"Oh." But it was no surprise. It was still raining. "All right. I'll
come down."
He found himself hurrying in spite of himself. It was only a couple
of minutes before he was hurrying through the lobby. He saw with a
shock that the sofas and chairs in the lobby were occupied--guests too
panicky to sleep in their rooms, too exhausted to stay awake; they were
sprawled and snoring.
The men from the boat were in the kitchen drinking coffee that the
cooks had somehow contrived to make. "I'm Brayer--Hebertown police
chief. You people all right here?"
"All right?" You call a hundred and sixty scared, sore guests all
right? You call wondering if the whole damn place is going to float
away all right? "I guess so," Dave Wax said slowly. He was almost
afraid to ask: "How--how is it outside?"
The man rubbed at his mustache. "It's a flood," he said succinctly.
"Ask me in the morning. Anyway, we're beginning to get a little
organized." His voice took on a mechanical, rehearsed quality. "Don't
let anybody drink water unless it's been boiled for ten minutes. Use up
everything you can that's in the refrigerators tomorrow morning. What's
in the freezers ought to be good till tomorrow night, if you don't open
them too often. What you don't eat by then, _don't eat_. Throw it away.
You probably don't have any water pressure, do you? Your own electric
pump, I guess? All right; you'll have to set up latrines--use chamber
pots if you have to. Dump them in the river to empty them--you're far
enough away from everything here."
"Wait a minute." Dave was a little slow to grasp the implications of
it. "You mean even by tomorrow night we won't have the power back?"
"I'll consider us very lucky," the police chief said heavily, "if
Hebertown ever has power again."
He got up. "They say that by daybreak the weather will be clear
enough for helicopters. If you need anything--a doctor if there's an
emergency, anything like that--hang a white sheet out of a window and
keep somebody standing by. When a helicopter or boat patrol comes by
they'll see it and investigate; then you wave another sheet at them and
they'll see that somebody gets here."
Dave Wax and Mr. Semmel watched Brayer and his boatman chug away.
"Hebertown Chief of Police," said Wax. "Isn't he a little out of his
jurisdiction?"
"He said they were looking for somebody. Wanted to know if we'd picked
up any refugees. God forbid." Mr. Semmel shook his head firmly. "A
mess. Now, in New Hampshire there would _never_--"
* * * * *
It was cracking daylight when Brayer got back to Hebertown. He sat down
in the police station, now an emergency shelter with men, women and
children sprawled all over everywhere, and dazedly pushed away the
coffee somebody offered him. He hoped he would never see another cup of
coffee again.
He said heavily, "Henry'll turn up. I have a lot of confidence in Artie
Chesbro's instinct for self-preservation; he'll find a place to hole up
in."
"Sure, Red." The head of Hebertown's Civil Defense Squad, an
organization with an honorable history extending back nearly four
hours, dug his fingers into the bags under his eyes and tried to stay
awake. He owned a ready-to-wear establishment on North Front, and he
had once allowed the Red Cross to use his second-floor storeroom as a
fund-drive headquarters, a record of achievement which had done very
little to fit him for staying up all night. "I went down at eleven
o'clock to look at the water," he said meditatively. "I didn't want
my cellar flooded again, like in thirty-nine, so I shoveled dirt up
against the windows, and then I went home to bed." He laughed. He had
gone by his store again two hours later--in a boat--and had had to bend
down to look through the windows of the loft the Red Cross once had
used. "I heard on the radio a list of all the cities that were hit--the
worst ones. They didn't even mention Hebertown.... Say, what are you
going to tell Bess Starkman?"