Edmond Hamilton: City at World's End

“Yes. Ken. I’m all right.” But her voice was remote and tired, and had no life in it.

Kenniston did not refer to the night before, to the time after the Mayor’s apocalyptic announcement. Of all the bad moments he had had that day, that one had been the worst. Mrs. Adams did the expected things, which he could cope with by means of brandy and ammonia capsules, but Carol did not. She sat quite still, looking at him in a way that he had never seen before. The Mayor had told the full truth about the Industrial Research Laboratory. It had been necessary, to explain why Hubbies’ statements were authoritative. Kenniston wished that he had told Carol about it himself. It seemed an unimportant thing in the face of the world’s end, and yet he felt that to her it was not unimportant at all.

He could not talk it out with her then, with Mrs. Adams’ hysterics dominating everything, and she had not come out to him later, and now, facing her again this morning, Kenniston felt unsure of himself and of her for the first time since he had met her.

“Stay inside and keep the furnace going,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He kissed her, and she stood there in the circle of his arms, neither yielding nor resisting. He said, almost desperately, “Don’t give up, Carol. We’ll find an answer to it all, somehow.”

She nodded and said, “Yes. Be careful,” and turned away. Kenniston went out alone, into the bitter morning.

It was still half dark, for the sullen Sun had not quite risen, sprawling in the east like some bloated monster heavy with blood. He refilled the jeep’s radiator, which he had drained the night before. It was very still, he noticed. The mill whistles, the delivery trucks, the peremptory voices of locomotives quarrelling at the Junction—all were gone. Even the children were silent now, afraid of the red, cold dawn. The roses all were dead, and the frost had blackened the summer shrubs and trees. The streets seemed empty as Kenniston drove the jeep down Main Street.

Middletown had taken on, overnight, the aspect of a tomb. Smoke arose from every chimney, in the houses where the people crouched indoors, peering sometimes with pale faces framed in frost-rimed glass as the jeep went clattering by in the silence. From every church he passed came sounds of hymns and praying. The bars, too, were noisy, having apparently defied law to remain open all night.

Kenniston realized that this town was dying as it stood. Fuel would run out fast, and without it life could not survive these bitter nights. A feeling of utter hopelessness swept over him. It seemed ironic that Middletown should have come safely through the most staggering cataclysm in history, only to perish miserably of cold.

Dimly, in the back of his mind, a thought began to form. It tempered his hopelessness a little, but before he could get it clear, he had made the turn into Vine Street, and the Keystone coal yard lay before him. And at that place in this still and deathly city, there was life and noise enough.

Policemen and National Guardsmen formed a cordon around the yard and its great black heaps of coal. They faced a crowd—an ugly crowd, still only muttering, but bound for trouble. Kenniston saw people he knew in that crowd, people who sat on their front porches in the warm summer nights and talked with neighbors and laughed. Mill hands, merchants, housewives—solid, decent folk, but turned wolfish now with the cold and the fear of dying.

Hubble met him inside the yard. A worried police sergeant was with him, and Borchard, who owned the yard.

“They were starting to loot the coal piles,” Hubble said. “Poor devils, it was summer and they didn’t have much fuel. Some of them burned their furniture last night to keep alive.”

Borchard said anxiously, “We don’t want to have to kill anyone. And right now, they’ll believe you scientists before anyone else.”

Hubble nodded. “You talk to them, Ken. You’ve gotten to know them better than I have, and they’ll trust you more.”

Kenniston said, “The hell they will. And anyway, what’ll I say to them? ‘Go home and freeze to death quietly, like gentlefolk, and let’s not have any nasty scenes.’ They’ll love that.”

“Maybe they don’t have to freeze,” said Hubble. “Maybe there’s an answer to that.”

The half-formed thought in the back of Kenniston’s mind leaped forward. He looked at Hubble, and he knew that the older man had had that same thought, but sooner and clearer. A small flicker of hope began to stir again in Kenniston.

“The domed city,” he said.

Hubble nodded. “Yes. It retains heat to a considerable degree, at night.

We saw that. That’s why the dome was built—how long ago? No matter.

It’s our only half-warm refuge. We have to go there, Ken, all of us. And soon! We can’t go through many more nights here!”

“But will they go? And if they do, what’ll happen when they see that city and realize Earth is a dead world?”

Hubble made an impatient gesture. “We’ll have to take care of that when it comes. The thing now is to give these people some hope. Tell them to wait in their homes, that soon they’ll be safe. Tell them anything you like, but make them go!”

Kenniston scrambled up a black ridge of coal, to stand above the crowd. From outside the cordon they snarled at him when he began. But he shouted them down, calling out the names of the ones he knew, ordering them to listen—being masterful, while his heart pounded with the same dread that drove the men and women in the street.

“Don’t talk to us about law when it’s the end of the world!” yelled a hard-faced woman.

“It’s the end of nothing unless you lose your heads,” Kenniston hammered. “The Mayor is arranging now to give you what you want—an answer to how you’re going to live and be safe. Your lives and the lives of your families depend on how you cooperate. Go home to your radios and wait for the orders.”

“Will they give us coal?” shouted a burly mill-hand.

“Coal, food, everything you need. Nobody’s going to cheat anyone.

We’re all in the same boat. We’ll stay in, or get out, together. Now go home and keep your families together and wait.”

He called suddenly to the men on guard, “You, too! Get out of here and report back to your headquarters! The orders coming up are more important than this coal!”

He climbed back down from the black heap, wondering whether his feeble attempt at psychology would work. Borchard started angry re-monstrance about dismissal of the guards, but Hubble shut him up.

“It worked,” he said. “Look, they’re going.” As the crowd dispersed, Chief of Police Kimer arrived. His unshaven face was gray from lack of sleep, his eyes red-rimmed. He did not seem to be much excited by the trouble at the coal yard.

“We’ve had a lot more than this on our hands, during the night,” he said.

Kenniston learned then what had gone on in Middletown since the Mayor had finished speaking—the deaths from shock, the scattering of suicides, the outbreaks of looting in the downtown streets, quickly checked. A dozen people, mostly drunks, had died of cold.

“But the barricades at the edge of town were the worst,” Kimer said tiredly. “You know, a good number of people from outside Middletown were trapped here by this thing. They, and some of our own people gone panicky, tried to stampede out of town.” He added, as he turned back to his car, “They tell me more than two thousand people were baptized last night.”

“We’ll go with you to City Hall,” Hubble told him. “Yes, you too, Ken.

I’ll need your help with the Mayor.”

It seemed impossible that the pudgy little Mayor could be a problem.

He had been so docile, so pathetically eager to take advice and follow orders. But when, in City Hall, Hubble confronted him with the plan to evacuate Middletown, Mayor Garris’ face took on a mulish look.