“Come on, Chief,” Major Lyle said, pulling him away. The man collapsed, and Lyle saw him vomiting inside his gas mask. The colonel got it off him, and pulled him clear. “Time to leave. It's all over here. You've done your job.” It turned out that four more people were still alive. The firemen loaded them on the engine deck of the tank, which drove off at once to the evacuation point. The remaining firefighters there washed everything off, and departed, too.
Perhaps the only good luck of the day, Larry Parsons thought, was the snow cover. It had attenuated the thermal damage to the adjacent buildings. Instead of hundreds of house fires, there were only a few. Better, the afternoon sun of the previous day had been just intense enough to form a crust on the yards and roofs around the stadium. Parsons was looking for material on that crust. He and his men searched with scintillometers. The almost incredible fact of the matter was that while a nuclear bomb converted much of its mass into energy, the total mass lost in the process was minuscule. Aside from that, matter is very hard to destroy, and he was searching for residue from the device. This was easier than one might have thought. The material was dark, on a flat white surface, and it was also highly radioactive. He had a choice of six very hot spots, two miles down-range of the stadium. Parsons had taken the hottest. Dressed in his lead-coated protective suit, he was trudging across a snow-covered lawn. Probably an elderly couple, he thought. No kids had built a snowman or lain down to make angels. The rippling sound of the counter grew larger… there.
The residue was hardly larger in size than dust particles, but there were many of them, probably pulverized gravel and paving material from the parking lot, Parsons thought. If he were very lucky, it had been sucked up through the center of the fireball, and bomb residue had affixed itself to it. If he were lucky. Parsons scooped up a trowel's worth and slid it into a plastic bag. This he tossed to his teammate, who dropped the bag into a lead bucket.
“Very hot stuff, Larry!”
“I know. Let me get one more.” He scooped up another sample and bagged it as well. Then he lifted his radio.
“Parsons here. You got anything?”
“Yeah, three nice ones, Larry. Enough, I think, for an assay.”
“Meet me at the chopper.”
“On the way.”
Parsons and his partner walked off, ignoring the wide eyes watching from behind windows. Those people were not his concern for the moment. Thank God, he thought, that they hadn't bothered him with questions. The helicopter sat in the middle of a street, its rotor still turning.
“Where to?” Andy Bowler asked.
“We're going to the command center — shopping center. Should be nice and cold there. You take the samples back and run them through the spectrometer.”
“You should come along.”
“Can't,” Parsons said with a shake of the head. “I have to call into D.C. This isn't what they told us. Somebody goofed, and I gotta tell them. Have to use a landline for that.”
The conference room had at least forty phone lines routed into it, one of which was Ryan's direct line. The electronic warble caught his attention. Jack pushed the flashing button and lifted the receiver.
“Ryan.”
“Jack, what's going on?” Cathy Ryan asked her husband. There was alarm but not panic in her voice.
“What do you mean?”
“The local TV station says an atomic bomb went off in Denver. Is there a war, Jack?”
“Cathy, I can't — no, honey, there's no war going on, okay?”
“Jack, they showed a picture. Is there anything I need to know?”
“You know almost everything I know. Something happened. We don't know what, exactly, and we're trying to find out. The President's at Camp David with the National Security Advisor and—”
“Elliot?”
“Yes. They're talking to the Russians right now. Honey, I have work to do.”
“Should I take the children somewhere?”
The proper thing, and the honorable and dramatic thing, Jack told himself, was to tell his wife to stay home, that they had to share the risks with everyone else, but the fact was there was no place of safety that he knew. Ryan looked out the window, wondering what the hell he should say.
“No.”
“Liz Elliot is advising the President?”
“That's right.”
“Jack, she's a small, weak person. Maybe she's smart, but inside she's weak.”
“I know. Cathy, I really have things to do here.”
“Love you.”
“And I love you, too, babe. Bye.” Jack replaced the receiver. “The word's out,” he announced, “pictures and all.”
“Jack!” It was the Senior Duty Officer. “AP just sent out a flash: shooting in Berlin between U.S. and Soviet forces. Reuters is reporting the explosion in Denver.”
Ryan got on the phone to Murray. “You have the wire services?”
“Jack, I knew this wouldn't work.”
“What do you mean?”
“The President told us to shut the networks down. I guess we goofed somewhere.”
“Super. You should have refused that one, Dan.”
“I tried, okay?”
There were just too many redundancies, too many nodes. Two satellites serving the United States were still up and operating, and so were nearly all of the microwave-repeater systems that had preceded them. The networks didn't merely run out of New York and Atlanta. NBC's Los Angeles bureau, after a surreptitious call from Rockefeller Center, took over for that network. CBS and ABC accomplished the same out of Washington and Chicago, respectively. The irate reporters also let the public know that FBI agents were “holding hostage” the network news headquarters people in the most heinous abuse yet of the First Amendment. ABC was outraged that its crew had been killed, but that was a small thing compared to the scope of the story. The proverbial cat was out of the bag, and phone lines at the White House press office lit up. Many reporters had the direct number to Camp David as well. There was no statement from the President. That only made things worse. The CBS affiliate in Omaha, Nebraska, had only to drive past SAC headquarters to note the beefed-up guard force and the empty flight line. Those pictures would be on nationwide in a matter of minutes, but it was the local news teams who did the best and the worst work. There is scarcely a city or town in America that lacks a National Guard armory, or a base for reservists. Concealing the activity at all of them was tantamount to concealing a sunrise, and the wire-service printers reported activity everywhere. All that was needed to punctuate those reports was the few minutes of tape from KOLD in Denver, running almost continuously now, to explain what was going on, and why.
The phones at the Aurora Presbyterian were all being used. Parsons knew that he could have forced his way onto one, but it was easier to run across the street to a largely deserted shopping center. He found an FBI agent there, wearing a blue “raid” jacket that proclaimed his identity in large block letters.
“You the guy from the stadium?” Parsons' head gear was gone, but he still wore the metallic coat and pants.
“Yeah.”
.“I need a phone.”
“Save your quarters.” They were standing outside a men's clothing store. The door had alarm tape on it, but looked cheap. The agent pulled out his service pistol and fired five rounds, shattering the glass. “After you, pal.”
Parsons ran to the counter and lifted the store phone, dialing his headquarters in Washington. Nothing happened.
“Where are you calling?”
“D.C.”
“The long-distance lines are down.”
“What do you mean? The phone company shouldn't be hurt from this.”