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,