City at World's End, Edmond Hamilton [free reads .txt] 📗

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—”

“I’d cover them, Mrs. Adams,” he told her. “The prediction is that it will be even colder.”

She threw up her hands. “The weather, these days! It never used to be like this.” And she hurried away to secure covering for the flowers, the flowers that had but hours to live. It hit Kenniston with another of those sickening little shocks of realization. No more roses on Earth, after today. No more roses, ever again.

“Ken— did you find out what happened?” It was Carol’s voice behind him, and he knew, even before he turned to face her, that he could not evade with her as he had with the others. She didn’t know about science, and such things as time warps and shattered continuums had never entered her head. But she knew him, and she gave him no chance to temporize.

“Are they true, the stories about an atom bomb going off over Middletown?”

She had had time, since he called her, to become really alarmed. She had dark hair and dark eyes. She was slim in a sturdy fashion, and her ankles were nice, and her mouth was firm and sweet. She liked Tennyson and children and small dogs, and her ways were the ways of pleasant houses and fragrant kitchens, of quiet talk and laughter. It seemed a dreadful thing to Kenniston that she should be standing in a dying garden asking questions about atomic bombs.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re true.” He watched the color drain out of her face, and he went on hastily, “Nobody was killed. There are no radiation effects in the city, nothing at all to be afraid of.”

“There is something. I can see it in your face.”

“Well, there are things we’re not sure of yet. Hubble and I are going to investigate them now.” He caught her hands. “I haven’t time to talk, but…”

“Ken,” she said. “Why you? What would you know about such terrible things?”

He saw it coming, now, the necessity he had always a little dreaded and had hoped might be forever postponed, the time when Carol had to learn about his work. With what eyes would she look on him when she knew? He was not sure, not sure at all. He was glad he could evade a little longer.

He smiled. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Stay in the house, Carol, promise me. Then I won’t worry.”

“All right,” she said slowly. And then, sharply, “Ken…”

“What?”

“Nothing. Be careful.”

He kissed her, and ran back toward the jeep. Thank God she wasn’t the hysterical type. That would have been the last straw, right now.

He climbed in and drove to the Lab, wondering all the way what this was going to do to Carol and himself, whether they would both be alive tomorrow or the next day, and if so, what kind of a life it would be. Grim, cold thoughts, and bitter with regret. He had had it all so nicely planned, before this nightmare happened. The loneliness would all be over, and the rootless drifting from place to place. He would have a home again, which he had not had since his parents died, and as much peace as a man was allowed in the modern world. He would have the normal things a man needed to keep him steady and give meaning to his years. And now…

Hubble was waiting for him outside the Lab, holding a Geiger counter and a clutter of other instruments. He placed them carefully in the jeep, then put on the leather coat and climbed into the seat beside Kenniston.

“All right, Ken— let’s go out the south end of town. From the hills we glimpsed that way, we can see more of the lay of the land.”

They found a barricade, and police on guard, at the southern edge of town. There they were delayed until the Mayor phoned through a hasty authorization for Hubble and Kenniston to go out “for inspection of the contaminated region.”

The jeep rolled down a concrete road between green little suburban farms, for less than a mile. Then the road and the green farmland suddenly ended.

From this sharp demarcation, rolling ocher plains ran away endlessly to east and west. Not a tree, not a speck of green broke the monotony. Only the ocher-yellow scrub, and the dust, and the wind.

Hubble, studying his instruments, said, “Nothing. Not a thing. Keep going.”

Ahead of them the low hills rose, gaunt and naked, and above was the vast bowl of the sky, a cold darkness clamped down upon the horizons. Dim Sun, dim stars, and under them no sound but the cheerless whimper of the wind.

Its motor rattling and roaring, its body lurching over the unevenness of the ocher plain, the jeep bore them out into the silence of the dead Earth.