Edmond Hamilton: City at World's End

Nor was quiet Walters Avenue, where he had his rooms, though the rows of maples were an odd color in the reddish light. Kenniston was glad his landlady was out, for he didn’t think he could face many more puzzled questions right now.

He loaded his hunting kit—a .30-30 rifle and a 16-gauge repeating shotgun with boxes of shells—into the jeep. He put on a mackinaw, brought a leather coat for Hubble, and remembered gloves. Then, before re-entering the jeep, he ran down the street half a block to Carol Lane’s house.

Her aunt met him at the door. Mrs. Adams was stout, pink and worried.

“John, I’m so glad you came! Maybe you can tell me what to do. Should I cover my flowers?” She babbled on anxiously. “It seems so silly, on a June day. But it’s so much colder. And the petunias and bleeding-heart are so easily frost-bitten. And the roses—”

“I’d cover them, Mrs. Adams,” he told her. “The prediction is that it will be even colder.”

She threw up her hands. “The weather, these days! It never used to be like this.” And she hurried away to secure covering for the flowers, the flowers that had but hours to live. It hit Kenniston with another of those sickening little shocks of realization. No more roses on Earth, after today.

No more roses, ever again.

“Ken—did you find out what happened?” It was Carol’s voice behind him, and he knew, even before he turned to face her, that he could not evade with her as he had with the others. She didn’t know about science, and such things as time warps and shattered continuums had never entered her head. But she knew him, and she gave him no chance to temporize.

“Are they true, the stories about an atom bomb going off over Middletown?”

She had had time, since he called her, to become really alarmed. She had dark hair and dark eyes. She was slim in a sturdy fashion, and her ankles were nice, and her mouth was firm and sweet. She liked Tennyson and children and small dogs, and her ways were the ways of pleasant houses and fragrant kitchens, of quiet talk and laughter. It seemed a dreadful thing to Kenniston that she should be standing in a dying garden asking questions about atomic bombs.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re true.” He watched the color drain out of her face, and he went on hastily, “Nobody was killed. There are no radiation effects in the city, nothing at all to be afraid of.”

“There is something. I can see it in your face.”

“Well, there are things we’re not sure of yet. Hubble and I are going to investigate them now.” He caught her hands. “I haven’t time to talk, but…”

“Ken,” she said. “Why you? What would you know about such terrible things?”

He saw it coming, now, the necessity he had always a little dreaded and had hoped might be forever postponed, the time when Carol had to learn about his work. With what eyes would she look on him when she knew? He was not sure, not sure at all. He was glad he could evade a little longer.

He smiled. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Stay in the house, Carol, promise me. Then I won’t worry.”

“All right,” she said slowly. And then, sharply, “Ken…”

“What?”

“Nothing. Be careful.”

He kissed her, and ran back toward the jeep. Thank God she wasn’t the hysterical type. That would have been the last straw, right now.

He climbed in and drove to the Lab, wondering all the way what this was going to do to Carol and himself, whether they would both be alive tomorrow or the next day, and if so, what kind of a life it would be.

Grim, cold thoughts, and bitter with regret. He had had it all so nicely planned, before this nightmare happened. The loneliness would all be over, and the rootless drifting from place to place. He would have a home again, which he had not had since his parents died, and as much peace as a man was allowed in the modern world. He would have the normal things a man needed to keep him steady and give meaning to his years. And now…

Hubble was waiting for him outside the Lab, holding a Geiger counter and a clutter of other instruments. He placed them carefully in the jeep, then put on the leather coat and climbed into the seat beside Kenniston.

“All right, Ken—let’s go out the south end of town. From the hills we glimpsed that way, we can see more of the lay of the land.”

They found a barricade, and police on guard, at the southern edge of town. There they were delayed until the Mayor phoned through a hasty authorization for Hubble and Kenniston to go out “for inspection of the contaminated region.”

The jeep rolled down a concrete road between green little suburban farms, for less than a mile. Then the road and the green farmland suddenly ended.

From this sharp demarcation, rolling ocher plains ran away endlessly to east and west. Not a tree, not a speck of green broke the monotony.

Only the ocher-yellow scrub, and the dust, and the wind.

Hubble, studying his instruments, said, “Nothing. Not a thing. Keep going.”

Ahead of them the low hills rose, gaunt and naked, and above was the vast bowl of the sky, a cold darkness clamped down upon the horizons.

Dim Sun, dim stars, and under them no sound but the cheerless whimper of the wind.

Its motor rattling and roaring, its body lurching over the unevenness of the ocher plain, the jeep bore them out into the silence of the dead Earth.

Kenniston concentrated on the wheel, gripping it until his hands ached.

He stared fixedly at the ground ahead, noting every rock, guiding the jeep carefully across shallow gullies, driving as though there were nothing in the universe but the mechanical act. He envied the jeep its ability to chug unemotionally over the end of the world. It struck him as so amusing that he laughed a little.

Hubble’s fingers clamped his shoulder, hard enough to hurt even through the heavy coat. “Don’t, Ken.”

Kenniston turned his head. He saw that Hubble’s face was drawn and gray, and that his eyes were almost pleading.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Hubble nodded. “I know. I’m having a hard enough time hanging on myself.”

They went on across the empty plain, toward the low skeletal hills that were like bony knees thrust up from the ocher dust. Soon the jeep was climbing an easy slope, its motor clattering and roaring. Somehow, the familiar motor sound only served to emphasize the fact that around them lay the silence and red dusk of world’s end. Kenniston wished that Hubble would say something, anything. But the older man did not, and Kenniston’s own tongue was frozen. He was lost in a nightmare, and there was nothing to do but drive.

A sudden whistling scream came piping down the slope at them. Both men started violently. With hands slippery with cold sweat, Kenniston swung the jeep a little and saw a brown, furry shape about the size of a small horse bolting over the ridge, going with long, awkward bounds.

Kenniston slowed down until he had stopped shaking. Hubble said in a low whisper, “Then there is still animal life on Earth—of a sort. And look there—” He pointed to a deep little pit in the dusty ground with a ridge of freshly dark new soil around it. “The thing was digging there. Probably for water. The surface is arid, so it must dig to drink.”

They stopped the jeep, and examined the pit and the scrub around it.

There were marks of teeth on the bark of the low shrubs.

“Rodential teeth,” said Hubble. “Enormously larger than anything like them occurring in our time, but still recognizable.” They looked at each other, standing in the chill red light. Then Hubble turned back to the jeep. “We’ll go on.”

They went on, up the ridge. They saw two more of the pits made by the diggers, but these were old and crumbling. The blind red eye of the Sun watched them coldly. Kenniston thought of a frightened, furry thing loping on and on over the ocher desolation that once long ago had been the home of men.