The Day the Machines Stopped

by Christopher Anvil

  Brian, wrestling with the problem the truck presented, was only vaguely aware of Carl’s discomfort. As far as Brian was concerned, the only thing that mattered was to get the clear picture of the situaion as Cardan had requested. And as far as Brian was concerned, he knew that his picture wasn’t clear yet.

  “How about that train?” he said. “That’s a diesel, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Wouldn’t it fire by compression, the same as the truck?” “Yes, but they’re actually electric trains. The diesel engines turn generators, and the electricity that’s generated runs the electric motors' which turn the wheels.”

  Brian looked at the trucks stalled here and there along the road. He could see at least one of them, close behind a small foreign-made car, that hid the upright stack of a diesel.

  Carl, his expression alert, had noticed the same thing. “Looks like that one almost ran into the car in front.” Brian nodded. “He probably stopped in a hurry, took one look around—”

  “And he’d naturally be dumfounded to see all the cars stopped at once,” Carl continued. “No doubt, people would start getting out. If he’d had his radio on, all of a sudden all the stations would go off.”

  “He might think it was an atomic attack.”

  “He’d yank on the brake, turn off the ignition, and take a flying dive for the nearest ditch.”

  “Then, when nothing happened and he came back, the engine wouldn’t start.”

  Carl looked at Brian with a puzzled expression, then frowned and looked down again at the highway. The diesel that was still running was out of sight now. The people were still walking along the edge of the highway, a few scrambling up the bank to the overpass Brian and Carl had crossed, and heading into town.

  “Now haven’t we seen everything?” Carl asked.

  Brian looked around and spotted a medium-sized white oak about fifty feet away. “If we climb that tree over there, couldn’t we see over these evergreens?”

  “Sure, but—you mean, so we could see further down the road?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the point of that? We’ll just see more of the same.”

  “How do we know?”

  Carl started to speak, then changed his mind. Scowling, he led the way to the oak. He turned to say something, then shrugged, took hold of a low limb, and pulled himself up into the tree.

  Brian waited till Carl was up in the tree and out of the way, then took hold of a small limb, feeling the rough bark under his fingers, pulled himself up, got his feet onto a limb nearby, stood up to grip another limb overhead. The dead, brown, violet-tinged leaves still clinging to the limbs rustled around him as he climbed.

  At last they were above the level of the young hemlocks and could look out onto a stretch of highway that reached far out into the distance. As far as the eye could see, the sun shone on the smooth hoods, roofs, and front windows of stalled cars spread out along the highway.

  “See,” said Carl. “What did I tell you?”

  “Yes,” said Brian. “You were right. But now we know it.”

  Carl flushed slightly, started angrily to speak, then stopped. Ruefully, he said, “You’ve got a point there. I do go off half-cocked sometimes.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Maybe not, but it’s so. That’s something in your favor.” Brian failed to get the point, but Carl reminded him, “Remember, we both want the same girl.”

  “Sure, but can’t we leave that up to her?”

  “Suppose you thought I was going to get her?”

  “I wouldn’t be happy. But—she could do worse.”

  Carl looked blank for an instant, then grinned. “Thanks. But how does that help you} You like her, don’t you?”

  “Of course I like her.”

  “Then how,” said Carl, looking puzzled, “could you give her up?”

  Brian exasperatedly started to speak. He was going to say: I don't own her. Neither of us do. How do I give up something I don’t have? But he saw this wasn’t what Carl meant. Slowly, Brian said, “I’ve lost things before.”

  For a brief instant Carl looked sympathetic. Then he shook his head. “That’s the difference between you and me. I always get what I want.”

  “Even—” Brian began.

  “By hook or by crook,” said Carl positively, his light-blue eyes frank and clear. “I win. I’ve got to.”

  Brian looked off in the distance for a moment. He, too, had an outlook on life, picked up in the bruising punishment that had come about Before he learned it, and he could put it in a few words, just as Carl could put his philosophy in a few words. But something warned Brian that this wasn’t the time. Instead, he smiled suddenly and looked at Carl.

  “What happens if two guys like you meet head-on? Something gets broken?”

  Carl grinned. “We try to avoid each other.”

  Brian laughed. They took a final look around, then climbed down the tree, dropped to the ground, wincing as the impact put strain on their sore legs, and headed back for the bicycles.

  Brian, smiling, said, “Race back?”

  “Ouch,” said Carl. “Let’s just see how far we can coast.” “I wonder if we could put the bikes out of sight by the side of the road on that last curve, then walk down and ask some of those people about the cars. You know, what it was like when they stalled?”

  Carl thought a long moment. “Worth a try.”

  They left the bikes in the trees by the road and asked the people coming up from the highway about what had happened. The answer was always the same:

  “The engine just stopped, that’s all. And then nothing worked. Starter, lights, horn, radio—the whole business was dead. So we got out and walked.”

  Brian and Carl got their bicycles and went back into town. On the way through town they could see the trouble building up.

  In the streets, with their motionless cars and dead traffic signals, without the usual faint sounds of radios playing, and of juke boxes in the background, with the television sets dark, the lights and electricity gone, and the phones dead, with the novelty of the thing starting to wear off, and the fact that it was going to have to be lived with beginning to dawn, with the familiar tools and comforts missing, and uncertainties and vague horrors beginning to loom, people were instinctively gathering together.

  The little groups Brian and Carl had seen earlier were big groups now. They stood about on the sidewalks, some staring glumly and others talking excitedly while they looked around at the dead neon signs, really noticing for the first time the gray untended structures that rose up behind the shiny store-fronts. They looked down the streets where no cars or buses ran, for the first time seeing a mile as a mile, not as a vague distance to be overcome via a token handed to the driver, a few steps to an empty seat, and a five-minute wait. Other little mobs of people had taken over neighborhood grills or soda fountains, invited in by special prices as worried proprietors cut down the stocks of food and ice-cream that wouldn’t keep with electric refrigerators and freezers off. And once the crowds gathered, they stayed there, no one anxious to leave his own, now-familiar group to walk down the nearly empty sidewalk. In a crowd, there was warmth, campanionship. Outside, the silent city, with its main life-current cut off, seemed strange and alien, and the atmosphere had the stillness that came before a thunderstorm.

  Past these uneasy, tentatively waiting groups of people, Brian and Carl pedaled with casual slowness, their expressions unconcerned. No one made any hostile gesture toward them. A few people called, “Hey, taxi!” or “Pretty good, no battery.” Brian and Carl grinned back and said nothing, but the perspiration on their brows wasn’t just from the exertion of pedaling the bikes.

  The tension of potential trouble was growing in the air, though the people in those groups waiting in occasional stores might not know it. They saw only each other, whereas Brian and Carl saw the city. So far, nothing really irreversible had happened. Let the power come on again in a few hours, and
it would just be an event that stood out, like Hurricane Hazel, or The Blizzard. It would be referred to in later days as The Power Failure, an event more unusual than natural disasters, but on the whole less harmful. It would be made into a joke by entertainers on TV. Magazine articles would be written to describe the way it came about, and how it ended.

  But what if the power failure didn’t end in a few hours?

  From somewhere came the smell of smoke, and up ahead Brian saw perspiring men in firemen’s uniforms carry past a long ladder, axes, and a length of hose. In a moment, they vanished up a side, street.

  When the fire trucks won’t run, what can the fireman do? Who has more power then, the fire company, or the man with a match?

  Brian and Carl glanced at each other, their faces deadly serious. Then they forced smiles, and kept pedaling slowly, casually, back toward the Research East building.

  Around them in the city, the pent-up hysteria slowly mounted.

  Chapter 4

  Brian and Carl left the bicycles where they’d rented them and started back on foot to the Research East building. The crowds in the doorways watched them in blank or speculative silence, and once they were stopped by men anxious for news—any news—who listened avidly as Brian and Carl told of cars stalled far up the highway.

  At the Research East entrance, the gate was shut, with an ominous black cable looped and coiled inside, and a sign, “Danger—High Voltage,” warning off people who might drift in and cause trouble later on.

  Smitty, his black hair combed straight back as usual, opened the gate for them and grinned. “Maybe we can’t do anything else with electricity, but it’ll still scare people. Go right up, the chief’s waiting for you.”

  Wearily they climbed the four flights of steps to the top floor, and the last flight of steps seemed as long as the other three put together.

  “All it used to take,” said Carl wonderingly, “was to push a button.”

  “That was just this morning.”

  “It seems like years ago—in another world.”

  Brian said, “Maybe Maclane and Donovan have figured something out.”

  “Maybe. But taking electricity away from civilization is like taking the framework out of a building. You have to find a substitute awful fast or the whole thing will collapse on top of you, and that’s the end of that.”

  They shoved open the doors at the head of the stairs, walked into the corridor, and a few moments later were staggered to see the piles of rifles, shotguns, ammunition in boxes and bandoliers, hunting knives, knapsacks, pack baskets, skis, snowshoes, heavy blankets, axes, canteens, ponchos, coils of rope, gasoline lanterns, kerosene lanterns, cans of meat, heavy paper sacks of flour and sugar, a stack of cigar boxes and cigarette cartons, gasoline and kerosene cans in a long row against the wall, a box two feet deep and about three feet long containing nothing but gloves and mittens in assorted sizes, another containing heavy socks. Brian and Carl looked at the supplies and whistled. “Looks like the chief plans on clearing out.”

  The sound of many voices came, slightly muffled, from the office ahead.

  They knocked and Cardan’s voice called, “Come in.” They pushed open the door of the office. Cardan sat at his desk, a smoldering cigar jutting from one comer of his mouth, a .45 Colt automatic flat on the desk beside him. Maclane was standing in front of the desk, and Donovan was at a table to one side, using a hydrometer to test several six-volt and twelve-volt batteries sitting on the table. Donovan looked up as Carl and Brian came in, Maclane kept talking, and Cardan nodded abstractedly.

  Maclane was saying, “Batteries, magnetos and generators just don’t work, that’s all. The only kind of electricity left, so far as I can see, is static electricity. You can still take a glass rod, rub it with a cloth, touch two pith balls hung close by on threads, and they’ll spring apart. But try to pass a current through a wire and you get nowhere.”

  “Take a look at this,” suggested Donovan. He was using the hydrometer on one of the cells of a six-volt battery. The fluid from this battery tested out as “fully charged.”

  “Almost thirteen hundred,” said Donovan. “But now look.”

  He took a flat metal bar, laid it across the clean shiny terminals of the battery—and nothing happened.

  “It’s not a question of the charge leaking away, after all. If it were, that battery would be dead,” mused Brian.

  Carl agreed, staring at the battery, then looking at the hydrometer. “Mind if I try that?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Carl repeated Donovan’s procedure and got the same result.

  Madane was saying, “. . . no conduction. The trouble seems to be that, for some reason, the electrons are more firmly bound to the metal atoms, so the ‘electron gas’ that ordinarily carries an electric current in a wire just doesn’t exist any more. Or, perhaps, it exists but it’s nowhere near as free-moving as it used to be. It’s as if that damned Helmand lab sent out a signal that threw a switch inside the atoms—made a minute rearrangement of some kind.”

  There was a knock at the door. Cardan called “Come in,” and Anne Cermak, wearing a light-gray lab coat, stepped into the room. Brian crossed to her immediately and she welcomed him with a smile.

  Carl looked up from the battery, saw Brian and Anne talking, and he studied Brian intently for a moment, his eyes lit with a pale glow. Abruptly, he blanked his face and looked back at the battery.

  Brian was conscious only of Anne, whose smile faded as she asked, “Is it bad out there?”

  “Not yet,” said Brian. “But it’s getting bad.” He realized why she was worried, and said, “Anne, I’ll try to get out to see your father after we’re through here.”

  She started to speak but was interrupted by Cardan. “How did things turn out? Notice any changes in chemical tests or reactions?”

  “No,” said Anne, “everything seemed the same. Except— sometimes the color of a reagent seemed slightly different. But it could have been the lack of electric light in the lab.”

  “But the reactions themselves seemed the same?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you hadn’t been particularly watching for differences, would you have noticed any?”

  Anne thought a moment. “No, I don’t think I would have.”

  Cardan turned to Brian. “What’s it like out there?”

  “Getting bad,” said Brian. He described much of what they’d seen. He told of the silent, waiting groups, the ominous quiet of the city, and the growing tension. “It looks like a powder keg waiting for a match.”

  “That’s the same impression we’ve had,” Cardan said, “even though we’ve stayed fairly close. Any sign of electricity?”

  “None that we could see.” Brian described the firemen headed for the fire, on foot. “And as far as we could see from North Hill, no cars were moving.”

  Carl cut in. “There was a diesel truck moving.”

  Cardan looked at the smoking tip of- his cigar, and there was a moment’s silence which contained a distinct suggestion of a rebuff. Carl drew his breath in as if to speak, then hesitated.

  “Where was this?” Cardan wanted to know.

  “On the highway.” Carl described it in careful and accurate detail.

  Brian, listening closely, remembered that he, Brian, had seen this truck after Carl had insisted that they might as well go back, and that there was nothing more to be seen. Brian now listened to Carl describe it very much as if he, Carl, had been the only one to see the truck.

  Cardan and the others were listening intently. Maclane looked interested, and Donovan seemed a little excited. Cardan’s face remained expressionless.

  “So,” Carl concluded, “it seems dear that diesel engines are all right while they’re running, but I imagine if once they stop, then the electric starting motor won’t work.”

  Maclane straightened up and glanced at Donovan with a faint grin.

  Donovan said, “That could be the answer. Rig the engine to start
on compressed air.”

  Cardan’s face was still expressionless. Carl cleared his throat, but didn’t speak. Cardan looked at Carl, a thin wisp of smoke drifting from the cigar he held in one hand.

  “Did you see anything else that moved?” There was a faint emphasis on the word “you.”

  Carl stammered a little as he said, “N-no. We did see a diesel locomotive, but it was stopped.”

  “What,” said Cardan, “did you decide was the reason for that?” Again there was the faintest emphasis on the word “you.”

  Carl said, “I—we thought it was because the generators and electric driving motors wouldn’t work.”

  Brian suppressed a grin. Carl had taken credit that belonged to Brian, and now, to avoid looking egotistical, Carl was forced to give up credit that really was his own. Brian had forgotten the quickness with which Cardan detected any false note in a man’s report.

  Cardan had turned to Maclane and Donovan. “Can we fix diesel trucks to start on air?”

  “Be a problem,” said Donovan. “For one thing, because of the lack of electric power tools. But we’ve got that portable steam turbine Hooper dreamed up, along with fourteen different sizes of the same thing. Some of them run on LP gas. You remember, Chief, we were trying to sell them as self-powered tools for use away from power lines, up on roofs and so on? And when we had a manufacturer lined up, the mechanic demonstrating the thing got it set up wrong, almost burning his arm off, and before we could get that mess straightened out, self-contained battery-operated tools were on the market.”

  “The main trouble,” said Cardan, “was that the things were bulky.”

  “That doesn’t matter now. And then there’s that shuttle-hammer gimmick he worked out, with the little self-contained, reciprocating steam-engine and all the attachments.”

  Maclane grinned. “That one will really keep your hands warm in cold weather. If it doesn’t shake your arms off first.”