5
Hook and Ladder Company Number 17 pulled hack to Broad Street, according to plan. The sea of fire began at Washington, to the north. Nothing could be done to stop a fire storm. It had to burn itself out, leaving just ash, the Hiroshima effect. The temperature inside it would rise to six thousand degrees or better. Any people alive, under that circle of one flame, would crisp and cremate, or, escaping that in some deep cellar, suffocate. For all the oxygen of the atmosphere near by would be used by the fire. Everything that could be oxidized would burn. The “air” would be CO and CO 2.
They reeled in their hoses and backed and filled until the equipment was turned around, the hook and ladder, the chemical engines, the pumps, the hose wagons, the chief’s car. Then they got aboard and went. It was their second major move. The first had been made in Condition Yellow—when they’d rendezvoused in Edgeplains and waited. It was a good tactic: the firehouse had been wrecked.
They thought maybe they could save the Police Station and everything from there south.
So they came over from Sunset Parkway again, cast, to the station. They noted, on the way, that the CD people were on the job. They’d dynamited clear through from the parkway to River Avenue, where a row of wooden houses had caught. Two bulldozers, sweating it out in the heat, had knocked down a scrabble of advertising signs, a house, and some miscellaneous junk that would otherwise have carried fire deeper into Green Prairie.
The chief, going past, cut his siren and tramped on his horn and waved, and one of the men on a dozer waved back.
When they got to the station, they piled out. There were lights in the windowless building and even the green lights outside were burning again. An auxiliary plant. Over toward Bigelow and Cold Spring, it looked comfortingly dark, though the firemen knew brands and sparks would be raining down there and probably clear to the city limits. The CD people would have to take care of that. The business of Number 17 was the big stuff, like the row of stores blazing on Broad. Fortunately, the wind blew toward the center of town from every compass point, feeding the fire storm; it made peripheral fire-fighting practicable. If it hadn’t been for that in-sucked wind, all Green Prairie would have gone.
The trucks fanned out. The growling sirens fell silent. Caps fell from fireplugs, hoses were screwed on, streams of water traversed Broad and crashed into the seething row of stores, sending up inverted spark-rains that could not be seen against the central city, the solid background of flame. Now, it vanished at the top—an unbelievable fire mountain that pierced a downreaching, outspreading pall of smoke. Smoke, with the dust from the bomb, canopied the Sister Cities.
Lieutenant Lacey, looking military neat, came out of the Police Station and pointed at a huge lump of debris in the street—a tangle of metal, half-melted, unrecognizable, and as big as a small house. “It fell,” he yelled in the fire chief’s ear, “right after the blast. Think your men are safe around it?”
The chief stared. “God knows! Around it is where they gotta be, anyhow, if they’re going to keep this fire from spreading.”