   “What’s she got-a football team?”
   “Kids eat a lot,” Randy said. Pete was skinny, chicken breasted, his chin undershot and his nails dirty, completely unlike Rita except for black eyes and olive skin.
   Pete began to play the cash register with two fingers while the car boy, awed, filled the big sacks. Randy was aware that seven or eight women, lined up behind him, counted his purchases, fascinated. He heard one whisper, “Fifteen cans of coffee-fifteen!” The line grew, and he was conscious of a steady, complaining murmur. Unaccountably, he felt guilty. He felt that he ought to face these women and shout, “All of you! All of you buy everything you can!” It wouldn’t do any good. They would be certain he was mad.
   Pete pulled down the total and announced it loudly: “Three hundred and fourteen dollars and eighty cents, Randy! Gees, that’s our record!”
   From habit, Randy looked at his watch. One hour and six minutes. That, too, was a record. He paid in cash, grabbed an armful of bags, nodded for Pete’s car boy to follow, and fled.
   He stopped at Bill Cullen’s bar, short-order grill, package store, and fish camp, just outside the town limits. There was space for two cases in the front seat, so he’d lay in his whisky supply. Bill and his wife, a strawhaired woman usually groggy and thick-tongued with spiked wine, operated all this business in a tworoom shack joined to a covered wharf, its pilings leaning and roof askew, in a cove on the Timucuan. The odors of fried eggs, dead minnows, gasoline and kerosene fumes, decaying gar and catfish heads, stale beer and spilt wine oozed across land and water.
   Ordinarily, Randy bought his bourbon two or three bottles at a time. On this day, he bought a case and a half, cleaning out Bill’s supply of his brand. He recalled that Helen, when she drank at all, preferred Scotch. He bought six fifths of Scotch.
   Bill, inquisitive, said, “Planning a big barbecue or party or something, Randy? You figure you’ll try politics again?”
   Randy found it almost impossible to lie. His father had beaten him only once in his life, when he was ten, but it had been a truly terrible beating. He had lied, and the Judge had gone upstairs and returned with his heaviest razor strop. He had grabbed Randy by the neck and bent him across the billiard table, and implanted the virtue of truth through the seat of his pants, and on bare hide, until he screamed in terror and pain. Then Randy was ordered to his room, supperless and in disgrace. Hours later, the Judge knocked and came in and gently turned him over in the bed. The Judge spoke quietly. Lying was the worst crime, the indispensable accomplice of all others, and would always bring the worst punishment. “I can forgive anything except a lie.” Randy believed him, and while he could no longer remember the lie he had told, he never forgot the punishment. Unconsciously, his right hand rubbed his buttocks as he thought up an answer for Bill Cullen.
   “I’m having visitors,” Randy said, “and Christmas is coming.” This was the truth, if not the whole truth. He couldn’t risk saying more to Bill. Bill’s nickname was Bigmouth and his lying not limited to the size of yesterday’s catch. Bigmouth Bill could spark a panic.
   When he turned into the driveway, Randy saw Malachai Henry using a scuffle hoe in the camellia beds screening the garage. “Malachai!” he called. “How about helping me get this stuff into the house?”
   Malachai hurried over. His eyes, widening, took in the cartons, bags, and cases filling the trunk and piled on the seats. “All this going up to your apartment, sir?”
   “No. It goes into the kitchen and utility room. Mrs. Bragg and the children are flying in from Omaha tomorrow.”
   As they unloaded, Randy considered the Henrys. They were a special problem. They were black and they were poor but in many ways closer to him than any family in Fort Repose. They owned their own land and ran their own lives, but in a sense they were his wards. They could not be abandoned or the truth withheld from them. He couldn’t explain Mark’s warning to Missouri. She wouldn’t understand. If he told Preacher, all Preacher would do was lift up his face, raise his arms, and intone, “Hallelujah! The Lord’s will be done!” If he told Two-Tone, Two-Tone would consider it an excuse to get drunk and stay that way. But he could, with confidence, tell Malachai.
   With the meat packed in the freezer and everything else stacked in cupboards and closets Randy said, “Come on up to my office, Malachai, and I’ll give you your money.” He paid Malachai twenty-five dollars a week for twenty hours. Malachai picked his own days to mow, rake, fertilize, and trim, days when he had no fruit picking, repairing, or better paying yard jobs elsewhere. Randy knew he was never short-timed, and Malachai knew he could always count on that twenty-five a week.
   Malachai’s face was expressionless, but Randy sensed his apprehension. Malachai never before had been asked upstairs to receive his pay. In the office, Randy dropped into the high backed, leather-covered swivel chair that had come from his father’s chambers. Malachai stood, uncertain. “Sit down,” Randy said. Malachai picked the least comfortable straight chair and sat down, not presuming to lean back.
   Randy brought out his wallet and looked up at the portrait of his bald-headed grandfather, Woodrow Wilson’s diplomat, with the saying for which he was known stamped in faded gold on the discolored frame: “Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies.”
   It was difficult. From the days when they fished and hunted together, he had always felt close to Malachai. They could still work in the grove, side by side, and discuss as equals the weather and the citrus and the fishing but never any longer share any personal, any important matters. They could not talk politics or women or finances. It was strange, since Malachai was much like Sam Perkins. He had as much native intelligence as Sam, the same intuitive courtesy, and they were the same size, weighing perhaps 180, and the same color, cordovan-brown. Randy and Sam Perkins had been lieutenants in a company of the 7th (Custer) Regiment of the First Cav. Together, Randy and Sam had dug in on the banks of the Han and Chongchon, and faced the same bugle heralded human wave charge at Unsan, and covered each other’s platoons in advance and retreat. They had slept side by side in the same bunker, eaten from the same mess tins, drunk from the same bottle, flown to Tokyo on R. and R. together, and together bellied up to the bar of the Imperial Hotel. They had (if it were learned in Fort Repose he would be ostracized) even gone to a junior-officer-grade geisha house together and been greeted with equal hospitality and favors. So it was a strange thing that he could not speak to Malachai, whom he had known since he could speak at all, as he had to Sam Perkins in Korea. It was strange that a Negro could be an officer and a gentleman and an equal below Parallel Thirty-eight, but not below the Mason-Dixon line. It was strange, but this was not the time for social introspection. His job was to tell Malachai to brace and prepare himself and his family.
   Randy took two tens and a five from his wallet and shoved them across the desk. `That’s for the week.”
   `Thank you, sir,” Malachai said, folding the bills and tucking them into the breast pocket of his checked shirt.
   Perhaps the difference was that Malachai had not been an officer, like Sam Perkins, Randy thought. Malachai had been in service for four years, but in the Air Defense Command, a tech sergeant babying jet engines. Perhaps it was their use of the language. Sam spoke crisp upstate-New York-Cornell English, but when Malachai talked you didn’t have to see him to know he was black. “Malachai,” Randy said, “I want to ask you a serious question.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “What would you say if I told you I have very good information-about as good as you can get-that before long a war is coming?”
   “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
   The answer surprised Randy. His swivel chair banged upright. “What makes you say that?”
   Malachai smiled, pleased with Randy’s reaction. “Well, sir, I keep up with things. I read all I can. I read all the news magazines and all the out-of-state papers I can get hold of and some service journals and lots of other stuff.”
   “You do? You don’t subscribe to them all, do you?” Malachai tried to control his grin. “Some I get from you, Mister Randy. You finish a magazine and throw it away and Missouri finds it and brings it home in her tote bag. And every day she collects the Cleveland papers and the business magazines from Mrs. McGovern’s. Mondays I work for Admiral Hazzard. He saves The New York Times and the Washington papers for me and the Naval Institute Proceedings and technical magazines. And I listen to all the commentators.”
   “How do you find the time?” Randy had never realized that Malachai read anything except the San Marco Sun (“It Shines for Timucuan County”).
   “Well, sir, there’s not much for a single, non-drinkin’ man to do around Fort Repose, week nights. So I read and I listen. I know things ain’t good, and the way I figure is that if people keep piling up bombs and rockets, higher and higher and higher, someday somebody’s going to set one off Then blooey!” “More than one,” Randy said, “and soon-maybe very soon.
   That’s what my brother believes and that’s why he’s sending Mrs. Bragg and the children down here. You’d better get set for it, Malachai. That’s what I’m doing.”
   Malachai’s smile was gone entirely. “Mister Randy, I’ve thought about it a lot, but there’s not a doggone thing we can do about it. We just have to sit here and wait for it. There’s not much we can lay up-” he patted his breast pocket. “This twenty-five dollars, with what Missouri brings home this evening, is it. Fast as we make it, it goes. Of course, we don’t need much and we’ve got one thing hardly anybody else has got.”
   “What’s that?”
   “Water. Running water. Artestian water that can’t be contaminated. You all only use it in the sprinkling system because it smells funny some say like rotten eggs. But that sulphur water ain’t bad. You gets to like it.”
   Until that moment, Randy hadn’t thought of water at all. His grandfather, in a year of freakish drought, at great cost had drilled nearly a thousand feet to find the artesian layer and irrigate the grove. And his grandfather had allowed the Henrys to tap the main pipe, so the Henrys had a perpetual flow of free water, although it was hard with dissolved minerals and Randy hated to taste it out of the sprinkler heads in grove and garden, even on a hot summer day.
   “I’m afraid I’d never get used to it,” he said. He counted out two hundred dollars in twenties and thrust the money across the desk. “This is for an emergency. Buy what you need.”
   The new notes felt slippery in Malachai’s fingers. “I don’t know when I can pay this back.”
   “Don’t worry about it. I’m not asking you to pay it back.” Malachai folded the bills. “Thank you, sir.”
   “See you next week, Malachai.”
   Malachai left and Randy mixed a drink. You turned a tap and lo, water came forth, sweet, soft water without odor, pumped from some sub-surface pool by a silent, faithful servant, a small electric motor. Every family on River Road, except the Henrys, obtained its water in the same way, each with its own pump and well. More important than anything he had listed was water, free of dangerous bacilli, unpolluted by poisons human, chemical, or radioactive. Pure water was essential to his civilization, accepted like pure air. In the big cities, where even a near miss would rupture reservoirs, demolish aqueducts, and smash mains, it would be hell without water. Big cities would become traps deadly as deserts or jungles. Randy began to consider how little he really knew of the fundamentals of survival. Helen, he guessed, would know a good deal more. It was a required subject in the education of Air Force wives. He decided to talk to Bubba Offenhaus, who ran Civil Defense in Fort Repose. Bubba must have pamphlets, or something that he could study.
   Downstairs Graf began to bark, an insistent, belligerent alarm announcing a strange car in the driveway. Randy went to the head of the stairs, shouted, “Shut up, Graf!” and waited to see who would knock.
   Nobody knocked but the door opened and Randy saw Elizabeth McGovern in the front hall, bending over Graf, her face curtained by shoulder-length blond hair. She stroked Graf’s hack les until his tail wigwagged a friendly signal. Then she looked up and called, “You decent, Randy?”
   One day she would barge in like this and he would be indecent. She bewildered him. She was brash, unpredictable, and sometimes uncomfortably outspoken. “Come on up, Lib,” he said. Like the Henrys, she was a special problem.
   All through the summer and early fall Randy had watched the McGoverns’ house and dock go up, while landscapers spotted palms in orderly rows, laid down turf, and planted flower pots and shrubbery. On a sultry October afternoon, trolling for bass in the channel, he had seen a pair of faultlessly curved and tapered legs incongruously stretched toward the sky from the McGovern dock. Since she was lying on the canvas-covered planking, heels propped up on a post, the legs were all that could be seen from water level. He turned the prow toward shore to discover whose body was attached to these remarkable and unfamiliar legs. When his boat was almost under the dock he’d spoken, “Hello, legs.” “You may call me Lib,” she’d said. “You’re Randy Bragg, aren’t you? I’ve sort of been expecting you’d call.”
   When they’d become something more than friends, although less than lovers, he’d accused her of luring him with her lovely legs. Lib had laughed and said, “I didn’t know, then, that you were a leg man but I’m glad you are. Most American males have a fixation about the mammary gland. A symptom of momism, I think. Legs are for men’s pleasure, breasts for babies’. Oh, that’s really sour grapes. I only said it because I know my legs are my only real asset. I’m flat and I’m not pretty.” Technically, she was accurate. She was no classic beauty when you considered each feature individually. She was only beautiful in complete design, in the way she moved and was put together.
   She came up the stairs and curled a bare arm around his neck and kissed him, a brief kiss, a greeting. “I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all day,” she said. “I’ve been thinking and I’ve reached an important conclusion. Where’ve you been?”
   “My brother stopped at McCoy, flying back to Omaha. I had to meet him.” He led her into the living room. “Drink?” “Ginger ale, if you have it.” She sat on a stool at the bar, one knee raised and clasped between her hands. She wore a sleeveless, turquoise linen blouse, doeskin shorts, and moccasins.
   He tumbled ice into a glass and poured ginger ale and said, “What’s this important conclusion?”
   “You’ll get mad. It’s about you.” “Okay, I’ll get mad.”
   “I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You’re vegetating. I don’t want a vegetable. I want a man.”
   He was instantly angry, and then he told himself that for a number of reasons, including the fact that her diagnosis was probably the truth, it was silly to be angry. He said, “If I went away and left you here, wouldn’t you turn into a noodle?”
   “I’ve thought it all out. As soon as you get a job, I’ll follow you. If you want, we can live together for a while. If it’s good, we can get married.”
   He examined her face. Her mouth, usually agile and humorous, was drawn into a taut, colorless line. Her eyes, which reflected her moods as the river reflected the sky, were gray and opaque. Under the soft tan painted by winter’s sun her skin was pale. She was serious. She meant it. “Too late,” he said.
   “What do you mean, `too late’?”
   Yesterday, there might have been sense and logic to her estimate, and he might have accepted this challenge, invitation, and proposal. But since morning, they had lived in diverging worlds. It was necessary that he lead her down into his world, yet not too abruptly, lest sight and apprehension of the future imperil her capacity to think clearly and act intelligently. “My sister-in-law and her two children are coming to stay with me,” he began. “They get in tonight-in the morning, really. Three thirty.”
   “Fine,” she said. “Meet them, turn the house over to them, and then pick yourself a city-a nice, big, live city. They can have this place all to themselves and while they’re here you won’t have to worry about the house. How long are they staying?”
   “I don’t know,” Randy said. Maybe forever, he almost added, but didn’t.
   “It won’t matter, really, will it? When they leave you can rent the house. If they leave soon you ought to get a good price for it for the rest of the season. What’s your sister-in-law like?”
   “I haven’t told you the reason they’re coming.” He reached out and covered her hands. Her fingers, long, round, strong, matched her throat. Her nails were tinted copper, and carefully groomed. He tried to frame the right words. “My brother believes-”
   Graf, lying near Randy’s stool, rolled to his feet, hair bristling like a razorback pig, tail and ears at attention, and then raced into the hallway and down the stairs, barking wildly.
   “That’s the loudest dog I’ve ever met!” Lib said. “What’s eating him now?”
   “He’s got radar ears. Nothing can get close to the house without him knowing.” Randy went downstairs. It was Dan Gunn at the door. An angular, towering man, sad-faced and saturnine, wearing heavy-framed glasses, awkward in movement and sparing of speech, he stepped into the hallway, not bothering to glance at Graf. Dan said, “You got a woman upstairs, Randy? I know you have because her car is in the driveway.” He removed his pipe from his mouth and almost smiled. “I’d like to talk to her. About her mother. Her father, too.”
   “Go on up to the apartment, Dan,” Randy said. “I’ll just wander around in the yard.” He guessed that Dan had just come from a professional visit to the McGoverns. Lib’s mother had diabetes. He didn’t know what her father had, but if Dan was going to discuss family illnesses with Lib, he would politely vanish.
   “I don’t think Elizabeth will mind if you sit in on this,” Dan said. “Practically one of the family by now, aren’t you?”
   Going upstairs Randy decided that Dan, too, should know of Mark’s warning. If anybody ought to know, it was a doctor. And at the same time Randy realized he had not included drugs in his list, and the medicine cabinet held little except aspirin, nasal sprays, and mouthwash. With two children coming, he should’ve planned better than that. Anyway, Dan was the man to tell him what to get, and write the prescriptions.
   Randy mixed Dan a drink and said, “Our medic is here to see you, Lib, not me. When he’s finished talking, I’ve got something to say to both of you.”
   Dan looked at him oddly. “Sounds like you’re about to make a pronouncement.”
   “I am. But you go first.”
   “It’s nothing urgent or terribly important. I was just making the placebo circuit and dropped in to see Elizabeth’s mother.” “The what?” Lib asked. Randy had heard Dan use the phrase before.
   “Placebo, or psychosomatic circuit-the middle-aged retirees and geriatrics who have nothing to do but get lonely and worry about their health. The only person they can call who can’t avoid visiting them is their doctor. So they call me and I let them bend my ear with symptoms. I give them sugar pills or tranquilizers-one seems about as good as the other. I tell them they’re going to live. This makes them happy. I don’t know why.”
   At thirty-five, Dan was a souring idealist. Afrer medical school in Boston he’d started practice in a Vermont town and in his free hours slaved at post-graduate studies in epidemiology. His target had been the teeming continents and the great plagues-malaria, typhus, cholera, typhoid, dysentery-and he was angling for a World Health Organization or Point Four appointment. Then he’d married. His wife-Randy did not know her name because Dan never uttered it-apparently had been extravagant, a nympho, a one-drink alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler. She’d recoiled at the thought of living in Equatorial Africa or a delta village in India, and pestered him to set up practice in New York or Los Angeles, where the big money was. When Dan refused, she took to spending weekends in New York, an easy pickup at her favorite bar in the Fifties. So he’d been a gentleman and let her go to Reno and get the divorce. When her luck ran out she returned East, filed suit for alimony, and the judge had given her everything she’d asked. Now she lived in Los Angeles and each week shovelled the alimony into bingo games or pari-mutuel machines, and Dan’s career was ended before it had begun. A World Health or Point Four salary would barely pay her alimony and leave nothing for him, and a doctor can’t skip, except into the medical shadowland of criminal practice. He had come to Florida because the state was growing and his practice and fees would be larger and he thought he’d eventually accumulate enough money to offer her a cash settlement and suture the financial hemorrhage.
   In Fort Repose, Dan shared the one-story Medical Arts Building with an older man, Dr. Bloomfield, and two dentists. He lived frugally in a two-room suite in the Riverside Inn, where he acted as house physician for the aging guests during the winter season. His gross income had doubled. While he delivered babies for Pistolville and Negro families for $25, he balanced this with ten dollar house calls on the placebo circuit. In a single two-hour sweep up River Road, handing out placebos and tranquilizers, he often netted $100. It did him no good. He discovered he was inexorably squeezed between alimony and taxes. Taxes rose with income and the escalator clause in his alimony order took effect. Once, he and Randy figured out that if his gross rose to more than $50,000 a year he would have to go into bankruptcy. Dan could imagine no combination of circumstances that would allow him to amass enough capital to buy off his former wife and set him free to fight the plagues. So he was a bitter man, but, Randy believed, a kind man, perhaps even a great one.
   Lib said, “You don’t consider our house a stop on the placebo circuit, do you?”
   “No,” Dan said, “and yes. Your mother does have diabetes.” He paused, to let her understand that was not all that was wrong. “She called me today. She was very much upset. She wondered whether she could change from insulin to the new oral drug. You’ve been giving her her insulin shot every morning, haven’t you?”
   “Yes,” Lib said. “She can’t bear to stick herself and she won’t let my father do it. She says he’s too rough. Says Dad jabs her like he enjoys it.”
   This was something Randy hadn’t known before.
   Dan said, “She wants me to get her oranise because she says you’re talking about leaving her.”
   Lib said, “Yes, I do intend to leave. I’m going to leave when Randy leaves.”
   Randy started to speak, but checked himself. He could wait a moment.
   Dan wiped his glasses. His face dropped unhappily. “I don’t know about experimenting,” he said. “Your mother is balanced at seventy units of insulin a day. A pretty solid shot. I don’t want to take her off insulin. She’ll have to learn to use the hypodermic herself. Now, let’s move on to your father.”
   “My father! Nothing’s wrong with Dad, is there?”
   “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. He’s turning into a zombie, Elizabeth. Doesn’t he have any hobbies? Can’t he start a new business? He’s only sixty-one and, except for a little hyper tension, in good shape physically. But he is dying faster than he should. The better a man is at business, the worse in retirement. One day he’s running a big corporation and the next day he isn’t allowed to run anything, even his own home. He wishes himself dead, and he dies.”
   Lib had been listening intently. She said, “It’s even harder on Dad. You see, he didn’t retire by choice. He was fired. Oh, we all call it retirement, and he gets his pension, but the board eased him out-he lost a quiet little proxy fight-and now he doesn’t think he is of any use to anyone at all.”
   “I felt,” Dan said, “it was something like that.” He was silent a moment. “I’d like to help him. I think he’s worth saving.” Now Randy knew it was time to speak. “When you came in, Dan, I was about to tell Lib what Mark told me today, out at McCoy. He is afraid-he is sure-that we are on the verge of war. That’s why Helen and the children are being sent down here. Mark thinks the Russians are already staged for it.”
   Randy watched them. Comprehension seemed to come first to Elizabeth. She said, softly, “Oh, God!” Her fingers locked in her lap and grew white.
   Dan’s head shook, a negative tremor. He looked at the decanter and Randy’s half-empty glass on the bar. “You haven’t been drinking, have you, Randy?”
   “First today-since breakfast.”
   “I didn’t think you’d been drinking. I was just hoping.” Dan’s massive head, with the coarse, wiry, reddish hair at the temples, bent forward as if his neck could no longer support it. “I guess that makes everything hypothetical,” he said. “How soon?” “Mark doesn’t know and I can’t even guess. Today-tomorrow-next week-next month-you name it.”
   Lib looked at her watch. “News at six,” she said. A portable radio no larger than a highball glass stood at the end of the bar. She turned it on.
   Randy kept the portable tuned to WSMF (Wonderful San Marco, Florida) the biggest station in the county. The dance music faded and the voice of Happy Hedrix, the disk jockey, said:
   “Well, all of you frozen felines, I’ve got to take the needle out of the groove for five minutes so the cubes-a cube is a square anyway you look at him, hah, hah—can get hip with what cooks around the sphere. So let’s start in with the weather. It’s sixty-nine outside our studios right now and the forecast for Central Florida is fair and mild with light to moderate east winds tomorrow, and no frost danger through Tuesday. That’s good fishing weather, folks, and to prove it here’s a story from Tavares, over in Lake County, Jones Corkle, of Hyannis, Nebraska, today caught a thirteen pound, four-ounce bigmouth in Lake Dora to take the lead in Lake County’s Winter Bass Tournament. He used a black eel bait. A UP item from Washington says the Navy has ordered preventive action against unidentified jet planes which have been shadowing the Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. At Tropical Park today, Bald Eagle won the Coral Handicap by three lengths, paying eleven-sixty. Careless Lady was second and Rumpus third. Now, turning to news of Wall Street, stocks closed mixed, with missiles up and railroads off, in moderate trading. The Dow-Jones averages . . .”
   Lib turned off Happy Hendrix. She said, “What’s it mean?” Randy shrugged. “That business in the Mediterranean? It’s happened before. I guess that’s one of the dangerous things about it. We get shockproof. We’ve been conditioned. Standing on the brink of war has become our normal posture.” He turned to Dan. “I think we should lay in some drugs-an emergency kit. How about prescribing for war, Doctor?”
   Dan fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out a pad. He moved slowly and seemed very tired. “I’ll give you both some,” he said, starting to write. “Stuff you can use yourselves without my help. And for your mother, Elizabeth, extra bottles of insulin. Also, I’ll order some oranise from a drug house in Orlando. Local pharmacy doesn’t carry it yet.”
   “I thought you’d decided not to experiment with it on Mother?” Lib said.
   “Insulin,” Dan said, continuing to write, “requires refrigeration.”
   Dan dropped the prescriptions on the bar. “Good night,” he said. “I’m delivering a baby at the clinic at seven. Caesarian section. Life goes on. At least that’s what I’m going to believe until proved otherwise.” He rose and shambled out of the room.
   Lib walked around the counter. “Hold me,” she said. Randy held her, crushed her, strangely without any passion except fear for her. Usually he had only to feel her body, or brush his lips across her hair and smell what she called “my courting perfume” to become aroused. Now his arms were completely encircling and completely protective. All he asked was that she live and he live and that things remain the same.
   She kept rolling her smooth head against his throat. She was saying no to it. She was willing and praying the clock to stand still, as Randy was; but, as Mark had said, this was against nature.
   She raised her head and gently pushed herself away and said, “Thanks, Randy. I get strength from you. Did you know that? Now tell me, what should I do?”
   “You’d better drive back to your house and speak with your mother and father.”
   “I don’t think they’ll believe it. They don’t pay much attention to the international situation and Mother doesn’t ever like to talk about anything unpleasant.”
   “They probably won’t believe it. After all, they don’t know Mark. Put it up to your father, as a business proposition. Tell him it’s like taking out insurance. Anyway, be sure and get Dan’s prescriptions filled.”
   “I’ll get the medicines tomorrow,” she said. “Food isn’t a problem. Our cupboard isn’t exactly bare. What are you going to do, Randy? Hadn’t you better get some rest if you have to be at the airport at three-thirty?”
   “I’ll try.” He took her into his arms again and kissed her, this time not feeling protective at all, and she responded, her fears contained.
   They left the house as the distended red run dropped into the river where it joined the wide St. Johns. She got into the car. He touched her lips again. “If you need me, call.”
   “Don’t worry. I will. See you tomorrow, Randy.” “Yes, tomorrow.”
   Now at this hour, when the cirrus clouds stretched like crimson ribbons high across the southwest sky, in such a hush that not even a playful eddy dared stir moss or palm fronds, the day died in calm and in beauty. This was Randy’s hour, this and dawn, time of stillness and of peace.
   His eye was attracted by movement in a clump of Turk’s-cap across the road, and then again, he saw the damn bird. There could be little doubt of it. Even at this distance, without binoculars, he could distinguish the white-rimmed eyes. Moving very slowly and in silence, drifting from bush to bush, he crossed the lawn.
   If he could cross the road and Florence Wechek’s front yard without frightening it, he might make a positive identification. Florence and Alice Cooksey watched him. Florence had been observing him from behind the bedroom blinds while he talked with the McGovern girl, and kissed her goodbye, a disgusting public exhibition. She had watched him stand in the doorway, hands on hips, alone and, for a long time, motionless. Then incredulously, she had seen him bend over and stealthily move toward her, and she had called Alice. “There he is!” she said triumphantly. “I told you so. Come and see for yourself. He’s a Peeping Tom, all right!”
   Alice, peering through the louvers, said, “I think he’s stalking something.”
   “Yes, me.”
   They watched while he crossed the road, placing his feet carefully as a heron feeding on minnows in the shallows. “The sneak!” Florence said.
   He reached Florence’s lawn and for a moment hid behind a clump of boxwood. “He’s going around the side of the house,” Florence said. “I think we can watch better from the dining room.” She ran into the dining room, Alice following.
   Bent almost double, he advanced from the boxwood toward the Turk’s-cap. Suddenly he straightened, threw an imaginary hat to the ground, and Florence heard him say distinctly, “Oh, God dam!” At the same time she heard Anthony shaking the cage on the back porch. Anthony had come home for the night. Then she heard Randy on the back porch. Anthony squawked. Randy swore, and shouted, “Hey, Florence!”
   She opened the kitchen door and said, “Now look here, Randolph Bragg, I’m not having any more of your prowling around the house and staring at me while I’m dressing. You ought to be ashamed!”
   Randy, mouth open, astonished, stared at the two birds, Anthony on the outside of the cage, Cleo fluttering within. He said, “Is that your bird?” He pointed at Anthony.
   “Certainly it’s my bird.” “What kind of a bird is it?” “Why he’s an African lovebird, of course.”
   Randy shook his head. “I’m a dope. I thought he was a Carolina parakeet. You know, the Carolina parakeet is, or was, our only native parrot. A specimen hasn’t been identified since 1925. They’re supposed to be extinct. If that isn’t one, I’m willing to admit they are.”
   “Is that why you’ve been spying on me? I saw you at it this morning, with glasses.”
   “I haven’t been spying on you, Florence. I’ve been spying on that fake Carolina parakeet.” He noticed Alice Cooksey standing behind Florence, smiling. Alice was one of his favorite people. He really ought to tell Alice about Mark, and what Mark predicted. Ought to tell Florence as well, but Florence still looked upset and angry. He said, “Now, Florence, cool off I’ve got something important to tell you.”
   “Bird watcher!” Florence shrieked. She slammed the kitchen door in his face and fled into the house.
   Randy put his hands in his pockets and strolled home. The world was real crazy. He’d talk to Florence and Alice in the morning, after Florence settled down.
   In his kitchen, Randy made himself a cannibal sandwich. Lib considered his habit of eating raw ground round, smeared with horseradish and mustard and pressed between slices of rye bread, barbarous. He’d explained it was simply a bachelor’s meal, quick and lazy, and anyway he liked it.
   He trotted downstairs and examined the purchases lined on shelves and stacked in closets. Some of it was pretty exotic stuff for an emergency. Perhaps he should make up a small kit of delicacies. If the worst happened, this would be their iron rations for a desperate time. If nothing happened, it would all keep. He selected a jar of English beef tea, a sealed package of bouillon cubes, a jar of Swiss chocolates and a sealed tin of hardcandies, a canned Italian cheese, and a few other small items. He placed them all in a small carton, wrapped the carton in foil, and took it up to the apartment. The teak chest in the office was a fine place to hide it and forget it. He rummaged through the chest, rearranging old legal documents, abstracts, bundles of letters, a packet of Confederate currency, peeling photograph albums. Lieutenant
   Peyton’s log and a half-dozen baby books-all family memorabilia judged not valuable enough to warrant space in a safe deposit vault but too valuable to throw away-and made space for the iron rations at the bottom.
   At seven o’clock he listened to the news. There was nothing startling. He flopped down on a studio couch, picked up a magazine, and started to read an article captioned, “Next Stop-Mars.” Presently the words danced in front of his eyes, and he slept.
   When it was seven Friday evening in Fort Repose, it was two o’clock Saturday morning in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Task Group 6.7 turned toward the north and headed for the narrow seas between Cyprus and Syria. The shape of the task group was a giant oval, its periphery marked by the wakes of destroyers and guided-missile frigates and cruisers. The center of Task Group 6.7, and the reason for its existence, was the U.S.S. Saratoga, a mobile nuclear striking base. In Saratoga’s Combat Information Center two officers watched a bright blip on the big radar repeater. It winked on and off, like a tiny green eye opening and closing. Interrogated by a “friend or foe” radar impulse, it had not replied. It was hostile. For thirty-six hours, ever since passing Malta, Saratoga had been shadowed. This blip was the latest shadower:
   One of the officers said, “No use sending up a night fighter. That bogy is too fast. But an F-11-F could catch him. So we’ll let him hang around, let him close in. Maybe he’ll come close enough for a missile shot from Canbena. If not, we’ll launch F-11-F’s at first light.”
   The other officer, an older man, a senior captain, frowned. He disliked risking his ship in an area of restricted maneuver while under enemy observation. He always thought of the Mediterranean as a sack, anyway, and they were approaching the bottom of it. He said, “All right. But be damn sure we chase him out of radar range before we enter the Gulf of Iskenderun.”

Chapter 4

   Helen Bra’s battle was over, and she had lost. The tickets were in her handbag. Their luggage-Mark had made them pack almost all the clothes they owned and paid an outrageous sum for the extra weight-was piled on the baggage cart already wheeled outside on the concrete, fine snow settling on it. She had lost, and yet fifteen minutes before plane time she still protested, not in the hope that Mark would change his mind. It was simply that she felt miserable and guilty. She said, “I still don’t think I ought to go. I feel like a deserter.”
   They stood together in the terminal lobby, a tiny island oblivious to the human eddies around them. Her gloved hand held to his arm, her cheek was pressed tightly against his shoulder. He pressed her hand and said, “Don’t be silly. Anybody with any sense gets out of a primary target area at a time like this. You aren’t the first to leave, and you won’t be the last.”
   “That doesn’t make it right and it isn’t right. My place is here with you.”
   He pulled her around to face him, so that her upturned mouth was inches from his own. “That’s just it. You can’t stay with me. If and when it comes I’ll be in the Hole, protected by fifty feet of concrete and steel and good earth. That’s where my place is and that’s where you can’t be. You’d be somewhere on the surface exposed. If you could come down into the Hole with me, then you could stay, darling.”
   This was something he had not said before, a fact she had not considered. Somehow it made her feel a bit better, yet she continued to argue, although dispiritedly. “Still, I think my job is here.”
   His fingers banded her arm and when he spoke his voice was flat, a direct order. “Your job is to survive because if you don’t the children won’t survive. That is your job. There is no other. You understand that, Helen?”
   On the other side of the drafty terminal Ben Franklin and Peyton buzzed around the newsstand, each with a dollar to spend on candy, gum, and magazines. They knew only that they were getting out of school a week early, and were spending Christmas vacation in Florida. That’s all Helen had told them, and in the excitement of packing, and greeting their father, and then packing more bags, there had been no questions. Helen said, “I understand.” Her head dropped against Mark’s chest. “If this business blows over you’ll let us come right home, won’t you?”
   “Sure.”
   “You promise?” “Certainly I promise.”
   “Maybe we could be home before the next school term.” “Don’t count on it, darling. But I’ll call you every day, and as soon as I think it’s safe I’ll give you the word.”
   The loudspeaker announced Flight 714 for Chicago, connecting with flights east and south.
   The children ran over to them. Peyton carried a quiver and bow slung over her shoulder. Ben Franklin a cased spinning rod, his Christmas present from Randy the year before.
   Mark shepherded them outside, and toward Gate 3. He lifted Peyton off the ground and held her a moment and kissed her, disarranging her red knitted cap. “My hair!” she said, laughing, and he put her down.
   He noticed other passengers filtering through the gate. He drew Ben Franklin aside. He said, “Behave yourself, son.”
   Ben looked up at him, his brown eyes troubled. When he spoke, his voice was intentionally low. “This is an evacuation, isn’t it, Dad>“
   “Yes.” It was Mark’s policy never to utter an untruth when replying to a question from the children.
   “I knew it as soon as I got home from school. Usually Mother gets all excited and happy about traveling. Not today. She hated to pack. So I knew it.”
   “I hate to send you away but it’s necessary.” Looking at Ben Franklin was like looking at a snapshot of himself in an old album. “You’ll have to be the man of the family for a while.”
   “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be okay in Fort Repose. I’m worried about you.” The boy’s eyes were filling. Ben Franklin was a child of the atomic age, and knowledgeable.
   “I’ll be all right in the Hole.”
   “Not if . . . Anyway, Dad, you don’t have to worry about us,” he repeated.
   Then it was time. Mark walked them to the gate, Peyton’s glove in his left hand, Ben Franklin’s in his right. Helen turned and he kissed her once and said, “Goodbye, darling. I’ll phone you tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got the duty tonight and I’ll probably sleep all morning but I’ll call as soon as I get up.”
   She managed to say, “Tomorrow.”
   He watched them walk to the plane, a small procession, and out of his life.
   At nine o’clock Randy awoke, aware of a half-dozen problems accumulated in his subconscious. The problem of transportation he had neglected entirely. He certainly ought to have a reserve of gas and oil. Half his grocery list remained to be purchased. He had not filled Dan Gunn’s prescriptions. He had yet to visit Bubba Offenhaus and collect Civil Defense pamphlets. He went into his bathroom, turned on the lights, and washed the sleep out of his eyes. Lights! What would happen if the lights went out? Several boxes of candles, two old-fashioned kerosene lamps, and three flashlights were cached in the sideboard downstairs, a provision against hurricane season. He had a flashlight in his bedroom and another in the car. He added candles, kerosene, and flashlight batteries to his list. Everything, except the gasoline, would have to wait until tomorrow anyway. With Helen to help him fill in the gaps, it would be easy to lay in all the essentials Saturday.
   He changed his clothes, shivering. The nights were getting cooler. Downstairs the thermometer read sixty-one and he turned up the thermostat. The Bragg house had no cellar-they were rare in Central Florida-but it did have a furnace room and was efficiently heated by oil. Oil! He doubted that he’d have to worry about oil. The fuel tank had been filled in November and thus far in the winter had been mild.
   In the garage Randy found two empty five-gallon gasoline cans. He put them in the car trunk and drove to town.
   Jerry Kling’s station was still open, but Jerry had already turned off his neon sign and was checking the cash register. Jerry filled the tank, and the two extra cans, and as an afterthought Randy asked for a gallon of kerosene and five extra quarts of oil. Driving back on River Road, Randy slowed when he reached the McGoverns’. All the lights were on in the McGoverns’ house. He turned into the driveway. It was ten-thirty. It was not necessary that he leave for the Orlando airport until two A.M.
   It was near dawn in the Eastern Mediterranean when Saratoga, working up speed in narrowing waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, catapulted four F-11-F Tigers, the fastest fighters in its complement. By then, the reconnaissance jet that had shadowed Task Group 6.7 through the darkness hours had vanished from the radar screens. The Admiral’s staff was convinced another would take its place, as on the previous morning, but this day the snooper would receive a surprise. Task Group 6.7’s primary mission was to take station in Iskenderun Gulf and give heart to the Turks, who were under heavy political and propaganda pressure. The force’s security would be endangered if its perilously tight formation, in this confined area, was observed.
   Quite often the flood of history is undammed or diverted by the character and actions of one man. In this case the man was not an official in Washington, or the Admiral commanding Task Group 6.7, or even the Captain or Air Group Commander of Saratoga. The man was Ensign James Cobb, nicknamed Peewee, the youngest and smallest pilot in Fighter Squadron 44.
   Ensign Cobb was assigned Combat Air Patrol duty on this Saturday morning simply because it was his turn. He was scarcely five feet, six inches tall, weighed 124, and looked younger than his twenty-three years. Under a flat-top haircut, his red head appeared knobby and outsized. His face was pinched, and mottled with freckles. In the presence of girls, he was shy to the point of panic. In the wonderful ports of Naples, Nice, and Istanbul, he distinguished himself as the only pilot in Fighting Forty-Four who never found reason to request a night’s liberty ashore.
   When he climbed into the cockpit of his aircraft, Peewee Cobb’s whole character changed. The instant his hands and feet were on the controls, he became as large and fast as his supersonic fighter, and as powerful as its armament. As compensation for outer physical deficiencies, he was gifted with superb reactions and eyesight. He was rated superior in rocketry and gunnery. He got a fierce thrill in pushing his F-11-F through the mach, and to the limit of its capability. He could outfly anybody in the squadron, including the Lieutenant Commander who led it, and who had once said, “Peewee may be a mouse aboard ship, but he’s a tiger in a Tiger. If I sent him up with orders to shoot down the moon, he’d try.”
   Now, for the first time, Peewee Cobb was flying CAP under wartime conditions, in a fighter armed with live rockets and with orders to intercept and destroy a snooper if it appeared. Climbing steadily in the darkness, he prayed that if the bogy came back, it would attempt to penetrate his sector. If it did, nobody would laugh at his size, his squeaky voice, his face, or his ineffectual awkwardness with women, ever again.
   Peewee Cobb had been given a code name, Sunflower Four, and instructions to orbit over an area of sea off Haifa, astern of Task Group 6.7. If the hostile reconnaissance jet came in from a base in Egypt or Albania, he would be in a position to intercept. His fighter was armed with Sidewinders, ingenious, single minded rockets, heat-seekers. A Sidewinder’s nose was sensitive to infra-red rays from any heat source. Peewee had fired two in practice. They not only had destroyed the targets, but had unerringly vanished up the tail pipes of the drones.
   At thirty thousand feet, Peewee judged he was on station and called for a radar fix. The missile-cruiser Canberra, closest ship in the formation, confirmed his position. As he circled, the sky in the southeast grew light. When the sun touched his wingtips, the sea was still dark below. Then gradually, the shape and color of sea and earth became plain. He felt entirely alone and apart from this transformation, as if he watched from a separate planet. He checked his map. Far to the east he picked out Mount Carmel, and a river, and beyond were the hills of Megiddo, also called Armageddon. He continued to orbit.
   His earphones crackled and he acknowledged Saratoga. The fighter controller’s voice said, “Sunflower Four, we have a bogy. He is at angels twenty-five, his speed five hundred knots. Your intercept course is thirty degrees. Go get him!”
   So the snooper was already north of him and racing up the coast, hoping to hang on to the flank of the task group and observe it by radar from a position close to friendly Syrian territory. Peewee took his heading and pushed his throttle up to ninety-nine percent power. He slid through the mach with a slight, thrilling tremor. Every fifteen or twenty seconds he made minute alterations in course in response to directions from Saratoga, which was holding both planes on its screens.
   Then he saw it, flicker of sun on metal, diving at great speed. He pushed the Tiger’s nose over and followed, reporting, “I am closing target.” He touched the switch that armed his rockets, and another calling for manual fire, singly.
   The chase had carried him down to nine thousand feet and the bogy was still losing altitude. It was a two-engined jet, an IL-33, Peewee believed, and remarkably fast at this low level. There was no doubt the bogy knew he was on its tail, for reconnaissance aircraft would be well equipped with radar. His speed held steady at mach 1.5, but his rate of closure slowed.
   Far ahead Peewee saw the Syrian port of Latakia, reputedly built into an important Red submarine base. Within a few seconds he would be within Syrian territorial waters, and a few more would carry him over the port itself.
   At this point Peewee should have dropped the chase, for they had been strictly warned, in the briefing, against violating anyone’s borders. He hung on. In another five seconds
   The bogy finked violently to the right, heading for the port and its anti-aircraft and rocket batteries and perhaps the sanctuary of an airfield in the brown hills and dunes beyond.
   Peewee turned the F-11-F inside him, instantly shortening the range.
   He pushed the firing button.
   The Sidewinder, leaving a thin pencil mark of smoke, rushed out ahead.
   For an instant the Sidewinder seemed to be following the flight of the bogy beautifully, and Peewee waited for it to merge into the tail pipe of one of the jet engines. Then the Sidewinder seemed to waver in its course.
   Peewee believed, although he could not be certain, that the bogy had cut its engines and was in a steep glide. Following the Sidewinder, Peewee lost sight of the bogy.
   The Sidewinder darted downward, toward the dock area of Latakia.
   It seemed to be chasing a train. That crazy rocket, Peewee thought.
   There was an orange flash and an enormous ball of brown smoke and black bits of debris rushing up to meet him. Peewee kicked his rudder hard and climbed away from it, compressed within his G-suit and momentarily losing his vision. Then the shock wave kicked him in the rear and he was out over the Mediterranean again. He was asking for a vector back to his ship when another flash reflected on his instrument panel. He banked to look back, and saw a black cloud, red flames at its base, rising from Latakia.
   Fifteen minutes later Ensign Cobb, freckles standing out on his white face like painted splotches, was standing in Admiral’s Country of Saratoga trying to explain what had happened.
   Randy Bragg pulled up in the rear driveway of the McGovern house, wondering whether he should go in. He was not exactly popular with the elder McGoverns, which was why Lib visited him more often than he visited her.
   Whenever he entered the McGovern home, Randy felt as if he were stepping into an enormous department-store window. The entire front of the house, facing the Timucuan, was plate glass clamped between thin stainless steel supports, and every piece of furniture appeared unused, as if a price tag and warranty would be found tied to one of the legs. Lavinia McGovern herself had thought up the basic plan, collaborated with the architect, and supervised the construction. The architect, pleading a hotel commission in Miami, had returned part of his fee and absented himself from Fort Repose before the foundation was laid.
   On his first visit, Randy had not endeared himself to Lavinia. She took him on what she called “the grand tour,” proudly showing off the multiple heat pumps insuring constant year-round temperature; the magnificent kitchen with electronic ovens and broilers operated from a central control panel; the cunning round holes in the ceiling which sprayed gentle light on dining-room table, bar, bridge table, and strategically located abstract statuary; the television screens faired into the walls of bedrooms, living room, dining room, and even kitchen; and the master bedroom’s free form tub, which extended through the wall and into a tiny, shielding garden. There were no fireplaces, which she called “soot-producers,” or bookshelves, which were “dust catchers.”
   All was new, modern, and functional. “When we came down here,” Lavinia said, “we got rid of everything in Shaker Heights and started fresh, bright, and new. See how I’ve brought the river right to our feet?” She indicated the expanse of glass. “What do you think of it?”
   Randy tried to be at once tactful and truthful. “It reminds me of an illustration out of Modern Living, but “
   “But?” Lavinia inquired, nervously.
   Randy, feeling he was being helpful, pointed out that in the summer months the sun’s direct rays would pour through the glass walls, and that the afternoon heat would become unbearable no matter how large and efficient the air-conditioning system. “I’m afraid that in summer you’ll have to shutter that whole southwest side of the house,” he said.
   “Is there anything else you think is wrong?” Lavinia asked, her voice dangerously sweet.
   “Well, yes. That indoor-outdoor bath is charming and original, but come spring it’ll be a freeway for moccasins and water snakes. On cool nights they’ll plop in and swim or crawl right into the house.”
   At this point Lavinia had squealed and clutched at her throat as it suffocating, and her husband and daughter had half-carried her to the bedroom. The next day plumbers and masons remodeled the sunken tub, eliminating the outdoor feature. Later, Lib explained that her mother dreaded snakes, and had been solely responsible for the design of the house. Randy never felt comfortable in Lavinia’s presence thereafter. And Lavinia, while attempting to be gracious, sometimes became pale and grew faint when he appeared.
   Randy’s relations with Bill McGovern were little better. On occasion, after a few extra drinks, he disagreed with Mr. McGovern on matters political, social, and economic. Since Bill for many years had been president of a manufacturing concern employing six thousand people, few of whom ever disagreed with him about anything, he had been affronted and angry. He considered Randy
   All was new, modern, and functional. “When we came down here,” Lavinia said, “we got rid of everything in Shaker Heights and started fresh, bright, and new. See how I’ve brought the river right to our feet?” She indicated the expanse of glass. “What do you think of it?”
   Randy tried to be at once tactful and truthful. “It reminds me of an illustration out of Modern Living, but “
   “But?” Lavinia inquired, nervously.
   Randy, feeling he was being helpful, pointed out that in the summer months the sun’s direct rays would pour through the glass walls, and that the afternoon heat would become unbearable no matter how large and efficient the air-conditioning system. “I’m afraid that in summer you’ll have to shutter that whole southwest side of the house,” he said.
   “Is there anything else you think is wrong?” Lavinia asked, her voice dangerously sweet.
   “Well, yes. That indoor-outdoor bath is charming and original, but come spring it’ll be a freeway for moccasins and water snakes. On cool nights they’ll plop in and swim or crawl right into the house.”
   At this point Lavinia had squealed and clutched at her throat as it suffocating, and her husband and daughter had half-carried her to the bedroom. The next day plumbers and masons remodeled the sunken tub, eliminating the outdoor feature. Later, Lib explained that her mother dreaded snakes, and had been solely responsible for the design of the house. Randy never felt comfortable in Lavinia’s presence thereafter. And Lavinia, while attempting to be gracious, sometimes became pale and grew faint when he appeared.
   Randy’s relations with Bill McGovern were little better. On occasion, after a few extra drinks, he disagreed with Mr. McGovern on matters political, social, and economic. Since Bill for many years had been president of a manufacturing concern employing six thousand people, few of whom ever disagreed with him about anything, he had been affronted and angry. He considered Randy an insolent young loafer, an example of decadence in what once might have been a good family, and a sadly scrambled egghead, and had so informed his daughter.
   So Randy, sitting in his car, hesitated. He was certain to be coolly received. Lib didn’t expect to see him until the next day, but he had a hunch she needed him now. He guessed a considerable argument was going on inside. Lib would be verbally overpowered by her father, and Mark’s warning go unheeded. Randy got out of his car.
   Lib opened the north door before he could ring. “I thought I heard a car in the drive,” she said. “I’m glad it’s you. I’ve got troubles.”
   Bill McGovern was standing in the living room, wrapped in an ankle-length white bathrobe, smiling as if nothing were funny. Lavinia McGovern, her eyes swollen and pink against pallid skin, lay back on a chaise. She held a hankerchief to her nose. Bill was bald, square shouldered, and rather tall. His nose was beaked and his chin prominent and strong. In his toga of toweling, and with feet encased in leather sandals, he looked like an angry Caesar. “So here comes our local Paul Revere,” he greeted Randy. “What are you trying to do, frighten my wife and daughter to death?”
   Randy regretted having come in, but now that he was in he saw no point in being anything less than frank. “Mr. McGovern,” he said-ordinarily he addressed Lib’s father as Bill-”you aren’t as bright as I thought. If I gave you a hot tip, from a good source, on the market, you would listen. This is somewhat more important than the market. I thought I was doing you a favor.” He turned to leave.
   Lib touched his arm. “Please, Randy, don’t go!” “Elizabeth,”-when her parents were present he always called her Elizabeth-”I’ll leave things the way they are. If you need me, call.”
   Lavinia began to sniffle, audibly. In a worried voice Bill said, “Now don’t rush off half-cocked, Randy. I’m sorry if I was rude. There are certain things you don’t understand.”
   “Like what?” Randy asked.
   Bill’s voice was conciliatory. “Just sit down and I’ll explain.” Randy continued to stand.
   “Now I’m twice as old as you are,” Bill said, “and I think I know more about what goes on in this world. After all, I know quite a few big men-the biggest. All these war scares are concocted by the Pentagon-no offense meant to your brother-to get more appropriations, and give more handouts to Europe, and jack up taxes. It’s all part of the damnable inflationary pattern that’s designed to cheat people on pensions and with fixed incomes and so forth. Now I know your brother thinks he’s doing the right thing, and I appreciate your telling Elizabeth. But chances are your brother’s been taken in too.”
   “Have you been listening to the news for the past few days?” “Yes. Oh, I’ll admit it looks bad in the Mideast but that doesn’t scare me. We might have a little brushfire war, like Korea, sure. But no atomic war. Nobody’s going to use atomic bombs, just like nobody used gas in the last war.”
   “You’ll guarantee that, eh, Bill?”
   Bill locked his hands behind his back. “I can’t guarantee it, of course, but only the other day I was talking to Mr. Offenhaus. You must know him. Runs Civil Defense here. Well, he isn’t worried. Says the only real danger we face is being overrun by people swarming out of Orlando and Tampa. He doesn’t even think there’s much chance of that. Fort Repose isn’t on any main highway. But he does say we’ll have to watch out for the dinges. Keep ‘em under control.”
   “Please, Bill!” Lavinia said. “Say darkies!”
   “Darkies, hell! The dinges are liable to panic and start looting. Oh, the local niggers, like Daisy, our cook, and Missouri, the cleaning woman, may be all right. Mr. Offenhaus was talking about the migrant labor, the orange pickers and so forth. So if Mr. Offenhaus isn’t worried, then I’m not worried. Mr. Offenhaus strikes me as a pretty solid businessman.”
   Randy knew that Bubba Offenhaus had been picked to head
   Civil Defense because he owned the only two ambulances, which with the addition of black scrollwork doubled as hearses, in Fort Repose. “Did you talk to him about fallout?” he asked.
   “Well, no, I didn’t,” Bill said. “Mr. Offenhaus said they sent him some booklets from Washington but he’s not passing them around because they’re too gruesome. Says why worry about something you can’t see, feel, hear, or smell? Says it’s just as bad to frighten people to death as kill them with radiation, and I must say that I agree with him.”
   Lavinia said, “If it came I suppose we’d have rationing like last time and all kinds of shortages. Bill, don’t you think we ought-no, I won’t think of it. Please, let’s not talk about it any more. It’s horrid.” She dabbed at her eyes and tried to smile. “Randolph, when your sister-in-law comes won’t you bring her over for dinner? Afterwards, we could play bridge. Perhaps you’d like to play a rubber now? I now you’re going to stay up to meet the plane, and I’m too overwrought to sleep.”
   “I’m sure Helen will be delighted to come to dinner,” Randy said. “As for bridge, I’ll take a rain check. I still have some things to do at home. Good night, Lavinia. Sorry I upset you.”
   Lib came out to the car with him. “Didn’t get very far, did I?” he said.
   “You started Dad thinking. That’s far.”
   Overhead he heard multi-engined jets. On that night there was three quarters of the moon. He looked up, and seeing nothing, knew the jets were military aircraft, too high for their running lights to show against the bright sky. On any night, if you listened for a while, you could hear the B-52’s and 47’s and 58’s, but on this night there seemed to be more of them.
   “Where are they from?” Lib asked. “Where are they going?” “I guess they’re from McCoy and MacDill and Eglin and Homestead,” Randy said, “and I don’t think they’re going anywhere much. They’re just stooging around up there because they’re safer up there than on the ground. When you can hear them floating around like that, high, you know you’re all right.”
   “I see,” Lib said. For the second time, he kissed her good night.
   When he reached home it was almost midnight. He made coffee and, yawning, turned on the radio and tuned an Orlando station for the late network news. The first bulletin jerked him wide awake:
   “From Washington-The official Arab radio, in a broadcast from Damascus, claims that American carrier planes are conducting a violent bombing attack on the harbor of Latakia. This news broke in Washington just a few minutes ago. There has been no reaction from the Pentagon, which at this hour of night is lightly staffed. However, it is reported that high Navy and Defense Department officials are being summoned into emergency conference. We will give you more on this as we receive it from our Washington newsroom. Here is the text of the official Arab broadcast: `At about six-thirty o’clock this morning’-please remember that it is morning in the Eastern Mediterranean, which is seven hours ahead of American Eastern Standard Time-`low-flying jet aircraft, of the type used on United States aircraft carriers and bearing United States insignia, brutally and without warning bombed the harbor area of Latakia. It is reported that civilian casualties are high and that many buildings are in flames.’ That was the text of the Arab broadcast and that is all the hard news we have at the moment. Latakia is the most important Syrian harbor. Within the last few years it has been heavily fortified, and there has been extensive construction of submarine pens under the direction of Russian technicians. It is generally regarded as one of the most powerful anti-Western naval bases in the Mediterranean. It is known that units of the United States Sixth Fleet are now in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that these units have been shadowed by fast, unidentified aircraft. . . .”
   The network announcer went on to other news, and Randy’s phone rang.
   He picked it up, irritated. It was Bill McGovern. “Did you hear the news?” Bill asked.
   “Yes. I’m trying to get more of it.” “What do you think?”
   “I don’t think anything, yet. I want to hear our side of it.” “Sounds to me like we’re starting a small preventive war,” Bill said.
   “I don’t believe that for an instant,” Randy said. “You don’t prevent a war by starting one.”
   “Well, we’ll see who’s right in the morning.”
   Mark Bragg missed the first news flash on Latakia. At that moment he was straightening up the house before driving to Offutt to assume direction of Intelligence analysis in the Hole. He had been recalled from the Puerto Rico mission because SAC’s Commander in Chief, General Hawker, felt that in this newest crisis senior members of his Operations and Intelligence staffs should maintain a round-the-clock watch. An attack is rarely planned to conform to a victim’s five-day, forty-hour week so Hawker divided his most experienced officers into three shifts covering the whole day. As SAC’s third-ranking Intelligence officer, junior to the A-2 and his deputy, both brigadiers, Colonel Bragg naturally drew the most onerous hours-midnight to 0800.
   At eleven P.M., Omaha time, while the Damascus broadcast was being repeated around the world, Mark was in the children’s rooms, feeling like an intruder. It was the silence that discomforted him. He found himself tiptoeing, listening for the missing sounds. The house was still as northern woods in winter, when all the creatures are gone.
   Ben Franklin’s room looked as if it had been ransacked by a band of monkeys rather than that a thirteen-year-old boy had packed. Mark closed dresser drawers and picked up ties, clothes—hangers, and shoes and socks, never in pairs. He supposed all boys were like that. Peyton’s room looked no different than if this had been an ordinary day, as if she had been invited to a slumber party at the home of a friend and would return in the morning. Her bedspread was uncreased, and the furry toy animal that held her pajamas rested precisely in its center, as always. She had forgotten it. Her doll collection, carefully propped up on a tier of shelves, formed a silent audience to his silent inspection. Peyton hadn’t asked to take her dolls to Florida. Perhaps she was outgrowing dolls. Or perhaps she didn’t realize; when she left them, that it might be forever. Her desk was neat, pencils aligned as if at squads right, schoolbooks stacked in a pyramid. He picked up the books and took them downstairs. He would mail them from Offutt in the morning, after he was off duty. Peyton was a tidy and thoughtful little girl, in looks and temperament much like her mother. He loved her. He loved them both. They had been very satisfactory children. The house was intolerably quiet. In the whole house the only sound was the ticking of clocks.
   Driving toward Offutt, and his job, Mark felt better. When he turned into the four-lane highway that ran south to the base he saw that it was eleven-thirty and flipped on the car radio. It was then that he heard the Arab charge that Latakia had been bombed by American planes and, in addition, a rather strange statement from Washington. “A Navy Department spokesman,” the newscaster said, “denies that there has been any intentional attack on the Syrian coast.”
   Mark stepped down on the accelerator and watched the speedometer needle pass seventy-five. On a turn the back wheels weaved. Ice. He forced himself to concentrate on his driving. Soon he would know everything that was known in the Hole, which meant everything that was known to American Intelligence, and the world-wide news networks, everywhere. Meanwhile it was pointless to guess, or end up in a ditch, a useless casualty with no Purple Heart.
   Twelve minutes later Mark entered the War Room, fifty feet underground. Blinking in the brilliant but shadowless artificial sunlight, he glanced at the map panels. Nothing startling. He walked on to the offices of A-2, Intelligence. In the inner office Dutch Klein, Deputy A-2 and a buck general in his early forties, waited for his relief. An electric coffee maker steamed on Dutch’s desk. Two ashtrays were filled with crushed cigarette butts. Dutch had been busy. Dutch said, “I guess you’ve heard the news.”
   “I caught it on the radio. It’s not true, is it?”
   “It’s fantastic!” Dutch touched a sheaf of pink flimsies, decoded priority messages, on his desk. “Two hours ago Sixth Fleet scrambled fighters to intercept a jet snooper. An ensign from Saratoga—an ensign, mind you-sighted the bogy and chased him all the way up the Levant. He closed at Latakia and fired a bird. Whether it was human error or an erratic rocket isn’t clear. Anyway, everything blew.” Dutch, a muscular, keg-shaped man with round, rubbery face, groaned and sank back into his chair.
   Automatically the fortifications of the port area of Latakia came into focus in Mark’s mind. “Large stores of conventional mines, torpedoes, and ammo,” he said. “They usually have four to eight subs in the new pens and a couple of cruisers and escort vessels in the harbor.” He hesitated, thinking of something else, worse. “The fire and blast could have cooked off nuclear weapons, if they were in combat configuration. That could well be. What do you make of it?”
   “Worst foul-up on record,” Dutch said. “Glad it’s the Navy and not us.”
   “I mean, how do you think the Russians will react?” Mark asked the question not because he thought Dutch could give him the answer, but as a catalyst to his own imagination. Intelligence wasn’t Dutch’s primary interest. On the way up to two stars and command of an air division, Dutch had been forced to assimilate two years of staff, part of his education. To Mark, the Intelligence job, with all its political and psychological facets, was a career in itself. He had a feel for it, the capacity to stir a headful of unrelated facts until they congealed into a pattern arrowing the future. Dutch said, “Maybe it’ll throw them off balance.”
   “It might upset their timetable,” Mark agreed, “but I’m afraid they’re all set. It might just give the Kremlin, a cases belli, an excuse.”
   Dutch lifted himself out of the chair. “I leave it with you. The C in C was here until a few minutes ago. He said he had to get some sleep because it might get even hairier tomorrow. If there are any important political developments you’re to call him. Operations will handle the alert status, as usual.”
   For thirty minutes Mark concentrated on the pile. of flimsies, the latest intelligence from NATO, Smyrna, Naples, the Philippines, Eastern Sea Frontier, and the summaries from Air Defense Command and the CIA. When he was abreast of the situation he crossed the War Room to Operations Control.
   The Senior Controller on duty was Ace Atkins, a former fighter pilot, like Mark an eagle colonel. He was called Ace because he had been one, in two wars. Because of proven courage and absolute coolness, he was at the desk now occupied, with the red phone a few inches from his fingers. One code word into Ace’s red phone would cock SAC’s two thousand bombers and start the countdown at the missile sites. It would take another word, either spoken by General Hawker or with his authority, to launch the force.
   Ace, slight and wiry, looked up and said, “Welcome to Bedlam!” The Control Room, separated from the War Room by heavy glass, was utterly quiet.
   Mark said, “I’m worried. I wish Washington would come forth with a complete statement. As things stand now, most of the world will believe we attacked Latakia deliberately.”
   “Why don’t the Navy information people give out?”
   “They want to. They’ve got a release ready. But they’re low echelon and you know Washington.”
   “Not very well.”
   “I know f it well,” Mark said, “and I think I can pretty well guess what’s happening. Everybody wants to put his chop on it because it’s so important but for the same reason nobody wants to take the responsibility. The Navy PIO probably called an Assistant Secretary, and the Assistant Secretary called the Secretary and the. Secretary probably called the Secretary of Defense. By that time: the Information Agency and State Department were involved. By now more and more people are getting up and they are calling more and more people.” Mark looked at the clocks, above the War Room maps, telling the time in all zones from Omsk to Guam. “It’s two A.M. in Washington now. As each man gives his okay to the release it turns out that somebody else has to be consulted. Eventually they’ll have the Secretary of State out of bed and then the White House press secretary. Maybe he’ll wake up the President. Until that happens, I don’t think there’ll be any full statement.”
   Ace said. “My God! That sounds awful.”
   “It is, but what worries me most is Moscow.” “What’s Moscow saying?”
   “Not a word. Not a whisper. Usually Radio Moscow would be screaming bloody murder. That’s what worries me. As long as people keep talking they’re not fighting. When Moscow quits talking, I’m afraid they’re acting.” Mark borrowed a cigarette and lit it. “I think the chances are about sixty-forty,” he said, “that they’ve started their countdown.”
   Ace’s fingers stroked the red phone. “Well,” he said, “we’re as ready as we ever will be. Fourteen percent of the force is airborne now and another seventeen percent on standby. I’m pre pared to hold that ratio until we’re relieved at 0800. How’s that sound to you, Mark?”
   As always, the responsibility to act lay with A-3. Mark Bragg, as A-2, could only advise. He said, “That’s a pretty big effort. You can’t keep the whole force in the air and on standby all the time. I know that, and yet “ He stretched. “I’ll trot back to my cave and see what else comes in. I’ll check with you in an hour.”
   On his desk, Mark found copies of three more urgent dispatches. One, from the Air attach, in Ankara, reported Russian aerial reconnaissance over the Azerbaijan frontier. Another, from the Navy Department, gave a submarine-sighting two hundred miles off Seattle, definitely a skunk. The third, received by the State Department from London in the highest secret classification, said Downing Street had authorized the RAF to arm intermediate range missiles, including the Thor, with nuclear warheads.
   In an hour Helen’s plane would touch down in Orlando. In two hours, if the plane was on time, Helen and the children would be in an area of comparative safety. Mark prayed that for the next two hours, at least, nothing more would happen. He held fast to the thought, so long as there was no war, there was always a chance for peace. As the minutes and hours eroded away, and no word came from Moscow, he became more and more certain that a massive strike had been ordered. He diagnosed this negative intelligence as more ominous than almost anything that could have happened, and determined to awaken General Hawker if it persisted.
   At three-thirty in the morning Randolph Bragg waited in Orlando’s air terminal for Helen’s flight. With only a few night coaches scheduled in from New York, plus the non-stop from Chicago, the building was almost empty except for sweepers and scrubwomen. When he saw a plane’s landing lights, Randy walked outside to the gate. On the other side of the field, near the military hangars used by Air-Sea Rescue Command, he saw the silhouettes of six B-47s, part of the wing from McCoy, he deduced, using this field in accordance with a dispersal plan. The military hangars and Operations building were bright with light, which at this hour was not usual.
   The big transport came in for its landing, approached on the taxi strip, pivoted to a halt before him, and cut its engines. He saw that only a few people were getting off Most would be going on to Miami. He saw Peyton and Ben Franklin come down the steps, Ben incongruously wearing an overcoat, Peyton carrying a bow, a quiver of arrows over her shoulder. Then he saw Helen and she waved and he ran out to meet them.
   Randy rumpled Ben Franklin’s hair. The children were both owl-eyed and tired. He leaned over, kissed Peyton, and relieved her of the bow slung over her shoulder. Helen said, “She’s been watching Robin Hood. She thinks she’s Maid Marian.”
   Helen was wearing a long cashmere coat and carrying a fur cape over her arm. She appeared fresh, as if starting rather than completing a journey. She was slight-Mark sometimes referred to her as “my pocket Venus-” yet Randy was never aware of that except when he saw her completely relaxed. At all other times her body seemed to obey the physical law that kinetic energy increases mass. Her abundant vitality she somehow communicated to others, so that when Helen was present everyone’s blood flowed a little faster, as Randy’s did now. She tiptoed to kiss him and said, “I feel like ten kinds of a fool, Randy.”
   He said, “Don’t be silly.”
   They walked toward the terminal. She presented him with a sheaf of baggage checks. “Mark made me take everything. We’re going to be an awful nuisance. Also, I feel like a coward.”
   “You won’t when you hear what’s just happened in the Med.”
   Ben Franklin turned, suddenly awake, and said, “What happened in the Med, Randy?”
   Randy looked at Helen, inquiringly. She said, “It’s all right. Both of them know all about it. I didn’t realize it until we were on the plane. Children are precocious these days, aren’t they? They learn the facts of life before you have a chance to explain anything.”
   While they waited for the luggage, Randy spoke of the news.
   They listened gravely. Ben Franklin alone commented. “Sounds like the kickoff. I guess Dad knew what he was doing.” Nothing more was said about it for a time.
   Randy felt relieved when the suburbs of Orlando were behind them and, with traffic thin at this hour, he was holding to a steady seventy. He thought his apprehension illogical. Why should he be upset by the remark of a thirteen-year-old boy? When he was sure the children slept in the back seat, he said, “They take it calmly, almost as a matter of course, don’t they?”
   “Yes,” Helen said. “You see, all their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war-atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal. All their lives they have heard nothing else, and they expect it.”
   `They’re conditioned,” Randy said. “A child of the nineteenth century would quickly go mad with fear, I think, in the world of today. It must have been pretty wonderful to have lived in the years, say, between 1870 and 1914, when peace was the normal condition and people really were appalled at the idea of war, and believed there’d never be a big one. A big one was impossible, they used to say. It would cost too much. It would disrupt world trade and bankrupt everybody. Even after the First World War people didn’t accept war as normal. They had to call it The War to End War or we wouldn’t have fought it. Helen, what has become of us?”
   Helen, busy tuning the car radio, trying to bring in fresh news, said, “You’re a bit of an idealist, aren’t you, Randy?”
   “I suppose so. It’s been an expensive luxury. Maybe one day I’ll get conditioned. I’ll accept things, like the children.”
   Helen said, “Listen!” She had brought in a Miami station, and the announcer was saying the station was remaining on the air through the night to give news of the new crisis.
   “Now we have a bulletin from Washington,” he said: “The Navy Department has finally released a full statement on the Latakia incident. Early today a Navy carrier-based fighter fired a single air-to-air rocket at an unidentified jet plane which had been shadowing units of the Sixth Fleet. This rocket exploded in the harbor area of Latakia. The Navy calls it a regrettable mechanical error. It is possible that this rocket struck an ammunition train and started a chain explosion, the statement admits. The Navy categorically denies any deliberate bombardment. We will bring you further bulletins as they are received.”
   The Miami station began to broadcast a medley of second World War patriotic songs which Randy remembered from boyhood. One was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” It sounded tinny and in poor taste, but Miami’s entertainment was usually in poor taste.
   Randy said, “Do you believe it? Is it possible?”
   Helen didn’t answer. She was staring straight ahead, as if hypnotized by the headlights’ beam, and her lips were moving. He realized that her mind was far away. She had not heard him.
   Randy had them all in their rooms, and asleep, by five-thirty. He had carried all their luggage, eleven bags, upstairs.
   He went to his own apartment and collapsed on the studio couch in the living room. Graf jumped up and snuggled under his arm. Almost at once, without bothering to loosen his belt or remove his shoes, Randy slept.
   It was 0500 at Offutt Field, with dawn still more than two hours distant, when General Hawker, unbidden, returned to the Hole. The General followed in the tradition of Vandenberg, Norstad, and LeMay. He had received his fourth star while still in his forties, and now, at fifty, considered it part of his job that he remain slim and in excellent physical condition. Once warfare, except among the untutored savages, had been fought during the daylight hours. This had changed during the twentieth century until now rockets and aircraft recognized neither darkness nor bad weather, and were handicapped neither by oceans nor mountains nor distance. Now, the critical factor in warfare was time, measured in minutes or seconds. Hawker had adjusted his life to this condition. In the past week he had not slept more than four hours at a stretch. He had trained himself to catnap in his office for tenor twenty-minute periods, after which he felt remarkably refreshed.
   The engineers who designed the Hole had arranged that the Commander in Chief’s Command Post be on a glass-enclosed balcony, from which he could see all the War Room maps, and all the activity on the floor below, and be surrounded by his staff In this moment it wasn’t operating like that at all. Hawker had his feet up on the desk in the Control Room. He was drinking black coffee from a green dimestore mug, and rapidly reading through a stack of the more important operational and intelligence dispatches. Occasionally, the General fired a question at one or the other of his two colonels, Atkins and Bragg.
   An A-2 staff sergeant came into the room with two pink flimsies and handed them to Mark Bragg. The General looked up, inquiringly.
   Mark said, “From the Eastern Sea Frontier. Patrol planes on the Argentina-Bermuda axis report three unidentified contacts. These skunks are headed for the Atlantic coast.”
   “Sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
   “I think this one sounds worse,” Mark said. “All news service and diplomatic communications between Moscow and the United States have been inoperative for the last hour. This comes from USIA. The news agencies have been calling their Moscow correspondents. All the Moscow operators will say is, `Sorry. I am unable to complete the call.’ “
   “And there’s been no reaction to Latakia from Moscow at “None, sir. Not a whisper.”
   The General shook his head, slowly, frowning, lines appearing and deepening around mouth and eyes, his whole face undergoing a transformation, growing older, as if in a few seconds all the strain and fatigue of weeks, months, years had accumulated and were marking his face and bowing his shoulders. the strain and fatigue of weeks, months, years had accumulated and were marking his face and bowing his shoulders.
   Hawker said, “This is the witching hour, you know. This is the bad one. Their submarines have had a whole night to run in on the coast if that’s what they’re doing. We’re in darkness. They’ll soon be in daylight. Dawn is the bad time. What time does it start to get light in New York and Washington?” “Sunrise on the seaboard is Seven-ten Eastern Standard,” Ace Atkins said. Washington’s clock read 6:41.
   Mark Braggs mind raced ahead, If an attack came, they could count on no more than fifteen minutes’ warning. If they used every one of those minutes with maximum efficiency, retaliation could be decisive. But Mark feared a minute, or even two, might be lost in necessary communication with Washington. He made a bold proposal. “May I suggest, sir, that we ask for the release of our weapons?”
   This was the one mandatory, essential act that must precede the terrible decision to use the weapons. Under the law, the President of the United States “owned” the nuclear bombs and missile warheads. General Hawker was entrusted with their custody only. Before SAC could use the weapons, the permission of the President~r his survivor in a line of succession-must be secured. If an attack were underway, that permission would come almost, but not quite, instantly.
   The General seemed a little startled. “Don’t you think we can wait, Mark?”
   “Yes, sir, we can wait, but if we get it out of the way, it couLd save us a minute, maybe two. The danger, and the necessity of not having a communications’ snafu, must be just as apparent in the Pentagon, or the White House, or wherever the President is, as it is here.”
   “What do you think, Ace?” Hawker asked. “I’d like to have it behind us, sir.”
   The General picked up one of the four phones on Atkins’ desk, the phone connecting directly with the Pentagon Command
   Post. In this CP, day and night, was a general officer of the Air Force. This duty officer was never out of communication with the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
   The General spoke briefly into the phone and then waited, keeping it pressed against his ear. Mark’s eyes followed the red second hand on the desk clock. This was an interesting experiment. The General said, “Yes John, this is Bob Hawker. I want the release of my weapons.” Mark knew that “John” was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Yes, I’ll hold,” the General said. The seconds raced away. The General said, “Thank you, John. It is now eleven forty-four, Zulu. You will confirm by teletype? Goodbye, John.”
   The General reached across the desk and wrote in Ace Atkins’ log: “Weapons released to SAC at 11:44, Zulu.” The Operations log was kept in Greenwich Time.
   Mark said, “I timed it. One minute and thirty-five seconds.” “I hope we don’t need it,” Hawker said, “but I’m glad to have it.” The worry lines became less conspicuous around his mouth and eyes. His back and shoulders straightened. Now that the responsibility was his, with complications and entanglements minimized, he accepted it with confidence. His manner said that if it came he would fight it from here, and by God win it, as much as it could be won.
   The General poured himself another cup of coffee. Ace Atkins told the General, “With your permission, I’m going to scramble fifty percent of all our tankers at Bluie West One, Thule, Limestone, and Castle. They’d be sitting ducks for missiles from subs. They’re right under the gun. They wouldn’t get fifteen minutes.” The General nodded. Ace flipped two keys on the intercom and dictated an order.
   Beside Ace’s desk, a tape recorder steadily turned, monitoring phone calls and conversations. The General glanced at it and said, “Do you realize that everything said in this room is being recorded for posterity?”
   They all smiled. On all the clocks another minute flipped. The direct line from NORAD, North American Air Defense, in Colorado Springs, buzzed. Ace picked it up, said, “Atkins, SAC Operations,” listened, said, “Roger. I repeat. Object, may be missile, fired from Soviet base, Anadyr Peninsular.”
   The emergency priority teletype machine from NORAD began to clatter.
   It’s only one, Mark thought. It could be a meteor. It could be a Sputnik. It could be anything.
   The NORAD line buzzed again. Ace answered and repeated the flash, as before, for the General and the tape recorder. “DEW Line high sensitivity radar now has four objects on its screens. Speed and trajectory indicates they are ballistic missiles. Presque Isle and Homestead report missiles coming in from sea. We are skipping the yellow. This is your red alert.”
   The General gave an order.
   Mark rose and said, “I think I’d better get back to my desk.” The General nodded and smiled thinly. He said, “Thanks for the ninety-five seconds.”

Chapter 5

   At first Randy thought someone was shaking the couch. Graf, nestled under his arm, whined and slipped to the floor. Randy opened his eyes and elevated himself on his elbow. He felt stiff and grimy from sleeping in his clothes. Except for the daschund, tail and ears at attention, the room was empty. Again the couch shook. The world outside still slept, but he discerned movement in the room. His fishing rods, hanging by their tips from a length of pegboard, inexplicably swayed in rhythm. He had heard such phenomena accompanied earthquakes, but there had never been an earthquake in Florida. Graf lifted his nose and howled.
   Then the sound came, a long, deep, powerful rumble increasing in crescendo until the windows rattled, cups danced in their saucers, and the bar glasses rubbed rims and tinkled in terror. The sound slowly ebbed, then boomed to a fiercer climax, closer.
   Randy found himself on his feet, throat dry, heart pounding. This was not the season for thunder, nor were storms forecast. Nor was this thunder. He stepped out onto the upstairs porch. To his left, in the east, an orange glow heralded the sun. In the south, across the Timucuan and beyond the horizon, a similar glow slowly faded. His sense refused to accept a sun rising and a sun setting. For perhaps a minute the spectacle numbed reaction.
   What had jolted Randy from sleep-he would not learn all the facts for a long, a very long time after-were two nuclear explosions, both in the megaton range, the warheads of missiles lobbed in by submarines. The first obliterated the SAC base at Homestead, and incidentally sank and returned to the sea a considerable area of Florida’s tip. Ground Zero of the second missile was Miami’s International Airport, not far from the heart of the city. Randy’s couch had been shaken by shock waves transmitted through the earth, which travel faster than through the air, so he had been awake when the blast and sound arrived a little later. Gazing at the glow to the south, Randy was witnessing, from a distance of almost two hundred miles, the incineration of a million people.
   The screen door banged open. Ben Franklin and Peyton, barefoot and in flannel pajamas, burst out onto the porch. Helen followed. The sight of war’s roseate birthmark on the sky choked back their words. Helen grabbed Randy’s arm tightly in both hands, as if she had stumbled. Finally, she spoke. “So soon?” It was a moan, not a question.
   “I’m afraid it’s here,” Randy said, his mind churning among all the possibilities, including their own dangers, seeking a clue as to what to do, what to do first.
   Helen was wearing a flowered kimono and straw slippers, booty from one of Mark’s inspection trips to the Far East. Her chestnut hair was disheveled, her eyes, a deep and stirring blue, round in apprehension. She seemed very slight, in need of protection, and hardly older than her daughter. She was, at this moment, less composed than the children.
   Ben Franklin, staring to the south, said, “I don’t see any mushroom cloud. Don’t they always have a mushroom cloud?” “The explosions were very far off,” Randy said. “Probably a lot of haze, or other clouds, between us and the mushrooms. What we see is a reflection in the sky. It’s dying, now. It was much brighter when I first came out here.”
   “I see,” Ben Franklin said, satisfied. “What do you think they clobbered? I’d guess Homestead and the Boca Chica Navy base at Key West.”
   Randy shook his head. “I don’t see how we could get rocked from that distance. Maybe they hit Palm Beach and Miami. Maybe they missed and pitched two into the Glades.”
   “Maybe,” Ben said, not as if he believed they had missed.
   It was so quiet. It was wrongly quiet. They ought to hear sirens, or something. All Randy heard was a mockingbird tuning up for his morning aria.
   Helen released her grip on his arm. Thoughts seemed to parallel his, she said, “I haven’t heard any planes. I don’t hear any now. Shouldn’t we hear fighters, or something?”
   “I don’t know,” Randy said.
   Ben Franklin said, “I heard ‘em. That’s what first woke me. I heard jets-they sounded like B-Forty-sevens-climbing. Traveling that way.” He showed them with a sweep of his arm. “That’s southwest to northeast, isn’t it?”
   “That’s right,” Randy said, and at that instant he heard another aircraft, whining under full power, following the same path. They all listened. “That one will be from MacDill,” Randy decided, “heading across.”
   Before its sound faded they heard another, and then a third. They all pressed close to the porch screen, looking up.
   High up there, where it was already sunlight, they saw silver arrows speeding and three white contrails boldly slashed across morning’s washed blue sky.
   Ben Franklin whispered, “Go, baby, go!”
   Terror departed Helen’s eyes. “Could we go up on the captain’s walk?” she said. “I want to watch them. They’re mine, you know.”
   Ben and Peyton sprinted for the ladder. “No!” Randy said. “Wait!”
   Ben stopped instantly. Peyton ran on. Her mother said, “Peyton! That was an order!”
   Peyton, her hand on the ladder, went no further. She said, “Shucks.”
   “You might as well start learning to obey your uncle Randy, just as you obey your father, right now!”
   Peyton said, “Why can’t we go up on the roof?”
   Randy had spoken instinctively. He found it difficult to put his objection into words. “I think it’s too exposed,” he said. “I think we all ought to be underground right now, but there isn’t any cellar and it’s too late to start digging.”
   Ben Franklin said, “You’re right, Randy. If they laid an egg close, we could get flash burns. Then there’s radiation.” The boy looked at the weathercock on the garage steeple. “Wind’s from the east, so we won’t get any fallout, anyway not now. But suppose they hit Patrick? We’re almost exactly west of Patrick, aren’t we? Patrick could cook us.”
   “Where did you learn all that stuff about fallout?” Randy asked.
   “I thought everybody knew it.” Ben frowned. “I don’t think they’ll hit Patrick. It’s a test center, not an operational base. Patrick can’t hurt them, but MacDill and McCoy, they can hurt them. And, brother, they will!”
   Randy, Helen, and Ben Franklin were facing the east, where the missile test pads on Cape Canaveral lay, and where the fat red sun now showed itself above the horizon. Peyton, nose pressed against the screen, was still trying to follow the contrails of the B-47’s. A stark white flash enveloped their world. Randy felt the heat on his neck. Peyton cried out and covered her face with her hands. In the southwest, in the direction of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota, another unnatural sun was born, much larger and infinitely fiercer than the sun in the east.
   Automatically, as a good platoon leader should, Randy looked at his watch and marked the minute and second in his memory. This time he would know the point of impact exactly, using the flash-and-sound system learned in Korea.
   A thick red pillar erected itself in the southwest, its base the unnatural sun.
   The top of the pillar billowed outward. This time, the mushroom was there.
   There was no sound at all except Peyton’s whimpering. Her fists were pressed into her eyes.
   A bird plunged against the screen and dropped to earth, trailed by drifting feathers.
   Within the pillar and the cloud, fantastic colors played. Red changed to orange, glowed white, became red again. Green and purple ropes twisted upward through the pillar and spread tentacles through the cloud.
   The gaudy mushroom enlarged with incredible speed, angry, poisonous, malignant. It grew until the mushroom’s rim looked like the leading edge of an approaching weather front, black, purple, orange, green, a cancerous man-created line squall.
   They shrank from it.
   Peyton screamed, “I can’t see! I can’t see, Mommy. Mommy, where are you?” Her eyes were wide, her face tear-stained and mottled. Arms outstretched, she was moving across the porch with tiny, stiff, uncertain steps.
   Randy scooped her into his arms. She seemed weightless. Helen opened the door and he rushed into the living room. Talking to her, saying, “Easy, Peyton, honey! Easy! Stop rubbing your eyes. Keep your eyes closed.” He stretched the child out on the couch.
   Helen was at his side, a wet towel in her hands. She laid the towel over her daughter’s eyes. “This will make you feel better, baby.”
   “Momm ~” y?
   “Yes.” This was the first time, since she was six, that Peyton had used Mommy instead of Mother.
   “All I can see is a big white ball. I can see it with my eyes closed. It hurts me, Mommy, right through my head.”
   “Sure, just like a big flashlight bulb. Lie still, Peyton, you’re going to be all right.” Now, with fear for her child’s sight supplanting all other fears, Helen steadied. Again she was composed, able, efficient, and she knew the moment of panic would not return. She told Randy, calmly, “Hadn’t you better call Dan Gunn?”
   “Of course.” Randy hurried into his office. Dan had two phones in his suite in the Riverside Inn. Randy dialed the private number. It was busy. He dialed Riverside Inn. Again, he heard the impersonal busy-beep. The inn had a switchboard. All its lines shouldn’t be busy. He tried the clinic building, although he knew it was most unlikely that Dan, or anybody, would be there at this hour. It was busy. He dialed operator. The same beep sounded in his ear. Once again, Randy tried Dan’s private number. The infuriating beep persisted. He gave up and announced, “I’ll have to drive into town and bring Dan out here.”
   At that moment the ground-conducted shock wave rocked the house.
   Peyton cried out, in her sightless terror. Helen pressed her down on the couch, murmuring reassuring mother words. Randy noticed that Ben Franklin was missing from the room.
   The blast and sound wave covered them, submerging all other sound and feeling. Again the kitchenware and glasses and china danced. A delicate vase of Viennese crystal crumpled into powder and shards on the mantle. The glass protecting a meticulous and vivid still life, a water color by Lee Adams, shattered in its frame with a loud report.
   Randy looked at his watch, marked the time, and did the flash-and-sound arithmetic in his head.
   Helen, watching him while soothing Peyton’s tense body with her fingers, watching and understanding, said, “What was it?”
   `what was MacDill,” Randy said. “Six minutes and fifteen seconds. That means seventy-five miles, just right for MacDill.” “MacDill means Tampa,” Helen said.
   “And St. Petersburg. You’ll be all right until I get back?” “We’ll be all right.”
   Randy banged into Ben Franklin on the stairs. “Where’ve you been?”
   “Opening up the windows and doors downstairs. Just made it. Not a window broke.”
   “Smart boy. Now you go on up and help your mother take care of Peyton. I’m going for the Doctor.”
   “Randy-” “Yes?”
   “I’m going to fill up all the pails and sinks and tubs with water. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know.”
   “I didn’t know.” Randy put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “But if that’s what you’re supposed to do, go ahead and do it.”
   Randy ran outside in time to see the Golden Dew Dairy truck careen past on River Road, headed for Fort Repose. The milkman was always a little late with his Saturday deliveries, since orders were heavier than on weekdays. He must have barely begun his route when the first blasts illuminated the sky in the south. Now he was racing home to his wife and children.
   As Randy reached his car he heard the undulating tocsin of the siren atop Fort Repose’s firehouse. A little redundant, he thought. Still, there was no sound quite like a siren wailing its air-raid alarm to spur people to constructive action-or paralyze them in fear.
   Randy caught and passed the milk truck before the turn in the road. A minute later he saw a big, new sedan overturned in the ditch, wheels still spinning. He slowed, and saw that the sedan’s front end was telescoped, its windshield shredded; that it bore New York plates. On the shoulder of the road lay a woman, arms outstretched, one bare leg grotesquely twisted under her back. Pallid flesh showed under blue and yellow checked shorts. Her upturned face was a red smear and he judged she was dead.
   In this second Randy made an important decision. Yesterday, he would have stopped instantly. There would have been no question about it. When there was an accident, and someone was hurt, a man stopped. But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Rome’s. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else. Already millions must be dead and other millions maimed, or doomed by radiation, for if the enemy was hitting Florida, they would hardly skip SAC bases and missile sites in more densely populated areas. Certainly they would not spare Washington and New York, the command posts and communication center of the whole nation. And the war was less than a half hour old. So one stranger on the roadside meant nothing, particularly with a blinded child, his blood kin, dependent on his mission. With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan.
   And yet Randy stopped. He touched the power brakes and burned rubber, swearing, and thinking himself soft and stupid. He backed, got out of the car, and examined the wreck. The woman was dead, her neck broken. She had been traveling alone. Examining the marks and a shattered cabbage palm, he deduced she was driving at high speed when the explosion at MacDill-he could see an orange patch in the southwest, probably fire storms consuming Tampa and St. Petersburg-unnerved or blinded her. She had swerved, hit the tree, and catapulted through the windshield. In the car were several pigskin bags, locks burst by the impact, and a pocketbook. He touched nothing. He would report the wreck to a road patrolman or deputy sheriff, if he could find one and when there was time.
   Randy drove on, although at reduced speed, for sight of a fatal accident always compels temporary caution. The incident was important only because it was self-revelatory. Randy knew he would have to play by the old riles. He could not shuck his code, or sneak out of his era.
   With respite for anxiety about what went on beyond his own sight and hearing, he clicked on his radio, tuned to a Conelrad frequency, 640, and turned it up to maximum power.
   All he heard was a distant and incoherent babble.
   He tried the other frequency, 1240. He heard a steady hum, and then the familiar voice of Happy Hedrix, the disk jockey on WSMF, in San Marco. `”This is a Civil Defense broadcast. Listen carefully, because we are only allowed to broadcast for thirty seconds, after which there will be two minutes of silence. An AP dispatch from Jacksonville says that a Red Alert was declared about thirty minutes ago. Another dispatch from Jacksonville says it is believed the country is under attack. Since that time, there has been disruption of communications between Jacksonville and the north.” Happy’s voice, usually so glib, was shaky and halting, and he seemed to have difficulty reading. “Obey the orders of your local Civil Defense Director. Do not use the telephone except for emergencies. You will receive further instructions later. This station will return to the air in two minutes.”
   Randy tuned in 640 again. Again, he heard many voices, far away and indistinguishable. He knew that under the Conelrad system all stations were required to operate at low power. He surmised that he was hearing a broadcast from Orlando or Ocala, but with interference from stations in other nearby cities, perhaps Daytona, or Leesburg and Eustis, not far off in Lake County. With every station confined to two frequencies, and limited to low-power operation, the confusion was understandable.
   A year before, Mark had warned him that the Conelrad system was tricky, and might not work at all. Mark had said, further, that the enemy was not dependent on radio homing devices to find the targets. “Conelrad,” Mark had said, “is as obsolete as the B-two-nine. Neither missiles nor jets equipped with modern radar and inertial guidance would think of homing on a radio beam. In the first phase, Conelrad is going to be next to useless, I’m afraid, except for local instructions. The news you get will be only as fresh and accurate as the news that comes in on the teletypes in your local stations. That news flows from the national news agencies. When their teletype circuits go out of business which will happen immediately when the big cities blow—everything will be screwed up. You’re not likely to find out anything until Phase Two-that’s the mopping-up stage when the first attack is over. In Phase Two the government will use clear channel stations to tell you what’s happening.”
   Mark apparently had been right about the inadequacy of Conelrad, as about all else. He wondered whether Mark was also right in his prediction that Offutt and the Hole would be one of the primary targets. Randy wondered whether Mark still lived, and how long it would be before he found out.
   On the edge of town he began to encounter traffic, heavier than usual and extraordinarily erratic. People were tensed over their wheels like racing drivers, even while moving at normal speeds, mouths set, eyes fixed, each intent on a personal crisis. Some obeyed the stop signs. Other cars progressed as if no hand were at the wheel.
   A dozen cars were lined up at Jerry Kling’s service station, blocking the sidewalk. Jerry was standing beside one of his pumps, filling a tank, and at the same time listening to three men, all gesticulating, all obviously demanding priority service. One of the men had a billfold in his hand and was waving money before Jerry’s eyes.
   Randy skirted Marines Park, a green triangular area, its walks lined with tall palms, its apex lapped by the waters of both Timucuan and St. Johns. Here, at the junction of the rivers, Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton had erected the original Fort Repose. The fort’s palm logs long ago had disintegrated, but relics remained, two small brass cannon. They were now mounted in concrete, and flanked the bandstand. Usually, on a bright Saturday morning, the tennis courts were occupied and the pre-breakfast lawn bowlers and shuffle boarders active. But today the park was deserted except for two youths slumped on a bench.
   He turned north on Yulee Street, and, three blocks further, into the driveway of Riverside Inn, which with its grounds occupied a block facing the St. Johns. The Riverside Inn catered to a vanishing race of hotel dwellers-widows, widowers, and elderly couples, supported by trusts, annuities, and dividends, spending their summers in New England or the Poconos, and each November migrating to Florida with the coots and mallards.
   Randy parked and went into the inn. Its ordered regimen had exploded with the first missile.
   The guests were milling around in the lobby like first-class passengers on a liner that has struck an iceberg, and that they suspect may founder at any moment. Some swarmed around the bellboys and assistant manager, babbling questions and demands. “I’ve been waiting in the dining room for fifteen minutes and I can’t seem to find a single waitress. . . . Are you sure you can’t get me a reservation on the Champion that leaves Orlando for New York tomorrow? . . . I’d like to know what’s wrong with the phone service? If my daughter doesn’t hear from me, she’ll be frantic. . . . The television in my room isn’t working. All television is off the air? Gracious, this really must be serious! . . . I’ve been a guest at this hotel for twenty-two seasons and this is the first time I’ve ever asked for anything special. . . . Is there any reason the hotel station wagon can’t take us to Tampa? . . . Please don’t think me timid, but I would like to know the location of a shelter. . . . It was that damned Roosevelt, at Yalta. . . . Do you think plane schedules will be interrupted for long? . . . You mean to say that your cooks have all cravenly left for their homes? I never heard of such a thing! They ought to be arrested. How, then, are we going to eat? . . . My husband slipped in the shower. I can’t seem to get him up. . . .”
   A retired major general, in full-dress uniform and displaying all his ribbons, burst out of the elevator. “Attention!” he cried. “Attention, everybody! Let’s have order here. You will all please be quiet. There is no cause for alarm!”
   Nobody heeded him.
   A bowlegged man, in Bermuda shorts and a bright red cap, a golf bag slung over one shoulder, and carrying two suitcases, bulled his way toward the entrance. He was followed by a woman wearing a fur coat over pajamas. She also was weighted with a golf bag, and held a jewel box under one arm and a make-up kit under the other. These two had a sanctuary, and a means of getting there, or so they believed. For most of the others, there was no place to go. They were rootless people. If the Riverside Inn sank, they must go down with the ship.

   Dan Gunn’s suite was on the second floor. Randy ignored the elevator and took the stairs two at a time.
   Dan’s rooms were empty, and his doctor’s bag missing. He was probably out on an emergency call, or at the clinic in the Medical Arts Building. Randy tried Dan’s private phone. There was no dial tone, only sounds like static. He lifted the room telephone. The hotel switchboard failed to answer.
   Randy heard voices in the hall, high-pitched and angry. He threw open the door.
   Feet apart and braced a thin, sallow woman, very pregnant, leaned against the wall. Her bony arms supported her abdomen, and she was sniffling. In the center of the hallway two men argued. The taller man was Jennings, manager of the Riverside Inn. The other man was John Garcia, a Minorcan fishing guide. Randy recognized the woman as Garcia’s wife.
   Jennings was saying, “She can’t have her baby here in the hotel. There’s too much confusion here already. You people will have to get out!”
   Garcia, an undersized man with face browned and shrunken by wind and sun, stepped back. His hand went to his hip pocket and he brought out a short, curved pruning knife, suitable for cutting lines, or slitting the bellies of perch and bass.
   Randy stepped between them. “Put that thing up, John,” he told Garcia. “I’ll get the Doctor.” He turned on Jennings. “Where’s Doctor Gunn?”
   “He’s busy,” Jennings said. “He’s very busy with one of our guests. A heart case. Tell these people to go to his clinic and wait.” “Where is he?”
   “It doesn’t matter. These people are trespassing.”
   Randy’s left hand grasped Jennings’ lapels. He slapped Jennings savagely across the face. He did this without any conscious thought except that it was necessary to slap the hysteria out of Jennings in order to locate Dan Gunn. He said, “Where is he?”
   Jennings’ knees buckled and Randy pinned him against the wall. “Let go! You’re choking me! Gunn is in two forty-four.” Randy relaxed his grip. The left side of Jennings’ face was flaming red and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Randy was astonished. This was the first time in his adult years that he had struck anyone, so far as he recalled, except one snarling North Korean line-Grosser. Jennings backed away, mumbling that he would call the police, and disappeared down the stairs. Randy told Garcia, “Take your wife in there. She can lie down on the bed. I’ll get Doctor Gunn.”
   Randy went down the hall and entered Room 244 without bothering to knock. It was a single room. On the bed lay a mound of gray flesh, a corpulent man past middle age, dead. Randy felt no sense of surprise or shock whatsoever. He had become a familiar of sudden death in Korea. This familiarity had left him, as a foreign language is quickly forgotten once you leave the country where it is spoken. Now it returned, as a foreign tongue is swiftly reacquired in its native land.
   Dan Gunn came out of the bathroom, drying his hands. “You’ve got more trouble waiting in your room,” Randy said. “A woman’s having a baby, or about to. Garcia’s wife.” Dan dropped his towel across the foot of the bed and pulled the ,sheet over the corpse. “Everybody who was going to have a coronary just had one,” he said, “and I suppose that every woman who was due to have a baby in the next two months is having one now. What’s your trouble, Randy?”
   “Peyton’s blind. You remember her from last year, don’t you? Helen’s little girl-not so little—eleven. I know you’re swamped, Dan, but “
   Dan raised his immensely long, hairy arms and cried out, “Oh, God! Why? Why to that child?”
   He looked and sounded like a rebellious Old Testament prophet. He looked and sounded half-mad. The worst thing that Randy could imagine, at that moment, was that Dan Gunn should lose his mental equilibrium. Randy said, “God had nothing to do with it. This was strictly man-made. The one that dropped on MacDill, or somewhere in the Tampa area. Peyton was looking right at it when it blew.”
   “Oh, the foul, life-destroying, child-destroying bastards! Those evil men, those evil and callous men! God damn them!” He used the expression as a true and awful curse, and then Dan’s arms drooped, his anger spent. He visibly shook off the madness. He said, “Sounds like a retina flash burn. To the human eye it’s what overexposure is to film. Her eyes can recover from that.”
   He looked down at the form on the bed. “Not much I can do for cardiacs. This was the third, right here in the hotel. Maybe the other two will live, for a while. It’s fear that kills ‘em, and the worst fear is that they’ll have a shock and not be able to reach the doctor. I pity all the other cardiacs around here, with the phones out. I pity them, but I can’t help them. You don’t have to worry so much with women having babies. They’ll have them whether I’m there or not, and chances are that both mother and baby will do all right.” He grasped Randy’s elbow. “Now let’s take a look at the Garcia woman, and then I’ll see about Peyton.” They left the room, and its lonely dead.
   Marie Garcia said her pains were coming at four—or five minute intervals. Dan said, “It’ll be much better if you can have the baby at home. It’ll be easier for me, too. This hotel is no place to be having a baby. Do you think you can make it?”
   Marie looked at her husband and nodded. Garcia said, “You’ll follow us, Doc?”
   “I’ll be right behind you,” Dan promised. He helped Marie to her feet. Leaning on John Garcia, she left, her lips compressed, awaiting the next clamp of pain, but her fear gone.
   Dan went into his bathroom and came out with a small bottle. “Eyedrops,” he said. “Once every three hours.” He dug into his bag and handed Randy a pillbox. “Sedative. One every four hours. And give her a couple of aspirins as soon as you get home. She stays in a dark room. Better yet, put a dark cloth over her eyes. As long as she knows she can’t see, she won’t strain her eyes trying. And it won’t frighten her so much. It’s frightening to open your eyes and not see.”
   “You’re coming out, aren’t you?” Randy asked.
   “Certainly. As soon as I can. I have to deliver this baby, and I have to check in at the clinic-God knows what’s waiting for me there-and I have to see Bloomfield. Somehow we have to coordinate what little we’ll be able to do. But soon as I can, I’ll be out to see Peyton. There really isn’t anything more I can do for her than you can do right now. And Randy-”
   “Yes?”
   “Did you get those prescriptions filled?” “No. I never had time.”
   “Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it for you. I’ll bring the stuff out when I come.”
   They left the hotel together. A gibbering woman, red-dish wig astray on her head like an ill-fitting beret, clawed at Dan’s arm. He shook himself loose. She dove for his medicine bag. He snatched it away and ran.
   Outside, they parted. Randy drove through town. Traffic was piling up. Those stores that opened early on Saturdays were crowded, and groups waited in front of others, and on the steps of the bank. There was as yet no disorder. It was a shopping rush, as on Christmas Eve. At the corner of Yulee and St. Johns he saw Cappy Foracre, the Fort Repose Chief of Police, directing traffic. He stopped and yelled, “Cappy, there’s a woman dead in a wreck out on River Road.”
   “That’s outside the town limits,” Cappy shouted. “Nothing I can do about it. I’ve got plenty of trouble right here.”
   Randy drove on, tuning his radio to the Conelrad frequencies, scouting for news. As before, the 640 channel brought only an incoherent jumble of distant voices, but Happy Hedrix was still broadcasting over WSMF, from San Marco, on 1240, although, obeying the Conelrad rules, he never mentioned the call sign. The AP ticker from Jacksonville told of a sea and air battle off the coast. The Governor had issued a pronouncement from Tallahassee—all target cities were to be evacuated at once. The cities named included Orlando and Jacksonville. There was no mention of Miami or Tampa.
   Randy wondered why the evacuation order originated in Tallahassee, instead of from a Civil Defense headquarters. Of the national situation, there was no word at all. Up to now, it sounded as if Florida were fighting the war alone. More than anything, Randy wanted news-real news. What had happened? What had happened everywhere? Was the war lost? If it was still being fought who was winning?
   On River Road he passed a dozen convicts, white men, clad in their blue denim with the white stripe down the trouser leg. They were straggling toward Fort Repose. Two of the convicts carried shotguns. Another had a pistol strapped to his waist. This was wrong. Road gang guards, not convicts, should be carrying the weapons. But the guards were missing. It wasn’t difficult to guess what had happened. The guards, some of them, were dour and sadistic men, skilled in unusual and degrading punishments. It was likely that any breakdown in government and authority would begin with a revolt of prisoners against road gang guards. There was a convict camp between Fort Repose and Pasco Creek. Randy guessed that these prisoners were being transported, by truck, to their work area, when the nuclear attack came. With realization, rebellion, and perhaps murder of the guards, had been almost instantaneous.
   He passed the wrecked car. The woman’s body still lay on the roadside. The luggage had been looted. Dresses, shoes, and lingerie littered the grassy shoulder. A pink-silk pajama top fluttered from a palmetto, a forlorn flag to mark the end of a vacation.
   As Randy reached his home, Florence Wechek’s Chevy bounced out of her driveway. He yelled, “Hey, Florence!” Florence stopped. Alice Cooksey was in the car with her. “Where are you going?” Randy asked.
   “To work,” Florence said. “I’m late.” “Don’t you know what’s happened?”
   “Certainly I know. That’s why it’s very important I open up the office. People will have all sorts of messages. This is an emergency, Randy.”
   “It sure is,” Randy said. “On the way to town you’ll see some convicts. They’re armed. Don’t stop.”
   Florence said, “I’ll be careful.” Alice smiled and waved. They drove on.
   On Friday night, Florence and Alice had split a bottle of sherry, an unaccustomed dissipation, and stayed up long past midnight, exchanging confidences, opinions, and gossip. As a result, Florence had neglected to set her alarm, and they had overslept. The explosions far to the south had shaken them awake, but it was not until some time later, when they had seen the glow in the sky, that Alice had thought to turn on the radio, and they first realized what was happening.
   Immediately, Florence wanted to start for the office. Having no close relatives, and approaching an age beyond which she could not reasonably hope for a proposal of marriage, and when even speculative second looks from rakish or lonely widowers had grown rare, her whole life centered in the office. Western Union didn’t expect her to open the wire until eight, but she was usually a bit early. Afternoons, she dreaded the relentless downsweep of the hour hand, which at five guillotined her day. After five, nothing awaited her except lovebirds, tropical fish, and vicarious journeys back to more romantic centuries via historical novels. In the office she was part of a busy and exciting world, a necessary communicating link in affairs of great importance to others. On this day of crisis, she could be the most important person in Fort Repose.
   Yet she allowed Alice to persuade her not to start at once. For such a wisp of a woman, Alice seemed remarkably brave and cool. Alice pointed out that Florence had better eat breakfast, because she’d need her strength and it might be many hours before she’d have an opportunity to eat again. And Alice had volunteered to go to town with her, although Florence had insisted it wasn’t necessary. “Who’s going to do any reading today?” she asked. “Why bother with the library?”
   “Maybe a good many people will be reading,” Alice said, “once they find out that Civil Defense pamphlets are stocked in the library. Not that it’s likely to be much help to them now, but perhaps it’ll help some. Bubba Offenhaus claimed they were taking up too much space in his office. So I offered to store them.” “You were farsighted.”
   “Do you think so? When two ships are on a collision course, and the men at the wheel inflexibly hold to that course, there is going to be a collision. You don’t have to be farsighted to see that.”
   And Alice had suggested that it would be wise for them to use their time and resources to buy provisions while they were in town. “Canned goods would be best, I think,” she said, “because if the lights go out, refrigeration goes too.”
   “Why should the lights go out?” Florence asked. “Because Fort Repose’s power comes from Orlando.” Florence didn’t quite understand this reasoning.
   Nevertheless, she followed Alice’s advice, listing certain essentials they would need and filling pails and bathtub with water before they left.
   Florence and Alice passed the dead woman and pillaged wreck on the way to town. It frightened them. But, when far ahead Florence saw the procession of convicts, and two of them, one armed, stepped into the middle of the road to wave her down, she stamped on the accelerator. The car quivered at a speed she never in her life had dared before. At the last second the two men jumped to safety and the others shook their fists, their mouths working but their curses unheard. Florence didn’t slow until she reached Marines Park. She dropped Alice at the library. She parked behind Western Union, which occupied a twenty-foot frontage in a one-story block of stores on Yulee Street. Her fingers were trembling and her legs felt numb. It was several seconds before her heart stopped jumping, and she found sufficient courage to enter her office. Fourteen or fifteen men and women, some of them strangers, swarmed in behind her. “Just a minute! Just a minute!” Florence said, and barricaded herself behind the protection of the counter.
   This was the first morning in years that she had been late, and so, on this of all mornings, waiting at the door would be more customers than she might customarily expect in a whole day. In addition, on Saturdays, Gaylord, her Negro messenger boy, was off His bicycle stood in the back of the office. “Now you will all have to wait,” she said, “while I open the circuit.”
   Fort Repose was one of a dozen small towns on a local circuit originating in Jacksonville and terminating in Tampa. Florence switched on her teleprinter and announced: “THIS IS FR RETURNING TO SERVICE.”
   Instantly the machine chattered back at her from JX, which was Jacksonville: “YOU ARE LIMITED TO ACCEPTING AND TRANSMTTTING OFFICIAL DEFENSE EMERGENCY MESSAGES ONLY UNTIL FUR THER NOTICE. NO MESSAGES ACCEPTED FOR POINTS NORTH OF JACKSONVILLE.”
   Florence acknowledged and inquired of Jacksonville: “ANY INCOMERS?”
   JX Said Curtly: “NO. FYI TAMPA IS OUT. JX EVACUATION ORDERED BUT WE STICKING UNTIL CIVIL DEFENSE FOLDS UP HERE.”
   Florence turned to her customers behind the counter, started to speak, and was battered by demands: “I was expecting a money order from Chattanooga this morning. Where is it? . . . I want you to get this off for New York right away. . . . Can I send a cable from here? My husband is in London and thinks I’m in Miami and I’m not in Miami at all. What is the name of this place? . . . This is a very important message. I tried to phone my broker but all the lines are tied up. It’s a sell order and I want you to get it right out. I’ll make it worth your while. . . . I can’t even telephone Mount Dora. Can I send a telegram to Mount Dora from here? . . . If I wire Chicago for money, how soon do you think before I’ll get an answer? . . .”
   Florence raised her hands. “Please be quiet—That’s better. I’m sorry, but I can’t take anything except official defense emergency messages. Anyway, nothing is going through north of Jacksonville.”
   She watched the transformation in their faces. They had been grim, determined, irritated. Suddenly, they were only frightened. The woman whose husband was in London murmured, “Nothing north of Jacksonville? Why, that’s awful. Do you think . . .”
   “I’ve just told you all I know,” Florence said. “I’m sorry. I can’t take any messages. And nothing has come in, nothing for anybody.” She pitied them. “Come back in a few hours. Maybe things will be better.”
   At a quarter to nine Edgar Quisenberry, the president of the bank, stepped into the Western Union office. His face was pink and shaven, he was dressed in a new blue suit, white handkerchief peeping from the breast pocket, and he wore, a correct dark blue tie. His manner was brisk, confident, and businesslike, which was the way a banker should behave in time of crisis. In his hand he carried a telegram, already typed up at the bank. “Good morning, Miss Wechek,” he said, and smiled.
   Florence was surprised. The bank was her best customer, and yet she rarely saw Edgar Quisenberry, in person, and she never before had seen him smile. “Good morning, Mr. Quisenberry,” she said.
   “Really can’t say there’s anything good about it,” Edgar said. “Reminds me of Pearl Harbor Day. That bunch in Washington have been caught napping again. I’d like you to send this message for me-” he slid it across the counter-”the telephone seems to be out of order, temporarily, or I would have called.”
   She picked up the telegram. It was addressed to the Atlanta branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, and it read: “URGENTLY NEED DIRECTIVE ON HOW TO HANDLE CURRENT SITUATION.” Florence said, “I’ve just received orders not to accept anything but official defense emergency messages, Mr. Quisenberry.” Edgar’s smile disappeared. “There isn’t anything more official than the Federal Reserve Bank, Miss Wechek.”
   “Well, now I don’t know about that, Mr. Quisenberry.” “You’d better know, Miss Wechek. Not only is this message official, but in a defense emergency there isn’t anything more important than maintaining the financial integrity of the community. You will get this message off right away, Miss Wechek.” He looked up at the clock. “It is now thirteen to nine. I’m going to ask for a report on exactly how quickly this is delivered.” Florence was flustered. She knew Edgar Quisenberry could make a great deal of trouble for her. However, Atlanta was far north of Jacksonville. She said, “We don’t have any communication with any points north of Jacksonville, Mr. Quisenberry.” “That’s ridiculous!”
   “I’m sorry, Mr. Quisenberry.”
   “Very well.” Edgar snatched the telegraph blank from the counter and revised the address. “There. Send it to the Jacksonville sub-branch.”
   Hesitating, Florence took the message and said, “I’ll see if they’ll accept it, Mr. Quisenberry.”
   “They’d better. I’ll wait.”
   She sat down at the teleprinter, called in JX, and typed: “I HAVE MESSAGE FOR JX SUB-BRANCH OF FEDERAL RESERVE. SENDER IS EDGAR QUISENBERRY, PRESIDENT OF FIRST NATIONAL BANK. WILL YOU TAKE IT?”
   JX replied: “IS IT AN OFFICIAL DEF . . .”
   Florence blinked. For an instant it seemed that someone had flashed mirrored sunlight into her eyes. At the same instant, the message from JX stopped. “That’s funny,” she said. “Did you see anything, Mr. Quisenberry?”
   “Nothing but a little flash of light. Where did it come from?” The teleprinter chattered again. “PK To CIRCUIT. BIG EXPLO-SION IN DIRECTION JX. WE CAN SEE MUSHROOM CLOUD.” PK meant Palatka, a small town on the St. Johns south of Jacksonville.
   Florence rose and walked to the counter with Edgar’s message. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Quisenberry,” she said, “but I can’t send this. Jacksonville doesn’t seem to be there any more.”
   Fort Repose’s financial structure crumbled in a day.
   During the winter season the First National was open on Saturday mornings from nine until noon, and Edgar saw no reason why a war should interfere with banking hours. Like almost everyone else, he was awakened by the rumble of the first distant explosions, and he felt a thrill of fear when the siren on the firehouse let loose. He urged his wife, Henrietta, to make breakfast at once while he tried to put through a long distance call to Atlanta. When his phone made strange noises, and the operator would not respond, he listened to the scanty, thirty-second local news broadcasts. Hearing nothing that sounded immediately alarming for Fort Repose, he reminded Henrietta that nothing drastic had occurred afrer Pearl Harbor. On the Monday after Pearl Harbor there had been no runs, and no panic. Nevertheless, he could not force himself to finish his bacon and eggs. He left for the bank fifteen minutes earlier than usual.
   But at the bank nothing was right. The phones weren’t working there, either, and at eight-thirty, when his staff should have reported for work half his people hadn’t shown up. At about the same time he noticed a line of depositors forming at the front entrance, and it was this that made him decide to send a wire to Federal Reserve. He had never received any instructions on what to do in an emergency of this kind, and, as a matter of fact, had never even considered it.
   Western Union’s failure to send his telegram worried Edgar somewhat, but he told himself that it was impossible that the enemy could have bombed all these big cities at once. It was probably some sort of mechanical trouble that would be cleared up before long, just as repairmen would soon have the Fort Repose phone system back in working order.
   When the bank’s doors opened at nine the people seemed orderly enough. It was true that everyone was withdrawing cash, and nobody making deposits. Edgar wasn’t overly worried. There was almost a quarter million cash on hand, a far higher ratio of cash than regulations required, but consistent with his conservative principles.
   In ten minutes Edgar’s optimism dwindled. Mrs. Estes, his senior teller, turned over her cage to the bookkeeper and entered his office. “Mr. Quisenberry,” she said, “these aren’t ordinary withdrawals. These people are taking out everything-savings accounts and all.”
   “No reason for that,” Edgar snapped. “They ought to know the bank is sound.”
   “May I suggest that we limit withdrawals? Let them take out enough so that each family can buy what’s necessary in the emergency. In that way we can stay open until noon, and there won’t be any panic. It’ll protect the merchants, too.”
   Edgar was incensed by her effrontery, practically amounting to insubordination. “When you are president of this bank,” he said, “then it will be up to you to make such decisions. But let me tell you something, Mrs. Estes. The only way to stop a run on a bank is to shovel out the cash. As soon as you do that, people regain confidence and the run stops.”
   “It’s entirely different today, Mr. Quisenberry. Don’t you see that? You have to assume some sort of leadership or there’s going to be a panic.”
   “Mrs. Estes, will you please return to your cage. I’ll run the bank.”
   This was Edgar’s first, and perhaps his vital error.
   Corrigan, the mailman, came in and dropped a packet of letters on the secretarial desk. Edgar was heartened to see Corrigan. The good old U.S. government still functioned. “Neither rain nor snow nor dark of night,” Edgar said, smiling.
   “This is my last delivery,” Corrigan said. “Planes and trains aren’t running, and the truck didn’t come in from Orlando this morning. This batch is from last night. We can accept outgoing mail but we don’t guarantee when it will go out, if ever.”
   Corrigan left and wedged himself into a queue before one of the teller windows.
   Paralysis of the United States mail was more of a shock to Edgar Quisenberry than anything that had occurred thus far. At last, he confessed to himself the impossible reality of the day. Realization did not come all at once. It could not, for his mind refused to assimilate it. He attempted to accept the probability that the Treasury in Washington, Wall Street, and Federal Reserve banks everywhere, all were now radioactive ash. No longer any clearinghouses or correspondent banks. He was sickened by the realization that a great part of his own assets-that is, the assets of his bank-were no longer assets at all. Of what use were Treasury bonds and notes when there was no Treasury? What good were the municipal bonds of Tampa, Jacksonville, and Miami when there were no municipalities? Who would straighten all this out, and how, and when? Who would tell him? Who would know? With all communications out, he could not even confer with fellow bankers in San Marco. He began to sweat. He took out his fountain pen and began jotting down figures on a scratch pad. If he could just get everything down in figures, they ought to balance. They always had.
   Edgar’s cashier came into the office and said, “We’re not cashing out-of-town checks, are we, Mr. Quisenberry?” “Certainly not! How can we cash out-of-town checks when we don’t know whether a town’s still there?” Edgar flinched, remembering that only yesterday he had cashed a big check for Randolph Bragg on an Omaha bank. Certainly Omaha, right in the center of the country, ought to be safe. Edgar had never given much thought to all the talk about rockets and missiles and such. He always prided himself on keeping his feet firmly on the ground, and examining the facts in a hardheaded, practical manner. And the facts, as he had publicly stated, were that Russia intended to defeat the United States by scaring us into an inflationary, socialistic depression, and not by tossing missiles at us. The country was basically sound and the Russians would never attack a basically sound country. And yet they had attacked, and if they could hit Florida they could hit Omaha-or anywhere.
   His cashier, Mr. Pennyngton, a thin man with a veined nose and nervous stomach, a man given to fretting over detail, clasped his hands tightly together as if to prevent his fingers from flying off into space. He asked another question, haltingly: “Mr. Quisenberry, what about travelers checks? Do we cash those?”
   “No sir! Travelers checks are usually redeemed in New York, and between me and you, I don’t think there’ll be much left of New York.”
   “And what about government savings bonds, sir? There are some people in line who want to cash in their bonds.”
   Edgar hesitated. To refuse to cash government savings bonds was fiduciary sacrilege so awful that the possibility never before had entered his head. Yet here he was, faced with it. “No,” he decided, “we don’t cash any bonds. Tell those individuals that we won’t cash any bonds until we find out where the government stands, or if.”
   The news that First National was refusing to honor travelers checks and government bonds spread through Fort Repose’s tiny business section in a few minutes. The merchants, grocers, druggists, the proprietors of specialty shops and filling stations, deduced that if travelers checks and government bonds were worthless, then all checks would soon be worthless. Since opening their doors that morning, all sales records had been smashed. Everybody was buying everything, which to the shopkeepers was exhilarating as well as frightening. Most of them, from the first, had been cautious, refusing to accept out-of-town checks, except, of course, payroll and annuity and government pension checks, which everyone assumed were always as good as cash. When the bank acted, their first reaction was to regard all paper except currency as probably worthless.
   Their next reaction was to race to the bank and attempt to convert their suddenly suspect paper assets into currency. Looking out through the office door, Edgar watched the queues in the lobby, hoping they would shorten. Instead, they lengthened. He called Mr. Pennyngton and together they checked the cash position. Incredibly, in a single hour it had been reduced to $145,000. If continued at this rate, the bank would be stripped of currency by eleven-thirty, and Edgar guessed that the rate of withdrawals would only increase. Edgar Quisenberry made his decision. He went into the four tellers’ cages and, one by one, removed the cash drawers and carried them into the vault. He then closed and locked the vault. He walked back to the lobby, stepped up on a chair, and raised his hands. “Quiet please,” he said.
   At that moment, there were perhaps sixty people in the queues. They had been murmuring. They were silent.
   “For the benefit of all depositors, I have been forced to order that the bank be temporarily closed,” Edgar said.
   They were all looking up at him. He was relieved to see Cappy Foracre, the Chief of Police, and another officer, turning people away from the door. Apparently, they had sensed there might be trouble. Yet Edgar saw no menace in the faces below. They looked confused and uncomprehending, dumb and ineffectual as cattle barred from the barn at nightfall. He said, “This temporary closing has been ordered by the government as an emergency measure.” It was only a white lie. He was quite sure that had he been able to get in touch with Federal Reserve, this is the course that would have been advised.
   His depositors continued to stare at him, as if expecting something more. He said, “I can assure you that your savings are safe. Remember, all deposits up to ten thousand dollars are insured by the government. The bank is sound and will be reopened as soon as the emergency is over. Thank you.”
   He stepped down and returned to his office, careful to maintain a businesslike and dignified attitude. The people trickled out. He kept his staff busy until past noon balancing books and accounts. When all was in order, he advanced each employee a week’s salary, in cash, and informed them that he would get in touch with them when they were needed. When all had left, and he was entirely alone, he felt relieved. He had saved the bank. His position was still liquid. Dollars were good, and the bank still had dollars. Since he was the bank, and the bank was his, this meant that he possessed the ready cash to survive personally any foreseeable period of economic chaos.
   Edgar’s calculations were not correct. He had forgotten the implacable law of scarcity.
   Like most small towns, Fort Repose’s food and drug supply was dependent upon daily or thrice weekly deliveries from warehouses in the larger cities. Each day tank trucks replenished its filling stations. For all other merchandise, it was dependent upon shipments by mail, express, and highway freight, from jobbers and manufacturers elsewhere. With the Red Alert, all these services halted entirely and at once. Like thousands of other towns and villages not directly seared by war, Fort Repose became an island. From that moment, its inhabitants would have to subsist on whatever was already within its boundaries, plus what they might scrounge from the countryside.
   Provisions and supplies melted from the shelves. Gasoline drained steadily from the pumps. Closing of the First National failed to inhibit the buying rush. Before closing, the bank had injected an extra $100,000 in cash into the economy, unevenly distributed. And strangers appeared, eager to trade what was in their wallets for necessities of the moment and the future.
   The people of Fort Repose had no way of knowing it, but establishments on the arterial highways leading down both coasts, and crisscrossing between the large cities, had swiftly been stripped of everything. From the time of the Red Alert, the highways had been jammed with carloads of refugees, seeking asylum they knew not where. The mushroom cloud over Miami emptied Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale. The tourists instinctively headed north on Route 1 and AlA, as frightened birds seek the nest. By nightfall, they would be stopped outside the radioactive shambles of Jacksonville. Some fled westward toward Tampa, to discover that Tampa had exploded in their face. The evacuation of Jacksonville, partially accomplished before missiles sought out the Navy Air complex, sent some of its people toward Savannah and Atlanta. Neither city existed. Others sped south, toward Orlando, to meet the evacuees from Orlando rushing toward the holocaust in Jacksonville. When the authorities in Tallahassee suspected that the fallout from Jacksonville, carried by the east wind, would blanket the state capital, they ordered evacuation. Some from Tallahassee drove south on Route 27, toward Tampa, unaware that Tampa was no longer there.
   This chaos did not result from a breakdown in Civil Defense. It was simply that Civil Defense, as a realistic buffer against thermonuclear war, did not exist. Evacuation zones for entire cities had never been publicly announced, out of fear of “spreading alarm.” Only the families of military personnel knew what to do, and where to go and assemble. Military secrecy forbade radio identification of those cities already destroyed, since this might be information for the enemy.
   In Florida alone several hundred thousand families were on the move, few with provisions for more than one day and some with nothing at all except a car and money. So of necessity they were voracious and all-consuming as army ants. The roadside shops, restaurants, filling stations, bars, and juice stands along the four-lane highways were denuded of stocks, or put out a sign claiming so. Only the souvenir shacks, with their useless pink flamingos and tinted shells, were not picked clean. This is why strangers, swinging off these barren highways, invaded Fort Repose and other little towns off the main traffic streams.
   Those people in Fort Repose who remembered rationing from the second World War also remembered what goods had been in short supply, back in ‘forty-two and ‘forty-three, and bought accordingly. There were runs on tires, coffee, sugar, cigarettes, butter, the choicer cuts of beef, and nylon stockings. Some proprietors, realizing that these items were vanishing, instituted their own rationing systems.
   The more thoughtful wives bought portable radios and extra batteries, candles, kerosene lanterns, matches, lighter fluid and flints, first-aid kits, and quantities of soap and toilet paper.
   When news spread that armed convicts, escaped from road gangs, had been seen near the town; Beck’s Hardware sold out of rifles, shotguns, pistols, and very nearly out of ammunition.
   By afternoon the cash registers of Fort Repose were choked with currency, but many shelves and counters were bare and others nearly so. By afternoon the law of scarcity had condemned the dollar to degradation and contempt. Within a few more days the dollar, in Fort Repose, would be banished entirely as a medium of exchange, at least for the duration.
   Sitting alone in his office, Edgar Quisenberry was aware of none of these facts, nor could his imagination anticipate the dollar’s fall, any more than he could have imagined the dissolution of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System in the space of a single hour. Methodically, he read through the last batch of mail. There was nothing of any great importance, except heartening items in the Kiplinger Letter, predicting another increase in FHA mortgage rates, and better retail business in the South during the Christmas season. Also, from Detroit there was notice of a ten percent stock dividend in automobile shares in his personal portfolio. He’d certainly got in on the ground floor of that one, he thought. He hoped nothing happened to Detroit, but he had a disquieting feeling that something would, or had.

   At two o’clock, as always on Saturdays, he left the bank, first setting the time lock on the vault for eight-thirty Monday morning. His car was a black Cadillac, three years old. He recalled that during the last big war automobile production had halted. He decided that on Monday, or perhaps this very afternoon, he would drive to San Marco and see what sort of a trade he could make on a new Caddy. Henrietta would be pleased, and it would be a hedge against long disruption of the economy.
   When he started the engine he saw that his gas was low, and on the way home stopped at Jerry Kling’s service station. He was surprised that there was no line of cars waiting, as there had been early that morning. Then he saw the big cardboard sign with its emphatic red lettering: SORRY. NO MORE GAS.
   Edgar honked and Jerry came out of the station, looking worn and limp. “Yes, Mr. Quisenberry?” Jerry said.
   “That’s just to keep away tourists and floaters and such, isn’t it?” Edgar said.
   “No, sir, I’m not only out of gas, I’m out of tires, spark plugs, batteries, thirty-weight oil, vulcanizing kits, drinks and candy, and low on everything else.”
   “I’ve got to have gas. I’m just about out.”
   “I should’ve put up that sign an hour after I opened. You know what, Mr. Quisenberry? I sold plumb out of tires before I got to thinking I needed new tires myself. I just let myself be charmed by that bell on the cash register. What a damn fool! I’ve got nothing but money.”
   “I don’t know that I can get home,” Edgar said.
   “I think we’ll all be walking pretty soon, Mr. Quisenberry.” Jerry sighed. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’re an old customer. I’ve got a drum stashed away in the stockroom. I’ll let you have three gallons. Back that thing up by the ramp, so nobody’ll see.” When he had his three gallons, Edgar brought out his wallet and said, “How much?”
   Jerry laughed and raised his hands in a gesture of repugnance. “Keep it! I don’t want money. What the hell’s money good for? You can’t drive it and you can’t eat it and it won’t even fix a flat.”
   Edgar drove on slowly, hunched over the wheel. He knew, vaguely, that in the Second World War the Greek drachma and Hungarian pengo had become utterly worthless. And in the War of the Revolution the shilling of the Continental Congress hadn’t been worth, in the British phrase, a Continental damn. But nothing like this had ever happened to the dollar. If the dollar was worthless, everything was worthless. There was a phrase he had heard a number of times, “the end of civilization as we know it.” Now he knew what the phrase meant. It meant the end of money.
   When Edgar reached home Henrietta’s car was gone. He found a note in the salver on the hall table. It read:
   1:30.
   Edgar—tried to get you all morning but the phone is still out of order. The radio doesn’t say much but I am frightened. Nevertheless, I am off to do the grocery shopping. I hope the stores aren’t crowded. I do think that henceforth I will shop on Tuesdays or Wednesdays instead of Saturdays. Hadn’t we better have both cars filled with gas? There may be a shortage. You remember how it was last time, with those silly A and B ration cards.
   You didn’t leave any money when you rushed off this morning, but I can always cash checks. It may be hard for a while, but life goes on.
   HENRIETTA
   Edgar went up to the master bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. What a fool she was. Life goes on, she said. How could life go on with no Federal Reserve, no Treasury, no Wall Street, no bonds, no banks?
   Henrietta didn’t understand it at all. How could life go on if dollars were worthless? How could anybody live without dollars, or credit, or both? She didn’t understand that the Bank had become only a heap of stone filled with worthless paper, so his credit would be no better than anybody’s credit. If dollars were worthless then there was nothing they could buy. You couldn’t even buy a ticket, say, to South America, and even if you could how would you get to an airport? Grocery shopping, indeed! How would they shop a week, or a month from now?
   Henrietta was a fool. This was the end. Civilization was ended. Of one thing, Edgar was certain. He would not be crushed with the mob. He had been a banker all his life and that was the way he was going to die, a banker. He would not allow himself to be humiliated. He would not be reduced to begging gasoline or food, and be dragged down to the level of a probationary teller. He thought of all the notes outstanding that now would never be paid, and how his debtors must be chuckling. He scorned the improvident, and now the improvident would be just as good as the careful, the sound, the thrifty. Well, let them try to go on without dollars. He would not accept such a world.
   He found the old, nickel-plated revolver, purchased by his father many years before, in the top drawer of his bureau. Edgar had never fired it. The bullets were green with mold and the ham mer rusted. He put it to his temple, wondering whether it would work. It did.

Chapter 6

   Always before, important events and dates had been marked in memory with definite labels, not only such days as Thanksgiving, New Year’s, and Lincoln’s Birthday, but Pearl Harbor Day, D-Day, VE-Day, VJ-Day, Income Tax Day. This December Saturday, ever after, was known simply as The Day. That was sufficient. Everybody remembered exactly what they did and saw and said on The Day. People unconsciously were inclined to split time into two new periods, before The Day, and after The Day. Thus a man might say, “Before The Day I was an automobile dealer. Now I operate a trotline for catfish.” Or a mother might boast, “Oh, yes, Oscar passed his college boards. Of course that was before The Day.” Or a younger mother say, “Hope was born after The Day, I wonder about her teeth.”
   This semantic device was not entirely original. Several generations of Southerners had referred to before and after “The War” without being required to explain what war. It seemed incongruous to call The Day a war-Russo-American, East-West, or World War III-because the war really was all over in a single day. Furthermore, nobody in the Western Hemisphere ever saw the face of a human enemy. Very few actually saw an enemy aircraft or submarine, and missiles appeared only on the most sensitive radar screens. Most of those who died in North America saw nothing at all, since they died in bed, in a millisecond slipping from sleep into deeper darkness. So the struggle was not against a human enemy, or for victory. The struggle, for those who survived The Day, was to survive the next.
   This truth was not quickly or easily assimilated by Randy Bragg, although he was better prepared for it than most. It was totally outside his experience and without precedent in history.
   On The Day itself, whatever else he might be doing, he was never beyond sound of a radio, awaiting the news that ought to accompany war-news of victories or defeats, mobilization, proclamations, declarations, a message from the President, words of leadership, steadfastness and unity. Altogether, there were seven radios in the house. All of them were kept turned on except the clock-radio in Peyton’s room where the child, her eyes lubricated and bandaged, slept with the help of Dan Gunn’s sedatives.
   Even when he ran up or down stairs, or discovered imperative duties outside, Randy carried his tiny transistor portable. Twice he left the grounds, once on a buying mission to town, again briefly to visit the McGoverns. The picture window on the river side of the McGovern home had been cracked by concussion, and this, rather than the more terrifying and deadly implications of The Day, had had a traumatic effect on Lavinia. She had been fed sleeping pills and put to bed. Lib and her father were functioning well, even bravely. Randy was relieved. He could not escape his primary duty, which was to his own family, his brother’s wife and children. He could not devote his mind and energy to the protection of two houses at once.
   Until midafternoon, Randy heard only the quavery and uninformative thirty-second broadcasts from WSMF.
   Now he was downstairs, in the dining room with Helen. She had been making an inventory of necessities in the house, discovering a surprising number of items she considered essential, war or no war, which Randy had entirely forgotten. He was eating steak and vegetables-Helen, disapproving of his cannibal sandwiches, had insisted on cooking for him-and washing it down with orange juice. Leaning back in the scarred, massive captain’s chair he relaxed for the first time since dawn. A weari—ness flowed upward from his throbbing legs. He had slept only two or three hours in the past thirty-six, and he knew that when he finished eating the fatigue would seep through his whole body, and it would be necessary to sleep again. Across the circular, waxed teak table, looking fresh and competent, Helen sipped a Scotch and checked what she called her “must” list. “One of us,” she was saying, “has got to make another trip to town. I have to have detergent for the dishwasher and washing machine, soap powder, paper napkins, toilet paper. We ought to have more candles and I wish I could get my hands on some more old-fashioned kerosene lamps. And, Randy, what about ammunition? I don’t like to sound scary, but “
   The radio, in an interval of silence between the local Conelrad broadcasts, suddenly squealed with an alien and powerful carrier wave. Then they heard a new voice. “This is your national Civil Defense Headquarters. . . .”
   The front legs of Randy’s chair hit the floor. He was wide awake again. The voice was familiar, the voice of a network newscaster, not one of the best known New York or Washington correspondents, but still recognizable, a strong and welcome voice connecting them with the world beyond the borders of Timucuan County. It continued:
   “All local Conelrad stations will please leave the air now, and whenever they hear this signal. This is an emergency clear channel network. If the signal strength is erratic, do not change stations. It is because the signal is rotated between a number of transmitters in order to prevent bombing by enemy aircraft. The next voice you hear will be that of the Acting Chief Executive of the United States, Mrs. Josephine Vanbruuker-Brown-”
   Randy couldn’t believe it. Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the President’s Cabinet, or had been until this day.
   Then they heard her Radcliffe-Boston voice. It was Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown, all right. She said:
   “Fellow countrymen. As all of you know by now, at dawn this morning this country, and our allies in the free world, were attacked without warning with thermonuclear and atomic weapons. Many of our great cities have been destroyed. Others have been contaminated, and their evacuation ordered. The toll of innocent lives taken on this new and darker day of infamy cannot as yet even be estimated.”
   These first sentences had been clearly and bravely spoken. Now her voice faltered, as if she found it difficult to say what it was now necessary to say. “The very fact that I speak to you as the Chief Executive of the nation must tell you much.”
   They heard her sob. “No President,” Helen whispered.
   “No Washington,” Randy said. “I guess she was out of Washington, at home, or speaking somewhere, and wherever she lives-”
   Randy hushed. Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown was talking again:
   “Our reprisal was swift, and, from the reports that have reached this command post, effective. The enemy has received terrible punishment. Several hundred of his missile and air bases, from the Chukchi Peninsula to the Baltic, and from Vladivostok to the Black Sea, have certainly been destroyed. The Navy has sunk or damaged at least a hundred submarines in North American waters.
   “The United States has been badly hurt, but is by no means defeated.
   “The battle goes on. Our reprisals continue.
   “However, further enemy attacks must be expected. There is reason to believe that enemy air forces have not as yet been fully committed. We must be prepared to withstand heavy blows.
   “As Chief Executive of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, I hereby declare a state of unlimited national emergency until such time as new elections are held, and Congress reconvenes.
   “In the devastated areas, and in those other areas where normal functions of government cannot be carried out, I hereby declare martial law, to be administered by the Army. I appointed Lieutenant General George Hunneker Army Chief of Staff, and Director of Martial Law in the Zone of the Interior, which means within the forty-nine states.
   “There have been grave dislocations of communications, of industrial, economic, and financial functions. I declare, effective at this moment, a moratorium on the payment of all debts, rents, taxes, interest, mortgages, insurance claims, and premiums, and all and any other financial obligations for the duration of the emergency.
   “From time to time, God willing, I will use these facilities to bring you further information, as it is received, and to issue further decrees as they become necessary. I call upon you to obey the orders of your local Civil Defense directors, state and municipal authorities, and of the military. Do not panic. “Some of you may have guessed how it happens that I, the head of the most junior of government departments and a woman, have been forced to assume the duties and responsibilities of Chief Executive on this, the most terrible day in our history.
   “One of the first targets of the enemy was Washington. “So far as we have been able to discover at this hour, neither the President nor the Vice President, nor any other Cabinet member, nor the leaders of House or Senate survived. It appears certain that only a small percentage of the members of the Congress escaped. I survive only by chance, because this morning I was in another city, on an inspection tour. I am now in a military command post of relative safety. I have designated this command post Civil Defense Headquarters, as well as temporary seat of government.”
   Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown coughed and choked, recovered herself and continued: “With a sick heart, but the resolution to lead the nation to victory and peace, I leave you for the time being.”
   The radio hummed for a second, the carrier wave cut off, and then there was silence.
   Randy said, “It’s about what I expected, but it’s awful to hear it.”
   “Still,” Helen said, “there is a government.”
   “I guess that’s some comfort. I wonder what’s left. I mean, what cities are left.”
   Helen looked up at Randy. She looked at him, and through him, and far away. Her hands came together on the table, and her fingers intertwined; when she spoke it was in a soft, almost inaudible voice, as if her thoughts were so fragile that they would be shattered by more than a whisper. “Do you think-is it possible-that the military command post she spoke of could be Offutt Field? Do you think she might be down in what we call the Hole, at SAC Headquarters? If she is at SAC, you know what that means, don’t you?”
   “It could mean that Mark is okay. But Helen-” “Yes?
   Randy didn’t think it likely that Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown was speaking from Omaha. The odds were against it. There were many headquarters, and the first one the enemy would try to destroy, after Washington itself, was SAC. Mark had feared this, and so did he. He said, “I don’t think we should count on it.” “I’m not counting on it. I’m just praying. If Mark is alive how long do you think it’ll be before we hear from him?”
   “I can’t even guess. But I do know who can make an educated guess. Admiral Hazzard. He lives on the other side of the Henrys’ place. He listens to short wave and keeps up with every thing that goes on. He served a tour in ONI, and later was on the Intelligence staff of the Joint Chiefs-I think that was his last duty before they retired him. So if anybody around here should know what’s happening then old Sam Hazzard should know.”
   “Can we see him?”
   “Of course we can see him. Any time we want. It’s only a quarter mile. But we can’t leave Peyton alone and I don’t have any idea what time Dan Gunn will get here.” His arms felt wooden, and detached, and his head too heavy for his neck. His chin dropped on his chest. “And I’m so blasted tired, Helen. I feel that if I don’t get a couple of hours of real sleep I’ll go off my rocker. If I don’t get some rest I won’t be much good from here in, and God knows what’ll happen tonight.”
   Helen said, “I’m sorry, Randy. Of course you’re groggy. Go on up stairs and get some sleep. I’m going to drive to town. There’s so much stuff we’ve just got to have.”
   “Suppose Peyton calls? I’ll never wake up.”
   “Ben Franklin will be here. I’ll tell him to wake you up if anything serious happens.”
   “Okay. Be careful. Don’t stop for anybody on the way to town.” Randy went upstairs, each step an effort. It was true, he thought, that women had more stamina than men.
   Randy decided not actually to take off his clothes and get into bed because once he got under the covers he would never get up. Instead, he took off his shoes and dropped down on the couch in the living room. He stared at the gunrack on the opposite wall. Until very recent years guns had been an important part of living on the Timucuan. Randy guessed they might become important again. He had quite an arsenal. There was the long, old-fashioned 30-40 Krag fitted with sporting sights; the carbine he had carried in Korea, dismantled, and smuggled home; two .22 rifles, one equipped with a scope; a twelve-gauge automatic, and a light, beautifully balanced. twenty-gauge double-barreled shotgun. In the drawer of his bedside table was a .45 automatic and a .22 target pistol hung in a holster in his closet.
   Ammo. He had more than he would ever need for the big rifle, the carbine, and the shotguns. But he had only a couple of boxes of .22’s, and he guessed that the .22’s might be the most useful weapons he owned, if economic chaos lasted for a long time, a meat shortage developed, and it became necessary to hunt small game. He rose and went into the hallway and shouted down at the stairwell, “Helen!”
   “Yes?” She was at the front door.
   “If you get a chance drop in at Beck’s Hardware and buy some twenty-two caliber long-rifle hollow points.”
   “Just a second. I’ll write it down on my list. Twenty-two long-rifle hollow points. How many?”
   “Ten boxes, if they have them.”
   Helen said, “I’ll try. Now, Randy, get some sleep.”
   Back on the couch, he closed his eyes, thinking of guns, and hunting. In his father’s youth, this section of Florida had been a hunter’s paradise, with quail, dove, duck, and deer in plenty, and even black bear and a rare panther. Now the quail were scattered and often scarce. Three coveys roamed the grove, and the hammock behind the Henrys’ place. Randy had not shot quail for twelve years. When visitors noticed his gunrack and asked about quail shooting, he always laughed and said, “Those guns are to shoot people who try to shoot my quail.” The quail were more than pets. They were friends, and wonderful to watch, parading across lawn and road in the early morning.
   Only the ducks were now truly plentiful in this area, and they were protected by Federal law. Once in a while he shot a rattlesnake in the grove, or a moccasin near the dock. And that was all he shot. Still, there were rabbits and squirrels, and so the .22 ammo might come in handy. A long time ago-he could not have been more than fourteen or fifteen-he remembered hunting deer with his father, and shooting his first deer with buckshot from the double-twenty. His first, and his last, for the deer had not died instantly, and had seemed small and piteous, twitching in the palmetto scrub, until his father had dispatched it with his pistol. He could still see it, and the round, bright red spots on the green fronds. He shivered, and he slept.
   Randy awoke in darkness. Graf was barking, and he heard voices downstairs. He turned on a light. It was nine-thirty. He had slept almost four hours. He felt refreshed, and good for whatever might come through the night. He was putting on his shoes when the door opened and Helen came into his apartment, followed by Ben Franklin and Dan Gunn.
   “I was just going to wake you up,” Helen said. “Dan is going in to look at Peyton.”
   Dan’s eyes were hollowed, and his face carved with fissures of exhaustion. Randy said, “Have you eaten anything today, Dan>“
   “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
   Helen said, “You’ll eat, Doctor, right after you’ve seen Peyton. Do you want me to go in with you?”
   “You and Randy can both come in with me. But don’t say anything. Let me do the talking.”
   They went into the child’s room. Randy flicked on the overhead light. “Not that one,” Dan said. “I want a dim light at first.” He turned on a lamp on the dressing table.
   Peyton’s hands crept out from under the sheet and touched the bandages over her eyes. “Hello,” she said, her voice small and frightened.
   “Hello, dear,” Helen said. “Doctor Gunn is here to see you. You remember Doctor Gunn from last year, don’t you?”
   “Oh, yes. Hello, Doctor.”
   Dan said, “Peyton, I’m going to take the bandage off your eyes. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see anything. There isn’t much light in the room.”
   Randy found he was holding his breath. Dan removed the bandage, saying, “Now, don’t rub your eyes.”
   Peyton tried to open her eyes. She said, “They’re stuck. They feel all gooey.”
   “Sure,” Dan said. He moistened cotton in a borax mixture and wiped Peyton’s eyes gently. “That better?”
   Peyton blinked. “Hey, I can see! Well, sort of. Everything looks milky.” Helen moved and Peyton said, “Isn’t that you, Mother?”
   “Yes. That’s me.”
   “Your face looks like a balloon but I could tell it was you.” Dan smiled at Randy and nodded. She was going to be all right.
   He rummaged in his bag and brought out a small kit, a bottle, and applicator, a tube. He said, “Peyton, you can stop worrying now. You’re not going to be blind. In perhaps a week, you’ll be able to see fine. But until then you’ve got to rest your eyes and we’ve got to treat them. This is going to sting a little.”
   He held her eyelids open and, his huge hands sure and gentle, applied drops, and an ointment. “Butyn sulphate,” he said. “This is really outside my line, but I remembered that butyn sulphate was what Air-Sea Rescue used for rescued fliers. After floating around in a raft for two or three days, the glare would blind them just as Peyton was blinded. It fixed them up, and it ought to fix her up.”
   Dan turned to Helen. “Did you see how I did it?” “I was watching.”
   “I’ll try to get out here at least once a day, but if I don’t make it, you’ll have to do it yourself.”
   “I won’t have any trouble. Peyton’s quite brave.”
   Peyton said, “Mommy, I’m not. I’m not brave at all. I’m scared all the time. Have you heard from Dad, yet? Do you think Dad’s all right?”
   “I’m sure he’s all right, dear,” Helen said: “But we can’t expect to hear right away. All the phones are out, and I suppose the telegraph too.”
   “I’m hungry, Mother.”
   Helen said, “I’ll bring something right up.”
   They turned off the light. Helen went downstairs. Dan Gunn came into Randy’s rooms. He took off his wrinkled jacket and dropped it on a chair and said, “Now I can use a drink.”
   Randy mixed a double bourbon. Dan drank half of it in a gulp and said, surprised, “Aren’t you drinking, Randy?”
   “No. Don’t feel like I want one.”
   “That’s the first good news I’ve heard all day. I’ve already treated two fellows who’ve drunk themselves insensible since morning. You could’ve been the third.”
   “Could I?”
   “Well, not quite. You react to crisis in the right way. You remember what Toynbee says? His theory of challenge and response applies not only to nations, but to individuals. Some nations and some people melt in the heat of crisis and come apart like fat in the pan. Others meet the challenge and harden. I think you’re going to harden.”
   “I’m really not a very hard guy,” Randy said, looking across the room at his guns and thinking, oddly, of the young buck he’d shot when a boy, and how he’d never been able to shoot a deer since that day. To change the subject he said, “You must’ve had a pretty harrowing day.”
   Dan drank the second half of his bourbon and water. “I have had such a day as I didn’t think it was possible to have. Seven cardiacs are dead and a couple more will go before morning. Three miscarriages and one of the women died. I don’t know what killed her. I’d put down `fright’ on the death certificate if I had time to make out death certificates. Three suicides-one of them was Edgar Quisenberry.”
   Randy said, “Edgar-why?”
   Dan frowned. “Hard to say. He still had as much as anybody else, or more. He wasn’t organically ill. I’ll refer to Toynbee again. Inability to cope with a sudden change in the environment. He swam in a sea of money, and when money was transmuted back into paper he was left gasping and confused, and he died. You’ve read the history of the ‘twenty-nine crash, haven’t you?”
   “Yes.”
   “Dozens of people killed themselves for the same reason. They created and lived in an environment of paper profits, and when paper returned to paper they had to kill themselves, not realizing that their environment was unnatural and artificial. But it wasn’t the adults that got me down, Randy, it was the babies. Give me another drink, a small one.”
   Randy poured another.
   “Eight babies today, three of them preemies. I’ve got the preemies in San Marco hospital. I don’t know whether they’ll make it or not. The hospital’s a mess. Cots end to end on every corridor. A good many of them are accident cases, a few gunshot wounds. And all this, mind you, with only three casualties caused directly by the war-three cases of radiation poisoning.”
   “Radiation?” Randy said. “Around here?” Suddenly the word had a new and immediate connotation. It was now a sinister word of lingering death, like cancer.
   “No. Refugees from Tallahassee. They drove through pretty heavy fallout, I guess. We estimate at the hospital that they received fifty to a hundred roentgens. Anyway, a pretty hefty dose, but not fatal.”
   “Are we getting any radiation, do you think?”
   Dan considered. “Some, undoubtedly. But I don’t think a dangerous dose. There isn’t a Geiger in town, but there is a dosimeter in the San Marco hospital and I guess we’re getting what San Marco gets. Most of the radioactive particles decay pretty fast, you know. Not cesium or strontium 90 or cobalt or carbon 14. Those will always be with us.”
   “Lucky east wind,” Randy said, and then was surprised at his words. The danger of radiation was still there, and might increase. Long before this day scientists had been worried about tests of nuclear weapons, even when conducted in uninhabited areas under rigid controls. Now the danger obviously was infinitely greater, but since there were other and more immediate dangers-dangers that you could see, feel, and hear-radiation had become secondary. He wasn’t thinking of its effect upon future generations. He was concerned with the present. He wasn’t exercised over the fallout blanketing Tallahassee from the attack on Jacksonville. He was worried about Fort Repose. He suspected that this was a necessary mental adjustment to aid self reservation. The exhausted swimmer, struggling to reach shore, isn’t worried about starving to death afterwards.
   When Helen called, they sat down to a dinner table that, under the circumstances, seemed incongruous. The meal was only soup, salad, and sandwiches, but Helen had laid the table as meticulously as if Dan Gunn had agreed to stay for a late supper on an ordinary evening. When Ben Franklin sat down Helen said, “Did you wash your hands?”
   “No, ma’am.” “Well, do so.”
   And Ben disappeared and returned with his hands washed and hair combed. They listened to the radio as they ate, hearing only the local broadcasts from San Marco at two-minute intervals. Their ears had become dulled to the repetitive, unimportant announcements and warnings, as those who live on the seashore fail to hear the sea. But any fresh news, or break in the routine, instantly alerted and silenced them.
   Several times they heard a brief bulletin: “County Civil Defense authorities warn everyone not to drink fresh milk which may have been exposed to fallout. Canned milk, or milk delivered this morning prior to the attack, can be presumed safe.”
   Dan Gunn explained that this precaution was probably a little premature. It was designed primarily for the protection of children. Strontium 90, probably the most dangerous of all fallout materials, collected in calcium. It caused bone cancer and leukemia. “In a week or so it can be a real hazard,” he said. “It can’t be a hazard yet, because the cows haven’t had time to ingest strontium 90 in their fodder. Still, the quicker these dangers are broadcast, the more people will be aware of them.”
   Helen asked, “What happens to babies?”
   “Evaporated or condensed canned milk is the answer-while it lasts. After that, it’s mother’s milk.”
   “That will be old-fashioned, won’t it?”
   Dan nodded and smiled. “But the mothers will have to be careful of what they eat.” He looked down at the lettuce. “For instance, no greens, or lettuce, if your garden has received fallout. Trouble is, you won’t know, really, whether your ground, or your food, is safe or not. Not without a Geiger counter. We’ll all have to live as best we can, from day to day.”
   Ben Franklin looked up at the ceiling, listening. He said, “Listen!”
   The others heard it, very faintly.
   “A jet,” Ben said. “A fighter, I think.”
   The sound faded away. Randy discovered he had been holding his breath. He said, “I guess it’s still going on.”
   Helen laid her salad fork on the plate. She had eaten very little. She said, “I have to know what’s happening-I just have to. Can’t we go over to see your retired admiral tonight, Randy?”
   “Sure, we can see him. But what about Peyton? We can’t leave her alone.”
   Helen looked at Ben Franklin and Ben said, “Is this what I’m going to be-a professional baby-sitter?”
   Dan Gunn rose. “I’ve got to get back to town. I’ve got to check in at the clinic and then I’ve got to get some sleep.” “Why don’t you stay here for the night, Dan?” Randy said. “I can’t. They’re expecting me at the clinic. And Randy, I brought the emergency kit for you.” He turned to Helen. “It was a wonderful supper. Thanks. I was so hungry I was weak. I didn’t realize it.”
   Randy walked him to his car. Dan said, “That poor girl.” “Peyton?”
   “No. Helen. Uncertainty is the worst. She’d be better off if she knew Mark was dead. See you tomorrow, Randy.”
   “Yes. Tomorrow.” He walked back to the house and paused on the porch to look at the thermometer and barometer. The barometer was steady, very high. Temperature was down to fifty five. It would get colder tonight. It might go to forty before morning. From across the river, far off, he heard a string of shots.
   In this stillness, at night, and across water, the sound of shots carried for miles. He could not tell from whence the sound came, or guess why, but the shots reminded him of a nervous sentry on post cutting loose with his carbine. It sounded like a carbine, or an automatic pistol.
   He walked into the house, head down, and went up to his bedroom and pulled on a sweater. He called Ben Franklin to the living room and Ben came in, his mother following. “Ben,” Randy said, “ever shoot a pistol?”
   “Only once, on the range at Offutt.” “What about a rifle?”
   “I’ve shot a twenty-two. I’m pretty good with a twenty two.”
   “Okay,” Randy said, “I’m going to give you what you’re good at.”
   He walked to the gunrack. The Mossberg was fitted with a sixpower scope, and a scope was not good for snap shooting, and hard to use at night. He took down the Remington pump, a weapon with open sights, a present from his father on his thirteenth birthday. He handed it to Ben.
   The boy took it, pleased, worked the action and peered into the chamber.
   “It’s not loaded now,” Randy said, “but from now on every gun in this house is going to be loaded. I hope we never have to use them but if we do there probably won’t be any time to load up.”
   Helen said, “I forgot to tell you, Randy. I couldn’t get ten boxes of the ammunition you wanted but I did get three. They’re somewhere in the kitchen. I’ll find them later.”
   “Thanks,” Randy said. He took a package of cartridges out of his ammunition case and handed it to Ben. “You load up your gun, Ben,” he said. “It’s yours now. Never point it at a man unless you intend to shoot him, and never shoot unless you mean to kill. You understand that?”
   Ben’s eyes were round and his face sober. “Yes, sir.”
   “Okay, Ben. You can baby-sit now. We should be back in an hour.”
   When Rear Admiral Hazzard retired he embarked upon what he liked to call “my second life.” He and his wife had prepared carefully for retirement. They had wanted an orange grove to supplement his pension and a body of water upon which he could look and in which he could fish. While still a four-striper he had located this spot on the Timucuan, and bought it for a surprisingly reasonable sum. The real estate agent had carefully explained that the low price included “niggers for neighbors,” meaning the Henrys. At the same time the agent had grumbled at the Braggs, who had allowed the Henrys to buy water-front property in the first place, thereby lowering values along the entire river, or so he said.
   The Hazzards first had planted a grove. A few years later they built a comfortable six-room rambler and started landscaping the grounds. Thereafter they lived in the house one month each year, when Sam took his annual leave, trying it and wearing it until it fitted perfectly.
   On his sixty-second birthday Sam Hazzard retired, to the relief of a number of his fellow admirals. There were rivalries within, as well as between, the armed services. In the Navy, the rivalry had once been between the battleship and carrier admirals. When it became a rivalry between atomic subs and super-carriers, Hazzard had outspokenly favored the submarines. Since he once had commanded a carrier task force, and never had been a submariner, the carrier admirals regarded his stand as just short of treason. Worse, for years he had claimed that Russia’s most dangerous threat was the terrible combination of submarines equipped with missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Such a theory, if unchallenged, would force the Navy to spend a greater part of its energy and money on anti-submarine warfare. Since this, per se, was defense, and since the Navy’s whole tradition was to take the offensive, Hazzard spent his final years of duty conning a desk.
   Two days after his retirement his wife died, so she never really lived in the house on the Timucuan, and she never physically shared his second life. Yet often she seemed close, when he trimmed a shrub she had planted, or when in the evenings he sat alone on the patio, and reached to touch the arm of the chair at his side.
   The Admiral discovered there were not enough hours in the day to do all the things that were necessary, and that he wanted to do. There was the citrus, the grounds, experiments with exotic varieties of bananas and papaya, discreet essays to be written for the United States Naval Institute Proceedings and not-so-discreet articles for magazines of general circulation. Sam Hazzard found that the Henrys were extraordinarily convenient neighbors. Malachai tended the grounds and helped design and build the dock. Two-Tone, when in the mood-broke and sober-worked in the grove. The Henry women cleaned, and did his laundry. Preacher Henry was the Admiral’s private fishing guide, which meant that the Admiral consistently caught more and bigger bass than anyone on the Timucuan, and possibly in all of Central Florida.
   But Sam Hazzard’s principal hobby was listening to shortwave radio. He was not a ham operator. He had no transmitter. He listened. He did not chatter. He monitored the military frequencies and the foreign broadcasts and, with his enormous background of military and political knowledge, he kept pace with the world outside Fort Repose. Sometimes, perhaps, he was a bit ahead of everyone.
   It was ten to eleven when Randy knocked on Admiral Hazzard’s door. It opened immediately. The Admiral was a taut, neatly made man who had weighed 133 when he boxed for the Academy and who weighted 133 now. He was dressed in a white turtleneck sweater, flannels, and boat shoes. A halo of cottony hair encircled his sunburned bald spot. Otherwise, he was not saintly. His nose has been flattened in some long-forgotten brawl in Port Said or Marseilles. His gray eyes, canopied by heavy white brows, were red-rimmed, and angry. For the Admiral, this had been a day of frustration, helplessness, and hatred-hatred for the unimaginative, purblind, selfish fools who had not believed him, and frustration because on this day of supreme danger and need, his lifetime of training and experience was not and could not be put to use. The Admiral said, “I saw your headlights coming down the road. Come in.” He squinted at Helen.
   “My sister-in-law, Helen Bragg,” Randy said.
   “An evil day to receive a beautiful woman,” The Admiral said, his voice surprisingly mild and mannered to issue from such a pugnacious face. “Come on in to my Combat Plot, and listen to the war, if such a massacre can be called a war.”
   He led them to his den. A heavily planked workbench ran along the wall under the windows overlooking the river. On this bench was a large, black, professional-looking shortwave receiver, a steaming coffee-maker, notebooks and pencils. The radio screeched with power, static, interference, and occasional words in the almost unintelligible language of conflict.
   On two other walls, cork-covered, were pinned maps-the polar projection and the Eurasian land mass on one wall, a military map of the United States on the other.
   A hoarse voice broke through the static: “This is Adelaide Six-Five-One. I am sitting on a skunk at Alpha Romeo Poppa Four. Skunk at Alpha Romeo Poppa Four.”
   A different voice replied immediately: “Adelaide Six-Five-One, this is Adelaide. Hold one.”
   There was silence for a moment, and then the second voice continued: “Adelaide Six-Five-One-Adelaide. Have relayed your message to Hector. He is busy but will be free in ten to fifteen minutes. Squat on that skunk and wait for Hector.” “Adelaide from Adelaide Six-Five-One. Charley.”
   Helen sat down. For the first time that day, she was showing fatigue. The Admiral said, “Coffee?”
   “I’d love a cup,” she said.
   Randy said, “Sam, what was that on the radio? Part of the war?”
   The Admiral poured coffee before he replied. “A big part of it, for us. Right now I’m tuned to a Navy and Air Force ASW frequency in the five megacycle band.”
   “ASW?”
   “Anti-submarine warfare. I’ll interpret. A Navy super Connie with a saucer radome has located a skunk-an enemy submarine-at coordinates Alpha Romeo Poppa Four. I happen to know that’s about three hundred miles off Norfolk. The radar picket has called home base-Adelaide-and Adelaide is sending Hector to knock off the skunk. Hector is one of our killer subs. But Hector is presently engaged. When he is free, he will communicate directly with Adelaide Six-Five-One. The plane will give Hector a course and when he is in range Hector will cut loose with a homing torpedo and that will be the end of the skunk. We hope.”
   “Who’s winning?” Randy asked, aware that it was a ridiculous question.
   “Who’s winning? Nobody’s winning. Cities are dying and ships are sinking and aircraft is going in, but nobody’s winning.” Helen asked the question she had come to ask. “Did you hear Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown on the radio a while ago?”
   “Yes.”
   “Where do you think she was speaking from?”
   The Admiral walked across the room and looked at the map of the United States. It was covered with acetate overlay and ten or twelve cities were ringed with red-crayon goose eggs, in the way that a unit position is marked on an infantry map. The Admiral scratched the white stubble on his chin and said, “I think Denver. Hunneker, the three-star she named Chief of Staff, was Army representative on NORAD, in Colorado Springs. Chances are that he was in Denver this morning, or she was in Colorado Springs, when the word came through that Washington had been atomized.”
   Helen set down her coffee cup. Her fingers trembled. “You’re sure that she couldn’t have been in Omaha?”
   “Omaha!” said the Admiral. “That’s the last place she’d be speaking from! You notice that whenever I’ve heard a broadcast, of any kind, that allowed me to identify a city, I ringed it on the map. I’ve heard no amateurs talking from Omaha, and I haven’t heard SAC since the attack. Ordinarily, I can pick up SAC right away. They’re always talking on their single side band transmitters to bases out of the country. Their call sign was `Big Fence.’ I haven’t heard `Big Fence’ all day on any frequency. And the enemy hates and fears SAC, more, even, than they fear the Navy, I’ll admit. Scratch Omaha.”
   Sam Hazzard noticed the effect of his words on Helen’s expression; he recalled that Randy’s brother, her husband, was an Air Force colonel, and he sensed that he had been tactless. “Your husband isn’t in Omaha, is he, Mrs. Bragg?”
   “It’s our home.”
   “I’m terribly sorry that I said anything.”
   A tear was quivering on her cheek. Her first, Randy thought. He felt embarrassed for Sam.
   Helen said, “There’s nothing to be sorry about, Admiral. Mark expected Omaha would be hit, and so did I. That’s why I’m here, with the children. But even if Omaha is gone, Mark may still be there, and all right. He had the duty this morning. He was in the Hole.”
   “Oh, yes,” the Admiral said. “The Hole. I’ve never been in it, but I’ve heard about it. A tremendous shelter, very deep. He may be perfectly safe. I sincerely hope so.”
   “I’m afraid not,” Helen said, “since you haven’t heard any SAC signals.”
   “They may have shifted communications or changed code names.” The Admiral looked at his maps. “Besides, I’m only guessing. I’m just playing games with myself, trying to G-two a war with no action reports or intelligence. I do this because I haven’t anything else to do. I just scramble around and move pins and make marks on the maps and try to keep myself from thinking about Sam, Junior. He’s a lieutenant JG with Sixth Fleet in the Med, if Sixth Fleet is still in the Med. I don’t think it is. For the Russkies, it must have been like shooting frogs in a puddle.” He turned to Helen again, “We inhabit the same purgatory, Mrs. Bragg, the dark level of not knowing.”
   Randy asked a question. “What are the Russians saying? Can you still get Radio Moscow?”
   “I get a station that calls itself Radio Moscow in the twentyfive meter band. But it isn’t Moscow. All the voices on the English-language broadcasts are different so we can be pretty cer tain Moscow isn’t there any more. However, the Russian leaders all seem to be alive and well, and they issue the kind of statements you’d expect. The very fact that they are alive indicates that they took shelter before it started. They probably aren’t anywhere close to a target area.”
   “Couldn’t the President have escaped?”
   “He probably had fifteen minutes’ warning. He could have been in a helicopter and away. But in that fifteen minutes he had to make the big decisions, and so my guess is that he deliberately chose to stay in Washington, either at his desk in the White House, or in the Pentagon Command Post. It was the same for the Joint Chiefs, and probably for the Secretarys of Defense and State. As to the other Cabinet members, they probably received it in their sleep, or were just getting up. Do you want to hear something strange?” The Admiral changed the wave length on his receiver. He said, “Now listen.”
   All Randy heard was static.
   “You didn’t hear anything, did you?” the Admiral said. “Right now, on this band, you ought to be hearing the BBC, Paris, and Bonn. I haven’t heard any of them all day. They must’ve truly clobbered England.”
   “Then you do think we’re finished?” Randy said.
   “Not at all. SAC may have been able to launch up to fifty percent of its aircraft, counting the planes they always have airborne. And remember that the Navy does have a few missile sub marines and the carriers must’ve got in some licks. Also, I’m pretty sure they weren’t able to take out all our SAC bases, including the auxiliaries. For all I know, the enemy may be finished.” “Doesn’t exactly hearten me.”
   The lights went out in the room, the radio died, and at the same time the world outside was illuminated, as at midday. At that instant Randy faced the window and he would always retain, like a color photograph printed on his brain, what he saw-a red fox frozen against the Admiral’s green lawn. It was the first fox he had seen in years.
   The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County.
   Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.
   So ended The Day.