Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman Read Online Free PDF Page A

giggling discussion of the weatherbeaten tomcats patrolling the overflowing trash cans. Somewhere else in the building a party was going on, with shrieks and whoops and the thrumming of punk-rock music. And somewhere, inevitably, somebody was cooking cabbage, adding its reek to the fetid garbage stench. Siddie knew them all by their sounds and smells—but there was no way she could go out to join them.
    It had been a long day for Siddie. The Man from social services had come today, like he'd said he would, to bring her his answer, like he'd said he would, and the answer was no. There wasn't going to be any banister-lift to carry her and her wheelchair down from this second-story flat to the ground floor below. There wasn't any money for that, the Man said. Everything had been cut back, so they had to do without the frills. A banister-lift wasn't a matter of life or death, the Man had

    She stirred, got her arms under her, and laboriously shifted the upper half of her body over from one side of the cot to the other for a while. Some eighteen-year-old girls might have wept at the news the Man had brought today, but not Sidonia Harper. There was a dogged toughness about her that made even her mother wonder sometimes. As soon as she'd heard what the Man had to say, she'd started revising her thinking about more freedom, making peace with the denial. She'd learned how to make peace with a lot of things since that awful night two years before when she'd gone through the fire-escape rail and down to the concrete alley below. . . .
    So there wouldn't be any lift to carry her chair down. Well, that was all right. Someday, she thought, things were going to be different and she wasn't going to need any lift.
    8
    On a mountainside north of Leavenworth, Washington, on the night after Pamela Tate died, Frank Barrington reached the uppermost corner of the 160-acre controlled-burn area about four-thirty in the morning and turned west along the firebreak line his crew had been busy digging for the past three weeks. He turned to survey the vast burned-out area below him, parts of it

    Down the line toward him a big girl came trudging along, a huge black water pack on her back, hard hat down over her ears. She was even grimier than Frank was, smeared from top to toe with ashes and soot. She looked very tired. "Ho, Becky," Frank said as she stopped to wipe sweat off her forehead.
    "Hi," the girl said. "Larry finally got that tanker pump working again, so we've got some water up here at last. Where do you want us to put it?"
    "Those spot fires up there," Frank said. "I'll get Billy and Sue up here to help you. How does it look farther over?"
    "Not too bad," the girl said. "There was a flare-up over beyond that granite rockfall that scared me a couple of hours ago; I thought it was going to jump the line, but only a few sparks went over." She sighed wearily. "I'm just glad we finally got the bugger burned, that's all. Before we had a lightning storm and the whole mountainside went up."
    The "bugger" was 160 acres of heaped-up piles of small logs, stumps, branches and other debris left over from a logging operation two years before, baked tinder-dry by long seasons of hot summer sun and no rain—a terrible forest-fire hazard in these steep Cascade mountains until it could safely be burned out. The problem was finding the chance: after watching closely for three weeks, it had not been until 8:30 the previous evening that the humidity had finally gotten high enough to make a controlled burn possible, and Frank and his crew had made their move. As Fire Boss, it had been his responsibility to coordinate the whole operation—send out the lighting crews to touch off the heaps of rubble, keep the tanker trucks rolling to supply the pumps carrying water through hoses high up the mountainside, patrol the firelines himself for spot fires and bring in crewmen where they were needed. Now, nine hours later the acute danger was over as long as the wind didn't