Patty, when she had cancer, wrote to Vernon, “I wish you and Julian could reconcile your differences. When I am gone, I’m afraid he’ll end up all alone.”
Yes, well, some people deserve to be alone.
He contemplates calling Mark, but doesn’t have a good reason.
This surprising world. His old vacuum-tube radio upstairs has the CONELRAD logo stamped on the dial at 640 and 1240 kHz. If the Soviets had attacked, all broadcasting would have shut down except at those two frequencies, and the stations using them would have operated round-robin, so that enemy bombers wouldn’t be able to home in on any one signal and target its host city. A smart plan, thought up by a team of smarties. The broadcasting stations would direct populations to shelters, engineered and constructed by more smarties. People would wait their turn, drive sensibly in their millions, written directions in hand, with a full tank of gas they’d stored in their garage ahead of time. In the back seat, Sally, Dick, and Jane would be troopers, despite the fact that Spot had been left behind. Civil defense volunteers in their thousands would be distributed sensibly all over the road network, to help the lame, hurry the halt, inform the lost. They would not spend one distracting second thinking about seeking shelter themselves.
Except the shelters were never built. All those blueprints, studies, salaries. How far did we get? At the top of basement stairs in public buildings, we put up signs and printed stencils—three triangles, Trinity squared, pointing down to the underworld. Nearly every school had a stencil, because our children are important. And like the civil defense logo on Vernon’s radio, many of those stencils and metal signs are still there, faded or rusting, because who wants to spend money to get rid of them? They don’t lead down to food or water, or dosimeters or Geiger counters, or baffle walls for keeping out Chinese demons. They never did. All that’s ever been down there is basement.
And now idiots think Reagan’s anti-missile system will work, when all it does is relocate that chimerical shelter in the sky. After thirty years of designing balloon and rocket flights with instrumentation that must remain directed toward the Sun, Vernon knows something about pointer systems. And after RAND, he knows something about the flight of ICBMs. In fact, these are pretty much his only two islets in the vast, mysterious sea. And he’ll signal with driftwood to anyone who will pay attention, which includes precisely no one who matters: dependable in-flight interception of an ICBM is impossible.
“But, you know,” idiots have said to him, “we thought it was impossible to put someone on the Moon.”
“That was acknowledged to be difficult, not impossible.”
“But surely, if we don’t try, how can we—”
“Do you know anything about the flight characteristics of an ICBM?”
“No, but—”
“You’re right. You don’t know. So your opinion is worthless.”
Yet here we go, obeying that doddering fool’s whim of iron: more studies, more salaries. Because our children are still important to us. Almost as important as our illusions.
Vernon puts his plate in the dishwasher, his bottle in the recycling tub. Redescends the basement stairs, holding on to the handrail for dear life.
Patty got the news about her bone marrow cancer when she was forty-seven. Two boys still in school. “Pray for me,” she wrote to Vernon. She’d always liked him more than he’d liked her. Life could be sad that way. Of course he would have prayed for her, if he’d believed in any of that nonsense. He hoped her religion comforted her. As for him, he’ll have to lose a lot more of his marbles for any consolation to come to him from that quarter.
In 1953 and 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Agency ran Operations Doorstep and Cue, in conjunction with atomic bomb tests run by the AEC. In the first, they built two wood-frame houses at 3500 and 7500 feet respectively from the shot tower, placed mannequins in them and filmed what happened when the bomb went off. The nearer house collapsed, which was expected, and in fact desired, because the FCDA was testing whether people in a lean-to shelter in the basement might survive the destruction of the house above them. (They concluded there was a good chance.) In the more ambitious Operation Cue, the FCDA built a wood-frame house, a brick house, and a concrete-block house—why the test wasn’t called Operation Big Bad Wolf, Vernon will never understand—plus power lines, a working electrical substation, a propane storage site, and two radio towers. They spread a few dozen cars around, put mannequins in the cars and in the houses, this time with canned food to test afterward for radioactivity, and lined up more mannequins outside, facing toward the blast wearing different types and colors of clothing. They called this bigger settlement Survival Town, and the newsreels featured can-do narration detailing the relatively modest preparations citizens could make to help them get through a holocaust in one piece.
But all anyone remembers from those films is two clips. The first is of the nearer wood-frame house in Operation Doorstep. It might be any suburban home of the northeast US, built in colonial style of white clapboard. It stands two-thirds of a mile away from a 16-kiloton explosion. At the instant of detonation, the house is bathed in a weirdly stark light that makes it look, frighteningly and appropriately, like a toy model. An instant later, the
