As with the seaport and commercial areas, no building remained erect, only part of a wall standing here and there, and smoke seemed to be rising from a thousand different sources. For all the visible portion of Canuche Town, the catastrophe was total.
Of greater significance at the moment than the magnitude of the disaster was the sight of figures moving about amidst the wreckage, some carefully, some rapidly and erratically. Death was not quite as universal up there as it was closer to the sea. Distance had given the residents that much grace.
Even more heartening to see were the masses of people crossing the crest and heading down, a steady, organized flood of them. The remainder of the city had survived, then, and the rescue effort was under way.
“It’ll be a while before they make it as far as here,” Rael remarked, quelling the hope rising in her heart. There would be more deaths yet before this was finally over and part of history.
She frowned as she looked once more at the scene of carnage around them. “It should be worse,” she said tightly. “The detonation had to have thrown out more fire.”
“Everything’s wet. I’d say there was a pretty big splash, lucidly straight into the air and back into the bay again instead of a slosh and surge over the shore, or we’d have been drowned in our rat hole. The water must have kept the heat off the victims.” The ones they could see here. Those on the ship herself and on the dock nearest her would have ceased to have physical form before they could be incinerated.
All around them was the irrefutable physical evidence of the explosion’s power. Not forty yards to Jellico’s left, a 150-foot motorized floating dock had been dropped after having been blown a good 200 feet out of the water below.
He tried not to think about what probably lay beneath it, or of what he could see on top of it, either. There lay the incredibly crushed remnants of three firetransports. A fourth vehicle, less heavily damaged, had been brought to a stop against its side. That one bore the black and silver colors of the Stellar Patrol.
Rael saw the direction of his gaze and started for the displaced dock. Her own injuries made her grateful for her companion’s help in scaling the monstrous thing, but she refused to give in further to them. If Miceal came to suspect the extent of the damage she had taken, he would pull her out of this hopeless fight, force her to return at once for aid.
That she was not prepared to do, not while she herself was in no immediate danger and others decidedly were.
She glanced at the nearest of the Fire Department vehicles, then involuntarily up at Miceal.
The Captain shook his head. “Forget it, Rael,” he told her gently. “None of them survived. It’s impossible that they should.”
Still, they looked at each transport, confirming that there was no life in any of them. They held no dead, either. The blast had carried off the lighter bodies of their crews. Only one corpse was to be seen on the dock, a man’s, naked except for one sock of a type adopted by seamen and others engaged in heavy physical outdoor labor the ultrasystem over. Jellico thought he might have been a sailor blown from a nearby vessel or else a dockworker. From the angle at which he was lying, they judged that his back had been broken in several places.
“There’s nothing we can do up here,” the Medic said.
The gnawing unease was flogging her again, demanding action despite her weariness and pain. “Someone around here is hurt. Let’s check out that Patrol flier first and then hunt around the base of this thing. — Damn it, I wish some of those Canucheans would light their burners and get down here! To judge by what we’ve seen thus far, anyone we come across is going to be in a pretty bad way.”
“You’re not in such a good way yourself,” he said sharply after seeing her wince as she lowered herself to the dock in preparation to scramble over its side.
“I don’t pretend to be as tough as you, Miceal Jellico,” she told him irritably. “These muscles are going to be singing me a sad story for some time to come. — You could give me a hand down if you’d like to be helpful.”
“Down here! Help!”
Both froze.
Jellico went to his knees beside his companion. The cry seemed to have come from the wrecked flier. They could see two people. One was lying across the rear seat, one in the front, the latter almost concealed by the great, jagged metal shard that had felled him. Had they not been studying the machine so closely, they would have missed seeing him.
The spacers made no delay in climbing down. Rael hastened first to the victim in the back, that one being the more readily accessible.
After a few moments, she drew back, her mouth twisting. First aid had been attempted, but injuries of this magnitude rendered any such effort worthless. The woman had been eviscerated, and the damage done to her lungs, while not visible, must have been greater still. How the poor creature had survived long enough to receive any treatment at all …
“Rael! Over here! He’s alive!”
She hurriedly backed out of the flier and ran to its opposite side, where Miceal was already beside the vehicle’s second occupant.
The woman caught her breath in horror. “Keil!”
The Patrol-Yeoman did not look like the same man. He appeared years older, his face marred by pain, fear, blood, and plain dirt, but there was no doubting the accuracy of her identification. As if to confirm it, he turned his head at the sound of her voice. It was about the only part of his body, certainly the only visible part, with a full range of free movement. “Doctor Cofort?”
“That’s right, my friend.”
“Gayle? Yeoman Argile? She’s dead?” There was more statement than question in that.
She nodded. “Aye. That was inevitable anyway. Most of her lungs had to have been ruptured.”
His eyes closed in the infinite weariness of defeat. “I know. I had to try to get her out, though. — I was farther away and only got flattened, and the flier somehow wasn’t damaged at all, so I took it and went back to the dock. Where it used to be. Gayle was near there, still alive. No one else was.”
He paused, then went on. “I did what I could for her and tried to make a run for it. That’s when this thing hit me and made an end of me, too. I think it’s part of the supports of one of the fuel tanks . . .”
“Nothing’s made an end of you, not yet!” She squeezed down beside him to try for a pulse count and to peer into his eyes. The pupils were even, at least. . . “Let me push in there so I can get a better look at you.”
“I’m finished,” the Yeoman stated flatly, his manner calm and quite certain but with an urgency underlying it.
“So are you two if you hang around here any longer. Maybe you are no matter how far you can run now.”
“What do you mean?” Jellico demanded sharply. Whatever one felt about the agents of the Stellar Patrol, they were not given to displays of hysterics even under gross provocation.
“See that ship over there?” he asked, pointing toward the Salty Sue with a toss of his head. “She’s got several holds full of that damned ammonium nitrate, too, nine thousand nine hundred tons of it, plus a couple of thousand tons of sulphur and I don’t know how many barrels of benzol on deck and below. She’s on fire right now, or if she isn’t, the pier right next to her certainly is in several places. One blaze or another will get to her soon enough, and she’ll go up with a bang that’ll make the Man’s explosion seem like a harmless little puff of a dry run.”
25
Doctor Tau was wedged in between Jasper Weeks and Karl Kosti, sharing with four Canuchean laborers a transport somewhat too small to carry so many.
He was only vaguely aware of the discomfort of the journey. The people around them were taking almost the whole of his attention. Most of them were moving away from Canuche Town, lines of dazed, frightened refugees. A horribly high percentage of their number were obvious physical as well as emotional casualties of the disaster, struggling on with the assistance of their fellows to reach medical care at one of the temporary hospitals set up in the camp on the hardpan until the grave danger of fire subsided sufficiently for the facilities to return to the city itself.