by Rick Raphael
and moaned feebly. Twinrivulets of dark blood trickled from her nostrils. Thick dust wassettling on the area and she coughed and gasped for breath.
On the opposite side of the hill, a vast, torn crater, nearly a hundredfeet across and six to ten feet deep, smoked like a stirring volcanoand gave off a strange, pungent odor of ether.
* * * * *
Johnny Culpepper's dramatic charge to the rescue was no more dramaticthan the reaction in a dozen other places in Nevada and California.Particularly sixty miles south where a small army of military andscientific men were preparing for an atomic underground shot when theCircle T pickup vanished.
The shock wave rippled across the desert floor, flowed around themountains and tunneled into Frenchman's Flat, setting off everyshock-measuring instrument. Then came the ground wave, rolling throughthe earth like a gopher through a garden. Ditto for ground-wavemeasuring devices. Lastly, the sound boomed onto the startledscientists and soldiers like the pounding of great timpani under thevaulted dome of the burning sky.
On mountain top observation posts, technicians turned unbelieving eyesnorth to the burgeoning pillar of smoke and dust, then yelped and swungoptical and electronic instruments to bear on the fantastic column.
In less than fifteen minutes, the test under preparation had beencanceled, all equipment secured and the first assault waves ofscientists, soldiers, intelligence and security men were racing northbehind white-suited and sealed radiation detection teams cradlingGeiger counters in their arms like submachine guns. Telephone lineswere jammed with calls from Atomic Energy Commission field officialsreporting the phenomena to Washington and calling for aid from WestCoast and New Mexico AEC bases. Jet fighters at Nellis Air Force basenear Las Vegas, were scrambled and roared north over the groundvehicles to report visual conditions near the purple pillar of power.
The Associated Press office in San Francisco had just received word ofthe quake recorded by the seismograph at Berkeley when a staffer on theother side of the desk answered a call from the AP stringer in CarsonCity, reporting the blast and mighty cloud in the desert sky. One fastlook at the map showed that the explosion was well north of the AECtesting ground limits. The Carson City stringer was ordered to get outto the scene on the double and hold the fort while reinforcements ofstaffers and photographers were flown from 'Frisco.
Before any of the official or civil agencies had swung into action, theCircle T station wagon had rocketed off the ranch road and turned ontothe oiled, county highway leading both to Carson City--and thenow-expanding but less dense column of smoke.
Johnny hunched over the wheel and peered through the thickening pall ofsmoke and dust, reluctant to ease off his breakneck speed but knowingthat they had to find Hetty--if she were alive. Neither man had said aword since the wagon raced from the ranch yard.
* * * * *
There was no valid reason to associate the explosion with Hetty, yetinstinctively and naggingly, Johnny knew that somehow Hetty wasinvolved. Barney, still ignorant of his error of the oil drums, justclung to his seat and prayed for the best.
The dust was almost too thick to see, forcing Johnny to slow thestation wagon as they penetrated deeper into the base of the smokecolumn. Hiding under his frantic concern for Hetty was the half-formedthought that the whole thing was an atomic explosion and that he andBarney were heading into sure radiation deaths. His logic nudged at thethought and said, "If it were atomic, you started dying back on theporch, so might as well play the hand out."
A puff of wind swirled the dust up away from the road as the stationwagon came up to the smoking crater. Johnny slammed on the brakes andhe and Barney jumped from the car to stand, awe-struck, at the edge ofthe hole.
The dust-deadened air muffled Johnny's sobbing exclamation:
"Dear God!"
They walked slowly around the ragged edges of the crater. Barney bentdown and picked a tiny metallic fragment from the pavement. He staredat it and then tapped Johnny on the arm and handed it to him,wordlessly. It was a twisted piece of body steel, bright at its tornedges and coated with the scarlet enamel that had been the color of theCircle T pickup.
Johnny's eyes filled with tears and he shoved the little scrap of metalin his pocket. "Let's see what else we can find, Barney." The two menbegan working a slow search of the area in ever-widening circles fromthe crater that led them finally up and over the top of the little hillto the south of the road.
Fifteen minutes later they found Hetty and ten minutes after that, thewiry, resilient ranchwoman was sitting between them on the seat of thestation wagon, explaining how she happened to be clear of the pickupwhen the blast occurred.
The suspicion that had been growing in Johnny's mind, now brought intothe open by his relief at finding Hetty alive and virtually unhurt,bloomed into full flower.
"Barney," Johnny asked softly, "which oil drum did you put in the backof the pickup?"
The facts were falling into place like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzlewhen the Carson City reporter, leading a caravan of cars and emergencyvehicles from town by a good ten minutes and beating the AEC andmilitary teams by twenty minutes, found the Circle T trio sitting inthe station wagon at the lip of the now faintly smoldering crater.
A half hour later, the AP man in San Francisco picked up the phone.
"I've just come back from that explosion," the Carson City stringersaid. The AP man put his hand over the phone and called across thedesk. "Get ready for a '95' first lead blast."
"O.K.," the San Francisco desk man said, "let's have it." He tucked thephone between chin and shoulder and poised over his typewriter.
"Well, there's a crater more than one hundred feet across and ten feetdeep," the Carson City stringer dutifully recounted. "The scene is onCounty Road 38, about forty miles east of here and the blast rockedCarson City and caused extensive breakage for miles around."
"What caused it," the AP desk man asked as he pounded out a lead.
"A lady at the scene said her milk and eggs blew up," the Carson Citystringer said.
* * * * *
Ten miles south, the leading AEC disaster truck stopped behind thesix-strand fence blocking the range road. Two men with wire cutters,jumped from the truck and snipped the twanging wires. The metal "KeepOut" sign banged to the ground and was kicked aside. The truck rolledthrough the gap and the men swung aboard. Behind them was a curtain ofdust rising sluggishly in the hot sky, marking the long convoy of otherofficial vehicles pressing hard on the trail of the emergency truck.
When the range road cut across the county highway, the driver pausedlong enough to see that the heaviest smoke concentrations from theunknown blast lay to the west. He swung left onto the oiled road andbarreled westward. In less than a mile, he spied the flashing red lightof a State trooper's car parked in the center of the road. The scenelooked like a combination of the San Francisco quake and the LosAngeles county fair.
Dozens of cars, trucks, two fire engines and a Good Humor man werescattered around the open range land on both sides of the vast craterstill smoldering in the road. A film of purple dust covered theimmediate area and still hung in the air, coating cars and people.Scores of men, women and children lined the rim of the crater, gawkinginto the smoky pit, while other scores roamed aimlessly around thenearby hill and desert.
A young sheriff's deputy standing beside the State trooper's car raisedhis hand to halt the AEC disaster van. The truck stopped and thewhite-suited radiation team leaped from the vehicle, counters in hand,racing for the crater.
"Back," the chief of the squad yelled at the top of his lungs."Everybody get back. This area is radiation contaminated. Hurry!"
There was a second of stunned comprehension and then a mad, pan-demonicscrambling of persons and cars, bumping and jockeying to flee. Theradiation team fanned out around the crater, fumbling at the levelscales on their counters when the instruments failed to indicateanything more
than normal background count.
All of the vehicles had pulled back to safety--all except a slightlybattered station wagon still parked a yard or two from the eastern edgeof the crater.
The radiation squad leader ran over to the wagon. Three people, two menand a dirty, disheveled and bloody-nosed older woman, sat in the frontseat munching Good Humor bars.
"Didn't you hear me?" the AEC man yelled. "Get outta here. This area'shot. Radioactive. Dangerous. GET MOVING!"
The woman leaned out the window and patted the radiation expertsoothingly on the shoulder.
"Shucks, sonny, no need to get this excited over a little spilt milk."
"Milk," the AEC man yelped, purpling. "Milk! I said this is a hot area;it's loaded with radiation. Look at this--" He pointed to the meter onhis counter, then stopped, gawked at the instrument and
