Andre Norton (ed) (30 page)

having
such an imagination, but his words fell
flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a
minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done,
and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to
tell us about the old days, and how it all happened.

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 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
warmblooded 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 ther 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 plu-tonium 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
fuel. 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.