“No, we’re not laughing, Ed.” Neil was the closest thing to a friend that he had. Neil was a foreman at the Magnesium Products Chemical factory a mile up the street. Ed dropped him off there every morning and picked him up on the way home. The Nicholsons had been his next-door neighbors for five years now. Being a single man, though, he’d never gotten too thick with them — he wasn’t too thick with anyone.
“Ed — you listening? The doctor is here.” Neil’s voice was different, somehow, as he tried to reason with his friend. “It wasn’t a bomb. It was an explosion at the lab. Now, open the door. We’re worried about you.”
Manson waved the high-powered rifle at the door as if they could see it. “Clear out! You’ll get no help from me,” he told them, bitterly. “You all had your chance — same as I did.”
He thought he could hear the shuffling of feet. Then the house above him was silent.
He stumbled away from the door and slumped on the cot. He tried the radio again — but only for an instant — until he remembered his stupidity.
Even with the sound-deadening bags of sand piled around the room, he felt the jar of a battering ram on the door. The cross-bars jiggled. The lead warped and buckled, ringing a short alarm.
He ran back to the door, cursing under his breath as he knocked over the ten-gallon pail which had taken the place of his toilet.
“Don’t do that again!” He shouted at them, desperately. “I’ve got a gun and I’ll start pumping bullets through the door.”
Neil laughed — a low, nervous laugh, barely loud enough to carry into the completely enclosed chamber.
“Take it easy, Ed old boy.” He talked as if to a child. “We’re just doing this for your own good.”
Ed could picture Neil shrugging his broad shoulders and turning up his palms as he lifted his arms to his sides. He could almost see the grin on Neil’s face — the same grin he had seen eight months ago.
Was it that long ago? It seemed like only last week that they were on their way to work when Ed disclosed his idea.
Neil had laughed, heartily. “A bomb shelter? You mean you’re going to build a shelter just because of that program on television?”
The literature from the local Civil Defense office had arrived two days later. It contained all the necessary instructions and plans.
Right from the time he began hauling in the lumber and bricks they laughed at him. At first, just giggles and amused expressions but later they laughed openly to his face.
There was no cellar or basement and he had decided on an underground shelter connected to the house. He also decided to build it himself.
He’d always been considered somewhat of an eccentric and now they were sure there was something strange about him as he dug in the yard until all hours of the night.
He seemed to work with a dreadful urgency. It took him nearly the whole summer to dig the gaping hole. It was a ten foot square and seven feet deep — as long as he was doing it he decided to make it comfortable.
He went a step farther than the pamphlets advised. After building up the eight-inch-thick concrete walls and ceiling he covered the interior with a thin layer of lead, after reading somewhere that it was an excellent shield against radiation.
Then against all the walls, piled to the ceiling, he placed sand bags. Covering one sand-bag-wall was a stack of shelves loaded with canned goods. Another smaller set of shelves was filled with books — he knew his worst enemy would be boredom.
By the time he completed the entrance from inside the house and attached the lead on the inside of the door the immediate usefulness of the shelter had become a foregone conclusion in the mind of Ed Manson. He read the ominous headlines and the pessimistic accounts of the disarmament talks. He saw right through the smoke-screen the Russians were sending up.
He read all the books on atomic warfare, particularly a prophetic novel about how atomic particles, after a nuclear war, were carried by the winds to every part of the earth. He believed the story. He was convinced of its inevitability!
By the time he had the walls of the room half-covered with sandbags his nightly sleep was already being interrupted by vividly horrible dreams of an atomic war.
By the time he had stocked the underground den of salvation with food enough for many months he found pangs of doomful premonition continually invading his innermost thoughts.
And indeed, by the time everything was in preparedness he found his mind saturated with visions of worldly disaster. Instead of a relaxing effect, the escape chamber had produced an everpresent aura of morbidity — a constant reminder that the earth was one large ball of atomic explosive with a short, highly inflammable fuse.
It happened on a Saturday night. He was in the living room, his head against the back of his chair, which faced away from the window. His eyes were closed. He was thinking about the bomb and its giant, ascending mushroom.