Toward morning, but in that part of the hours when it should have been darkest, Henry left his second-in-command at his desk and went out in the night with the police lieutenant, Lacey. Some streets, some avenues, were slots leading arrow-straight to the fire storm, box-ended with flame.
Other thoroughfares merely caught the downbeat of illumination. On them, great shadows danced as the grotesque, the monstrous pyre flickered in the sky. Here and there, night infiltrated a row of houses, loomed in a stand of stores or glowered from the windows of a stalled streetcar.
Elsewhere, a building or a home burning individually—and as a rule under siege by volunteers—made a big candle for this block or that.
They went farther south. Henry had the lieutenant make their first stop, so he could inspect the injured on the banks of Crystal Lake.
Torches and bonfires glared on the near terraces, glimmered across the ice. Upon the metallic surface of the lake itself, men hurried hither and thither, some pulling children’s sleds heaped with clapboards and smashed steps, balustrades, broken ladders, branches, anything combustible. In the once-elegant yards all around other men were chopping. The earth was humanity—covered—a litter of supine men and women and children, blanketed, quilted, dressed like hobgoblins, warming fires spaced between. The snow here had turned to mud. And here the roar of the fire storm was a mumble. The earth quivered only a little.
Here, the night was rent by one single shriek, one voice of a myriad in agony. Lacey crossed himself when first he heard it, as he stopped his car and switched off its siren. Henry went closer. His skin pimpled with horror, his feet felt like freight, he wanted to retch. But the fires sent a drift of woodsmoke over the bloodscape and the burned-meat smell was abruptly overridden. He saw a doctor whom he remembered from the meetings.
“How’s it going?” Henry yelled.
“Don’t be a fool, man! Oh! You, eh, Henry?” The physician straightened up. A syringe glinted in his hand. “What can you expect?” he bellowed back. “They’re still dying! Blood’s run out. Plasma was out for a while—Army got some in. Cold. Some freeze.”
“I can’t spare any more people right now.”
“We’ve got people enough,” the doctor answered, bending even as he talked, fishing for an ampule in a case slung over his shoulder. “Unless you have more medical people.”
“No more medical people.” Henry shouted.
The physician stabbed a needle into the arm of a child. Her mouth opened. She was screaming. You couldn’t hear it at all, Henry realized. It was lost in the general scream.
“Help from outlying towns—” Henry broke off, said it more loudly because the doctor had cupped his car, “Help from outside will be coming in by morning.”
The doctor just nodded and turned away, looking at the patient-covered earth for the next one.
Because of the red headlights and the siren, they got across on Decatur and came back north to the Country Club, where the brief meeting was to be held. The clubhouse had no windows but it did have electric lights, which astonished Henry until he recalled that he had voted—
years before, when he’d still had his membership—to put in a power plant simply to show a little spunk to the electric company. Ambulances were feeding people into the club. It was a better place than the shore of Crystal Lake.
They went into the main room, which seemed a bright glare after a night of emergency illumination. A few dozen of the scattered easy chairs had been pulled together and faced in one direction. Sighing, not removing his overcoat, because it was cold there, Henry dropped into a chair. Lacey took a seat beside him. Perhaps fifty men were there already. They, like Henry, were just sitting, sitting low in the upholstered chairs, saying nothing.
The CD chief, McVeigh, came down an aisle left between the chairs. He was followed by two women who wore CD brassards. They pulled up a big library table, helped by the men in the front row. Then McVeigh faced the sector leaders and their delegates:
“We’ve had to pull out of headquarters,” he said. “Fire storm making it too difficult to save the place.” His face grimaced as if of its own accord: “What was left of it, I mean to say. Here’s why I asked you to come over or send a delegate. We’ve got it bad, but River City’s far worse. The bulk of their fire-fighting apparatus lost. Most doctors dead or casualties. Short—almost out entirely—of every class of personnel. The whole city panicked. Nobody’s coming down from Kansas City or up from Omaha; nobody who’ll do any good, that is. Hundreds of unchecked fires over there, besides their half of the main show. Thousands—tens of thousands of people—still in the city. We don’t have to worry, for the moment, about the bulk of them. Because mostly they swarmed out of town. Point is, what can the Green Prairie outfit do to help—if anything?”
Not a man in the room spoke.
McVeigh nodded. “I know how you feel. I do myself. But what are we dealing with?
Certainly not local pride. Simply human numbers. If you can save ten here, you let one go there.
Right? All night I’ve been getting appeals from Jeffrey Allison—he’s their chief. I can’t decide alone. You’ll have to help me. We never figured we’d have to salvage Rivet City. It was their job, that they didn’t prepare for. If you sector heads could spare even one person in ten, of every classification, beginning at dawn—?”
A man whom Henry did not know stood up. “I can’t spare a man. I can’t spare myself here. I can use ten more for every man and woman I’ve got!”
There was a sound of agreement.
McVeigh studied the faces for a moment. “About fifty thousand people,” he said slowly, “crowded into the ball park. God knows why. Somebody started it—the rest followed. Maybe a third were kids. They filled the field solid; then the bleachers caught fire and the whole mob stampeded. They’re up there, what remains of ’em. Not one doctor. Nothing. That’s how things are all over River City.”
Henry stood up. “How can you get people around?”
McVeigh’s face cracked with a momentary look of relief. “I’ve got trucks. The roads in close are almost deserted now. The main swarm’s gone far beyond. You tell”—he jerked his head toward the women with arm bands—“these ladies how many men you can spare and at what point they can be picked up—and I’ll deliver them across the river. God knows they’re needed!”
“We’ll tithe,” Henry said.
Lieutenant Lacey grabbed his arm: “You can’t do it, I lank! That doctor just told you-we’re short on the medical end—”
“No medical end at all at the ball park.”
“You’ll be letting Green Prairie people die!”
Henry nodded. His eyes were empty. The room was listening to this private argument.
“Sure. Green Prairie people will die. One for ten, didn’t he say?”
McVeigh cut in. “That’s about the size of it. Much as our people can do here, they can do ten times as much where there isn’t any functioning group at all.”
“Okay,” Henry said. “We’ll get going. I’ll have about a hundred and fifty ready in an hour—for your first load.”
Henry stalked from the room. Behind him, he could hear other sector chiefs making offers. It didn’t hearten him. He felt no pride in having started the ball rolling. He’d never done a tougher thing in his life: he’d condemned some of the provident to save many of the improvident. He wasn’t even sure it was just.
“Mr. Conner!” someone called from across the club porch.
“Yeah?”
The man ran up. “Thought you ought to know. Your son Ted was running a walkie-talkie down the line. Got buried in a brick slide. They’re trying to dig him out now.” The man said that and ducked away through the dark. He picked up a rolled stretcher, slung it over his shoulder, trotted toward a waiting ambulance.
Henry took hold of a porch post. He felt Lacey’s hand on his arm.
“I know about where that crew was,” the police lieutenant said. “Let’s go!”
The other man sobbed just once. He took one immense breath. His head shook. “What the hell extra could two of us do? Let’s get on.”
While Lacey drove, Henry used the car radio. He ordered his subordinates to take one tenth of the personnel—medical, rescue, first aid, decontamination, and so on-off what they were doing. Quietly, firmly he put down frantic protests. He arranged for the assembly of the selected people and said he’d be back as soon as he finished his inspection.
While Henry gave the orders, Lacey kept glancing at him. He looked, shook his head, turned to the business of driving through partially blocked streets, past fire-fighting points, and turned back to stare again at the man beside him, to shake his head slowly. Henry didn’t notice.
They went down to the perimeter. That was where things were toughest. All the way around the fire storm’s edge. The spot they had chosen was the closest practicable approach, on Bigelow Avenue.
This particular juncture of street and flame occurred at the site of a number of apartment houses built in the latter part of the First World War. They had been vast structures, six stories high, brick on the outside, wood within—built hastily to accommodate white-collar workers in the booming new industries of the Sister Cities.
The atomic bomb had not only collapsed these buildings on their tenants but hurled on top of them, by some freak of blast, the contents of a half-dozen small factories and machine shops, closer in town, along with the scrap and metal stocks in the yards of the plants. From this area, all night, Henry had been besieged with calls for monitors, for medical and aid people, for rescue and decontamination personnel as well as fire fighters. Here, more furiously than anywhere else in his sector, the rescue battle raged. It was conducted against a backdrop of the fire storm which seethed straight into the sky at what seemed no distance at all, down Bigelow Avenue. It was actually some blocks distant, yet near enough so that a man could not stand long exposure to the direct heat of it. For intense heat baked outward from the fire wall in spite of the wind, a near-hurricane draft which bellowed and squealed down the street, tearing loose parts of roofs and Slicking them in, whipping the clothing of the rescuers with painful force, even knocking down men and women who tripped or were careless. The wind fed oxygen to the titanic, fiery wall.
There was no water pressure in the mains here. They had been shattered. The fire companies had long since abandoned the scene. All that stood was a great moraine of debris which had been apartments the day before—a miscellaneous mountain that furnished a barricade against the fire-head, a flame-lee, but no windbreak.
Into it, during the night, spelling one another, men had tunneled their way. Wherever they had holed through to rooms, halls or their crushed remains, they had found the living and living-dead—these last because masses of metals in the machining area were close to the fireball; they had been violently irradiated and were giving back that deadliness now. Some of the tunneled corridors in the debris were entirely safe; many were passable to people who did not stay too long: but some were contaminated beyond a radiation level that permitted any exposure, however brief. And the farther the rescuers fought their way into the fantastic scramble of the apartment houses, the more deadly the ray dosages became.
Henry had come to this place with a view to ordering his crews back farther. The proximity of the fire storm constantly threatened the rubble mass with burning, in which case it would become a mere addition to the central torrent of heat and flame. The general outdoor radiation level, high at many points near the fire storm, was endangering everyone who worked in this area for too many hours. South of the apartment buildings, furthermore, was a wide, empty space in the process of conversion from a near-slum to a new development. It had been bulldozed bare and would serve, even if the crushed apartments caught, to prevent further local spread of the great, central blaze. This fire, in any case and most providentially, had only a minor tendency to eat its way outward: the hurricane force of in-sucked winds controlled and delimited the fire storm: it could not be put out by any human device, or by any number of human beings and machines; but it would bum out.
Shielding their faces from the hot wall of light, the two men approached a group of rescuers at work on the mountain of debris. One of them stepped forward, a man so black with soot and white with plaster as to be unrecognizable. He bellowed above the drum roll of the fire,
“Hi, Henry! Ed Pratt.”
Henry nodded. “What’s the situation now?” Ed, who had a house-painting business, was in charge of this team.
“About like our last talk. We got out over a hundred people, but we’ve only dug in about halfway.” He gestured toward some men hauling, tug-of-war fashion, on ropes. “We’re trying to deepen a passage now.” The ropes disappeared in a hole in the mass.
Henry went closer, followed by Lacey. “How hot is it?” He was not aware that he was shouting. The fire storm here was like near, continual thunder. But it was necessary to converse in shouts almost everywhere that night.
Ed waved at the blaze. “Gettin’ warmer in there all the time. Awful-looking thing, ain’t it?”
Henry hardly glanced at the intimidating fire wall. “I mean, radiation hot?”
“Oh! This new tunnel we’re making—I dun no. Got a monitor in there now, measuring!”
The rope-pullers shouted in unison, heaved together, and from the ragged entrance of their “tunnel” they drew forth a huge fragment of floor and ceiling lumber. Henry could see that the opening ran for at least a hundred feet into the wreckage. He shuddered and asked loudly.
“How do you know that cave will hold up?”
He couldn’t see Ed Pratt’s expression but he could guess it from the man’s voice: “We don’t know! Matter of fact, a few hours back one tunnel roof fell. We were trying to work the fire side of this mess then. Lost five of my people—and one of your radiation monitors. Couldn’t get back to ’em. A whole hunk of apartment came down between them and us.”
“You mean-they’re still in there?”
“If they weren’t crushed, they maybe are. But it’s pretty hot on that side now. They’re probably cooked up by this time.”
A figure—then another—showed in the tunnel. Behind trudged a third and a fourth. They carried flashlights. The broken, snaglike intrusions in the tunnel made their approach slow. The first one, Henry saw, was wearing the yellow, plastic garments of a monitor and carrying a counter. This was the one who addressed Ed Pratt and, until he bent close, he didn’t realize it was a woman. Even then he did not recognize Lenore.
“It’s too high a level,” she reported. ‘We got to a lot of metal and kind of a big cave beyond, but it’s too hot to stick around. You can’t send your people any deeper, Mr. Pratt. In minutes they’d get enough radiation to be sick—maybe die.”
The men who had made the perilous trek with her stood by, panting a little, opening and shutting hands that were raw from pulling on timbers, throwing brick, moving heavy bits of building. Other rescue workers gathered around and passed the report along. One of the three who’d gone into the tunnel with Lenore said, “Pity. Beyond that opening she talked about, you could hear kids calling.”
Henry looked with fear and horror at the demolished building, at the frightening flame.
He looked at the rescue people, and they were eying him. “This whole crew,” he yelled out, “will get in touch with my headquarters for another assignment!” He jerked his head. “Abandon this!
You’ve done what you can.”
That was that. Men nodded. One or two women cried. But people began throwing picks, shovels, crowbars, a block-and-tackle, other gear into a metal truck. A bulldozer came alive and moved off in the street. Joe Dennison was driving it.
That was that—until Henry heard a shout near the tunnel mouth and saw two men rush in. “They shouldn’t!” The woman with the radiation counter exclaimed.
Henry recognized her then. “Great God Almighty,” he whispered. He reached out and gripped her arm. Her teeth showed white in a kind of smile. Her face was black as a miner’s.
“How about your family?” Lenore asked. She was hoarse from much shouted talk.
Henry felt the pain again. “I don’t know, dear! I don’t know!” He held his head close to reduce the need for bellowing every word. “Ted’s under a brick slide….”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mother’s up at the First Aid. Nora—search me! Chuck reported yesterday at Hink Field.”
She nodded. She looked, briefly but in a special way, at the fire storm. Henry knew what she was thinking: Chuck was not in there; he hadn’t been caught downtown as she’d feared. But she didn’t mention her feelings. “Gotta get cracking,” she said and left.
He looked, now, at the tunnel. That was where she’d been. In that hole through hell.
There, where the roof might fall, where there could be a gas explosion, where she might be burned alive or slowly baked alive, suffocated, smothered, crushed, even drowned, pinned in some spot where a pipe leaked.
The crew was clearing out in cars and trucks, going someplace unknown to Henry. He hadn’t asked where. There were more assignments than people. And his people, he reflected grimly, were being reduced in numbers now to aid River City.
“Shall we get along?” Lacey asked.
“ Wait.” Henry approached the tunnel, followed by the lieutenant. “You recognize your neighbor? The Bailey girl?”
“Yes.”
“Guts.”
Henry didn’t reply. He just nodded and bent to peer into the dark dreadfulness of the hole the rescuers had made and abandoned, the hole into which two men, against orders, had plunged.
For what seemed a long time nothing happened.
It wasn’t, Henry thought, actually long, but merely long by the standards of that night: ten minutes, perhaps, or maybe less. Then he saw a wink of lights and shadows moving. One man made his way to the tunnel mouth and put down the thing in his arms. It was a baby and it cried.
The man turned back.
“Got a torch?” Henry asked the policeman.
“ You can’t go in!” Lacey yelled back. “Too risky for you!”
“Got a torch?”
Lacey went to the squad car and returned. He followed Henry into the tunnel.
Far down, they encountered the other man, helping along two children, who wept and shivered. Lacey, on Henry’s orders, led them back.
It was quiet in there. One of the men said to Henry, “You stay here, sir. Beyond this point, the radiation’s bad. There’s only one more kid and Sam’s getting her free. No use exposing yourself. We’ve already had the full dose and he won’t need help.”
The man left. He was gone awhile. Henry stood still, more frightened than he’d known he could be.
He could see, in the light of a lantern left by the tunnel-makers, what had happened. A weight of machinery and sheet metal had cut through the collapsing building and piled up, just ahead; that was the point of peak radioactivity, he was sure. Beyond, apparently with another lantern in it, he saw a kind of opening, room-sized; a girder or some other structural member had held up the debris. Beyond that was a doorway with a smashed-off door. Behind it, somewhere in the darkness, they’d found the children.
The second man came, with a form on his shoulder. A little girl, unconscious. As he passed the metal mass, he turned his back and put the inert girl in front of him, shielding her body with his own. Henry appreciated that what these two men had done might succeed, for the children. They might survive. But the men had quite likely received ultimately fatal doses of radiation when they tore a path around the intrusion of scrap metal. Some of the rescue squad, too, had probably been marked for sickness, at least, by working there, before Lenore arrived to measure.
Henry said nothing then. The man indicated the lantern with his toe. Henry picked it up, following. Soon they were outdoors in the light of the fire storm—in the strange night, where a cold wind blew on their faces and their hacks were seared by heat. Lacey had loaded the other children.
The man carried the unconscious girl to the car and put her in, too. His brave companion was just standing by the fender, a smile of satisfaction on his face.
“I’ll send a car back for you two,” Henry said. ‘We’ll do everything we can—over at the Country Club. Got good doctors there. They may be able to…”
One man said, “Thank you.”
Henry gazed at them. “That was the finest thing I ever saw. Who are you two guys?”
The nearer one, a rather slight man, who was dabbing at the blood from a cut on his arm, laughed and answered, “I’m Jerome Taggert, minister of the Bigelow Street Baptist Church, and Sam is Father Flaugherty of St. Bonaventure’s Roman Catholic….”
Henry said, “Oh,” and kept looking back at them as Lacey drove away.