City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton (free ebook reader for ipad .txt) 📕

Hubble woke him at last out of an uneasy slumber, to tell him that Varn Allan and Lund had come, and that the Mayor had called the City Council.

“We need you to interpret, Ken,” he said. “You speak the language better than any of us, and this is too important to take any chances of misunderstanding.”

Neither of them talked much on the way to the soaring tower that was now City Hall. And Kenniston could see that Hubble was as worried and oppressed as he.

A crowd had gathered in the plaza, a happy crowd, come to cheer their good friends who had helped them so much. Inside City Hall, the Council of Middletown sat around a massive metal table. The Mayor, Borchard the coal dealer, Moretti the wholesale produce merchant, half a dozen more, facing at one end of the table the woman and the man who came from Vega and who were Administrators over a vast sector of space with all its worlds and peoples.

Mayor Garris fastened on Kenniston the moment he came in. He looked as though he had slept even less than Kenniston, and his mood had not changed since the night before.

“You ask her, Kenniston,” he said. “You ask her if this evacuation story is true.” He asked her.

Varn Allan nodded. “Quite true. I’m sorry that Gorr Holl spoke so prematurely— is seems to have upset your people.” She glanced at the ominous faces of the City Council and the tense countenance of the Mayor. It struck Kenniston that she had been all through this situation before with other populations, and was attacking the problem with a kind of weary patience.

“I am sure,” she said, “that when they understand, they will realize that we are only serving their best interests.”

“Best interests?” cried Garris, when he had heard that. “Then why didn’t you tell us at first? Why plan this behind our backs?”

Norden Lund, a smug look on his face, said to the woman, “I told you it would have been better—”

“We’ll discuss that later,” she flashed. Kenniston could see the effort she made to keep her imperious temper in check as she went on, speaking directly to him, “We wanted to wait until we could present a complete plan of evacuation, so as not to upset your people too much.”

“In other words,” said Kenniston angrily, “you were dealing with a bunch of primitive aborigines who had to be coaxed along?”

“Aren’t you acting in just such fashion?” Varn Allan demanded. Again, she visibly got a grip on her irritation. She said, carefully as though explaining to a child, “A shipful of evacuation experts is on its way here, should arrive soon. They can assess the needs of your people, and find a world that will fit their physical and psychological needs. We will see that it is a world as much like your past Earth as possible.”

“That,” said Kenniston ironically, “is very decent of you.” The woman’s blue eyes flashed open hostility at him. He turned away from her, for Garris was demanding a translation. He gave it, and in his own resentment he did not soften it.

Garris forgot oratory, in his indignation. He sputtered, “If they think we are going to move away from Earth to some crazy world out in the sky, they’re badly mistaken! You make that clear to them!”

Varn Allan looked honestly bewildered, when Kenniston did. “But surely you people don’t want to stay in the cold and hardship of this dying world?”

Kenniston, watching the anger and the instinctive, basic fear grow still stronger in the Mayor’s white face, could understand his feelings. His own reaction was the same.

“Not want to stay here?” said Garris, forcing words out painfully from a throat constricted with emotion. “Not want to? Listen, you people! We have left our own time. We have had to leave our own city, our homes. That’s enough. It’s all we can stand in one lifetime. Leave Earth, leave our own world? No!” There was no oratory about him now, at all. He was like a man who has been asked to die.

Kenniston spoke to Varn Allan. His own voice was not quite steady. “Try to understand. We are Earth-born. Our whole life, all the generations before us, since the beginning…”

He could not put it into words, this sudden passionate oneness with Earth.

The Earth hath He given to the children of men… The Earth, the soil, the winds and the rains, the growth and the dying over the ages, beast and tree and man. You could not forget that. You could not let drop the heritage of a world as though it had never been.

The sorrel-haired Norden Lund was speaking to Varn Allan, looking contemptuously at the Middletowners as he spoke. “I warned you, Varn, that these primitives are too emotional for ordinary methods.”

The woman, her blue eyes troubled, ignored Lund and addressed Kenniston. “You must make them recognize the facts. Life here is impossible, and therefore they must go.”

“Let her tell that to the people,” said the Mayor, in an oddly tight voice. “No. I’ll tell them myself.”

He rose and left the council room. There was a curious dignity about his plump figure now. Borchard and Moretti and the others followed. They, too, showed a shrinking, instinctive dread of the thing that had been proposed. They went out on the steps, and Kenniston and Hubble and the two from the stars went with them.

Outside in the plaza were still gathered thousands of the Middletowners, millhand, housewife, banker and bookkeeper, the old men and the little children. They were still happy, and they cheered, sending up a great joyous shout to echo from the towers.

Mayor Garris took the microphone of the loudspeaker system.

“Folks, listen carefully! These new people are telling us now that we ought to leave Earth. They say they’ll give us a better world, somewhere out there among the stars. What about it? Do you want to go— away from Earth?”

There was a long moment of utter silence, in which Kenniston saw the Middletowners’ faces grow bewildered, incredulous. He looked at Van Allan’s clearcut face and saw that the shadow of weariness on it was deeper. He realized again that two epochs, two utterly different ways of life were looking at each other here, and finding it difficult to understand each other.

When, finally, the crowd of Middletowners had grasped the suggestion, their answer came as a rising chorus of exclamations.

“Go off and live someplace in the sky? Are these people nuts?”

“It was bad enough to leave Middletown for this place! But to leave Earth?”

A large-handed, stocky man whom Kenniston recognized as Lauber, McLain’s truckdriver, came to the steps and spoke up to the Mayor.

“What’s all this about, anyway? We’re getting along here all right now. Why would we want to go off to the Moon or somewhere?”

The Mayor turned to the two star-folk. “You see? My people wouldn’t listen to an idea like that for a minute!”

Kenniston told the woman, “The people completely reject the whole proposal.”

Varn Allan stared at him, in honest surprise. “But it is not a ‘proposal’— it is a formal order of the Board of Governors! I recommended this evacuation, and they have approved it.”

Kenniston said dryly, “Unfortunately, our people don’t recoganize any authority but their own government, so the order means nothing to them.”

The woman looked appalled. “But nobody defies the Governors! They are the executive body of the whole Federation of Stars.”

The Federation of Stars? It had a sound of distant thunder in it, and again Kenniston realized the incomprehensible, staggering vastness of the civilization out there which this woman and this man represented.

He said, exasperated, “Can’t you understand that to these people the stars are just points of light in the sky? That your Suns and worlds and Governors mean nothing to them?”

Norden Lund chose that moment to intervene. He said smoothly to Varn Allan, “Perhaps, in an impasse of this nature, we should consult Government Center?”

She gave him a hot look. “You would like me to admit my incapacity by doing that. No. I’ll carry this matter through, and when it’s done I’ll have words to say to Gorr Holl for precipitating things prematurely.”

She turned to Kenniston, and said, “Your people must comprehend that this is not a cruel thing we’re doing. Explain to them what life would be like on this dead planet— isolated, precarious, increasingly difficult, with nothing to look forward to but an ultimate dying out of attrition and sheer hopelessness. Perhaps they’ll realize then that what they’re asking me to do is to abandon them to a very ugly fate.”

“Perhaps,” said Kenniston, “but I wouldn’t count on it. You don’t know us yet. As a people, we’re neither soft nor easily frightened.”

He spoke with hostility, because of the truth that he had recognized in Varn Allan’s words, and did not want to recognize.

She gave him a level glance, as though she were taking his measure and through him the measure of all Middletown. Then she said quietly, “Bear in mind that a formal decree passed by the Board of Governors is a law which must be respected and complied with. The evacuation has been ordered, and will be carried out.”

She nodded to Lund, who shrugged and fell in beside her. They went down the steps and across the plaza, and the muttering crowd, alarmed and confused but not yet hostile, moved apart to let them through.

Kenniston turned to Hubble. “What are we going to do?” he said, and the older man shook his head.

“I don’t know. But I know one thing we must not do, and that is to let any violence occur. That would be fatal. We’ve got to calm people down before that evacuation staff arrives and brings things to a head.”

Kenniston did his best, during the rest of that day. He repeated Varn Allan’s plea for understanding, but it fell on unreceptive ears. The city was functioning, they had light and water, they were not alone in the universe, and life today seemed pretty good. With the irrepressible optimism of the human race, they were convinced that they could make tomorrow even better. And they were not going to leave Earth. That was like asking them to leave their bodies.

The shock of losing their own time and the pattern of life that went with it had been terrible enough. It might have overwhelmed them completely, Kenniston knew, except that in a measure the shock had been softened. For a while they had kept their own old city, and it was still there beyond the ridge, an anchor in their memories. To a certain extent, they had brought their own time with them, for life in the alien city had been adapted as much as possible to the pattern of life in old Middletown. They had oriented themselves again, they had built a facsimile of their familiar existence. It had been hard, but they had done it. They could not now, quite suddenly, throw it all away and start again on something utterly divorced from everything they had ever known.

Kenniston realized perfectly that it was not only an atavistic clinging to the Earth that had bred them which made them reject the idea of leaving it so fiercely. It was the physical and immediate horror of entering a perfectly unknown kind of ship and plunging in it out beyond the sky, into— into what? Night and nothingness and sickening abysses that ran on for ever, with only the cold stars for beacons and the Earth, the solid, understandable, protecting Earth lost forever! His own mind