The Worlds of Edmond Hamilton Page 6

  Kenniston, sweating now despite the frozen chill of the air, prayed that the gathering panic would not burst into violence. At the front of the surging, roaring mass, he found Mayor Garris. And the Mayor's pallid face showed that panic had infected him too.

  "Shouldn't we go?" he shouted to Kenniston over the uproar of horns and motors. "Everyone seems ready here!"

  "McLain's running the traffic movement, and we've got to stick to his orders!" he shouted back.

  "But if these people break loose--" the Mayor began. He stopped. Over the shrieking horns and thundering motors, a new sound was rising. A distant, banshee wail, a faraway scream that swelled into a hoarse, giant howl. The auto horns, the shouting voices from the cars, fell silent. Only the sound of motors was background to that unending scream that wailed across Middletown like a requiem.

  "That's the Tube Mill whistle!" cried Lauber. "That's the signal!"

  Kenniston sent the jeep jumping ahead. "Okay, let those trucks roll! But keep people in line, back of them! No stampeding!"

  The big Diesels that barricaded the way began to snort and rumble, and then started to move out, as ponderously as elephants. Kenniston's jeep swung in front. But almost at once, cars behind pressed to get around them.

  "Run the trucks three abreast, in front!" he shouted to Lauber. "It'll keep them from getting around!"

  Down Jefferson Street, down over the muddy bed of the vanished river, past the old houses with their doors carefully shut and locked, past the playground that looked as forlorn as though it knew the children were going, never to return.

  Past Home Street, past the silent mills, past the beer signs of South Street, where from an upstairs window a drunken man shouted and waved a bottle at them. Past the last rows of drab frame houses, the last brave little yards whose flowers were blackened now by frost.

  Kenniston saw ahead of them the line of demarcation, the boundary between the past and what was now Earth. They reached it, passed it--

  And then the rolling, ocher-yellow plains were all about them, barren and drab beneath the great, firelashed red eye of the Sun. The cold wind whooped around them, as they started to climb the easy slope toward the ridge. Behind his jeep, Diesels, jalopies, buses, shiny station wagons rolled with roaring, sputtering, purring motors.

  Kenniston looked back down the slope at them. Already the other Ward was moving out, and he rode at the head of a huge caravan of vehicles crawling endlessly out of Middletown-- a caravan out of the Earth that was gone forever, into this unguessable tomorrow.

  Chapter 7

  under the dome

  When they came up over the ridge, and for the first time had view of the distant domed city that shimmered in the wan light far out on the desolate plain, Kenniston could sense the shock of doubt and fear that ran through all of this host who were seeing it for the first time. He could see it in all their peering faces, pale and strained in the red light of the dying Sun.

  Even he, seeing it for only the second time, felt an inner recoiling. With his mind still filled with every sight and sound and smell of the old town they had left, the alien, solemn, deathly city of the dome seemed to him impossible as a refuge. He choked down that feeling, he had to choke it down; it was go on or die.

  "Keep moving!" he shouted, sounding the jeep's horn to command attention, gesturing authoritatively forward. "Keep going!"

  He conquered that brief pause of recoil, got them moving over the ridge, skidding and sliding down the other slope, in clouds of heavy dust.

  He glimpsed Mayor Garris staring ahead, his plump face shocked and pallid. He wondered what Carol was thinking, as she looked out at the lonely shining bubble in the sad wastes.

  The endless caravan, shrouded in dust, was halfway down the long slope when Kenniston heard a raging of horns and looked back. An old sedan had stopped squarely in the middle of the narrow track the trucks had beaten down across a shallow gully. Cars were pulling out around it, wallowing in soft earth, jamming their low-hung frames against the banks, getting inextricably tangled. Behind them, the line was damming up.

  Kenniston yelled to Lauber to keep the head of the caravan moving on toward the distant dome, and then sent his jeep snorting back along the line. A knot of people had collected now around the offending sedan. Kenniston hastily shouldered his way through them.

  "What the hell's going on here?" he demanded. "Whose car is this?"

  A weatherbeaten, middle-aged man turned to him, half-scared, half-apologetic. "Mine-- my car. I'm John Borzak." He gestured to the back seat of the old sedan. "My wife, she's having a baby in there." He added, as an afterthought, "My fifth."

  "Oh, Christ, that's all we needed!" Kenniston cried. Borzak looked instantly guilty. He looked so sad that Kenniston began to laugh. Suddenly all of them were laughing, in sheer relief from nervous tension.

  He set men scurrying to get a doctor and ambulance out of the procession, and meanwhile willing hands carefully rolled the old sedan a little aside.

  The dammed-up lines of cars began to roll again. But the pause, the waiting, the minutes spent in staring at the drear landscape, had been too much for some of those in line. Kenniston saw cars, only a few of them as yet, curving out of line and scrambling on the slope to swing back toward Middletown.

  He'd feared that, above all things. People--people of a 20th Century Middlewestern town-- could take only so much of the unknown. But he had to stop them, or panic would spread like fire that nobody could stop. He bucketed the jeep after them, got ahead of them by the advantage of his four-wheel drive, and then blocked their way back and stood up in the jeep and shouted at them and pointed ahead.

  A man who looked like an aging carpenter, with a knobby face sheet-pale now, cursed Kenniston out of the depths of his fear.

  "We're not going out to die in this damned desert! We're going back home!"

  "You'll never even get near it!" Kenniston warned. "There are special guards who won't let anyone back into Middletown! Get it into your heads that the place is a death trap, will you!"

  "Oh, Hugh, maybe we'd better go on!" whimpered the shapeless woman beside the man.

  "Like hell we will! I'm a free American and this isn't any dictatorship!"

  Kenniston found the only argument that could sway these people who were recoiling from the deathliness of the desert.

  "If you go back, if you do get into Middletown and stay there, you'll soon be all alone there! You and the few like you-- all alone, here at the end of the world, with the night and the cold!"

  That got to them, replacing their fear with a greater dread, the dread of aloneness in this lonely world. The knobby-faced man looked sick and trapped, but he finally turned his car around, and the other cars followed him back into line.

  Kenniston's squad cars had come up but they weren't needed. He told them, "Watch the line close! Don't let one start to turn again-- not one."

  He fought the jeep back up along the line, choking on dust and exhaust fumes, hanging precariously to the wheel, deafened by the continuous roar of motors.

  At the head of the caravan he was at least out of the dust, and could look ahead at the distant city. It was still only a shimmering, tiny bubble on the horizon, only a glittering point lost and drowned in the vast indifference of the ocher-colored wastes that stretched-- how far? Clear around the world, over the beds of dried-up oceans and the sites of vanished cities? Was the bottom of the Atlantic like this, was New York, was Paris, were the Poles?

  He had to forget that and keep his mind on the city ahead, on the job of getting these thousands of people to it, for if he didn't the weight of the whole dying world would come down upon him like an avalanche and he would cease to struggle. The world couldn't all be like this, there must be green valleys and people somewhere yet. But there wasn't time to think of it now, they had hit the road that led to the portal and the dome of man's last refuge was towering, colossal, in front of them.

  He saw that Hubble's men had closed the portal. That wou
ld be the first step, of course, to conserve what warmth there was and keep out the frigid wind. It opened now to receive them, and an armed man waved and smiled, and then clung on to the side of the jeep.

  "Straight up this boulevard, and then turn. I'll show you. Yeah, we got the section ready. No, no sign of anything. I don't think even a mouse lives here anymore." A pause. "I'm sure glad you people have got here. This place is so damned quiet it would scare you."

  The tall, white silent towers watched them, the long, long line of dusty cars and trucks and buses that crept along the empty boulevards. The noise of motors greatly magnified echoed and rebounded from the walls and was repeated faintly from the dome, and the very shocking loudness of the sound made Kenniston shiver.

  Apart from that mechanical racket, a curious hush had come over the Middletowners. All down the lines heads were thrust forth out of car windows, looking, peering, savoring the height of buildings whose tops they could not see, staring at the lines and colors that were alien to all they knew, listening to the emptiness. Kenniston knew how they felt. It was too big, and too strange. Even a native New Yorker would have found awe among these mighty towers, and to the folk of Middletown, used to the little slate-roofed houses and the squat buildings of dingy brick, they were overpowering, crushing, with something in them of dread because they were all deserted.

  The head of the caravan reached a section that was barred off with ropes. The ropes were laid aside, and the cars went in.

  Hubble's advance squad was ready. Without them the assignment of nearly seventeen thousand people to improvised quarters would have been impossible. With them, it was a scrambling chaos, carried out strangely without much noise. Men and women moved with a sort of stunned docility, glancing sidelong into the dust and the shadows, peering at the blank windows and the tall strange rooms, afraid to raise their voices. Gradually the sound of motors died, and the streets were ghastly in their silence, and it was a silence so great that the scuffling of many feet and the murmur of many voices and the labor of unpacking trucks and cars did not disturb it, but were merely lost. Even the dogs were cowed.

  Kenniston made his report to Hubble and then went in search of Carol. Here and there people still sat in their cars, refusing to move from their one last familiar reality, and he passed a woman who crouched in the dust of the street and wept, with her arms full of blankets. Something of the same feeling of despair infected Kenniston. It was not going to work, it was not going to work at all, and he dreaded to talk to Carol. But he plodded on until he found her.

  There was a great vaulted room on the street level, smelling dismally of the dust and desertion of ages. Very tall windows let in what light they could, but still it was dusky. There were twenty women in the room, of all sorts and ages, milling about with suitcases and loads of bedding, uttering vague wails and words of complaint, struggling with rolled-up-mattresses. Carol and her aunt were two of the twenty.

  Characteristically, they had managed to get off in a corner as much by themselves as possible. Mrs. Adams had collapsed onto her improvised bed, and Carol was making what order she could of their scanty belongings.

  "Are you all right?" he asked her anxiously, and she nodded. From the nested blankets on the floor Mrs. Adams whimpered, "Why did they bring us here, to this dreadful place? Why couldn't they have let us stay at home?" Carol hushed her as she would a fretful child.

  Two sniffling, mouse-faced girls had crept up to ask Kenniston questions. Behind them a short, thick, middle-aged woman was stamping up and down along the walls, banging open the doors that pierced them. "Where's the bathrooms?" she was demanding belligerently.

  Kenniston took Carol to the doorway and a little beyond it, where if there was no more privacy they were at least not besieged. He said, "I know it's rough as hell now, but it's only for a little while-- this bunking together, I mean. There's room enough for everybody here, and you can pick out a place you like, all to yourselves. I can fetch anything you want from your house, your books and things, even furniture..."

  She cut him short. "No! I don't want anything touched there. I want to know it's all just as I left it, so I can at least think about it, and maybe..." She shook her head, and then went on, "Ken, old Mr. Peters from our street had another stroke when we got here. They took him away on a stretcher. He was dying, and I saw his face. He was looking up at these awful buildings, so puzzled and afraid. He was trying to understand, and he couldn't." She shivered.

  "Dying isn't good anywhere you do it," he said. "But we're young and strong and we aren't going to die." He added, before he left her, "There was a baby born on the march. Think of the baby, Carol, instead of the old man."

  He went away, depressed and worried. Carol seemed different, and he didn't think it was just her tiredness. Perhaps she had roots too deep, not just in Middletown but in the pattern, the state of mind. Well, the pattern was smashed forever now, and she, and all of them, had to adjust.

  Kenniston had gone two of the long squares, sunk in his disturbed thoughts, before he realized that a change had come into the streets. He tried to think what it was. People were more in the buildings now, and less in the cars, but that was not all of it. There was something...

  The streets had suddenly come alive.

  The children had done it. Overawed at first by the strangeness and the silence and the behavior of their elders, it had slowly dawned upon them that here was a whole great city lying ready to their hands-- fabulous empty buildings full of mysteries and treasures, new streets, new narrow ways behind them, all virgin territory to be explored. By twos and threes the venturesome spirits had started out and taken others with them. And now the lofty hallways rang with shouts and running feet, small figures scudded to and fro across the pavement, the shadows teemed with motion, with screams and squeals and the voices of parental anger. One bull-lunged urchin had discovered that he could make echoes. Another, intoxicated by blank expanses of white, unsullied wall, stood with a stub of pencil in his hand writing in ever-enlarging letters. Kenniston thought, The irreverent little bastards! But his step quickened, and quite suddenly, he felt that it was going to work out after all. The human race was tough.

  He had further evidence of that in the next two days. The great waves of the migration poured down across the dusty ridge and in through the portal, the clamorous thousands of wheels and motors, the countless faces and peering eyes. And for those who came on the second day and on the third, it was not so bad as it had been for those who came first. The seventeen thousand pioneers had lifted the curse of the empty stillness. Community kitchens, working on oil and gasoline ranges, filled the air with the homely, cheering smell of coffee. There was hot food, and the excitement of searching out friends and comparing notes. Indefatigable housewives busied themselves with brooms and drove their husbands to cleaning windows and whacked their unruly children. And the cars piled up in lines along the streets and boulevards, the Plymouths and Nashes and Chevrolets and Fords, incongruous in this dreamlike city of an elder Earth.

  On the third day they brought the sick and put them in the hospital. They brought the prisoners from the jail and locked them away in another building. A great structure on the central plaza became the City Hall. And by that third night, not a soul was left in Middletown. All were here under the great dome of the alien city.

  "We'll call this place New Middletown," Mayor Garris had proclaimed. "Makes it seem more like home."

  Kenniston walked with Carol that night down one of the dark main avenues of the domed city. There was candlelight and lamplight from doorways and tall windows. A baby wailed from inside a dark doorway and was hastily soothed. Dogs barked defiance to alien ghosts. A tinny phonograph sang somewhere:

  "I can't give you anything but love, baby!"

  Kenniston thought that the streets of tall white buildings looked down with their windows as with eyes-- amazed, bewildered. This city beneath the shimmering starlit dome had had silence for a long, long time. Silence, and the slow sw
ing of the cold red Sun and the farther stars.

  Could a city remember, Kenniston wondered? Did this one remember the old days of its builders, the lovers who had walked its ways and the children who had known its nooks and corners? Was it glad that men had come again, or did it regret the age-long silence and peace?

  Carol shivered a little and buttoned her topcoat. "It's getting colder."

  Kenniston nodded. "But not bitterly so-- only like an October night, back in our own time. We can stand that."

  She looked up at him, her eyes dark in the white blur of her face. "But how will we live here, Ken? I mean, when the food from Middletown's warehouses runs out?"

  He and Hubble had known the question would come up, and had the answer for it. Not a perfect answer, but the only one.

  "There are big hydroponic tanks farther over in the city, Carol. The people here raised their food in them. We can do the same. There are plenty of seeds in Middletown."

  "But water?"

  "Lots of it," he answered promptly. "Big underground reservoirs, that must tap deep water-bearing strata. Hubble had it tested, and it's perfectly safe."

  They walked on to the edge of the plaza. Now the Moon was rising, that copper-colored, unreal big Moon that was so much nearer Earth than in the old times. Its coppery light poured through the dome upon the city. The white towers dreamed. The chill deepened.

  The whole mighty past of dead Earth seemed to crush down upon Kenniston. Millions of years, trillions of lives full of pain and hope and struggle, and all for what? For this?

  Carol felt it too, for she pressed closer to him. "Are they all dead, Ken? All the human race, but ourselves?"

  He and Hubble had the answer for that, too, the answer they would have to give to everyone.

  "There's no reason to assume that. There may be other cities that are still inhabited. If so, we'll soon contact them."

  She shook her head. "Words, Ken. You don't even believe them yourself." She drew away from him. "We're alone," she said. "Everything we had is gone, our world, our whole life, and we're quite alone."