A doubleplusungood screaming comes across the sky

[The Great Quail]

Well, thanks to Slothrop, we all know how those proles know....

>From the new Plume edition, page 86-87:

Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from
all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young
woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny
child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again,
all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black
suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing
excitedly to the sky.

'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead! Lay down quick!'

'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to
rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were
nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance
when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster
than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered
on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments
of glass from the nearest window.

He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the
street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of
plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There
was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the
middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw
that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump,
the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.

* * * * 

Sorry if this was posted before,

--Quail