Гарри Гаррисон - There Won't Be War

“Of course he tripped. He should count on tripping.”

“Get up, Saulie,” Herbie, his older brother, screamed from the garage where he stood with Louise Dawkins, the pail of eggs still between them. “Get up and run! This corner here! You can make it!”

The boy weaved to his feet, and threw his body forward again. Plunkett could hear him sobbing. He reached the cellar steps—and literally plunged down.

Plunkett pressed the stopwatch and the second hand halted. Three minutes thirteen seconds.

He held the watch up for his wife to see. “Thirteen seconds, Ann.”

Her face wrinkled.

He walked to the house. Saul crawled back up the steps, fragments of unrecovered breath rattling in his chest. He kept his eyes on his father.

“Come here, Saul. Come right here. Look at the watch. Now, what do you see?”

The boy stared intently at the watch. His lips began twisting; startled tears writhed down his stained face. “More—more than three m-minutes, poppa?”

“More than three minutes, Saul. Now, Saul—don’t cry son; it isn’t any use—Saul, what would have happened when you got to the steps?”

A small voice, pitifully trying to cover its cracks: “The big doors would be shut.”

“The big doors would be shut. You would be locked outside. Then what would have happened to you? Stop crying. Answer me!”

“Then, when the bombs fell, I’d—I’d have no place to hide. I’d burn like the head of a match. An’—an’ the only thing left of me would be a dark spot on the ground, shaped like my shadow. An’—an’—”

“And the radioactive dust,” his father helped with the catechism.

“Elliot—” Ann sobbed behind him, “I don’t—”

“Please, Ann! And the radioactive dust, son?”

“An’ if it was ra-di-o-ac-tive dust ‘stead of atom bombs, my skin would come right off my body, an’ my lungs would burn up inside me—please, poppa, I won’t do it again!”

“And your eyes? What would happen to your eyes?”

A chubby brown fist dug into one of the eyes. “An’ my eyes would fall out, an’ my teeth would fall out, and I’d feel such terrible terrible pain—”

“All over you and inside you. That’s what would happen if you got to the cellar too late when the alarm went off, if you got locked out. At the end of three minutes, we pull the levers, and no matter who’s outside— no matter who— all four comer doors swing shut and the cellar will be sealed. You understand that, Saul?”

The two Dawkins children were listening with white faces and dry lips. Their parents had brought them from the city and begged Elliot Plunkett as he remembered old friends to give their Children the same protection as his. Well, they were getting it. This was the way to get it.

“Yes, I understand it, poppa. I won’t ever do it again. Never again.” .

“I hope you won’t. Now, start for the barn, Saul. Go ahead.” Plunkett slid his heavy leather belt from its loops.

“Elliot! Don’t you think he understands the horrible thing? A beating won’t make it any clearer.”

He paused behind the weeping boy trudging to the barn. “It won’t make it any clearer, but it will teach him the lesson another way. All seven of us are going to be in that cellar three minutes after the alarm, if I have to wear this strap clear down to the buckle!”

When Plunkett later clumped into the kitchen with his heavy farm boots, he stopped and sighed.

Ann was feeding Dinah. With her eyes on the baby, she asked, “No supper for him, Elliot?”

“No supper.” He sighed again. “It does take it out of a man.”

“Especially you. Not many men would become a farmer at thirty-five. Not many men would sink every last penny into an underground fort and powerhouse, just for insurance. But you’re right.”

“I only wish,” he said restlessly, “that I could work out some way of getting Nancy’s heifer into the cellar. And if eggs stay high one more month I can build the tunnel to the generator. Then, there’s the well. Only one well, even if it’s enclosed—”

“And when we came out here seven years ago—” She rose to him at last and rubbed her lips gently against his thick blue shirt. “We only had a piece of ground. Now, we have three chicken houses, a thousand broilers, and I can’t keep track of how many layers and breeders.”

She stopped as his body tightened and he gripped her shoulders.

“Ann, Ann\ If you think like that, you’ll act like that! How can I expect the children to—Ann, what we have-all we have—is a five-room cellar, concrete-lined, which we can seal in a few seconds, an enclosed well from a fairly deep underground stream, a windmill generator for power and a sunken oil-burner-driven generator for emergencies. We have supplies to carry us through, geiger counters to detect radiation and lead-lined suits to move about in—afterwards. I’ve told you again and again that these things are our lifeboat, and the farm is just a sinking ship.”

“Of course, darling.” Plunkett’s teeth ground together, then parted helplessly as his wife went back to feeding Dinah, the baby.

“You’re perfectly right. Swallow now, Dinah. Why, that last bulletin from the Survivors Club would make anybody think.”

He had been quoting from the October Survivor, and Ann had recognized it. Well? At least they were doing something—seeking out nooks and feverishly building crannies—pooling their various ingenuities in an attempt to haul themselves and their families through the military years of the Atomic Age.

The familiar green cover of the mimeographed magazine was very noticeable on the kitchen table. He flipped the sheets to the thumb-smudged article on page five and shook his head.

“Imagine!” he said loudly. “The poor fools agreeing with the government again on the safety factor. Six minutes! How can they—an organization like the Survivors Club making that their official opinion! Why freeze, freeze alone ....”

“They’re ridiculous,” Ann murmured, scraping the bottom of the bowl.

“All right, we have automatic detectors. But human beings still have to look at the radar scope, or we’d be diving underground every time there’s a meteor shower.”

He strode along a huge table, beating a fist rhythmically into one hand. “They won’t be so sure, at first. Who wants to risk his rank by giving the nationwide signal that makes everyone in the country pull ground over his head, that makes our own projectile sites set to buzz? Finally, they are certain: they freeze for a moment. Meanwhile, the rockets are zooming down—how fast, we don’t know. The men unfreeze, they trip each other up, they tangle frantically. Then, they press the button; then, the nationwide signal starts our radio alarms.”

Plunkett turned to his wife, spread earnest, quivering arms. “And then, Ann, we freeze when we hear it! At last, we start for the cellar. Who knows, who can dare to say, how much has been cut off the margin of safety by that time? No, if they claim that six minutes is the safety factor, we’ll give half of it to the alarm system. Three minutes for us.”

“One more spoonful,” Ann urged Dinah. “Just one more. Down it goes!”

Josephine Dawkins and Herbie were cleaning the feed trolley in the shed at the near end of the chicken house.

“All done, pop,” the boy grinned at his father. “And the eggs taken care of. When does Mr. Whiting pick ’em up?”

“Nine o’clock. Did you finish feeding the hens in the last house?”

“I said all done, didn’t I?” Herbie asked with adolescent impatience. “When I say a thing, I mean it.”