I get on the elevator and press the button for the lobby, but the door opens on a penthouse floor and then on the super dragging a garbage bag in the basement.
“Say, I was hoping you hadn’t left and might drop by again. My wife says I was very rude not asking you in before. She says I forgot how much you lost ten years ago and how much I was personally spared. So come on in now to meet the missus and also for a stiff apologetic drink.”
I go into his apartment. It’s almost palatial compared to his old basement flat. The television set is on. He hands me a drink. A woman comes out of the kitchen carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres.
“My wife, Gerta. We had two kids, something the first wife didn’t want, but they were snatched up from us during one of those harsh flus. Drink strong enough for you, Phil? And where you planning to bed down for the night if I can ask?”
“In a hotel downtown. I’ll find one, thanks.”
“Lots of nice hotels in town.”
“Most are too expensive for the ordinary man,” Gerta says. “Expensive for us, maybe, but I don’t believe for him. But what do you know about hotels here? You ever stay in one?”
“Our friends have told us about them.”
“She’s right. Visiting friends who come through not so much to see us as a whole slew of people. I forgot about them.”
“I wish you wouldn’t forget that maybe I don’t forget.”
“I’m sorry. It seems all I’m telling people today is I’m sorry, but I am. To both of you for what I didn’t remember and should have done.”
The television program concerns a hospital resident who wants to operate on a woman before she takes her first flight to Earth. This series about a traveling space hospital has been running a long time or perhaps this is a rerun, as I remember my daughters watching it. The patient says “Honestly, Doctor, is it plausible for me to think I’ll ever reach my affianced alive?” The doctor bites his thumb. The super asks me how I like the set’s reception. “Real sharp,” he says. “Like real life, if not clearer.”
“Sets have certainly progressed in the last few years,” Gerta says.
“Remember old lady Longmore, Phil? How she got the first giant color set in the building? Cost her a fortune it did, and she was never found either. All those unmarked graves under this building. All-tolled I’d say a few hundred.”
“Well, that’s not very much for a new set,” Gerta says. “People. I meant people.”
“Lon!”
“Okay. She doesn’t like me talking about it so I won’t. But it has been ten years since it happened, which should be time enough to mention it without someone else getting upset.”
“I’d think so,” I say.
“You see?’” He refills my glass. The doctor says “Everything will go smoothly — I swear.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear,” the patient says. She’s put on a stretcher, wheeled through the hospital’s many halls. Through a window in the operating room, Earth and passing spaceships and comets can be seen. A nurse fastens a surgical mask over the doctor’s mouth, another nurse slaps a scalpel into his hand. “Gently does it now,” the doctor says, when the screen goes blank. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice says. “We are having difficulty with our transmitters, so please stand by,” A sign on the screen says the regularly scheduled program will resume shortly. Court music from another century and country is played. Just as I’m beginning to enjoy a rare flute and double bassoon duet, the music stops and an army officer stares at the audience from behind a desk. “It’s just like our first revolution here,” I say to Lon, “except this guy’s got a pistol in his hand instead of a pointer. And much like my last region’s revolution three years ago, except then there were two officers from different military branches sharing a stand-up mike.”
“This is not a television drama or news documentary,” the officer says. “I am the designated communications spokesman for the national government in power. Minor revolutionary activity has broken out on both sides of the border of this and the Central regions. All noncombatant citizens are ordered to evacuate any outdoor areas and stay in their business, living or shopping quarters till the conflict has ended. Most of the rebels have been defeated, tried and executed, but hundreds more need to be caught and exterminated before the two regions can be considered safe from siege and slaughter and the country at large free from similar outbreaks and bloodshed.”
A second officer appears on the now split screen. He says the president and his military staff will give a report soon from their permanent underground building, and then gives specific instructions to people in this region. “Though there’s little chance the hostilities will increase or spread, go to the bottom of whatever building you’re in or nearest to. Lie flat with your body against a wall till the all-clear sirens are sounded. If the sirens aren’t working, then the signals may also be heard on your radios and TVs. If the radio and TV stations aren’t operating, the all-clear will be delivered over bullhorns by servicemen dispatched to all populated areas.”
A message “Go to your building’s lowest floor” flashes on the screen till it’s replaced by the title and credits of a film dramatization of what people should do from the time they learn of a local armed disturbance till the moment the all-clear signal is made. Actors, carrying portable televisions and supplies, take elevators and stairs to their building’s basement, undo their top buttons, buckles, laces, ties and belts, and lie face-down on the floor with their hands behind their heads—”But as far away from any wall with a window in it,” one child actress stands up to demonstrate and say, “because of the danger of flying glass.”
“If this position becomes unendurable,” an actor says, “try mine as a substitute,” He removes his shoes, empties his pockets of eyeglasses and sharp objects such as pens and keys, crouches down on his shins, crosses his feet, sticks his head between his chest and forearms—”Which in this position should be as huddled up to your knees as you can get them.”
“Looks like we’ve again got no place to go down to,” the super says. “And seems you’ll have to stick it out with us, Phil, unless you think you can make it to a hotel in time.”
“Nonsense,” Gerta says. “Mr. Devine will stay here and think of it as his home till the city’s no longer threatened.”
We hear faint reports of what seem like distant explosions and buildings crumbling to the ground.
“There it is,” the super says. “You hear it once you never forget.
Oh how I’m reminded from the last time when just our simple brownstone went. Remember, Phil? There we were, Gerta — my first wife and I having ourselves a fine old supper, when all of a sudden—”
“I thought it was around lunchtime when you said the first rumblings came.”
“Then a fine old lunch, which in those days were as big as our suppers are today, when all of a sudden — but why don’t I stand you both to another drink?”
“Might as well,” Gerta says. “Mr. Devine — the same?”
Should I run up and get Georgia and Jimmy? Warn them at least, because maybe their television’s on the blink and for some reason they didn’t hear those explosions and cave-ins before, if that’s what those sounds were. I start for the door.