Edmond Hamilton: City at World's End

And you can’t tell what people will do when they’re frightened. Promise? Yes—yes, I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

He hung up, and as soon as that contact with Carol was broken, reality slipped away from him again. He looked around the office, and it became suddenly rather horrible, because it had no longer any meaning.

He had an urgent wish to get out of it, yet when he rose he stood for some while with his hands on the edge of the desk, going over Hubble’s words in his mind, remembering how the Sun had looked, and the stars, and the sad, alien Earth, knowing that it was all impossible but unable to deny it. The long hall of time, and a shattering force… He wanted desperately to run away, but there was no place to run to. Presently he went down the corridor to Hubble’s office.

They were all there, the twelve men of the staff, and Johnson. Johnson had gone by himself into a corner. He had seen what lay out there beyond the town, and the others had not. He was trying to understand it, to understand the fact and the explanation of it he had just heard. It was not a pleasant thing, to watch him try. Kenniston glanced at the others.

He had worked closely with these men. He had thought he knew them all so well, having seen them under stress, in the moments when their work succeeded and the others when it did not. Now he realized that they were all strangers, to him and to each other, alone and wary with their personal fears.

Old Beitz was saying, almost truculently, “Even if it were true, you can’t say exactly how long a time has passed. Not just from the stars.”

Hubble said, “I’m not an astronomer, but anyone can figure it from the tables of known star-motions, and the change in the constellations. Not exactly, no. But as close as will ever matter.”

“But if the continuum were actually shattered, if this town has actually jumped millions of years…” Beitz’ voice trailed off. His mouth began to twitch and he seemed suddenly bewildered by what he was saying, and he, and all of them, stood looking at Hubble in a haunted silence.

Hubble shook his head. “You won’t really believe, until you see for yourselves. I don’t blame you. But in the meantime, you’ll have to accept my statement as a working hypothesis.”

Morrow cleared his throat and asked, “What about the people out there—the town? Are you going to tell them?”

“They’ll have to know at least part of it,” Hubble said. “It’ll get colder, very much colder, by night, and they’ll have to be prepared for it. But there must not be any panic. The Mayor and the Chief of Police are on their way here now, and we’ll work it out with them.”

“Do they know yet, themselves?” asked Kenniston, and Hubble said,

“No.”

Johnson moved abruptly. He came up to Hubble and said, “I don’t get all this scientific talk about space and time. What I want to know is—is my boy safe?”

Hubble stared at him. “Your boy?”

“He went out to Martinsen’s farm early, to borrow a cultivator. It’s two miles out the north road. What about him, Mr. Hubble—is he safe?”

That was the secret agony that had been riding him, the one he had not voiced. Hubble said gently. “I would say that you don’t have to worry about him at all, Johnson.”

Johnson nodded, but still looked worried. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Hubble. I’d better go back now. I left my wife in hysterics.”

A minute or two after he left, Kenniston heard a siren scream outside.

It swung into the Lab yard and stopped. “That,” said Hubble, “would be the Mayor.”

A small and infirm reed to lean upon, thought Kenniston, at a time like this. There was nothing particularly wrong about Mayor Garris. He was no more bumbling, inefficient, or venal than the average mayor of any average small city. He liked banquets and oratory, he worried about the right necktie, and he was said to be a good husband and father. But Kenniston could not, somehow, picture Bertram Garris shepherding his people safely across the end of the world. He thought so even less when Garris came in, his bones well padded with the plump pink flesh of good living, his face the perfect pattern of the successful little man who is pleased with the world and his place in it. Just now he was considerably puzzled and upset, but also rather elated at the prospect of something important going on. Kimer, the Chief of Police, was another matter. He was a large angular man with a face that had seen many grimy things and had learned from them a hard kind of wisdom. Not a brilliant man, Kenniston thought, but one who could get things done. And he was worried, far more worried than the Mayor. Garris turned immediately to Hubble. It was obvious that he had a great respect for him and was proud to be on an equal footing with such an important person as one of the nation’s top atomic scientists. “Is there any news yet, Doctor Hubble?

We haven’t been able to get a word from outside, and the wildest rumors are going around. I was afraid at first that you might have had an explosion here in the laboratory, but…”

Kimer interrupted him. “Talk is going around that an atomic bomb hit here, Doctor Hubble. Some of the people are getting scared. If enough of them get to believe it, we’ll have a panic on our hands. I’ve got our officers on the streets soothing ’em down, but I’d like to have a straight story they’ll believe.”

“Atomic bomb!” said Mayor Garris. “Preposterous. We’re all alive, and there’s been no damage. Doctor Hubble will tell you that atomic bombs…”

For the second time he was cut short. Hubble broke in sharply. “We’re not dealing with an ordinary bomb. And the rumors are true, as far as they go.” He paused, and went on more slowly, making every word distinct, “A super-atomic was exploded an hour ago, for the first time in history, right here.”

He let that sink in. It was a lingering and painful process, and while it was going on Kenniston looked away, up through the window at the dusky sky and the sullen red Sun, and felt the knot in his stomach tighten. We were warned, he thought. We were all warned for years that we were playing with forces too big for us.

“It didn’t destroy us,” Hubble was saying. “We’re lucky that way. But it did have certain—effects.”

“I don’t understand,” said the Mayor piteously. “I simply don’t—Certain effects? What?”

Hubble told him, with quiet bluntness.

The Mayor and the Chief of Police of Middletown, normal men of a normal city, adjusted to life in a normal world, listening to the incredible.

Listening, trying to comprehend—trying, and failing, and rejecting it utterly.

“That’s insane,” said Garris angrily. “Middletown thrown into the future? Why, the very sound of it… What are you trying to do, Doctor Hubble?”

He said a great deal more than that. So did Kimer. But Hubble wore them down. Quietly, implacably, he pointed to the alien landscape around the town, the deepening cold, the red, aged Sun, the ceasing of all wire and radio communication from outside. He explained, sketchily, the nature of time and space, and how they might be shattered. His scientific points they could not understand. But those they took on faith, the faith which the people of the Twentieth Century had come to have in the interpreters of the complex sciences they themselves were unable to comprehend. The physical facts they understood well enough. Too well, once they were forced to it.

It got home at last. Mayor Garris sank down into a chair, and his face was no longer pink, and the flesh sagged on it. His voice was no more than a whimper when finally he asked, “What are we going to do?”

Hubble had an answer ready, to a part of that question, at least. “We can’t afford a panic. The people of Middletown will have to learn the truth slowly. That means that none of them must go outside the town yet—or they’d learn at once. I’d suggest you announce the area outside town is possibly radioactive contaminated, and forbid anyone to leave.”