They had dropped off the AP man, and Artie could talk freely. "Another thing I didn't want to say in front of him, Halmer, is the Southern angle. Those Democrats from Dixie are going to be swarming around the valley offering sites and tax write-offs and hell knows what to persuade damaged industries to relocate. This means you build up the Democratic South and drain strength out of our state. Unemployment and discontent. We're G.O.P. here, but not by such a margin that a sharp local depression couldn't put the state over the line. The cities, frankly, we lost last time but we have the counties as of now. If the valley isn't saved, Halmer, it might cost us a senator--and you know what that would mean. Knocking off Bolling and his sixteen years of seniority and the committee appointments that go with it would be a very serious thing for us nationally. I'm not exaggerating when I say that a large, prompt injection of cash is vital to everything you and I stand for." Akslund hooded his wise old eyes and nodded. CHAPTER THIRTEEN Polly Chesbro went through the ranks of litters to the one on which the burgess lay. A nurse in the pinstriped cotton fatigue uniform had shoved a thermometer under his tongue and was looking at her watch. "How is he, Lieutenant?" Polly asked. The nurse whipped out the thermometer, read it, jotted down a figure on her clipboard and said, "Holding his own. Excuse me." She shook down the thermometer, popped it into a glass that held many thermometers, picked out another one and slipped it under the tongue of the person in the next litter, a girl of ten with a dry, burning face and dry, burning eyes. In the marble lobby of the schoolhouse Mickey Groff was studying an extraordinary organization that had sprung up within a very few hours. Card tables had been set up and conference tables dragged from offices and classrooms. For an ad-hoc government with the wires out you wanted everything under one roof, in one room, instead of scattered through a town hall. When a man came to you with trouble you could fix, this way there was no phone to pick up; this way you called across the room and things happened fast. There were two main centers around the fire chief and the police chief. They retained roughly their old jurisdictions, respectively over the destructiveness of nature and the cussedness of man. While Groff watched, a woman came coolly to the fire chief in her turn to say that her undermined house was beginning to sag and she had twenty refugees. They had gone out into the street, could he find places for them? And, as an afterthought, could they do anything about the house? The fire chief called to three boy scouts, part of his combined field force and housing records. One knew a big thirteen-room place on the outskirts which, when he last checked, had only twelve people in it. Thirteen rooms. Space for twenty more. And the house?