Yet everywhere outside there was fire. The towering glow in the east--that would be the City, fifty miles away. Destruction and confusion there would be unimaginable. Nearer at hand, trees were aflame--leaves and branches that minutes ago had been cool with greenness now blazed wildly. Mixed with the tumult of voices was the clang of robot fire units. Eddie rushed to the radio and turned it on, as he had been taught to do in emergencies. You listened; you obeyed directions. "... lunar blowup," someone was saying. "Follow the usual precautions and measures for radioactive contamination and flesh burns. Rescue and relief units are already in action. Fortunately most of our buildings are not made of combustible materials...." For minutes Eddie was furiously busy, rubbing special salves and lotions into the skin of his entire body. Then, dressed in fresh clothes, he and his mother just stared out of the windows for a while. Outside, metal shapes were at work. Science and civilization were working efficiently to recapture their balance after an upset that might have been the end. Eddie and his mother explored the house and found it mostly intact. Then incident piled on incident in quick succession. The first of these began with a whimper at the door. Masked with respirators against possible radioactive taints in the outside air, they opened it. A blackened thing without eyes dragged itself inside, quivered once, and lay still. It was death among supposed immortals. The passing of a dachshund called Schnitz. Eddie was dazed. Child-grief or man-grief had no chance to come to him then. Events moved too fast. There was too much to be done. A half-dozen people in radiation armor came into the house. At once it was converted into a first-aid station. Hard law and hard drills, blueprinted long before for disaster, came into play. Eddie's mother joined the crew. Nor was he left out of it. There was coffee for him to prepare in the kitchen, and rugs and furniture to be cleared away, and equipment to be set up. He saw blood and death, and hysteria-twisted faces. He saw glinting, complex instruments and apparatus, as the therapeutic methods of the age were applied. There were blood pumps that could serve as hearts and machines to duplicate the functions of kidneys and lungs. There were devices to teleport scattered body cells from a dozen healthy individuals, converting them briefly into mobile energy, and then back into living tissue in the body of an injured person. Mostly the maimed and burned remained stolid and calm. Luxury had not weakened them. They, too, had known their era and had had some preparation.