Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

But, hungry as he was, he found that he had little appetite, and he had to force the meal down mouthful by mouthful. The rigid faces of corpses were staring at him from the nearby cars. While he was on the move he had been able to ignore them; but now, sitting here on what had once been Saro Province’s finest highway, he could not screen the sight of them from his mind. There were moments when he felt that he had murdered them all himself.

They built a bed from seat-cushions that had been thrown from colliding cars, and slept close together, a fitful scattered sleep, which could not have been much worse had they tried to sleep on the hard concrete roadbed itself.

During the evening came shouts, hoarse laughter, the distant sound of singing. Theremon awoke once and peered over the edge of the elevated highway, and saw distant campfires in a field down there, perhaps twenty minutes’ march off to the east. Did anyone ever sleep under a roof any more? Or had the impact of the Stars been so universal, he wondered, that the whole population of the world had turned itself out of house and home, to camp in the open as he and Siferra were doing, beneath the familiar light of the eternal suns?

Toward dawn he finally dozed. But hardly had he fallen asleep when Onos came up, pink and then golden in the east, pulling him out of fragmentary, terrifying dreams.

Siferra was already awake. Her face was pale, her eyes were reddened and puffy.

He managed a smile. “You look beautiful,” he told her.

“Oh, this is nothing,” she said. “You ought to see me when I’ve gone without washing for two weeks.”

“But I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” she said. “I think.”

That day they covered four miles, and it was difficult going for them, every step of the way.

“We need water,” Siferra said, as the afternoon wind began to rise. “We’ll have to take the next exit ramp we see, and try to find a spring.”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to.”

Theremon felt uneasy about descending. Since the beginning of the journey they had had the highway virtually to themselves; and by now he had come to feel almost at home, in a strange sort of way, amid the tangle of crushed and ruined vehicles. Down there, in the open fields where the bands of refugees were moving— Odd , he thought, how I call them refugees, as though I’m simply off on some sort of holiday myself —there was no telling what sort of trouble they would get into.

But Siferra was right. They had to go down and find water. The supply that they had brought with them was all but exhausted. And perhaps they needed some time away from the hellish unending strip of demolished cars and stiff, staring corpses before they resumed their march toward Amgando.

He pointed to a road-sign a short way in front of them. “Half a mile to the next exit.”

“We should be able to get there in an hour.”

“Less,” he said. “The road looks pretty clear up ahead. We’ll get ourselves down from the highway and do what we need to do, as fast as we can, and then we’d better get back up here to sleep. It’s safer to bed down out of sight between a couple of these cars than to take our chances in the open fields.”

Siferra saw the logic of that. In this relatively uncluttered stretch of the road they moved quickly toward the upcoming exit ramp, traveling faster than they had in covering any previous section of the highway. In hardly any time at all they came to the next road-sign, the one that gave quarter-mile warning of the exit.

But then their rapid progress was sharply checked. They found the roadbed blocked at that point by so immense a pileup of crashed cars that Theremon feared for a moment that they would not be able to get through at all.

There must have been some truly monstrous series of crashes here, something dreadful even by the standards of what he and Siferra had already passed through. Two huge transport trucks seemed to be in the middle of it, interlocked face to face like two warring beasts of the jungle; and it appeared that dozens of passenger cars had come barreling into them, flipping up on end, falling back on those who followed them, building a gigantic barrier that reached from one side of the road to the other and outward over the railings at the road’s margins. Crumpled doors and fenders, sharp as blades, stuck out everywhere, and acres of broken glass set up a sinister tinkling as the wind played over it.

“Here,” Theremon called. “I think I see a way—up through this opening, and then over the left-hand truck—no, no, that won’t work, we’ll have to go under—”

Siferra came up alongside him. He showed her the problem—a cluster of up-ended cars waiting for them on the far side, like a field of upturned knives—and she nodded. They went underneath instead, a slow, dirty, painful crawl through shards of glass and clotted pools of fuel. Midway through they paused to rest before continuing through to the far side of the pileup.

Theremon was the first to emerge.

“Gods!” he muttered, staring in bewilderment at the scene that lay before him. “What now?”

The road was open for perhaps fifty feet on the far side of the great mass of wreckage. Beyond the clear space a second roadblock lay across the highway from one side to the other. This one, though, had been deliberately constructed—a heap of car doors and wheels neatly piled on the roadbed to a height of eight or nine feet.

In front of the barricade Theremon saw some two dozen people, who had set up a campsite right on the highway. He had been so intent on getting through the tangle of wreckage that he had paid no attention to anything else, and so he had not heard the sounds from the other side.

Siferra came crawling out beside him. He heard her gasp of surprise and shock.

“Keep your hand on your needler,” Theremon said quietly to her. “But don’t pull it out and don’t even think of trying to use it. There are too many of them.”

A few of the strangers were sauntering up the road toward them now, six or seven brawny-looking men. Theremon, motionless, watched them come. He knew that there was no turning back from this encounter—no hope of escape through that maze of knife-sharp wreckage through which they had just wriggled. He and Siferra were trapped in this clearing between the two roadblocks. All they could do was wait to see what happened next, and hope that these people were reasonably sane.

A tall, slouch-shouldered, cold-eyed man came unhurriedly up to Theremon until they were standing virtually nose to nose, and said, “All right, fellow. This is a Search station.” He put a peculiar emphasis on the word Search.

“Search station?” Theremon repeated coolly. “And what is it that you’re searching for?”

“Don’t get wise with me or you’ll find yourself going over the edge head first. You know damned well what we’re searching for. Don’t make trouble for yourself.”

He gestured to the others. They moved in close, patting Theremon’s clothes and Siferra’s. Angrily Theremon pushed the questing hands away.

“Let us pass,” he said tightly.

“Nobody goes through here without Search.”

“By whose authority?”

“By my authority. You going to let us, or we going to have to make you?”

“Theremon—” Siferra whispered uneasily.

He shook her off. Rage was rising in him.

Reason told him that it was folly to try to resist, that they were badly outnumbered, that the tall man wasn’t fooling around when he said there’d be trouble for them if they refused to submit to the search.

These people didn’t exactly seem to be bandits. There was something official-sounding about the tall man’s words, as though this were some kind of boundary, a customs station, perhaps. What were they searching for? Food? Weapons? Would these men try to take the needle-guns from them? Better to give them everything they were carrying, Theremon told himself, than to be killed in a vain and foolishly heroic attempt at maintaining their freedom of passage.