The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (23 page)

Hubble stared at his pad. “It all fits in. Yes, it all fits in.”

“What do you make of it, Doctor?” asked Crisci anxiously. “That bomb went off over Middletown, even though it didn’t hurt us. Yet it’s as though all the world outside Middletown has been silenced!”

Kenniston, cold from what he had seen in Hubble’s face, waited for the senior scientist to tell them what he knew or thought. But the phone rang suddenly with strident loudness.

It was the intercom from the watchman at the gate. Hubble picked it up. After a minute he said, “Yes, let him come in.” He hung up. “It’s Johnson. You know, the electrician who did some installations for us. He lives out on the edge of town. He told the watchman that was why he had to see me—because he lives on the edge of town.”

Johnson, when he came, was a man in the grip of a fear greater than Kenniston had even begun to imagine, and he was almost beyond talking. “I thought you might know,” he said to Hubble. “It seems like somebody’s got to tell me what’s happened, or I’ll lose my mind. I’ve got a cornfield, Mr. Hubble. It’s a long field, and then there’s a fence row, and my neighbor’s barn beyond it.”

He began to tremble, and Hubble said, “What about your cornfield?”

“Part of it’s gone,” said Johnson, “and the fence row, and the barn… Mr. Hubble, they’re all gone, everything…”

“Blast effect,” said Hubble gently. “A bomb hit here a little while ago, you see.”

“No,” said Johnson. “I was in London last war, I know what blast can do. This isn’t destruction. It’s…” He sought for a word, and could not find it. “I thought you might know what it is.”

Kenniston’s chill premonition, the shapeless growing terror in him, became too evil to be borne. He said, “I’m going out and take a look.”

Hubble glanced at him and then nodded, and rose to his feet, slowly, as though he did not want to go but was forcing himself. He said, “We can see everything from the water tower, I think—that’s the highest point in town. You keep trying to get through, Crisci.”

Kenniston walked with him out of the Lab grounds, and across Mill Street and the cluttered railroad tracks to the huge, stilt-legged water tower of Middletown. The air had grown colder. The red sunshine had no warmth in it, and when Kenniston took hold of the iron rungs of the ladder to begin the climb, they were like bars of ice. He followed Hubble upward, keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating soles of Hubble’s shoes. It was a long climb. They had to stop to rest once. The wind blew harder the higher they got, and it had a dry musty taint in it that made Kenniston think of the air that blows from deep rock tombs with dust of ages in them.

They came out at last on the railed platform around the big, high tank. Kenniston looked down on the town. He saw knots of people gathered on the corners, and the tops of cars, a few of them moving slowly but most of them stopped and jamming the streets. There was a curious sort of silence.

Hubble did not bother to look at the town, except for a first brief glance that took it all in, the circumference of Middletown with all its buildings standing just as they always had, with the iron Civil War soldier still stiffly mounting guard on the Square, and the smoke still rising steadily from the stacks of the mills. Then he looked outward. He did not speak, and presently Kenniston’s eyes were drawn also to look beyond the town.

He looked for a long time before it began to penetrate. His retinas relayed the image again and again, but the brain recoiled from its task of making sense out of that image, that unbelievable, impossible… No. It must be dust, or refraction, or an illusion created by the dusky red sunlight, anything but truth. There could not, by any laws known to Creation, be a truth like this one!

The whole countryside around Middletown was gone. The fields, the green, flat fields of the Middle West, and the river, and the streams, and the old scattered farms—they were all gone, and it was a completely different and utterly alien landscape that now stretched outside the town.

Rolling, ocher-yellow plains, sad and empty, lifted toward a ridge of broken hills that had never been there before. The wind blew over that barren, lifeless world, stirring the ocher weeds, lifting heavy little clouds of dust and dropping them back again to earth. The Sun peered down like a great dull eye with lashes of writhing fire, and the glimmering stars swung solemn in the sky, and all of them, the Earth, the stars, the Sun, had a look of death about them, a stillness and a waiting, a remoteness that had nothing to do with men or with anything that lived.

Kenniston gripped the rail tightly, feeling all reality crumbling away beneath him, searching frantically for an explanation, for any rational explanation, of that impossible scene.

“The bomb—did it somehow blast the countryside out there, instead of Middletown?”

“Would it take away a river, and bring instead those hills and that yellow scrub?” said Hubble. “Would any bomb-blast do that?”

“But for God’s sake, then what—”

“It hit us, Kenniston. It went off right over Middletown, and it did something…” He faltered, and then said, “Nobody really knew what a super-atomic bomb would do. There were logical theories and assumptions about it, but nobody really knew anything except that the most violent concentrated force in history would be suddenly released. Well, it was released, over Middletown. And it was violent. So violent that…”

He stopped, again, as though he could not quite muster up the courage to voice the certainty that was in him. He gestured at the dusky sky.

“That’s our Sun, our own Sun—but it’s old now, very old. And that Earth we see out there is old too, barren and eroded and dying. And the stars.… You looked at the stars, Ken, but you didn’t see them. They’re different, the constellations distorted by the motions of the stars, as only millions of years could distort them.”

Kenniston whispered, “Millions of years? Then you think that the bomb…” He stopped, and he knew now how Hubble had felt. How did you say a thing that had never been said before?

“Yes, the bomb,” said Hubble. “A force, a violence, greater than any ever known before, too great to be confined by the ordinary boundaries of matter, too great to waste its strength on petty physical destruction. Instead of shattering buildings, it shattered space and time.”

Kenniston’s denial was a hoarse cry. “Hubble, no! That’s madness! Time is absolute—”

Hubble said, “You know it isn’t. You know from Einstein’s work that there’s no such thing as time by itself, that instead there is a space-time continuum. And that continuum is curved, and a great enough force could hurl matter from one part of the curve to another.”

He raised a shaking hand toward the deathly, alien landscape outside the town.

“And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into this dying, future Earth!”

The rest of the staff was waiting for them when they came back into the Lab grounds. A dozen men, ranging in age from Crisci to old Beitz, standing shivering in the chill red sunlight in front of the building. Johnson was with them, waiting for his answer. Hubble looked at him, and at the others. He said, “I think we’d better go inside.”

They did not ask the questions that were clamoring inside them. Silently, with the jerky awkward movements of men strung so taut that their reflex centers no longer function smoothly, they followed Hubble through the doorway. Kenniston went with them, but not all the way. He turned aside, toward his own office, and said, “I’ve got to find out if Carol is all right.”

Hubble said sharply. “Don’t tell her, Ken. Not yet.”

“No,” said Kenniston. “No, I won’t.”

He went into the small room and closed the door. The telephone was on his desk, and he reached for it, and then he drew his hand away. The fear had altered now into a kind of numbness, as though it were too large to be contained within a human body and had ebbed away, carrying with it all the substances of strength and will as water carries sand. He looked at the black, familiar instrument and thought how improbable it was that there should still be telephones, and fat books beside them with quantities of names and numbers belonging to people who had lived once in villages and nearby towns, but who were not there any more, not since—how long? An hour or so, if you figured it one way. If you figured it another…

He sat down in the chair behind the desk. He had done a lot of hard work sitting in that chair, and now all that work had ceased to matter. Quite a lot of things had ceased to matter. Plans, and ideas, and where you were going to go on your honeymoon, and exactly where you wanted to live, and in what kind of a house. Florida and California and New York were words as meaningless as “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” They were gone, the times and the places, and there wasn’t anything left out of them but Carol herself, and maybe even Carol wasn’t left, maybe she’d been out with her aunt for a little drive in the country, and if she wasn’t in Middletown when it happened she’s gone, gone, gone…

He took the phone in both hands and said a number over and over into it. The operator was quite patient with him. Everybody in Middletown seemed to be calling someone else, and over the roar and click of the exchange and the ghostly confusion of voices he heard the pounding of his own blood in his ears and he thought that he did not have any right to want Carol to be there, and he ought to be praying that she had gone somewhere, because why would he want anybody he loved to have to face what was ahead of them. And what was ahead of them? How could you guess which one, out of all the shadowy formless horrors that might be…

“Ken?” said a voice in his ear. “Ken, is that you? Hello!”

“Carol,” he said. The room turned misty around him and there was nothing anywhere but that voice on the line.

“I’ve been trying and trying to get you, Ken! What on earth happened? The whole town is excited—I saw a terrible flash of lightning, but there wasn’t any storm, and then that quake… Are you all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine…” She wasn’t really frightened yet. Anxious, upset, but not frightened. A flash of lightning, and a quake. Alarming yes, but not terrifying, not the end of the world… He caught himself up, hard. He said, “I don’t know yet what it was.”

“Can you find out? Somebody must know.” She did not guess, of course, that Kenniston was an atomic physicist. He had not been allowed to tell that to anyone, not even his fiancŽe. To her, he was merely a research technician in an industrial laboratory, vaguely involved with test tubes and things. She had never questioned him very closely about his work, apparently content to leave all that up to him, and he had been grateful because it had spared him the necessity of lying to her. Now he was even more grateful, because she would not dream that he might have special information. That way, he could spare her a little longer, get himself in hand before he told her. “I’ll do my best,” he told her. “But until we’re sure, I wish you and your aunt would stay in the house, off the street. No, I don’t think your bridge-luncheon will come off anyway. And you can’t tell what people will do when they’re frightened. Promise? Yes—yes, I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

He hung up, and as soon as that contact with Carol was broken, reality slipped away from him again. He looked around the office, and it became suddenly rather horrible, because it had no longer any meaning. He had an urgent wish to get out of it, yet when he rose he stood for some while with his hands on the edge of the desk, going over Hubble’s words in his mind, remembering how the Sun had looked, and the stars, and the sad, alien Earth, knowing that it was all impossible but unable to deny it. The long hall of time, and a shattering force… He wanted desperately to run away, but there was no place to run to. Presently he went down the corridor to Hubble’s office.

They were all there, the twelve men of the staff, and Johnson. Johnson had gone by himself into a corner. He had seen what lay out there beyond the town, and the others had not. He was trying to understand it, to understand the fact and the explanation of it he had just heard. It was not a pleasant thing, to watch him try. Kenniston glanced at the others. He had worked closely with these men. He had thought he knew them all so well, having seen them under stress, in the moments when their work succeeded and the others when it did not. Now he realized that they were all strangers, to him and to each other, alone and wary with their personal fears.

Old Beitz was saying, almost truculently, “Even if it were true, you can’t say exactly how long a time has passed. Not just from the stars.”

Hubble said, “I’m not an astronomer, but anyone can figure it from the tables of known star-motions, and the change in the constellations. Not exactly, no. But as close as will ever matter.”

“But if the continuum were actually shattered, if this town has actually jumped millions of years…” Beitz’ voice trailed off. His mouth began to twitch and he seemed suddenly bewildered by what he was saying, and he, and all of them, stood looking at Hubble in a haunted silence.

Hubble shook his head. “You won’t really believe, until you see for yourselves. I don’t blame you. But in the meantime, you’ll have to accept my statement as a working hypothesis.”

Morrow cleared his throat and asked, “What about the people out there—the town? Are you going to tell them?”

“They’ll have to know at least part of it,” Hubble said. “It’ll get colder, very much colder, by night, and they’ll have to be prepared for it. But there must not be any panic. The Mayor and the Chief of Police are on their way here now, and we’ll work it out with them.”