Norton, Andre - Anthology (18 page)

He sometimes doesn't mind telling
that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we
were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw
for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a
hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him.

It was the same old story as
always—I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep—though Pa
always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots.

He told us how the Earth had been
swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to
make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other
right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this
dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets everything.

You know, I find it hard to believe
in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming
number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they
were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end
their nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool every
bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger,
any more than we can hope to end the cold?

Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates
and makes things out too black. He's cross with us once in a while and was
probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the
old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right.

* * *

The dark star, as Pa went on
telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn't much time to get ready. At
the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the
truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of
unfrozen water!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night.
First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit
the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called
China
,
because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they
found it wasn't going to hit either side, but was going to come very close to
the Earth.

Most of the other planets were on
the other side of the Sun and didn't get involved. The Sun and the newcomer
fought over the Earth for a little while—pulling it this way and that, like two
dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won
and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute
he managed to hold on to the Moon.

That was the time of the monster
earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also
the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly,
just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it,
when I've been sitting too far from the fire.

You see, the dark star was going
through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to
wrench the world considerably in order to take it away.

The Big Jerk didn't last long. It
was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark
star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of
cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts
gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out
of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled
over and fainted—though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked
down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked.

We've often asked Pa how people acted
during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all
four, but he's sort of leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says
he was mostly too busy to notice.

You see, Pa and some scientist
friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen—they'd known
we'd get captured and our air would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to
fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold,
and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got
smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed then and in
the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without
any advantages, just using any stuff he could lay his hands on.

I guess he's telling pretty much
the truth when he says he didn't have any time to keep an eye on how other
folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very
quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and
because Earth's rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights
were ten old nights long.

Still, I've got an idea of some of
the things that happened from the frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other
rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basements
where we go for coal.

In one of the rooms, an old man
sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and
a woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just
see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young
lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully
toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with warmth and
food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life.

Pa showed them to me once in quick
winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could
afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart
pound, especially the young lady.

* * *

Now, with Pa telling his story for
the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of
the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than
anything yet. You see, I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the
window. I'd forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the
others.

What, I asked myself, if the frozen
folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a
new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought
its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves
endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the ever-growing cold,
with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had
mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life—not warm-blooded life, but
something icy and horrible?

That was a worse idea than the one
about something coming down from the dark star to get us.

Or maybe, I thought, both ideas
might be true.
Something coming down from the dark star and
making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work.
That would fit
with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike
light.

The frozen folk
with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling,
snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest.

I tell you, that thought gave me a
very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I
remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.

We were all sitting very still.
Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa's voice and
the clocks.

And then, from beyond the blankets,
I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me.

Pa was telling about the early
years in the Nest and had come to the place where he philosophizes.

"So I asked myself then,"
he said, "what's the use of going on? What's the use of dragging it out
for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and
loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked
myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer."

Again I heard the noise, louder
this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.

"Life's always been a business
of working hard and fighting the cold," Pa was saying. "The earth's
always been
a lonely place, millions of miles from the next
planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would
have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is
good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of
flowers—you've seen pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or
the fire's glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for
the last man as the first."

And still the steps kept shuffling
closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little.
Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering,
frozen eyes.

"So right then and
there," Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and
was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear them, "right then and there I
told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have
children and teach them all I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for
the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep
everything beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at
the cold and the dark and the distant stars."

But then the blanket actually did
move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice
stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it
touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him.

* * *

In through the blanket stepped the
beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she
carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered
over her shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.

Well, my heart couldn't have been
stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a
suit and helmet like Pa's homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were,
too—and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I
noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.

The silence kept on while I
swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there
was
all sorts of jabbering and commotion.

They were simply people, you see.
We hadn't been the only ones to survive; we'd just thought so, for natural
enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with
them. And when we found out how they'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop
of joy.

They were from
Los Alamos
and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the
uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for
thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with airlocks and
all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At
this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)

But if we were flabbergasted at
them, they were double-flabbergasted at us.

One of the men kept saying,
"But it's impossible, I tell you. You can't maintain an air supply without
hermetic sealing. It's simply impossible."

That was after he had got his
helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around
at us as if we were saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and
suddenly she broke down and cried.

They'd been scouting around for
survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had
rocket ships at
Los Alamos
and plenty of chemical fuels.
As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket
at the top level. So after they'd got things going smoothly at
Los
Alamos
, which had taken years, they'd decided to make some trips
to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying
long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere to carry
them around the curve of the Earth.

Well, they'd found other colonies
at
Argonne
and Brookhaven and way around the world at
Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving our city a look, not really
expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the
faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so
they'd landed to investigate. Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there
was no air to carry the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a
while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and
they'd wasted some time in the building across the street.

* * *

By now, all five adults were
talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and
got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully
and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking
about how the women dressed at
Los Alamos
. The strangers
marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way
they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never
mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions.

In fact, there was so much talking
and excitement that Pa forgot about
things,
and it
wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had
all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the
blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The
newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.