Pat Frank - Alas,Babylon

fiction/science-fiction/post-apocalyptic/Frank,Pat-Alas_Babylon-v2.0

In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said that sending

a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it over the combined

networks. This was not entirely true. It was true that Florence Wechek, the

manager, gossiped. Yet she judiciously classified the personal intelligence

that flowed under her plump fingers, and maintained a prudent censorship over

her tongue. The scandalous and the embarrassing she excised from her

conversation. Sprightly, trivial, and harmless items she passed on to friends,

thus enhancing her status and relieving the tedium of spinsterhood. If your

sister was in trouble, and wired for money, the secret was safe with Florence

Wechek. But if your sister bore a legitimate baby, its sex and weight would

soon be known all over town.

Florence awoke at six-thirty, as always, on a Friday in early December.

Heavy, stiff and graceless, she pushed herself out of bed and padded through

the living room into the kitchen. She stumbled onto the back porch, opened the

screen door a crack, and fumbled for the milk carton on the stoop. Not until

she straightened did her china-blue eyes begin to discern movement in the

hushed gray world around her. A jerky-tailed squirrel darted out on the

longest limb of her grapefruit tree. Sir Percy, her enormous yellow cat, rose

from his burlap couch behind the hot water heater, arched his back, stretched,

and rubbed his shoulders on her flannel robe. The African lovebirds

rhythmically swayed, heads pressed together, on the swing in their cage. She

addressed the lovebirds: "Good morning, Anthony. Good morning, Cleo."

Their eyes, spectacularly ringed in white, as if embedded in mint Life

Savers, blinked at her. Anthony shook his green and yellow plumage and rasped

a greeting. Cleo said nothing. Anthony was adventurous, Cleo timid. On

occasion Anthony grew raucous and irascible and Florence released him into

limitless freedom outside. But always, at dusk, Anthony waited in the

Turk's-cap, or atop the frangipani, eager to fly home. So long as Cleo

preferred comfortable and sheltered imprisonment, Anthony would remain a

domesticated parrot. That's what they'd told her when she bought the birds in

Miami a month before, and apparently it was true.

Florence carried their cage into the kitchen and shook fresh sunflower

seed into their feeder. She filled Sir Percy's bowl with milk, and crumpled a

bit of wafer for the goldfish in the bowl on the counter. She returned to the

living room and fed the angelfish, mollies, guppies, and vivid peons in the

aquarium. She noted that the two miniature catfish, useful scavengers, were

active. She was checking the tank's temperature, and its electric filter and

heater, when the percolator chuckled its call to breakfast. At seven, exactly,

Florence switched on the television, turned the knob to Channel 8, Tampa, and

sat down to her orange juice and eggs. Her morning routine was unvaried and

efficient. The only bad parts of it were cooking for one and eating alone. Yet

breakfast was not her loneliest meal, not with Anthony ogling and gabbling,

the six fat goldfish dancing a dreamy oriental ballet on diaphanous fins, Sir

Percy rubbing against her legs under the table, and her cheery friends on the

morning show, hired, at great expense, to inform and entertain her.

As soon as she saw Dave's face, Florence could sense whether the news was

going to be good or bad. On this morning Dave looked troubled, and sure

enough, when he began to give the news, it was bad. The Russians had sent up

another Sputnik No. 23, and something sinister was going on in the Middle

East. Sputnik No. 23 was the largest yet, according to the Smithsonian

Institution, and was radioing continuous and elaborate coded signals. "There

is reason to believe," Frank said, "that Sputniks of this size are equipped to

observe the terrain of the earth below."

Florence gathered her pink flannel robe closer to her neck. She glanced

up, apprehensively, through the kitchen window. All she saw were hibiscus

leaves dripping in the pre-dawn ground fog, and blank gray sky beyond. They

had no right to put those Sputniks up there to spy on people. As if it were on

his mind also, Frank continued:

"Senator Holler, of the Armed Services Committee, yesterday joined others

of a Midwest bloc in demanding that the Air Force shoot down Sputniks capable

of military espionage if they violate U.S. air space. The Kremlin has already

had something to say about this. Any such action, the Kremlin says, will be

regarded the same as an attack on a Soviet vessel or aircraft. The Kremlin

pointed out that the United States has traditionally championed the doctrine

of Freedom of the Seas. The same freedom, says the Soviet statement, applies

to outer space."

The newsman paused, looked up, and half-smiled in wry amusement at this

complexity. He turned a page on his clipboard.

"There is a new crisis in the Middle East. A report from Beirut, via

Cairo, says that Syrian tanks of the most modern Russian design have crossed

the Jordanian frontier. This is undoubtedly a threat to Israel. At the same

time Damascus charges that Turkish troops are mobilizing. . . ."

Florence flipped to Channel 6, Orlando, and country music. She did not

understand, and could not become interested in, the politics of the Middle

East. Sputniks seemed a closer and more personal menace. Her best friend Alice

Cooksey, the librarian, claimed to have seen a Sputnik one evening at

twilight. If you could see it, then it could see you. She stared up through

the window again. No Sputnik. She rinsed the dishes and returned to her

bedroom.

As she wrestled with her girdle, Florence's thought gravitated to the

equally prying behavior of Randy Bragg. She adjusted the Venetian blinds until

she could peer out. He was at it again. There he was, brazenly immodest in

checked red and black pajamas, sitting on his front steps, knees akimbo and

binoculars pressed to his eyes. Although he was perhaps seventy-five yards

distant, she was certain he stared directly at her, and could see through the

tilted louvers. She ducked back against the bedroom wall, hands protecting her

breasts.

Almost every evening for the past three weeks, and on a number of

mornings, she had caught him at it. Sometimes he was on the piazza, as now,

sometimes at a second-floor window, and sometimes high up on the captain's

walk. Sometimes he swept the whole of River Road with his glasses, pretending

an interest elsewhere, but more often he focused on her bungalow. Randolph

Rowzee Bragg a Peeping Tom! It was shocking!

Long before Florence's mother moved south and built the brown-shingle

bungalow, the Braggs had lived in the big house, ungainly and monolithic, with

tall Victorian windows and belly-ing bays and broad brick chimneys. Once it

had been the show place of River Road. Now, it appeared shabby and outmoded

compared with the long, low, antiseptic citadels of glass, metal, and tinted

block constructed by rich Northerners who for the past fifteen years had been

"discovering" the Timucuan River. Still, the Bragg house was planked and

paneled with native cypress, and encased in pine clapboard, hard as iron, that

might last another hundred years. Its grove, at this season like a full green

cloak flecked with gold, trailed all the way from back yard to river bank, a

quarter mile. And she would say this for Randy, his grounds were well kept,

bright with poinsettias and bougainvillea, hibiscus, camellias, gardenias, and

flame vine. Florence had known Randolph's mother, Gertrude Bragg, well, and

old Judge Bragg to speak to.

She had watched Randolph graduate from bicycle to jalopy, vanish for a

number of years in college and law school, reappear in a convertible, vanish

again during the Korean War, and finally come home for good when Judge Bragg

and Mrs. Bragg were taken in the same year. Now here was Randy, one of the

best known and most eligible young men in Tumucuan County, even if he did run

around with Pistolville girls and drink too much, a-what was it the French

called it? - a voyeur. It was disgusting. The things that went on in small

towns, people wouldn't believe. Florence faced the bureau mirror, wondering

how much he had seen.

Many years ago a man had told her she looked something like Clara Bow.

Thereafter, Florence wore her hair in bangs, and didn't worry too much about

her chubby figure. The man, an imaginative idealist, had gone to England in

1940, joined the Commandos, and got himself killed. She retained only a vague

and inexact memory of his caresses, but she could never forget how he had

compared her to Clara Bow, a movie star. She could still see a resemblance,

provided she sucked in her stomach and lifted her chin high to erase the

fleshy creases in her neck-except her hair was no longer like Clara's. Her

hair had thinned, and faded to mottled pink. She hurriedly sketched a Clara

Bow pout on her lips, and finished dressing.

When she stepped out of the front door, Florence didn't know whether she

should cut Randy dead or give him a piece of her mind. He was still there on

the steps, the binoculars in his lap. He waved, grinned, and called across

lawn and road, "Morning, Miss Florence." His black hair was tousled, his teeth

white, and he looked boyish, handsome, and inoffensive.

"Good morning, Randy," Florence said. Because of the distance, she had to

shout, so her voice was not formal and frigid, as she had intended.

"You look real pretty and chipper today," he yelled.

She walked to the car port, head averted as if avoiding a bad odor, her

stiff carriage a reprimand, and did not answer. He really was nervy, sitting

there in those vile pajamas, trying to sweet-talk her. All the way to town,

she kept thinking of Randy. Who would ever guess that he was a deviate with a

compulsion to watch women dress and undress? He ought to be arrested. But if

she told the sheriff, or anybody, they would only laugh at her. Everybody knew

that Randy dated lots of girls, and not all of them virgins. She herself had

seen him take Rita Hernandez, that little Minorcan tart from Pistolville, into

his house and, no doubt, up to his bedroom since the lights had gone on

upstairs and off downstairs. And there had been others, recently a tall blonde

who drove her own car, a new Imperial with Ohio plates, into the circular

driveway and right up to the front steps as if she owned the place, and

Randy.

Nobody would believe that he found it necessary to absorb his sex at long

range through optic nerves and binoculars. Yet it was strange that he had not

married. It was strange that he lived alone in that wooden mausoleum. He even

had his office in there, instead of in the Professional Building like the

other lawyers. He was a hermit, and a snob, and a nigger lover, and no better

than a pervert. God knows what he did with those girls upstairs. Maybe all he

did was make them take off their clothes and put them on again while he

watched. She had heard of such things. And yet she couldn't make herself

believe there was anything basically wrong with Randy. She had voted for him

in the primaries and stood up for him at the meetings of the Frangipani Circle

when those garden club biddies were pecking him to bits. After all, he was a

Bragg, and a neighbor, and besides

He obviously needed help and guidance. Randy's age, she knew, was

thirty-two. Florence was forty-seven. Between people in their thirties and

forties there wasn't too wide a gap. Perhaps all he needed, she decided, was a

little understanding and tenderness from a mature woman.

Randy watched Florence's ten-year-old Chevy diminish and disappear down

the tunnel of live oaks that arched River Road. He liked Florence. She might

be a gossipy old maid but she was probably one of the few people on River Road

who had voted for him. Now she was acting as if he were a stranger trying to

cash a money order without credentials. He wondered why. Maybe she disapproved

of Lib McGovern, who had been in and out of the house a good deal in the last

few weeks. What Florence needed, he guessed, was the one thing she was

unlikely to get, a man. He rose, stretched, and glanced up at the bronze

weathercock on the garage steeple. Its beak pointed resolutely northeast. He

checked the large, reliable marine barometer and its twin thermometer

alongside the front door. Pressure 30.17, up twenty points in twelve hours.

Temperature sixty-two. It would be clear and warm and the bass might start

hitting off the end of the dock.

He whistled, and shouted, "Graf! Hey, Graf!" Leaves rustled under the

azalea bed and a long nose came out, followed by an interminable length of

dachshund. Graf, his red coat glistening and tail whipping, bounded up the

steps, supple as a seal. "Come on, my short-legged friend," Randy said, and

went inside, binoculars swinging from his neck, for his second cup of coffee,

the cup with the bourbon in it.

Except for the library, lined with his father's law books, and the

gameroom, Randy rarely used the first floor. He had converted one wing of the

second floor into an apartment suitable in size to a bachelor, and to his own

taste. His taste meant living with as little exertion and strain as possible.

His wing contained an office, a living room, a combination bar and kitchen

alcove, and bedroom and bath. The decor was haphazard, designed for his ease,

not a guest's eye. Thus he slept in an outsize mahogany sleigh bed imported

from New England by some remote ancestor, but it was equipped with a foam

rubber mattress and contour nylon sheets. When, in boredom, he wasted an

evening preparing a full meal for himself, he ate from Staffordshire bearing

the Bragg crest, and with silver from Paul Storr, and by candlelight; but he

laid his place on the formica bar separating living room from efficient

kitchen. Now he sat on a stool at this bar, half-filled a fat mug with

steaming coffee, dropped two lumps of sugar into it, and laced it with an inch

of bourbon. He sipped his mixture greedily. It warmed him, all the way down.

Randy didn't remember, exactly, when he had started taking a drink or two

before breakfast. Dan Gunn, his best friend and probably the best medic north

of Miami, said it was an unhealthy practice and the hallmark of an alcoholic.

Not that Dan had reprimanded him. Dan had just advised him to be careful, and

not let it become a habit. Randy knew he wasn't an alcoholic because an

alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and

the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter

morning. Besides, when you took it with coffee that made it part of breakfast,

and therefore not so depraved. He guessed he had started it during the

campaign, when he had been forced to load his stomach with fried mullet, hush

puppies, barbecued ribs dripping fat, chitlins, roasted oysters gritty with

sand, and to wash all down with warm beer and raw rotgut. After such nights,

only mellow bourbon could clear his head and launch him on another day.

Bourbon had buoyed him during the campaign, and now bourbon mercifully clouded

its memory. He could have beaten Porky Logan, certainly, except for one small

tactical error. Randy had been making his first speech, at Pasco Creek, a cow

town in the north end of the county, when somebody shouted, "Hey, Randy, where

do y' stand on the Supreme Court?"

He had known this question must come, but he had not framed the right

kind of answer: the moderate Southern quasi-liberal, semi-segregationist

double-talk that would have satisfied everybody except the palmetto scrub

woolhats, the loud-mouthed Kluxers and courthouse whittlers who would vote for

Porky anyway, and the Georgia and Alabama riffraff crowding the Minorcans for

living space in the shanties and three-room bungalows of Pistolville. The

truth was that Randolph Bragg himself was torn by the problem, recognizing its

dangers and complexities. He had certain convictions. He had served in Korea

and Japan and he knew that the battle for Asia was being lost in counties like

Timucuan. He also knew that Pasco Creek had no interest in Asia. He believed

integration should start in Florida, but it must begin in the nursery schools

and kindergartens and would take a generation. This was all difficult to

explain, but he did voice his final conviction, inescapable because of his

legal heritage and training, and the oaths he had taken as voter and soldier.

He said: "I believe in the Constitution of the United States-all of it."

There had been snickers and snorts from the rim of the crowd, and his

listeners, except for the reporters from Tampa, Orlando, and the county

weekly, had drifted away. In later speeches, elsewhere, he attempted to

explain his position, but it was hopeless. Behind his back he was called a

fool and a traitor to his state and his race. Randolph Rowzee Bragg, whose

great grandfather had been a United States Senator, whose grandfather had been

chosen by President Wilson to represent his country as Minister

Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extrordinary in time of war, whose father had been

elected, without opposition, to half a dozen offices, Randolph was beaten

five-to-one in the Democratic primaries for nomination to the state

legislature. It was worse than defeat. It was humiliation, and Randy knew he

could never run for public office again. He refilled his mug, this time with

more bourbon than coffee, and Missouri, his maid, shuffled in the hallway and

knocked. He called, "Come in, Mizzoo."

Missouri opened the door, pushing a vacuum cleaner and carrying a pail

filled with cans, bottles, and rags. Missouri was the wife of Two-Tone Henry,

neighbor as well as maid. She was six inches shorter than Two-Tone, who was

just Randy's height, five-eleven, but Two-Tone claimed she outweighed him by a

hundred pounds. If this was true, Missouri weighed around two-forty. But on

this morning, it seemed to Randy that she had dwindled a bit. "You dieting,

Mizzoo?" he said.

"No, sir, I'm not dietin'. I got nerves."

"Nerves!" Missouri had always seemed nerveless, solid, and placid as a

broad, deeply rooted tree. Two-Tone been giving you a bad time again?"

"No. Two-Tone been behavin'. He down on the dock fishin' right now. To

tell you the truth, Mister Randy, it's Mrs. McGovern. She follow me around

with white gloves."

Missouri worked two hours each morning for Randy, and the rest of the day

for the McGoverns, who lived half a mile closer to town. The McGoverns were

the W. Foxworth McGoverns, the Central Tool and Plate McGoverns, formerly of

Cleveland, and the parents of Lib McGovern, whose proper name was Elizabeth.

"What do you mean, Mizzoo?" Randy asked, fascinated.

"After I dust, she follow me around with white gloves to see has I

dusted. I know I cleans clean, Mister Randy."

"You sure do, Mizzoo."

Missouri plugged in the vacuum cleaner, started it, and then shut it off

She had more on her mind. "That ain't all. You been in that house, Mister

Randy. You ever seen so many ashtrays?" "What's wrong with ashtrays?"

"She don't allow no ashes in 'em. That poor Mister McGovern, he has to

smoke his cigars outside. Then there was that roach. Big roach in the silver

drawer. Mrs. McGovern opened that drawer yesterday and saw that roach and

screeched like she'd been hit by a scorpion. She made me go through every

drawer in the kitchen and dining room and put down fresh paper. Was that roach

sent me to Doctor Gunn yesterday. Mrs. McGovern she can't 'bide bugs or little

green lizards and she won't go out of the house after dark for fear of snakes.

I don't think the McGoverns going to be with us long, Mister Randy, because

what's Florida except bugs and lizards and snakes? I think they leave around

May, when bug season starts good. But Miss McGovern, she won't want to leave.

She stuck on you."

"What makes you think so?"

Missouri smiled. "Questions she asks. Like what you eats for breakfast."

Missouri glanced at the decanter on the bar. "And who cooks for you. And does

you have other girls."

Randy changed the subject. "You say you went to see Doctor Gunn. What'd

he say?"

"Doctor says I'm a complicated case. He says I got high blood, on account

of I'm heavy. He says it's good I'm losin' weight, because that lowers the

high blood, but frettin' about Mrs. McGovern white-glovin' me is the wrong way

to do it. He says quit eatin' grits, eat greens. Quit pork, eat fish. And he

gives me tranquil pills to take, one each day before I go to work for Mrs.

McGovern."

"You do that, Mizzoo," Randy said, and, carrying his mug, walked out on

to the screen upstairs porch overlooking grove and river. He then climbed the

narrow ship's ladder that led to the captain's walk, a rectangle sixteen by

eight feet, stoutly planked and railed, on the slate roof. Reputedly, this was

the highest spot in Timucuan County. From it he could see all the riverfront

estates, docks, and boats, and all of the town of Fort Repose, three miles

downstream, held in a crook of sun-flecked silver where the Timucuan joined

the broader St. Johns.

This was his town, or had been. In 1838, during the Seminole Wars, a

Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton, USN, a Virginian, had been dispatched to

this river junction with a force of eighteen Marines and two small brass

cannon. Lieutenant Peyton journeyed south from Cow's Ford, its name

patriotically changed to Jacksonville, by longboat. His orders from General

Clinch were to throttle Indian communications on the rivers, thus protecting

the flank of the troops moving down the east coast from St. Augustine.

Lieutenant Peyton built a blockhouse of palm logs on the point, his guns

covering the channel. In two years, except during one relief expedition

overland to New Smyrna, he fought no battles or skirmishes. But he shot game

and caught fish for the garrison pot, and studied botany and the culture of

citrus. The balmy weather and idyllic life, described in a log now in a teak

chest in Randy Braggs office, inspired the Lieutenant to name his outpost Fort

Repose.

When the wars subsided, the fort was decommissioned and Lieutenant Peyton

was assigned to sea duty. Four years later he returned to Fort Repose with a

wife, a daughter, and a grant from the government for one hundred acres. He

had picked this precise spot for his homestead because it was the highest

ground in the area, with a steep gradient to the river, ideal for planting the

oranges just imported from Spain and the Far East. Peyton's original house had

burned. The present house had been built by his son-in-law, the first Marcus

Bragg, a native of Philadelphia and a lawyer eventually sent to the Senate.

The captain's walk had been added for the aging Lieutenant Peyton, so that

with his brass spyglass he could observe what happened at the junction of

rivers.

Now the Bragg holdings had dwindled to thirty-six acres, but thirty were

planted in prime citrus-navels, mandarins, Valencias, and Temples - all tended

and sold in season by the county co-operative. Each year Randy received checks

totaling eight to ten thousand dollars from the co-operative. Half went to his

older brother, Mark, an Air Force colonel stationed at Offutt Field,

Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, near Omaha. With his share, plus

dividends from a trust established by his father, and his occasional fees as

an attorney, Randy lived comfortably. Since he drove a new car and paid his

bills promptly, the trades people of Fort Repose thought him well-to-do. The

rich newcomers classed him with the genteel poor.

Randy heard music below, and knew that Missouri had started his record

player and therefore was waxing the floor. Missouri's method was to spread the

wax, kick off her shoes, wrap her feet in rags, and then polish by dancing.

This was probably as efficient, and certainly more fun, than using the

electric waxer. He dropped into a deck chair and focused his binoculars on

Preacher Henry's place, looking for that damn bird in the hammock of pines,

palmettos, and scrub oak. The Henrys had lived here as long as the Braggs, for

the original Henry had come as slave and manservant to Lieutenant Peyton. Now

the Henrys owned a four-acre enclave at the east boundary of the Bragg groves.

Preacher Henry's father had bought it from Randolph's grandfather for fifty

dollars an acre long before the first boom, when land was valued only for what

it grew. Preacher was hitching his mule, Balaam - the last mule in Timucuan

County so far as anyone knew - to the disk. In this month Preacher harrowed

for his yam and corn planting, while his wife, Hannah, picked and sold

tomatoes and put up kumquat preserves. He ought to go down and talk to

Preacher about that damn bird, Randy thought. If anyone was likely to observe

and recognize a Carolina parakeet floating around, it was Preacher, because

Preacher knew all the birds and their calls and habits. He shifted his glasses

to focus on the end of the Henrys' rickety dock. Two-Tone had five bamboo

poles out. Two-Tone himself reclined on his side, head resting on his hand, so

he could watch the corks without effort. Preacher's younger son, Malachai, who

was Randy's yardman, and reliable as Two-Tone was no-account, was not about.

Randy heard the phone ringing in his office. The music stopped and he

knew Missouri was answering. Presently she called from the piazza, "Mister

Randy, it's for you. It's Western Union."

"Tell her I'll be right down," Randy said, lifted himself out of the deck

chair, and backed down the ladder, wondering who would be sending him a

telegram. It wasn't his birthday. If some thing important happened, people

phoned. Unless-he remembered that the Air Force sent telegrams when a man was

hurt, or killed. But it wouldn't be Mark, because for two years Mark had been

flying a desk. Still, Mark would get in his flying time each month, if

possible, for the extra pay.

He took the phone from Missouri's hand and braced himself. "Yes?" he

said.

"I have a telegram, Randy - it's really a cable-from San Juan, Puerto

Rico. It's signed by Mark. It's really very peculiar." Randy let out his

breath, relieved. If Mark had sent the message, then Mark was all right. A man

can't pick his relatives, only his friends, but Mark had always been Randy's

friend as well as brother. "What's the message say?"

"Well, I'll read it to you," Florence said, "and then if you want me to

read it again I'll be glad to. It says, `'Urgent you meet me at Base Ops McCoy

noon today. Helen and children flying to Orlando tonight. Alas, Babylon."'

Florence paused. "That's what it says, `Alas, Babylon.' Do you want me to

repeat the whole thing for you, Randy?"

"No thanks."

"I wonder what `Alas, Babylon' means? Isn't it out of the Bible?"

"I don't know. I guess so." He knew very well what it meant. He felt sick

inside.

"There's something else, Randy."

"Yes?"

"Oh, it's nothing. I'll tell you about it next time I see you and I hope

not in those loud pajamas. Goodbye, Randy. You're sure you have the message?"

"I'm sure," he said, hung up and dropped into the swivel chair. Alas,

Babylon was a private, a family signal. When they were boys, he and Mark used

to sneak up to the back of the First Afro-Repose Baptist Church on Sunday

nights to hear Preacher Henry calling down hell-fire and damnation on the

sinners in the big cities. Preacher Henry always took his text out of the

Revelation of St. John. It seemed that he ended every lurid verse with, "Alas,

Babylon!" in a voice so resonant you could feel it, if you rested your

fingertips gently on the warped pine boards of the church. Randy and Mark

would crouch under the rear window, behind the pulpit, fascinated and

wide-eyed, while Preacher Henry described the Babylonian revels, including

fornication. Sometimes Preacher Henry made Babylon sound like Miami, and

sometimes like Tampa, for he condemned not only fornication--he read the word

right out of the Bible-but also horse racing and the dog tracks. Randy could

hear him yet: "And I'm telling you right now, all wife-swappers,

whisky-drinkers, and crap-shooters are going to get it! And all them who come

out of those sin palaces on the beach, whether they be called hotels or

motels, wearing minks and jewels and not much else, they is goin' to get it!

And them fast-steppers in Cadillacs and yaller roadsters, they is going to get

it! Just like it says here in the Good Book, that Great City that was clothed

in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious

stones and pearls, that Great City was burned off the face of the earth in an

hour. Just one hour Alas, Babylon!"

Either Preacher Henry was too old, or the Afro-Repose congregation had

tired of his scolding and awful prophecies, for he no longer preached except

on those Sundays when Afro-Repose's new minister, a light-skinned college

graduate, was out of town. Randy and Mark never forgot Preacher Henry's

thundering, and from it they borrowed their private synonym for disaster, real

or comic, past or future. If one fell off the dock, or lost all his cash at

poker, or failed to make time with a promising Pistolville piece, or announced

that hurricane or freeze was on the way, the other commiserated with, "Alas,

Babylon!"

But in this telegram it had very special and exact meaning. Mark had

secured leave at Christmas season last year, and flown down with Helen and the

two children, Ben Franklin and Peyton, for a week. On their last evening at

Fort Repose, after the others were in bed, Mark and Randy had sat here, in

this office, peering into the bourbon decanter and the deep anxieties of their

hearts, trying to divine the future. Christmas had been a time of troubles, a

time of confusions at home and tensions abroad, but in his whole life, Randy

could recall no other sort of time. There had always been depression, or war,

or threat of war.

Mark, who was in SAC Intelligence, had rolled the old fashioned globe,

three feet through, from its place in the window bay, so that the desk lamp

shone on it. It was a globe purchased by their grandfather, the diplomat,

before the First World War, so that the countries, some with unfamiliar names,

seemed oddly scrambled. The continents and seas were the same, which was all

that mattered. As Mark talked, his face became grave, almost gaunt, and his

index finger traced great circle routes across the cracking surface-missile

and bomber trajectories. He then drew a rough chart, with two lines that

intersected. The line that con- timed upward after the intersection belonged

to the Soviet Union, and the time of the intersection was right then.

"How did it happen?" Randy had asked. "Where did we slip?"

"It wasn't lack of money," Mark had replied. "It was state of mind.

Chevrolet mentalities shying away from a space-ship world. Nations are like

people. When they grow old and rich and fat they get conservative. They

exhaust their energy trying to keep things the way they are-and that's against

nature. Oh, the services were to blame too. Maybe even SAC. We designed the

most beautiful bombers in the world, and built them by the thousands. We

improved and modified them each year, like new model cars. We couldn't bear

the thought that jet bombers themselves might be out of style. Right now we're

in the position of the Federal Navy, with its wooden steam frigates, up

against the Confederate iron-clad. It is a state of mind that money alone

won't cure." "What will?" Randy asked.

"Men. Men like John Ericsson to invent a Monitor to face the Merrimac.

Bold men, audacious men, tenacious men. Impatient, odd-ball men like Rickover

pounding desks for his atomic sub. Ruthless men who will fire the deadheads

and ass-kissers. Rude men who will tell the unimaginative, business-as-usual,

seven carbon sons of bitches to go take a jump at a galloping goose. Young men

because we've got to be a young country again. If we get that kind of men we

may hack it if the other side gives us time."

"Will they?"

Mark had spun the globe and shrugged. "I don't know. If I think the

balloon is about to go up I'm going to send Helen and the kids down here. When

a man dies, and his children die with him, then he is dead entirely, leaving

nothing to show."

"Do you think they'd be safer here than in Omaha? After all, we've got

the Jax Naval Air complex to the north of us, and Homestead and Miami to the

south, and Eglin to the northwest, and MacDill and Tampa to the southwest, and

the Missile Test Center on Canaveral to the east, and McCoy and Orlando right

at the front door, only forty miles off. What about fallout?"

"There isn't any place that'll be absolutely safe. With fallout and

radiation, it'll be luck-the size of configuration of the weapons, altitude of

the fireball, direction of the wind. But I do know Helen and the children

won't have much chance in Omaha. SAC Headquarters has got to be the enemy's

number one target. I'll bet they've programmed three five-megaton IC's for

Offutt, and since our house is eight miles from the base any kind of near-miss

does it "- Mark snapped his fingers-"like that. Not that I think it'll do the

enemy any good-command automatically shifts to other combat control centers

and anyway all our crews know their targets. But they'll hit SAC Headquarters,

hoping for temporary paralysis. A little delay is all they'd need. I'll have

to be there, at Offutt, in the Hole, but the least a man can do is give his

children a chance to grow up, and I think they'd have a better chance in Fort

Repose than Omaha. So if I see it's coming, and there is time, I'll send Helen

and the kids down here. And I'll try to give you a warning, so you can get set

for it."

"How?"

Mark smiled. "I won't call you up and say, `Hey, Randy, the Russians are

about to attack us.' Phones aren't secure, and I don't think my C-in-C, or the

Air Staff, would approve. But if you hear `Alas, Babylon,' you'll know that's

it."

Randy had forgotten none of this talk. A week or so later, thinking about

Mark's words, Randy had decided to go into politics. He would start in the

state legislature, and in a few years be ready to run for Congress. He'd be

the kind of leader Mark wanted.

It hadn't worked out that way. He couldn't even beat Porky Logan, a gross

man whose vote could be bought for fifty bucks, who bragged that he had not

got beyond the seventh grade but that he could get more new roads and state

money for Timucuan County than any half-baked radical, undoubtedly backed by

the burrheads and the N.A.A.C.P., who didn't even know that the

Supreme Court was controlled by Moscow. So Randy's fiasco had been

inspired by that night, and now the night bore something worse.

He wondered what Mark was doing in Puerto Rico, and why his warning had

come from there. It should have come from Washington or London or Omaha or

Colorado Springs rather than San Juan. It was true that SAC had a big base,

Ramey, in Puerto Rico, but - It was no use guessing. He'd know at noon. Of one

thing he was certain, if Mark expected it to come, it would probably come. His

brother was no alarmist. Randy sometimes allowed emotions to distort logic,

Mark never did. Mark was capable of calculating odds, in war or poker, to the

final decimal, which was why he was a Deputy Chief of Intelligence at SAC, and

soon would have his star.

Randy knew there were a thousand things he should be doing, but he

couldn't think of any of them. He became aware of a rhumba rhythm in the

living room, and presently Missouri skated into view, feet bundled with waxing

cloths, shoulders moving and hips bouncing with elephantine elegance, intent

on her polishing. He yelled, "Missouri!"

"Yessir?" Her forward motion stopped, but her hips continued to wobble

and feet shuffle.

"Quit that struttin' and make up the three bedrooms on the front. Colonel

Bragg's family will be here tomorrow."

"Oh, ain't that nice! Just like last year."

"No, not like last year. The Colonel's not coming with them. Just Mrs.

Bragg and Ben Franklin and Peyton."

Missouri peered through the door at him. "Mister Randy, you don't look

good. Them telegrams are yellow death. You get bad news or something? Ain't

nuthin' happen to Colonel Mark?"

Pat Frank - Alas, Babylon

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