He had feared this night since 1945, this night when a robomb would rocket over the North Pole at supersonic speed. This night when an unknown assassin would massacre America abed. That atomic conflagration would transform the metropolises of the United States into skyscraping mushrooms, tortured molecules resembling poison toadstools.
He had hoped only that obliteration would come instantaneously and painlessly, that he would be volatolized in his dreams, either to awake in the Hereafter, where there theoretically were no A-bombs, or . . . . never to awake.
But there was always the unfaceable possibility that he would be caught on the fringe of the fission, then God knew what death would be like. Not a ripping asunder too rapid for the senses to record, but a lingering largo of death: a peeling away of the dermatic tissues in leprous patches: a brain fried in its skull, shriveled and convulsed like blind worms writhing in a fiery skillet: eyes, liquefying and spilling out of their sockets like sap from a tree.
The man knew himself: not a coward, but a cerebrotonic, supersensitive to the thought of pain. A thousand times he had suffered premature agony, envisioning his life ending in an atomic cauldron of radiation, his body burning in waves of invisible flame. He couldn't take a torture like that. That was why he protected himself with an automatic. He always slept with it under his pillow. He sought it now.
Pray God the heat had not warped it, melted the barrel or exploded the cartridges!
In the darkness he groped. He couldn't see. He couldn't hear a sound. He was conscious only of the prickling sensation needling his body.
His fingers found the gun. It was hot. In terror mixed with relief he jerked it to his temple, and in a moment it was hotter.
'Now what could have made him do that?' the fire chief puzzled. 'He wasn't in any danger. The steam didn't even really scald him to amount to anything. He looked a bit dazed ... anybody'd be shocked, sure, to have a boiler blow up underneath 'em in the middle of the night ... but I called to him, 'You're okay, Mister,' just a second before he fished under his pillow for the pistol.'
'Poor Mr. Vance.' The apartment manager shook his head regretfully. 'Our unfortunate tenant was born deaf, and on top of that lost his sight about two years ago.'
Data entered by Judy Bemis
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