Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

Braden smiled at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was expected. But, Myra, I am serious. Will you marry me?”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “I—don’t know. The strange thing is that—I guess I am in love with you a little. I don’t know why I should be. You’ve been so impersonal and businesslike, so tied up in your work. You’ve never even tried to kiss me, never even paid me a compliment.”

“But—well, I don’t like this sudden and—unsentimental—a proposal. Why not ask me again sometime soon. And in the meantime—well, you might even tell me that you love me. It might help.”

“I do, Myra. Please forgive me. But at least—you’re not definitely against marrying me? You’re not turning me down?”

She shook her head slowly. Her eyes, staring at him, were very beautiful. “Then, Myra, let me explain why I am so late and so sudden in asking you. First I have been working desperately and against time. Do you know what I’ve been working on?”

“Something to do with defense, I know. Some—device. And, unless I’m wrong you’ve been doing it on your own without the government backing you.”

“That’s right,” Braden said. “The high brass wouldn’t believe my theories—and most other physicists disagreed with me too. But fortunately I have—did have—private wealth from certain patents I took out a few years ago in electronics. What I’ve been working on has been a defense against the A-bomb and the H-bomb—and anything else short of turning Earth into a small sun. A globular force field through which nothing—nothing whatever—can penetrate.”

“And you…”

“Yes, I have it. It is ready to flash into existence now around this building and to remain operative as long as I wish it to. Nothing can get through it though I maintain it for as many years as I wish. Furthermore this building is now stocked with a tremendous quantity of supplies—of all kinds. Even chemicals and seeds for hydroponic gardens. There is enough of everything here to supply two people for—for their lifetimes.”

“But—you’re turning this over to the government, aren’t you? If it’s a defense against the H-bomb…”

Braden frowned. “It is, but unfortunately it turns out to have negligible, if any, military value. The high brass was right on that. You see, Myra, the power required to create such a force field varies with the cube of its size. The one about this building will be eighty feet in diameter—and when I turn it on the power drain will probably burn out the lighting system of Cleveland.”

“To throw such a dome over—well, even over a tiny village or over a single military camp would take more electric power than is consumed by the whole country in weeks. And once turned off to let anything or anybody in or out it would require the same impracticable amount of power to recreate the field.”

“The only conceivable use the government could make of it would be such use as I intend to make myself. To preserve the lives of one or two, at most a few individuals—to let them live through the holocaust and the savagery to come. And, except here, it’s too late even for that.”

“Too late—why?”

“There won’t be time for them to construct the equipment. My dear, the war is on.”

Her face grew white as she stared at him.

He said, “On the radio, a few minutes ago. Boston has been destroyed by an atomic bomb. War has been declared.” He spoke faster. “And you know all that means and will lead to. I’m closing the switch that will put on the field and I’m keeping it on until it’s safe to open it again.” He didn’t shock her further by saying that he didn’t think it would be completely safe within their lifetimes. “We can’t help anyone else now—it’s too late. But we can save ourselves.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry I had to be so abrupt about this. But now you understand why. In fact, I don’t ask you to marry me right away, if you have any doubt at all. Just stay here until you’re ready. Let me say the things, do the things, I should have said and done.”

“Until now”—he smiled at her—“until now I’ve been working so hard, so many hours a day, that I haven’t had time to make love to you. But now there’ll be time, lots of time—and I do love you, Myra.”

She stood up suddenly. Unseeingly, almost blindly, she started for the doorway.

“Myra!” he called. He started around the desk after her. She turned at the door and held him back. Her face and her voice were quite calm.

“I’ve got to go, Doctor, I’ve had a little nurse’s training. I’m going to be needed.”

“But, Myra, think what’s going to happen out there! They’re going to turn into animals. They’re going to die horribly. Listen, I love you too much to let you face that. Stay, please!”

Amazingly she had smiled at him. “Good-bye, Dr. Braden. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to die with the rest of the animals. I guess I’m crazy that way.”

And the door had closed behind her. From the window he had watched her go down the steps and start running as soon as she had reached the sidewalk.

There’d been the roar of jets overhead. Probably, he thought, this soon, they were ours. But they could be the enemy—over the pole and across Canada, so high that they’d escaped detection, swooping low as they crossed Erie. With Cleveland as one of their objectives. Maybe somehow they’d even know of him and his work and had made Cleveland a prime objective. He had run to the switch and thrown it.

Outside the window, twenty feet from it, a gray nothingness had sprung into being. All sound from outside had ceased. He had gone out of the house and looked at it—the visible half of it a gray hemisphere, forty feet high and eighty feet broad, just big enough to clear the two-story almost cubical building that was his home and his laboratory both. And he knew that it extended forty feet into the earth to complete a perfect sphere. No ravening force could enter it from above, no earthworm crawl through it from below.

None had for thirty years.

Well, it hadn’t been too bad a thirty years, he thought. He’d had his books—and he’d read his favorite ones so often that he knew them almost by heart. He’d kept on experimenting and—although, the last seven years, since he’d passed sixty, he’d gradually lost interest and creativeness—he’d accomplished a few little things.

Nothing comparable to the field itself or even his inventions before that—but there hadn’t been the incentive. Too slight a probability that anything he developed would ever be of use to himself or to anybody else. What good is a refinement in electronics to a savage who doesn’t know how to tune a simple radio set, let alone build one.

Well, there’d been enough to keep him sane if not happy.

He went to the window and stared through it at the gray impalpability twenty feet away. If only he could lower it and then, when he saw what he knew he would see, restore it quickly. But once down it was down for good.

He walked to the switch and stood staring at it. Suddenly he reached up and pulled it. He turned slowly to the window and then walked, almost ran, to it. The gray wall was gone—what lay beyond it was sheerly incredible.

Not the Cleveland he’d known but a beautiful city, a new city. What had been a narrow street was a wide boulevard. The houses, the buildings, were clean and beautiful, the style of architecture strange to him. Grass, trees, everything well kept. What had happened—how could it be? After atomic war mankind couldn’t possibly have come back this far, this quickly. Else all of sociology was wrong and ridiculous.

And where were the people? As if in answer a car went by. A car? It looked like no car he’d ever seen before. Much faster, much sleeker, much more maneuverable—it barely seemed to touch the street, as though anti-gravity took away its weight while gyroscopes gave it stability. A man and woman rode in it, the man driving. He was young and handsome, the woman young and beautiful.