The Wonder Effect Read Online Free Page A

no better than anybody else, d-d-damn’it!”
    He said uncomfortably, “Maybe a drink’s not such a bad idea. What do you say?”
    “I’d love it,” she sobbed. But then the sirens began to wail and they said, “Damn it,” and “Oh, dear” -respectively, she did and he did-and they took their bearings by the signs and made for the shelters. Under Lobby House was nothing like enough space, so the air-raid shelter was the interior parts of the 10 th through 85 th floors, away from the flying glass of the curtain walls but not too near the elevator shafts. It was not a bad shelter, actually. It was proof against any bomb that the world had ever known, up to say, early 1943.
    There was plenty of room but not enough benches. Maggie and Denzer found a place on the floor where they could put their backs against a wall, and he allowed her to lean against Ms shoulder. She wasn’t such a bad kid, he thought sympathetically, especially as the perfume in her hair was pleasant in his nostrils. There wasn’t anything really wrong with Female Integration. Maggie wasn’t a nut. Take baseball. Why, that was the Integrationist’s major conquest, when women demanded and got equal representation on every major-league team in spite of the fact that they could not throw or run on competitive terms with men. They said that if all the teams had the same number of women it wouldn’t matter. And it hadn’t. And Integrationists were still crowing over the victory; and yet Maggie had refused to fall into the All-Star hysteria.
    A roar like an outboard motor in the crown of your hat shook the building; A. A. “carpet” cannon laying a sheet of sudden death for missiles across the sky above them. Denzer relaxed. His headache was almost gone. He inclined his head to rest his cheek against Maggie’s hair. Even with a hangover, it had been pleasant in the cab with his arms around her. He had been kind of looking forward to the return trip. If Denzer were indeed a nucleus, as in a way he was, he was beginning to feel a certain tugging of binding energy toward certain other nuclear particles.
    As soon as the noise stopped, he thought he would speak to her.
    The noise stopped. The voices of the men beside them bellowed into the sudden quiet: “-damned foolish idea of Therapeutic War was exploded ten years ago! And that’s what we’d be if your idiot Crockhouse was in-exploded!”
    And the man next to him: “At least Crockhouse wouldn’t have us sitting ha these fool imitation shelters! He’d do something.”
    “Whadya think Braden wants, for God’s sake? Not these things. He’s right on the record for C.S.B.”
    And then Maggie Frome, breathing fire, her head no longer resting on Denzer’s shoulder: “What the hell is so great about C.S.B.? Shelters, no shelters, can’t you get it through your head that if this keeps up we’re dead? Dear God above, deliver me from fools, baseball players and p-p-politicians!”
    Denzer tried to look as though he’d never met her; he was white-faced. Round, yes, sweet-smelling, yes, warm-but how could he ever get used to her dirty talk?
    III
    If Denzer was a nucleus and Walter Chase a neutron, what can we call the President of the United States? He played a part. Without him nothing could happen. Perhaps what he did was to shape the life of the neutron before fission happened; in that sense one could call him a “moderator.” This was an apt term for President Braden.
    On this bright June morning in Washington-not Arlington-Alex or the bedroom municipalities in Maryland but the little old Federal District itself-the President of the United States held what was still called a “press” conference. He was late. The cathode-tube “newspapermen” grumbled a little as Secret Service men frisked them, but it was habit. They were used to being frisked, ever since that fanatic Alaskan nationalist publisher emptied a .32 at then-President Hutzmeyer in ‘83. And they were used to now-President Braden