touched Alice’s arm. “Alice, come out to my house tonight for the weekend. I want you to see for yourself.”
“I can’t. I keep the library open Saturdays. That’s my only chance to get the young ones. Evenings and Sundays, they’re paralyzed by TV.”
“I’m open Saturday mornings, too, so we can drive in together. I’ll pick you up when you’re through tomorrow evening. It’ll be a change for you, out in the country, away from that stuffy room.”
Alice hesitated. It would be nice to visit with Florence, but she hated to accept favors she couldn’t repay. She said, “Well, we’ll see.”
When Alice returned to the library, three old-timers, too old for shuffleboard or the Lawn Bowlers Club, were bent over the periodical table. Like mummies, she thought, partially unwrapped. One of the mummies leaned slowly over until his nose fell into the fold of Cosmopolitan. Alice walked over to the table and made certain he still breathed. She let him nap on, smiled at the other two, and darted into the reference room, with its towering, topheavy stacks. From the first stack, religious and spiritual works in steady demand, she brought down the King James Bible. She believed she would find the words in Revelation, and she did. She read two verses, lips moving, words murmuring in her throat:
And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,
Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
Alice put the Bible back on its shelf and walked, head down, to her cracked oak desk, like a schoolmarm’s desk on a dais, in the main hallway. She sat there, staring at the green blotter, at the antiquated pen and the glass inkwell, at the wooden file filled with readers’ cards, at the stack of publishers’ spring lists. Alone of all the people in Fort Repose, Alice Cooksey knew Mark Bragg well enough, and had absorbed sufficient knowledge of the world’s illness through the printed word, to understand that the books she had ordered from those spring lists might never be delivered. She had small fear of death, and of man none at all, but the formlessness of what was to come overwhelmed her. She always associated Babylon with New York, and she wished, now, that she lived on Manhattan, where one could die in a bright millisecond, without suffering, without risking the indignity of panic.
She picked up the telephone and called Florence. She would come out for the weekend, or even longer, if Florence was agreeable. When she set down the phone Alice felt steadier. If it came soon, she would have a friendly hand to hold. She would not be alone.
The Air Police sergeant at McCoy’s main gate questioned Randy, and then allowed him to call Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hart, a squadron commander, and friend of Mark’s. Hart had been to Fort Repose to fish for bass, first as Mark’s guest, and later, on several occasions, as a guest of Randy, so he was something more than an acquaintance. Randy said he had had a wire from Mark to meet him at noon, and Hart said, “He whistled through here yesterday. Didn’t expect him back so soon. Anyway, drive to Base Ops. We’ll go out on the line and meet him together. Let me talk to the Air Police. I’ll clear you through.”
Driving through the base, Randy sensed a change since his last visit, the year before. Physically, McCoy looked the same. It felt different. The Air Police questioning had been sharper, and more serious. That wasn’t the difference. He realized something was missing; and then he had it. Where were all the people? McCoy seemed almost deserted, with less activity, and fewer men and fewer cars than a year ago. He saw no other civilians. He saw no women, not even around the clubs and the BX. The most congested area on the base was the steps and lawn in front of the alert barracks opposite wing headquarters, where standby crewmen, rigid and stiff in pressure suits, talked and smoked. Trucks, tail gates down, were backed to the curb. Drivers slouched over their wheels as if they had been there a long time.
He drove onto Base Operations and parked close to the flight-line fence. Last year he had seen B-47’s, tankers, and fat transports stretching their wings, tip to tip, the length of the line-miles. Now, their numbers had dwindled. He counted fewer than twenty B-47’s, and guessed that the wing was in Africa or Spain or England on ninety-day foreign duty. But this could not be so, because Paul Hart, winner of bombing and navigation trophies, a Select Crew Aircraft Commander, would have led the flight.
Hart, a stocky, bandy-legged man with punched-in nose, a fighter’s chin, and an easy grin, met him at the door of Operations. “Hi, Randy,” he said. “Just checked the board. Mark will touch down in eight minutes. How’s the fishing?”
“It’s been lousy.” He looked up at the wind sock. “But it’ll get better if this high sticks around and the wind holds from the east. What’s he flying?”
“He’s not flying anything. He’s riding soft and plush in a C-One-thirty-five-that’s the transport version of our new jet tanker-with a lot of Offutt brass. Other brass, that is. I hear he gets his star soon. Only promotion I’ll ever get is to a B-Five eight.”
“Penalty for being a hot pilot,” Randy said. “What’s going on around here? Looks like a ghost town. You boys shutting up shop?”
“You haven’t heard about SAC’s interim dispersal?” “Vaguely, yes, on some of the commentaries.”
“Well, we’re not shouting about it. We try to keep half the wing off this base, because where we’re standing right now is a primary target. We farm out our planes to fighter fields and Navy fields and even commercial airports. And we try to keep ten percent of the wing airborne at all times, and if you look down there in front of the jumbo hangar you’ll see four standby Forty-sevens, bombed up and ready to go. Damn expensive way to run an air force.”
Randy looked. They were there, wings drooping with full tanks, bound to earth by slender umbilical cords, the starter cables. “I didn’t mean the planes so much as the people,” Randy said. “Where’s everybody?”
“Oh, that.” Hart frowned, as if deciding how much could be said and what words to use. “The papers know about it but they aren’t printing it,” he said finally, “and the people around Orlando must know about it by now so it can’t be any great secret. We’ve been on sort of a modified alert for four or five weeks. Maybe I should call it a creeping evacuation. We’ve cleared the area of all civilian and nonessential personnel, and we’re encouraging everybody to move their families out of the blast zone. You see, Randy, we can’t expect three to six hours’ warning any more. If we’re lucky, we might get fifteen minutes.”
Randy nodded. He noticed long red missiles slung under the wings of the standby B-47’s. He recognized them, from the newspaper photographs, as the Rascal, an air-to-ground H-bomb carrier. “Is that red baby much help?” he asked.
“That red baby,” Hart said, “is what we call the crew-saver. The Russkies are no dopes. They’ll try to stop us with missiles air-to-air and ground-to-air, beam-riders, heat-seekers, sound finders, and, for all I know, smellers. It’ll be no milk run but with the Rascal-and some other gadgets-we don’t have to write ourselves off as a kamikaze corps. We won’t have to penetrate their inner defense zones. We can lay off target and let that red baby fly. It knows where to go. Do you know what?”
“What?”
Paul Hart’s smile had vanished, and he looked older, and when he spoke it was gravely. “When the whistle blows, I’ll have a better chance if I’m in my aircraft, headed for target, than if I’m sitting at home with my feet propped up, drinking a Scotch, and Martha rubbing the kinks out of my neck-and our little place on the lake is five miles from here. So I’m a man of peace. I wish Martha and the kids lived in Fort Repose.”
Randy heard the low whine of jet engines at fractional power and saw a cigar-shaped C-135 line up with the runway in its swoop downward. Presently it wheeled into a taxi strip and braked in front of Operations. A flag, three white stars on a blue field, popped out of the cockpit, indicating that a lieutenant general was aboard, and alerting McCoy to provide the courtesies due such rank.
The three-star general was first down the ramp, his pink cheeked aide scurrying about his heels like an anxious puppy. Mark was last off Randy waved and caught his eye and Mark waved back but did not smile. Coming down the ramp and across the concrete, knees bare in tropical uniform, Mark looked like a slightly larger edition of Randy, an inch taller, a shade broader. At thirty feet they looked like twins, with the same jet hair, white teeth behind mobile lips, quizzical eyes set deep, the same rakish walk and swing of shoulders, cleft in chin and emphatic nose with a bony bump on the bridge. At three feet, fine, deep lines showed around Mark’s eyes and mouth, gray appeared in his black thicket, his jaw thrust out an extra half-inch, his face was leaner. At three feet, they were entirely different, and it was apparent Mark was the older, harder, and probably wiser man.
Mark put one hand on Hart’s shoulder and the other on Randy’s, and walked them toward the building. “Paul,”
