A cry, a wail for help, halted them. Even with the three of them searching and the shouting continuing, it took several minutes to locate its source, a crevice roughly half a foot square in the mound of rubble beside them. Inside, they could just see the face of a man.
Working with infinite care lest they dislodge more debris and turn that narrow place into a tomb, they slowly enlarged the hole until they were able to draw the victim out.
Incredibly, the Canuchean was whole apart from the most minor scrapes and bruises. He appeared dazed, but that was the shock of what had happened to him. There was no sign of head or other major injury.
He went of his own accord to the middle of the street and sat down, fixing his eyes on the slope above, which was fairly clearly visible from that place. “I was kind of lucky, I guess,” he said more or less to his rescuers. “I was at my computer when I heard a loud bang and instinctively dived under the desk. I didn’t even have time to turn around when the ceiling came down. It couldn’t have been much more than that, or the desk couldn’t have protected me.
“Anyway, when everything got quiet, I crawled out and just kept going until I got stopped here. I didn’t want to go back into the dark, so I waited. Somebody had to come sometime.”
He gave a great sigh. “That was my house up there, right next to where the grade school used to be.”
“A lot of people got out,” Rip Shannon told him gently, “and a lot of others have been rescued by now. It wasn’t quite as bad higher on the slope even if it looks from here like it was.”
All’s voice was sharper. “You said only the ceiling seemed to have come down on you. Could anyone else be alive in there?”
“I— don’t know. It was dark as an unlit mine, and I didn’t hear anyone. There were six of us on the computer staff, though, and ten in the clerical pool next door …”
Rip started to swear, but Mura’s raised hand silenced him. He gripped his temper. It was not the Canuchean’s fault. The man was stunned, and his mind could not yet grasp anything much beyond himself and his own situation. He had given them their lead. The rest was up to them. Hopefully, help would reach them before too many more hours had passed.
The spacers quickly traced the Canuchean’s escape route to its source. All of them were slender, agile men armed with good head lamps, and they were not long in discovering that his report was accurate. By some presently unaccountable quirk of chance, the moderately large room in which they found themselves had taken relatively light damage, and they located its five other occupants without difficulty. One was dead, his neck broken, and another was fairly severely injured, but the remaining three were little worse off than the initial survivor.
These last, they led out first and then carried their more critically hurt co-worker, leaving the dead man for a future trip.
Before going back inside a second time, Mura gave a hasty report of what they had discovered over his portable transceiver. Conditions that had shielded one floor or room might have been repeated elsewhere, perhaps many times over. That could be the salvation of a lot of lives if it were known, and he dared not assume that they would be able to deliver the information in person. They would have to venture again and again into the ruins, where any shift of the freshly piled, unsettled rubble or any other mischance could bury them forever.
Frank drew his sleeve across his face to wipe off the sweat, smearing the coating of grime, soot, and blood into an even tighter clinging paste.
The second office, which housed the clerical workers, was not so well preserved, and the one beyond it was infinitely worse. After that third chamber, they had been compelled to quit the ruins altogether lest they just bring the whole thing down on the poor wretches still trapped there. Only when a backup company armed with major emergency equipment arrived in response to Mura’s report were they able to resume the massive effort.
It seemed to be about over now, he judged. They appeared to have discovered all the survivors at this site. At least, all that had come out in the last several trips were bodies and parts of bodies.
His eyes shut with infinite weariness. Had Japan suffered like this, he wondered, before volcano and giant wave had combined to throw her islands, population, and ancient culture beneath the cloaking surface of Terra’s ocean? It had taken two days and the night between them. Had desperate rescue teams struggled on even as they were doing here in the face of ever-mounting calamity throughout all that first day and night and maybe part of the second day until an implacably furious nature had left none alive to save or be saved?
The Steward shook his head and looked with concern at the party just pulling itself out of the ruin. That was not his own history. It was not the history of his parents or grandparents. For Ali Kamil, this was his boyhood returned.
Apart from the fact that the cause had been cruel accident rather than human savagery, he had seen all this, lived it, and he had survived. Would he be able to do so a second time?
Frank watched the Engineer-apprentice haul himself erect and claim the luxury of stretching cramped, exhausted muscles. His face was blank, a mask, but his dark eyes were alive and afire, blazing like a pair of young stars pulled out of the depths of space.
Kamil had been tireless in his efforts. More than that.
They all had worked and were working, but Ali had proven to be worth any three of the rest of them. He seemed to have no fear of the treacherous rubble and ventured time and again into it without hesitation or apparent qualm, and once inside, he rarely failed to accomplish his mission. He had an almost uncanny feel for it, for locating hidden, otherwise lost survivors, for figuring with a minimum of lost time how best to shove or pry or lift away the material confining them. When this day was over, it would be the darkly handsome space hound that the greater part of the people brought alive out of this place would have to thank for their deliverance.
27
Jellico twisted around. The Salty Sue was clearly visible from the shattered Patrol flier, and so, too, were the clouds of smoke and the sullen glow of flames rising from the broken dock beside her. He could not tell whether the freighter herself was already ablaze.
He came to his feet. “The ship’s my business,” he told Cofort and the injured yeoman. “A Medic’s what’s needed here at the moment, and that we’ve got”
Rael looked up at him. “Miceal . . .”
The Captain shook his head. “You’re hurt,” he said quietly, “and Keil’s hurt worse.” His voice dropped. “He’s also been alone through too much of this already.”
It was a command, however softly voiced. The woman’s head lowered, as much to conceal the weight of grief and loss she feared she would not otherwise be able to mask as to give her assent.
Jellico said nothing more to either of them. He turned from the pair and ran for the threatened freighter. Maybe there was no chance, probably there was none, but he was not going to surrender to the Grim Commandant without the best damn fight of his life. He would not quietly give over Rael or that wounded Yeoman or the rest of his crew, most of whom would by now be working in the ruins above, oblivious to the peril once again overshadowing them all.
His lips tightened. If only the Patrol agent’s transceiver had not been shattered in the crash he would at least have been able to sound the alarm, but one quick look had been sufficient to tell him he would send no warning out by that route, and there would be no point at all in trying to do so on foot. With the possibility of flight blocked, the fires would have to be kept away from the Sally Sue’s cargo if a second, even more violent explosion was not to rip them all to shreds.
For one instant, he knew a stab of regret as hard and sharp as a physical blow. Perhaps he should not have refused Rael Cofort’s help, he thought. If nothing else, they might then at least have met their deaths together.
Angrily, he put that from his mind. The Medic had her own work to do, and with one or more cracked ribs, she would have been hard pressed to carry the strenuous activity that probably lay ahead of him if he was given the time to half begin. Fate had assigned each of them his own task in this one. They had no alternative, either of them, but to accept that fact and get on with it.