Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon Page A

Robin against his coat. “The baby,” she croaked. “Get him out of this smoke.”
    He grunted and suddenly Robin was gone from her arms. “You all right?” He was peering into the black and the smoke.
    “Take him out,” she said. “Then I’ll want your coat.”
    He went out. Miss Schmidt could hear Robin’s clear voice: “You a fireman?”
    “I sure am,” rumbled the man. “Want to see my fire engine? Then sit right there on the grass and wait one second. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    The coat flew through the doorway.
    “Got it?”
    “Thank you.” She put the huge garment on and went out. The fireman waited there, again holding Robin in his arms. “You all right, ma’am?”
    Her lungs were an agony and she had burns on her feet and shoulders. Her hair was singed and one of her hands was flayed across its back. “I’m just fine,” she said.
    They began to walk up the road. Robin squirmed around in the man’s arms and popped his head out to look back at the brightly burning house.
    “ ’Bye, Boff,” he said happily, and then gave his heart to the fire engine.
XII
    “Mother, the bread’s burning!”
    Mary Haunt opened her eyes to an impossible glare and a great roaring. She shrieked and flailed out blindly, as if she could frighten it away, whatever it was; and then she came enough to her senses to realize that she still sat in her chair by the window, and that the house was on fire. She leaped to her feet, sending the heavy chair skittering across the room where it toppled over against the clothespress. As it always did when it was bumped, the clothespress calmly opened its doors.
    But Mary Haunt didn’t wait for that or anything else. She struck the screen with the flat of her hand. It popped out easily, and she hit the ground almost at the same time it did. She ran off a few steps, and then, like Lot’s wife, curiosity overtook her and she stopped. She turned around in fascination.
    Great wavering flames leapt fifty and sixty feet in the air and all the windows were alight. From the town side she could hear the shriek and clang of fire engines, and the windows and doors opening, and running feet. But the biggest sound of all was the roar of the fire, like a giant’s blowtorch.
    She looked back at her own window. She could see into the room easily, the chair on its side, the bed with its chenille top-spread sproutingmeasles of spark and char, and the gaping doors of the— “My clothes! My clothes!”
    Furiously she ran back to the window, paused a moment in horror to see fire run along the picture-molding of the inside wall like a nightmare caterpillar. “My clothes,” she whispered. She didn’t make much money at her job, but every cent that wasn’t used in bed and board went on her back. She mouthed something, and from her throat came that animal growl of hers; she put both hands on the sill and leaped, and tumbled back into the house.
    She was prepared for the heat but not for that intensity of light, and the noise was worst of all. She recoiled from it and stood for a moment with her hands over her eyes, swaying with the impact of it. Then she ground her teeth and made her way across to the clothespress. She swept open the bottom drawer and turned out the neatly folded clothes. Down at the bottom was a cotton print dress, wrapped around a picture frame. She lifted it out and hugged it, and ran across to the window with it. She leaned far out and dropped it gently on the grass, then turned back in again.
    The far wall, by the door, began to buckle high up, and suddenly there was fire up there. The corner near the ceiling toppled into the room with a crash and a cloud of white dust and greasy-looking smoke, and then the whole wall fell, not toward her, but away, so that her room now included a section of the corridor outside. As the dust settled somebody, a man, came roaring inarticulately and battering through the rubble. She could not know who it was. He apparently meant to travel the