That was the question. That was the answer. It wasn’t a grim practical joke. It wasn’t a test.
It was Condition Yellow. Real.
So many things happened in his mind that he was astonished by the mere capacity to think of them all.
He would have to leave and so would Ted. Chuck could stay—no—Chuck was “military personnel” and entitled to the information.
It was going to ruin the pre-Christmas party.
And—What in God’s name am I thinking about a party, for? Hashed in his head.
“Condition Yellow,” in its latest construction, meant that enemy airplanes had been recognized over continental U.S.A. It was an alert, currently confidential, which was intended to reach and mobilize all Civil Defense people, police, firemen and other city employees, as well as “key” technicians in industry. For years, for many tedious years of drill, the inhabitants of big cities had planned for Condition Yellow. Henry thought, in the tumbling, muscle-weakening scramble of his mind, that all over America, men like himself, and women, would be reacting the same way to the identical two words.
Condition Yellow.
At the time they’d dreamed up a code to check alerts, Henry had thought the idea absurd.
He was glad now they’d done it. Green Prairie people like himself could at least be sure that CD headquarters—and that meant the military—believed the risk was great enough to warrant the shock and disturbance of a complete but quiet official turnout, on the Saturday before Christmas.
Next Henry thought of the Air Force “exercises” which had been going on for a month.
The probabilities were a hundred to one that some flight of our own bombers, off course somewhere, over California or New York or Alaska—anywhere—had been mistaken for enemy planes. It was a thought that immediately, or soon, Hashed through the minds of some millions of city dwellers who picked up telephones all over U.S.A. and heard the two words: Condition Yellow.
With the skies above the continent crossed and crisscrossed by American flights, how could they be sure? Why wouldn’t spotters be liable to error? After all, there hadn’t been any sign of hostility whatever on the enemy’s part.
Even men at the top of military and Government intelligence agencies—men “cleared” to know all the known facts—hesitated. There had been nothing from behind the Iron Curtain to indicate the assembly of long-range planes, the gassing up, the bombing up, the vast number of activities required to launch a “surprise” attack. If this was “it,” the experts thought almost as one man, the Soviets had outdone the Japs in their surprise onslaught on Pearl.
The experts, however, reacted dutifully. Others did not.
In cities on the West Coast, the East Coast, and in the South and the Middle West, hundreds of thousands of ordinary persons, men and women, ready for Christmas, thinking the world on the verge of assured and eternal peace, decided for themselves. They were not as well indoctrinated in the meaning of duty as the professionals. It had to be an error, these myriads thought-and went back to lunch, to the TV set, to mowing the lawn in Miami and shoveling snow in Detroit.
Not Henry.
When his brother-in-law came into the hall and said, “Something wrong? You’re ghost-white!” Henry smiled and nodded.
“Maybe, Jim. Look. Don’t say anything to the women.
Ask Chuck to step in, willya?”
Charles came. “Lord, Dad! What’s wrong?”
Henry motioned. Charles shut the hall door. His father said, “Just reached me from CD.
Condition Yellow, Chuck.”
The soldier, in the dark blue suit, lost color also. Fear jumped into his eyes and was mastered. His pale lips moved. “That’s—what—I’ve been scared of.”
“You think it could be the McCoy? Or some error…?”
Chuck strode to the phone, snatched it up, thought a moment and dialed. He waited, then set the phone down. “I called Hink Field—on a special number. Busy. So I can’t say. But we can’t take chances now.”
“On the other hand, I’d hate like the devil to scare Beth and Ruth and the kids half to death-and find it was a bloomer.”
“That’s true. Suppose you take our car, and Ted—he’s due to report, isn’t he?—and go.
I’ll try the phone awhile. We can tell the folks it’s a practice-for the moment. I’ll come along—
on Willowgrove, to keep clear of the Christmas crowds—right after dinner.”
“That’ll do,” Henry decided. He bellowed up the stairs, “Hey, Ted! Hurry down! The fools have called a practice alert and you and I have to make tracks!”
The door from the hall into the kitchen flew open. Two indignant women stood there.
“Henry,” Beth said, firmly, “this is really too much!”
“Of all the idiotic ideas, on a Saturday, at dinnertime!” Huth added.
Jim Williams came through the living-room door. “You two stay right here, Hank. This damn fool defense thing has gone too far.”
“Long as I’m in it, I have no choice.” Henry was shrugging into his coat, the blue one with the velvet collar. He threw a meaningful glance at his older son. “I’ll rely on you, Chuck, for everything. Come on, Ted; get cracking.”
4
Below West Broad Street, the mammoth tile in which Nora walked became steadily darker. She had grown accustomed to the short spaces of darkness between the streets; each one, though inky enough to hide her feet from her own view, showed ahead the ever-brightening illumination from the next street. As she walked on from Broad, however, she remembered what a long distance it was to the Washington Avenue intersection. She couldn’t see any light at all. Yet she went ahead, believing the darkness would yield in the next few steps to at least the dim evidence of light from the manhole at Broad.
No such thing happened. The curved walls closed over her head, at a point about half again as high as she was. The darkness thickened, deepened, and the echoing sound of her arctic-shod feet came back in a muffled fashion from the distances. She looked back. The light from Broad was dim and far behind. A sense of compression, and with it a gnawing anxiousness, began to replace her eager determination. Still she went on, and steadily she lost the confidence that her progress had established.
Suppose, she thought, it suddenly drops. She went ahead cautiously after that notion, feeling with her foot before she stepped.
Traffic bumbled and shook the place. She put a hand out, touched the damp side of the tube, moved slower, slower. The tunnel was curving now, but the curve was so gradual that she could not discern it in the dark. She did not notice any change until she looked back-for the wan comfort of the distant light—and saw it had vanished.
Panic touched her for the first time.
Yet it was not absolute panic. Had it been, she would have turned, fled whence she had come, screaming, perhaps. Instead, she stopped, shivered, and listened to her own hard breathing.
By an act of will, of self-scolding, she brought hack a measure of composure. Surely, she thought, it would be shorter to go ahead than the long way back to Broad Street. She admitted she was scared, which helped. And she determined to come out at the very next manhole. No more sewer-walking for her.
She had gone perhaps another hundred feet when two things happened simultaneously.
She became conscious of light, dim and somehow different, up ahead. It showed the tubular walls faintly. The bend was also disclosed, and Nora realized why she had lost the Broad Street light to view. But, at the same time, the geography of the city below Broad leaped into her mind: River Avenue slanted straight through Restland Cemetery before it reached Washington and she, presumably, was under the graveyard right here! The thought caused her flesh to prickle and a sprinkling sweat to burst out on her body. She felt too weak to move, too scared to scream, and yet unwilling to slide down into the trickling water that marked the exact bottom of the great pipe.