ans, 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 skyscrapers 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--N