No, not downtown. Potter stopped west of it, on the far side of the Schuylkill River. At his order, Wilton pulled into a parking lot. Potter ducked into the back of the truck and set two timers on the side of the crate-he wasn't going to take chances with only one. The driver, meanwhile, raised the hood.
"What's going on?" somebody called.
"Damn thing's broken down," Wilton answered. "We've got to round up a mechanic somewhere."
He and Potter jumped into one of the command cars. "Back the way we came," Potter said. "Fast as you can go." He eyed the man who'd questioned them. The fellow only shrugged and ambled into a shop. Maybe he'd seen breakdowns before.
"How long, sir?" asked the corporal behind the command car's wheel.
"Not long enough," Potter said. "Step on it."
Fifteen minutes later, the world blew up behind them.
I rving Morrell wasn't looking west when the bomb went off. He was standing at a counter, trying to decide between a chocolate bar and a roll of mints. All of a sudden, the light swelled insanely, printing his shadow on the wall in back of the sidewalk stand. The fat little old woman behind the counter screeched and covered her eyes with her hands.
"Good God!" Morrell said, even before the roar of the explosion reached him. His first thought was that an ammo dump somewhere had blown sky high. He didn't think of a bomb. The explosion seemed much too big for that.
He forgot about the candy and ran out into the street. Then he realized just how lucky he'd been, because a lot of windows had turned to knife-edged flying shards of glass. The magazine stand and snack counter where he'd been dithering didn't have a window of any sort, so he'd escaped that, anyhow.
He stopped and stared. He wasn't the only one. Everybody out there was looking west with the same expression of slack-jawed disbelief. No one had ever seen anything like that rising, boiling, roiling cloud before. How high did it climb? Three miles? Four? Five? He had no idea. The colors put him in mind of food-salmon, peach, apricot. The top of the cloud swelled out from the base, as if it were a toadstool the size of a god.
The roar came then, not just in his ears but all through his body. He staggered like a drunken man. But it wasn't his balance going; the ground shook under his feet. A blast of wind from nowhere staggered him. Also out of nowhere, rain started pelting down. The drops were enormous. They left black splashes when they hit the ground. When one hit his hand, he jerked in surprise-the rain was hot.
"Where's it at?" somebody asked.
"Across the river, looks like," a woman said.
It looked that way to Morrell, too. The rain shower didn't last more than a couple of minutes. It hadn't ended before he started trying to scrub the filthy drops from his skin. He remembered what John Abell had told him a few days before: uranium bombs put out poison. And what else could that horrible thing be? No ammunition dump in the world blew up like that.
How much poison was in the rain? How much was in that monstrous toadstool cloud? Am I a dead man walking? he wondered.
"We gotta go help," said the man who'd asked where the blast was. He hurried toward the Schuylkill River.
His courage and resolve shamed Morrell. Of course, the stranger-who was plump and fiftyish, with a gray mustache-didn't know what Morrell did. If ignorance was bliss…
After a moment's hesitation, Morrell followed. If he was already poisoned, then he was, that was all. Nothing he could do about it now. Overhead, that cloud grew taller and wider. Winds began to tear at it and tug it out of shape…and blow it toward downtown Philadelphia.
Crowds got worse the farther west Morrell went. Everybody was pointing and staring and gabbling. You fools! Don't you realize you might all be dead? No, Morrell didn't shout it out. But it filled his thoughts.
Damage got worse the farther west he went, too. All the windows that had survived years of Confederate air raids were blown out. Motorcars and trucks had windows shattered, too. Drivers, their faces masks of blood, staggered moaning through the streets. Many of them clutched at their eyes. Morrell knew what that was bound to mean: they had glass in them.
As he neared Philadelphia's second river, he saw buildings brutally pushed down and vehicles flipped onto their sides or upside down. Some men stopped to help the injured. Others pressed on.
And then Morrell got a chance to look across the Schuylkill. That part of the city was almost as heavily built up as downtown. Or rather, it had been. Next to Morrell, a skinny woman crossed herself. He felt like doing the same thing. Almost everything over there was knocked flat. A few buildings that must have been uncommonly strong still stood up from the rubble, but only a few.
A bridge across the Schuylkill survived, though it leaned drunkenly to one side. How long it would stay up, God only knew. People staggered across it from the west. Some had had the clothes burned off of them. Morrell saw several with one side of their face badly seared and the other fine: they must have stood in profile to the bomb when it went off.
"His shadow!" a dreadfully burned man babbled. "I saw his shadow on the sidewalk, all printed like, but not a thing left of George!" He slumped down and mercifully passed out. Morrell wondered whether he would ever wake. He might be luckier not to.
A loudspeaker started to blare: "All military personnel! Report at once to your duty stations! All military personnel! Report at once to-"
Morrell didn't exactly have a duty station. He headed back to the War Department. The catastrophe across the river was bigger than any one man. And he had a better chance of finding out what was going on at the military's nerve center.
So he thought, anyway. But one of the guards who patted him down asked, "What the hell happened, sir? Do you know?"
"Not exactly," Morrell answered. "I was hoping people here did."
Before a private took him down to John Abell's office, he paused in a men's room and washed off as much of the filthy rainwater as he could. "Why are you doing that, sir?" asked the kid, who went in with him.
"Just in case," Morrell answered. Getting rid of the horrible stuff wouldn't hurt. He was sure of that.
Abell always looked pale. He seemed damn near transparent now. He might have aged ten years in the few days since Morrell last saw him. "My God!" he said. "They beat us to the punch. I didn't think they could, but they did."
"Have you been up top?" Morrell asked. "Did you see it with your own eyes?"
"No." Abell had always wanted to deal with things from a distance. Was that a strength or a weakness? Probably both at once, Morrell thought. The General Staff officer went on, "How did they get it here? They couldn't have used an airplane-I swear to God they don't have a machine that can carry it. And our Y-ranging gear didn't spot a thing coming up from the south."
"They must have sneaked it in, God damn them," Morrell said. "Remember how they broke through in eastern Ohio? They had a whole battalion of guys in our uniforms, in our vehicles, who could talk like us. What do you want to bet they did the same damn thing again-and made it work?" He'd made it work himself, getting over the Tennessee River in front of Chattanooga.
Abell managed a shaky nod. Then he reached for a telephone. "With a little luck, they won't get away. We can shoot every last one of them if we catch them in our uniforms."
Morrell nodded. That was what the laws of war said. Whether the USA would want to shoot those Confederates if it caught them might be a different story. How much could they tell interrogators about their uranium-bomb project?
"We'd better catch them," Abell said as he slammed down the telephone after barking into it with unaccustomed heat. "They can't get away with that. How many thousands of people did they just murder?"