In its pure state, natural gas has no odor—its unpleasant stench has to be added, to make gas leaks easy to smell. Few Topsiders had their olfactory sense more attuned to changes in atmosphere than those whose jobs took them beneath the city streets, for down below, a keen sense of smell could mean the difference between life and death.
Shortly before Lindsay’s walls rattled and her drains belched, a dozen tireless teams of city workers had begun to break through the Downside barricades, into tunnels that seemed remarkably well maintained—tunnels that seemed to lead inward toward some other place entirely. Just as their curiosity began to take hold, drawing their thoughts deeper into the mysteries that lay ahead, their noses caught the unmistakable smell of leaking gas. When they were faced with a maddened scurry of rats racing past to seek better air, they didn’t wait to find the source of the gas leak. Each and every team turned tail, abandoning their curiosity along with their equipment, and joined the rat race in a mad dash for the surface.
As they ran, they heard the gas ignite somewhere deep down, and they could hear the series of explosions drawing nearer, moving just behind the speed of sound. By the time they emerged into daylight, they knew there was no time to do anything but dive for cover.
Few people, however, had a better view of the catastrophe than Becky Peckerling—whose eyewitness account would make her the most popular girl at Icharus Academy for some time to come.
Becky was making her way from her West Side apartment to her Saturday violin lesson, fuming over the fact that this utility crisis didn’t come close enough to hell freezing over for her instructor to cancel the lesson. Around her, traffic police had replaced the unlit streetlights. Word was that traffic was at a standstill around the city’s bridges and tunnels, where impatient citizens were making hasty escapes. But here, on the West Side, traffic was actually less busy than on a typical Saturday.
The policeman had just blown his whistle and signaled for her to cross the street, when the ground began to shake with the force of an earthquake. All at once a blast of light and heat hit her from the right, and she turned to see, several blocks away, a cloud of fire erupt from a construction site, sending dump trucks and all sorts of other heavy equipment flying through the air like Tonka toys.
That’s the Aqueduct Shaft! she thought to herself just as the sound from the blast hit her like a sonic boom, rattling her braces and purging all thoughts from her mind. She stood there in the middle of the street, watching the fireball rise and facing an approaching procession of exploding manhole covers, which popped from the ground like corks from champagne as the underground shock wave moved closer. Then, when she looked down, she noticed that her own feet were standing squarely on a manhole cover.
One block away another manhole blew, and then another half a block away. Needless to say, Becky was not in an enviable position—and although her instinct for survival was less developed than some, she did manage to sidestep off the man hole cover just before it blew sky-high with a fiery burst that melted the nylon off the right sleeve of her jacket. As she fell to the ground, she caught sight of that manhole cover flipping through the air like a two-hundred-pound coin, and she knew it had to come down somewhere. She got up screaming, convinced that no matter where she ran, that manhole cover would land squarely on her head, as punishment for all her years of prattling chatter. When the manhole landed a healthy twenty feet away, she was relieved, but also a bit disappointed that the Powers-That-Be did not find her worthy of smiting in a freak accident.
Then, in the silence just after the explosion, it began to rain—but it wasn’t the kind of rain that any weatherman would predict. It pummeled the streets around Becky with a jangling clatter, and shone in the air as it fell, like shimmering bits of sun. It was more like hail. It struck her head and arms, stinging like snaps from a rubber band, so she held her violin case above her head to protect herself from the falling sky.
Around her the street began to glimmer bronze, and she dared to reach out to catch one of these hailstones in her hand only to discover that it wasn’t hail at all. “Hmm,” said Becky, “that’s odd.”
It appeared that today’s prevailing weather condition called for only the sturdiest of umbrellas—because today, it was raining subway tokens.