At three o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, October 25, 1940, there is a bomb threat at the Empire State Building. The president-for-life of the Empire State Building, Alfred E. Smith, who is in his office with the capitalist James Haworth Love, is informed about the bomb. The man who called in the bomb threat claims to belong to a group of American Nazis. The building’s chief of the fire battalion, Captain M’Naughton, is in charge of evacuation procedures. A young man (Joe) refuses to leave, saying he has too much work to do and has handcuffed himself to his desk.

Smith wants Harley and M’Naughton to get people out of the building and keep them quiet. He even recommends sending them all to get a drink on Smith’s dime. Smith wants his employees to unbolt the desk from the floor and forcefully extract Joe from the building. Love wants to try talking to Joe first.

Smith and Love talk to Joe, much to the chagrin of M’Naughton. Love attempts to sympathize with Joe, and the narrator informs the reader that Love and Joe have something in common, in that Love lost his best friend, Gerhardt Frege, to the Nazis—Frege died in the concentration camp at Dachau.