The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (24 page)

“Do they know yet, themselves?” asked Kenniston, and Hubble said, “No.”

Johnson moved abruptly. He came up to Hubble and said, “I don’t get all this scientific talk about space and time. What I want to know is—is my boy safe?”

Hubble stared at him. “Your boy?”

“He went out to Martinsen’s farm early, to borrow a cultivator. It’s two miles out the north road. What about him, Mr. Hubble—is he safe?”

That was the secret agony that had been riding him, the one he had not voiced. Hubble said gently. “I would say that you don’t have to worry about him at all, Johnson.”

Johnson nodded, but still looked worried. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Hubble. I’d better go back now. I left my wife in hysterics.”

A minute or two after he left, Kenniston heard a siren scream outside. It swung into the Lab yard and stopped. “That,” said Hubble, “would be the Mayor.”

A small and infirm reed to lean upon, thought Kenniston, at a time like this. There was nothing particularly wrong about Mayor Garris. He was no more bumbling, inefficient, or venal than the average mayor of any average small city. He liked banquets and oratory, he worried about the right necktie, and he was said to be a good husband and father. But Kenniston could not, somehow, picture Bertram Garris shepherding his people safely across the end of the world. He thought so even less when Garris came in, his bones well padded with the plump pink flesh of good living, his face the perfect pattern of the successful little man who is pleased with the world and his place in it. Just now he was considerably puzzled and upset, but also rather elated at the prospect of something important going on. Kimer, the Chief of Police, was another matter. He was a large angular man with a face that had seen many grimy things and had learned from them a hard kind of wisdom. Not a brilliant man, Kenniston thought, but one who could get things done. And he was worried, far more worried than the Mayor. Garris turned immediately to Hubble. It was obvious that he had a great respect for him and was proud to be on an equal footing with such an important person as one of the nation’s top atomic scientists. “Is there any news yet, Doctor Hubble? We haven’t been able to get a word from outside, and the wildest rumors are going around. I was afraid at first that you might have had an explosion here in the laboratory, but…”

Kimer interrupted him. “Talk is going around that an atomic bomb hit here, Doctor Hubble. Some of the people are getting scared. If enough of them get to believe it, we’ll have a panic on our hands. I’ve got our officers on the streets soothing ’em down, but I’d like to have a straight story they’ll believe.”

“Atomic bomb!” said Mayor Garris. “Preposterous. We’re all alive, and there’s been no damage. Doctor Hubble will tell you that atomic bombs…”

For the second time he was cut short. Hubble broke in sharply. “We’re not dealing with an ordinary bomb. And the rumors are true, as far as they go.” He paused, and went on more slowly, making every word distinct, “A super-atomic was exploded an hour ago, for the first time in history, right here.”

He let that sink in. It was a lingering and painful process, and while it was going on Kenniston looked away, up through the window at the dusky sky and the sullen red Sun, and felt the knot in his stomach tighten. We were warned, he thought. We were all warned for years that we were playing with forces too big for us.

“It didn’t destroy us,” Hubble was saying. “We’re lucky that way. But it did have certain—effects.”

“I don’t understand,” said the Mayor piteously. “I simply don’t—Certain effects? What?”

Hubble told him, with quiet bluntness.

The Mayor and the Chief of Police of Middletown, normal men of a normal city, adjusted to life in a normal world, listening to the incredible. Listening, trying to comprehend—trying, and failing, and rejecting it utterly.

“That’s insane,” said Garris angrily. “Middletown thrown into the future? Why, the very sound of it… What are you trying to do, Doctor Hubble?”

He said a great deal more than that. So did Kimer. But Hubble wore them down. Quietly, implacably, he pointed to the alien landscape around the town, the deepening cold, the red, aged Sun, the ceasing of all wire and radio communication from outside. He explained, sketchily, the nature of time and space, and how they might be shattered. His scientific points they could not understand. But those they took on faith, the faith which the people of the Twentieth Century had come to have in the interpreters of the complex sciences they themselves were unable to comprehend. The physical facts they understood well enough. Too well, once they were forced to it.

It got home at last. Mayor Garris sank down into a chair, and his face was no longer pink, and the flesh sagged on it. His voice was no more than a whimper when finally he asked, “What are we going to do?”

Hubble had an answer ready, to a part of that question, at least. “We can’t afford a panic. The people of Middletown will have to learn the truth slowly. That means that none of them must go outside the town yet—or they’d learn at once. I’d suggest you announce the area outside town is possibly radioactive contaminated, and forbid anyone to leave.”

Police Chief Kimer grasped with pathetic eagerness at the necessity of coping with a problem he could comprehend. “I can put men and barricades at all the street-ends, to see to that.”

“And our local National Guard company is assembling now at the Armory,” put in Mayor Garris. His voice was shaky, his eyes still stunned.

Hubble asked, “What about the city’s utilities?”

“Everything seems to be working—power, gas and water,” the Mayor answered.

They would, Kenniston thought. Middletown’s coal-steam electric generation plant, and its big watertower, and its artificial gas plant, had all come through time with them.

“They, and all food and fuel, must be rationed,” Hubble was saying. “Proclaim it as an emergency measure.”

Mayor Garris seemed to feel a little better at being told what to do. “Yes. We’ll do that at once.” Then he asked, timidly, “Isn’t there any way of getting in touch with the rest of the country?”

“The rest of the country,” Hubble reminded him, “is some millions of years in the dead past. You’ll have to keep remembering that.”

“Yes—of course. I keep forgetting,” said the Mayor. He shivered, and then took refuge in the task set him. “We’ll get busy at once.”

When the car had borne the two away, Hubble looked haggardly at his silent colleagues.

“They’ll talk, of course. But if the news spreads slowly, it won’t be so bad. It’ll give us a chance to find out a few things first.”

Crisci began to laugh, a little shrilly. “If it’s true, this is a side-splitting joke! This whole town flung into the end of the world and not even knowing it yet! All these fifty thousand people, not guessing yet that their Cousin Agnes in Indianapolis has been dead and dust for millions of years!”

“And they mustn’t guess,” Hubble said. “Not yet. Not until we know what we face in this future Earth.”

He went on, thinking aloud. “We need to see what’s out there, outside the town, before we can plan anything. Kenniston, will you get a jeep and bring it back here? Bring spare gasoline, and some warm clothing, too. We’ll need it out there. And Ken—bring two guns.”

Kenniston walked back down Mill Street, toward the garage where he had left his car a billion years ago when such things were still important. He knew they kept a jeep there for road service, and he knew also that they would not have any need for it now because there were no longer any roads. He wished he had a topcoat. At the rate the air was chilling off it would be below zero by nightfall.

Quite literally, he began to feel as though he were walking in a nightmare. Above him was an alien sky, and the red light of it lay strangely on the familiar walls of brick. But the walls themselves were not altered. That, he decided, was the really shocking thing—the drab everyday appearance of the town. When time and space gape open for the first time in history, and you go through into the end of the world, you expect everything to be different. Middletown did not look different, except for that eerie light.

There were a lot of people on Mill Street, but then, there always were a good many. It was the street of dingy factories and small plants that connected Middletown with the shabby South Side, and there were always buses, cars, pedestrians on it Perhaps the bumbling traffic was a bit more disorganized than usual, and the groups of pedestrians tended to clot together and chatter more excitedly, but that was all.

Kenniston knew a number of these people, by now, but he did not stop to talk to them. He was somehow unwilling to meet their eyes. He felt guilty, to know the truth where they did not. What if he should tell them, what would they do? It was a terrible temptation, to rid himself of his secret. His tongue ached to cry it out.

There were people like old Mike Witter, the fat red-faced watchman who sat all day in his little shack at the railroad crossing, with his small rat-terrier curled up by his feet. The terrier was crouching now, shivering, her eyes bright and moist with fear, as though she guessed what the humans did not, but old Mike was as placid as ever.

“Cold, for June!” he hailed Kenniston. “Coldest I ever saw. I’m going to build a fire. Never saw such a freak storm!”

There was the knot of tube-mill workers at the next corner, in front of Joe’s Lunch. They were arguing, and two or three of them that Kenniston knew turned toward him.

“Hey, there’s Mr. Kenniston, one of the guys at the Industrial Lab. Maybe he’d know!” Their puzzled faces, as they asked, “Has a war started? Have you guys heard anything?”

Before he could answer, one asserted loudly, “Sure it’s a war. Didn’t someone say an atomic bomb went off overhead and missed fire? Didn’t you see the flash?”

“Hell, that was only a big lightning flash.”

“Are you nuts? It nearly blinded me.”

Kenniston evaded them. “Sorry, boys—I don’t know much more than you. There’ll be some announcement soon.”

As he went on, a bewildered voice enquired, “But if a war’s started, who’s the enemy?”

The enemy, Kenniston thought bitterly, is a country that perished and was dust—how many millions of years ago?

There were loafers on the Mill Street bridge, staring down at the muddy bed of the river and trying to explain the sudden vanishing of its water. In the beer-parlors that cheered the grimy street, there were more men than was normal for this hour. Kenniston could hear them as he passed, their voices high, excited, a little quarrelsome, but with no edge of terror.

A woman called across the street from an upstairs flat window, to the other housewife who was sweeping the opposite front porch. “I’m missing every one of my radio stories! The radio won’t get anything but the Middletown station today!”

Kenniston was glad when he got to Bud’s Garage. Bud Martin, a tall thin young man with a smudge of grease on his lip, was reassembling a carburetor with energetic efficiency and criticizing his harried young helper at the same time.

“Haven’t got to your car yet, Mr. Kenniston,” he protested. “I said around five, remember?”

Kenniston shook his head and told Martin what he wanted. Martin shrugged. “Sure, you can hire the jeep. I’m too busy to answer road calls today, anyway.” He did not seem particularly interested in what Kenniston intended to do with the jeep. The carburetor resisted and he swore at it.

A man in a floury baker’s apron stuck his head into the garage. “Hey, Bud, hear the news? The mills just shut down—all of them.”

“Ah, nuts,” said Martin. “I been hearing news all morning. Guys running in and out with the damnedest stories. I’m too busy to listen to ’em.”

Kenniston thought that probably that was the answer to the relative calm in Middletown. The men, particularly, had been too busy. The strong habit patterns of work, a job at hand to be done, had held them steady so far.

He sighed. “Bud,” he said, “I’m afraid this story is true.”

Martin looked at him sharply and then groaned. “Oh, Lord, another recession! This’ll ruin business—and me with the garage only half paid for!”

What was the use of telling him, Kenniston thought, that the mills had been hastily shut down to conserve precious fuel, and that they would never open again.

He filled spare gasoline cans, stacked them in the back of the jeep, and drove northward.

Topcoats were appearing on Main Street now. There were knots of people on street corners, and people waiting for buses were looking up curiously at the red Sun and dusky sky. But the stores were open, housewives carried bulging shopping-bags, kids went by on bicycles. It wasn’t too changed, yet. Not yet.

Nor was quiet Walters Avenue, where he had his rooms, though the rows of maples were an odd color in the reddish light. Kenniston was glad his landlady was out, for he didn’t think he could face many more puzzled questions right now.

He loaded his hunting kit—a .30-30 rifle and a 16-gauge repeating shotgun with boxes of shells—into the jeep. He put on a mackinaw, brought a leather coat for Hubble, and remembered gloves. Then, before re-entering the jeep, he ran down the street half a block to Carol Lane’s house.

Her aunt met him at the door. Mrs. Adams was stout, pink and worried.

“John, I’m so glad you came! Maybe you can tell me what to do. Should I cover my flowers?” She babbled on anxiously. “It seems so silly, on a June day. But it’s so much colder. And the petunias and bleeding-heart are so easily frost-bitten. And the roses—”