Metafire

The Marines were adept at the Subterranean TV. Jill handled looking. Jack handled navigating. He hypothesized where to look. The Marines placed out the subterranean TV sensor disks, and Jill looked down into the rubble. They looked for two hours and sat down, in a pocket of low radiation, for water and lunch.

"Jack, I don't think we are finding the right place. The building is almost smeared across the streets here. The second floor that Dr. Miller was on could be five hundred yards from its original location."

"Then Jack saw a piece of metal about five feet away. It had the label, "207," Dr. Miller's room number. It was also metal and probably highly radioactive. "Look over here. Here is a room number, and I think that's the end of a door. Over here guys."

The Marines proceeded to quickly place an array of disks around the "207" and Jill walked over it. Then she said, "I see it! Well, I see a computer. Yes! It's an Alpha all right. I can see the shape and the screen. The screen was crushed. It's right down here, about five feet down. Just concrete and a few wires. Not much metal. We can dig here."

The Captain signalled his guys to clear out an area for digging. Then he got a power hammer from the helicopter. This was no ordinary power hammer. It popped the surface in loud cracks, and concrete and stone flew out in a jet in front. The effect was like a snow plow but on concrete not snow. Within thirty minutes they were down nearly five feet. They placed a few Subterranean TV disks about in the hole, and blew away the surface until it showed the metal of the Alpha workstation. At this point, three Marines got into the hole and pitched out pieces of concrete and stone. Then, out of the hole, came the DEC Alpha. On its crushed front was the lettering, "kkm.math.rockefeller.edu." This was Kevin Miller's machine and the radiation was low. This thing was buried with five feet of concrete and stone between it and the fiery outside of the collapsing Big Apple. The crew quickly collected all the stuff together, and they hustled Jack and Jill back on board the helicopter. A military jet took them to a secure installation at Los Alamos where John Ferguson was waiting.