Short Fiction by Robert Sheckley (interesting novels in english txt) 📕

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“Look carefully,” I said. “Watch one section at a time. There was one! Did you see it?”

“No.”

“Watch for little winks,” I said. But it wasn’t until the Thomas kid came from next door and loaned her his telescope that she saw it.

“Here, Mrs. Ostersen, use this,” the kid said. He had three or four telescopes in his hands, a pair of binoculars, and a handful of charts. Quite a kid.

“You too, Mr. Ostersen,” he said.

Through the telescope I could really see it. One moment a pinpoint of light would be there, and then⁠—bing! It was gone. It was downright weird. For the first time I started getting worried.

It didn’t bother Jane, though. She went back into her kitchen.

Of course, even with the galaxy collapsing, the dress business had to go on, but I found myself buying a newspaper four or five times a day and keeping the radio on in the store to find out what was going on. Everybody else was doing the same. People were even arguing about it on street corners.

The newspapers had about a thousand different theories. There were scientific articles on the red shift, and intergalactic dust; there were articles on stellar evolution and visual hallucination; the psychologists were trying to prove that the stars hadn’t been there in the first place, or something like that.

I didn’t know what to believe. The only article that made any sense to me was one written by a social commentator, and he wasn’t even a full-fledged scientist. He said it looked as if someone was doing a big job of housecleaning in our galaxy.

The Thomas kid had his own theories. He was sure it was the work of invaders from another dimension. He told me they were sucking our galaxy into theirs, which was in another dimension, like dust into a vacuum cleaner.

“It’s perfectly clear, Mr. Ostersen,” he told me one evening after work. “They’ve started sucking in the outside stars at the other side of the Milky Way, and they’re working through the centre. They’ll reach us last, because we’re at the far end.”

“Well⁠ ⁠…” I said.

“After all,” he told me, “Astonishing Yarns and Weird Science Stories practically agree on it, and they’re the leaders in the sci-fic field.”

“But they’re not scientists,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter,” the kid told me. “They predicted the submarine before there was one. They predicted airplanes when scientists were saying the bumblebee couldn’t fly. And rockets and radar and atom bombs. They’ve got the truth about this too.”

He paused for breath. “Someone’s gotta stop the invaders,” he went on in a tone of utter conviction. He looked at me sharply. “You know, since they’re dimension-changers, they can take the appearance of humans.” Again he looked at me, suspiciously.

“Anyone might be one. You might be one.”

I could see he was getting nervous, and maybe on the verge of handing me over to some committee or other, so I fed him milk and cake. That just made him more suspicious, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

The newspapers took up the science-fiction theory just as the Thomas kid had told it to me, and added their own embellishments. Some guy said he knew how the invaders could be stopped. He had been approached by them, he said, and they’d offered him controllership of a small galaxy if he’d cooperate. Of course, he wouldn’t.

It sounds foolish, but the sky was getting pretty bare. People in every country were saying foolish things and doing foolish things. We were starting to wonder how soon our own sun would go.

I watched every night, and the stars disappeared faster and faster. The thing seemed to increase at a geometric rate. Soon the sky was just filled with little lights going out, faster than you could count. Almost all of it could be seen with the naked eye now, because it was getting a lot closer to us.

In two weeks the only part of the Milky Way left were the Magellanic clouds, and the astronomers said that they weren’t a part of our galaxy anyhow. Betelguese and Actares and Rigel winked out, and Sirius and Vega. Then Alpha Centauri disappeared, and that was our closest neighbor. Aside from the moon, the sky was pretty bare at night, just a few dots and patches here and there.

I don’t know what would have happened if the voice hadn’t been heard then. It would be anybody’s guess. But the voice came the day after Alpha Centauri vanished.

I first heard it on my way to the store. I was walking down Lexington Avenue from the 59th Street station, looking in the dress windows to see what my competitors had to offer. Just as I was passing Mary-Belle’s Frocks, and wondering how soon they’d have their Summer line in, I heard it.

It was a pleasant voice, friendly. It seemed to come from just behind me, about three feet over my shoulder.

“Judgment of the inhabitants of the planet Earth,” it said, “will be held in five days. Please prepare yourselves for final examination and departure. This announcement will be repeated.”

I looked around at once to find out who was speaking. I half-expected to find a tall, cadaverous fanatic at my shoulder, some fiery-eyed fellow with flowing hair and a beard. But there was no one at all. The nearest person was about fifteen feet from me. For a moment I thought I was having a hallucination, hearing voices, that sort of thing. Then I saw that everyone else must have heard it, too.

Lexington Avenue is a pretty busy place at nine o’clock in the morning. There are plenty of people hurrying back and forth, kids going to school, subways roaring beneath you, cars and buses honking. Not now. You couldn’t hear a sound. Every car had stopped, right where it was. The people on the sidewalks seemed frozen practically in mid-stride.

The man nearest me walked up. He was well-dressed, about my age⁠—in his early forties. He was eyeing me