City at World's End - Edmond Hamilton (best classic books to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: Edmond Hamilton
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Book online «City at World's End - Edmond Hamilton (best classic books to read .TXT) 📗». Author Edmond Hamilton
Police and National Guardsmen were already forming up cars on South Jefferson Street. Cadillacs, Buicks, Fords, ancient Hupmobiles. City and school buses were crowded with those who had no cars, and piled high with their belongings. Policemen on motorcycles roared past.
McLain boomed rapid orders. “Get sidecars on those motorcycles— they won’t make it without them, over rough ground.
“Divide up the garage tow-trucks as they come in— divide them evenly between the wards, so they can haul any car that conks out!”
And, to a worried National Guard officer, “No! What the devil use would we have for your fieldguns? Leave ‘em in the Armory and bring cots, blankets, camp equipment, instead!”
Then McLain commandeered a car, jumped in, and shouted back to Kenniston, “Have ‘em ready to move out by noon! I’ll have the Tube Mill whistle sounded, for a starting signal!”
And he was gone, racing off to the other ward gathering point. Kenniston found himself faced by police, Guardsmen, deputies, officials, all clamoring for orders.
“What are we going to do with these cars? Half of them are so overloaded they’ll never get anywhere!”
Kenniston saw that. The arriving cars were piled not only with bedding and other essentials, but with radios, musical instruments, big framed family portraits, hobby-horses, every sort of possession.
“Go along and tear some of that junk off,” he ordered. “Form up all the way down South Jefferson— but only two abreast, for some of those South Side streets are narrow.”
As he sweated to marshal the gathering cars, he watched for Carol’s blue coupe. When she came, driving with pale self-possession while her aunt looked scaredly at the jam, he got her as near the front of the form-up as he could, and then raced back to the Square.
The squad leaders rapidly reported in on their assigned streets. “Everybody’s out of Adams Street! Everybody’s out of Perry Street! Lincoln Avenue—”
But— “We haven’t got ‘em all out of North Street, Mr. Kenniston! Some of those old people just won’t go!”
Kenniston swore, and then jumped back into the jeep and drove around to North Street. It was the street of shabby ancient brick houses only two blocks off Main Street. And the first person he saw there was a grim-looking, shawled old woman standing with folded arms on her front porch.
“I’m not leaving my home,” she snapped to Kenniston before he could speak. “I’ve lived in this house all my life, and my mother before me. I’ll not leave it now.” She sniffed scornfully. “The idea of the whole town taking up and running away just because it’s got a little cold!”
Kenniston, baffled, saw a little girl of six peering at him from inside the window of the house.
“That your granddaughter?” he asked. “Listen. She’ll be dead in a few days. Stone, frozen dead. Unless you bring her and your warm clothes and blankets along now.”
The shawled old woman stared at him. Then, her voice suddenly dull, she asked, “Where do I go?”
He hastened on along the street. A peppery old man was being carried out in a wheelchair by two squad men, and was viciously striking at them with his cane.
“God-damned foolishness!” he was swearing. They got them into the waiting buses, and hastily loaded on their belongings. Then Kenniston raced back to the Square. His watch said eleven-ten, and he knew how far they were from ready.
On the Square, under the big sycamore tree, a gaunt, tall man with burning eyes was brandishing a Bible and shouting, to no one, “End of the world— punishment for sin—”
Lauber, the truck dispatcher whom McLain had left in charge of the First Ward caravan under Kenniston, came running up to him when he reached South Jefferson.
“These people are crazy!” he panted. “The ones already here want to start right now— and they don’t even know the way!”
Kenniston saw that the police had drawn a barricade of big trucks across the street some blocks southward. Cars were surging against it, motors roaring, drivers shouting, horns sounding in a deafening chorus.
Panic! He knew it was in the air. He, all of them, had known there was danger of it when the Mayor had made his broadcast. They had had to risk it, for only real fear could make people leave their lifelong homes. But if it got out of hand—
He rode along the line, shouting, “Form up! Form in line! If you jam the street, you’ll be left behind!”
He couldn’t even be heard. Limousines, trucks, jalopies— they crowded each other, banged fenders, bumped and recoiled and pressed forward again. And the horns never stopped their shrieking cacophony.
Kenniston, sweating now despite the frozen chill of the air, prayed that the gathering panic would not burst into violence. At the front of the surging, roaring mass, he found Mayor Garris. And the Mayor’s pallid face showed that panic had infected him too.
“Shouldn’t we go?” he shouted to Kenniston over the uproar of horns and motors. “Everyone seems ready here!”
“McLain’s running the traffic movement, and we’ve got to stick to his orders!” he shouted back.
“But if these people break loose—” the Mayor began. He stopped. Over the shrieking horns and thundering motors, a new sound was rising. A distant, banshee wail, a faraway scream that swelled into a hoarse, giant howl. The auto horns, the shouting voices from the cars, fell silent. Only the sound of motors was background to that unending scream that wailed across Middletown like a requiem.
“That’s the Tube Mill whistle!” cried Lauber. “That’s the signal!”
Kenniston sent the jeep jumping ahead. “Okay, let those trucks roll! But keep people in line, back of them! No stampeding!”
The big Diesels that barricaded the way began to snort and rumble, and then started to move out, as ponderously as elephants. Kenniston’s jeep swung in front. But almost at once, cars behind pressed to get around them.
“Run the trucks three abreast, in front!” he shouted to Lauber. “It’ll keep them from getting around!”
Down Jefferson Street, down over the muddy bed of the vanished river, past the old houses with their doors carefully shut and locked, past the playground that looked as forlorn as though it knew the children were going, never to return.
Past Home Street, past the silent mills, past the beer signs of South Street, where from an upstairs window a drunken man shouted and waved a bottle at them. Past the last rows of drab frame houses, the last brave little yards whose flowers were blackened now by frost.
Kenniston saw ahead of them the line of demarcation, the boundary between the past and what was now Earth. They reached it, passed it—
And then the rolling, ocher-yellow plains were all about them, barren and drab beneath the great, firelashed red eye of the Sun. The cold wind whooped around them, as they started to climb the easy slope toward the ridge. Behind his jeep, Diesels, jalopies, buses, shiny station wagons rolled with roaring, sputtering, purring motors.
Kenniston looked back down the slope at them. Already the other Ward was moving out, and he rode at the head of a huge caravan of vehicles crawling endlessly out of Middletown— a caravan out of the Earth that was gone forever, into this unguessable tomorrow.
When they came up over the ridge, and for the first time had view of the distant domed city that shimmered in the wan light far out on the desolate plain, Kenniston could sense the shock of doubt and fear that ran through all of this host who were seeing it for the first time. He could see it in all their peering faces, pale and strained in the red light of the dying Sun.
Even he, seeing it for only the second time, felt an inner recoiling. With his mind still filled with every sight and sound and smell of the old town they had left, the alien, solemn, deathly city of the dome seemed to him impossible as a refuge. He choked down that feeling, he had to choke it down; it was go on or die.
“Keep moving!” he shouted, sounding the jeep’s horn to command attention, gesturing authoritatively forward. “Keep going!”
He conquered that brief pause of recoil, got them moving over the ridge, skidding and sliding down the other slope, in clouds of heavy dust.
He glimpsed Mayor Garris staring ahead, his plump face shocked and pallid. He wondered what Carol was thinking, as she looked out at the lonely shining bubble in the sad wastes.
The endless caravan, shrouded in dust, was halfway down the long slope when Kenniston heard a raging of horns and looked back. An old sedan had stopped squarely in the middle of the narrow track the trucks had beaten down across a shallow gully. Cars were pulling out around it, wallowing in soft earth, jamming their low-hung frames against the banks, getting inextricably tangled. Behind them, the line was damming up.
Kenniston yelled to Lauber to keep the head of the caravan moving on toward the distant dome, and then sent his jeep snorting back along the line. A knot of people had collected now around the offending sedan. Kenniston hastily shouldered his way through them.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded. “Whose car is this?”
A weatherbeaten, middle-aged man turned to him, half-scared, half-apologetic. “Mine— my car. I’m John Borzak.” He gestured to the back seat of the old sedan. “My wife, she’s having a baby in there.” He added, as an afterthought, “My fifth.”
“Oh, Christ, that’s all we needed!” Kenniston cried. Borzak looked instantly guilty. He looked so sad that Kenniston began to laugh. Suddenly all of them were laughing, in sheer relief from nervous tension.
He set men scurrying to get a doctor and ambulance out of the procession, and meanwhile willing hands carefully rolled the old sedan a little aside.
The dammed-up lines of cars began to roll again. But the pause, the waiting, the minutes spent in staring at the drear landscape, had been too much for some of those in line. Kenniston saw cars, only a few of them as yet, curving out of line and scrambling on the slope to swing back toward Middletown.
He’d feared that, above all things. People— people of a 20th Century Middlewestern town— could take only so much of the unknown. But he had to stop them, or panic would spread like fire that nobody could stop. He bucketed the jeep after them, got ahead of them by the advantage of his four-wheel drive, and then blocked their way back and stood up in the jeep and shouted at them and pointed ahead.
A man who looked like an aging carpenter, with a knobby face sheet-pale now, cursed Kenniston out of the depths of his fear.
“We’re not going out to die in this damned desert! We’re going back home!”
“You’ll never even get near it!” Kenniston warned. “There are special guards who won’t let anyone back into Middletown! Get it into your heads that the place is a death trap, will you!”
“Oh, Hugh, maybe we’d better go on!” whimpered the shapeless woman beside the man.
“Like hell we will! I’m a free American and this isn’t any dictatorship!”
Kenniston found the only argument that could sway these people who were recoiling from the deathliness of the desert.
“If you go back, if you do get into Middletown and stay there, you’ll soon be all alone there! You and the few like you— all alone, here at the end of the world, with the night and the cold!”
That got to them, replacing their fear with a greater dread, the dread of aloneness in this lonely world. The knobby-faced man looked sick and trapped, but he finally
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