Ben Franklin whispered, “Go, baby, go!”

Terror departed Helen’s eyes. “Could we go up on the captain’s walk?” she said. “I want to watch them. They’re mine, you know.”

Ben and Peyton sprinted for the ladder. “No!” Randy said. “Wait!”

Ben stopped instantly. Peyton ran on. Her mother said, “Peyton! That was an order!”

Peyton, her hand on the ladder, went no further. She said, “Shucks.”

“You might as well start learning to obey your uncle Randy, just as you obey your father, right now!”

Peyton said, “Why can’t we go up on the roof?”

Randy had spoken instinctively. He found it difficult to put his objection into words. “I think it’s too exposed,” he said. “I think we all ought to be underground right now, but there isn’t any cellar and it’s too late to start digging.”

Ben Franklin said, “You’re right, Randy. If they laid an egg close, we could get flash burns. Then there’s radiation.” The boy looked at the weathercock on the garage steeple. “Wind’s from the east, so we won’t get any fallout, anyway not now. But suppose they hit Patrick? We’re almost exactly west of Patrick, aren’t we? Patrick could cook us.”

“Where did you learn all that stuff about fallout?” Randy asked.

“I thought everybody knew it.” Ben frowned. “I don’t think they’ll hit Patrick. It’s a test center, not an operational base. Patrick can’t hurt them, but MacDill and McCoy, they can hurt them. And, brother, they will!”

Randy, Helen, and Ben Franklin were facing the east, where the missile test pads on Cape Canaveral lay, and where the fat red sun now showed itself above the horizon. Peyton, nose pressed against the screen, was still trying to follow the contrails of the B-47’s. A stark white flash enveloped their world. Randy felt the heat on his neck. Peyton cried out and covered her face with her hands. In the southwest, in the direction of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota, another unnatural sun was born, much larger and infinitely fiercer than the sun in the east.

Automatically, as a good platoon leader should, Randy looked at his watch and marked the minute and second in his memory. This time he would know the point of impact exactly, using the flash-and-sound system learned in Korea.

A thick red pillar erected itself in the southwest, its base the unnatural sun.

The top of the pillar billowed outward. This time, the mushroom was there.

There was no sound at all except Peyton’s whimpering. Her fists were pressed into her eyes.

A bird plunged against the screen and dropped to earth, trailed by drifting feathers.

Within the pillar and the cloud, fantastic colors played. Red changed to orange, glowed white, became red again. Green and purple ropes twisted upward through the pillar and spread tentacles through the cloud.

The gaudy mushroom enlarged with incredible speed, angry, poisonous, malignant. It grew until the mushroom’s rim looked like the leading edge of an approaching weather front, black, purple, orange, green, a cancerous man-created line squall.

They shrank from it.

Peyton screamed, “I can’t see! I can’t see, Mommy. Mommy, where are you?” Her eyes were wide, her face tear-stained and mottled. Arms outstretched, she was moving across the porch with tiny, stiff, uncertain steps.

Randy scooped her into his arms. She seemed weightless. Helen opened the door and he rushed into the living room. Talking to her, saying, “Easy, Peyton, honey! Easy! Stop rubbing your eyes. Keep your eyes closed.” He stretched the child out on the couch.

Helen was at his side, a wet towel in her hands. She laid the towel over her daughter’s eyes. “This will make you feel better, baby.”

“Momm ~” y?

“Yes.” This was the first time, since she was six, that Peyton had used Mommy instead of Mother.

“All I can see is a big white ball. I can see it with my eyes closed. It hurts me, Mommy, right through my head.”

“Sure, just like a big flashlight bulb. Lie still, Peyton, you’re going to be all right.” Now, with fear for her child’s sight supplanting all other fears, Helen steadied. Again she was composed, able, efficient, and she knew the moment of panic would not return. She told Randy, calmly, “Hadn’t you better call Dan Gunn?”

“Of course.” Randy hurried into his office. Dan had two phones in his suite in the Riverside Inn. Randy dialed the private number. It was busy. He dialed Riverside Inn. Again, he heard the impersonal busy-beep. The inn had a switchboard. All its lines shouldn’t be busy. He tried the clinic building, although he knew it was most unlikely that Dan, or anybody, would be there at this hour. It was busy. He dialed operator. The same beep sounded in his ear. Once again, Randy tried Dan’s private number. The infuriating beep persisted. He gave up and announced, “I’ll have to drive into town and bring Dan out here.”

At that moment the ground-conducted shock wave rocked the house.

Peyton cried out, in her sightless terror. Helen pressed her down on the couch, murmuring reassuring mother words. Randy noticed that Ben Franklin was missing from the room.

The blast and sound wave covered them, submerging all other sound and feeling. Again the kitchenware and glasses and china danced. A delicate vase of Viennese crystal crumpled into powder and shards on the mantle. The glass protecting a meticulous and vivid still life, a water color by Lee Adams, shattered in its frame with a loud report.

Randy looked at his watch, marked the time, and did the flash-and-sound arithmetic in his head.

Helen, watching him while soothing Peyton’s tense body with her fingers, watching and understanding, said, “What was it?”

`what was MacDill,” Randy said. “Six minutes and fifteen seconds. That means seventy-five miles, just right for MacDill.” “MacDill means Tampa,” Helen said.

“And St. Petersburg. You’ll be all right until I get back?” “We’ll be all right.”

Randy banged into Ben Franklin on the stairs. “Where’ve you been?”

“Opening up the windows and doors downstairs. Just made it. Not a window broke.”

“Smart boy. Now you go on up and help your mother take care of Peyton. I’m going for the Doctor.”

“Randy-” “Yes?”

“I’m going to fill up all the pails and sinks and tubs with water. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know.”

“I didn’t know.” Randy put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “But if that’s what you’re supposed to do, go ahead and do it.”

Randy ran outside in time to see the Golden Dew Dairy truck careen past on River Road, headed for Fort Repose. The milkman was always a little late with his Saturday deliveries, since orders were heavier than on weekdays. He must have barely begun his route when the first blasts illuminated the sky in the south. Now he was racing home to his wife and children.

As Randy reached his car he heard the undulating tocsin of the siren atop Fort Repose’s firehouse. A little redundant, he thought. Still, there was no sound quite like a siren wailing its air-raid alarm to spur people to constructive action-or paralyze them in fear.

Randy caught and passed the milk truck before the turn in the road. A minute later he saw a big, new sedan overturned in the ditch, wheels still spinning. He slowed, and saw that the sedan’s front end was telescoped, its windshield shredded; that it bore New York plates. On the shoulder of the road lay a woman, arms outstretched, one bare leg grotesquely twisted under her back. Pallid flesh showed under blue and yellow checked shorts. Her upturned face was a red smear and he judged she was dead.

In this second Randy made an important decision. Yesterday, he would have stopped instantly. There would have been no question about it. When there was an accident, and someone was hurt, a man stopped. But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Rome’s. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else. Already millions must be dead and other millions maimed, or doomed by radiation, for if the enemy was hitting Florida, they would hardly skip SAC bases and missile sites in more densely populated areas. Certainly they would not spare Washington and New York, the command posts and communication center of the whole nation. And the war was less than a half hour old. So one stranger on the roadside meant nothing, particularly with a blinded child, his blood kin, dependent on his mission. With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan.