"What do you think happened?" Cronnin asked. "One of the Doernberg-Giardanos let go?"
"Yes. Your man Crandall. If he survived that, it"s his bad luck," Melroy said grimly. "Last night, while Fred Hausinger was pulling the fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter CM. I don"t know what was done with it, but I do know that Crandall had the maintenance gang repack that reactor, to keep my people from working on it. n.o.body"ll ever find out just what happened, but they were in a hurry; they probably shoved things in any old way. Somehow, that big subcritical nugget must have got back in, and the breeding-cans, which were pretty ripe by that time, must have been shoved in too close to it and to one another. You know how fast those D-G"s work. It just took this long to build up CM for a bomb-type reaction. You remember what I was saying before the lights went out? Well, it happened. Some moron--some untested and undetected moron--made the wrong kind of a mistake."
"Too bad about Crandall. He was a good kid, only he didn"t stop to think often enough," Cronnin said. "Well, I guess the strike"s off, now; that"s one thing."
"But all those people, out there!" Womanlike, Doris Rives was thinking particularly rather than generally and of humans rather than abstractions. "It must have killed everybody for miles around."
Sid Keating, Melroy thought. And Joe Ricci, and Ben Puryear, and Steve Chalmers, and all the workmen whom he had brought here from Pittsburgh, to their death. Then he stopped thinking about them. It didn"t do any good to think of men who"d been killed; he"d learned that years ago, as a kid second lieutenant in Korea. The people to think about were the millions in Greater New York, and up the Hudson Valley to Albany, and as far south as Trenton, caught without light in the darkness, without heat in the dead of winter, without power in subways and skysc.r.a.pers and on railroads and interurban lines.
He turned to the woman beside him.
"Doris, before you could get your Board of Psychiatry and Neurology diploma, you had to qualify as a regular M.D., didn"t you?" he asked.
"Why, yes--"
"Then you"d better report to the nearest hospital. Any doctor at all is going to be desperately needed, for the next day or so. Me, I still have a reserve major"s commission in the Army Corps of Engineers. They"re probably calling up reserve officers, with any radios that are still working. Until I hear differently, I"m ordering myself on active duty as of now." He looked around. "Anybody know where the nearest Army headquarters is?"
"There"s a recruiting station down on the thirty-something floor,"
Quillen said. "It"s probably closed, now, though."
"Ground Defense Command; Midtown City," Leighton said. "They have a medical section of their own; they"ll be glad to get Dr. Rives, too."
Melroy helped her on with her coat and handed her her handbag, then shrugged into his own overcoat and belted it about him, the weight of the flashlight and the automatic sagging the pockets. He"d need both, the gun as much as the light--New York had more than its share of vicious criminals, to whom this power-failure would be a perfect devilsend. Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm.
Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.
THE END