Ted cut back one time more: “Is that all you have on Dallas?”
“That’s all, son. Station W5CED reported. He’s outside the city some twenty miles. The blast wave bent his aerial, he claimed. One big flame is all he can actually see. Where Dallas is.
Or was. As the case may be.”
At that point Ted wished the family was at home. It was an awful thing, he thought, to be sitting up there alone in the kind of dim attic room, with tubes glowing and word of practically the end of the world pouring in. But nobody to tell it to.
He considered running over to the Baileys’ and getting Nora. She was darn good company at a time like this, and she would sure like to take the extra headset and listen with him.
However, Nora would be an unauthorized person. That observation reminded him of duty. In Condition Yellow, he was supposed to get on the CD network with other locals and stand by for orders and relays.
He sighed heavily and tuned according to regulations.
The whole air around Green Prairie and Hiver City was on fire with communication, all right. Somebody at headquarters—Al Tully, it turned out—soon was saying, “Station W Double Zero CDJ. Come in, Ted Conner. Over.”
Ted’s hands moved swiftly. His voice said in a businesslike way, “Conner, here. W Double Zero TKC. Come in, please.”
“Where the hell you been?”
“On the way. Driving myself—alone—in Dad’s car!”
That any person should still be able to get a thrill from so minor a matter seemed to stun Albert Tully. “Nothing from your district at all. Why?” he asked.
“Dunno.” At that moment, at Ted’s side, an illegal phone, which he had installed himself and plugged in as he sat down, began to ring. “Here it is! Stand by….”
He grabbed the instrument, thanking his stars he’d violated the law, for otherwise he would probably make about a thousand trips up—and downstairs in the hours ahead. To his surprise, he heard his father’s voice. “That you, son?”
“Yes, Dad. Say! Dallas was hit! Frisco and LA don’t answer.”
“Good God!” Henry Conner was shocked to brief silence. His son, listening in on a ham radio set, knew. All Henry knew, in the principal’s office in South High, was what came from State CD. Not much, nothing as appalling as the information Ted had tersely stated. “Mother home yet?” he finally asked, and Ted heard him swallow, it was so loud.
“Nope. Not yet. Nobody here.” Henry’s voice was tighter, more brusque. “Okay. It’s just as we figured. Phone lines swamped downtown. Can’t raise H.Q. We ought to have paid for a direct line, like I said, and the phone company’s supposed to put us through. Try and do it. The whole thing’s a mess.”
“I got H.Q. here,” Ted answered. “They want your report.”
“Good kid! Tell ’em—in general—we’re doing all right. We’re about forty-five per cent mustered, at a guess. I’d say the doctors and surgeons are worst. Not reporting they’ve followed the plan and gone outside town, most of them. But we’re quietly getting all movable people out of Jenkins Hospital, into the homes around, with the homeowners mad as spit, even though they volunteered for it.”
“Why,” Ted passionately asked a question that had been burning in his mind, “don’t they let go with the sirens?”
“You forget!” his father said. “Condition Red is only for the direct attack. Planes actually headed toward us.”
“I don’t forget,” Ted answered. “I just suspect planes are headed for everybody!” He heard the slam of the front door and stood up, looking out a window. “I guess Mom just came in,” he said. “I see Chuck in Uncle Jim’s car.”
Henry said, “Thank God! Shoot in the report, son—and I’ll send you a runner soon, if I can’t get a wire.”
When Charles Conner approached Hink Field he brought and received an assortment of impressions:
On the streets and the open highway, he had passed, and even been passed by, thirty or forty vehicles, mostly private cars, bearing families, outward bound and going like hell’s chased bats. These obviously were people who reacted to the confidential news about Condition Yellow by packing up and getting out of town. Or they were people who had been told by somebody who ought not to have told them. Perhaps they’d had short-wave receivers of their own and begun to pick up news from police channels and the like. Anyhow, they were getting away from the city.
Like his father and brother, Chuck had skirted the busiest section of the two cities, following Willowgrove clear to Walnut. Willowgrove was residential for the most part, wide, and it had fewer traffic lights than the north-south streets closer in. But even at that distance from the center of the Sister Cities, a distance at which the proud skylines of both merged, he’d seen enough to realize that Condition Yellow had not fazed most people. Certainly the mob downtown didn’t know of it yet, or the people would have started home and Willowgrove itself would have been a bumper-to-bumper proposition. He had made home easily, changed, and gone on.
Beyond the tan fence and gates of Hink Field, a crescendo of noise told Chuck that the base, at least, was reacting. As he approached, accelerator on the floor, six jet planes came in low, cut around, and climbed at full power. His pass put him through the gates and he parked in the section reserved for junior officers. He went into Flight Operations, not because that was where hastily assembling servicemen were expected to report, but because he had already officially visited the Hink Field command and his orders were special.
Nobody stopped him or questioned him, which was unusual. The W AAF secretaries and stenographers, the sergeants and corporals, seemed just to be sitting around the big rooms, rather stiffly. Hardly a typewriter was going. Outside, beyond the windows, a jet took off, shaking the building. Up above the building, he knew, the radar antenna was circling, the sock was flying in a moderate breeze, the anemometer cups were whirling and the men behind the great blue-glass windows were vigilant. At the door of Control Ops, he was stopped by two soldiers with rifles in their hands and bayonets on the rifles, which was anything but usual. He wouldn’t have got farther if Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, the general’s aide, hadn’t come out to the water cooler while Chuck was arguing with the guard.
“Oh,” the lieutenant colonel said, “Connel. It’s you.”
“Conner, sir.” Chuck smiled a little.
“You’re the Intelligence they sent over from Eames’ outfit?” The Lily cup from which he drank trembled minutely.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your colonel’s notion was sure solid! Might as well come in and watch the shambles.”
In the Operations room, on the left-hand wall, was a huge map of the United States, Canada and Mexico. On the right wall was a large-scale map of the Hink Field region, showing all of two states and parts of four more. Around the big map. in a cluster, between the American flag on one side and the hat rack on the other, were perhaps forty officers. Two of them were moving colored pins and colored flags on the big map. Another was advising them, according to messages he received from headphones.
The group was absolutely silent. Men smoked. One man even blew his nose. But nobody said anything for a long while. The flags moved toward Chicago, Chuck saw, and Indianapolis, Detroit and Toledo. There were scarlet flags on four cities—all of them, Chuck observed, coastal cities and big ones: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia.
Finally General Boyce spoke. Chuck couldn’t see him because he was shorter than most of the other officers and stood closest to the map.
“It appears that the assault from the south is a small wave. Note it seems to have broken into three parts. Nothing coming this way. The northern waves, both of them, split east and west.