City at World's End, Edmond Hamilton [free reads .txt] 📗
- Author: Edmond Hamilton
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“Don’t talk to us about law when it’s the end of the world!” yelled a hard-faced woman.
“It’s the end of nothing unless you lose your heads,” Kenniston hammered. “The Mayor is arranging now to give you what you want— an answer to how you’re going to live and be safe. Your lives and the lives of your families depend on how you cooperate. Go home to your radios and wait for the orders.”
“Will they give us coal?” shouted a burly millhand.
“Coal, food, everything you need. Nobody’s going to cheat anyone. We’re all in the same boat. We’ll stay in, or get out, together. Now go home and keep your families together and wait.”
He called suddenly to the men on guard, “You, too! Get out of here and report back to your headquarters! The orders coming up are more important than this coal!”
He climbed back down from the black heap, wondering whether his feeble attempt at psychology would work. Borchard started angry remonstrance about dismissal of the guards, but Hubble shut him up.
“It worked,” he said. “Look, they’re going.” As the crowd dispersed, Chief of Police Kimer arrived. His unshaven face was gray from lack of sleep, his eyes red-rimmed. He did not seem to be much excited by the trouble at the coal yard.
“We’ve had a lot more than this on our hands, during the night,” he said.
Kenniston learned then what had gone on in Middletown since the Mayor had finished speaking— the deaths from shock, the scattering of suicides, the outbreaks of looting in the downtown streets, quickly checked. A dozen people, mostly drunks, had died of cold.
“But the barricades at the edge of town were the worst,” Kimer said tiredly. “You know, a good number of people from outside Middletown were trapped here by this thing. They, and some of our own people gone panicky, tried to stampede out of town.” He added, as he turned back to his car, “They tell me more than two thousand people were baptized last night.”
“We’ll go with you to City Hall,” Hubble told him. “Yes, you too, Ken. I’ll need your help with the Mayor.”
It seemed impossible that the pudgy little Mayor could be a problem. He had been so docile, so pathetically eager to take advice and follow orders. But when, in City Hall, Hubble confronted him with the plan to evacuate Middletown, Mayor Garris’ face took on a mulish look.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “Take up a whole city of fifty thousand people and transport them to another place we don’t know anything about? It’s insane!”
“There are enough cars, buses and trucks to transport the population and supplies. There’s enough gasoline to run them.”
“But this other city— what do we know about it? Nothing. There might be any kind of danger there. No. I was born in Middletown. I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. I just spent five thousand dollars to redecorate my house, and I’m not going to leave it.”
He glared at them, and his plump body trembled. Hubble said gently, “We’re all afraid, Mr. Garris. It’s a hard thing to do. People have their roots, and they can’t break them easily all at once. But we must go. We must seek shelter, or die.”
The Mayor shook his head. “My wife and daughter— they’ve been hysterical all night, pleading with me to do something, to make things go as they always have. This has been an awful shock to them. I don’t think they could stand any more.”
“Slap their faces, Mr. Garris,” Hubble said brutally. “This has been a shock to all of us. Now what are you going to do? Will you call in the City Council or won’t you?”
“I can’t, not on that proposal.” Garris’ face crinkled like that of a child about to cry. “Honestly, gentlemen, I can’t.”
Kenniston thought of Carol shivering in her fur coat, struggling with the last shovels of coal, and the thought made him grasp Garris savagely by the shirtfront.
“All right, don’t,” he snapped. “The people are waiting for an announcement from you, but I’ll make one myself. I’ll tell them that there’s a way to save them, but that Mayor Garris won’t hear of it. I’ll tell them they must die of cold because their Mayor won’t give up his big fine house with its cellarful of coal. Would you like me to tell them that, Mr. Garris?”
Kenniston thought he had never seen a man turn so white. “They’d tear me to pieces,” whispered Garris. “No. No, don’t.” He looked piteously from one to the other, and then he said, “I’ll call in the Council.”
The men of the Council reacted, at first, very much as the Mayor had done. Kenniston did not entirely blame them. The difficulties of uprooting a population of fifty thousand and moving it bodily in a short space of time to a place it had never seen nor heard of were enough to daunt anybody. But Hubble’s arguments were unanswerable. It was move or die, and they knew it, and in the end the decision was made. A crushed, frightened little man, Mayor Garris went to make his announcement.
On the way to the broadcasting station, Kenniston looked at Middletown. The big houses, standing lordly on the North Side. The little houses, in close-set rows, with their tiny gardens. It was going to be hard, very hard. The people who lived in those houses would not want to leave them.
In a low, tired voice, bereft now of pomposity and guile, the Mayor spoke to the people of Middletown.
“So we must leave Middletown, temporarily,” he concluded. And he repeated the word. “Temporarily. The domed city out there will be a little cold too, but not so cold as unprotected Middletown. We can live there, until— until things clear up. Stay by your radios. You will be given instructions. Please cooperate, to save all our lives. Please—”
Kenniston lost track of his own emotions very quickly in the rush of urgent tasks. City Hall became the nerve center of the evacuation. The police and National Guard officers were already there, and other men were called in— the wholesale grocers, the warehouse men, the heads of trucking and bus and van lines. McLain, the big rawboned manager of the largest trucking company, proved a tower of strength. He had been a transport officer in the last war, and knew something about moving men and supplies.
“You’ll have a traffic madhouse, and won’t get these people out for weeks,” he said crisply. “It’s got to be organized by wards. There have to be quarters in your domed city assigned for each ward, so they can go into their own streets when they get there.”
Hubble nodded. “I can get a crew of twenty men ready to handle that.”
“Good. I figure the move will take three days. A third of the population is about all we can handle safely at one time. Civilian populations are the devil and all! Now, there’ll have to be a squad assigned to distribute fuel to the ones who have to wait here in Middletown, and to quarter them so as to conserve that fuel. Also…”
Hubble sighed. “You take a big load off my mind, McLain. Will you organize the march? Kenniston can lead the first contingent, when you’re ready.”
McLain nodded brusquely, sat down at someone else’s desk, and began to fire orders. Hubble departed with his twenty picked men, well armed, to set up a base in the domed city.
The radio chattered incessantly now, urging, soothing, cajoling, issuing instructions. Police and Guardsmen were dispatched to each ward, with a responsible man heading each squad. They were ordered to take the streets house by house, to assure complete evacuation, and also to ascertain how many private cars could be counted on for transportation. The city buses could carry only a fraction of the evacuees.
McLain was the one who thought of the patients in the Middletown hospitals, and set men to collecting ambulances, hearses, whatever would carry the sick comfortably. The police patrol wagons and a few big army trucks from the Armory he assigned to move the prisoners in the jail who could not safely be released. Both they and the sick would be left until the last day, to ensure proper quarters for their reception.
Fleets of trucks were started to the warehouses, with hasty lists of the food and other emergency supplies that must go with them. “We can run a truck line back to Middletown for more supplies later,” McLain told Kenniston. “But this stuff we’ll need right away.”
The First and Second Wards were to go first, and that meant that Carol and her aunt would be in the first day’s evacuation. Kenniston managed to get away long enough to see them.
He was sorry he went. Mrs. Adams sat weeping in the living room, and Carol struggled alone with blankets and mattresses and suitcases, in a bitter, stonyfaced mood that Kenniston could not quite understand. He stayed longer than he should have done to help them pack, trying earnestly to penetrate Carol’s tight-lipped silence.
“I know it’s hard to leave your home,” he said, “but it’s hard for everybody. And after all, we’ll have shelter and warmth, and can stay alive.”
“Shelter and warmth?” said Carol. She looked around at the starched white curtains, the polished furniture, the pictures on the walls and the bits of fine china that were so lovingly placed, and she said bitterly, “We had those. We had them for generations, until we had to have scientific progress too.”
“I’ll admit you have a point there,” said Kenniston heavily, “but it’s too late to argue now.”
“Yes,” she said. “Too late.” Suddenly she began to cry, in a slow, painful way that was not in the least like Mrs. Adams’ whimpering. “Oh, Ken, my house and all the things I loved…” He had wit enough to know that it was not for glass and china that she wept, but for a way of life that was gone and could never possibly return. He felt a terrible pity for her, which almost smothered his irritation at the inability of the female mind to grapple with the essentials of a situation.
“It won’t be so bad,” he said reassuringly. “And I’ll be leading tomorrow’s first evacuation, and won’t be far from you at any time.”
It was before nine o’clock the next morning when Kenniston left City Hall with McLain, to check the progress of preparations. Under the cold red eye of the Sun, Middletown seethed with an excited activity that centered in the First and Second Wards.
Cars were being hastily loaded, piled high on roofs and fenders. Children were being called together, barking dogs being caught and leashed, families gathering in excited haste. Roar of motors filled the wintry air. Motors of great trucks rumbling to and from the warehouse, motors of police cars dashing with sirens screaming, sputtering motors of old cars being agonizedly coaxed to life.
The people on the streets, the people hurrying with bundles and children and dogs, looked more dazed than frightened. Some of them were laughing, a false merriment edged with excitement. Only a few women were sobbing.
McLain and Kenniston rode down in the jeep to the center of town, the Square. This was the down town First Ward of Middletown.
“The First and Second Ward will move out in that order,” McLain told Kenniston. “You take charge of the
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