“Radiation level okay. Am okay, too. Love. Lenore.”
“Bless her,” Beth whispered. She went in and put down the bag tiredly. She’d had three or four hours of sleep, all told.
She looked out the kitchen window. A great smoke towered over the north view, but there was no visible fire. The kitchen was a shambles, but she had expected that. Women coming and going from the vast hospital area at Crystal Lake had described just such messes already.
She tried the gas stove; it didn’t work. She went back to the hall and opened the suitcase. There was a Sterno stove in it, six cans of pink fuel, powdered coffee, sugar, tinned milk—amongst many other items. She took the things for coffee, and a flashlight, and went back to the kitchen and tried the water but that didn’t run either.
Downstairs, in the air-raid shelter Henry had fixed up years before, were the five-gallon bottles of distilled water he made her change every six months. She was too exhausted to lug one up but she found a pan on the floor—silently thanking Lenore, because she otherwise would not have used any metal objects. She went down in the cellar. Light penetrated it from numerous places; she could see how the house had moved on its foundations. She poured water and went into the jelly closet, discovering that most of the canned things were still on the shelves where she’d placed them, labeled and tidy, all summer long and all during the fruit season in the fall.
They could eat, then, without drawing from the Green Prairie food stocks.
She went up with the water, unfolded the little stove, lit the solidified alcohol and put on the water. Someone knocked at the front door, frightening her. She ran to it.
“Hi, Mrs. Conner! Henry home yet?” It was Jed Emmings, from Spruce Street.
“Not yet”
“You all right?”
“Yes, thanks. Are you?”
“You bet—and thank God. So are my folks. I just came by, to let you know your Ted’s okay, too.”
“Ted?” She stared at him perplexedly. He was filthy dirty, like almost everybody. “I didn’t know,” she said finally, “Ted was hurt.”
“Hurt bad, Mrs. Conner. But he’s over in the Green Prairie Country Club, getting real good care. I was on duty there. I talked to him.”
“What happened?”
“Got buried in a brick slide. Broke both legs.”
“But…?”
Jed Emmings smiled because he understood. “Absolutely okay, Mrs. Conner—or I’d have said so. No head injuries worth worrying about and nothing internal. Chipper and full of beans already. In traction, of course.”
She said, “Thank you, Jed.”
He nodded. “Glad to tell you. Glad to bring some good news to one door, anyhow!”
He went down the walk.
She noticed that the sun was shining. She hadn’t really noticed that before. She felt almost surprised that the sun was still there in the sky in its place.
When she went back to the kitchen, the water was close to a boil. She found an unbroken cup, rinsed it, put in some hot water and a spoonful of powdered coffee, started to take sugar and refrained, sat down on the seat of an armless chair to sip the hot fluid.
A little later, she heard car brakes.
I got home just in time, she thought. More visitors.
The car went on before she reached the hall and what she heard, she did not believe. It was Nora’s voice calling. “Mummie! Mummie! Aren’t you home?”
There she was, running up the walk, the way she always did, and Mrs. Conner felt things start to go black because she did not, could not believe. But there was a car, going away, a colored girl at the wheel, and it wasn’t quite the same Nora, coming up the steps on her spidery legs. She wore a different coat, too small for her, and a dress Beth didn’t recognize. Her hat was missing and one side of her long bob had been chopped off short. There was a big pad of bandage on her right cheek. Mrs. Conner still wasn’t absolutely sure, until she felt Nora in her arms.
“We thought—” she started to say.
Nora leaned back and looked up. “I had one hell of a time, I really did!” Nora said.
Henry didn’t get home till evening.
15
Outside of the place where Washington had been—far outside—in a big house that had belonged to a famous eighteenth-Century American, some fifty men held a meeting in the lamp-lit drawing room. The men came there by automobile, mostly; but three or four walked, and one arrived as the original householder often had, riding on a horse. Some of the men wore bandages, two were brought on stretchers, and all of them had to go through a considerable process of identification at check points around the estate. Bayoneted rifles and even cannon bristled on every hand.
When they had assembled, when they had waited for an hour beyond the agreed time—and greeted a few additional arrivals with quiet joy—a man who wore the white garments of a doctor, and around whose neck a stethoscope hung, said to a man in slacks and a tweed jacket,
“Mr. President….” The man shook his head. “I haven’t taken the oath yet.”
The doctor shrugged. “Mr. Gates, then. I think you ought to have the meeting soon, if possible. The Secretary of State is slipping fast.”
The man in tweeds, in slacks—“Mr. Gates”—walked to the middle of the handsome drawing room and stood at the head of a carved mahogany table. A young man handed him a gavel and he rapped. Talk stopped. Every person present turned toward Mr. Gates.
“The meeting,” he said, “will come to order.”
Chairs moved. Attendants brought stretchers close.
Harry Jackson Gates was sworn in as President of the United States. It was done quickly, in low tones. The only Justice they could find gravely administered the oath. When it was over, all but the new President sat down. He returned to the head of the long, gleaming table. On it, there was only the gavel and a Bible.
“Our group,” he began, in a somber voice, “constitutes, as you all know, all the high-echelon members of the Government who could be assembled, this frightful Christmas Day.” He looked at a notebook which he took from a jacket pocket. “Three members of the late President’s Cabinet are here.” He named them. “Supreme Court Justice Willard. Seventeen members of the United States Senate. Thirty-eight members of the House of Representatives. In an adjacent room, General Faversham and some other high military officers are waiting and I shall ask them in—with your consent. All in favor?”
There were grave “Ayes.”
“Opposed?”
Silence.
The new President nodded to the guards at a far door and it swung back. The military men carne in quietly, took chairs. The President spoke their names, gave their rank, and continued:
“I shall be brief. As you know, panic reigns from coast to coast. Four great cities were totally obliterated by hydrogen bombs in the afternoon and early evening of the twenty-third.
Washington met the same fate later. Twenty-five cities have been struck by plutonium bombs of exceptionally high power. Some twenty millions of us were killed or injured in the attack. Untold numbers, hundreds of thousands, are dying in the progressively worsening riots. It is the judgment of the military”—he paused, looked at the officers—“that weeks, if not months, will be required to restore order, and an indeterminate interval, many more months, to bring the nation back to a state of production and communication which will support the survivors at a survival level. I am sure you are, in general, familiar with those ghastly facts.”
There were murmurs of assent.