City at World's End - Edmond Hamilton (best classic books to read .TXT) 📗

The younger of the two men was broad and hard and healthy, with sorrel hair and one of those frank, jovial faces that is built over flint. Like the woman’s, his attitude was of alert, half-cautious reserve.

The other man was thin and untidy and very human. He had none of the cool reserve of his companions. He was excited, and showed it, blinking eagerly at the Middletowners. Kenniston warmed to him at once.

There was a strange silence, and the woman and two men stopped. They looked at the Middletowners, and the Middletowners stared at them. Then the woman said something to her companions in a rapid, unfamiliar tongue. The younger man nodded silently, and the thin eager man poured out a tumbling flood of words.

Mayor Garris stepped forward hesitantly, a paradox of pompous humility.

“I…” he said, and stopped. The small word vanished away on the wind, and he could seem to find nothing to replace it. The blond woman regarded him with her bright gaze, intent and faintly amused.

The thin man stepped forward toward them. Forming the words very carefully, he said, “Middletown calling.” And again, “Middletown— calling!”

Kenniston was shaken by a great amazement. Relief and understanding made him almost giddy for the moment, and he heard again his own tired voice speaking those two hopeless, pleading words into a silence that neither heard nor answered. But it had heard. It had answered, from somewhere. From where? Another world, another star? Not from anywhere on Earth, surely. That great ship had never stooped to make such a paltry journey.

He heard Mayor Garris utter a squeaking, strangled cry. A wave of shock, audible in the indrawn breath of every man there, swept the tight-packed group. Kenniston’s wandering thoughts came back with a start.

The fourth member of the party had come up and joined the other three. And Kenniston himself was appalled at what he saw.

The fourth of the newcomers was not human. Manlike, yes— but not a man.

He was tall, his body enormously strong and massive, his thick arms ending in hands like heavy paws. He was clothed in his own shaggy fur, supplemented by a harness-like garment. His head was flattened, its muzzle protruding in the fashion of a beast, his round and tufted ears alert. And his eyes… It was the eyes that were most shocking. They met Kenniston’s, large, and dark and full of a quick, penetrating intelligence. Good-natured eyes, curious, smiling…

The Mayor had backed away. His face was quite white. He cried out shrilly, “Why, it isn’t human!”

The furry one looked puzzled by this outburst. He glanced at the woman and the two men, and they all looked at Garris, frowning, as though at a loss to understand his fright.

The creature moved toward Garris a step or two, his pawlike hands outstretched. He spoke in a slow, rumbling voice and smiled, showing a row of great teeth that glistened sharp as sabres in the light.

Garris shrieked. And Kenniston saw panic on the faces of the other men, and saw the guns come up.

“Wait!” he yelled, and darted forward, thrusting the Mayor aside. “For God’s sake, wait, you fools!” He faced them, standing so that his body shielded the alien one. He had, himself, a revulsion from that creature that was both beastlike and manlike. But the furry one had looked at him, and had smiled…

“Don’t shoot!” he cried. “It’s intelligent, it’s one of them!”

“Stand aside, Kenniston,” shouted the Mayor, his voice high with panic. “The brute looks dangerous!”

The guns he faced swung sharply away from Kenniston. He turned and saw that the four newcomers had suddenly stepped a little to one side. And abruptly, the scene ended. The woman raised her hand in a swift gesture. From the ship out on the plain came a flash of white light. It struck like a snake, at all the crowd of Middletowners in the portal. It struck, and was gone in an instant.

Kenniston had been in its path, too. He felt a stunning shock in every nerve of his body. There was only a split second of pain, and then a numbed paralysis as from an electric shock. He saw Garris and Hubble and the others stagger, their faces white and shaken. The guns dropped from nerveless hands.

Then the furry one trudged toward Kenniston. Again, his dark eyes smiled. He made reassuring rumbling sounds, and his big pawlike hands kneaded into Kenniston’s neck with expert deftness. The paralysis of Kenniston’s nerves began to fade.

The sorrel-haired younger man had stepped forward and picked up one of the fallen guns. Incredulity came into his eyes as he examined it. He said something in a sharp voice to the others. They looked the gun over and over. Then, puzzled and startled, they stared at Kenniston and at the other Middletowners who now seemed returning to normal.

“They’ve got a death ray or something!” choked Bertram Garris. “They can kill us!”

Hubble said savagely, “Shut up. You’re making an ass of yourself. That weapon was only a nonlethal means of defense that you forced them to use.”

The woman called excitedly to the furry one. “Gorr Holl!” It was, obviously, his name. And Gorr Holl rejoined the other three. He too uttered sounds of bewilderment as he looked at the gun.

Kenniston spoke to Hubble, ignoring Garris and the dazed police. “I think they’ve just begun to suspect where we came from.”

The excitement of the four newcomers was obvious. It was the woman, Kenniston noticed, who first recovered from that bewilderment. She spoke quickly to the thin, blinking man, the one who had so happily repeated, “Middletown calling!” From her repeated use of the name, Kenniston guessed the man was called Piers Eglin. And Piers Eglin looked the most staggered of all the four— and the most joyful.

He came back to Kenniston. He almost devoured him with those blinking eyes. “Middletown,” he said. And then, after a moment, “Friends.”

Kenniston seized on that. “Friends? Then you speak English?” The word “English” set Piers Eglin off into a new paroxysm of excitement. He began to babble to the others, but the woman cut him short. He swung back to Kenniston. “English— language,” he almost panted. “You— speak— English— language.” Kenniston simply nodded.

A look of awe crept into Piers Eglin’s blinking eyes as he asked, “Who— No!” He began again. “Where— do you— come from?”

“From the past,” Kenniston answered, and felt the full unreality of it as he said it. “From far in the past.”

“How far?”

Kenniston realized that twentieth-century dates would mean little, after all these epochs. He thought a moment. Then he said, “Very far in the past. In our lifetime, atomic power was first released.”

“So far?” whispered Piers Eglin numbly. “But how? How?” Kenniston shrugged helplessly. “There was an atomic explosion over our city. We found our whole city in this age. That’s all.”

The thin man feverishly translated for the others. The woman showed deep interest. But it was Gorr Holl, the furry one, who made the longest comment in his rumbling voice.

Piers Eglin swung back to Kenniston, but Kenniston stemmed the other’s eager questions by a question of his own. “Where do you come from?”

The thin one pointed up at the dawnlit sky. “From—” he seemed trying to remember the ancient name. Then, “— from Vega.”

It was Kenniston’s turn to be staggered. “But you’re Earth-men!” He pointed to Gorr Holl’s furry figure. “And what about him?”

Again, Piers Eglin seemed to search his memory for a name. Then he said it. “Capella. Gorr Holl is from Capella.”

There was a silence, in which the four looked at the men of Middletown. Kenniston’s mind was a chaotic whirl, out of which one thing stood clear. The televisor-radio of this domed city had indeed been far outside his comprehension. That radio had been designed for interstellar distances. That was where the call had gone, and whence it had been answered— from Vega, from Capella, from the stars!

“But you speak our old language!” he cried incredulously.

Piers Eglin stumblingly explained. “I am an— historian, specializing in the pre-atomic Earth civilization. I learned its language from the old records. That is why I asked leave to accompany this party to Earth.”

The woman interrupted. She was shivering a little, and she spoke now in a low, rapid voice. Piers Eglin told them, “She is Varn Allan, the Administrator of this— this sector. Here—” nodding to the sorrel-haired younger man— “is Norden Lund, the Sub-Administrator.” The words were hard for him to remember, harder still to shape. He added, “Varn Allan asks that we— we talk inside the city, where it is not so cold.”

Kenniston had guessed that the woman held authority in the group. He was not surprised. Her vibrant forcefulness was striking.

Mayor Garris, who was half frozen himself, was only too happy to accede to that request. He turned toward the portal, behind which all the thousands of New Middletown were being held with difficulty. Their massed faces showed as a pale blur through the glass of the dome.

“Make way, there!” Garris ordered, in his most important tone. He gestured at the sweating guardsmen and police who held the line. “Clear a way there, now, we’re coming in.” He raised his voice, speaking to the people beyond. “Stand back, will you? Everything’s fine, the other people have come at last, and they want to see our city. So let them through, let them through!”

The crowd, with painful reluctance, made a narrow lane through itself, which was widened by the efforts of the guardsmen. Leading the way for the star-folk, the Mayor’s dignity was somewhat injured by the uneasiness that caused him to skip hastily ahead with nervous backward glances at Gorr Holl’s towering figure. But he kept up his jovial front as leader of his people, shouting to them that all was well, that there was nothing to fear, and begging them to keep back and refrain from pushing.

Varn Allan was the first one to follow Garris through the portal. She hesitated, just an instant, as she and the jostling eager crowd caught sight of one another, and the crowd sent up a wild-throated roar of cheering that shook the dome. Behind her, Norden Lund grinned and shook his head, as a man might at the bad manners of children. Then Varn Allan smiled at the people and went on, and the edges of the crowd swayed and buckled inward and the guardsmen swore, and some irreverent soul whistled appreciatively at the tall, lithe woman with the golden hair. They shouted questions at her, a thousand all at once, and the half-hysterical greetings of people who have waited so long that they have lost hope and then find it suddenly fulfilled, and Kenniston hoped that they would not do anything violent, like carrying her and Norden Lund on their shoulders.

He went in right beside Gorr Holl. The people had not seen him yet, except as a vague, dark figure beyond the wall of curving glass. When they did, their voice dropped dead still for a moment and then took up again on a rising note of incredulity and alarm. Women who had shoved and clawed to get in the first row now tried to scramble back out of harm’s way, and the edges of the crowd drew sharply apart. Kenniston walked close to the big furry Capellan, his hand resting on one mighty shoulder, to show the crowd that they had nothing to fear. And the people stared and stared.

“What the devil is it? A pet?”

“Look, it’s got clothes on! Don’t tell me it’s one of them!”

“Keep it away from me! It’s showing its teeth…” Kenniston shouted explanations, and under his palm the dark thick fur