Edmond Hamilton: City at World's End

Kenniston turned in at the gate of the smoke-grimed brick structure that bore the sign, “Industrial Research Laboratories.” The watchman at the gate nodded to him unperturbedly as he let him through.

Neither the watchman nor any of Middletown’s fifty thousand people, except a few city officials, knew that this supposed industrial laboratory actually housed one of the key nerve centers of America’s atomic defense setup.

Clever, thought Kenniston. It had been clever of those in charge of dispersal to tuck this key atomic laboratory into a prosaic little Midwestern mill town.

“But not clever enough,” he thought.

No, not quite clever enough. The unknown enemy had learned the secret, and had struck the first stunning blow of his surprise attack at the hidden nerve center of Middletown.

A super-atomic, to smash that nerve center before war even started.

Only, the super-atomic had fizzled. Or had it? The Sun was a different Sun. And the air was strange and cold.

Crisci met Kenniston by the entrance of the big brick building. Crisci was the youngest of the staff, a tall, black-haired youngster—and because he was the youngest, he tried hard not to show emotion now.

“It looks like it’s beginning,” said Crisci, trying to smile. “Atomic Armageddon—the final fireworks.” Then he quit trying to smile. “Why didn’t it wipe us out, Kenniston? Why didn’t it?”

Kenniston asked him, “Don’t the Geigers show anything?”

“Nothing. Not a thing.”

That, Kenniston thought numbly, fitted the crazy improbability of it all. He asked, “Where’s Hubble?”

Crisci gestured vaguely. “Over there. He’s had us trying to call Washington, but the wires are all dead and even the radio hasn’t been able to get through yet.”

Kenniston walked across the cluttered plant yard. Hubble, his chief, stood looking up at the dusky sky and at the red dull Sun you could stare at without blinking. He was only fifty but he looked older at the moment, his graying hair disordered and his thin face tightly drawn.

“There isn’t any way yet to figure out where that missile came from,” Kenniston said.

Then he realized that Hubble’s thoughts weren’t on that, for the other only nodded abstractedly.

“Look at those stars, Kenniston.”

“Stars? Stars, in the daytime—?”

And then, looking up, Kenniston realized that you could see the stars now. You could see them as faint, glimmering points all across the strangely dusky sky, even near the dull Sun.

“They’re wrong,” said Hubble. “They’re very wrong.”

Kenniston asked, “What happened? Did their super-atomic really fizzle?”

Hubble lowered his gaze and blinked at him. “No,” he said softly. “It didn’t fizzle. It went off.”

“But Hubble, if that super-atomic went off, why—”

Hubble ignored the question. He went on into his own office in the Lab, and began to pull down reference volumes. To Kenniston’s surprise, he opened them to pages of astronomical diagrams. Then Hubble took a pencil and began to scrawl quick calculations on a pad.

Kenniston grabbed him by the shoulder. “For Christ’s sake, Hubble, this is no time for scientific theorizing! The town hasn’t been hit, but something big has happened, and—”

“Get the hell away from me,” said Hubble, without turning.

The sheer shock of hearing Hubble swear silenced Kenniston. Hubble went on with his figures, referring often to the books. The office was as silent as though nothing had happened at all. Finally, Hubble turned.

His hand shook a little as he pointed to the figures on the pad.

“See those, Ken? They’re proof—proof of something that cannot be. What does a scientist do when he faces that kind of a situation?”

He could see the sick shock and fear in Hubble’s gray face, and it fed his own fear. But before he could speak, Crisci came in.

He said, “We haven’t been able to contact Washington yet. And we can’t understand—our calls go completely unanswered, and not one station outside Middletown seems to be broadcasting.”

Hubble stared at his pad. “It all fits in. Yes, it all fits in.”

“What do you make of it, Doctor?” asked Crisci anxiously. “That bomb went off over Middletown, even though it didn’t hurt us. Yet it’s as though all the world outside Middletown has been silenced!”

Kenniston, cold from what he had seen in Hubble’s face, waited for the senior scientist to tell them what he knew or thought. But the phone rang suddenly with strident loudness.

It was the intercom from the watchman at the gate. Hubble picked it up. After a minute he said, “Yes, let him come in.” He hung up. “It’s Johnson. You know, the electrician who did some installations for us. He lives out on the edge of town. He told the watchman that was why he had to see me—because he lives on the edge of town.”

Johnson, when he came, was a man in the grip of a fear greater than Kenniston had even begun to imagine, and he was almost beyond talking. “I thought you might know,” he said to Hubble. “It seems like somebody’s got to tell me what’s happened, or I’ll lose my mind. I’ve got a cornfield, Mr. Hubble. It’s a long field, and then there’s a fence row, and my neighbor’s barn beyond it.”

He began to tremble, and Hubble said, “What about your cornfield?”

“Part of it’s gone,” said Johnson, “and the fence row, and the barn… Mr. Hubble, they’re all gone, everything…”

“Blast effect,” said Hubble gently. “A bomb hit here a little while ago, you see.”

“No,” said Johnson. “I was in London last war, I know what blast can do. This isn’t destruction. It’s…” He sought for a word, and could not find it. “I thought you might know what it is.”

Kenniston’s chill premonition, the shapeless growing terror in him, became too evil to be borne. He said, “I’m going out and take a look.”

Hubble glanced at him and then nodded, and rose to his feet, slowly, as though he did not want to go but was forcing himself. He said, “We can see everything from the water tower, I think—that’s the highest point in town. You keep trying to get through, Crisci.”

Kenniston walked with him out of the Lab grounds, and across Mill Street and the cluttered railroad tracks to the huge, stilt-legged water tower of Middletown. The air had grown colder. The red sunshine had no warmth in it, and when Kenniston took hold of the iron rungs of the ladder to begin the climb, they were like bars of ice. He followed Hubble upward, keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating soles of Hubble’s shoes.

It was a long climb. They had to stop to rest once. The wind blew harder the higher they got, and it had a dry musty taint in it that made Kenniston think of the air that blows from deep rock tombs with dust of ages in them.

They came out at last on the railed platform around the big, high tank.

Kenniston looked down on the town. He saw knots of people gathered on the corners, and the tops of cars, a few of them moving slowly but most of them stopped and jamming the streets. There was a curious sort of silence.

Hubble did not bother to look at the town, except for a first brief glance that took it all in, the circumference of Middletown with all its buildings standing just as they always had, with the iron Civil War soldier still stiffly mounting guard on the Square, and the smoke still rising steadily from the stacks of the mills. Then he looked outward. He did not speak, and presently Kenniston’s eyes were drawn also to look beyond the town.

He looked for a long time before it began to penetrate. His retinas relayed the image again and again, but the brain recoiled from its task of making sense out of that image, that unbelievable, impossible… No. It must be dust, or refraction, or an illusion created by the dusky red sunlight, anything but truth. There could not, by any laws known to Creation, be a truth like this one!