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

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Hubble nodded. “I know. I’m having a hard enough time hanging on myself.”

They went on across the empty plain, toward the low skeletal hills that were like bony knees thrust up from the ocher dust. Soon the jeep was climbing an easy slope, its motor clattering and roaring. Somehow, the familiar motor sound only served to emphasize the fact that around them lay the silence and red dusk of world’s end. Kenniston wished that Hubble would say something, anything. But the older man did not, and Kenniston’s own tongue was frozen. He was lost in a nightmare, and there was nothing to do but drive.

A sudden whistling scream came piping down the slope at them. Both men started violently. With hands slippery with cold sweat, Kenniston swung the jeep a little and saw a brown, furry shape about the size of a small horse bolting over the ridge, going with long, awkward bounds.

Kenniston slowed down until he had stopped shaking. Hubble said in a low whisper, “Then there is still animal life on Earth— of a sort. And look there—” He pointed to a deep little pit in the dusty ground with a ridge of freshly dark new soil around it. “The thing was digging there. Probably for water. The surface is arid, so it must dig to drink.”

They stopped the jeep, and examined the pit and the scrub around it. There were marks of teeth on the bark of the low shrubs.

“Rodential teeth,” said Hubble. “Enormously larger than anything like them occurring in our time, but still recognizable.” They looked at each other, standing in the chill red light. Then Hubble turned back to the jeep. “We’ll go on.”

They went on, up the ridge. They saw two more of the pits made by the diggers, but these were old and crumbling. The blind red eye of the Sun watched them coldly. Kenniston thought of a frightened, furry thing loping on and on over the ocher desolation that once long ago had been the home of men.

They came up onto the low ridge, and he stopped the jeep so they could look out across the red-lit plain beyond.

Hubble stared southwest, and then his hands began to tremble a little.

“‘Ken, do you see it?” Kenniston looked that way, and saw.

The stunning shock of relief and joy! The wild gladness at finding that you and your people are not alone on a lifeless Earth!

Out there on the barren plain stood a city. A city of white buildings, completely enclosed and roofed and bounded by the great shimmering bubble of a transparent dome.

They looked and looked, savoring the exquisite delight of relief. They could see no movement in that domed city at this distance, but just to see it was enough.

Then, slowly, Hubble said, “There are no roads. No roads across the plain.”

“Perhaps they don’t need roads. Perhaps they fly.” Instinctively both men craned their necks to examine the bleak heavens, but there was nothing there but the wind and the stars and the dim Sun with its Medusa crown of flames.

“There aren’t any lights, either,” said Hubble.

“It’s daytime,” said Kenniston. “They wouldn’t need lights. They’d be used to this dusk. They’ve had it a long time.”

A sudden nervousness possessed him. He could barely perform the accustomed motions of starting the jeep again, grating the gears horribly, letting in the clutch with a lurching jerk.

“Take it easy,” said Hubble. “If they’re there, there’s no hurry. If they’re not…” His voice was not quite steady. After a moment he finished, “There’s no hurry then, either.”

Words. Nothing but words. It seemed to Kenniston that he could not bear the waiting. The plain stretched endlessly before him. The jeep seemed to crawl. Rocks and pits and gullies moved themselves maliciously into its path. The city mocked, and came no nearer.

Then, all at once, the domed city was full before them. It loomed in the sky like a glassy mountain out of fairy tale, for from this angle its curved surface reflected the sunlight.

Here, at last, they struck a smooth, broad road. It went straight toward a high, arched portal in the glassy wall of the city. The portal was open.

“If they domed this city to keep it warm, why should the door be open?” Hubble said.

Kenniston had no answer for that. No answer, except the one that his mind refused to accept.

They drove through the portal, were beneath the city dome. And after the emptiness of the plain, the weight of this city and its mighty shield was a crushing thing.

And it was warmer here beneath the dome. Not really warm, but the air here lacked the freezing chill of the outside.

They went down a broad avenue, going slowly now, timidly, shaken by the beating of their own hearts. And the noise of the motor was very loud in the stillness, echoed and re-echoed from many facets of stone— blasphemously loud, against the silence. Dust blew heavily along the pavement, hung dun-colored veils across the open places where boulevards met. It lay in ruffled drifts in the sheltered spots, in doorways and arches and the corners of window ledges.

The buildings were tall and massive, infinitely more beautiful and simple in line than anything Kenniston had ever imagined. A city of grace and symmetry and dignity, made lovely with the soft tints and textures of plastics, the clean strength of metal and stone.

A million windows looked down upon the jeep and the two men from another time. A million eyes dimmed with cataracts of dust, empty, blind. Some were open, some shut, but none saw.

The chill wind from the portal whispered in and out of sagging doorways, prowling up and down the streets, wandering restlessly across the wide parks that were no longer green and bright with flowers, but only wastes of scrub and drifting dust. Nowhere was there anything but the little wind that stirred. Yet Kenniston drove on. It seemed too terrible a thing to accept, that this great domed city was only a shell, an abandoned corpse, and that Middletown was alone on the face of the dying Earth.

He drove on shouting, crying out, sounding the horn in a sort of frenzy, both of them straining their eyes into the shadowy streets. Surely, somewhere in this place that men had built, there must be a human face, a human voice! Surely, in all these countless empty rooms and halls, there was space enough for life! But there was no life.

Kenniston drove more and more slowly. He ceased to sound the horn and call out. Presently he ceased even to look. He allowed the jeep to roll to a halt in a great central plaza. He cut the motor, and the silence descended upon him and Hubble like an avalanche.

He bowed his head in his hands and sat that way for a long time. He heard Hubble’s voice saying, “They’re all dead and gone.”

Kenniston raised his head. “Yes. Dead and gone, all of them, long ago.” He looked around the beautiful buildings. “You know what that means, Hubble. It means that Earth won’t support human life any more. For even in this domed city they couldn’t live.”

“But why couldn’t they?” Hubble said. He pointed to a wide space of low, flat, open tanks that covered acres of the city nearby. “Those were hydroponic tanks, I think. They could raise food in them.”

“If they had water. Perhaps that’s what ran out on them.” Hubble shook his head. “Those ratlike digging animals we saw could find water. Men could find it, too. I’m going to see.” He got out of the jeep and walked toward the dusty tanks nearby. Kenniston dully watched him.

But presently he too climbed out, and began looking into the buildings around the plaza. He could see little but lofty, shadowy rooms illuminated only by the sad light that filtered through dusty windows. In some of the rooms was heavy furniture of metal, massive yet graceful. In others, nothing but the quiet dust.

A great sadness and futility came upon Kenniston as he went slowly around the silent streets. What did it matter, after all, that a town lost out of its time was facing death? Here a race had died, and the face of the Earth was barren wilderness. Kenniston was roused from his numbness by Hubble’s voice. “There’s still water there, Ken— big reservoirs of it under those tanks. So that isn’t what ended them. It was something else.”

“What difference does it make now what it was?” Kenniston said heavily.

“It makes a difference,” Hubble said. “I’ve been thinking— But there isn’t time to talk now. The night and cold are coming.”

With a start, Kenniston realized that the Sun was sinking in the west, and that the shadow of the mighty buildings lay black upon the streets of the city. He shivered a little, and led the way back to the jeep. Again, its clattering roar profaned the deathly silence as they drove back to and through the portal.

“We have to get back,” Hubble was saying. “They don’t know yet in Middletown what they’re facing.”

“If we tell them of this place,” Kenniston said, “if they learn that there are no more people, that they’re maybe all alone on Earth, they’ll go mad with panic.”

The Sun was very low, a splotch of crimson that bulked huge in the western sky as the jeep whined and lurched toward the ridge. The stars were brighter, the unfamiliar stars that had done with man. The cold became more piercing by the minute, as the dusk deepened.

A horror of the dying planet’s gathering night gripped both men. They uttered exclamations of shaken relief when the jeep finally topped the ridge.

For there ahead, incongruous on this nighted elder Earth, gleamed the familiar street lights of Middletown. The bright axes of Main Street and Mill Street, the fainter gridiron of the residential sections, the red neon beer signs of South Street— all shining out on the icy night of a dead world.

“I forgot about anti-freeze in the jeep’s radiator,” Kenniston said, inconsequentially.

It was that cold, now. The wind had the edge of a razor of ice, and even in their heavy coats they couldn’t stop shivering.

Hubble nodded. “People have to be warned about things like that. They don’t know yet how cold it will be tonight.”

Kenniston said hopelessly, “But after tonight— when the fuel and food are gone, what then? Is there any use struggling?”

“Why, no, if you look at it that way, there’s no use,” Hubble said. “Stop the jeep, and we’ll lie down beside it and freeze to death quickly and comfortably.”

Kenniston drove in silence for a moment. Then he said, “You’re right.”

“It isn’t completely hopeless,” Hubble said. “There may be other domed cities on Earth that aren’t dead. People, help, companionship. But we have to hang on, until we find them. That’s what I’ve been thinking about— how to hang on.” He added, as they neared the town, “Drive to City Hall first.”

The barricade at the end of Jefferson Street had a leaping bonfire beside it now. The police guards, and a little knot of uniformed National Guardsmen, had been staring out into the gathering darkness. They greeted the jeep excitedly, asking eager questions, their breath steaming on the frosty air. Hubble steadily refused answers. There would be announcements soon.

But the terrier-like little police captain who cleared the way through the group for them had his own questions before they left him. “They’re talking stuff around City Hall about the whole Earth being dead. What’s there to this story about falling through time?”