But he waited. The telephone soon told him the men were out on duty, the cars marked, all the necessary things done, and nearly three quarters of their assigned numbers on hand.
“Good,” he said.
His fingers drummed the table, his friendly eyes, narrowed with thought, looked unnoticing from his borrowed office on the top floor of the school.
Then his unseeing eyes were seeing, seeing too well, too much. The Light gushed over the trees. The view turned white; only degrees of whiteness existed anywhere outdoors. His retina beheld a scene like a positive negative lifted up to the naked sun, a scene of trees and roofs and the front of the tall hospital, Crystal Lake and more trees, more snow-clad grounds beyond, white, brilliant, one step from transparency.
“Duck, everybody!” he had bellowed at the empty room.
He shoved back his chair, fell on his face, crawled beneath the desk. The fist struck the building. It lurched. Steel-hard air ripped part of the roof away, went around walls, closed beyond and, driving and sucking, took the windows on one side across the schoolrooms to shatter and cascade along the walls, flung the rest out in the day, horizontally in the velocities, the temperatures, the glare.
Henry got up, looked at a crack through which the sky showed, watched plaster dribble, heard bricks cataract into the yard, stamped on a firebrand that dropped in the room, stared at the unglassed windows, noted by the scene beyond how the last flare of the fireball was vanishing.
Still it imbued with livid light a cityscape that seemed disorderly now and heaving, that had begun to show sudden smokes.
He was all right. And people, scared, moving weakly, were coming back from a corridor where every electric bulb had gone out.
“There’s a fire downstairs,” someone said.