Toward eight o’clock they brought food to Henry. He had not left the room, had scarcely moved from his desk.
He had been aware for some time, subconsciously, of the smell of hot food. In his mind, he had ticked that off as one more thing going according to plan. Plenty was not. But the mobile kitchen, earmarked for his headquarters, had evidently come up; the women volunteers were heating beans in cauldrons, firing up the coffee makers, opening stacks of gallon fruit cans, running bread through the slicer.
The high school’s windows had been boarded up with plywood. A large kerosene stove was shedding heat and smoking slightly in the corner. Canvas had been nailed temporarily across the big crack in the roof. An engineer had made his inspection and assured everybody the high school wouldn’t collapse. There were plenty of kerosene lamps. For people in other rooms who didn’t have heaters, there had been an issue of coats and sweaters, collected from God knew where by God knew whom. A bevy of determined housewives, wearing arm bands and having nothing better to do, had come in with brooms and dustpans, raised a fearful dust, and cleaned out the plaster and loose debris.
At a desk pushed up to face his, Eve Sanders, acting as secretary, kept typing out notes-summaries of word that came over the walkie-talkies, and from the few ham radio stations still operable; and from runners from all parts of the area: boys on bikes, mostly. But the Motorcycle Club, having cleaned up the preliminary search and police auxiliary work in Henry’s sector, was checking in now in numbers, for message work.
On blackboard stands, beyond Mrs. Sanders, three men kept writing and erasing. Henry, just by looking up, could tell where his main crews were working. The Fire Department companies, after a two-hour fumble and an effort to run things their own way, were in direct liaison with him now, and some of the phone company linesmen were already making emergency connections on standing, usable lines that crisscrossed the sector.
Henry felt lucky, fantastically lucky.
Only a small arc of the area of very severe damage intruded his sector. And the fires were being handled. He had plenty of casualties—glass, mainly—burns, next—shock—and miscellaneous. He also had approximately nine thousand very badly hurt people from the area closer in. There had been some panics, at first. They had blockaded Dumond, Arkansas, River, Sedmon, Ames, VanNess, Bigelow and Cold Spring avenues. That had stopped the cars mostly, though an undetermined number of people—“thousands” they said out along Decatur, exaggerating, no doubt—had got beyond the city limits, during the long span of Condition Yellow and later, before they’d set up the blockades.
Where traffic piled up, the loud-speaker trucks had sailed in. Many fugitives, of course, had trudged ahead on foot. But the speakers had brought most of the panicky groups back toward town, toward the high flame, the radioactivity, the horror—by argument, cajolery and threat.
There was no guarantee of a way to live in the countryside; but in the city, the loud-speakers bellowed ceaselessly—there was food, shelter, clothing, medical aid, all that people required.
A great many of the doctors and nurses in Henry’s sector had followed the plan for Condition Yellow, but many had not. The ones who had packed the prescribed medical and surgical equipment in cars, and driven with their families to outlying areas, were now back in town at work. The doctors and nurses and other “key personnel” who had refused to respond properly to Condition Yellow were now dead, or among the casualties themselves, or trapped behind the irregular rim of fire that circled the fire storm proper.
Thousands of people had been rescued from homes, stores, apartments, factories, lofts, buses, trolleys, other spots suddenly rendered perilous. Thousands remained, even in Henry’s area, in distress and danger. But the trained hundreds in his groups, with growing numbers of volunteer helpers from the unhurt, were tearing into every problem as they came to it, dousing fires, removing the injured, streaking them to Crystal Lake. They were carting bulldozers and cranes on fiat truckbeds around the perimeter of ruin, smashing fire lanes, crumpling fire hazards, sweeping debris from trunk thoroughfares. They were performing prodigies shoulder to shoulder with the regular firemen. They were standing fire watch on the rickety tops of once-handsome buildings. They were pacing, armed and alert, in every street, looking out for looters.
They were sweating with the Water Supply people over emergency means to divert Crystal Lake down its overflow to a hastily dammed gulley above Broad, where the lire hoses could feed.
They were commandeering the contents of damaged stores, especially food stores and clothing stores, and bringing truckloads to Hobart Park where a vast “dump” of supplies was accumulating. They were—the women—tending the hurt, the shocked, the frightened, helping the surgeons, assisting the nurses, corralling the hundreds of lost children, making out tickets of identification, making out cards for withdrawals of food, clothes, shoes, whatever was required.
All that and more was happening when the food came for Henry. He took a big bite of a hot corned beef sandwich. He swigged coffee and picked up a plate of beans. “Why don’t you come over to the other side,” one of his assistants said, “and take a look.”
Henry surveyed his assistants. They were working efficiently. Things, at the moment, were comparatively quiet. He said, “All right,” and carried his plate and his sandwich into the corridor as he went.
From an opposite, unshielded window, he could see. Between this top-floor vantage point and the fire storm, nothing remained that stood higher.
The single flame of the burning city-heart could not be followed to its summit. It disappeared in smoke, in smoke so thick and dark, so folded and contoured it looked like a range of hills in the sky, upside down, illuminated by fire. The flame itself was yellow-white and solid, a curving wall that slanted in toward the center and could be followed for a thousand feet or more to the place where smoke screened it. Silhouetted against it, for a mile and a half, were the intervening buildings and homes, many burning with separate fires.
The city roared like a volcano and the night shook.
Henry stood still. He stopped eating. It was his city, his life, his boyhood and manhood and it had died and this was its funeral pyre—this tremendous thing.
The heart and significance of the city was gone. Only its people, the majority of its human contents, could be saved. But they had raised it up.
The city, he thought, transfixed by the magnificence of its dying, was the people. It was an extension of their bodies.
When they had been primitive men, they had added the hides of beasts to their own insufficient body hair and the protection of caves to that, and then huts, and now a city. The railroads and all the cars and the motors and engines had been added to their muscles. To their ears, telephones, radios, communications. To their eyes, TV. The very pavement of the streets and the traffic it bore were extensions of the bare feet of men.
It was all, Henry thought, just a big human body—all that city of his and the city beyond it. All part of man. If his blood did not actually flow through it, his mind did. If his cells did not actually develop the intricacies of it, his brain cells had contrived every bit. It moved and had life and function and meaning and purpose only when, and only because, the nerves of man moved first, commanding his giant self-extension, his city.
It was dying, Henry thought, the huge superbody of man. But not man.
“Okay,” Henry said. “I’ve seen it.”
He went back.
“The goddamndest thing!” a runner reported breathlessly, as Henry came back,
“happened out Bigelow, beyond Decatur. A train, loaded with people, pulled from downtown and got all the way out there before it smacked a freight. The whole shebang went off the rails.
And nobody even noticed until an hour or so ago! Hardly anyone lived. It was going about ninety when it hit.”
Henry merely nodded.