Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

Actually the money had gone to Columbia University, where Cantwell was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

“A sealed-off environment,” Rolfe said. “But because Columbia didn’t have the space just at that time, and because the work was vital, NASA gave Cantwell permission to build the rooms in his own home. They were— still are—in his basement, and that’s where you and I slept that fateful night when the world ended.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“We were completely sealed off in there,” Rolfe said. “We weren’t breathing Earth air and we weren’t connected in any way to the rest of the world. We might as well have been out in space or on the moon. So when it happened to everybody else—to Professor and Mrs. Cantwell, and to the Glenns and the Torquemadas and to the Nassers in Egypt and the Joneses in Jones Beach and all the people at Columbia, and in Washington and Moscow and Pretoria and London and Peoria and Medicine Hat and La Jolla and all those places all over—it didn’t happen to us. That’s because Professor Cantwell was a smart man and his closed systems worked.”

“And we were saved.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“What’s the other way?”

“We were doomed.”

From his notebooks'.

Siss asked why I’m so sure there’s nobody but us left in the whole world. A fair question. Of course I’m not absolutely positively cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, swear-on-a-Bible convinced that there isn’t a poor live slob hidden away in some remote corner. Other people besides Bill must have been working with closed systems; certainly any country with a space program would be, and maybe some of their nassers were inhabited, too. I hadn’t heard that any astronauts or cosmonauts were in orbit that day but if they were, and got down safely, I guess they could be alive somewhere.

But I’ve listened to the rest of the world on some of the finest radio equipment ever put together and there hasn’t been a peep out of it. I’ve listened and signaled and listened and signaled and listened. Nothing. Nil. Short wave, long wave, AM, FM, UHF, marine band, everywhere. Naught. Not a thing. Lots of automatic signals from unmanned satellites, of course, and the quasars are still being heard from, but nothing human.

I’ve sent out messages on every piece of equipment connected to Con Ed’s EE net. RCA, American Cable & Radio, the Bell System, Western Union, The Associated Press, UPI, Reuters’ world news network, The New York Times’ multifarious teletypes, even the Hilton Hotels’ international reservations system. Nothing. By this time I’d become fairly expert at communications and I’d found the Pentagon network at AT&T. Silent. Ditto the hot line to the Kremlin. I read the monitor teletype and saw the final message from Washington to Moscow. Strictly routine. No hint that anything was amiss anywhere. Just as it must have been at the Army message center at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning a generation ago.

This is for posterity, these facts. My evidence is circumstantial. But to Siss I say: “There’s nobody left but us. I know. You’ll have to take my word for it that the rest of the world is as empty as New York.”

Nobody here but us chickens, boss. Us poor flightless birds. One middle-aged rooster and one sad little hen, somewhat deficient in the upper story. What do you want us to do, boss? What’s the next step in the great cosmic scheme? Tell us: where do we go from here?

But don’t tell me; tell Siss. I don’t expect an answer; she does. She’s the one who went into the first church she found open that Sunday morning (some of them were locked, you know) and said all the prayers she knew, and asked for mercy for her relatives, and her friends, and her employers, and for me, and for all the dead people who had been alive only yesterday, and finally for herself; and then she asked why. She was in there for an hour and when she came out I don’t think she’d had an answer.

Nobody here but us chickens, boss. What do you want us to do now, fricassee ourselves?

Late on the morning of doomsday they had taken a walk down Broadway, starting from Cantwell’s house near the Columbia campus.

There were a number of laughs to be had from cars in comical positions, if anybody was in a laughing mood. Some were standing obediently behind white lines at intersections, and obviously their drivers had been overtaken during a red light. With its driver gone, each such car had simply stood there, its engine dutifully using up all the gas in its tank and then coughing to a stop. Others had nosed gently into shop windows, or less gently into other cars or trucks. One truck, loaded with New Jersey eggs, had overturned and its cargo was dripping in a yellowy-white puddle. Rolfe, his nose twitching as if in anticipation of a warm day next week, made a mental note never to return to that particular spot.

Several times he found a car which had been run up upon from behind by another. It was as if, knowing they would never again be manufactured, they were trying copulation.

While Siss was in church Rolfe found a car that had not idled away all its gas and he made a dry run through the streets. He discovered that he could navigate pretty well around the stalled or wrecked cars, though occasionally he had to drive up on the sidewalk or make a three-block detour to get back to Broadway.

Then he and Siss, subdued after church, went downtown.

“Whose car is this, Mr. Ralph?” she asked him.

“My car, Siss. Would you like one, too?”

“I can’t drive.”

“I’ll teach you. It may come in handy.”

“I was the only one in church,” she said. It hadn’t got through to her yet, he thought; not completely.

“Who were you expecting?” he asked kindly.

“God, maybe.”

She was gazing straight ahead, clutching her purse in her lap. She had the expression of a person who had been let down.

At 72nd Street a beer truck had demolished the box office of the Trans-Lux movie house and foamy liquid was still trickling out of it, across the sidewalk and along the gutter and into a sewer. Rolfe stopped the car and got out. An aluminum barrel had been punctured. The beer leaking from it was cool. He leaned over and let it run into his mouth for a while.

The Trans-Lux had been having a Fellini festival; the picture was 816. On impulse he went inside and came back to the car with the reels of film in a black tin box. He remembered the way the movie had opened, with all the cars stalled in traffic. Like Broadway, except that the Italian cars had people in them. He put the box in the rear of the car and said: “We’ll go to the movies sometime.” Siss looked at him blankly.

At Columbus Circle a Broadway bus had locked horns with a big van carrying furniture from North Carolina. At 50th Street a Mustang had nosed gently into the front of a steak house, as if someone had led it to a hitching post.

He made an illegal left turn at 42nd Street, noting what was playing at the Rialto: two naughty, daring, sexy, nudie pix, including a re-run of “My Bare Lady.” He didn’t stop for that one.

At the old Newsweek Building east of Broadway, an Impala had butted into the ground-floor liquor store. The plate glass lay smashed but the bottles in the window were intact. He made a mental note. Across the street, one flight up, was the Keppel Folding Boat Company, which had long intrigued him. Soon it might be useful to unfold one and sail off to a better place. He marked it in his mind.

Bookstores, 42nd Street style. Dirty books and magazines. Girly books. Deviant, flagellant, homosexual, Lesbian, sadistic books. Pornographic classics restored to the common man— Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The Kama Sutra, quaint but lasciviously advertised. Books of nudes for the serious artist (no retoucher’s airbrush here, men!).