End of the Dream

by Wylie, Philip;

  The radio station was informed and now advised complete evacuation, with the warning that a used cigarette lighter, a struck match or even a spark might result in an explosion. Now and then this alarm was repeated. The leak was located in a main, but repair would take time. Gas pervaded the structure, rapidly. Its windows were the new plastic like those in the building where we sat, and unopenable. The doors at street level closed automatically behind those few tenants and people admitted from the street. Many people rushed out into the storm as the grim implications of the bulletins struck home. Most did not.

  When the building exploded, the colossal firework was visible from our tower windows and the shock wave cracked two picture windows in the Smythe drawing room, letting in a thin, screaming blast of icy air and snow, though the plastic panes were supposedly unbreakable. Nora and I tried taping the long rents from the inside but the pressure of the storm ripped off the silicone adhesive tape. In the end, I got a door open and went out, in my wet overcoat. There I managed to close the tape Pat and Nora heated and handed out. The driving wind held it in place.

  When I came back, half frozen, the radio was saying something new:

  “. . . this channel will handle only emergency news and orders from now on. All information on weather will be transferred to Station 8018. . . .”

  Pat was already turning the dial. “Some friends of Zill’s were due in from Paris about now,” she said. “At Kennedy—or Cranberry.”

  She looked at my wife and me questioningly to see if we objected to the switch. We didn’t, of course, and it was with a shock I recalled that several Foundation people, among them Dr. Davies, the ecologist, Plantley, the demographer, and Zanley, the plant biologist, with some of their assistants and secretaries, were also expected to fly in this evening, from Vienna. No use mentioning it, I thought.

  Pat tuned the set and we heard a talk by a man with a voice both brazen and emotionless about the weather: the blizzard would not likely end until early morning, though from now on it would tend to become squally with briefly diminished winds and an occasional lessening of snowfall.

  While that word was studiously stated in its flat, harsh announcer’s tones, Miles and Zill hurried in. The rotonde was full of people and locked against others trying to enter. There were people down there with burns and cuts and frostbite. We offered to help but were told the place was already packed and a pair of trained nurses had managed to get in before Bill locked up. He’d done it at Miles’s command when the vast, ornate lobby was packed. By then most people outdoors had found shelter somewhere.

  I helped fill a wastebasket with such medical supplies as Miles’s father kept on hand. When he left the penthouse with Zill I realized I was looking at a Zill I’d never known. She’d always been offhand about her wartime ambulance driving. “I probably drove fewer casualties from the lines in that ambulance,” she’d said, “than the number of guys who used it with me, and a couple of other Red Cross gals, for a love-wagon.”

  That, I thought, might not even have been exaggeration.

  But the Zill I briefly saw now was the one who drove the wounded. Calm, hair tied up under a scarf, swift and busy as she gathered a load of edibles, eyes very clear and purposeful, blood on her hands and arms, bare now, with the scissored stumps of an evening dress showing, and in flat-heeled shoes to which she’d just changed, making her seem very different. Calm and calming, competent, efficient, her sex-smolder subdued, making her a person only.

  They went out and I returned to the big room where tall candles were burning, logs blazed evenly, and my wife and Pat were listening to the damned incessant horror coming from the new channel.

  “. . . I will repeat the information we have, as of now, 8:17 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. Air traffic is stacked up over most east coast areas. Planes able to reach airports at or beyond Columbus, Ohio, and points west, or the border of North Carolina and on south, have landed in those areas or are proceeding to them. Planes destined for the blackout region but not yet airborne and flights short of their points of no return have remained grounded or are en route back. None of the fields serving the New York area is open. Everything from Maine to southern Virginia and west to central Ohio is shut down.”

  It was a woman’s voice. I realized this only after hearing that much of the news. Quiet, but very clear, calm, with no sign of stress or even its repression. What it said flung the imagination into horror before it made that horror specific:

  “The newly opened Cranberry Airport in New Jersey is not in use. Equipment meant to permit landings in all weather has failed. Kennedy is under ten-foot drifts. Dulles, also supposedly immune to any storm, went dark twenty minutes ago.

  “Flight SST-S 108 from London attempted ditching off the shore of Delaware. The Coast Guard has not returned from its effort at sea rescue. Flight SST-S 1119 from Rome made a safe landing on the frozen surface of Greenwood Lake in New Jersey. Bulletin. All planes running low on fuel and able to get this message are urged, if no better landing facilities are within range, to make some similar attempt. The official order follows.”

  What followed was a long list of lakes, and of some river stretches possibly usable by lighter aircraft, along with various extensive flatlands including, even, swampy regions I knew to be spottily clear but patched with small tree clumps and heavy brush. The very mention of those swamps and their precise locations showed the desperation of Flight Control everywhere.

  We were listening to that list when Horicon silently materialized and said in his standard register, “Dinner is served, madam.”

  Pat stood slowly. “We better, I guess.”

  But we didn’t, right then.

  The reason was Nora’s cry, “The storm’s dropped down.”

  We looked out the windows and it had.

  For perhaps a quarter mile we could see through the diminished snowfall and what we could see was illuminated by dozens of fires, large and small. Some were in the streets nearby. Some apparently were consuming lower structures. The greatest one soared from the remains of Regent Towers, which we couldn’t see because the buildings between us and that mass of debris cut off our line of sight. What still became shakingly evident was that the upper part of Regent Towers, visible before the explosion, had collapsed. About thirty floors.

  But we remained there for a time for another reason.

  Commander Emmet Buckley had kept his ship at cruising altitude for nearly an hour now, hoping and, until recent minutes, perhaps even believing his communications officer would get through to Flight Control somewhere. The solar flares that had caused this mess were growing larger. His crew and passengers, four hundred and eight people all told, were getting some extra radiation but not a dose that couldn’t be borne in this emergency.

  The passengers knew they were stacked up. Some probably knew, or guessed knowledgeably, that it wasn’t usual for one of the new, “silent” supersonic superliners to remain at seventy thousand feet when over the continent and, so, above their destination.

  Emmet Buckley was a powerful man, not tall, wide and thick, forty-one years old with a record for hours aloft and miles logged as near to perfect as any. He’d flown SST-S’s for three months before he made his first commercial run—on this same trip, Berlin to New York—rather, Jersey and Cranberry. He wished, now, that his kids could see the grandeur of the Aurora Borealis, pale and sweeping rays, red, yellow, purple, green, sliding silently across the sky. Solar wind transformed to light.

  Invisible from the ground—air too dense, now.

  His communications officer, Billings, called sharply on the intercom, “Plane closing on our orbit, approximately same level.” Why another ship, another SST-S it must be, was “closing,” the commander didn’t know. Coming around the opposite way. He moved the controls to climb, which was standard operational procedure, but Billings cut in with two words: “Com’s out.”

  Buckley had no time to be glad there had been a brief moment when the communications worked. The double-belt
warning had been on for some time. He made swift movements and the huge ship slipped on its side, righted and shot out of its circling course at a sharp angle after it leveled off. A moment later the closing SST-S was briefly visible before it passed—a shimmering form against the Aurora, port and starboard lights glimpsed, gone. Their combined speeds were nearly three thousand miles an hour. The flight deck and the steamlined passenger-striped tube shivered briefly in the thin air that brought vibrations from the other craft’s passage.

  Buckley swore. Why had the pilot gone counterclockwise?

  A Soviet ship? With a pilot who forgot the stackup rules were opposite, everywhere else? Probably.

  A stewardess came through after she unlocked the doors. “Captain?” She remembered. “Commander?”

  “Yes, Olive?”

  “A passenger failed to clamp his double,” the girl said with a breathlessness. “Hit the opposite seats and he’s screaming his ribs are broken.”

  “Maybe they are,” Buckley said, aware his flat tone was a sign of nerves. “Why isn’t Lea seeing to the guy? She has the training.”

  “Lea didn’t hitch. She had a sick baby. She’s unconscious. Dead, I think—neck broken, it looks like.”

  The commander frowned. “Okay. Jim, go out and pacify the cripples. If Lea’s dead, or even out cold, bring her up here. Suggest we have facilities for taking care of her. I mean—stop the sweat, if possible.”

  Jim unhitched and followed Olive into the first-class cabin. He had a glimpse of white faces, smoky air and the shimmer of the extra drinks he’d ordered as they were shakily sipped or held in tight hands; light caught the cocktail glasses and flickered.

  When the door slammed and the bolts automatically slid in place, Norman Dover, the flight engineer, leaned over Buckley’s shoulder.

  “Just thirty,” he said quietly.

  Buckley stared at him. His sense of time must have gone haywire. He’d thought they had a good hour’s fuel left. He called Billings and spoke tersely. “We’re going down, Bill. Tank’s going dry. You have got to get through and find us a field.”

  Billings tried, tried as sweat began to bead his forehead, as it ran to his chin. He kept manipulating dials with long, sensitive fingers that did not quiver because he dared not let them. As he listened, called, changed frequencies and came back to standard tuning, he knew the ship was coming on down and finally, with a porthole glance, that she was leveling off just above the overcast. He heard shattered parts of many sorts of talk and realized from those bits that controllers were suggesting frozen open lakes, even fields.

  He hurried to Buckley.

  The commander at first was incredulous. He turned the controls over to his second, Ames, and checked.

  When he took over again his face was ashen. Jim turned keys, entered. “Lea’s dead. I brought the body in. The guy with the smashed ribs is in bad shape.”

  That was as far as he got. Buckley explained their fix. Jim took the seat beside his commander then without comment and waited, watching the square, steady face as it looked at the deck below, solid like the sea at thirty thousand. Twice Buckley’s eyes ranged over the panels in a sweep that took in every one of the hundred-odd instrument dials and recorders. He stopped both times to stare at the radar scope which he then turned up to “full bright.” Vague blips began to multiply on the tube.

  “Billings couldn’t even get dope enough for the crazy landing areas they’re offering. But if there’s one field I know blindfolded in total dark it’s Kennedy. I ought to get enough outline of Manhattan coming in from the sea to pick a slot and one I can use for the rest of the trip. Any better ideas?”

  “It’s dark. Drifts. Closed.”

  “Yeah. All the better. This baby can knock the drifts apart. It will be rough. If there’s a wreck on the strip I pick, that’s a shame. You think of anything surer?”

  “No.”

  A minute later and Flight SST-S 108 from Vienna plunged into the top of the tempest. As it let down the storm tossed it like a kite without a tether. They sloped through ink, through the roaring, buffeting, snow-thick dark just beyond little areas of semi-visibility made by the glaze of landing lights. Buckley soon cut them in order not to be blinded.

  He swiveled his eyes to the radar as often as he could and, finally, as he made a third sweep, caught a trace he recognized—a stretch of the south shore of Long Island. Then he looked at the altimetric gauges and back. The known line was gone. But he had a heading. At two thousand the air was incredible. He was aimed toward Manhattan but the ship behaved with such sluggishness he had to increase speed for the sake of control. He’d heard other pilots complain of this model and its slow responses in very heavy turbulence. They had said the Soviet SST handled better and so did the American plane. But the American airlines had been forced to buy foreign supersonics to compete; their own country’s SST was still being tested. The public hadn’t wanted the noise or the air pollution at high altitude—or low, for that matter. Well, they were getting it anyhow, and the profit was going to France and England.

  Buckley did not think that out clearly but merely had a flash of feeling that passed in a second and left a sense of vague grudge that he was not flying an American-made ship. His eyes skimmed dials and his hands moved swiftly from point to point as he descended, shunting and bucking, below two thousand feet, below fifteen hundred. At that level he had to know exactly where he was: a number of buildings were as tall as his plane was high. So his was now an emergency procedure and it recalled the words of a long-ago instructor when their trainer was flying blind in the mountains: “There are rocks in these clouds!”

  There were rocks in these, too, man-emplaced.

  “You’re low!” Jim screamed.

  It distracted him for an instant. “Going between ’em,” he said and nodded slightly at the scope, which gave a picture of what lay below and ahead. It was his decision as commander and he based it on the reasonable belief that the turbulence above was too intense to fly through, while there was space enough over Manhattan to cross safely.

  He was going to come down at Kennedy, closed or not.

  A tremendous cross wind hurled the plane sideways. Then, abruptly, Buckley saw a great area of radiance ahead and in another moment the plane emerged into that opening where fires in buildings furnished the glare and the white world was blinding. Dead ahead stood a tremendous tower. It was almost dark, which seemed odd, till he realized the faintly glowing windows were lit by candles. There wasn’t time to change course or even to scream, he thought, if you were that type.

  We saw that collision. The pointed snout of the plane hit the building at an angle, hit the Regina Arms Hotel Apartments. The impact speed must have been near five hundred miles an hour, for there was time only to draw a breath between the plane’s emergence from the wall of snowflakes to its shattering penetration of one wall and its still sliding appearance as it came through the other on its diagonal course. Steel beams and a great blast of bricks came out with the now demolished and compressed nose and the beams stopped the plane, soon and savagely, then held it so the forward part and the stern were suspended over the avenue and the side street. Part of a wing dropped into Madison. There was an avalanche of masonry that thudded and roared and bounded to the white streets and walks where few people, surely, were in the path of that cascading murder.

  The noises seemed to go on a long while and they were loud even in that insulated apartment. Silence came slowly but finally as the movement of metal and masonry stopped. The plane stood out from the corner of the building it had pierced, looking like a ruined javelin.

  The nose was a stump clamped in the fingers of steel beams but more than half of the other end stood out over the street, wings crumpled, two engines swinging loose and, inside, three decks of people. I thought the people would have been killed by the G-forces at impact. My eyes were on a dangling engine as it snapped free and fell toward the street far below. A gout of oil squirted from the engine socket and splash
ed the building. There was a bright flare as fuel caught and dribbled, blazing, down the walls.

  “My God,” Pat groaned, “they’re alive!”

  Of course, some of them and maybe a great many. This was the new type of SST-S with Harmon swing-slip seats and Grogger bags. Passengers with double belts hitched properly would be automatically whirled around to meet the crash backward. Each seat would slide a meter on braking rails, and plastic sacks, instantly inflated, would surround everyone with an air cushion. Even such deceleration as we’d beheld could be survived.

  As the drooling fuel and spurting oil mixed flames we could see quite clearly the movements of human figures in the ship and, soon, the violent opening of a hatch followed by the swift extension of a chute from the wreck to a window. There, hands from within caught it and presently, fantastically, people were moving, crawling out on that bridge, high above the avenue.

  The flame of oil and fuel lengthened down the wall, its course wind-slanted, so it was twice delayed by high balconies where it fed pools to overflowing and continued its burning descent. We soon saw people in the glass-paned, opposite corner of the building where there were staircases. A few people appeared and, in moments, throngs, so the stairs became crowded and the descent was slowed. From the summit for forty stories that thickening snake of humanity corked down and over landings around and on down, more gradually all the time, with greater jamming as floor after floor of tenants tried to escape by that one remaining route. The puddle of people at the street exit grew swiftly; many were getting out safely and many times their number seemed for a while to have a chance, including, doubtless, some of those still crawling from the plane to the window.