The Tower

by Richard Martin Stern

  4:23 P . M .-4:34 P . M .

  Even with the fluorescent lights dead, there was ample light coming through the tinted windows in the Tower Room and the candles still burned. The governor said to Ben Caldwell, “What does it mean? No lights? No power at all?” His voice was steady, his tone almost accusatory.

  “I don’t know,” Caldwell said.

  “You’re the architect. Find out.”

  The governor was the man in command, Beth Shirley thought, and took comfort from the concept. What was that old song from South Pacific—“Some Enchanted Evening”? Listening to him in this moment of crisis as he took command without hesitation, it was difficult to control what she felt—like a schoolgirl with her first sudden crush. Well, so be it. She put her hand gently on the governor’s forearm.

  “It’s all right,” the governor said immediately. “We’ll get it sorted out, whatever it is.”

  “I know you will, Governor.”

  “My name,” the governor said, “is Bent. Don’t ever use the title again.” He took time to favor Beth with a swift grin. Then, to Grover Frazee who had not stirred, “Where is the Fire Commissioner? And Bob Ramsay? You said you have a telephone. Lead the way.”

  Across the broad, no longer silent room, on all sides conversation buzzing, Beth on the governor’s arm, Grover Frazee leading the parade. Someone said, “What is it, Governor? Can you tell us?” And there was sudden silence in the vicinity.

  The governor paused and raised his voice. “We don’t know yet. But we’ll find out, and when we do, you’ll be told. That’s a promise.” Again that familiar grin. “Not a campaign promise,” he added. It got a small murmur of amusement. They went on, following Frazee.

  It was a pleasant office abutting the building’s core, dimly lighted now by two candles. The mayor was at the desk, telephone at his ear. He nodded to the governor and said into the phone, “Then get him. I want a report from Assistant Commissioner Brown in person, is that understood?” He hung up.

  Frazee said, “What do we do? Do we clear the room?” He spoke to the mayor and to the fire commissioner, who stood large and solid beside the desk chair.

  “You heard the man,” the governor said. “Before we do anything, we find out where we stand, how it looks from outside. We know there is a fire—”

  “It wasn’t the fire that shook this building,” the fire commissioner said. There was truculence in his tone. “Unless there was an ammunition dump somewhere. We’ve got other trouble and I want to know what before we let anybody go anywhere.”

  “Nobody’s arguing,” the governor said. “But there are some things we can do up here while we wait. Are the elevators operable? There should be standby power, shouldn’t there?”

  “There sure as hell ought to be,” the fire commissioner said, “but I haven’t seen any indication of it.” His truculence had faded. He watched the governor and waited.

  “Stairs,” the governor said. “There are fire stairs, aren’t there?”

  “Two sets,” the fire commissioner nodded.

  “All right,” the governor said. “Grover, have Ben Caldwell check the elevators. You check the stairs. Oh, yes, and have those waiters start passing drinks again. We don’t want a bunch of drunks, but we don’t want panic either. Get moving, man, and come back here before you tell anybody anything.” He paused and looked down at the mayor. “It’s your city, Bob. Objections?”

  The mayor smiled faintly. “You seem to be in charge. Carry on.”

  If the governor felt the faint proud pressure of Beth’s hand on his arm, he gave no indication. “It’s probably nothing to get concerned about,” he said, “but let’s play it straight anyway.”

  Senator Peters walked in, nodded to the room in general, and leaned against the wall. “There was this young bank robber,” he said without preamble in his normal voice and harsh accent. “His first job and he was uptight. He had his mask on and he rushed into the bank waving his gun. ‘All right, you motherstickers,’ he said, ‘this is a fuckup!’”

  Some of the tension went out of the room. The governor looked at Beth. She was smiling at the crudity. “That’s our Jake,” the governor said. “He can quote Shakespeare too, by the yard. He alters his repertoire to fit the situation.” He paused. “You are getting a cram course in behind-the-scenes-and-the-speeches politics, aren’t you?” He was smiling too. “Disillusioning?”

  “No.” She shook her head slowly in emphasis. “You are the people in charge. I am content.”

  “Lady—” the fire commissioner began, and stopped at the sudden ringing of the telephone.

  The mayor picked it up, spoke his name, listened briefly. “All right, Brown,” he said. “I’ll put the commissioner on. Give him your report.” He paused. “The whole report, no punches pulled, is that understood?” He handed the phone to the fire commissioner.

  The senator said, “When somebody’s on the phone and you can hear only his side of the conversation—” He shook his head. “I never know whether to look at him or stare out the window.” Then, with no change of tone, “Quite a little party you people are throwing, Bent.” He was remembering his vague hunch back in Washington.

  “In case you were wondering,” the governor said, “it wasn’t planned quite this way.”

  “Understood,” the senator said. “The topless waitresses failed to show, so you had to do something, no?”

  Ben Caldwell walked in. He looked at the fire commissioner on the phone, glanced around at the rest, and nodded without expression. He said nothing.

  The governor said, “Where’s Bert McGraw? He ought to have been here.”

  “McGraw,” the mayor said, “had a heart attack. That’s all I know.”

  The governor closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, he said softly, “I always thought of him as indestructible.”

  “We’re none of us getting younger, Bent,” the senator said. “I haven’t had any intimations of immortality for a long time.” He was silent as the fire commissioner cupped his hand over the phone and cleared his throat.

  “Brown says,” the fire commissioner said, “that the fire above grade in the lower floors isn’t good, but the battalion chief thinks it can be controlled. He’s called in more units, equipment and men.”

  There was silence. Beth’s hand tightened on the governor’s arm. He covered it with his own.

  “But the real problem,” the fire commissioner said, “is down in the mechanical-equipment basements. As near as they can figure—and one of your men is there, Mr. Caldwell—”

  “Nat Wilson,” Ben Caldwell said, “I hope.”

  “And,” the fire commissioner said, “Will Giddings, clerk of the works, they’re both there. Near as they can figure, like I said, some maniac got inside the building by pretending he was an electrician sent for some minor job. They found him down in the major transformer room, fried to a crisp. Somehow he managed to short out everything, near as they can tell, but the smoke’s so thick they can’t know for sure what happened except that there isn’t any power.”

  Ben Caldwell said, “The standby generators?”

  The fire commissioner raised his massive shoulders and let them fall. “There isn’t any power,” he said, “period.”

  Ben Caldwell nodded. He had lost none of his neatness or calm. “The elevators do not respond,” he said. “I checked them all. There are the stairs, of course, and if the fire in the lower floors is in any way contained, as it ought to be, then the stairs will be perfectly safe. The fire doors are for just that purpose. I suggest that we start sending everybody down the stairs, half on one side, half on the other.”

  The governor nodded. “With marching orders,” he said, “and a dozen or so men on either stairway to enforce them. No running. No panic. It’s a hell of a long way down and there are going to be some who won’t be able to make it on their own power and will have to be helped.” He looked around the room. “It is a ridiculous way to run a railroad, I’ll admit, but does anybo
dy have a better suggestion?” He squeezed Beth’s hand gently.

  Grover Frazee started through the doorway and stopped. He was sweating. “The doors to the stairs,” he began, and the words ran down. He tried again. “The doors to the stairs—are locked.”

  The fire commissioner said, “They can’t be. You’ve got it wrong, man. There’s no way—” He shook his head, raised the phone, and spoke into it. “Stay by the phone,” he said. “We’ve got some looking to do.” He hung up.

  “Ben,” the governor said to Caldwell, “you and the commissioner go see.” He looked at Frazee. “And you come in here and sit down and pull yourself together, Grover.” He looked at Beth and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry for all this, my dear.”

  “In a way,” Beth said, “I’m not. I don’t think in any other circumstances I’d ever really have gotten to know you.”

  “The lady looks on the bright side of life,” the senator said. “I applaud.”

  12

  The building was in torment, gravely wounded. For a time, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, many of its more serious wounds would not be visible, merely discernible, as in diagnosis, through sheer deduction.

  There had been an explosion: that much was obvious. Much later bomb experts would assess the structural damage in the main transformer room and estimate the power of the explosive Connors had carried in his toolbox.

  Plastic explosive is safe to carry: it is brownish-gray puttylike stuff that can be dropped or molded or otherwise pushed about without protest. It is set off by a probe inserted into its body and a small electric current sent through a wire to the probe. Its explosive force is almost unbelievable.

  The main transformers had been badly damaged, and although the fire that started immediately after the explosion destroyed or distorted much material which might have been studied later, Joe Lewis’s computers in a sense working backward from known results did a creditable job of reconstructing probable cause:

  There had been a massive short-circuit in the primary power, undoubtedly caused by the explosion. No other explanation fit the facts.

  The resultant surge of uncontrolled power shot far beyond the cables thick as a man’s leg designed to carry the voltage in safety, through the crippled transformers, and undiminished into wiring designed to transmit only such voltages as are required to light fluorescent fixtures or run electric typewriters.

  The surge of uncontrolled power lasted only a matter of microseconds. That infinitesimal time was enough.

  The result, as the battalion chief had feared, was immediate and catastrophic.

  Wiring melted and in melting burst its insulation.

  In some instances there were further short-circuits which, acting like arc-welders, threw the enormous heat of an open electrical spark against wall material, soundproofing, insulation—all heat-resistant but never totally fireproof.

  In the final analysis, nothing is. Far less than the ultimate heat of the sun’s body will incinerate most substances. Witness Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Hamburg.

  Within the interior walls of the building, then, creeping fires developed.

  Some of these would die for lack of oxygen, leaving only hotspots as their legacy.

  But some would break into ducting or burst into open shafts or corridors, there to breathe deeply of fresh air, gather force and fury, and roar on, consuming paint, woodwork, fabric draperies, rugs, flooring, materials easily consumed, but also materials usually considered fire-resistant.

  Overhead sprinklers, their fusible links quickly melted, would come on and for a time stem the fires’ spread.

  But too much heat generates steam in waterpipes, which sooner or later burst, and then the sprinklers are dead.

  The fires would be slowed here, slowed there; skirmishes, even battles against the multiple enemy would be won.

  But from the beginning, as Joe Lewis’s computers later showed, the outcome of the war was never in doubt.

  4:10 P . M .-4:31 P . M .

  Patty McGraw Simmons had always detested hospitals, probably, she admitted to herself, because they both frightened and embarrassed her. She was a healthy young woman and her feeling always in a hospital was that because of her obvious well-being she was resented. It was as if the silent eyes that watched her walk down the corridor were saying, “You have no right to be as you are when I am suffering. Go away.”

  But she could not go away this time, and that, somehow, made it worse. They had Bert McGraw in what they called the Coronary Care Unit in University Hospital, a room seen only when the door opened occasionally, a room filled with dials and shiny cabinet-like things whose use Patty could only guess at; and the bed her father lay in looking like some ancient torture rack with tubes and wires leading from it and him.

  Oh, other people had heart attacks. You read about them every day. But not Bert McGraw, indestructible father and man. That concept was ridiculous, of course; it was just the Irish in her exaggerating. And yet there was more to it, at that, than could have been thought of other men.

  Her first memories were of him, big and boisterous, shouting with laughter, treating Patty, as her mother said, “More like a bear cub, Bert McGraw, than like a tiny girl daughter. You’ll break every bone in her body the way you fling her around.”

  And Patty herself had squealed denial to match Bert’s “Nonsense. I’ll not have her kept wrapped up in cotton wool. She loves it.”

  It was not the usual tomboy-father relationship, the way the books said. Once Patty had asked him point blank if he would rather she had been a boy. His answer, like all of his answers, was without hesitation, without guile, “Hell, no. If I had a boy, then I wouldn’t have you, and that would make me a lonesome old man, it would indeed.”

  The door to the Coronary Care Unit opened and a nurse walked out. Patty had her brief glimpse before the door closed again without sound. A lonesome old man—the phrase was in her mind, and she could not have said why or how. A proud lonesome old man, lying helpless on a white bed.

  When you are young, Patty thought, they do for you. They pick you up and brush you off and kiss you where it hurts; they are always there when you need them, and you take them for granted. Then their turn at helplessness comes along, and what can you do but sit and wait and wish that you could believe in prayer because a little simple faith would go a long way?

  Mary McGraw, located at last among her good works in Queens, came walking quickly, breathlessly along the corridor. Patty rose and took her mother’s hands, kissed her.

  “There’s nothing to say,” Patty said. “He’s in there.” She nodded toward the closed door. “No one can see him. The doctor is a great heart man who’ll tell me nothing, maybe because there is nothing to tell. Sit down.”

  Mary McGraw said, “He had been complaining of shortness of breath. I told him he was overweight and overworked. Maybe—”

  “You’ll stop right there,” Patty said. “Next you’ll be working it into being all your fault, which it is not.” Maybe it is at least partly mine, she thought, for laying the burden of my troubles on him at lunch. And then a new thought occurred. “Paul was with him when it happened,” she said. And where was Paul now?

  Mary McGraw looked pleased. “I’m glad Paul was with him,” she said. “He is such a fine boy, your Paul. He and your father get along so well.”

  What point, what purpose in saying otherwise? Patty was silent.

  Her mother said, “Your father was always afraid you would marry some roughneck—like himself, he always said, which was not so, as he knew very well. Then when you brought Paul home, your father and I stayed awake half the night talking about him and wondering if he was the one for you. Do you remember the wedding? Of course you do. All those grand people on Paul’s side of the aisle and you on your father’s arm—”

  “Mother,” Patty said, her tone almost sharp, “Daddy isn’t dead. Other men have had heart attacks and recovered. You—you are talking as if he were already gone, and he isn’t.”

/>   Mary McGraw was silent.

  “We’ll just have to see,” Patty said, “that he doesn’t work so hard, carry so much on his own shoulders.”

  Mary McGraw smiled. “Maybe Paul can help. He is young and strong, and doing very well, your father says.”

  “Yes.” Automatic response.

  “I just hope,” Mary McGraw said, “that your father doesn’t hear of the trouble they’re having at the World Tower opening. He was to have been there, and he asked me, but I said no, all those important people, the governor and senators and congressmen and the mayor and the like, they just make me uncomfortable. But not your father. They don’t impress him. He—”

  “Mother,” Patty said, and again her tone was commanding, “what trouble are they having?”

  “It was on television. I heard about it on the T.V. when I passed through the lounge downstairs.”

  “We’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon.” Unimportant now. “What kind of trouble?”

  “There is smoke. A fire. Nobody seems to know.” Mary was silent for a moment. And then, suddenly, “Bert! Bert! Please!” in a soft, urgent voice.

  “He’s going to be all right, Mother.”

  “Of course he is.” There was quiet strength in her, now for the first time showing. Mary shook her head as if to clear it, brushed back a strand of hair. “You’ve been here a long time, child.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Waiting is the hard part.” Mary smiled faintly. “It is a thing you learn.” She paused. “I will stay with him now.”

  “You can’t see him.”

  “He’ll know I’m here. You go off. Have a cup of tea, go for a walk. Come back when you’ve rested a little. I’ll be here.”