A Town Is Drowning Read online

  “Yeah. CMA Flight 24 was early and south of their course, so I phoned in for the hell of it. Coffee’s hot.”

  “Maybe later. Well, I relieve you.”

  The man passed over the night glasses and went yawning through the curtains. The air watcher wiped the drizzled lenses of the binoculars, sighed and stepped out onto the roof. He slumped into the swivel chair, tilted back in the patter of rain and watched the overcast sky with boredom. The little town’s lights were bright; after a few minutes outside you could see how far they really shone. And a few minutes more and you could see the lights of the next little town, fifteen miles away, as a dim haze on the horizon. By the time his tour was over they would have gone out and everybody would be in bed, light rain comfortably pattering on their roofs.

  The phone inside the shack jangled—most unusual!

  He blundered in through the curtains, blinking at the naked bulb. He picked up the direct-wire phone and gave his GOC post number.

  “Filter Center,” said the phone. “Is your town flooded?”

  “No!” he said, astounded.

  “How much rain are you having?”

  “Just a light drizzle. Why?”

  “Thanks,” Filter Center said, and hung up.

  “Now what the hell—?” he gasped, standing there with the phone in his hand, not realizing that he—one of thousands—had just played his part in alleviating statewide disaster.

  The Filter Center was in the basement of the College’s newest structure, the Physical Sciences Building. Its location was a low-grade secret in that it was never published in the papers. Since it was staffed mostly by unpaid volunteers, that was about as far as the secrecy went.

  The government had spent a lot of money on it in 1949. The money had transformed an ordinary storage and heating-plant basement into an ‘air-conditioned, soundproofed office of enormous size. There was a huge table with an inlaid map of the area; this was the heart of the center and the numerous other installations were designed either to send information to the table or take information from it. Information came by phone from watchers like our man on the roof; his messages buzzed from headsets into the ears of girls who stood at a plexiglas sheet ruled off in grids. At word from him that he had sighted a plane—direction traveling, height and type if possible—they scribbled symbols in china-marking pencil on the sheet. One of the girls around the map table then shoved a marker to the right spot on the map. The Air Force liaison officer constantly on duty at the table checked the marker against his list of submitted flight plans from the Civil Aeronautics Authority and decided that all was well. If the marker did not correspond with any submitted flight plan he picked up a phone and called an interceptor base, usually to find that radar units had beaten the filter center and its volunteers to the warning, that jet fighters had scrambled, perhaps that the errant plane had already been identified as a strayed commercial flight and that the fighters were down again. Twice in five years the volunteers had beaten the radar, and the lieutenant considered those two times well worth the cost of the center and the boredom of duty there.

  It was a very dull night, and the lieutenant was looking forward to his relief when the call from the State Director of Civil Defense came in.

  “Hell’s busting loose, Lieutenant.” the director said succinctly. “I’m getting calls from here and there with spotty reports of flooding, but mostly from scared people who want to know what’s going on and what they should do about it. Can you call all your air watchers and get a summary of the situation?”

  “I’ll put the chief operator on it, sir,” the lieutenant said. “We can put the reports on the map. I’ll report this to Group at once; I’m sure they can get a meteorologist here at once to try and evaluate it for you. And maybe the army will lend us an engineer officer with some experience in flood control.”

  The night was turning out to be not so dull after all. Diplomatically—he was liaison, not command—he filled in the chief operator, and she made a little speech to the matrons and girls, detailing half of them to continue meticulously with the aircraft work and the rest to start phoning the watchers. The lieutenant rapidly devised a set of symbols to summarize the conditions at each point; his weather studies helped there.

  Within minutes they were jotting them down on the map table. One girl came to him with the question, what do you do when you can’t get a wire through?

  “Put down an F” he said. “For flooded.”

  The director was back on the wire, and he hadn’t even called Group yet. “You’d better send a man of your own down here, sir,” he advised. “Somebody from your staff who can do nothing but report to you.”

  “Good idea. He’s on his way, Lieutenant.”

  He got through to Group, the officer of the day first and then the sleepy executive officer. The exec carefully avoided commenting on his action but said, “We’ll send you a meteorologist pronto. I’ll message First Army about the engineer officer. Meanwhile, keep at it—and don’t forget your primary mission, Lieutenant.”

  He would not forget. One of the girls at the plexiglas scribbled a symbol, but nobody at the table picked it up; they were too busy twittering and tutting over the grim picture shaping up along the rivers of their state.

  “Get that intercept!” he snapped at the girl who was responsible for the sector.

  “Sorry,” she said, burning red, and picked out a marker to shove carefully to the right spot on the map. Multi-engine, approximately angels ten, bearing 280. The lieutenant checked his list; it was CMA Flight 24 a little off course.

  And the girls kept calling; from some alert watchers they got unbelievably exact information relayed from local police or newsmen—normal river depth, present river depth, rise during the past 24 hours, condition of phone and power lines. From others they got only brief impressions that there was trouble, and how much. From many they got nothing at all. Down the river valley towns on the map table crawled the menacing symbol F, over and over again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The man in the winterized jeep unzipped a window, leaned out and yelled: “The burgess around here?”

  The four soaked men working around the tow truck didn’t even answer. One of them gestured down the road with an arm and they went back to trying to get a line to a car that had gone off the road. It was now roof-deep in the torrent that had once been a drainage ditch, and up to five minutes ago it had looked as though something was moving behind the windshield.

  The man in the jeep spat into the rain and drove on. He finally found the burgess’s car parked with its lights on, along with a couple of others, a few yards from the edge of the river. That was crazy, he thought, why didn’t they park them up on the highway, twenty-five feet above the water? Then he remembered that he was on the highway.

  “Man wants you, Henry.”

  The burgess turned around to face his chief of police. “If it’s that Artie Chesbro again, tell him to take his goddamn car and—”

  “No. Lloyd Eisele—don’t know if you know him, he’s got a dairy farm up in the hills.”

  “Then why didn’t he have sense enough to stay there?”

  “His boy’s a radio ham, Henry. He’s got a message for you.”

  Burgess Starkman snapped at the man: “Well?”

  The dairy farmer said, “The kid has a contact with a phone line open to the Civil Defense Filter Center in Springfield. They want an estimate of damage; they want to know what help and supplies you’ll need in the morn— ing. And they’ve got instructions for you.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it over.

  Burgess Starkman said to his chief of police, “What do you think? Should I send somebody back with him to talk to them?”

  “Sprayragen,” said Chief Brayer promptly. “He’s too old for this anyhow. Let him sit down for a while.” He went off to get him.

  The dairy farmer looked around at the cars, the fire engine, the men with flashlights and electric lanterns moving around in the downp
our. “Something happen?” he wanted to know.

  “You could say that,” the burgess said wearily. “There was a boy’s camp a mile up the river. It’s gone now, and eight of the kids are missing. We put a boat in the water, and all that happened was we lost a boat.” He glanced at the dairy farmer. “How’d you know where to find me? Have you been in Hebertown?”

  The dairy farmer nodded.

  “Is it bad there?”

  The dairy farmer coughed. “You haven’t been in town for a while, have you?” He didn’t look at the burgess. “The water was up to the corner where the Moose building is—you know? Somebody told me all the stores on Front Street are gone.”

  He went on from there. By the time the chief of police got back with old Sprayragen the burgess had pieced together an ugly picture.

  As the jeep turned around, Burgess Starkman yelled, “Oh, by the way—thanks!” He looked blankly at Brayer. “Did you hear what he said?”

  “Enough.” Brayer looked sick. He burst out, “God amighty, Henry, we’re doing this all wrong. We ought to be back in town, running the show, instead of out here trying to do everything ourselves. We ought to have two-way radio on the pumpers, and a first-aid emergency truck, and an organization set up year-round with volunteers trained for emergency work. Sure, it’d cost a little money, but what the hell, the taxpayers’ll stand for it. Something like this will make godfearing citizens out of them for a while anyhow.”

  “Sure,” said the burgess gently. “Sure, Red. You finish up here and come on back to town and we’ll start over.” He left the chief of police there, with his thick mustache running water and his old face worried and indignant. As he headed back to the car where the Chesbros were waiting, he thought: Red’s a good man and he’s right, only he hasn’t finished thinking it through yet. We need all those things all right. But after this—what taxpayers?

  Artie Chesbro was sulking. If that power-mad son of a bitch Starkman had been willing to give him two lousy minutes of his time, they could have got the whole thing over with and he’d be back in Summit by now, getting a good night’s sleep, instead of catching pneumonia sitting in the car. He couldn’t even help out in their lousy Boy-Scout act—they’d chased him bade to the car the second time he’d fallen in, on the pretext that they didn’t have another flashlight to replace the one he’d lost. So there went a fine chance to get Starkman’s ear. Thank God, he told himself virtuously, nothing like this could happen back in Summit. For two cents he’d turn around and head back and the hell with the burgess—the old Swanscombe place wasn’t worth all this trouble.

  Or anyway, it wouldn’t be, if it hadn’t been for the signed option agreement he’d given the men from Chillicothe, Ohio…“Shut up that damn humming,” he snapped at his wife.

  Mrs. Chesbro laughed softly.

  Chesbro didn’t even notice the burgess until the door of the car opened. “How’s it going, Henry?” he demanded cordially. “Hope you found those kids. Damn shame about the camp, but if they will build on low ground they have to expect something like this.”

  “Let’s head back for town,” said the burgess. He looked at the clock on Chesbro’s dashboard. That couldn’t be right! Two—three—four hours they’d been out here, he counted.

  That was time enough to wash all of Hebertown away. He leaned back, and let himself be weary. He hadn’t been up this late in—in—he couldn’t remember.

  Chesbro was at it again, he noticed abstractedly. It didn’t take him fifty words to get from the flood to Topic A—why the borough of Hebertown should, ought and must give him the old Swanscombe place. But the burgess didn’t mind. Chesbro was a saturation-talker; his tactic was to hammer, hammer, hammer away, never giving the other man a chance to get an adverse word in; and it wasn’t too hard, after all, to listen to the rain on the car roof instead. He realized vaguely that that rain had been coming down awful hard for an awfully long time. Once, he remembered, they had had a big summer thunderstorm and Bess had read him out of the paper the amazing statement that more than four inches of rain had come out of that one storm. This had to be more than that. Much more.

  What about Bess, by the way? Their house was high enough up, he calculated, there wasn’t much chance of flood water reaching it. But had she stayed home? It wouldn’t be like Bess to stay home by herself, especially when he didn’t show up and the phones were down. She would have tried to cross the highway into the borough and found out that that was impossible. Then she would have—he checked off the possibilities—probably she would have gone to her sister’s house. That was all right; good location. Barring some freak like a falling tree or a collapsing roof.

  He leaned back, his mind slowly going blank and relaxed, under the soothing drone of the flapping windshield wipers and the pounding rain and Artie Chesbro’s ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta. Mrs. Chesbro had let her head slump onto the burgess’s shoulders. She was probably used to that maddeningly persistent voice. Maybe asleep.

  He glanced down at her.

  She wasn’t asleep. Her eyes were squeezed shut with anguish and her mouth was suffering. Not with physical pain. The burgess realized slowly that she was not used to the maddening voice at all and had infinitely more reason to hate its clacking than he.

  “Cigarette?” Artie Chesbro said again. Now what was the matter with the old son of a bitch? He said more loudly: “Cigarette, Henry?”

  “Uh, sure.” Chesbro grinned wisely; the burgess had just come across Polly in one of her queer moods. He reached over to the glove compartment. “Matches? Here, here’s my lighter.”

  The burgess spun the wheel of the lighter and held the flaming wick to his cigarette for a long second while he took three puffs. Mrs. Chesbro moved over a little. The darkness outside and the momentary brightness inside the car turned the windshield into a mirror; he could see her tortured smile.

  The brightness inside almost wrecked them. As the burgess snapped the lighter shut and you could see through the windshield again, Chesbro gasped and tramped on the brake; fast as he was, the car was already nosing into a surging stream that cut across the road.

  The engine chugged and died. There was a long moment of silence. How little we know our land, the burgress thought, too tired for panic, filled with resignation. The hills and valleys we know and name, but the little draws in the hills down which the heavens drain into our river, we glance stupidly at them in a dry season and see nothing. But this torrent before us is one of those draws. No doubt we paid just enough attention to it—only where it crossed this road—to bury a culvert that would guide it in time of rain and thought we were through with it for all time. But the rain began and first it soaked into the pasture and woodlot duff until they could hold no more; the rain went on and raced in a sheet across pasture and cropland until it found the draw and gurgled into it and raced down the hillside safely channeled, hit the culvert with a gurgle and poured through and tumbled down the hill on the other side, and still the rain sheeted down and the culvert filled, and when it was gorged to the full the rain still fell, and the water rose above the culvert and blindly poured across the road six inches deep, a foot, a yard, and here we are. Try to get through and blue sparks will snap from, the sparkplug terminals to the wet block, the vapor in the cylinders will not fire and Artie Chesbro’s pride, his joy, his car, will soon be a coffin for three drowned bodies, costlier than any bronze sarcophagus.

  But Chesbro was swearing and tramping on the starter. “Stay in!” he yelled as his wife half-opened the door. “I’ll get this son of a bitch started or know the reason why!” There was a lopsided chugging. One terminal was dry enough; it had been only spray. And then the motor roared. The car backed violently up the hill in the dark. “There was a side road,” Chesbro panted. “Headed uphill. Can’t turn around on this damn thing, we’d go into the ditch, but I can flip onto the side road when we come to it.”

  He felt good; this was what he was good at. From high school on he had been a fast, hard driver who delighted i
n tricky maneuvering; for years now he had been in the habit of passing anything on the road; it made him feel good and he felt good now. He backed the car, roaring, twisted full around in the seat and peering into the dark. He remembered a straightaway and a left curve; as the car backed into the curve he slowed a little but not much. And then they came to the side road. “What did I tell you?” he cried happily. “There’s the son of a bitch right where I said it would be!”

  He shifted and roared into the right turn up the hill. “Where does this take us, Henry?” he snapped, as from the bridge to the chartroom.

  The burgess smiled in the dark. “I don’t know, Arthur,” he said. “How little we know our land…”

  “Eh?” The old man was tired and rambling. Too bad; now it was all on his shoulders. But when he got at him later he’d remind him that he had, in a way, saved his life, that he didn’t expect anything for himself, but that he wanted to do something for the community—

  “There’s a light!*’ screamed Mrs. Chesbro.

  It seemed to be a filling station; there were the pumps and there was a two-storey frame building behind them. One of those crossroads groceries, Chesbro thought as they swept past.

  “But aren’t you going to stop, Arthur?” she asked.

  “Nonsense, dear,” he grunted. “We started for Hebertown and that’s where we’re going.”

  How little we know our land, thought the burgess again. For there, ahead in the twin beams, was a sheet of muddy water. Their speed was such that they plowed into it with a tremendous gush of spray. “We’ll make it,” Chesbro cried. Water rose chillingly inside the car to their calves as they plowed heavily forward and then lurched to a stop.

  Chesbro said between his teeth: “Like last time.” He ground the starter three times; the fourth time he tramped on the button nothing happened. The battery was shorted out.

  “Here we are,” Mrs. Chesbro said inanely.