Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Where in hell is she?”

“At the high school, naturally.”

“At the…? Oh. You mean, she really went—with all that junk?”

“She really did. A long time ago. Come up here, Beau, and help me pack!”

“ Pack? Ye Gods, woman, there’s no time to pack. That’s the Red alert! We’re going down by the furnace!”

“And leave all my new clothes up here? I should say not !”

Beau stood at the foot of the staircase, vacillating.

“Where’s that cleaninbg woman?”

“I sent her home an hour ago.” The siren rose and fell, rose and fell. Slowly.

On the radio the music stopped, and Jim Williams frowned. He did not know about Conelrad, the radio way of trying to baffle enemy bombers. But he turned dials and tuned in on the emergency wavelength:

“Repeat. This is a CONELRAD Radio Alert. Enemy bombers have attacked the United States. A condition of confidential alert has existed for some hours. This is not a practice. Not a drill. This is real. Enemy planes, possibly bearing atomic weapons, are said to be approaching Green Prairie and River City. Take cover immediately. Everybody. Take cover instantly!

Condition Red is in effect! Sirens are now blowing. Persons in cars draw to curb and wind up windows and get on the floor below the window glass. All persons near windows get below the level of the glass. Take refuge in cellars and basements, if possible. Instantly. Repeat—”

Jim switched off the radio. “Hey, Ruth,” he called, “you hear that?”

She came from the kitchen. “Yes, I did. I don’t believe it.”

“Neither do I,” Jim said. “Must be a walloping hoax.” He went to the window in contravention of the radioed orders. He looked out. “Some cars are stopping, though. Most aren’t. Maybe they haven’t got their radios on. Or radios in ’em at all.” He snickered. “Just like that Martian gag!”

Ruth’s hands were wet with dishwater. “What a day!” she said, “What a crazy day!”

Jim finished pouring the beer, and drank it rapidly. “All hell would have broken loose long since if there’d really been an attack, anywhere.”

“Not necessarily,” his wife argued. “They’re not supposed to give you that Condition Red warning unless planes are actually heading toward your town.”

He lighted a cigarette. “You think maybe we ought to go out and rally the kids and take ’em down cellar?”

“Let’s see what the radio says now.” She turned it on.

The siren burst into his brain as Coley stood in the outer offices on the editorial floor.

The effect was amazing. Everybody—secretaries and rewrite men, copy boys and stenographers, editors and subeditors—rose together and rushed at the place where Coley stood.

He flattened himself against the wall. As they streamed past, he could tell from disjointed phrases, and even better from the fear on their faces, that they’d been aware for some time of things unknown by the people on the street, the shoppers, the store clerks. Trust newspaper folks.

Some pushed buttons frantically, for elevators. Most started the long, spiral trek down the twenty-seven floors of staircase.

An elevator car came up, and was instantly packed. “No more,” the operator yelled, and the siren drowned him, but the door, dosing automatically, divided the people between those inside and those left standing.

It was a time, evidently, when being on the top floor was a benefit. Because every car came up there first, and when it left it was full, so full it would not be able to stop for any more passengers on the long way down.

There were some eighty people on the top tower floor. Coley knew. It took about three minutes for them all to go. He just stood there, bewildered by the confusion, unrecognized by persons who were united in one idea: getting to the ground, or under it.

Nobody, he observed glassily, was trampled. Nobody was even hurt much. The newspaper people were, perhaps, better used to crisis than others. But nobody helped anybody either. They just shoved into the elevator cars or stampeded down the stairs, letting the slow ones be last. Their feet sounded loud on the steel and cement steps, whenever the siren went low—mingled with the tramp of other feet getting into the same shaft of endless steps, from floors below.

Coley could imagine what it would he like, on those stairs, farther down, where the numbers of fleeing people became too great for the width of the stairs, for the interminable, rectilinear turns.

By and by, he went through the city room to his old office.

There were papers on his successor’s desk. There was copy and proof. There were cigarette stubs, thick in the big ashtray. There was a phone left off its cradle. Coley put it back.

The very walls, when the siren rose to its top pitch, seemed to vibrate. He looked out over his long-time command, the city room. Blue streams of cigarette smoke rose above places at the copy desk where, brief moments before, men had sat. The chairs would still be warm. The smoke flattened under the hanging, hooded lights and became stratified. The place seemed vaguely alive, yet it was empty; probably some of its recent inhabitants were already dead, or dying, down there below in the terrible stair well.

Coley went back into the managing editor’s sanctum. He walked to its familiar windows.

He opened one and leaned out and looked up. The clouds were high and thin. It was going to be a clear night—clear, and very cold. Here and there toward the west, blue sky showed through in slits and streaks, blue tinged with pearly colors. He could only see one airplane—a jet, from the speed—and it was going away, north and west, across River City.

A scarf of light fell down every skyscraper. The day was still bright, but waning; indoors, the twilight effect would be noticeable everywhere. Coley wondered, as he stared at the infinitely familiar vista, what was happening elsewhere. He regretted, momentarily, that he would probably never know. Then, with the siren penetrating his very skull, he looked down.

“Great God,” he whispered softly.

The cars in Court Avenue and on Madison were packed solid and standing still. The sidewalks were black with people. People who hadn’t obeyed the shelter signs. People who wouldn’t stay in the jam-packed stores. Coley supposed others, other tens of thousands, were following the advice of frantic section managers and floorwalkers disporting sudden air-raid-warden brassards—huddling in fear where the arrows indicated shelter.

But the ones on the street were desperate. The streets themselves were already packed with cars and trucks. The sidewalks wouldn’t hold the humanity that gushed from the big buildings. The people, driven by the siren, gripped now by stark terror, rendered of sanity, were trying to make progress over the vehicles. They swarmed up like ants—slid off—climbed again—some going toward ‘the river, some toward the south, some east, some west—all merely going, for motion’s sake. Thinking, escape!

It was like looking down at ants in an anthill calamity. He could see what was happening, both in the mass and to individuals. He saw a woman in purple clothes fall flat and he saw a man use her body, an instant later, as a steppingstone to cross the radiator of a truck.

Then, suddenly, the siren was still. It dropped its brazen voice, rattled death in its own throat and fell silent. But silence did not follow.

From the streets below came the most bloodcurdling sound Coley had ever heard or dreamed of, the sound of thousands upon thousands of people—men and women and children—

in absolute panic, in total fear, in headless flight, being trampled, being squeezed to death, having ribs caved in and legs broken, screaming, trying to escape. The combined tumult of that agony came up the building sides, up the concrete cavern walls, to Coley’s ears, as one sound.