Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“It’s too high a level,” she reported. ‘We got to a lot of metal and kind of a big cave beyond, but it’s too hot to stick around. You can’t send your people any deeper, Mr. Pratt. In minutes they’d get enough radiation to be sick—maybe die.”

The men who had made the perilous trek with her stood by, panting a little, opening and shutting hands that were raw from pulling on timbers, throwing brick, moving heavy bits of building. Other rescue workers gathered around and passed the report along. One of the three who’d gone into the tunnel with Lenore said, “Pity. Beyond that opening she talked about, you could hear kids calling.”

Henry looked with fear and horror at the demolished building, at the frightening flame.

He looked at the rescue people, and they were eying him. “This whole crew,” he yelled out, “will get in touch with my headquarters for another assignment!” He jerked his head. “Abandon this!

You’ve done what you can.”

That was that. Men nodded. One or two women cried. But people began throwing picks, shovels, crowbars, a block-and-tackle, other gear into a metal truck. A bulldozer came alive and moved off in the street. Joe Dennison was driving it.

That was that—until Henry heard a shout near the tunnel mouth and saw two men rush in. “They shouldn’t!” The woman with the radiation counter exclaimed.

Henry recognized her then. “Great God Almighty,” he whispered. He reached out and gripped her arm. Her teeth showed white in a kind of smile. Her face was black as a miner’s.

“How about your family?” Lenore asked. She was hoarse from much shouted talk.

Henry felt the pain again. “I don’t know, dear! I don’t know!” He held his head close to reduce the need for bellowing every word. “Ted’s under a brick slide….”

“I’m sorry.”

“Mother’s up at the First Aid. Nora—search me! Chuck reported yesterday at Hink Field.”

She nodded. She looked, briefly but in a special way, at the fire storm. Henry knew what she was thinking: Chuck was not in there; he hadn’t been caught downtown as she’d feared. But she didn’t mention her feelings. “Gotta get cracking,” she said and left.

He looked, now, at the tunnel. That was where she’d been. In that hole through hell.

There, where the roof might fall, where there could be a gas explosion, where she might be burned alive or slowly baked alive, suffocated, smothered, crushed, even drowned, pinned in some spot where a pipe leaked.

The crew was clearing out in cars and trucks, going someplace unknown to Henry. He hadn’t asked where. There were more assignments than people. And his people, he reflected grimly, were being reduced in numbers now to aid River City.

“Shall we get along?” Lacey asked.

“ Wait .” Henry approached the tunnel, followed by the lieutenant. “You recognize your neighbor? The Bailey girl?”

“Yes.”

“Guts.”

Henry didn’t reply. He just nodded and bent to peer into the dark dreadfulness of the hole the rescuers had made and abandoned, the hole into which two men, against orders, had plunged.

For what seemed a long time nothing happened.

It wasn’t, Henry thought, actually long, but merely long by the standards of that night: ten minutes, perhaps, or maybe less. Then he saw a wink of lights and shadows moving. One man made his way to the tunnel mouth and put down the thing in his arms. It was a baby and it cried.

The man turned back.

“Got a torch?” Henry asked the policeman.

“ You can’t go in!” Lacey yelled back. “Too risky for you !”

“Got a torch?”

Lacey went to the squad car and returned. He followed Henry into the tunnel.

Far down, they encountered the other man, helping along two children, who wept and shivered. Lacey, on Henry’s orders, led them back.

It was quiet in there. One of the men said to Henry, “You stay here, sir. Beyond this point, the radiation’s bad. There’s only one more kid and Sam’s getting her free. No use exposing yourself. We’ve already had the full dose and he won’t need help.”

The man left. He was gone awhile. Henry stood still, more frightened than he’d known he could be.

He could see, in the light of a lantern left by the tunnel-makers, what had happened. A weight of machinery and sheet metal had cut through the collapsing building and piled up, just ahead; that was the point of peak radioactivity, he was sure. Beyond, apparently with another lantern in it, he saw a kind of opening, room-sized; a girder or some other structural member had held up the debris. Beyond that was a doorway with a smashed-off door. Behind it, somewhere in the darkness, they’d found the children.

The second man came, with a form on his shoulder. A little girl, unconscious. As he passed the metal mass, he turned his back and put the inert girl in front of him, shielding her body with his own. Henry appreciated that what these two men had done might succeed, for the children. They might survive. But the men had quite likely received ultimately fatal doses of radiation when they tore a path around the intrusion of scrap metal. Some of the rescue squad, too, had probably been marked for sickness, at least, by working there, before Lenore arrived to measure.

Henry said nothing then. The man indicated the lantern with his toe. Henry picked it up, following. Soon they were outdoors in the light of the fire storm—in the strange night, where a cold wind blew on their faces and their hacks were seared by heat. Lacey had loaded the other children.

The man carried the unconscious girl to the car and put her in, too. His brave companion was just standing by the fender, a smile of satisfaction on his face.

“I’ll send a car back for you two,” Henry said. ‘We’ll do everything we can—over at the Country Club. Got good doctors there. They may be able to…”

One man said, “Thank you.”

Henry gazed at them. “That was the finest thing I ever saw. Who are you two guys?”

The nearer one, a rather slight man, who was dabbing at the blood from a cut on his arm, laughed and answered, “I’m Jerome Taggert, minister of the Bigelow Street Baptist Church, and Sam is Father Flaugherty of St. Bonaventure’s Roman Catholic….”

Henry said, “Oh,” and kept looking back at them as Lacey drove away.

Six men rode in the weapons carrier. Chuck was in command.

A sailor drove. They cruised street after street of the severe damage area. But there was not much left to do. Where they heard screams, they investigated, helped if they could. They didn’t search buildings and houses: it was too dangerous and there were too many such structures ready to fall, falling occasionally with an alarming roar, on fire, smoking. Here and there in River City they encountered individuals or groups at work-police, a few CD volunteers, firemen.

These few who had stood fast were trying to concentrate on such measures as would save the little that remained.

They had thrown a guard around St. Agnes Hospital, east of Market, and prevented the mob from stopping all useful work inside. They had kept the fringe fires from eating their way to the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. They had checked the reservoir for dangerous radioactivity and taken the dead bodies out of it. They had collected most of the wandering children, hurt or not, and sent them in cars outside River City to a big orphanage. These and other things the citizens of River City had done in the long night. But their training had been near nil, their numbers were pitifully inadequate, and for every saving effort they made, they had to watch helplessly while many times the number were lost.

Chuck realized, as they drove through the empty streets, that it was getting light. He gazed toward the fire storm, but that was not the source. The flame, in fact, was lessening in width and density. The light came from the sky again, from the east, where the sun would soon rise.