Edmond Hamilton: City at World's End

The whole countryside around Middletown was gone. The fields, the green, flat fields of the Middle West, and the river, and the streams, and the old scattered farms—they were all gone, and it was a completely different and utterly alien landscape that now stretched outside the town.

Rolling, ocher-yellow plains, sad and empty, lifted toward a ridge of broken hills that had never been there before. The wind blew over that barren, lifeless world, stirring the ocher weeds, lifting heavy little clouds of dust and dropping them back again to earth. The Sun peered down like a great dull eye with lashes of writhing fire, and the glimmering stars swung solemn in the sky, and all of them, the Earth, the stars, the Sun, had a look of death about them, a stillness and a waiting, a remoteness that had nothing to do with men or with anything that lived.

Kenniston gripped the rail tightly, feeling all reality crumbling away beneath him, searching frantically for an explanation, for any rational explanation, of that impossible scene.

“The bomb—did it somehow blast the countryside out there, instead of Middletown?”

“Would it take away a river, and bring instead those hills and that yellow scrub?” said Hubble. “Would any bomb-blast do that?”

“But for God’s sake, then what—”

“It hit us, Kenniston. It went off right over Middletown, and it did something…” He faltered, and then said, “Nobody really knew what a super-atomic bomb would do. There were logical theories and assumptions about it, but nobody really knew anything except that the most violent concentrated force in history would be suddenly released. Well, it was released, over Middletown. And it was violent. So violent that…”

He stopped, again, as though he could not quite muster up the courage to voice the certainty that was in him. He gestured at the dusky sky.

“That’s our Sun, our own Sun—but it’s old now, very old. And that Earth we see out there is old too, barren and eroded and dying. And the stars…. You looked at the stars, Ken, but you didn’t see them. They’re different, the constellations distorted by the motions of the stars, as only millions of years could distort them.”

Kenniston whispered, “Millions of years? Then you think that the bomb…” He stopped, and he knew now how Hubble had felt. How did you say a thing that had never been said before?

“Yes, the bomb,” said Hubble. “A force, a violence, greater than any ever known before, too great to be confined by the ordinary boundaries of matter, too great to waste its strength on petty physical destruction. Instead of shattering buildings, it shattered space and time.”

Kenniston’s denial was a hoarse cry. “Hubble, no! That’s madness! Time is absolute—”

Hubble said, “You know it isn’t. You know from Einstein’s work that there’s no such thing as time by itself, that instead there is a space-time continuum. And that continuum is curved, and a great enough force could hurl matter from one part of the curve to another.”

He raised a shaking hand toward the deathly, alien landscape outside the town.

“And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into this dying, future Earth!”

The rest of the staff was waiting for them when they came back into the Lab grounds. A dozen men, ranging in age from Crisci to old Beitz, standing shivering in the chill red sunlight in front of the building. Johnson was with them, waiting for his answer. Hubble looked at him, and at the others. He said, “I think we’d better go inside.”

They did not ask the questions that were clamoring inside them. Silently, with the jerky awkward movements of men strung so taut that their reflex centers no longer function smoothly, they followed Hubble through the doorway. Kenniston went with them, but not all the way. He turned aside, toward his own office, and said, “I’ve got to find out if Carol is all right.”

Hubble said sharply. “Don’t tell her, Ken. Not yet.”

“No,” said Kenniston. “No, I won’t.”

He went into the small room and closed the door. The telephone was on his desk, and he reached for it, and then he drew his hand away. The fear had altered now into a kind of numbness, as though it were too large to be contained within a human body and had ebbed away, carrying with it all the substances of strength and will as water carries sand.

He looked at the black, familiar instrument and thought how improbable it was that there should still be telephones, and fat books beside them with quantities of names and numbers belonging to people who had lived once in villages and nearby towns, but who were not there any more, not since—how long? An hour or so, if you figured it one way. If you figured it another…

He sat down in the chair behind the desk. He had done a lot of hard work sitting in that chair, and now all that work had ceased to matter.

Quite a lot of things had ceased to matter. Plans, and ideas, and where you were going to go on your honeymoon, and exactly where you wanted to live, and in what kind of a house. Florida and California and New York were words as meaningless as “yesterday” and “tomorrow.”

They were gone, the times and the places, and there wasn’t anything left out of them but Carol herself, and maybe even Carol wasn’t left, maybe she’d been out with her aunt for a little drive in the country, and if she wasn’t in Middletown when it happened she’s gone, gone, gone…

He took the phone in both hands and said a number over and over in-to it. The operator was quite patient with him. Everybody in Middletown seemed to be calling someone else, and over the roar and click of the exchange and the ghostly confusion of voices he heard the pounding of his own blood in his ears and he thought that he did not have any right to want Carol to be there, and he ought to be praying that she had gone somewhere, because why would he want anybody he loved to have to face what was ahead of them. And what was ahead of them? How could you guess which one, out of all the shadowy formless horrors that might be…

“Ken?” said a voice in his ear. “Ken, is that you? Hello!”

“Carol,” he said. The room turned misty around him and there was nothing anywhere but that voice on the line.

“I’ve been trying and trying to get you, Ken! What on earth happened? The whole town is excited—I saw a terrible flash of lightning, but there wasn’t any storm, and then that quake… Are you all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine…” She wasn’t really frightened yet. Anxious, upset, but not frightened. A flash of lightning, and a quake. Alarming yes, but not terrifying, not the end of the world… He caught himself up, hard. He said, “I don’t know yet what it was.”

“Can you find out? Somebody must know.” She did not guess, of course, that Kenniston was an atomic physicist. He had not been allowed to tell that to anyone, not even his fiancé. To her, he was merely a research technician in an industrial laboratory, vaguely involved with test tubes and things. She had never questioned him very closely about his work, apparently content to leave all that up to him, and he had been grateful because it had spared him the necessity of lying to her. Now he was even more grateful, because she would not dream that he might have special information. That way, he could spare her a little longer, get himself in hand before he told her. “I’ll do my best,” he told her. “But until we’re sure, I wish you and your aunt would stay in the house, off the street. No, I don’t think your bridge-luncheon will come off anyway.