The Pathless on Paths---------Chapter V part 4(6)

They left the garage and embraced the wind. Close to the blast crater indeed! Karrson thought. As they walked alone the street in a file, they could see the lip of the crater yonder in front of them. A huge and wide pit in the earth the blast had made, and at that very lip were the roots of the great pillar of dust. It rotated slowly, the fine dust making it impossible to see inside. They saw only an uneven a jagged wall moving slowly before them. The low rumble became nearly unbearable, if not for the headphones attached to their gas mask, which controlled the environmental sounds to a clear but not unbearably loud volume. This did not change the the fact that the rumble shook their guts with it. Karrson felt sick.

“It seems near, but it is in fact still far away enough that we are safe,” Emmerich said in the radio, so that all of them could hear clearly thanks to their quite multifunctional gas mask, and he would not have to shout over the howling wind. “Distances here can be deceiving. Good thing though, that D.L.s seldom appear in places which the Distortion Radiation is so overwhelmingly strong.” That was true, for a modified Geiger counter, now tuned to measure Distortion Radiation, clicked and rattled furiously. This, perhaps, contributed also to that which made Karrson feel sick.