Ричард Стерн - The Tower

“Tea?” He was trying to keep it light.

“I’m that old-fashioned,” Patty said.

The telephone crackled. Nat picked it up. “Yes, Governor?”

“We’ve had one heart attack,” the governor said. “It has set me thinking. I’m having a list prepared of names and addresses of all those up here. When it is ready, I’ll have it read to you for someone to set down.” He paused. “Just in case.”

“Yes, sir.” Nat cupped a hand over the phone. “Get a stenographer to take down names,” he said to Brown.

Patty stirred herself on the comer of the desk.. “Let me.” Something, anything to do, she thought, anything that might in the slightest way help. Nat watched her; he was smiling approval. “I write legibly,” she said.

Nat said into the phone, “We’re ready for your list whenever, Governor.” Again he leaned back in the desk chair, and smiled up at Patty.

“You did it,” Patty said quietly. “You promised a new idea and you came up with it. I’m proud of you.”

“It isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.”

“I’m still proud of you. And however many people manage to get out will—”

The walkie-talkie said, “Oliver to Trailer. They’ve got the line over there. I want to make damn sure somebody knows how to tie a decent knot; a bowline is what I’d like. If that end pulls loose while somebody is between the buildings—” He left the sentence unfinished.

Nat said, “There are two firemen up there, and probably some ex-Boy Scouts as well—” He could not stifle entirely a triumphant sense of gaiety. “I’ll see to it, Chief. Hold on.”

He picked up the phone and spoke to the governor, smiling a little at the thought of a man used to dealing with the problems of eighteen million people now bothering to make sure that somebody had tied a knot properly in a piece of line. He listened. “Thank you, Governor,” he said, and returned to the walkie-talkie. “Bowline it is,” he said. “Rest easy, Chief.”

“Then,” the chief said, “tell them to haul away on the breeches buoy line. We’re ready at this end.” There was triumph in the chief’s voice too.

In the building’s core, already converted to one great flue, temperatures were climbing to welding-torch levels. A continuous blast of fresh air was sucked in at the base, driven upward by its own almost explosive expansion and accelerating to near the hurricane speed, acting, as the battalion chief had said, in the manner of a blast furnace.

Structural steel* began to glow. Lesser materials melted or vaporized. Where, as on floor after floor, random spacing, superheated air burst out of the core into open corridors and turned instantly to flames, the heavy tempered windows lasted only moments before they shattered and threw out their shards to rain down on the plaza.

Aluminum panels curled and melted, the ‘kin of the structure peeling away to expose the sinews and the skeleton beneath.

Like a gigantic animal in torment, the great building seemed to writhe and shudder, its agony plain.

From the ground, to those whose eyesight could make it out, the line dangling between the two buildings looked impossibly fine, delicate as gossamer. And when the breeches buoy swung loaded for the first time from the Tower Room and began its catenary descent to the roof of the lower Trade Center roof, it seemed that the canvas bag and the woman it contained were hanging free, suspended by nothing more than faith, defying gravity in a miraculous attempt to escape the rising blast-furnace heat.

Her name was Hilda Cook, and she was currently starring on Broadway in the new musical Jump for Joy!

She was twenty-nine years old, dressed in shoes, minibriefs, and a mid-thigh dress tucked up now above her waist. Her long shapely legs dangled crotch-deep through the breeches buoy holes. She clung to the edges of the canvas bag with the strength of hysteria.

She had stared unbelieving at the number on the small square paper slip she had been handed from the empty punchbowl, and her first sound had been a squeal. Then, “It can’t be!” Her voice was shrill. “I’m number one!”

The secretary general was conducting the drawing.

“Someone,” he remarked, “had to be. My congratulations, young lady.”

They had carried the heavy line on which the breeches buoy rode through the window and up to the ceiling where one of the firemen had broken through with his halligan tool to expose a steel beam around which they had bent the line.

Ben Caldwell, directing the operation, had made the point: “Unless we go to the ceiling,” he said as if explaining a problem to a class of not very bright young architects, “the line will rest on the window sill and we will not be able to get the breeches buoy into the room. I, for one, would rather get into the bag inside than climb out the window to get to it.”

Three men manned the lighter line attached to the breeches buoy itself, and Hilda Cook, swinging free within the room, said, “Easy, guys, for God’s sake! I’m already scared spitless!”

As she rode through the window and away from the building’s protection, wind buffeted the bag, the heavy line began to swing, and the sensation of falling was inescapable.

Hilda screamed and closed her eyes and screamed again. “And it was just about then, darlings,” as she told it later, “that I wet myself. I really did. I’m not a damned bit ashamed to say it.”

The wind was cold on her legs and it blew through the pulleys above her head with a banshee wail.

The rocking, swinging motions continued, the oscillations becoming wilder as she approached the center of the span.

“I thought I was going to die, I really did. And then I was afraid I wasn’t! I screamed for the damned thing to stop! You know. Stop the world, I want to get off! But there was no way. No way! And when I was a girl, I didn’t even like roller-coasters!”

She may have’ fainted; she was never sure.

“The next thing I knew, I was in Heaven! I mean the swinging had stopped, and the howling of the wind, and the biggest, strongest man I ever saw, darlings, just

plucked me out of that canvas sack like I was something coming out of a grocery bag. And he set me down on my feet and held me up or I would have gone flat on my face.” Pause. “Was I crying? Darlings, I was bawling like a baby, and laughing all at the same time!” Another pause. “And all the big man said was, ‘Okay, lady. It’s all over now.’ What he didn’t know was that I still dream about it and wake up trying to scream!”

Nat watched from the trailer doorway until the breeches buoy had returned to the Tower Room and for the second time emerged loaded. “I make it just over a minute,” he said. “At that rate—” He shook his head in silence and walked back inside to pick up the walkie-talkie. “Trailer to Oliver,” he said.

“Nice going, Chief.”

“Yeah, thanks.” There was a pause. “But what?” the chief said.

The big man is perceptive, tuned to nuances, Nat thought. “It’s going to take a long time to get them all,” I he said. He paused. “How about a second line, two breeches buoys working at once?”

The big man was also decisive. “No dice. At the angle we shoot from, we couldn’t get the lines far enough apart through those windows. Then in this wind they’d sure as hell foul each other, and we’d have nothing at all.” His voice was calm, but tinged with regret. “I thought of it. But it won’t work. We’ll have to do the best we can.”

Nat nodded slowly. “I know you will. Thanks, Chief.” He put the walkie-talkie down.

For every problem there is not necessarily a solution—true or false? Unfortunately entirely too goddam true. One hour and forty minutes, he thought, that’s all we need. All? Eternity.