The Mouse That Roared (13 page)

The rebellion was slower in getting started in the downtown areas of the cities, where most of those caught in the air-raid were men. Perhaps because generations of active participation in warfare had conditioned men to the necessity for being herded, it was three or four hours before there was any active rebellion against being enclosed in places of safety. In New York there had been the rumour that the city was being invaded by men from Mars, who had landed in flying saucers. The first effect of this, as already told, was panic. The panic was followed by a kind of false courage, or bravado, manifested in the singing of “Mairzy Doats,” “The Little Doggie in the Window,” and “Abide with Me” in the subways. This turned to impatience that nothing appeared to be happening. And the impatience became, in a little while, active rebellion in which those in the subways demanded to be let out to go to their homes.

The Secretary of Defence had done all he could to keep the situation in New York under control, even to dispatching his Civil Defence Chief, General Snippett, to put down the rumour about the men from Mars. But three hours after he had sent him on this mission, there was still no report from General Snippett. And still the anguished appeals of other defence officials poured in, stating that the population was getting completely out of hand.

At the Eighty-sixth Street West Side subway, a group of men started looting a train which had stopped there. They dismantled most of the motor and ripped up the seat cushions. Attempts to prevent them were blocked by others who were taking no active part in the looting. It seemed that New Yorkers who had long travelled on the subways, bore some kind of grudge against the dinginess and noisiness of the trains, and were seizing this opportunity to get a kind of revenge for their years of suffering and crowding.

On the East Side, at the Seventy-seventh Street Station, a train had been derailed. Moustaches had been drawn on every poster in the station which bore a human face, whether male or female, and, by a strange coincidence, those who had been caught by the sirens at Fifty-ninth Street were short of cigarettes. There were, the wardens reported, about five hundred people in the station and no more than twenty packets of cigarettes. These had quickly been disposed of and the whole mob had taken up the chant, “I’d brave an atomic pile for a Camel.” This was followed by the whole five hundred roaring, “Call for Philip Morris,” the drawn-out cry echoing down the dark and silent tunnels and off the iron stanchions and girders.

There were a dozen other symptoms of impending revolt of a like nature to be reported, not only from New York, but also from other cities. The plain fact of the matter was that there were too few officials to control the crowds. And the crowds, individually and collectively, would prefer to meet their fate in the open than be kept penned up in safety.

That was the general situation which brought about the cancellation, after six hours, of a monster air-raid alert which was to have lasted much longer. There were particular reasons, however, why the Secretary of Defence decided to call off the exercise.

The first and the most perplexing of these was the disappearance of General Snippett. When he did not report back three hours after being sent out to deal with the rumour of the men from Mars, the Secretary called the General’s headquarters in New York and sent out a search party for him. The search party, consisting of two hundred policemen on motorcycles, took every avenue and parallel street on Manhattan Island, from the Battery to the Bronx. But no sign of the General was to be found. His car, with two sound trucks and a mobile canteen, was, however, discovered at the Cunard dock. There were several dents in the body and most mysterious of all, an arrow, three feet long, embedded in the upholstery of the back seat. When this report was turned in, the Secretary ordered all four cars taken to the police garage and kept there until he had a chance to inspect them personally. On second thought, he asked that the arrow be sent to him immediately by special messenger.

The police turned in one further report, though this was not until some time later. This was to the effect that the main door of the administration building of Columbia University had been smashed in, apparently by a battering ram made of a tree which had been cut down nearby.

The final argument, if indeed one was necessary, for the cancellation of the alert, was pressure from the east coast Press. With the whole of their readership locked up, with their circulation, printing, type-setting departments unable to get to work, or to work even if they were already in their offices, newspaper publishers were unable to bring out their editions and were in danger of losing large sums of money for an indefinite period.

In New York the editors of the
Times,
the
Herald Tribune,
the
Daily Mirror,
the
Daily News,
the
Journal-American,
the
Compass,
the
Post,
and the
World-Telegram and Sun,
met in defiance of the air-raid restrictions at Bleeck’s bar on Thirty-ninth Street, and putting aside their policy differences and professional criticisms the one of the other, solemnly vowed that they would have the scalp of the Secretary of Defence unless the air-raid was cancelled and their readership returned to them.

“Unless we have a freely circulating daily Press, we have lost whatever war we are fighting, or are called upon to fight,” the editor of the
Times
announced. “It is one thing if people are prevented from reading newspapers because they have been killed by an atom-bomb, but quite another thing if they are prevented from reading newspapers for fear of being killed by an atom-bomb.”

The editor of the
Daily Mirror
made a note of this on the back of an envelope and ran a box in the first post-air-raid edition to appear, summarizing the
Times
editor’s remarks under the headline: Times Claims Precedence Over A-bomb.

So the great alert was cancelled and the confusion which followed was almost as chaotic as that which preceded it. The telephone exchanges were overwhelmed as a liberated population called relatives, newspapers, fire stations, police stations, radio stations, television stations, indeed all sources of information to inquire whether all was well, whether the men from Mars had withdrawn, whether it was true that Manhattan was a shambles, and whether it was true that all the water had been rendered radio-active by agents ranging from atomic explosives to fiery darts, hurled from the silent reaches of space. Those in the cities sought to go to their homes; those in their homes in the suburbs, seized by an irresistible curiosity, sought to get to the cities--in Boston to view the reported shambles of Old North Church; in Philadelphia to examine the wreckage of Independence Hall; in New York to gaze with horror and wonder on what report had it was the blackened skeleton of the world’s proudest city.

Thus thousands of families missed their immediate reunion, adding to the confusion. Reports of missing persons, turned in by distraught husbands and wives, ran into tens of thousands. The police, the Civil Defence Organization, the Red Cross, the Traveller’s Aid--all were quite unable to cope with them. And in this morass of rumour and of inquiry, of hysteria and of bustling about from one place to another, Mrs. Reiner’s report that her boarder, Dr. Kokintz, had not been home for three days and was not to be found anywhere, was utterly lost.

Mrs. Reiner, however, had not spent fifty-five years living in Brooklyn to have her own aims and interest set aside or swallowed in a furore involving millions.

“You find Mr. Kokintz,” she instructed the Missing Persons’ Bureau, Manhattan Division, “or I come over there and find him myself. What for you think I pay taxes?”

“Lady,” said the weary clerk, to whom her .call had been switched, “we got maybe ten thousand people reported missing in the last three hours. Four of our own men in the Missing Persons’ Bureau are missing, and there ain’t nowhere we can report them to. How do you spell his name?”

“Kokintz,” said Mrs. Reiner. “Anybody knows how to spell Kokintz. It’s a natural name, easy to spell, like Schmidt.”

“Well,” replied the clerk, “maybe I might spell it wrong. You spell it for me.”

“Look,” said Mrs. Reiner, “I’m not spending ten cents calling you for you to get fresh about my spelling. Kokintz is the name. A very nice bachelor gentleman that sometimes stays out at night. Working at the Columbia University, he says. But he never stayed out two nights and three days before.”

“We’ll look for him,” replied the clerk, “and let you know what we find.” He hung up and filled out a routine report, saying that a Mr. Kokenz, bachelor, aged about fifty, wearing thick glasses, bird lover, fond of staying out at night, was missing. He put the form with twenty others he had filled out in the past hour and turned to the next call.

Mrs. Reiner, however, was not satisfied. She had already called Dr. Kokintz at his special number at the University, the private line whose secret she shared with the President of the United States, and got no reply. She debated whether she should go over to Columbia and make inquiries personally. But she had other boarders to look after, and there was a
I
quantity of grocery shopping to do for them. She did her shopping, fretting the while, and then decided that she would write a letter to the President about her missing boarder.

The letter took her a full hour to compose, but she felt the time was well spent when she was finished. It read:

DEAR PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES,

Mr. Kokintz, my boarder, has been missing three days and two nights now, and I want that you should help to find him. He is a bachelor gentleman and sometimes stays out at night, but never as much as this before. Sometimes he says he is out because he is working, and sometimes he says he fell asleep in a movie. I been feeding his birds while he is away, and I will keep on feeding them, naturally. But I am worried about him. He is a nice gentleman and pays his rent regular and I am worried about him. So please help me find him. Maybe you got people can search the movie houses. Some of them are open twenty-four hours a day and there may be a lot of missing people in there.

Your fellow citizen,

ELIZA REINER.

P.S.--I voted Republican all my life except when we needed a Democrat during the depression.

The letter, due to the disruption of the postal services and the fact that Mrs. Reiner had addressed it merely “The President of These United States,” was four days before it reached --after examination by the Secret Service--the desk of the secretary who culled the correspondence which should be brought to the attention of the Chief Executive. He decided on a whim to let the President see it, not that it was important but because it might cheer him up with its humanity.

In the meantime, a number of strange oddments arising out of the great alert were uncovered. But they were all of them lost for several days in the great welter of news which the exercise had engendered. A
New York Herald Tribune
reporter, covering the waterfront, discovered a banner with a double-headed eagle flying on top of a customs shed in the place of the Stars and Stripes. Nobody knew who put it there. Nobody knew what it represented. It developed that the Stars and Stripes was supposed to be raised at dawn each day and lowered at sunset. But the man whose duty it was to attend to this was among the missing of the great exercise--he turned up later in Toronto, Canada, indignantly pointing out that he had gone away on his regularly scheduled annual leave. In the confusion, his replacement had forgotten about the flag-raising ceremony.

The reporter turned in the story and it was put down as some kind of a hoax, a hoax which, as the
Tribune
pointed out in a small and dignified editorial, was in the poorest of taste. The item, however, came to the attention of the Secretary of Defence and he sent for the double-headed eagle banner in the same way that he had sent for the three-foot arrow found in the back of the missing General Snippett’s car.

Then, three days after the alert, the Press got around to reporting that the main doors of Columbia University had been beaten open with an improvised battering ram. Nothing inside, however, had been touched. The incident was again taken to be some kind of irresponsible frolic indulged in by parties unknown. One theory was that a number of would-be students, whose candidacies had been refused because the University was full, had battered down the doors to illustrate their determination to be admitted. The dean made scrupulous and intensive inquiries and satisfied himself that the incident could not be laid to any of his students. In a statement issued to the Press, he deplored the barbarism of those who had cut down a tree to smash open the University doors, and had compounded their crime by apparently taking a coat of fine chain mail of the fourteenth century, out of some museum, to make a head for their battering ram.

“Armour of this kind is exceedingly rare,” his statement read. “The mail used was a hauberk, or shirt of chain, covering the head, neck, shoulders, and whole figure of a man. Many sections have been irreparably damaged.”

But an armourer employed by the Metropolitan Museum, who asked permission to examine the suit, declared that he believed he knew of every piece of chain mail in the United States and this was not one of them.

“This suit of mail,” he told the dean, “is made on the exact pattern of the fourteenth century, but judging by its condition, it has either been remarkably well preserved, or was made much later by an expert armourer. The only place in the world to-day where such armourers are to be found is in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.”

The statement by the chain mail expert was reported in the
Times,
which obtained an exclusive on the story, and this also came to the attention of the Secretary of Defence. He sent for the hauberk in the same way he had sent for the arrow and the eagle banner. Then he went to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and read all there was available on the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. There were only five lines, giving a desiccated history. One of the lines said that the national flag was a double-headed eagle banner. The Secretary became so absorbed in the discovery that he forgot to leave his office at 5.30 that evening--the first time he had been guilty of staying late in twenty years of Government service.