Patty said slowly, “Thank you. I—don’t want to be in the way.” But I have no place else to go, she thought suddenly, it is as simple as that. And at last the enormity, of being alone, wholly alone, bore in upon her. In an unsteady voice, “Thank you,” she said again. “I’ll try to stay out of the way.”
The walkie-talkie crackled. “We’re at the Tower Room floor, Chief.” Denis Howard’s voice, panting and dull with fatigue. “The smoke isn’t too bad yet. We’ll try to get the door cleared.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Oh, Christ, Chief, how can things like this happen?” \ Almost a lament. “There’re big boxes, heavy boxes, some of them marked ‘Fragile, Electronic Equipment,’ and they’re jammed so the door can’t open from the inside. Where in hell were our people, letting anybody block a fire door like this?”
The battalion chief closed his eyes. “I don’t know, Denis. I sure as hell don’t know. All I do know is that if there’s a wrong way to do something, somebody will find it. I’ve never known it to fail. And when all the wrong things happen at the same time—” He stopped. “Tear the goddam boxes apart.” His voice was savage. “Get out of that stairwell and inside! There’s your best chance.”
Brown gestured wearily. The battalion chief handed him the walkie-talkie. “The governor has promised you a drink and some snacks,” Brown said. “That ought to make your day.”
There was no reply. The batteries in Howard’s unit had failed from the mounting heat.
Nat was down in the black bowels of the building, moving partly by feel and partly by the eerie light of firemen’s headlamps, claustrophobic in his mask and afraid that each breath would somehow be the last, drenched by water from the big hoses and fighting through smoke almost as through a solid substance. Giddings and Joe Lewis and two men of a pickup electrical crew were somewhere near, but for the moment Nat had lost them.
It was, he told himself, ridiculous that he should even be down here. Joe Lewis was the electrical engineer; Giddings knew as much about actual placement of panels and circuitry as anybody, including Nat himself. And yet here he was, unable to wait outside or, like a proper little prototypical architect, back at his drawing board, pencil in hand, head filled with abstruse calculations.
I don’t belong here, he thought, and by here he no longer meant simply beneath this great building, but anywhere in this complex compartmentalized right-hand-doesn’t-know-what-left-hand-is-doing megalopolis society where man was so far removed from actuality that a switch thrown miles away could cut off his light, his heat, his means of cooking or of keeping himself sane against constant din by playing the kind of music he could lose himself in. Or kill him by a radioactive mistake at some distant generator.
Oh, that was exaggeration, of course, but not by much. Here—
He was jostled suddenly by two firemen stumbling past in the murk, dragging a new hose. They seemed unaware that there had been any contact.
And that was another thing: the crowding even under the best of circumstances. Big city people were like turkeys in a pen. They seemed to prefer to be shoved and jostled and packed into impossibly small spaces. The subways at rush hour. The buses. The crowded ramps at Yankee Stadium. The Coney Island beaches. Times Square New Year’s Eve. A Madison Square rally. By God, they enjoy it!
Thoughts flicked across the screen of his mind far faster than words could contain them.
A nearby voice muffled through a mask said suddenly, “If the motherfucker will—there, you bastard! Okay. Give me a light, goddammit!” One of the electricians.
Giddings was there, massive in the smoke. “If you can’t move it, let me in.” His voice too sounded unreal, distant and hollow.
“Look, mac, keep your goddam meathooks off this panel. You don’t carry no union card.”
Oh no! Nat thought. Not now! And yet it was so; ingrained, ineluctable. You staked out your own little territory and you defended it against all comers, friend or enemy. Why? Because that territory was you, manifestation of your essence; its violation assaulted your very soul. Shit. That was not how it ought to be. His anger had spread now to include the world in general.
Joe Lewis, standing close, said hollowly, “Hurry it up.” He began to cough. “A man can only stand so much of this.”
“Then beat it,” Giddings said. “We’ll finish it off.”
In the smoke and near-darkness Nat saw Lewis raise an arm and let it fall in a gesture of defeat. His coughing was deep, wracking. He turned away, stumbled, fell, tried to raise himself, and failed.
Giddings said, “Goddammit—”
“Stay at the job,” Nat said. His voice was sharp. “I’ll get him out.”
He knelt beside Lewis, turned him over on his back and raised him to a sitting position. Slowly, heavily, he levered the man over his shoulder and into a fireman’s carry, took a deep breath, and managed to heave himself to his feet.
His legs were weak and even through the mask the taste of smoke filled his lungs, usurping areas of tissue that ought to have been filled with oxygen, creating a dizziness that would not go away.
He leaned forward against the burden on his shoulder and, half-walking, half-stumbling, headed off into the murk.
Lewis’s body was limp, a dead weight. Nat could not tell whether the man breathed. He stumbled onto the first stairs and slowly, laboriously began to climb. One, two, three … there were fourteen steps to each level—why would he remember a thing like that now?
Thirteen, fourteen … level floor and then more stairs, and the smoke was in no measure diminished.
The next step would have to be his last—and he knew that it was not so. As in the mountains on a steep trail, the only thing to do was put your head down and concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other in slow rhythm. Ignore your breathing—if you can. Ignore the coughing that chokes you. Thirteen, fourteen—another level floor, and more stairs.
Once he stumbled over a hose and went painfully to his knees, was tempted to drop the body that hampered him—and managed to withstand the temptation. Get up, goddammit, get up!
He heard voices and knew them to be nothing more than sounds within his own head.
He stopped in the middle of a flight of stairs to cough and cough again, and then lurch on.
Ahead there was only blackness and smoke. And here was a door, closed—was it, for God’s sake, locked as well? If it is, Nat thought, then I’ve taken the wrong stairs and we’ve both had it.
He lurched up the last two steps, and felt with his free hand for the doorknob. There was none.
The dizziness was near-nausea now, and thinking was almost impossible. No doorknob—why? Goddammit, you know the answer—what is it? You’re the architect, aren’t you? He leaned forward, pushing Lewis’s limp body against the door. It opened suddenly and Nat almost fell through—into the smoke-filled concourse.
Out at last into the unbelievably sweet air of the plaza, freed from the claustrophobic mask—and here came two men in white to take the body from his shoulder, and someone else saying “Breathe this” and slapping a rubber mask over his nose and mouth.
He breathed deeply of the oxygen and gradually the plaza came back into focus, the dizziness receded. Nat freed himself from the mask and went stumbling toward the trailer. His legs were weak as he climbed the steps.
One of the battalion chiefs grinned at him. “Like to join the Department?” he said. “We can offer smoke-filled outings almost every day, if that’s the way your pleasure runs.”