Snow White and the Giants

by J. T. McIntosh

  The stack room, with just enough ventilation to act as an efficient furnace, generated such heat that when at last the fire burst its prison, it was an explosion of flame. The whole library was soon an inferno.

  The fire grew gross in secret by one of the many quirks of chance that enabled the Shuteley fire to become what it did. Most public libraries are in the town's main street; they have huge uncurtained windows and a fire inside would be spotted as soon as books started to blaze.

  But this library, though in the center of town, was just off High Street and presented a blank Victorian-quasi-Greek pillared facade to the world. The interior lighting was by skylights facing the other way.

  And the warehouse next door, with the court behind, was in process of changing hands. It was blank, shuttered, empty. There was little in the warehouse to help the fire -- and nothing to hinder it.

  So fingers of flame sped covertly through the warehouse to the timbered houses beyond, through the silent court to the rear of the shops in High Street, through a church hall to a tire store.

  There were automatic fire alarms in the library, connected to the fire station and set to go off at a certain temperature. Something went wrong; the connection was broken without setting off the alarm. Even fire alarms are not always wholly fireproof.

  Never before had a fire in the middle of an inhabited town, and not even a sleeping town, for all this was around 9:30, gained such a hold unknown to anybody. At other times and places something would have been seen -- but this blaze, grew behind blank stone and shuttered doors.

  Of course it wasn't long anyway before the secret was out -- but by that time the library, the tire store, six shops, four or five houses, the inner court, the church hall, the warehouse and a filling station announced the news simultaneously with leaping, roaring flame almost beyond hope of control.

  If there had been firemen on the spot within five minutes, they wouldn't have known where to start.

  But that was another of the-laughable tricks fate played that night . . . At 9:35, a matter of minutes before Shuteley knew it had a fire of its own, the fire units were dashing to a farm blaze three miles south of the town. Not all of them -- not for another couple of minutes. Then a barn blaze was reported, also south of the town, and Shuteley was denuded of all official fire-fighting potential.

  The irony was that the last tender crossed the New Bridge seconds after the discovery of the Shuteley fire . . . and it left from the fire station across the road from the library.

  Mere seconds after the first shouts of "Fire! Fire!" the blaze had swallowed the town's telephone exchange and the fire station radio.

  So far there was not a single human casualty. And perhaps, if everybody had stayed calm and collected, there might not have been any. Well, perhaps a few people in the nearest houses, those which were pretty comprehensively on fire before the first alarm, must inevitably have been trapped. But others, some distance and several minutes from the heart of the blaze, should have lived, and didn't . . .

  Wood smoke swept the streets. People coughed and ran. A few brave souls went the wrong way, trying to save wives, children, parents who might or might not have already escaped. Heat struck them down, for this was the hottest of fires. It wasn't a creeping, insidious fire. It was a roaring, searing, all-engulfing tiger of a fire. A man took three steps towards it and never had a chance to retrace them. Heat lashed him, blinded him, struck him down and boiled him.

  Most people had the sense to go the right way. And they lived. Fierce as it was, this fire couldn't race like a prairie fire. It had to leap from house to house, taking hold -- taking hold, true, in about a quarter of the usual time, yet still needing time.

  And the people in the streets could outrun it with no trouble at all. They could even give the alarm as they went, if it didn't take too long . . .

  Children died because they were too slow. Most of the younger children were asleep, which put them at a big initial disadvantage. They were difficult to rouse; blazing towns were outwith their experience; they were inclined to waste time over such luxuries as screaming for parents, putting on clothes, going in search of favorite toys.

  Old people died because they wouldn't go without savings, mementos, insurance policies, pension books, framed photographs -- and often because they wouldn't leave without locking the front door. If they'd forgotten the keys, they'd go back for them.

  Others died because they couldn't believe it. Fires in towns are put out. You watch them as you watch workmen excavating. It's safe across the road. Other people are nearer than you are. These people couldn't believe that this was something different, something that was going to go down in the history books. They had the chance to run for their lives, and they didn't take it.

  They thought other chances would come, and they didn't.

  The fire waited for nobody. Given such a splendid start, it spread out rapidly in all directions, reaching the river very quickly, because High Street was only about a hundred yards from the river.

  Hardly anybody, as it happened, fled across any of the bridges. They were forced east or west by the fire's dash to the river, or, if they had a chance, north. And the fire, reaching the river, proceeded to spread all the way along it.

  That the firemen weren't even there was an irony, after the first few minutes, rather than a significant factor. They might certainly have helped in giving the warning and in the withdrawal from the town. They could not have done anything that mattered in putting the fire out.

  Every man, woman and child who looked into the yellow maw of the blaze and decided at once to get the hell out of this lived to tell the tale. Those who died were the people who for one reason or another never had a chance; those who made up their minds, erroneously, that there was no desperate rush; the heroes and heroines; and those who thought that there might be an opportunity of making something out of the disaster. It was a grim night for looters, who gambled on having time that they didn't get.

  In addition, there was Trinity Hall.

  I should have known at once when I came on the mounds of skeletons that this must be the site of Trinity Hall. Shuteley had various other hails, but only one with two upstairs assembly rooms where hundreds of people could gather.

  On the first of the upper floors a pensioners' party was being held. Above, a school dance was in full swing.

  The stairway, though narrow and wooden, was adequate. The trouble was, by mutual agreement the old and the young people had shut themselves off from each other. Neither wanted to have anything to do with the other. Everyone who was coming was present, and both halls were firmly barred to gatecrashers or others who weren't wanted.

  The fire raced past the hall on two sides and closed in. Nobody escaped -- the whole thing was too quick. The fire-escape, ancient as it was, was sound enough. But if anyone ever got to it (and perhaps nobody did), it would have offered a grim, hopeless choice -- the fire inside, the fire outside, the fire all around, the fire beyond the fire.

  Because of the noise in both halls and those two barred, Keep Out doors, in the few vital minutes when escape would have been possible, nobody knew there was anything to escape from. People running before the fire in the streets outside were shouting, screaming, banging on doors -- but not bursting in, dashing upstairs and battering on inside doors.

  Brave, foolhardly people elsewhere took heroic chances to spread the alarm. But no one happened to think of Trinity Hall . . . no one who was in the right place at the right time to do anything about it.

  The fire cut the telephones almost at once, but the electricity failed in only a few places early on. Perhaps it was a blessing that lights stayed on; their failure would have added to the panic of old and young people.

  Yet if the lights had gone out when all phones ceased to operate, people who got no warning until it was too late would have been alerted. At the least, television and radio would have gone off.

  In Trinity Hall, in particular, the sudden failure of all lights would ha
ve brought both parties to a sudden halt. But the lights stayed on.

  So 61 pensioners and 139 boys and girls between thirteen and nineteen died in Trinity Hall. Exacty two hundred. And that grisly piece of the disaster more than anything else, Miranda told me, was the thing which was going to make my name stink forever.

  I didn't attempt to interrupt as she told me what she knew, which was less than I'd have expected. The giants didn't really know everything; their remarkable knowledge which had so impressed me on severai occasions was merely a small collection of isolated bits of exact information. Miranda, who knew so much about me, hadn't known of the existence of Dina. Perhaps, in the world in which the giants played no part, Dina became worse, had to go into a home, and was not mentioned in any accounts that survived.

  Miranda did not, after all, have to do much explaining to show me how I could become the villain of the Shuteley fire. As she spoke, I oouid see this for myself. And I felt cold horror at the partial justice of it.

  I wasn't really a villain. I had done nothing stupid, immoral or illegal. And yet . . .

  FLAG was to all intents and purposes the only insurance company in Shuteley. Practically all pressure exerted on traders, farmers, firms, factories and ordinary householders to make fire less likely was exerted by FLAG -- by me. I didn't personally inspect anything, of course. But I was responsible. If there was blame, it was laid at my door.

  And there was going to be blame. After such a catastrophe, millions of people all over the world were going to feel that such a thing couldn't happen unless someone had been criminally irresponsible.

  There were fire prevention officers, too, but not one based in Shuteley. Anyway, Shuteley didn't have a bad fire record. Advice on fire prevention and official pressure for better standards usually followed incidents which showed the need for them.

  We were the people most responsible for fire prevention. And we were slack . . .

  FLAG head office was pleased with Shuteley. The directors liked having a town in their pocket, insurance-wise. As local manager, I was expected to carry on the good work. Shuteley made more money for the firm than any other town four times its size, simply because of the volume of business. And the claims record was highly satisfactory. The office ran smoothly. But after all, the directors liked Shuteley first and foremost became it was the one place where the company was supreme. Shuteley made them feel good. It was unique.

  There was no actual directive, but I was well aware that I must not lose business, must not allow any other insurance company a toehold. This meant that I wasn't supposed to be too hard to please. It would never do if we wouldn't insure a property and some other company would; if we insisted on certain fire safeguards and the other company waived them; if we set a higher premium than the other company.

  So, while our methods in Shuteley were not exactly bent, they had always been yielding. No doubt some of the town's smarter business men knew our position and cunningly took advantage of it. We wanted to insure them, and prestige mattered even more than profit. We could easily be maneuvered into giving a better deal than anyone else. We could also be persuaded to be satisfied with lower standards of safety than anyone else.

  No, I hadn't been careless, I hadn't been crooked. I had merely been more easily satisfied than any insurance manager anywhere else would have been, with full backing from my firm.

  But my firm's backing was going to fade away after this, after the staggering claims that would be made. FLAG would have to pay, in effect, the cost of the town, plus the insured value of the lives lost. Although the bill wouldn't kill the firm, it would make it very sick indeed. And instead of being the blue-eyed boy who kept a whole town in the company's pocket, I'd be the crass idiot whose incompetent methods were partly or even wholly responsible for the biggest pay-out ever made by any single insurance company in the world.

  Also the firm's backing would fade away the moment there was a hint of public concern about the branch's methods.

  Naturally the firm had known what I was doing, and approved. But that was before the Great Fire of Shuteley.

  Oh, I could see it all. People like to have someone to blame. And I was just sufficiently involved to be a perfect choice.

  "The most unfair bit," Miranda said quietly, "is the way Trinity Hall will be blamed on you. A fire officer called Christie inspected it a year ago and reported . . . "

  I groaned. I hadn't exactly forgotten the incident, I had merely failed to fit it in place. I knew what was coming. "You saw Christie and showed him your own inspector's report on Trinity Hall. This said that although the building wasn't up to the highest fire-prevention standards, and had a big proportion of wood in the structure, and old wood at that, although the situation left a great deal to be desired, all fire-safety conditions were fully met -- "

  "That's enough," I said. It was more than that: it was too much.

  I wanted to hear about other things, no longer that.

  "What happened to you?" I asked.

  "Greg hit hard," she said, "but not hard enough. I'm small, yet I'm pretty tough. I came to in the river, choking, and let it carry me almost to the blockage. Then I swam ashore. I had a suit hidden in some bushes as a safeguard -- it wasn't entirely a surprise to me, what Greg did."

  "What I can't understand," I began, and stopped. I'd been going to say I couldn't understand why Greg was allowed to sabotage everything that the others were trying to do, whatever that was, why Miranda and the rest of the giants had ever thought for a moment it was worth going ahead with their scheme while Greg was along with them, wrecking every move they made, and in the end trying to kill Miranda and failing only because in his vicious anger he preferred to lash out rather than make quite sure of her.

  But that was only one of the things I couldn't understand. The others rose up and silenced me, tongue-tying me because I couldn't make up my mind which to press first.

  Miranda, not surprisingly, was no longer immaculate. The two minute pink garments she wore were merely utilitarian, totally dissimilar from the subtle, carefully designed bikini she had worn that afternoon. It was probable that she and the giants had worn the briefs under their suits simply to avoid startling too much the Shuteley people who were to see them.

  She was scratched and bruised, apart from the huge discoloration where Greg had hit her. And seeing her as she was then reminded me of the impossible glossiness of all the giants.

  "You do come from the future," I said.

  "What you call the future," she agreed. "What we know is the present."

  "That's a play on words."

  "No. Time doesn't happen all at once. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on . . . The date is 2097."

  " Your date."

  "No. The date. At this moment, it's April 17, 2097 -- a Wednesday, if you care to check. What comes after April 17, 2097, is the future, completely inaccessible. Before 2097 is the partly accessible past."

  Her certainty irritated me. "This is what makes all you people cruel, inhuman -- the delusion that your own period is the only one that matters."

  She was as certain as the torturers of the Inquisition. "It's April 17, 2097."

  "Then I was born to no real existence? I live out my life in the shadows, dead from the moment I was born?"

  That made her pause for a moment. "The metaphysical problems," she said at last, "are far beyond me. Perhaps you lived out your life in the second half of the twentieth century . . . perhaps you're restored to play it out again at the end of the twenty-first. I can't tell you the truth from your angle. All I know is that the pointer of time stands at 2097 . . . "

  When I tried to argue, she went on: "Val, just think. I was born in 2067, and I'm here. Time must have reached . . . "

  So she was thirty. It was surprising, in a way disappointing. She could have been eighteen or eighty, from what I had known, guessed and imagined. Thirty seemed an indeterminate age for Miranda. It seemed an anticlimax.

  She went on trying to convi
nce me that time had always reached a definite point, just as a clock had to register something, even if it had stopped. The date, the vital date, the only date that had any life or meaning, was April 17, 2097. Anything before that was the past, anything in front of it was the future.

  Presently she realized she was wasting her time trying to convince me, and abandoned the attempt.

  "It doesn't matter," she sighed, sitting down and leaning back against the stasis machine. "You want to know, but you don't want to know. You think you want the truth. All you want, of course, is what you want to hear."