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"They would have missed all this," said Melanie, "if you hadn't convinced me to trust Dick as a baby sitter."
Dick, the oldest at twelve, was more excited about the airport than anything else, especially about the subway trains that linked the various terminals together.
"If only Jennie could have come with us," said Melanie. "She would have really enjoyed this little holiday."
"I'm sure she would have," said Frank, "except she wanted you to go. She knew you would enjoy the opera more than she ever would. We only two tickets."
"That is why she stayed home?"
Frank nodded, and smiled. "I had to promise not to say anything until now. She was afraid you might refuse her offer."
"Certainly I would have refused! You guys are really something. I should have realized she was up to something like that. That's just the kind of friend she is, a real angel! Both of you are just too much, you know; you're simply the best friends anyone could ever wish for."
"Paul would have enjoyed the opera," added Frank.
"He's been away far too often," Melanie replied. "He should have better routes that he has been getting."
Frank began to laugh; "He should come and work for our outfit!"
A wall of plate-glass gave a sweeping view of the runway and its incoming traffic, takeoffs, and lineups. Melanie glanced at the clock now and then and then at the runway. "What does this new plane look like?" she asked Frank.
"Is this where daddy's plane is coming to?" asked Fiona in a loud voice, with her arms stretched out towards a doorway where some people were lining up.
"No Fiona, he won't come to this door, but he will be here soon," said Frank. Frank took Fiona in his arms and went to the window.
"I can't wait to show him my dolly," Fiona exclaimed. "I love my daddy, you know. I'll tell him about the circus, and the fun we had."
"That wasn't a circus, Fiona," Frank explained. "You got this dolly at an amusement fair. There is much more to see and to do at a fair, than at a circus. For one thing, you can't win a dolly at a circus."
"But there was a clown there," Fiona remarked. "Right? He made funny faces. Isn't that what a circus is? Clowns are funny..."
Before Fiona could say more, the shrill sound of the National Emergency Broadcast filled the building. Then came its dreadful message.
+ + +
We must have gone two or three miles before it dawned on me that this was not a school exercise. I was shocked! The runway lay before us. Only seconds ago, everything was normal. The tower had spoken to us about a slippery spot in the breaking zone of the runway. "Hold your braking until..."
The high pitched sound cut the tower off in mid-sentence.
"Attention!" a voice called out. "Attention! This message is NOT a test..."
Those little words, "not a test," turned black into white, and white into a dark, murky, bottomless, gray: Nuclear War had begun! It was incomprehensible.
For one thing, the announcement sounded much too sweet for what it said. It sounded like a call for afternoon tea, too nicely spoken, too unemotional; and so it had to be. There is no voice on earth that can roar as loud in order to say what should be said to do justice to the pain that will be!
"...A Russian missile has been launched at the Pacific Northwest with sixteen warheads on board," the voice told us politely. It listed names of cities, small towns that were targeted, homes of people! Seattle was first on the list.
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