I tried to start the car, and only after several seconds did I realize I'd never killed the motor. I put the car in reverse . . .
There were two faint pops and the front settled. At the same time, I noticed steam rising from the front of the car. Above all the other burning smells, I smelt burning rubber.
Protected by the car, I hadn't realized that the fierce heat from across the river was capable of melting the tires and boiling the water in the radiator. However, the car did move jerkily, and in a few seconds we were back over the brow of the hill, protected by it.
"What can we do?" Sheila said.
Well, what could we do? Nothing, probably. Nobody could do anything that I could see -- it was too late for any measures that I could imagine.
It was ironic and symbolic, rather than really important, that the firemen were trapped this side of the river. Certainly they could do nothing if they crossed the bridge -- if it were possible to cross the bridge. The fire engines were rubber-shod, like my car, and there was water in the radiators. Anyway, firemen in conventional uniform couldn't get near a conflagration like that.
Since the only sign of life we had seen had been at this end of the New Bridge, I turned the car, and running on the rims, with a steaming radiator, drove along the lane behind the warehouses.
I stopped.
Here in the semi-gloom, lit by the blaze in the sky but unaffected by the outbreak as yet, were old huts, sheds, stores. And in the lane in front of us, blazing fiercely, was a wood brand a foot thick and three feet long.
We got out of the car and looked at the blazing balk rather helplessly. Thrown into the sky from the other side of the river, no doubt, it had fallen precisely in the middle of the lane and was spluttering harmlessly. Even a small spark, falling on a tarred felt roof, would have started a blaze on this side of the river too. A fire on this side would never rival the destruction of Shuteley itself, but would make this night of destruction appallingly complete.
I found a spade in a shed and covered the balk with earth and stones. Without much of a struggle, the fire went out. But I was almost certainly wasting my time. If a great blazing balk of timber could be thrown a quarter of a mile, millions of equally dangerous sparks must be coming over all the time. Indeed, I could see them flying across the sky.
Sheila caught my ann. "Val, please," she said. "Let's go back."
"Back?" I echoed blankly, wondering whether she meant to the place just over the hill where we had watched our town being burned to death, or to the roadhouse, or to our home a quarter of a mile along the river on the side we were on.
"Anywhere," she said. "We can't do anything here. No one can."
It was true, of course. The firemen we were trying to join couldn't do anything. Fires differ in kind rather than merely in degree. You can spit on a tiny fire and put it out. A fire in a long-unused grate won't go, despite all your efforts and the fact that you're using specially selected combustible material.
But when the temperature goes up, when water boils, when rubber smolders, when wood, untouched by flame, gradually glows and blazes through the effect of high temperature alone, when human beings simply can't go near . . . that's a fire that simply has to be left alone.
As if to reinforce what Sheila was saying, a flying spark dropped and imbedded itself in her fur wrap. She threw it off, and I stamped on, it. And then, startlingly, we were drenched in a shower of water.
"Rain!" I exclaimed. "If it would only pour -- "
Sheila, in her green dress which was short top and bottom, soaked, didn't shiver. "Hot rain?" she murmured, puzzled.
I took her arm. She wanted to escape, to leave the fire to burn itself out, which was sensible but impossible. With the other arm I picked up her wrap, and pushed it rather roughly around her. Then we went on.
The men at this end of the New Bridge were nearly all firemen. There were a few children, a few old men.
The firemen, protected from the direct blast of the heat by the very obstruction which kept them from attempting to cross the bridge, were spraying water this side of the river, which was sensible. Jets directed across the river would not even land. Anyway, the jets they were directing were more like trickles, possibly of some value on this side of the river, of none if directed the other way.
I recognized Fire Officer Sayell, brother of the wit of my office.
"How did it start?" I asked.
His face twitched in annoyance, and I realized how silly my question was. Undoubtedly later there would be an investigation, and it might even be possible to establish the original cause of the fire. Meantime there were a million things that mattered more.
"Excuse me, Mr. Mathers," he said, and I recognized the carefully controlled tone of a man near the end of his tether, impotent, with an impossible job on his hands. "There's not much I can do, but I've got to get on with it anyway."
"There's help coming?"
"Lots of it. Mostly to the other side. Nobody can do anything much here. We've tried the ladders. They don't reach the other side, not from any place we can put the tenders."
It would not, I thought, have made much difference if the ladders had spanned the bed. Nobody could go across there and live. Anyway, the steel ladders would buckle in the heat.
Sayell swore as one of the jets failed, closely followed by the other.
"Everything's wrong," he said bitterly. "The river's dried up. Blocked higher up."
"How about the Winshell brook?" Sheila suggested.
"Dry before this happened. Dry yesterday."
"Have you looked?" I demanded.
He stared at me with desperation in his eyes. The interference of local VIPs was another penultimate straw.
"No, I haven't bloody looked," he snapped. "The bloody brook was dry when the river was still -- "
"Send somebody," I said.
Suddenly quiet, he said: "Do you want me to hit you, Mr. Mathers? Do you want me to cleave your skull with my axe? Because so help me -- "
"Send somebody to look," I said, and turned slightly away. If I tried to outface him, maybe he would cleave my skull with his axe. Many men with impossible jobs on their hands get like Sayell then. A breath of opposition sends them into spontaneous combustion.
But if someone says casually "Do so-and-so," and moves on, they've got something to try, something that isn't likely to make the situation any worse and might improve it. And if it fails utterly, it's not their fault.
Behind me, Sayell shouted: "Horner! Take a look over the hill and try the Winshell brook. And look lively!"
The Winshell brook was a tiny tributary of the Shute. It went the wrong way, meeting the river head on rather than quietly trickling into it. The meeting place, called not unexpectedly The Meeting of the Waters, was only a short distance downriver from where we stood.
I had remembered the water running across the road.
At the giants' camp, at our house, probably even just beyond the mound of debris at the Old Bridge which I had glimpsed through the smoke, the river was still running. It was only in Shuteley itself, at the moment when it was most needed, that it had run dry. But all that water was still flowing somewhere; some of it, though not nearly enough, was still getting through along the old river bed. Some of it was perhaps going on the other side of the river, doing something to limit the blaze. That was unlikely, however, because it would have to get round Castle Hill.
The rest of it must be flowing along the other side of the hill which for so many miles had cut off our view of Shuteley. And the Winshell brook was there.
The human animal has survived, and will continue to survive, because of its enormous talent for adaptation -- and rapid adaptation at that.
We were living in a world of smoke which stung our eyes and made breathing always difficult, sometimes painful and occasionally impossible.
We were living in a world of heat which made sweat run from us continuously. We were all so thirsty that we would have drunk anything, even the muddy crimso
n trickles that were still meandering down the river bed.
We were living in a world where thirst, pain, hunger and comfort had to be set apart. All of us had small burns where sparks had landed. Several of us had small smoldering spots in our clothes which we beat out absently. We were hungry from our exertions, at least I was, but that didn't mean the thought of eating was present. Drinking was different. All of us, given the chance, would have knocked down a pint or two of water, milk, lemonade, beer, anything. We couldn't say drinking no longer mattered. We'd have drunk greedily if we could. But if we couldn't, it would have to wait.
We were living in a nightmare world where only one thing could be held in the mind at one time. At the moment it was the Winshell brook. Even Sayell, who had wanted to kill me for bothering him, was waiting, praying.
If there was water, something could be done. Without water, stuck across the river from the fire (which nobody for the moment was looking at) we could do nothing but watch this side of Shuteley, such as it was, burn with the rest.
It was no use thinking of what had happened and was still happening across the river. Apparently these firemen knew little more than I did about that.
Our wives, children, parents, friends and lovers were over there, dead or alive. Either they'd escaped when the fire started (whenever that was) or they were still there, forever, unrecognizable.
I suppose I was the luckiest of all those people there. Sheila was with me, and Sheila, despite everything, was the human being I cared most about. Sheila and I were going to live. If necessary we could run from the holocaust and save ourselves.
We had no children, and at that moment I had never been more glad of anything. Sheila's parents were dead, and the remaining parent I had was far from Shuteley.
There was only Dina to worry about. And Gil, perhaps.
As for others . . . Well, through being faithful to Sheila and her alone, I had become unconcerned with most of the people in Shuteley. In the office, I was concerned chiefly about Sally Henrey, and she was on holiday, out of this altogether. Of course I'd be sorry about many others, but they weren't close, apart from Gil. And was he close any more?
Somebody screamed, and I turned. As if thrown by an ancient catapult, a blazing mass of timber was flying in a leisurely parabola across the dry river, straight for us.
I grabbed Sheila and pulled her to the left. But we bumped into two very solid firemen and bounced the other way. The timber crashed on the ground twenty yards from us.
Nobody was near it. Everybody had had plenty of time to get clear. But when it hit the ground it flew asunder into a thousand blazing sparks which exploded in all directions, and the curses and screams of those hit by the sparks temporarily drowned the noises from across the river.
A couple of brands dug into my clothes, and obstinately stuck. I was trying to brush them off when a scream from Sheila made me look at her and see that a spark was clinging like a leech to the front of her dress. I tore off my jacket, still with a smoldering patch in it, and plucked away the spark and some of her dress, whereupon Sheila. promptly fainted.
I could have sworn she had her fur wrap on, but either it had slipped off unnoticed or she had thrown it away in the broiling heat. Picking her up, I carried her behind the shelter of one of the sheds. The spark on my leg had fallen off, though not before burning through to the skin. The pain was sharp and more like a stab wound than a burn.
I put Sheila down. She'd been lucky. There was no sign of a burn.
I pulled up a leg of my pants and saw to my astonishment that the considerable pain in my leg was caused by a tiny burn no larger than a pinprick.
Sheila opened her eyes. She didn't move. "Val," she said, "am I badly burned?"
"You aren't burned at all," I said bluntly. Reassured, she jumped up, and wailed when she saw that the left top half of her dress was torn away.
"Where's your wrap?" I demanded.
"I can't wear it in this heat. It's -- "
"Find it, put it on and keep it on."
"Sparks stick in it."
"I know, but . . . "
I was beginning to realize that though it was reassuring to have your wife with you in such a situation, and many men who found themselves alone at this moment would have given their right arms to be as fortunate as I was, a fully feminine girl like Sheila kept your hands full and you'd scarcely time even to see what was going on.
So I said: "Look, Sheila, the best thing you can do is gather all the kids and old folk together and take them back over the hill, where it's safe, and just stay there. A lot of people were burned and injured unnecessarily just now. They needn't have been here."
"And what are you going to do?" she demanded.
I shrugged. I didn't know. If the firemen were helpless, it wasn't likely I'd be able to do anything useful. But I had to try. I had to be there. If I could do nothing else, I had to stand and watch.
"What will this mean to your job?" Sheila said.
Trust a woman to be practical. The thought seemed to come from a thousand miles away.
But I was responsible for practically all the insurance in Shuteley -- and the San Francisco disaster that wrecked insurance companies among other things was a minor affair compared with this. True, Shuteley wasn't a big town. But never in history, save by act of war, had any town been so completely destroyed as Shuteley obviously would be before this was over.
Behind us there was a shout. And we ran back, for at such a time the last thing we expected to hear was a shout of excitement and delight.
When we saw the firemen talking to Sayell and gesticulating, we didn't have to hear what they were saying. There was water in the Winshell brook, and plenty of it.
It was remarkable how merely having something they could do transformed the firemen from a dispirited, cursing, demoralized mob no more useful than the children and old people who still stood around into an efficient well-drilled team.
A squad raced up the hill with their equipment, and Sayell turned to me; his face alight. "Thanks, Mr. Mathers," he said. "If it hadn't been for you, we might never have looked at the brook. I never guessed it would be . . . anyway, we're in business again."
Significantly he turned to look at the fire on the other side of the river, which for some time he had been ignoring. Then he turned back, shouting orders.
I sent Sheila to do as I'd suggested, and saw that she too became efficient once she had something useful to do. She waved to me as she shepherded the children and old people over the hill . . . and that was the last I saw of her while the Great Fire raged.
Soon the firemen had a water supply again. Wisely they first doused our own side of the river. The powerful jets of the two engines could reach practically every building on this side without having to move.
For the first time I had a good look at the blocked New Bridge. It was badly damaged and twisted, yet after the fire it might remain serviceable as a bridge, once the debris on it had been cleared. It was all too clear, however, that there was no chance of clearing it while the fire still raged. Some of the stones were still glowing red, and there was smoldering wood in the pile. In any case, I estimated that without bulldozers it would take a hundred men two days to clear the bridge.
Without bulldozers . . . We were in farming country, and although all the resources of Shuteley itself were on the other side of the river, there ware plenty of farms this side.
I raced to a callbox. There was one among the sheds not a hundred yards away. I picked up the receiver . . .
As I might have guessed, it was dead. The exchange was in Shuteley. In any case, water, debris and heat must have put the overhead wires to the box out of service long since.
There was a callbox about a mile back, and it might be working. Sayell should know about communications. Probably, I realized, he was in constant radio contact with his headquarters.
I ran back and tried to talk to him, But he was busy and waved me away. My suggestion about the brook had enabled him to
be busy; he was quite certain, however, that I could not repeat the triumph.
The jets had been turned across the river, and rather unexpectedly they had made some impression. On the other side a fairly large semicircular area was free of fire, partly because nearly everything that would burn was already consumed, certainly everything highly inflammable, and partly because, being next to the river, its mean temperature was not as high as areas in the center of the holocaust. The water as it fell still rose in clouds of steam in places, but as the cooling jets played everywhere, the glow of heat was fading and the redness of everything visible was now a reflection of the flames still leaping farther back.
Indeed, the eye had now become used to the overall redness and canceled it out, just as, when one wears dark glasses, it is possible after a while to see colors as they really are. Everything was red. But blue-red didn't look the same as green-red.
Snow White and the Giants Page 10
