Gordon Dickson: Hour of the Horde

“It’s all right. I’m awake,” he called back. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Groggily he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat upright. The single window of his room was a square of night blackness, with the shade not drawn above it. His eyes went to the large round face of the windup alarm clock that stood before the mirror on his dresser. The hands stood at five minutes to ten. He had been asleep at least four hours.

In the mirror his sleep-tousled dark hair, fallen down over his forehead, gave him a wild and savage look. He shoved the hair back and forced himself to his feet. He stumbled across the room, stepped out of the door, and walked numbly down the hall to the upstairs extension phone, which was lying out of its cradle. He picked it up.

“Miles!” It was the soft voice of Marie Bourtel. “Have you been there all this time?”

“Yes,” he muttered, still too numb from sleep to wonder why she asked.

“I called a couple of times for you earlier, but Mrs. Arndahl said you hadn’t come in yet. I finally had her check your room anyway.” The usually calm, gentle voice he was used to hearing on the phone had an unusual edge to it. An edge of something like fear. “Didn’t you remember you were going to meet me for dinner at the Lounge?”

“Lounge?” he echoed stupidly. He scrubbed his face with the back of his hand that held the phone, as if to rub memory back into his head. Then contrition flooded him. He remembered the plan to have dinner with Marie at six thirty at the Lounge, which was an off-campus restaurant on the east bank of the river. “Sorry, Marie—I guess I did it again. I was painting this afternoon, and I came back and lay down. I must’ve fallen asleep.”

“Then you’re all right.” There was relief in Marie’s voice for a second; then tension returned. “You don’t know what’s been happening?”

“Happening?”

“The sun’s changed color! About five o’clock this afternoon—”

“Oh, that?” Miles rubbed the back of his hand again over his sleep-numbed face. “Yes, I saw it change. I’d just finished painting—what about it?”

“What about it?” Marie’s voice held a sort of wonder. “Miles, the sun’s changed color !”

“I know,” said Miles a little impatiently. But then, rousing him from that first impatience to sudden near anger, came recognition of the relief in Marie’s voice a few seconds before, when she had said: “Then you’re all right.”

Those remembered words jarred unpleasantly back to mind his own first few moments of alarm when he had seen the sun’s changed color. He heard the edge in his own voice as he answered her.

“I know the sun’s changed color! I said I saw it happen! What of it?”

“Miles—” Marie’s voice broke off, oddly, as if she were uncertain of what to say to him. “Miles, I want to see you. If you’ve been asleep all this time you haven’t had dinner yet, have you?”

“Well… no. I haven’t.” Miles was abruptly reminded of the emptiness inside him. Come to think of it, he had not eaten since breakfast, thirteen hours before.

“I’ll meet you at the Lounge in ten minutes then,” said Marie swiftly. “You can have some dinner, and we can talk. Ten minutes?”

“All right,” he said, still somewhat numb with sleep.

“Good-bye, Miles.”

“Good-bye.”

He hung up.

Slowly waking up in the process, Miles went back to his room, washed his face, put on a fresh shirt and a sport coat, and left the rooming house for the half-mile walk back across the two campuses and their connecting walkway to the business section beyond the east campus. As he passed the landlady’s living room, the door was still ajar, and from within he heard the voice of a television announcer, still talking about the change, and saw the backs of a number of people sitting and listening.

The irritation which Marie’s concern for him had awakened in him expanded again to include these people. It was ridiculous, almost superstitious of them, to be stampeded into fear just because of what seemed to be a change—undoubtedly temporary, undoubtedly freakish—in the color of the sun.

“Latest reports over Honolulu say that the redness persists—” The TV announcer’s voice was cut off sharply as Miles softly closed the front door of the house behind him. He headed up the darkened street under the towering, dark-leaved branches of the elms toward the footbridge and the east bank of the river where the Lounge was.

His walk across the campus and over the footbridge was like a walk though an evacuated city. There seemed to be nobody about. But once on the far side of the river, when he pushed open the door of the Lounge, he found the place crowded; only the crowd was all clustered at one end, around the television set at the front of the bar. Forty or fifty people, many of them students, were seated and standing there, packed closely together, listening in absolute silence to the same sort of news broadcast he had overheard as he was leaving his rooming house. He threaded his way through them and went back into the rear area where the high-backed wooden booths were; all of these were empty.

Miles took a corner booth in the back of the room. It was the booth he and Marie always took if it was available, and after a few moments their usual waitress, a girl named Joan, a part-time student in the English Department, came through the swinging doors from the kitchen, saw him, and came over to ask him what he wanted.

“Just coffee—two coffees, for now—” Miles remembered suddenly that Marie had said she had already eaten. “I guess just one dinner, come to think of it. Are there any hot beef sandwiches left?”

“Lots of them,” said Joan. “Hardly anyone’s been eating. They’re all listening to television. We’re listening, back in the kitchen. You know the weather people can’t figure it out? The sun’s actually changed. I mean, it isn’t just something in our atmosphere—” She broke off in the face of Miles’ silence. “I’ll get your coffee.”

She went off. She had scarcely brought two cups of coffee back and left again in search of Miles’ sandwich when the sound of footsteps from the front of the Lounge made him look up. He saw Marie coming quickly down the aisle between the booths toward him.

She looked at him with the brown eyes that were now so dark and luminous they seemed to have doubled their size in her white face.

“Miles…” She reached across the table to lay her hand on his arm. “Do you feel all right?”

“All right? Me?” He smiled at her, for clearly she needed reassurance. “I’m still a little dopey from sleep and I could stand some food. Outside of that, I’m fine. What’s the matter with you?”

She looked at him strangely.

“Miles, you can’t be that much out of touch with the rest of the world,” she said. “You just can’t !”

“Oh—” The word came out more harshly than he had meant it to. “You mean this business about the sun changing color? Don’t worry, it hasn’t done any damage yet. And if it did, that’s not my line of work. So why worry about it?”

The waitress came up with Miles’ order and said hello to Marie.

“Isn’t it terrible? It’s still going on,” she said to Marie. “We’re all following the news, back in the kitchen. They’re just beginning to see it from planes in the South Pacific now—and it’s still red.”

She went back to the kitchen.

“I’ll tell you why you ought to worry,” said Marie quietly and tensely, taking her hand from his arm and sitting back almost huddled in her corner of the booth. “Because it’s something that affects the whole world, all the people in the world, and you’re one of them.”