New York was the first city to stampede.
Before the S in BASTARDS! was completed, a loft caught fire in Seventh
Avenue. The engines were unable to reach it, the fire spread, a wall
fell into the crowd, and horrified survivors pressed both north and
south in the thoroughfare, screaming. Their hysteria went ahead of them
and, since the neck-craning throngs could not know the cause of it,
they interpreted the oncoming roar in the wildest fashions. They, also,
turned to run. Central Park furnished a place in which one-half of this
tumultuous and trampling herd was able to spread out and regain some
composure, though it had left the streets behind dotted with the maimed
and slain. There was no sizable park to the south, however, and those
who took that direction (save for a few thousands who sought shelter
in the Pennsylvania Station) built up an avalanche of humanity which
pelted and thundered clear to the Battery, itself its own Juggernaut.
The infection spread to side streets and to other avenues, inevitably.
Within an hour, a great part of middle and lower Manhattan became such
an abattoir as history has no record of. The show-windows along Fifth
Avenue were burst in by the push of people who were then sliced and
guillotined by the cascading glass. Wooden buildings were knocked askew
in places.
Nobody could cope with such a situation but the mayor did his
resourceful best. He ordered airplanes equipped with loud-speakers of
great power to fly over the self-beleaguered city and explain what the
source of the great stampede had been. Every morgue and hospital in
the city and in its environs was mobilized. All bridges and tunnels
were instantly cleared for the transport of the injured, as Manhattan's
hospitals could not handle five per cent of the casualties. Police,
using pistols with little ceremony, brought to a partial halt the
epidemic of looting that occurred in the early afternoon. People were
commanded to take the equivalent of air-raid shelter and to stay there.
The military, acting with their usual belated but firm ineffectuality,
again essayed the problem of the Word itself. Unveiling a new weapon--a
rocket adapted for air-to-air combat, with a warhead of a secret
explosive--the Army launched squadrons of fighters and bombers to
the attack. A great cannonade over the city began near five o'clock.
It was futile: the blasts disrupted edges and fringes of the letters
in the sky but they mended themselves as fast as they were tattered.
Army Ordinance then tried its supersecret, twenty-four-inch rockets.
Careless fusing caused one of these to explode at a low level,
destroying the upper stories of the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Building--but subsequent accurate salvos of the tremendous weapon
merely caused the letters to undulate.
Shortly after six o'clock the Navy, carrying out a suggestion of
Cardinal Bleatbier, tried a new tactic--the interposition of a smoke
screen between the abomination and the desolated city. The idea was
greeted by officers with enthusiasm. The effect of it was not. For,
after some fifty Navy planes had laid a great, brown carpet underneath
the Word and above the buildings, there came new and hitherto
unobserved eddyings of the air and the Navy smoke was drawn into the
writing on the heavens--not only fortifying and clarifying what it had
been intended to obscure but also giving the letters a phosphorescent
glow which became visible as soon as twilight descended.
That night, as electricity began to fail in the city, the surviving
people undertook to leave en masse. They had no stomach for another day
such as they had passed through. An additional factor urged them on.
During the years of the Atomic Age they had been living--like people
of every city--with keen, increasing queasiness. It is not conducive
to urban content to know that any of a dozen foreign governments
can, or potentially can, blot out you and yours in an eye-twinkling.
Indeed, for many years, people had been trickling away from cities
everywhere--either openly giving their reason or offering some excuse.
Finally, from the very onslaught of B Day, there had poured forth a
succession of orders setting up various official hierocracies for the
emergency--deputy police, wardens, and so on, along with the rationing
of gasoline, restrictions on subway use, abrogation of power supply,
and other such matters. Americans are not a patient people and of
all Americans, New Yorkers are the most impatient. Unlike Britains,
Russians, and Europeans, they had never accepted the brash contempt of
the public exhibited continually both by government and industry after
World War II. Nor had they become reconciled to bureaucratic rule.
They had resented the multiplication of authorized agents and official
personnel. Hence, not being schooled to such vicissitudes at the time
of B Day, they lost their tempers. They left town. By midnight, the
tunnels, bridges, and ferries could no longer be held open for the
evacuation of casualties. By three in the morning, every bridge and
every tunnel and every boat was swarming with one-way, antlike movement
as New Yorkers abandoned New York. All the next day the human tide
welled into metropolitan environs.
The contagion spread to other cities as words began to form above them
and in some instances even before their skies developed a C or a J or a
P or an A or the like. Terror begat terror. Various metropolises were
soon without electricity, water, food, gasoline, and so on. Fires began
to rage in them. In no time, Cleveland, Detroit, Birmingham, Boston,
Los Angeles, and other centers were in a condition like that of cities
over which a powerful enemy has gained absolute control of the air.
There is, of course, no general record of the total effect of this
exodus. Towns, villages, hamlets, and lone farms were unprepared to
house or to feed the scores of millions who descended upon them--rich
refugees in limousines piled high with canned foods and guns--slum
masses in rags and on foot, with nothing but fear and hunger to drive
them ahead. Here and there some man of feudal abilities organized bands
of the fugitives and these forcibly evacuated whole communities, taking
possession of them--only to be driven out by bands better armed and
more ruthless. Theft and violence became the national way of life; and
murder--murder that took the lives of millions--the means to obtain
a meal or a woman or a bauble in some as yet unsmashed village store
window. City people had become the sworn enemies of country people--and
vice versa. The Hindus and Mussulmans of India on the days after its
liberation were more kindly disposed to one another than these--and
dealt more mercifully.
So it went--fire, blood and turmoil, death, epidemic and ruin.
Only Russia maintained, for a little while, the mask of order. No
obscenity in its skies was able to break the disciplined ranks of the
proletariat. But this calm--this grimly enforced maintenance of socialІ
decorum--was ultimately shattered. On the 3rd of September, while
the Kremlin exulted over the downfall of each and every empire and
democracy, there appeared, almost experimentally, over the city of Kiev
the phrase:
јІЕНИН ДИСИВД
No mere exposure of lewd words could faze the Soviets; but the hideous
violation of the proprieties represented by the simple statement that
"Lenin deceived" sent consternation whistling from the Baltic to theҪИ
Black Sea. The next day, the sky of Moscow reported that Stalin had
lied methodically; and the day after that, the people of Ordzhonikidze
were informed that the Kremlin feasted, the party guzzled, the people
starved. Russia rose against its government and Politburo heads were
carried from city to city on stakes. Exodus followed. From the hot
wheatfields of the Ukraine to the cool timberlands of Siberia, the
panoply of death began.
Last to enjoy the fruits of organized society, perhaps, were the atomic
scientists and their families at Los Alamos. These persons, impounded
by a series of fences and protected by guards trained not only to
mistrust rumor, but to bear silently all knowledge of however weird a
nature, and to shoot without asking questions, were protected through
the precedents and methodologies of what is called security. The town
and its laboratories were stocked with food and water against possible
air attack and resultant isolation by radiation. Hence the planetary
debacle, while it became known to the scientists, did not greatly
affect the local status quo. The guards were ordered to destroy such
bands of wandering refugees as made their way across the deserts to the
vicinity. This was done.
Meantime, the scientists took measures to study and if possible to
arrest the universal disintegration of humanity.
It is the custom of journalists (and it is the habit in fiction) to
depict scientists as impractical, dreamy men, absent-minded, innocent,
and not competent to deal with simple situations--men forever in need,
like infants, of overseers. Nothing could possibly be further from the
truth. Indeed, it may fairly be said that, had the people of the world
understood this fallacy about scientists, they might themselves have
been more scientific--which is to say aware--and so prevented their
catastrophe. Actually, it was known--known statistically--even before
World War II, that scientists as a group were possessed of an all-round
superiority over their fellows. They were not merely precocious,
but like the precocious everywhere, they had on the average larger
physiques, more strength and endurance, quicker reflexes, greater
athletic ability, and better looks than common Homo sapiens. However,
although this fact had been published a thousand times and proved in a
hundred ways, the people preferred to cling to the myth that scientists
were inept in all but their métier--naïve, absent-minded, and rather
foolish.
That but affords another index of the general foolishness.
New York's tragedy convinced the farsighted physicists, chemists,
biologists, and others at Los Alamos that the nation and possibly the
world would be swept with unprecedented panic. The steps anent local
guards which have been already described were immediately taken. Under
Xerxes Cohn, the scientists organized research parties; in fifteen
planes, they took off to study the situation at first hand. Within
forty-eight hours they had assembled a full report of events in a
dozen urban areas and of the gory melee in progress everywhere in the
countryside. (They had, naturally, all the information available on
the Words from Calk's first account in the Chicago papers, through
Cummings's initial survey, to the latest military data--as well as
reports of many great savants made before their own flights from
various cities of the earth.)
These data were now screened, and evaluated. Charts were prepared. A
discussion meeting was held in the hall for top-secret conferences.
Various papers were read, including the following:
_Tead's Hypothesis_ that energy, in whatever form, has a sort of
subnuclear consciousness and will power and that the watery masses
which made up clouds, revolted by the wretched spectacle of humanity,
had taken up word-spelling as a form of rebuke, i.e., as Nature talking
to human nature.
_Schilch's Theory_ that there were no words and that the whole grisly
phenomenon was the result of mass autohypnosis. This proposition (which
might valuably have been given further investigation) was discarded
by the scientists for empirical reasons: they, themselves, they felt,
could not be hypnotized and certainly their instruments could not be.
(It will be noted that there was no discussion of the possibility that
the scientists could be so hypnotized as uniformly to misread their
instruments.)
_Boden's Proposal_ that the human unconscious mind actually formed the
Words by telekinesis. To defend this (another idea worthy of deeper
scrutiny) he cited J.B. Rhine--and was laughed off the rostrum.
_Jetefti's_ remarkably erudite _Demonstration_--following studies
of cosmic radiation around various Words--studies of ionization, of
stratospheric air currents, of polarization, of the uninterruptibility
of streams of neutrons, gamma rays, alpha particles, electrons,
photons, and other forms of radiation with which the Words had been
surrounded, of the Heaviside Layer, etc., etc.--that no external (i.e.,
interplanetary) agency or intelligence had _projected_ the Words on
city skies.
_Poglief's Discussion_ of God which concluded, "Religious
Fundamentalism has been the recourse of millions, as might be
expected. These persons hold either that God has permitted the Devil
thus to rebuke humanity, which may be a sound moral observation but
which is not good physics; or else that the Words represent the
imminence of the Day of Judgment and the approach of the Opening of the
Gates of Paradise. This latter theory, gentlemen, is not, I feel, borne
out by the specific nature of the abundant tokens."
Hearty laughter greeted this conclusion. And again--the opportunity to
consider the nature of God, a third valuable occasion, was missed.