“Little Frankie again?” he snarled in a low voice. “Still wants to get hurt.” His hand twitched toward a breast pocket.

  I came at him so fast that my feet only touched the floor twice. I smashed one satisfying crack at his jaw. The force of my rush carried us both to the dresser in one pile of arms and legs and grunts. He drove an elbow into my ribs and brought a knee up sharp into me.

  As I doubled, his huge right hand, balled into a murderous fist, came tearing around at my face. I twitched my head and the fist bounced off my eye. I butted him with my head. He grunted. He was soft.

  I brought my fist back with every ounce of energy I had and hit him hard. He started to scream. I jabbed a fist wrist-deep into his jaw. Then, as he started to slide to the floor, I went to work on his face. I must have hit him ten times before he lit. He was out colder than dry ice.

  My lip had opened again; but then, so had my ego. My fists hurt, my back ached, my eye was a patch of numbness—but I felt fine.

  I dropped to one knee and began to search him.

  After a while I stood up, feeling sick. I’d found everything from brass knuckles to foreign picture postcards but no souvenir of Daniels or anyone else. Mumbles must have felt the case was still too hot to indulge his hobby.

  He stirred and groaned. I put him back to sleep.

  I was in a fine spot. If Tony Pirotti came sweeping in, he was likely to be very embarrassed. I didn’t have a thing to show him, a shred of proof against Mumbles. And Mumbles could very easily prefer charges against me for assault and battery. Which, under the peculiar circumstances, wouldn’t do Ginnie very much good. Or Louise. Or myself.

  hat time was it? I flipped my sleeve back. I had broken my watch in the scuffle. Mumbles was wearing a pocket watch. I bent over and pulled it out of his vest.

  I put my fingernail under the cover of the watch and opened it. Then I let out a gulp. There, pasted to the inside of the watch cover, was a human ear. Daniels’s body was missing it when they found him. An expert could identify it.

  I turned the watch over. On the back, engraved into the gold, was a rather ornately lettered Regg.

  There were shots downstairs, under the noise of a police siren. Feet made large from patrolling a beat were pounding up the stairs, I unlocked the door and leaned hazily against a wall. Tony Pirotti and another cop came in with drawn revolvers.

  “This is good.” Pirotti grinned as he snapped his handcuffs on Regg. “Well, well,” he said with relish, after I had told my story and given him the grisly memento of Steve Daniels. “Headquarters will be awfully glad to see this guy. You’ve had quite a night.”

  I nodded. I felt as if I’d eaten two whole lobsters in one gulp. The room was beginning to quiver and melt.

  “Hey, Joe,” Tony called. “Get Mr. Carlyle home. I heard all about what happened at the Red Devil,” he told me. “But here’s something you don’t know—we picked up another one of Regg’s hoods, a new boy. Calls himself Harlow Dexter. Yeah, that one.

  “The room clerk noticed he was carrying a gun and phoned us. We grabbed him as he left your hotel, holding him on a charge of—Hey, Joe, get this guy home! He’s ready to pass out!”

  As Joe began to lead me out, Mumbles woke up. He took it all in fast: me, the police, the watch in Tony Pirotti’s hand. He began yelling—not mumbling anymore—but yelling: “This isn’t over yet, Frankie! They won’t make this rap stick. We have a date when I get out.” That’s what I was worrying about, back in the hotel, with Louise bathing my cuts.

  I said to myself: What will happen to Louise, to me, to Ginnie, when Mumbles gets out! Even in prison, Regg could still give an order to an outside hood . . .

  Maybe. But the law made a terrific mistake when Mumbles was booked and shoved into an overnight cell with a char-acted named Harry Daniels, alias Harlow Dexter. There wasn’t much left of Daniels’s mind the next morning.

  And not much of Mumbles’s throat.

  1951

  Generation of Noah

  That was the day Plunkett heard his wife screaming guardedly to their youngest boy.

  He let the door of the laying house slam behind him, forgetful of the nervously feeding hens. She had, he realized, cupped her hands over her mouth so that only the boy would hear.

  “Saul! You, Saul! Come back, come right back this instant. Do you want your father to catch you out there on the road? Saul!”

  The last shriek was higher and clearer, as if she had despaired of attracting the boys attention without at the same time warning the man.

  Poor Ann!

  Gently, rapidly, Plunkett shh’d his way through the bustling and hungry hens to the side door. He came out facing the brooder ran and broke into a heavy, unathletic trot.

  He heard the other children clatter out of the feed house. Good! They have the responsibility after Ann and me, Plunkett told himself. Let them watch and learn again.

  “Saul!” his wife’s voice shrilled unhappily. “Saul, your father’s coming!”

  Ann came out of the front door and paused. “Elliot,” she called at his back as he leaped over the flush well-cover. “Please, I don’t feel well.”

  A difficult pregnancy, of course, and in her sixth month. But that had nothing to do with Saul. Saul knew better.

  At the last frozen furrow of the truck garden Plunkett gave himself a moment to gather the necessary air for his lungs. Years ago, when Von Rundstedt’s Tigers roared through the Bulge, he would have been able to dig a foxhole after such a run. Now, he was badly winded. Just showed you: such a short distance from the far end of the middle chicken house to the far end of the vegetable garden—merely crossing four acres—and he was winded. And consider the practice he’d had.

  He could just about see the boy idly lifting a stick to throw for the dog’s pleasure. Saul was in the further ditch, well past the white line his father had painted across the road.

  “Elliot,” his wife began again. “He’s only six years old. He—”

  Plunkett drew his jaws apart and let breath out in a bellyful of sound. “Saul! Saul Plunkett!” he bellowed. “Start running!”

  He knew his voice had carried. He clicked the button on his stopwatch and threw his right arm up, pumping his clenched fist.

  The boy had heard the yell. He turned, and, at the sight of the moving arm that meant the stopwatch had started, he dropped the stick. But, for the fearful moment, he was too startled to move.

  Eight seconds. He lifted his lids slightly. Saul had begun to run. But he hadn’t picked up speed, and Rusty skipping playfully between his legs threw him off his stride.

  Ann had crossed the garden laboriously and stood at his side, alternately staring over his jutting elbow at the watch and smiling hesitantly sidewise at his face. She shouldn’t have come out in her thin housedress in November. But it was good for Ann, too. Plunkett kept his eyes stolidly on the unemotional second hand.

  One minute forty.

  He could hear the dog’s joyful barks coming closer, but as yet there was no echo of sneakers slapping the highway. Two minutes. He wouldn’t make it.

  The old bitter thoughts came crowding back to Plunkett. A father timing his six-year-old son’s speed with the best watch he could afford. This, then, was the scientific way to raise children in Earth’s most enlightened era. Well, it was scientific . . . in keeping with the latest discoveries. . . .

  Two and a half minutes. Rusty’s barks didn’t sound so very far off. Plunkett could hear the desperate pad-pad-pad of the boy’s feet. He might make it at that. If only he could!

  “Hurry, Saul,” his mother breathed. “You can make it.”

  Plunkett looked up in time to see his son pound past, his jeans already darkened with perspiration. “Why doesn’t he breathe like I told him?” he muttered. “He’ll be out of breath in no time.”

  Halfway to the house, a furrow caught at Saul’s toes. As he sprawled, Ann gasped. “You can’t count that, Elliot. He tripped.”

  “Of course he tripped. He should count on tripping.”

  “Get up, Saulie,” Herbie, his older brother, screamed from the garage where he stood with Josephine Dawkins, one pail of eggs between them. “Get up and run! This corner here! You can make it!”

  The boy heaved to his feet, and threw his body forward again. Plunkett could hear him sobbing. He reached the cellar steps—and literally plunged down.

  Plunkett pressed the stopwatch and the second hand halted. Three minutes thirteen seconds.

  He held the watch up for his wife to see. “Thirteen seconds, Ann.”

  Her face wrinkled.

  He walked to the house. Saul crawled back up the steps, fragments of unrecovered breath rattling in his chest. He kept his eyes on his father.

  “Come here, Saul. Come right here. Look at the watch. Now, what do you see?”

  The boy stared intently at the watch. His lips began twisting; startled tears writhed down his stained face. “More—more than three m-minutes, poppa?”

  More than three minutes, Saul. Now, Saul—don’t cry, son; it isn’t any use—Saul, what would have happened when you got to the steps?”

  A small voice, pitifully trying to cover its cracks: “The big doors would be shut.”

  “The big doors would be shut. You would be locked outside. Then—what would have happened to you? Stop crying. Answer me!”

  “Then, when the bombs fell, I’d—I’d have no place to hide. I’d burn like the head of a match. An’—an’ the only thing left of me would be a dark spot on the ground, shaped like my shadow. An’—an’—”

  “And the radioactive dust,” his father helped with the catechism.

  “Elliot—”Ann sobbed behind him. “I don’t—”

  “Please, Ann! And the radioactive dust, son?”

  “An’ if it was ra-di-o-ac-tive dust ’stead of atom bombs, my skin would come right off my body, an’ my lungs would burn up inside me—please, poppa, I won’t do it again!”

  “And your eyes? What would happen to your eyes?”

  A chubby brown fist dug into one of the eyes. “An’ my eyes would fall out, an’ my teeth would fall out, and I’d feel such terrible terrible pain—”

  “All over and inside you. That’s what would happen if you got to the cellar too late when the alarm went off, if you got locked out. At the end of three minutes, we pull the levers, and no matter who’s outside—no matter who—all four corner doors swing shut and the cellar will be sealed. You understand that, Saul?”

  The two Dawkins children were listening with white faces and dry lips. Their parents had brought them from the city and begged Elliot Plunkett, as he remembered old friends, to give their children the same protection as his. Well, they were getting it. This was the way to get it.

  “Yes, I understand it, poppa. I won’t ever do it again. Never again.”

  “I hope you won’t. Now start for the barn, Saul. Go ahead.” Plunkett slid his heavy leather belt from its loops.

  “Elliot! Don’t you think he understands the horrible thing? A beating won’t make it any clearer.”

  He paused behind the weeping boy trudging to the barn. “It won’t make it any clearer, but it will teach him the lesson another way. All seven of us are going to be in that cellar three minutes after the alarm, if I have to wear this strap clear down to the buckle!”

  When Plunkett later clumped into the kitchen with his heavy farm boots, he stopped and sighed.

  Ann was feeding Dinah. With her eyes on the baby, she asked, No supper for him, Elliot?”

  “No supper.” He sighed again. “It does take it out of a man.

  “Especially you. Not many men would become a farmer at thirty-five. Not many men would sink every last penny into an underground fort and powerhouse, just for insurance. But you’re right.”

  “I only wish,” he said restlessly, “that I could work out some way of getting Nancy’s heifer into the cellar. And if eggs stay high, one more month, I can build the tunnel to the generator. Then there’s the well. Only one well, even if it’s enclosed—”

  “And when we came out here seven years ago—” She rose to him at last and rubbed her lips gently against his thick blue shirt. “We only had a piece of ground. Now, we have three chicken houses, a thousand broilers, and I can’t keep track of how many layers and breeders.”

  She stopped as his body tightened and he gripped her shoulders.

  “Ann, Ann! If you think like that, you’ll act like that! How can I expect the children to—Ann, what we have—all we have—is a five-room cellar, concrete-lined, which we can seal in a few seconds, an enclosed well from a fairly deep underground stream, a windmill generator for power and a sunken oil-burner-driven generator for emergencies. We have supplies to carry us through, Geiger counters to detect radiation and lead-lined suits to move about in—afterwards. I’ve told you again and again that these things are our lifeboat, and the farm is just a sinking ship.”

  “Of course, darling.” Plunkett’s teeth ground together, then parted helplessly as his wife went back to feeding the baby.

  “You’re perfectly right. Swallow, now, Dinah. Why, that last bulletin from the Survivors Club would make anybody think.”

  He had been quoting from the October Survivor and Ann had recognized it. Well? At least they were doing something—seeking out nooks and feverishly building crannies—pooling their various ingenuities in an attempt to haul themselves and their families through the military years of the Atomic Age.

  The familiar green cover of the mimeographed magazine was very noticeable on the kitchen table. He flipped the sheets to the thumb-smudged article on page five and shook his head.

  “Imagine!” he said loudly. “The poor fools agreeing with the government again on the safety factor. Six minutes! How can they—an organization like the Survivors Club making that their official opinion! Why freeze, freeze alone . . .”

  “They’re ridiculous,” Ann murmured, scraping the bottom of the bowl.

  “All right, we have automatic detectors. But human beings still have to look at the radar scope, or we’d be diving underground every time there’s a meteor shower.”

  He strode along a huge table, beating a fist rhythmically into one hand. “They won’t be so sure, at first. Who wants to risk his rank by giving the nationwide signal that makes everyone in the country pull ground over his head, that makes our own projectile sites set to buzz? Finally, they are certain: they freeze for a moment. Meanwhile, the rockets are zooming down—how fast, we don’t know. The men unfreeze, they trip each other up, they tangle frantically. Then they press the button, then the nationwide signal starts our radio alarms.”

  Plunkett turned to his wife, spread earnest, quivering arms. “And then, Ann, we freeze when we hear it! At last, we start for the cellar. Who knows, who can dare to say, how much has been cut off the margin of safety by that time? No, if they claim that six minutes is the safety factor, we’ll give half of it to the alarm system. Three minutes for us.”

  “One more spoonful,” Ann urged Dinah. “Just one more. Down it goes!”

  Josephine Dawkins and Herbie were cleaning the feed trolley in the shed at the near end of the chicken house.

  “All done, pop,” the boy grinned at his father. “And the eggs taken care of. When does Mr. Whiting pick ’em up?”

  “Nine o’clock. Did you finish feeding the hens in the last house?”

  “I said all done, didn’t I?” Herbie asked with adolescent impatience. “When I say a thing, I mean it.”

  “Good. You kids better get at your books. Hey, stop that! Education will be very important, afterwards. You never know what will be useful. And maybe only your mother and I to teach you.”

  “Gee,” Herbie nodded at Josephine. “Think of that.”

  She pulled at her jumper where it was very tight over newly swelling breasts and patted her blonde braided hair. “What about my mother and father, Mr. Plunkett? Won’t they be—be—”

  “Naw!” Herbie laughed the loud, country laugh he’d been practicing lately. “They’re dead-enders. They won’t pull through. They live in the city, don’t they? They’ll just be some—”

  “Herbie!”

  “—some foam on a mushroom-shaped cloud,” he finished, utterly entranced by the image. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” he said, as he looked from his angry father to the quivering girl. He went on in a studiously reasonable voice. “But it’s the truth, anyway. That’s why they sent you and Lester here. I guess I’ll marry you—afterwards. And you ought to get in the habit of calling him pop. Because that’s the way it’ll be.”

  Josephine squeezed her eyes shut, kicked the shed door open, and ran out. “I hate you, Herbie Plunkett,” she wept. “You’re a beast!”

  Herbie grimaced at his father—women, women, women!—and ran after her. “Hey, Jo! Listen!”

  The trouble was, Plunkett thought worriedly as he carried the emergency bulbs for the hydroponic garden into the cellar—the trouble was that Herbie had learned through constant reiteration the one thing: survival came before all else, and amenities were merely amenities.

  Strength and self-sufficiency—Plunkett had worked out the virtues his children needed years ago, sitting in air-conditioned offices and totting corporation balances with one eye always on the calendar.

  “Still,” Plunkett muttered, “still—Herbie shouldn’t—” He shook his head.

  He inspected the incubators near the long steaming tables of the hydroponic garden. A tray about ready to hatch. They’d have to start assembling eggs to replace it in the morning. He paused in the third room, filled a gap in the bookshelves.

  “Hope Josephine steadies the boy in his schoolwork. If he fails that next exam, they’ll make me send him to town regularly. Now there’s an aspect of survival I can hit Herbie with.”

  He realized he’d been talking to himself, a habit he’d been combating futilely for more than a month. Stuffy talk, too. He was becoming like those people who left tracts on trolley cars.

  “Have to start watching myself,” he commented. Dammit, again!”