CHAPTER 9
May 11, Saturday: The darkness still continues. No milk was delivered this morning. Prices for food have begun to go up. There is very little fresh meat to be had, practically no vegetables or fruits. Evaporated milk is being sold at a dollar a can. I am afraid the children are going to suffer a great deal…
CHAPTER 10
May 12, Sunday: Church was packed. There have been several riots in the poorer sections of the city. Grocery stores were raided, a warehouse gutted. The militia has been called out, and all stocks of food taken over by the authorities for rationing.
Aloysia has just appeared, bag and baggage. She says she feels safe only here. I am going out to see what is going on.
Two p.m.: There is no longer any water in the system! The lakes in Central Park are being emptied, the fluid taken to breweries and distilleries nearby, where the water is being filtered and chlorinated. The little thus obtained, and canned fruit juices, furnish the only drink for children. Adults are drinking beer and wine.
My car was stopped by a detail of national guardsmen in uniform. No gasoline engines are to be run any longer. There is no escape for the carbon monoxide fumes being generated, and they are poisoning the atmosphere. There already have been several deaths from this cause.
A fire started in an apartment house on Third Avenue. It was extinguished by chemicals. I wonder how long that will be efficacious?
I thought I was fairly well stocked up for at least a week. But with Aloysia here, her maid and my own man, my stock of food and drinkables is rapidly disappearing. For the first time I have sent Jarvis out to the food depots, with an affidavit setting forth the size of my “Family,” my residence, etc. I understand that each adult is being allotted one can of meat or vegetables, and one pint of water, per day.
Three p.m.: All house lights have been turned off to conserve coal. I am writing by candle. Street lighting is still maintained. There has been no gas since the Darkness fell, the plant being in Astoria. As my own kitchen has an electric range this did not impress me, but I understand those not so taken care of had been displaying remarkable ingenuity. Several families had upended electric laundry irons and used those as grills. That is ended now. However, there is so little to cook that the lack of heat hardly brings added hardship.
Jarvis has not yet returned.
Midnight: From my window I can overlook quite a large portion of the city. A vast black pall rests over us, relieved only by the network of glowing lamps outlining the streets. Even these seem to be growing dimmer.
My valet, Jarvis, is still among the missing. He has been with me for ten years. I thought him loyal, honest. He was honest with respect to money. I have trusted him with large sums and never found him faithless. But money is worth nothing today, while food…
Stress reveals the inner nature of the human animal. I met the Harrison-Smiths today, walking along Park Avenue in the foreboding restlessness that is keeping all New York on the sidewalks. The usually iron-visaged banker presented a countenance whose color matched the clammy hue of a dead fish’s belly. His heavy jowls were dewlaps quivering with fear. Even while we talked his eyes clung to his wife, who was erect, a bright white flame in the Darkness. Her eyes were answering the appeal in his. She had strength enough for both, and was keeping him from collapse by sheer, silent will. The gossips, this winter, were buzzing about Anita and Ted Van Norden, the wastrel who reminds me so much of my own youth. There could not have been any truth in the rumors.
CHAPTER 11
May 13, Monday: Noon, I went out at five this morning to take my place in the long line at the food station. I have just returned with my booty. One can of sardines and a six-ounce bottle of soda—to maintain three adults twenty-four hours! On my way back I saw a man, well-dressed, chasing an alley cat. He caught it, killed it with a blow of his fist, and stuffed it in a pocket.
The air is foul with stench. A white hearse passed me, being pushed by men on foot. Someone told me that Central Park is being used as a burying ground.
I stopped to watch the passing hearse near a National Guardsman, a slim young chap whose uniform did not fit him very well. He spoke to me. “That’s the worst of this thing, sir, what it’s doing to children.” Under his helmet his eyes were pits of somber fire. “Just think of the babies without milk. The canned stuff gave out today. My own kid is sick in bed; he can’t stand the junk we’ve been giving him. June—that’s my wife—is clean frantic.”
I wanted to comfort him, but what was there to say? “How old is your youngster?” I asked.
“Junior is two. And a swell brat! You ought to hear him talk a mile a minute. He’s going to be a lawyer when he grows up.”
I listened to him for a while, then made some excuse and got away. I had to or he would have seen that my eyes were wet.
Later: Aloysia has slept all day. All the windows in the apartment are open, but the air is heavy, stifling. It is difficult to move, to breathe. The shell that encloses us is immense, but eventually the oxygen in the enclosed air must be used up. Then what?
Unless relief comes soon death will be beforehand, the mass death of all the teeming population of this island. One must face that. Just what form will it take? Starvation, thirst, asphyxiation? Queer. I, who have so often babbled of the futility of life, do not want to die. It is—unpleasant—to contemplate utter extinction, the absolute end of self. I wish I believed in immortality—in some sort of future life. Even to burn eternally in hell would be better than simply—to stop.
There is a red glow to the south. Is it a thinning of the Darkness?
The city seems hushed with all traffic noise stopped. But another sound has replaced it. A high-pitched murmur, not loud, but omnipresent, insistent. I have just realized what it is. Children crying. Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, hungry children—thirsty children…
CHAPTER 12
May 14, Tuesday: The clock says it is morning. It is not dark outside any more. A red light suffuses the scene, the light of the gigantic flame that has enveloped all the lower end of the Island. There is no wind. The conflagration is spreading very slowly, but it is coming inexorably. Overhead are vast rolling billows of smoke, edged with scarlet glare. Below there is a turbulent sea of human beings. The roar of the fire, pent-in and reverberant, mingles with the crash of breaking glass, the rattle of rifle shots, a growling animal-like sound that is the voice of the mob. They are engaged in a carnival of destruction, a blind, mad venting of protest against the doom that has overtaken them. I had a dog once that was run over by some fool in a truck. When I went to pick it up it snarled and sank its teeth in my hand. That is like those people down there. They do not know what has hurt them, but they must hurt someone in return.
Where they find the strength to fight I do not know. I can scarcely move. My tongue fills my mouth. It is almost impossible to breathe.
Aloysia has just called me. It was the ghost of a word, her “Felix.” In a moment I shall go in to her and lie down beside her.
* * * *
Grant Lowndes looks up from the book.
“That is all,” he says simply. “In an inner room of the apartment where this was found the searchers discovered two skeletons on the moldering ruin of a bed, a man’s and a woman’s.
“General Flyers bids you good night. I shall be with you again at this same hour on Friday.”
He turns and goes slowly out through the gray curtains. The diary remains on the little gray table. Shadows close in from the edges of the screen, concentrating light within their contracting circle. The book is the last thing visible. That, too, is gone…
There is silence in the living room for a long minute. Rand Barridon reaches to the radiovisor switch, clicks it off. The screen is blankly white in the glow of the room light.
“You know,” Barridon says slowly. “The city wasn’t all burned up. Guess the fire burned up all the oxygen and put itself out. That was what killed the people too.”
Ruth sighs tremu
lously. “Rand, I was thinking about that one thing he said, about that soldier that was worried about his sick little boy. Just think if anything like that were to happen to our Rob.”
“Say, I noticed that too. The fellow had a good idea. That’s what we’re going to make of the kid, a lawyer. Big money and not too much hard work. We’ll send him to Dartmouth first, and then to Harvard. A fellow was telling me they’ve got the best law school in the country.”
LOST IN TIME
CHAPTER I
The Stratocar
Jim Dunning gasped in the surge of terrific heat. A vast roaring deafened him. He leaped to the lashed wheel of the Ulysses. In a single motion he loosed the fastenings and threw all the power of his knotted muscles into a desperate twirling of the polished spokes. The deck slanted. The yawl shot about in a foaming half circle and fled like some live, terrified thing from the whirling, topless column of fire that had leaped out of the sea.
Dunning stared, over his shoulder, across the lurid waters that a moment before had been a glassy plain, silvery under the moon of a windless Pacific night. The crimson pillar soared stupendously, the speed of its whirling whipping the ocean into long, blurred spirals of fire.
The tremendous blare of sound leaped suddenly higher in pitch, became a shriek. Something sprang into view at the base of the fiery column, something huge and black and round. On the moment the sea heaved and climbed heavenward till the flame was lashing from within a huge liquid crater. The dark wall of water expanded. A towering wave rushed toward Dunning with incredible speed.
Dunning crouched over the wheel as if to add the naked force of his will to the frantic putt-putt of the Ulysses’ motor. The little vessel darted away like a thoroughbred under the lash. But the towering wave caught up with her, loomed appallingly above her. A briny avalanche crashed down on the doomed craft.
Jim Dunning fought for his life in a seething welter of waters. A hatch-cover, torn from its hinges, thudded against him. With a last, instinctive effort he hauled himself across the cleated plank, clung to it desperately as consciousness left him.
A reckless bet with some of his club members had sent Jim Dunning out from ’Frisco, six weeks before, on his disastrous attempt to cross the Pacific, single-handed, in a thirty-foot, auxiliary-engined yawl. And now in the graying dawn, his still shape floated on the tiny raft amidst a mass of wreckage. About him the vast circle of the horizon enclosed a waste of heaving waters, vacant of any life. Only a light breeze ruffled the sea’s surface, calm again after the sudden disturbance of the night.
Eventually his eyes opened. Hopelessly, he raised his head. A curious object that looked like a large spherical buoy, floating half submerged, met his gaze. But what was a buoy doing here, a thousand miles from the nearest land, in water a half mile deep?
Dunning kicked off his shoes and swam strongly through the cool brine. The great ball hung above him as he floated, its exterior glass-smooth. He swam slowly around it, searching for some projection that would enable him to get to its summit. Inches above the water a threadlike crack showed. It made a rectangle three feet wide by five. Was it an entrance to the interior of the ball whose floating showed it to be hollow? There was no handle, no means of opening it.
Dunning trod water and with the flat of his hand he pushed against the unyielding sector, inward, then side-ward, with no result. In sudden exasperation he drove his fist against the polished surface and yelled: “Open, damn you, open up and let a fellow in!”
Amazingly, the metal moved! Dunning stared as the curved panel jogged inward for an inch, then slid smoothly aside.
“It’s like the Arabian Nights,” he muttered. “I yelled ‘open sesame’ and it opened.” A prickle along his spine did deference to the uncanny happening. Then, oddly enough, he chuckled.
“That’s it! An electric robot. Nothing to be scared of.”
Only a week before Dunning’s departure Tom Barton had demonstrated to him this latest ingenuity of the electrical wizards. It was installed in Barton’s garage, a phono-electric cell so adjusted that at the coded honking of a horn it would set a motor in motion to open the doors. Barton had picked up the idea at the airport; where the same device turned on the floodlights in response to a siren signal from an approaching airplane.
“If honking horns and howling sirens can open doors, why not the human voice? Well, let’s take a look at the Forty Thieves.”
Gripping the opening’s lower edge Dunning leaped out of the water and through the aperture. He was in a confined chamber, its walls and ceiling the vaulted curve of the sphere itself.
Sprawled across the flat floor was a girl, unmoving. Dunning caught his breath at the white beauty framed by long black hair that cascaded along her slim length.
“No!” he groaned. “She can’t be dead!”
Dunning bent over the girl and lifted one limp hand, feeling for a pulse. There was a slow throb. A long whistle of relief escaped him. She was breathing, shallowly but steadily, and her dark lashes quivered a bit where they lay softly against the curve of her pale cheeks.
There was a couch just beyond the girl. He lifted her to it, laid her down. Gently he straightened her robe of some unfamiliar, shimmering material—and whirled to some inimical presence glimpsed from the corner of his eye.
He crouched, his spine tingling with ancestral fear, his brawny arms half curved, his great fists clenched. But the man did not stir. Seated at a desk-like object just beyond the opening, he stared straight before him. It was his uncanny rigidity, the fish-white pallor of his face, that were so menacing. He was dead.
Dunning moved cautiously across the floor toward the seated corpse. It toppled as he reached it, thumped soggily to the floor.
The acrid odor of burned flesh stung Dunning’s nostrils. There was a huge cavity in the cadaver’s chest, its gaping surface blackened and charred by some searing flame!
Dunning swung his back to the wall, and his glance darted about the room.
The dead man and the unconscious girl were the only other occupants of the hemisphere. Had someone killed the man, struck the girl down, and escaped? But how had he managed it? There was no room for an attacker between the body and the contrivance before which it had been seated.
That strange object was of some unfamiliar, iridescent metal. It had somewhat the size and contour of an old-fashioned roll-top desk, minus the side wings. Across the center of the erect portion, where the pigeonholes should be, stretched a long panel of what appeared to be milky-white glass, divided into two portions by a vertical metal strip. Above and below, tangent to the edge of the long panel at the ends of the metal strip, were two round plates of the same clouded glass. In spaces to left and right of these disks were arrayed a number of dial-faces; gauges or indicators of some kind.
On a waist-high, flat ledge were little colored levers, projecting through slitted grooves. From the forward edge of this a metal flap dipped down some four inches. Through this metal flap a hole gaped, its curled edges melted smooth by a flame, by the flame that had killed the man at his feet!
Something hard thrust into his back.
“Don’t move! Twitch a muscle and you die!”
Dunning froze rigid at the crisp command. That voice from behind, vibrant with threat, was yet unmistakably feminine.
Dunning obeyed. A vague strangeness in the words bothered him. They were oddly accented. The low-timbred, contralto voice was speaking English, but an English queerly changed, glorified in sound, lambent with indefinable majesty.
A hand passed over his body.
“You seem to be unarmed now—turn around, slowly.”
The girl was standing a yard away, pointing a black tube steadily at him. Her lips were scarlet against the dead white of her skin. Her eyes were dilated. Rage—and fear—stared forth from their grey depths.
“What have you done to Ran? Why have you killed him?”
“Nothing. I—”
“You lie!” she blazed at him. “You lie! You�
��re one of Marnota’s helots—sent to murder me! But how did he dare—open assassination? There is still law in the land—in spite of him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sister,” Dunning drawled. “My yawl was wrecked last night. When I came to, I saw your—this thing, whatever it is, and swam to it. The hatchway opened, you were on the floor, dead to the world. I lifted you to the couch, looked around, and found—this. I know less than you do how Ran was killed:”
A flicker of doubt crossed the girl’s face. There was an almost imperceptible relaxation of her tenseness.
“Your voice is so strange, you speak so queerly. Where do you come from? What are you?”
“I am an American.”
Suspicion flared again, and hate. Dunning waited what seemed ages for a flash from the cylinder of death.
“But—somehow—you don’t seem a murderer,” she said. “You have not the brutish appearance of Marnota’s mercenaries. There is something strange here, something I don’t understand.” The tube wavered, dropped a bit.
Dunning saw his chance. His hand flicked out, closed on the uncanny weapon; wrenched it away. The girl gasped. She was white, congealed flame.
“Go ahead,” she whispered defiantly. “Finish your task. Press the button and kill me.”
“I haven’t any desire to kill you, or to harm you,” Dunning chuckled. “I only want to know what this is all about. I’m Jim Dunning. What’s your name?”
“I am Thalma, Thalma of the house of Adams,” she proclaimed proudly.
“Sorry, Miss Adams. The name means nothing to me.”
Amazement showed in her mobile features.
“You do not know me!” she exclaimed, wonderingly. “And you say you are an American?”
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 28
