Contest

'Call the fire department. But when they get here, tell them to hold off. We don't want them going in there until we've had a good look inside. I just want them here in case that fire gets out of con--'

'Hey. Hold on a minute...' Quaid called. He had wandered off down the side of the building and was now standing at the south-eastern corner.

'What is it?' Marshall said.

'What the fuck...?' Quaid disappeared down the southern side of the building.

'What is it?' Marshall followed, rounding the corner after Quaid.

Quaid was thirty yards down the southern wall, almost at the south-western corner of the building. He called back to the group. 'Special Agent Higgs, you in charge of surveillance tonight?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Tell me, did you find anybody around here earlier? Anybody near this wall?'

Higgs didn't understand what was going on. Quaid was peering at the base of the wall, at what appeared to be a small window down near the ground.

'Well -- uh -- yes, sir. Yes, we did,' Higgs said. 'We found a drunken bum asleep up against this wall not long ago.'

'Was he down near this corner? Near the window down here?' Quaid asked.

'Uh, yes. Yes he was, sir.'

'And where is this drunken bum now, Higgs?' Quaid asked, kneeling on the grass, still looking at the base of the building.

Marshall, Levine and Higgs came closer.

Higgs swallowed. 'We put him in the rotunda over there, sir.' He pointed back over his shoulder. 'I was going to call it in, but I didn't think there was any hurry.'

'Special Agent Higgs, I want you to go straight to that rotunda and find that bum for me, right now.'

Higgs hurried off immediately.

Quaid glanced up at the others as they saw what he had been looking at.

'What the...?' Levine gasped.

'Well would you look at that,' Marshall said as he saw the spiderweb of electricity that spread across the small ground-level window. Tiny shards of glass lay strewn on the grass around the base of the window.

There was nobody in sight.

Quaid leaned close to the window. It was just big enough for a man to fit through. But why would somebody break it? That would serve no purpose whatsoever.

Unless they wanted to get in...

Higgs came running back. He spoke breathlessly.

'Sir, the bum is gone.'

----ooo0ooo------

Hawkins burst through the flames and fell out of the doorway and dropped to the floor of the study hall.

He checked his body. His police trousers and parka had survived the dash through the fire intact and unharmed. But for some reason his head stung like crazy.

He reached up to touch the crown of his head and suddenly felt the searing heat.

His hair was on fire!

Hawkins frantically took off his parka and smothered the tiny flames on his head with it. The heat died down quickly, and he began breathing again.

The janitor's room was glowing bright yellow now, lighting up the study hall outside. Flames flared out through the doorway.

It wouldn't be long now, he thought.

Hawkins crawled to the side of the doorway, pushed his back up against the wall.

He only had to wait a few seconds.

The chemicals inside the janitor's room combined well. After the first aerosol can exploded in a ball of gaseous blue flame, a chain reaction of chemical explosions was set in motion.

The concrete wall behind Hawkins cracked under the weight of the shock wave as a golden fireball blasted out through the doorway, rocketing past Hawkins, setting the study hall aglow in a flash of brilliant yellow light.

Marshall, Levine and Quaid all looked up at the same time as the entire third floor of the building flared like a fiery flashbulb, lighting up the night.

Voices came in over their radios:

'--fire is spreading!--'

'--corner room just exploded--'

'Holy shit,' Levine breathed.

It sounded like thunder.

Close, booming thunder.

The whole building rocked under the weight of the explosions.

On the Second Floor of the library, Holly and Selexin reached desperately for handholds as they tried to stay on their feet.

The Second Floor of the New York State Library was comprised mainly of two large computer rooms. In the centre of each room, long wooden tables were covered with PCs. A tangle of air-conditioning units and aluminium air ducts hung from the ceiling, providing much-needed humidity control for the computers. Glass-walled reading rooms lined the perimeter of the floor.

The explosions from the Third Floor were growing in intensity, and on the Second Floor they were received with all their violent force.

The glass walls of the reading rooms shattered all around Holly and Selexin. Computers fell from the edges of the tables, crashed to the floor.

Selexin pulled Holly under one of the long tables in the centre of the floor and they huddled together, covering their ears, as the building shook and the explosions boomed and monitors and keyboards fell from the tables all around them, smashing down onto the floor.

Chaos. Absolute chaos.

In the study hall, Hawkins pressed his hands tightly against his ears as waves of flames lashed out from the doorway next to him.

Several of the L-shaped desks around him were on fire -- ignited by the initial flamethrower-like finger of fire that had blasted out from the janitor's room.

The explosions were bigger now -- bigger than he had expected them to be, bigger than any chemical fire he knew.

They were almost, well... too big.

Why had that--?

Hawkins froze. Something else must have happened. But what?

And then he saw it.

A small pipe, running horizontally, high up on the wall near the ceiling.

It ran out from the janitor's room, across the wall of the study hall -- above the northern windows -- and then, halfway across, it turned abruptly downwards and ran down to the floor, and then through the floor down to the other floors below...

A gas pipe.

There must have been a gas valve in the janitor's room that he hadn't seen. A gas water heater or a gas--

The small pipe ignited.

Hawkins watched in horror as a yellow-blue flame sped in a thin line across the pipe's horizontal length, and