He could see the fire crew standing ready by their water cannon. They were in full firefighting togs, helmets, capes, faces masked, breathing from respirators. They had to be suffering from the Mississippi heat.
Which Larry knew firsthand, because he was suited himself. Not, thank God, in a complete radiation suit, one that looked like what the astronauts wore on the moon, but in something that was bad enough. He was in anti-C clothing—the C stood for Contamination—which consisted of heavy overalls, boots, gloves, skullcap, and a gas masklike respirator to keep him from breathing in any airborne contamination. The boots and gloves had been duct-taped to the overalls to make certain that no contaminated particulates got into his clothing. If any of the portable radiation detectors on the boat showed that he’d been contaminated, he’d be able to throw away the suit and walk away free.
But he was hot, even in the shade of the pilothouse. The respirator was claustrophobic. Sweat kept dripping from his forehead onto the inside lenses of his spectacles, and he’d wished he’d remembered to put on a sweatband before he donned the gear.
Larry wasn’t alone in his misery. Accompanying him on the boat were separate teams from the power company and from the Department of Energy, all in their own anti-C apparel. The fantail of the boat looked like an astronauts’ convention.
Helicopters thundered overhead. A nuclear accident was just the sort of thing to really concentrate the government’s attention as well as the attention of the media, which with its usual efficiency was in the process of blowing the incident into mass panic. Larry figured that more people were going to die of heart attacks and strokes while listening to the television coverage than would ever die of radiation exposure.
The depth sounder made ticking noises as the boat edged closer to the auxiliary building. The helmsman fired the stern thrusters briefly to nudge the back end of the boat around, then paused, the boat hovering alongside the long, buff-colored flank of the storage building, its engines providing just enough thrust to hover in the current. The depth sounder reported fourteen feet of swift-moving water under the keel.
“I believe, sir,” the captain said, in soft, deferential Southern tones, “that we may commence.” Larry had spent the night in his own bed, in his quake-damaged home. His wife Helen had survived the quake without so much as a scratch, but the house had not been so lucky. Most of the shingles had fallen from the roof. The rear porch had become detached and moved about five feet into the yard. All the windows had broken, and all the shelves had fallen.
Helen had coped perfectly well with his absence, however. The fallen books and smashed crockery had been cleared up, and the shelves set up again, this time fixed firmly to wall studs with anchor bolts. Nothing was going to fall again unless it took the entire wall with it. Larry was thankful that he’d married a practical girl who knew how to use his tools.
That morning, on his way to his rendezvous with the fireboat, Larry had flown over the Poinsett Landing plant and surveyed the collapsed roof of the auxiliary building, looking for places to rain water into the holding pond. He’d taken a number of Polaroid photographs from the air, and he reached into an envelope for these and blinked at them past the smeared lenses of his spectacles. He made his way out of the pilothouse, then told the captains of each of the water cannons where to direct their attack. Pumps began to throb. Valves were turned.
And brown Mississippi water began to flow from the nozzles of the water cannon. It took most of the day before Larry’s radiation detectors suggested that the great reservoir of the holding pond had at last been filled, and the spent fuel’s furious heat temporarily quenched. At this point Larry thankfully got out of his anti-C gear; the teams of inspectors left the boat to enter the auxiliary building to analyze the damage and dump large amounts of radiation-absorbing boric acid into the cooling water. Larry himself was spared this duty, both because of his injury and because all the access routes to the building lay under water and would have to be entered by people using scuba equipment. Operation Island, as General Frazetta had dubbed it, was getting under way.
NINETEEN
On Wednesday, in the afternoon, I visited every part of the island where we lay. It was extensive, and partially covered with willow. The earthquake had rent the ground in large and numerous gaps; vast quantities of burnt wood in every stage of alteration, from its primitive nature to stove coal, had been spread over the ground to very considerable distances; frightful and hideous caverns yawned on every side, and the earth’s bowels appeared to have felt the tremendous force of the shocks which had thus riven the surface. I was gratified with seeing several places where those spouts which had so much attracted our wonder and admiration had arisen; they were generally on the beach; and have left large circular holes in the sand, formed much like a funnel. For a great distance around the orifice, vast quantities of coal have been scattered, many pieces weighing from 15 to 20 lbs. were discharged 160 measured paces—These holes were of various dimensions; one of them I observed most particularly, it was 16 feet in perpendicular depth, and 63 feet in circumferences at the mouth.
Nick was eating his breakfast—Campbell’s Chunky Beef, straight from the can—when they motored free of trees and wreckage, and there was the bridge dead ahead, the span between its three great towers glittering like a spider web in the morning sun. Mouth full of soup, he nudged Jason, but Jason had already seen it.
The boy turned to him with a grin. “All right!” he said. “We’re rescued!” Don’t be too sure, Nick thought, though his heart grew lighter for all his caution. Jason looked down at his can of food. “Creamed corn,” he said. “Couldn’t you find something in the pantry that doesn’t suck?”
Nick looked in their bag of supplies. “Want some olives?” he said.
After escaping from the Lucky Magnolia, they had motored south till nightfall, then cut the engine so as not to run onto debris. Morning found them out of the main channel and somewhere in the flood plain, surrounded by tall trees, with a bluff hard by the west bank. Or perhaps this was the main channel now. It was impossible to tell.
They started the Evinrude and motored carefully southward through the trees, the engine turning at low revs to keep the boat away from obstacles. A brisk wind blew through the trees overhead, but at the water’s surface the air was almost still. Jason steered while Nick prepared their unappetizing breakfast.
“Hey look!” Jason said, excited. “Look! It’s a city!”
Through his own rising excitement, Nick paged through mental road maps. A town on the west bank, built up on a bluff, with a highway bridge crossing the Mississippi.
“Helena,” he said. “That’s Arkansas over there.”
He could see towboats and rafts of barges moored along the waterfront. Maybe one of them would let him use their radio, he thought.
Jason put his bowl of half-eaten creamed corn on the gunwale. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand,” he said, and reached for the throttle.
As they neared Helena, Nick saw the place had suffered in the quake. Parts of the bluff had spilled downward into the lower town, and all of the buildings he could see over the town’s big floodwall were damaged. Some of the older brick buildings had collapsed. From the marks of soot, it looked as if other buildings had burned.
“That way!” Nick said, pointing, as a lagoon opened up on the right. He saw piers, masts, small boats. Jason turned the wheel and the boat heeled as it roared for the marina entrance. The moored pleasure boats, rising on the flood, had suffered little damage, though some, parked on dry land in trailers, had been knocked over, and sat now half-full of water. Jason cut the throttle as he entered the lagoon, and the speedboat slid over glassy water. Silence enveloped them. Nick could hear wire halyards rattling in the wind against aluminum sailboat masts, the cawing of the flocks of crows that massed overhead, the hiss of water under the keel. There were no sounds of traffic, no footsteps, no sounds of voices. Beyond its floodwall, Helena was strangely silent.