Or wrapping from a box that held something.”
“What did you think, Lieutenant?” the colonel asked.
“It occurred to me, sir, that it could have come from a plane. Accident aloft. Explosive decompression might have ripped out some seat covering. Lining. Something.”
“But the major didn’t agree?”
“No, sir.”
Eames considered. “I’d like to see it. Maybe send it to the Pentagon. It could be more evidence of this sort of business.” He drew a studied breath and went on. “Anyway, appropriate orders for all of you here are being made out, as of now. We’re going, ostensibly, to hold air games. Actually the entire continent is to be scouted by the Air Force, at high altitude, for the next six weeks. During that time, incidentally, there’s to be a change in alerts. Condition Yellow will be confidential, as it used to be years ago.”
“Isn’t that risky?” Major Taylor snapped.
“GHQ thinks not. They’ve got good information lines into Russia, China, the satellite states. No sign of activity. No mobilization. No evidence, from any channel, of large air preparations. Attack is therefore regarded as out of the question. The point is, if Condition Yellow stood as at present, every tenth civilian sky watcher and every other Filter Center would constantly be reporting our own flights: they won’t be announced. Our own planes, then, would touch off hundreds of false alerts; Condition Yellow would flash into every city time and again.
The only way to prevent that is to return to the confidential basis.”
Charles said impulsively, “If the enemy knew, it would make a good opportunity for…
!” The colonel grinned. “It would, if the ‘enemy,’ as you call him, showed any signs now of preparation. But he doesn’t. So the Pentagon feels the plan is safe. The official opinion is that this business of reconnaissance is one more stupid action, one more mere crude breach of ordinary international etiquette. They spar for peace, but they can’t resist the improved chance it gives them to sneak a few photographs.”
“Sounds like them,” Major Taylor grunted.
“Still,” Charles said, “if they wanted to get our planes up, foul our warning system—”
The colonel nodded. “Orders,” he said. “Any more questions, gentlemen?”
There were none. The meeting ended. Colonel Eames walked across his office with Charles. “Bring back the fabric.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And don’t worry, Lieutenant, about the air games and your ‘enemy.’”
“No, sir.”
“I did myself, Chuck, at first. Went through exactly your train of thought. We have to rely on our own Intelligence.”
It was the first time the colonel had ever used Charles’s nickname, even his first name.
Charles was unaware that his commanding officer even knew his whole name. He felt flattered.
But he also perceived that the slight familiarity involved a skillful act. Things at the base were about to tighten up. Half-trained men were going to undertake the work of trained crews. Ships, inevitably, would crash. People would be hurt, and killed. The colonel, almost instinctively, had began to behave with that increased intimacy which danger and morale required.
All Charles replied was, “Yes, sir.”
But the colonel stayed beside him, walking toward the door. “I even called Washington myself, before the meeting,” he said. “I suggested restoring Condition Blue to the alert system, just in case. They thought I was crazy. And I guess I was.” He opened the door because Charles couldn’t, so long as the colonel talked. “I’ll put you in a staff car,” he said. “Long way back to your quarters, and a real cold day.”
Charles thanked him. He saluted and started for one of the cars.
The colonel called, “And about that—material. Appreciate your mentioning it. Proper, under the circumstances.”
A damned good officer, Charles thought, as a sergeant drove him swiftly along the edge of the big field.
3
The Mildred Tatum Infirmary for Colored was a large, brick building on the corner of St. Anne and James streets in River City. Its location, four blocks north of the heart of “Niggertown,” was due to a number of factors, none of which was related to the convenience of the patients or the requirements of therapy. Emmet Sloan had always liked colored people in a genuine, if somewhat patronizing, way. His grandfather, coming to River City from Illinois after the Civil War, had been an abolitionist and for a time had run an “underground railroad station” on the bloody road that led slaves from the South to freedom.
Like other Americans of large affairs, Emmet Sloan had welcomed the tide of working immigrants—the “Micks, Wops, Latwicks, Polacks, Hunkies” and others, who had poured into River City at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. They worked hard and cheap at mill jobs and in foundries and they thus furnished much of the muscle that was essential to make America great—as well as to make men like Emmet Sloan rich. These people settled near the river, east of Market Street, on the mile-long, parallel stretches of Mechanic and Water streets, for the most part, and on the close-in cross streets. Land there was cheap. In summer it boiled with heat and damp from the river, as well as with mosquitoes. In winter it was raw and cold and gloomy. There were, furthermore, several then-small factories in the district as well as the GK. and T.T. yards and roundhouse. It was a smoky, clangorous neighborhood.
Gradually, however, the Irish and Italians and Slavs pushed north into the St. Anne, St. Paul and Mary streets area, which came to he known as the “Catholic Section.” The Negroes, displaced for a generation to outlying districts, often to mere tin shacks along the municipal dump, poured back in town and filled the slummy vacuum left by the economically ascending “foreigners.” These, by the early twenties, were second- and third-generation Americans and controlled much of River City’s politics as well as most of its organized vice and its rackets.
Emmet Sloan, perhaps because his occasional patronage of The Block kept him in sensory touch with the dismal living conditions of the Negroes, determined to do something for them. Their direst need was a hospital. And when, in 1937, he foreclosed on a rayon knitting mill on James Street, he rebuilt it into an “infirmary.” At first, the inhabitants of the “Catholic” area had violently and actively resented the resulting enlargement of Negro “territory.” There had been street brawls. The windows of the Infirmary had been smashed the night before its dedication. But Sloan, a determined man, finally established his gift for its intended recipients, by the costly but very effective means of constructing a much better hospital for the “foreign” population on a site which thitherto had been the territory of “white” people—native sons, one hundred per cent Americans, his “own” group. This in turn caused litigation. However, the “old families” of River City along with its citizens were beginning to move to the suburbs.
Looking at maps, thinking of the temper of people, considering the future population and the probable developments of technology, Emmet Sloan decided the migration to suburbs in the thirties and forties was the start of a future landslide. Hence he invested in real estate on River City’s edges and was among the first to finance the removal into suburban communities of branches of big department stores. His grandfather had seen what railroads meant to the farm and the city; his father had seen what automobiles would do to make cities grow; now Emmet perceived the automotive vehicle was about to strangle cities. All three had acted on their views with phenomenal financial success.