Henry looked at them curiously. "Their ears are ringing, too," he said.
Martia did not question how he knew this, because she was also sure the babies were hearing the eerie ringing of the flutes. And that no one else heard--none of the adults on board....
"Your name is Henry," she said, irrelevantly.
"Yes, and yours is Martia. I feel like something is going to happen."
She pressed against him and held on to him, shuddering in nameless terror, as hysterical screams and shouts suddenly emanated from A deck, above them. He held her, equally frightened, while the babies screamed--and while the people on B deck began to shout and scurry about in all directions.
"What in God's name--!" a man yelled, getting up from his seat by the windows.
"Something's happened on A deck!" exclaimed the commissary steward.
"What the hell! It's a fight!" shouted a grizzled construction worker.
"Come on!" cried another, excitedly anticipating something to write home about.
"Stay where you are! Don't panic!" shouted a newsman, fumbling frantically with the straps of his camera carrying case.
No one could ascend the spiral staircase because a panic stricken mob from A deck was descending, with the G.I. negro sliding down over their heads. The whites of his eyes glistened in unreasoning terror. Screams of women and the angry shouting and cursing of men filled the staircase, while outside the muffled roar of the great engines continued unabated.
"_All right! All right!_" came a tense voice over the P.A. system. "_Passengers will remain seated and refrain from panic. Do not crowd B deck as it changes the load factors and we'll not be able to trim if you don't stay put!_" It seemed to Henry that the announcer wanted to say more but was interrupted by the sudden press of the emergency, whatever it was.
Henry caught sight of a young woman wearing the uniform of a WAAC nurse sliding down upside down under the feet of the mob, her face bloodied, eyes rolled upward into her head. Either she had fainted or been knocked unconscious. Or she was dead. Grown men, frothing at the mouth and shrieking curses, struck at each other with intent to kill. It was blind panic riding on the animal instinct to survive.
Far from regarding the scene calmly, Henry was visited by an instinctive desire to run through that crowd and find Uncle Andy, who always knew the answer when the chips were down. But the quivering girl beside him detained him, and her presence also made him fight to control an incipient trembling of his chin. It was as though he could smell events and the events there in the lounge had a stench of disaster, of death, of tragic newspaper headlines. You couldn't really smell such things, but Henry had no name for the strange sense that gave him a vivid impression of the total human element surrounding him.