As she spoke, I realized that whatever the reasons, I really was the
one person still breathing and still in Shuteley who knew anything
important about Snow White and the giants. Nobody but me had paid any
particular attention to them in The Copper Beech. Gil had noticed the
peculiarity about the coins, but he'd kept it to himself and now it would
be impossible to prove anything. The luxon suits had made people stare,
but by this time everybody but me -- and Tommy -- must have decided
they'd been seeing things.
Apart from that, Greg had talked only to me, and Miranda had talked
only to me. If I were suddenly transported to Parliament or Scotland
Yard or the FLAG head office, I couldn't hope to convince the people
there that the giants were anything but a party of kids in a summer
camp. Of course there would be oddities to excite curiosity, even official
curiosity. None of the campers would ever be traced -- they'd disappear,
with their camp, into thin air. Other witnesses would confirm the giants'
abnormal proportions. And surely I couldn't be the only person to glimpse
a giant in a fire suit? But these would be only enigmas. There would be
enough to make it appear there must be something in my story. Not enough
to prove any significant part of it.
"Yes, I see," I said. "But why me? Because I'm not going to be around,
is that it?"
"That's not the reason," she said, "though just now I can't see how
you and Dina can survive. One of you, yes. There's one suit. Not both,
any way I can figure . . . "
We had time to work out something about that. It was still a long time
to dawn.
"Why me?" I insisted.
We had been standing talking, Miranda still in her suit, the goggles
at her neck, the hood over her head. Now she started to take it off,
turning away.
But almost at once she turned back. She had made up her mind.
"Val," she said, "remember the first time I saw you? I knew you. I'd seen
photographs of you. And I was careless enough to show it. After that,
I spoke to you. So did Greg. We both wanted to meet you, to make up our
minds about you."
"So I'm famous?" I said. "Important?"
"Not important, Val. Not famous. Infamous. You're the villain of the
Shuteley fire."
The calm, factual statement shook me. I must have gone white. "I --
I started it?"
"No, no, not that. History didn't need that to make you the villain. The
scapegoat, if you like. After this there's going to be a new word in the
language -- mather. Not a capital Mather -- you don't talk of a capital
Boycott either. Just mather -- meaning a catastrophe following the most
incredible incompetence."
"Me?" I said stupidly.
"Oh, it isn't fair, of course. I know that. But history often isn't
fair. An inhuman monster becomes a national hero. A clever man who made
one wrong decision goes down as a jackass, a blunderer. A fool who did
one right thing by mistake is held up for all time as the personification
of wisdom. You . . . "
"Well, what did I do?"
"Nothing," she said gently. "I said it isn't fair. You'll be blamed
for what you did do, what you didn't do, and history will accept
wild accusations as truth. You'll even be confused with old Amos
What's-his-name, who died long before you were born, and blamed for what
he did. He started a fire or two, you know. The general impression of Val
Mathers is going to be that he was completely heartless and unscrupulous,
and stupid as well. He bribed and lied his way to control of all insurance
in Shuteley and then he set fire to the town -- "
"But this is absolutely impossible!" I exclaimed. "History can't -- "
"Well, there I misled you. Real history, the history of the historians,
will get things much straighter. Real history is fairer to Captain Bligh,
too, than the legend. The historians know you're not old Amos and didn't
start the fire and lots of other facts like that. It's a fact, too,
that it would hardly be to your advantage to be head of insurance and
then start the fire. But it's not facts that go into legend."
She smiled slightly. "You may, now that I've warned you, be able to do
something to protect yourself. That's if you do get out . . . "
"I most certainly will," I said warmly. "If what you say is true, there
must be some villain in the piece, and if it's not me -- "
"Oh, there you're wrong again, Val. It
is
you."
"I thought you said -- "
She sighed and said: "We're in the same boat, you and I. You're going to
be a scapegoat, and so am I. You're partly to blame, and I'm partly to
blame. You for the fire, I for the failure of my mission here . . . Wait
till I get this suit off, and I'll tell you the whole story."
She took off her fire-suit with obvious relief. It was cool in the stasis,
but until she took off the suit she was insulated from coolness as well
as heat. There were beads of moisture on her smooth midriff and her bare
abdomen glittered with droplets.
A large multicolored bruise under her right breast showed where Greg had
hit her -- carelessly, mistakenly, for there was scarcely any other part
of her body where such a blow would have done less damage.
I wanted to ask what had happened to her and where she got the suit,
but I refrained. I'd hear in due course.
She was going to tell me about herself and the giants and Jota and
the fire.
She told me.
Chapter Nine
The fire started in the stack room of the public library over an hour
after the library was closed and shuttered for the night. This was
(would be?) established later from evidence pieced together too late to
be of more than academic interest. Presumably an assistant who wasn't
supposed to be smoking at all had thrown down the butt. It was going to
be assumed that this assistant was one Maggie Hobson, an elderly library
assistant who smoked furtively and incessantly, and it was a convenient
assumption -- because Maggie Hobson, who lived alone in a single room
near the library, did not survive the fire.
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.