The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (29 page)

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 beseiged. 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 swing 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 agelong 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, unreally 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.”

He put his arms around her. He would have said something to comfort her, but she stood stiff and quivering, and suddenly she said,

“Ken, there are times when I can’t help hating you.”

Utterly shocked, and too bewildered to be angry yet, he let her go. He said, “Carol, you’re wrought up—hysterical—”

Her voice was low and harsh, the words came fast as though they could no longer be held back. “Am I? Maybe. But I can’t help remembering that if you and men like you hadn’t come to Middletown with that secret laboratory, fifty thousand people wouldn’t have had to suffer for it. You brought this on us…”

He began to understand now all that had been behind Carol’s taut manner and unfriendly silences, all the blind resentment that had focused upon himself.

He was for the moment furiously indignant, the more so because what she had said stung him on a sensitive nerve. He stood, almost glaring at her, and then his anger washed away, and he took her by the shoulders and said,

“Carol, you’re not making sense, and you know it! You’re bitter because you’ve lost your home, your way of life, your world, and you’re making me a scapegoat for that. You can’t! We need each other more than ever, and we’re not going to lose each other.”

She stared at him rigidly, then started to sob, and clung to him crying.

“Oh, Ken, don’t let me be a fool! I’m so mixed up, I don’t know my own mind any more.”

“All of us feel like that,” he said. “But it’ll all come right. Forget about it, Carol.”

But as he held her and soothed her and looked up past her at the alien towers and the face of the alien Moon, he knew that she could not completely forget, that that deep resentment would not die easily, and that he would have to fight it. And it would be hard to fight, for there had been the sting of truth in her words, only a partial truth but one he had not wanted ever to face.

When Kenniston awoke, he lay for some time in his blankets looking around the great room, with the same feeling of unreality that he felt now each morning.

It was quite a large room, with graceful curving walls and ceiling of soft-textured, ivory plastic. But it was not as large as it looked, for the builders of the city had known how to use daringly jutting mezzanines to give two floor levels the spaciousness and loftiness of one.

He looked up at the tall, dusty windows, and wondered what this room had once been. It was part of a big structure on the plaza, for Mayor Garris had insisted that the whole Lab staff be quartered near City Hall. It had obviously been a public building, but except for a few massive tables it had been quite empty, and there was no clue to its function.

He looked around at the others on the row of mattresses. Hubble was still sleeping calmly. So was Beitz, with the slight, groaning stirrings of slumbering age. But Crisci lay wide awake and unmoving, looking up at the ceiling.

Kenniston remembered something, with a sudden pang, something that he had completely forgotten in the rush of events. He went over to Crisci, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Louis. I never thought until now about your girl.”

“Why would you think about that?” Crisci’s low voice was toneless. “Why would you, when all this has happened?” He went on, as tonelessly, “Besides, it was all over a long time ago. For millions of years now, she’s been dead.”

Kenniston lingered a moment, seeking something to say, remembering now Crisci’s eager talk of the girl he was soon to marry—the girl who lived fifty miles away from Middletown. He could find nothing to say. Crisci’s tragedy had been repeated many times among these people—the mother whose son had gone to California, the wife whose husband had been upstate on a business trip, the lovers, the families, the friends, divided forever by the great gulf of time. He felt again a great thankfulness that Carol had come through with him, and a renewed determination to hold her against anything.

Kenniston was lighting his morning cigarette, when the others rose. He paused suddenly, and said, “I just thought—”

Hubble grinned at him. “Yes, I know. You just thought about tobacco. You, and a lot of people, will soon have to do without.”

As they went out to get their breakfast at the nearest community kitchen, Hubble told him what was going forward.

“McLain’s going back to Middletown to bring gasoline engines and pumps. We have to get water flowing in the city’s system at once, and it may be a long time before we can figure out its pumping power. They seem to be atomic engines of some sort, but I’m not sure.”

“What about food rationing?”

“Food and medicine will all go into guarded warerooms. Ration tickets will be printed at once. Use of cars is forbidden, of course. Everybody is restricted to their own Ward district temporarily, to prevent accidents in exploration. We’ve already organized crews to explore the city.”

Kenniston nodded. He drew the last drags of a cigarette suddenly precious, before he spoke.

“That’s all good. But the main problem will be morale, Hubble.” He thought of Carol, as he added, “I don’t believe these people can take it, if they find out they’re the last humans left.” Hubble looked worried. “I know. But there must be people left somewhere. This city wasn’t abandoned because of sudden disaster. They may just have gone to other, better cities.”

“There wasn’t a whisper on the radio from outside Middletown,” Kenniston reminded.

“No. But I believe they used something different from our radio system. That’s what I want you for this morning, Ken. Beitz last night found a communication system in a building near here. It has big apparatus that he thinks was for televisor communication. That’s more in your field than ours.”

Kenniston felt a sharp interest, the interest of the technician that not even world’s end could completely kill. “I’d like to see that.”

As they walked through the cold red morning, Kenniston was surprised by the unexpectedly everyday appearance of this alien city beneath the dome.

Families were trooping toward the community kitchens, with the air of going on picnic. A little band of children whooped down the nearest street, a small, woolly dog racing beside them with frantic barking. A bald, red-faced man in undershirt and trousers smoked his pipe and looked down the mighty street with mild curiosity. Two plump women, one of whom was buttoning a reluctant small boy into his jacket, called to each other from neighboring doorways.