Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

The plaster beneath his palms became suddenly cooler. Was there some burrowing flame back there under the floor somewhere?

He sniffed. The strong hospital odor of ether and formalin — but no smoke. Maybe he’d been jittery for nothing.

No! He’d turned the corner, was working across behind the backdrop. The wall here was warm!

Sweat moistened his forehead — not from the heat.

There was something more than radiation from steam pipes, here. The varnish on the woodwork was sticky!

He didn’t hurry as he went out onto the stage, crossed to the control room. Any sign of panic, now, might be worse than a blaze.

Gaydel swung around from his campstool, scowled.

“Now, what?”

“Call Toleman,” Pedley said easily. “Want an announcement over the mike.”

Ross cried, “This isn’t a rehearsal, you dimwit! We’re on the air. You can’t break up a network broadcast—”

“You’ll break it up. There’s a fire backstage, here, somewhere.”

Amery’s stool clattered to the floor. “I don’t see—”

“Neither do I. But it’s here. Get Toleman. Get him quick.”

Gaydel hesitated. Leila was just going into the final chorus of “Chloe.” The heavy beat of the drums was building up to a climax. Maybe another half-minute wouldn’t make any difference; maybe it wasn’t anything serious; maybe—

Pedley gauged the producer’s indecision, made his decision.

He went out of the control room, strolled casually to the microphone, put a hand on Leila’s arm. She half-turned, without missing a phrasing. Consternation was clear in her eyes.

He pulled her back from the microphone, as Toleman glared, started toward him from the wing.

“You’ll want to lynch me for cutting into the performance,” he said into the mike, “but we’ll have to call it off, temporarily. There’s been an accident—” he made it purposely obscure — “there’ll be rain checks. Everybody out, now.” He gestured with his open hand to the substitute orchestra leader to keep on playing.

Toleman pawed at him. Pedley brushed him aside. He cut across to the corporal. “Pull your box. Then tell your em-pees to get these boys out of here, fast.”

The corporal ran.

Pedley used sign language to Shaner, across the stage. He held both hands at his side as if gripping a rifle, then pantomimed as if he were suddenly shooting the rifle into the ground. Shaner nodded, hurried for the nearest wall rack holding an extinguisher.

The movement toward the exits began reluctantly. Not more than a third of the invalids were on their feet. None of the wheel-chair cases had spun themselves around to head for the doors. A few veterans were filtering out. The aisles were slowly beginning to fill up. Maybe it would be all right, if they would only move a little faster. They might all get out in time.

He saw the smoke. No larger than the trailing plume from a cigarette, at first. It drifted aimlessly up from the staircase they had used to climb from below-stage. Before he could reach the top of the steps, it had become a gray funnel a foot wide.

Then the cry of “Fire! FIRE!!!!”

It took about ten seconds for the recreation hall to turn into pandemonium.

Pedley, jerking a fire ax from its bracket, saw what was happening. The “walking cases” weren’t in any panic; they weren’t crowding and fighting toward the doors at all. That was the trouble; the men who could get out easily weren’t doing it. They were staying to help the others who couldn’t navigate without aid — the wheelchair occupants, the two-crutch cases. Before Shaner came lumbering across the stage with his extinguisher, the two long aisles were a tangle of chairs, canes, crutches, struggling men.

The nurses, from the back rows, did what they could. The M.P.’s carried men bodily out of the milling mass.

With the first burst of flame, the marshal knew there’d be a stampede.

The four men in the control room had run for sand buckets. The fire was eating away under the stage somewhere; Pedley hacked away at the floor beside the hottest place on that rear wall. If he could get a draft through here, it might stop the flames from cauliflowering out over the aisles.

His ax sank through inch-thick planking as if it had been a rotten stump. When he yanked the blade free, a little sprinkle of sparks followed it. Then a thin trident of orange flame.

Beside him, Shaner yelled, “One more sock, I can get this baby working.”

The ax lifted, fell. A square foot of the planking broke away, fell out of sight, was replaced by a gush of vanilla-colored smoke. Shaner let go with the extinguisher.

A livid sheet of violet flashed as the stream squirted out of the nozzle; it blinded Shaner momentarily, left him stunned. Pedley knocked the cylinder out of the deputy’s hands. It rolled along the floor, sprouting lavender flame over backdrop and floor!

Gasoline! In the extinguisher!

The marshal seized Shaner by the collar, dragged him back from the miniature volcano roaring up through the hole in the flooring.

The backdrop blazed up with the rapidity of a window shade zipping to the top when the catch doesn’t work. Pedley could see through to the stage.

Leila was at the mike again — singing. Some of the orchestra men had fled but most of them stayed with her.

Loud above the crackling and snapping of the flames, clear and cool over the terrified melee of the entangled aisles, came the husky, steadying voice:

It wasn’t exactly oil on the troubled waters; nothing could have completely calmed that fear-crazed group of sick and injured men. But it was enough. It gave them the narrow margin of confidence they had to have, if they were to survive.

She had nerve enough to stand there and sing:

And they wouldn’t be shown up by a girl — not by the voice many of them had listened to in faraway corners of the world, on shipboard, in foxholes. If Leila could take it, they could.

The hospital fire crew was swarming in now, with hoses. Men flung sand and retreated before searing geysers welling up out of the floor.

The seats themselves were nearly empty. But the aisles were still clogged, the exits hopelessly jammed. Another three minutes and most of the boys would be out. They wouldn’t have half that, unless that fireproof curtain shut off the flames from the stage.

It had jammed on the track somewhere. The patrol corporal and Ollie and Toleman were tugging frantically at the rope; the thing was stuck, a third of the way across the stage.

Pedley grabbed an armful of the heavy fabric, was attempting to drag it back toward the wing to clear the pulleys, when he saw the widening, luminous circles on Leila’s skirt. He dived at her, beat the flames out with his hands.

She staggered away from the mike, saw the gilt sparks racing across the material of her dress — and ran.

He tried to grab her, but she was too horrified at being afire to realize that running only fanned the sparks.

In an instant she’d reached the wings, staring over her shoulder, terrified at the trail of flame following her. She tripped over the extinguisher Pedley had knocked out of Shaner’s hand, fell headlong — disappeared into the smoke belching from the flight of stairs leading below-stage.

Pedley was plunging into the smoke and down the staircase before she hit the cement floor. But he couldn’t see her, couldn’t find her when he felt around at the foot of the steps.