The rumble stopped almost on top of him; it was a rock crusher and it was loaded down with people, people clinging to it all over and even riding the spade. The driver yelled, "Climb on! And hurry!"
Then he saw the cow and added, "No live stock."
"We've got a stretcher with my little girl in it," Dad shouted back to him. "We need help."
There was a short commotion, while the driver ordered a couple of men down to help us. In the mix up Dad disappeared. One moment Molly was holding Mabel's halter, then Dad was gone and so was the cow.
We got the stretcher up onto the spade and some of the men braced it with their backs. I was wondering what to do about Dad and thinking maybe I ought to jump off and look for him, when he appeared out of the darkness and scrambled up beside me. "Where's Molly?" he asked.
"Up on top. But where is Mabel? What did you do with her?"
"Mabel is all right." He folded his knife and put it in his pocket. I didn't ask any more questions.
17. Disaster
We passed several more people after that, but the driver wouldn't stop. We were fairly close into town and he insisted that they could make it on their own. His emergency power pack was running low, he said; he had come all the way from the bend in the lake, ten miles beyond our place.
Besides, I don't know where he would have put them. We were about three deep and Dad had to keep warning people not to lean on the bubble of the stretcher.
Then the power pack did quit and the driver shouted, "Everybody off! Get on in on your own." But by now we were actually in town, the outskirts, and it would have been no trouble if it hadn't been blowing a blizzard. The driver insisted on helping Dad with the stretcher. He was a good Joe and turned out to be—when I saw him in the light—the same man who had crushed our acreage.
At long, long last we were inside the hospital and Peggy was turned over to the hospital people and put in a pressurized room. More than that, she was alive. In bad shape, but alive.
Molly stayed with her. I would like to have stayed, too—it was fairly warm in the hospital; it had its own emergency power pack. But they wouldn't let me.
Dad told Molly that he was reporting to the chief engineer for duty. I was told to go to the Immigration Receiving Station. I did so and it was just like the day we landed, only worse—and colder. I found myself right back in the very room which was the first I had ever been in on Ganymede.
The place was packed and getting more packed every minute as more refugees kept pouring in from the surrounding country. It was cold, though not so bitterly cold as outside. The lights were off, of course; light and heat all came from the power plant for everything. Hand lights had been set up here and there and you could sort of grope your way around. There were the usual complaints, too, though maybe not as bad as you hear from immigrants. I paid no attention to any of them; I was happy in a dead beat sort of way just to be inside and fairly warm and feel the blood start to go back into my feet.
We stayed there for thirty-seven hours. It was twenty-four hours before we got anything to eat.
Here was the way it went: the metal buildings, such as the Receiving Station, stood up. Very few of the stone buildings had, which we knew by then from the reports of all of us. The Power Station was out, and with it, the heat trap. They wouldn't tell us anything about it except to say that it was being fixed.
In the mean time we were packed in tight as they could put us, keeping the place warm mainly by the heat from our bodies, sheep style. There were, they say, several power packs being used to heat the place, too, one being turned on every time the temperature in the room dropped below freezing. If so, I never got close to one and I don't think it ever did get up to freezing where I was.
I would sit down and grab my knees and fall into a dopey sleep. Then a nightmare would wake me up and I'd get up and pound myself and walk around. After a while I'd sit down on the floor and freeze my fanny again.
I seem to remember encountering Noisy Edwards in the crowd and waving my finger under his nose and telling him I had an appointment to knock his block off. I seem to remember him staring back at me as if he couldn't place me. But I don't know; I may have dreamed it. I thought I ran across Hank, too, and had a long talk with him, but Hank told me afterwards that he never laid eyes on me the whole time.
After a long time—it seemed a week but the records show it was eight o'clock Sunday morning—they passed us out some lukewarm soup. It was wonderful. After that I wanted to leave the building to go to the hospital. I wanted to find Molly and see how Peggy was doing.
They wouldn't let me. It was seventy below outside and still dropping.
About twenty-two o'clock the lights came on and the worst was over.
We had a decent meal soon after that, sandwiches and soup, and when the Sun came up at midnight they announced that anybody could go outside who cared to risk it. I waited until noon Monday. By then it was up to twenty below and I made a dash for it to the hospital.
Peggy was doing as well as could be expected. Molly had stayed with her and had spent the time in bed with her, huddling up to her to keep her warm. While the hospital had emergency heat, it didn't have the capacity to cope with any such disaster as had struck us; it was darn near as cold as the Receiving Station. But Peggy had come through it, sleeping most of the time. She even perked up enough to smile and say hello.
Molly's left arm was in a sling and splinted. I asked how that happened—and then I felt foolish. It had happened in the quake itself but I hadn't known it and George still didn t know about it; none of the engineers were back.
It didn't seem possible that she could have done what she did, until I recalled that she carried the stretcher only after Dad had rigged the rope yokes. Molly is all right.
They chased me out and I high-tailed it back to the Receiving Station and ran into Sergei almost at once. He hailed me and I went over to him. He had a pencil and a list and a number of the older fellows were gathered around him. "What's up?" I said.
"Just the guy I'm looking for," he said. "I had you down for dead. Disaster party—are you in?"
I was in, all right. The parties were made up of older Scouts, sixteen and up, and the younger men, We were sent out on the town's tractors, one to each road, and we worked in teams of two. I spotted Hank Jones as we were loading and they let us make up a team.
It was grim work. For equipment we had shovels and lists—lists of who lived on which farm. Sometimes a name would have a notation "known to be alive," but more often not. A team would be dropped off with the lists for three or four farms and the tractor would go on, to pick them up on the return trip.
Our job was to settle the doubt about those other names and—theoretically—to rescue anyone still alive.
We didn't find anyone alive.
The lucky ones had been killed in the quake; the unlucky ones had waited too long and didn't make it into town. Some we found on the road; they had tried to make it but had started too late. The worst of all were those whose houses hadn't fallen and had tried to stick it out. Hank and I found one couple just sitting, arms around each other. They were hard as rock.
When we found one, we would try to identify it on the list, then cover it up with snow, several feet deep, so it would keep for a while after it started to thaw.
When we settled with the people at a farm, we rummaged around and found all the livestock we could and carried or dragged their carcasses down to the road, to be toted into town on the tractor and slapped into deep freeze. It seemed a dirty job to do, robbing the dead, but, as Hank pointed out, we would all be getting a little hungry by and by.