Harry Frank - Alas, Babylon

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.