of the side windows
were smashed but the windshield was intact except for a small, starred
crack in the safety glass. Clear of the debris, Barney opened the
opposite door and slid in beside Johnny. Dirt spun from beneath the
wheels of the car as he slammed his foot to the floor and raced towards
the smoke column that now towered more than a mile and a half into the
air.

Beneath her protective overhang, Hetty stirred and moaned feebly. Twin
rivulets of dark blood trickled from her nostrils. Thick dust was
settling on the area and she coughed and gasped for breath.

On the opposite side of the hill, a vast, torn crater, nearly a hundred
feet across and six to ten feet deep, smoked like a stirring volcano
and gave off a strange, pungent odor of ether.

* * * * *

Johnny Culpepper's dramatic charge to the rescue was no more dramatic
than the reaction in a dozen other places in Nevada and California.
Particularly sixty miles south where a small army of military and
scientific men were preparing for an atomic underground shot when the
Circle T pickup vanished.

The shock wave rippled across the desert floor, flowed around the
mountains and tunneled into Frenchman's Flat, setting off every
shock-measuring instrument. Then came the ground wave, rolling through
the earth like a gopher through a garden. Ditto for ground-wave
measuring devices. Lastly, the sound boomed onto the startled
scientists and soldiers like the pounding of great timpani under the
vaulted dome of the burning sky.

On mountain top observation posts, technicians turned unbelieving eyes
north to the burgeoning pillar of smoke and dust, then yelped and swung
optical and electronic instruments to bear on the fantastic column.

In less than fifteen minutes, the test under preparation had been
canceled, all equipment secured and the first assault waves of
scientists, soldiers, intelligence and security men were racing north
behind white-suited and sealed radiation detection teams cradling
Geiger counters in their arms like submachine guns. Telephone lines
were jammed with calls from Atomic Energy Commission field officials
reporting the phenomena to Washington and calling for aid from West
Coast and New Mexico AEC bases. Jet fighters at Nellis Air Force base
near Las Vegas, were scrambled and roared north over the ground
vehicles to report visual conditions near the purple pillar of power.

The Associated Press