Chapter FIVE

An air watcher, it doesn't matter which one of the thousands he was, stepped from the hospital elevator at the third, and top floor. He went through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE and climbed iron stairs to the roof. It was black and drizzling; he hoped the rain wouldn't get worse, at least not during his tour of duty. He had heard on a news broadcast that west of his area there were cloudbursts.

He was tired from a long day at his appliance store on Broad Street and he was a little sorry he had signed up for this Ground Observer Corps thing, but everybody in Rotary was taking a shift so he felt he had to go along. He threaded his way around the invisible obstacles that studded the hospital roof and groped at the black-out curtain of the shack.

It was dry and bright inside the little cubicle, but somewhat crowded. The man he was relieving yawned, looked at the clock--so he was two minutes late!--and said: "Howdy. Ready to go?"

"Sure. Everything quiet?"

"Yeah. CMA Flight 24 was early and south of their course, so I phoned in for the hell of it. Coffee's hot."

"Maybe later. Well, I relieve you."

The man passed over the night glasses and went yawning through the curtains. The air watcher wiped the drizzled lenses of the binoculars, sighed and stepped out onto the roof. He slumped into the swivel chair, tilted back in the patter of rain and watched the overcast sky with boredom. The little town's lights were bright; after a few minutes outside you could see how far they really shone. And a few minutes more and you could see the lights of the next little town, fifteen miles away, as a dim haze on the horizon. By the time his tour was over they would have gone out and everybody would be in bed, light rain comfortably pattering on their roofs.

The phone inside the shack jangled--most unusual!

He blundered in through the curtains, blinking at the naked bulb. He picked up the direct-wire phone and gave his GOC post number.

"Filter Center," said the phone. "Is your town flooded?"

"No!" he said, astounded.

"How much rain are you having?"

"Just a light drizzle. Why?"

"Thanks," Filter Center said, and hung up.

"Now what the hell--?" he gasped, standing there with the phone in his hand, not realizing that he--one of thousands--had just played his part in alleviating state-wide disaster.

* * * * *

The Filter Center was in the basement of the College's newest structure, the Physical Sciences Building. Its location was a low-grade secret in that it was never published in the papers. Since it was staffed mostly by unpaid volunteers, that was about as far as the secrecy went.

The government had spent a lot of money on it in 1949. The money had transformed an ordinary storage and heating-plant basement into an air-conditioned, soundproofed office of enormous size. There was a huge table with an inlaid map of the area; this was the heart of the center and the numerous other installations were designed either to send information to the table or take information from it. Information came by phone from watchers like our man on the roof; his messages buzzed from headsets into the ears of girls who stood at a plexiglas sheet ruled off in grids. At word from him that he had sighted a plane--direction traveling, height and type if possible--they scribbled symbols in china-marking pencil on the sheet. One of the girls around the map table then shoved a marker to the right spot on the map. The Air Force liaison officer constantly on duty at the table checked the marker against his list of submitted flight plans from the Civil Aeronautics Authority and decided that all was well. If the marker did not correspond with any submitted flight plan he picked up a phone and called an interceptor base, usually to find that radar units had beaten the filter center and its volunteers to the warning, that jet fighters had scrambled, perhaps that the errant plane had already been identified as a strayed commercial flight and that the fighters were down again. Twice in five years the volunteers had beaten the radar, and the lieutenant considered those two times well worth the cost of the center and the boredom of duty there.

It was a very dull night, and the lieutenant was looking forward to his relief when the call from the State Director of Civil Defense came in.

"Hell's busting loose, Lieutenant," the director said succinctly. "I'm getting calls from here and there with spotty reports of flooding, but mostly from scared people who want to know what's going on and what they should do about it. Can you call all your air watchers and get a summary of the situation?"

"I'll put the chief operator on it, sir," the lieutenant said. "We can put the reports on the map. I'll report this to Group at once; I'm sure they can get a meteorologist here at once to try and evaluate it for you. And maybe the army will lend us an engineer officer with some experience in flood control."

The night was turning out to be not so dull after all. Diplomatically--he was liaison, not command--he filled in the chief operator, and she made a little speech to the matrons and girls, detailing half of them to continue meticulously with the aircraft work and the rest to start phoning the watchers. The lieutenant rapidly devised a set of symbols to summarize the conditions at each point; his weather studies helped there.

Within minutes they were jotting them down on the map table. One girl came to him with the question, what do you do when you can't get a wire through?

"Put down an _F_," he said. "For flooded."

The director was back on the wire, and he hadn't even called Group yet. "You'd better send a man of your own down here, sir," he advised. "Somebody from your staff who can do nothing but report to you."

"Good idea. He's on his way, Lieutenant."

He got through to Group, the officer of the day first and then the sleepy executive officer. The exec carefully avoided commenting on his action but said, "We'll send you a meteorologist pronto. I'll message First Army about the engineer officer. Meanwhile, keep at it--and don't forget your primary mission, Lieutenant."

He would not forget. One of the girls at the plexiglas scribbled a symbol, but nobody at the table picked it up; they were too busy twittering and tutting over the grim picture shaping up along the rivers of their state. "Get that intercept!" he snapped at the girl who was responsible for the sector.

"Sorry," she said, burning red, and picked out a marker to shove carefully to the right spot on the map. Multi-engine, approximately angels ten, bearing 280. The lieutenant checked his list; it was CMA Flight 24 a little off course.

And the girls kept calling; from some alert watchers they got unbelievably exact information relayed from local police or newsmen--normal river depth, present river depth, rise during the past 24 hours, condition of phone and power lines. From others they got only brief impressions that there was trouble, and how much. From many they got nothing at all. Down the river valley towns on the map table crawled the menacing symbol _F_, over and over again.