From the next room came a bold, cajoling giggle.
Then quiet.
The building quivered.
The planet turned.
Exhaustion lowered me into sleep on a jerky rope that did not loosen me
for a long time.
12
Contrary to expectation, the end of civilization came about through a
series of events connected in no way with war or atomic bombardment. Of
these events the earliest, so far as careful inquiry could determine at
the time, was initially observed by Malcolm Calk of 2531 North Munley
Street, Urbana, Illinois. Mr. Calk had just become engaged to Dorothea
Lurp of the same address--the boarding establishment of Sarah L. Rev,
or Reev--and they were celebrating the happy occasion by spending a
weekend at the Chicago home of Miss Lurp's parents. The day being
warm--it was the 9th of August, in the hot summer of 1953--the young
couple determined to repair to the beach.
They were contentedly ensconced at the lakeside when Mr. Calk's eyes
wandered from the person of his fiancée, who was in wading, to the
clouds overhead. These were of a cumulus nature, for the most part
widely spaced, and drifting southward on a wind reported later by the
Weather Bureau as of twelve miles per hour at mean cloud altitude.
Calk's mind was, as may readily be imagined, turned toward those
fancies which are commonly described as "building castles in the air."
He reports, indeed, that the phrase passed through his thoughts as he
looked at the vaporous structures overhead.
Within them he observed a certain slight turbulence or agitation to
which he at first paid scant heed. Clouds revolve and turn themselves
inside out in a manner that bespeaks air currents and their own
diaphanous consistency--a manner that sometimes suggests they have a
life of their own in a weird fourth dimension of the blue up yonder.
But the young Calk gave the phenomenon only a cursory, occasional
glance; his head was already "in the clouds"--another phrase upon which
he recalls musing at the time. He was apparently a person of whimsey--a
patternmaker employed by the Racine Forge and Tool Company of Urbana.
Presently, however, his focus was drawn with insistence toward the
slow-tumbling clouds and, as people will, he gave free play to his
imagination, seeing in the changing shapes now a dragon, now a cat's
face, and now the chuck of a turret lathe. These gossamer figures
wove themselves, vanished, and eddied into yet different forms until,
ultimately he found himself viewing a large letter N. About this he
saw nothing remarkable--at first. A letter of the alphabet is probably
shaped by the clouds as often as any boar's head or serpent.
The "N," however, took on contour and texture until it seemed a
deliberate thing--resembling, as Calk put it later, "Sky-writing done
backwards in a newsreel so that the frayed-out smoke pulled together
again to make a real clean-cut N."
At the moment, however (so uncritical was his brain and so unrelated
was the celestial phenomenon to his thoughts), he came to a different
conclusion. When the N established itself as a clear and sharply
defined capital letter, some two miles in length and many thousands of
feet above Lake Michigan, Calk informed himself that it was, actually,
the work of a sky-writer. This is a kind of rationalization which any
psychologist will recognize. Because what he saw did not quite conform
to his past experience, Calk discounted his sensory impression and
interpreted an external fact in terms of orderly recollections rather
than of observable reality. Donner, Bates, Breesteen, Cavanaugh, Cohen
and Wilstein, among other authorities, have noted the similiarity of
this process to that by which prejudices are often established.
"Look, honey," Mr. Calk called to his fiancée. "Sky-writer."
Miss Lurp looked and nodded in agreement. "Yeah. Bet it's cold up
there! Lucky fellow--the pilot."
No one else in the vicinity appeared to be aware of the process
overhead. Miss Lurp continued to wade--Mr. Calk to watch her and to
cast an occasional glance at the sky. A letter U was slowly formed
alongside the perfect N.
Miss Lurp at this point stepped on a clamshell, or possibly a broken
bottle, which hurt her foot although it did not break the skin.
Exaggerating the injury, she hopped ashore to solicit comfort, which
Mr. Calk readily supplied. Thereafter, sitting side by side, they gazed
up at the NU, near which yet other clouds were shifting and shaping
themselves.
"Why," said Miss Lurp, "that's not sky-writing at all! It's just the
clouds coming together accidental-like." To another couple, sitting on
the sand nearby, she called, "Look, people! The clouds are having a
spelling bee!"
One upturned countenance, or even two, may not serve to divert a throng
from its preoccupations, whether sordid or sublime. But four faces
intently elevated will permeate any mass of people and constrain nearly
all of the individuals in it to join. This contagion of curiosity
now spread over the beach. Soon, persons everywhere--on the sand and
the walk behind and in the water--bathers, loafers, nurses with
perambulators on the Drive, and policemen who were supposed to patrol
it but who were more attentive to the nurses--looked up to see, in a
vast blue area above, three letters: