Alas, Babylon Read online

  He walked into the house, head down, and went up to his bedroom and pulled on a sweater. He called Ben Franklin to the living room and Ben came in, his mother following. “Ben,” Randy said, “ever shoot a pistol?”

  “Only once, on the range at Offutt.”

  “What about a rifle?”

  “I’ve shot a twenty-two. I’m pretty good with a twenty two.”

  “Okay,” Randy said, “I’m going to give you what you’re good at.”

  He walked to the gunrack. The Mossberg was fitted with a sixpower scope, and a scope was not good for snap shooting, and hard to use at night. He took down the Remington pump, a weapon with open sights, a present from his father on his thirteenth birthday. He handed it to Ben.

  The boy took it, pleased, worked the action and peered into the chamber.

  “It’s not loaded now,” Randy said, “but from now on every gun in this house is going to be loaded. I hope we never have to use them but if we do there probably won’t be any time to load up.”

  Helen said, “I forgot to tell you, Randy. I couldn’t get ten boxes of the ammunition you wanted but I did get three. They’re somewhere in the kitchen. I’ll find them later.”

  “Thanks,” Randy said. He took a package of cartridges out of his ammunition case and handed it to Ben. “You load up your gun, Ben,” he said. “It’s yours now. Never point it at a man unless you intend to shoot him, and never shoot unless you mean to kill. You understand that?”

  Ben’s eyes were round and his face sober. “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, Ben. You can baby-sit now. We should be back in an hour.”

  When Rear Admiral Hazzard retired he embarked upon what he liked to call “my second life.” He and his wife had prepared carefully for retirement. They had wanted an orange grove to supplement his pension and a body of water upon which he could look and in which he could fish. While still a four-striper he had located this spot on the Timucuan, and bought it for a surprisingly reasonable sum. The real estate agent had carefully explained that the low price included “niggers for neighbors,” meaning the Henrys. At the same time the agent had grumbled at the Braggs, who had allowed the Henrys to buy water-front property in the first place, thereby lowering values along the entire river, or so he said.

  The Hazzards first had planted a grove. A few years later they built a comfortable six-room rambler and started landscaping the grounds. Thereafter they lived in the house one month each year, when Sam took his annual leave, trying it and wearing it until it fitted perfectly.

  On his sixty-second birthday Sam Hazzard retired, to the relief of a number of his fellow admirals. There were rivalries within, as well as between, the armed services. In the Navy, the rivalry had once been between the battleship and carrier admirals. When it became a rivalry between atomic subs and super-carriers, Hazzard had outspokenly favored the submarines. Since he once had commanded a carrier task force, and never had been a submariner, the carrier admirals regarded his stand as just short of treason. Worse, for years he had claimed that Russia’s most dangerous threat was the terrible combination of submarines equipped with missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Such a theory, if unchallenged, would force the Navy to spend a greater part of its energy and money on anti-submarine warfare. Since this, per se, was defense, and since the Navy’s whole tradition was to take the offensive, Hazzard spent his final years of duty conning a desk.

  Two days after his retirement his wife died, so she never really lived in the house on the Timucuan, and she never physically shared his second life. Yet often she seemed close, when he trimmed a shrub she had planted, or when in the evenings he sat alone on the patio, and reached to touch the arm of the chair at his side.

  The Admiral discovered there were not enough hours in the day to do all the things that were necessary, and that he wanted to do. There was the citrus, the grounds, experiments with exotic varieties of bananas and papaya, discreet essays to be written for the United States Naval Institute Proceedings and not-so-discreet articles for magazines of general circulation. Sam Hazzard found that the Henrys were extraordinarily convenient neighbors. Malachai tended the grounds and helped design and build the dock. Two-Tone, when in the mood—broke and sober—worked in the grove. The Henry women cleaned, and did his laundry. Preacher Henry was the Admiral’s private fishing guide, which meant that the Admiral consistently caught more and bigger bass than anyone on the Timucuan, and possibly in all of Central Florida.

  But Sam Hazzard’s principal hobby was listening to shortwave radio. He was not a ham operator. He had no transmitter. He listened. He did not chatter. He monitored the military frequencies and the foreign broadcasts and, with his enormous background of military and political knowledge, he kept pace with the world outside Fort Repose. Sometimes, perhaps, he was a bit ahead of everyone.

  It was ten to eleven when Randy knocked on Admiral Hazzard’s door. It opened immediately. The Admiral was a taut, neatly made man who had weighed 133 when he boxed for the Academy and who weighted 133 now. He was dressed in a white turtleneck sweater, flannels, and boat shoes. A halo of cottony hair encircled his sunburned bald spot. Otherwise, he was not saintly. His nose has been flattened in some long-forgotten brawl in Port Said or Marseilles. His gray eyes, canopied by heavy white brows, were red-rimmed, and angry. For the Admiral, this had been a day of frustration, helplessness, and hatred—hatred for the unimaginative, purblind, selfish fools who had not believed him, and frustration because on this day of supreme danger and need, his lifetime of training and experience was not and could not be put to use. The Admiral said, “I saw your headlights coming down the road. Come in.” He squinted at Helen.

  “My sister-in-law, Helen Bragg,” Randy said.

  “An evil day to receive a beautiful woman,” The Admiral said, his voice surprisingly mild and mannered to issue from such a pugnacious face. “Come on in to my Combat Plot, and listen to the war, if such a massacre can be called a war.”

  He led them to his den. A heavily planked workbench ran along the wall under the windows overlooking the river. On this bench was a large, black, professional-looking shortwave receiver, a steaming coffee-maker, notebooks and pencils. The radio screeched with power, static, interference, and occasional words in the almost unintelligible language of conflict.

  On two other walls, cork-covered, were pinned maps—the polar projection and the Eurasian land mass on one wall, a military map of the United States on the other.

  A hoarse voice broke through the static: “This is Adelaide Six-Five-One. I am sitting on a skunk at Alpha Romeo Poppa Four. Skunk at Alpha Romeo Poppa Four.”

  A different voice replied immediately: “Adelaide Six-Five-One, this is Adelaide. Hold one.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then the second voice continued: “Adelaide Six-Five-One-Adelaide. Have relayed your message to Hector. He is busy but will be free in ten to fifteen minutes. Squat on that skunk and wait for Hector.”

  “Adelaide from Adelaide Six-Five-One. Charley.”

  Helen sat down. For the first time that day, she was showing fatigue. The Admiral said, “Coffee?”

  “I’d love a cup,” she said.

  Randy said, “Sam, what was that on the radio? Part of the war?”

  The Admiral poured coffee before he replied. “A big part of it, for us. Right now I’m tuned to a Navy and Air Force ASW frequency in the five megacycle band.”

  “ASW?”

  “Anti-submarine warfare. I’ll interpret. A Navy super Connie with a saucer radome has located a skunk—an enemy submarine—at coordinates Alpha Romeo Poppa Four. I happen to know that’s about three hundred miles off Norfolk. The radar picket has called home base—Adelaide—and Adelaide is sending Hector to knock off the skunk. Hector is one of our killer subs. But Hector is presently engaged. When he is free, he will communicate directly with Adelaide Six-Five-One. The plane will give Hector a course and when he is in range Hector will cut loose with a homing torpedo and that will be the end of th
e skunk. We hope.”

  “Who’s winning?” Randy asked, aware that it was a ridiculous question.

  “Who’s winning? Nobody’s winning. Cities are dying and ships are sinking and aircraft is going in, but nobody’s winning.”

  Helen asked the question she had come to ask. “Did you hear Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown on the radio a while ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you think she was speaking from?”

  The Admiral walked across the room and looked at the map of the United States. It was covered with acetate overlay and ten or twelve cities were ringed with red-crayon goose eggs, in the way that a unit position is marked on an infantry map. The Admiral scratched the white stubble on his chin and said, “I think Denver. Hunneker, the three-star she named Chief of Staff, was Army representative on NORAD, in Colorado Springs. Chances are that he was in Denver this morning, or she was in Colorado Springs, when the word came through that Washington had been atomized.”

  Helen set down her coffee cup. Her fingers trembled. “You’re sure that she couldn’t have been in Omaha?”

  “Omaha!” said the Admiral. “That’s the last place she’d be speaking from! You notice that whenever I’ve heard a broadcast, of any kind, that allowed me to identify a city, I ringed it on the map. I’ve heard no amateurs talking from Omaha, and I haven’t heard SAC since the attack. Ordinarily, I can pick up SAC right away. They’re always talking on their single side band transmitters to bases out of the country. Their call sign was ‘Big Fence.’ I haven’t heard ‘Big Fence’ all day on any frequency. And the enemy hates and fears SAC, more, even, than they fear the Navy, I’ll admit. Scratch Omaha.”

  Sam Hazzard noticed the effect of his words on Helen’s expression; he recalled that Randy’s brother, her husband, was an Air Force colonel, and he sensed that he had been tactless. “Your husband isn’t in Omaha, is he, Mrs. Bragg?”

  “It’s our home.”

  “I’m terribly sorry that I said anything.”

  A tear was quivering on her cheek. Her first, Randy thought. He felt embarrassed for Sam.

  Helen said, “There’s nothing to be sorry about, Admiral. Mark expected Omaha would be hit, and so did I. That’s why I’m here, with the children. But even if Omaha is gone, Mark may still be there, and all right. He had the duty this morning. He was in the Hole.”

  “Oh, yes,” the Admiral said. “The Hole. I’ve never been in it, but I’ve heard about it. A tremendous shelter, very deep. He may be perfectly safe. I sincerely hope so.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Helen said, “since you haven’t heard any SAC signals.”

  “They may have shifted communications or changed code names.” The Admiral looked at his maps. “Besides, I’m only guessing. I’m just playing games with myself, trying to G-two a war with no action reports or intelligence. I do this because I haven’t anything else to do. I just scramble around and move pins and make marks on the maps and try to keep myself from thinking about Sam, Junior. He’s a lieutenant JG with Sixth Fleet in the Med, if Sixth Fleet is still in the Med. I don’t think it is. For the Russkies, it must have been like shooting frogs in a puddle.” He turned to Helen again, “We inhabit the same purgatory, Mrs. Bragg, the dark level of not knowing.”

  Randy asked a question. “What are the Russians saying? Can you still get Radio Moscow?”

  “I get a station that calls itself Radio Moscow in the twentyfive meter band. But it isn’t Moscow. All the voices on the English-language broadcasts are different so we can be pretty certain Moscow isn’t there any more. However, the Russian leaders all seem to be alive and well, and they issue the kind of statements you’d expect. The very fact that they are alive indicates that they took shelter before it started. They probably aren’t anywhere close to a target area.”

  “Couldn’t the President have escaped?”

  “He probably had fifteen minutes’ warning. He could have been in a helicopter and away. But in that fifteen minutes he had to make the big decisions, and so my guess is that he deliberately chose to stay in Washington, either at his desk in the White House, or in the Pentagon Command Post. It was the same for the Joint Chiefs, and probably for the Secretarys of Defense and State. As to the other Cabinet members, they probably received it in their sleep, or were just getting up. Do you want to hear something strange?” The Admiral changed the wave length on his receiver. He said, “Now listen.”

  All Randy heard was static.

  “You didn’t hear anything, did you?” the Admiral said. “Right now, on this band, you ought to be hearing the BBC, Paris, and Bonn. I haven’t heard any of them all day. They must’ve truly clobbered England.”

  “Then you do think we’re finished?” Randy said.

  “Not at all. SAC may have been able to launch up to fifty percent of its aircraft, counting the planes they always have airborne. And remember that the Navy does have a few missile submarines and the carriers must’ve got in some licks. Also, I’m pretty sure they weren’t able to take out all our SAC bases, including the auxiliaries. For all I know, the enemy may be finished.”

  “Doesn’t exactly hearten me.”

  The lights went out in the room, the radio died, and at the same time the world outside was illuminated, as at midday. At that instant Randy faced the window and he would always retain, like a color photograph printed on his brain, what he saw—a red fox frozen against the Admiral’s green lawn. It was the first fox he had seen in years.

  The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County.

  Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.

  So ended The Day.

  Chapter 7

  When nuclear fireballs crisped Orlando and the power plants serving Timucuan County, refrigeration stopped, along with electric cooking. The oil furnaces, sparked by electricity, died. All radios were useless unless battery powered or in automobiles. Washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, fryers, toasters, roasters, vacuum cleaners, shavers, heaters, beaters—all stopped. So did the electric clocks, vibrating chairs, electric blankets, irons for pressing clothes, curlers for hair.

  The electric pumps stopped, and when the pumps stopped the water stopped and when the water stopped the bathrooms ceased functioning.

  Not until the second day after The Day did Randy Bragg fully understand and accept the results of the loss of electricity. Temporary loss of power was nothing new in Fort Repose. Often, during the equinoctial storms, poles and trees came down and power lines were severed. This condition rarely lasted for more than a day, for the repair trucks were out as soon as the wind abated and the roads became passable.

  It was hard to realize that this time the power plants themselves were gone. There could be no doubt of it. On Sunday and Sunday night a number of survivors from Orlando’s suburbs drove through Fort Repose, foraging for food and gasoline. They could not be positive of what had happened, except that the area of destruction extended for eight miles from Orlando airport, encompassing College Park and Rollins College, and another explosion had centered on McCoy Air Force Base. The Orlando Conelrad stations had warned of an air raid just before the explosions, so it was presumed that this attack had not come from submarine-based missiles or ICBM’s, but from bombers.

  Randy did not hear Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown again, or any further hard news or instructions on the clear channel stations on Sunday or Monday. He did hear WSMF announcing that it would be on the air only two minutes each hour thereafter, since it was operating on auxiliary power. He knew that the hospital in San Marco possessed an auxiliary diesel generator. He concluded that this source of power was being tapped, each hour on the hour, to operate the radio station.

  Each hour the county Conelrad station repeated warnings to boil all drinking water, do not drink fresh milk, do not use the telephone, and, in the Sunday morning hours after the destruction
of Orlando, warnings to take shelter and guard against fallout and radiation. There had been no milk deliveries and the telephones hadn’t worked since the first mushroom sprouted in the south; nor were there any actual shelters in Fort Repose. All Sunday, Randy insisted that Helen and the children stay in the house. He knew that any shelter, even a slate roof, insulation, walls, and roof, was better than none. There was no time to dig. The time to dig had been before The Day. After Orlando, digging seemed wasted effort. Anyway, there were so many other things to do, each minor crisis demanding instant attention. While radiation was a danger, it could not be felt or seen, and therefore other dangers, and even annoyances, seemed more imperative.

  At two o’clock Monday afternoon Helen was in Randy’s apartment, and they were listening to the hourly Conelrad broadcast, when Ben Franklin marched in and announced, “We’re just about out of water.”

  “That’s impossible!” Randy said.

  “It’s Peyton’s fault,” said Ben Franklin. “Every time she goes to the john she has to flush it. The tub in our bathroom is empty, and she’s been dipping water out of mother’s bathtub too.” Randy looked at Helen. This was a mother’s problem. “Peyton’s a fastidious little girl,” Helen said. “After all, one of the first things a child learns is always to flush the john. What’re we going to do?”

  Randy said, “For now, Ben Franklin and I will drive down to the dock and fill up what washtubs and buckets we have out of the river. You can’t drink river water without boiling it but it’ll be okay for the toilets. And from now on Peyton—all of us—can’t afford to be so fastidious. We’ll flush the toilets only twice a day. Then I guess we’ll have to dig latrines out in the grove because I can’t haul water from the river forever. Matter of gasoline.”

  Randy looked out on the grove, noticing a thin powder of dust on the leaves. There had been a long dry spell. The fine, clear, crisp days with low humidity were wonderful for people but bad for the orange crop. He would have to turn on the sprinklers in the grove….