Stuart and Lightheiser ran up the sidewalk to where the gray-green metal sidewalk doors were which opened onto the underground storage basement that once, a long time ago, a drugstore had used for its stock but which now was empty. Stuart tore at the metal doors, and so did Lightheiser, and both of them yelled that it wouldn’t open; there was no way to open it except from below. At the entrance of the men’s clothing store a clerk appeared, saw them; Lightheiser shouted at him, yelled for him to run downstairs and open up the sidewalk. “Open the sidewalk!” Lightheiser yelled, and so did Stuart, and now so did several people all standing or squatting at the sidewalk doors, waiting for the sidewalk to open. So the clerk turned and ran back into the clothing store. A moment later a clanking noise sounded under Stuart’s feet.
“Get back,” a heavy-set elderly man said. “Get off the doors.” The people saw down into cold gloom, a cave under the sidewalk, an empty cavity. They all jumped down into it, falling to the bottom; they lay pressed against damp concrete, rolling themselves up into balls or flattening themselves out—they squirmed and pressed down into crumbly soil with the dead sowbugs and the smell of decay.
“Close it from above.” a man was saying. There did not seem to be any women, or if there were they were silent; his head pressed into a corner of the concrete, Stuart listened but heard only men, heard them as they grabbed at the doors above, trying to shut them. More people came down now, falling and tumbling and yelling, as if dwnped from above.
“How long, oh Lord?” a man was saying.
Stuart said, “Now.” He knew it was now; he knew that the bombs were going off—he felt them. It seemed to occur inside him. Blam, blam, blam, blam, went the bombs, or perhaps it was things sent up by the Army to help, to stop the bombs; perhaps it was defense. Let me down, Stuart thought. Low as I can be. Let me into the ground., He pressed down, rolled his body to make a depression. People lay now on top of him, choking coats and sleeves, and he was glad; he did not mind—he did not want emptiness around him: he wanted solidness on every side. He did not need to breathe. His eyes were shut; they, and the other openings of his body, his mouth and ears and nose, all had shut; he had walled himself in, waiting.
Blam, blam, blam.
The ground jumped.
We’ll get by, Stuart said. Down here, safe in the earth. Safe inside where it’s safe; it’ll pass by overhead. The wind.
The wind, above on the surface, passed by at huge speed; he knew it moved up there, the air itself, driven along altogether, as a body.
In the nose cone of Dutchman IV, Walt Dangerfield, while still experiencing the pressure of many gravities on his body, heard in his earphones the voices from below, from the control bunker.
“Third stage successful, Walt. You’re in orbit. We’ll fire off the final stage at 15:45 instead of 15:44, they tell me.”
Orbital velocity, Dangerfield said to himself, straining to see his wife. She had lost consciousness; he looked away from her at once, concentrating on his oxygen supply, knowing she was all right but not wanting to witness her suffering. Okay, he thought, we’re both okay. In orbit, waiting for the final thrust. It wasn’t so bad.
The voice in his earphones said, “A perfect sequence so far, Walt. The President is standing by. You have eight minutes six seconds before the initial corrections for the fourth-stage firing. If in correcting minor—“
Static erased the voice; he no longer heard it.
If in correcting minor but vital errors in attitude, Walter Dangerfield said to himself, there is a lack of complete success, we will be brought back down, as they did before in the robot-runs. And later on we will try it again. There is no danger; reentry is an old story. He waited.
The voice in his earphones came on again. “_Walter, we are under attack down here_.”
What? he said. What did you say?
“God save us,” the voice said. It was a man already dead; the voice had no feeling, it was empty and then it was silent. Gone.
“From whom?” Walt Dangerfield said into his microphone. He thought of pickets and rioters, he thought of bricks, angry mobs. Attacked by nuts or something, is that it?
He struggled up, disconnected himself from the straps, saw through the port the world below. Clouds, and the ocean, the globe itself. Here and there on it matches were lit; he saw the puffs, the flares. Fright overcame him, as he sailed silently through space, looking down at the pinches of burning scattered about; he knew what they were.
It’s death, he thought. Death lighting up spots, burning up the world’s life, second by second.
He continued to watch.
There was, Doctor Stockstill knew, a community shelter under one of the big banks, but he could not remember which one. Taking his secretary by the hand he ran from the building and across Center Street, searching for the black and white sign that he had noticed a thousand times, that had become part of the perpetual background of his daily, business existence on the public street. The sign had merged into the unchanging, and now he needed it; he wanted it to step forward so that he could notice it as he had at the beginning: as a real sign, meaning something vital, something by which to preserve his life.
It was his secretary, tugging at his arm, who pointed the way to him; she yelled in his ear over and over again and he saw—he turned in that direction and together they crossed the street, running out into the dead, stalled traffic and among the pedestrians, and then they were struggling and fighting to get into the shelter, which was the basement of the building.
As he burrowed down, lower and lower, into the basement shelter and the mass of people pressed together in it, he thought about the patient whom he had just seen; he thought about Mr. Tree and in his mind a voice said with clarity, You did this. See what you did, you’ve killed us all.
His secretary had become separated from him and he was alone with people he did not know, breathing into their faces and being breathed on. And all the time he heard a wailing, the noise of women and probably their small children, shoppers who had come in here from the department stores, mid-day mothers. Are the doors shut? he wondered. Has it begun? It has; the moment has. He closed his eyes and began to pray out loud, noisily, trying to hear the sound. But the sound was lost.
“Stop that racket,” someone, a woman, said in his ear, so close that his ear hurt. He opened his eyes; the woman, middle-aged, glared at him, as if this was all that mattered, as if nothing was happening except his noisy praying. Her attention was directed on stopping him, and in surprise he stopped.
Is that what you care about? he wondered, awed by her, by the narrowness of her attention, by its mad constrictedness. “Sure,” he said to her. “You damn fool,” he said, but she did not hear him. “Was I bothering your’ he went on, unheeded; she was now glaring at someone else who had bumped or shoved her. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, you stupid old crow, you—“ He cursed at the woman, cursing instead of praying and feeling more relief by that; he got more out of that.
And then, in the middle of his cursing, he had a weird, vivid notion. The war had begun and they were being bombed and would probably die, but it was Washington that was dropping the bombs on them, not the Chinese or the Russians; something had gone wrong with an automatic defense system out in space, and it was acting out its cycle this way—and no one could halt it, either. It was war and death, yes, but it was error; it lacked intent. He did not feel any hostility from the forces overhead. They were not vengeful or motivated; they were empty, hollow, completely cold. It was as if his car had run over him: it was real but meaningless. It was not policy, it was breakdown and failure, chance.
So at this moment, he felt himself devoid of retaliatory hatred for the enemy because he could not imagine-did not actually believe in or even understand—the concept. It was as if the previous patient, Mr. Tree or Doctor Bluthgeld or whoever he had been, had taken in, absorbed all that, left none of it for anyone else. Bluthgeld had made Stockstill over into a different person, one who could not think that way even now. Bluthgeld, by being insane, had made the concept of the enemy unbelievable.