Doomsday Morning M

by C. L. Moore

  “Explain what?” he demanded. “That he’s been working with the rebels? Damn you, Rohan, why did you have to keep quiet about it? I’m with you. What do you want me to do?”

  I felt my jaw drop as I looked at him. Polly said, “Roy?” in a small, thin voice.

  “You think I’ve just been sitting around with my eyes shut?” he demanded angrily. “I know what’s been going on out here. I like what I’ve seen. I like the feel of it.” He wiped the back of his hand across his cheek with a violent motion, smearing the make-up. With a sort of savage contempt he held out the streaked hand. “You think I like being an actor? You think I want to act? I hate it. I always did hate it. But under Comus I act or starve. I want out of this rat race.” He swung back to me. “Rohan! Have we still got a chance?”

  I tried to read the truth in his eyes. How much could I trust him? How strong a tool would he be in my hands? He wiped his palm across his thigh and then held out both hands to me, shaking with tension.

  “Give me a job to do! I’m willing to gamble if you are. What’s going on?”

  I found I was shaking again, too.

  “It’s too dangerous,” I said. “No.”

  “Yes!” Roy yelled at me. “I’m not afraid! I’m sick of Comus. How much of a chance have we got?”

  I looked around the jolting truck. I looked at the dark trees whipping by outside. I looked toward the east, where at any moment, for all I knew, the white glare of explosion might begin to rise.

  “I don’t know!” I yelled back at him. “Damn it, I don’t know! I think there’s a chance but I don’t know. I’m so scared I can’t think ahead. I’m so scared I’m shaking. Look!”

  “But you still want to go into Corby?”

  “I’ve got to!”

  “You can’t make it alone. I’ll go too.”

  Cressy said seriously, “I can’t hold the bleeding back when you yell like that, Rohan. Calm down or you won’t do anything at all.”

  I looked down at the freshly welling blood. I leaned back against the rumbling wall and drew a long, unsteady breath.

  “All right,” I said. “Over there behind the control panels is a square box. Inside it there’s a safety fuse that belongs with the Anti-Com. My job’s to get it into Corby before the Anti-Com crew gets desperate enough to go ahead without it. So now you know.”

  Roy said, “With it everything will go through without a hitch? Is that it?”

  I nodded. “The Anti-Com will knock out Comus—if we get there in time. If we don’t, it may just knock California off the map.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Pod Henken turn around in the driver’s seat. I felt the floor under me begin to slow in its vibrations. The darkness outside flowed slower too. Then brakes sighed and the truck rolled heavily to a halt. Pod Henken’s voice called calmly back to us.

  “All out that’s going out,” he said.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  IN THE SUDDEN dead silence Polly finished ripping the strip of shirt she held in mid-air. It made an angry sound.

  “Who’s getting out?” she demanded. “I’d just as soon get blown up trying as blown up running. All right, Cressy, your thumb, will you? Let’s get this bandage on.”

  Pod grinned at her from over the back of the seat.

  “I can remember the old days,” he said in a conversational tone. “Before Comus. I’m with you, Rohan. Eileen?”

  She gave him a placid smile. “We’re not gambling much at our age, are we? What are we waiting for?”

  Cressy looked up. “Me?” she said. “You mean me?” She flashed me a make-up–smeared smile, opportunist to the last. “Maybe we’ll all be famous,” she said. “It’s worth a chance.”

  I sat up straighten Suddenly I began to feel much better.

  “Hurry up with that bandage, can’t you?” I said to Polly. “I’m going up front with Pod. It rides easier, and I want to get to Corby in one piece. We’ve got a rough trip ahead, cast. Hang on!”

  The pavement poured past under us like a curving, uneven river that swung us rhythmically from side to side. There seemed to be an unusual amount of traffic on the Corby road tonight. Ahead of us and behind lights swung in and out of the steep, climbing curves. I was glad of the company on the road. It made us less conspicuous. I wondered how many other travelers toward Corby knew what it was they were racing into. Probably Comus was pouring in troops, by air as well as by road. Probably they’d find the Anti-Com long before we got there. Probably by the time we rounded the next curve, or the one beyond, we’d see the blinding flash start to burst outward from the exploding town, spreading fast toward us and eastward across the continent.

  I didn’t believe it. I didn’t care. My arm throbbed and the blood kept seeping in a wider and wider stain through the bandage, but that didn’t bother me either. I felt cool and confident. The whole night world around me seemed strangely alive, and I was responding vividly to every random stimulus. The stars glittered against my very skin and the sound of a night bird calling clearly in the dark was a sound my own mind had made. I felt as if the last walls had fallen away around me and I was alone and free. It made me a little sad without knowing yet just why, but very fresh and clear.

  In the rearview mirror I saw the lights of following traffic jolt up and down. We were going much too fast and it didn’t seem to matter. I had the wild, irrational idea that we couldn’t go wrong tonight. The world was turning obediently under my feet again and history was turning too. History of our own making, new-minted, fresh as the mountain night around us.

  Pod said suddenly, “Look over there to the right. Wait a minute—there. Those lights. That must be Corby.”

  The road was topping a rise, and for a moment we could all see the winking clusters far off. Then the road sank again and all we could see was the rushing river of the highway and the bursts of light and sound that were passing traffic. But the glow of Corby hung above it in the sky now, and over the glow a star winked red, white, and blue over and over. I thought of Charlie Starr and the San Diego Massacre and I wondered in that formless way we all must have when we think of the dead whether he could possibly know what was happening tonight, ending the thing he had begun. Ending it one way or another. But that was a thing too big and dim for the mind to cope with long.

  Pod Henken said with a sound of sudden alarm, “Look back, Rohan. I thought I saw something—something behind us that was red.”

  My heart gave a lurch before my reason did. Something red? I leaned out futilely, trying to see the road behind us. Something the color of Comus following us along the Corby road? “Not necessarily following us,” I told myself. “Corby is the center of the nation tonight. Everything on this road except us is bound to be Comus.”

  We rounded a curve. I could see down the way we had come, and something brilliantly red flashed suddenly into sight five or six headlights behind us. I caught my breath.

  “You were right, Pod. There’s a Prowler on the road. Coming this way.”

  “After us?” Pod asked quietly.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t see how anybody could know. Unless——” The thought jolted me. Unless they picked up Elaine. … But I couldn’t believe that one either. I remembered the blue ring on her hand. I didn’t think they could keep Elaine in their hands long enough to make her talk. She had her own infallible way of slipping between their fingers and I knew she would have used it. No, they couldn’t be looking for us. …

  Pod said, “Brace yourself. I’m going off automatic. We’ve got more maneuverability on manual, and we couldn’t outrun a Prowler anyhow.”

  I felt a strange little wrench somewhere in my mind as the truck lurched and we broke, maybe forever, the bond with that humming artery which had been guiding us down the highway. The artery of Comus. We were on our own.

  Pod said, “Listen.” And after a moment I heard it too—a siren that wailed high and then low, shrill and demanding. In the rearview mirror I saw the distant spot of red swell with terrifying
speed as it swept toward us down the road, radiant in its own crimson light. The noise swelled as the teardrop shape swelled. A sight to make the heart hesitate and the breath come faster. Already I’d begun to forget how intensely red they are, how big, how fast.

  It swung wide around the set of headlights just in front of it, screamed peremptorily, and crowded the two shining eyes to a halt at the edge of the road. Then the little tableau leaped backward and dwindled to a dot as Pod put on more speed. The truck groaned and boomed hollowly. The road poured past lie a river in flood. The stars burned white above the treetops. I heard a heavy buzzing overhead even above the truck’s thunder, and a moment later we saw the lights of a laboring helicopter sinking toward Corby like an overladen bee buzzing in bass. And another. And a third.

  When we topped the next rise Corby was much nearer. The whole town was brilliantly alight, and I thought I could hear the sharp crack of gunfire, though the noise around me was too heavy now to be sure. The town couldn’t be more than five minutes away, I thought.

  But maybe we didn’t have five minutes to spare. The voice of the Prowler rose again in that terrifying, high, undulating scream that sounded bright red like the creature that voiced it. In the mirror I watched it swing contemptuously around two sets of headlights and come roaring after us down the road, swelling, crimson, glaring with light and color.

  Pod’s foot was on the floor boards and the truck heaved and rocked, booming in protest. The lights of Corby rushed toward us and the tree rushed backward along the road in continuous hissing streams. The stars winked above Corby, quiet and cool.

  The Prowler cut in on a car two places behind us, herding it in toward the roadside with an ear-destroying wail of the siren. Again the tableau of Prowler and captive leaped backward and dwindled in the dark.

  But this time something else happened. One of the enormous Comus trucks behind the Prowler swung wide around the halted tableau and came thundering after us, closing the distance with appalling speed. I saw the wheel fighting Pod Henken’s grip like something alive, terrified and struggling to escape. He swerved toward the edge of the road, cutting across the humming power lanes, trying to lose us among the line of rushing trucks and cars.

  He couldn’t do it. The pursuers were coming too fast behind us, and it was us they were after. A quarter of a mile behind us the huge Comus van swung into a lane paralleling ours and came roaring down on us like a cyclone, blinking its lights on and off furiously. Pod stamped the accelerator hard on the floor boards and the whole vehicle shuddered under us, but still the big pursuer gained and gained.

  Now it was drawing level with us in the next lane. It didn’t try to pull ahead, but went thundering along neck and neck in a high-speed tableau, hunter and hunted alike roaring down the road together. I saw Pod give it one quick glance and then stare straight ahead, his jaw set, fighting the wheel to keep us on our course. Very briefly I realized how little I had known of the old man until tonight. He had come a long way from the red-faced nonentity I’d met back there in the redwoods. Or maybe I’d come a long way. Maybe it was I who’d changed.

  The enormous truck towered over us on juggernaut wheels like a moving factory that thundered along the road. Now it was moving in as the Prowler had done to other cars, crowding us toward the edge of the pavement. The relief driver on our side was leaning out of the window, yelling and waving.

  “Pod!” I shouted. “Your gun! If we could hit their tires——”

  Pod rolled sideways in the seat. “My pocket!” he yelled, not taking his eyes off the road. I groped in his coat pocket with my left hand. And then, with the gun in my grip and halfway lifted to take aim, I paused suddenly, straining my ears. Had I heard what I thought I heard?

  “Hey, Charlie!” a thin voice was yelling in the whistling dark between us. “Hey, Charlie—can you hear me?”

  A flash of bright excitement glinted in my mind. I leaned back across Pod’s bent shoulders and waved furiously.

  “Charlie?” I yelled in answer. “What’s the word?”

  The wind whipped his answer to rags in the space between us. All I could hear was a thin sound that seemed to say, “—block ahead—”

  “What?” I shouted. And this time it came clearer through the roaring of the wind.

  “Roadblock ahead! Take it easy—we’ll crash through! Let us get—ahead. …”

  Time seemed to stretch out like elastic. Time stopped entirely. We would go on at this racking speed forever with the huge bulk of the truck pulling ahead of us, lengthening the distance between our lights and the great, rumbling, shaking galaxy of lights that outlined its rear.

  Now I could see the barricade set up across the whole highway just outside the lights of the Comus check station at the edge of Corby. But trucks were parked nose to tail in a solid wall across the road, and an enormous Prowler sat waiting at the narrow gap through which traffic was being passed. I thought, watching the traffic slip through the barrier:

  They know about us. Somehow they know. The trap’s set up for us and nobody else. And it had to be true that the word was out about us, or how had our friends in the truck ahead known we needed help? Someone had talked. It was the only answer. I wondered painfully if the someone had been Elaine. And I wondered if I’d ever know the truth about that one.

  The Prowler at the barricade began to howl high and shrill as the hugh truck hurtled toward it, not slowing down at all. The truck added its own hornblast to the commotion, raucous and defiant. For one long last moment it thundered straight for the barricade with all its lights glittering and its horn screaming until the echoes rolled back from the hills around us. The noise was exhilarating and contagious. I leached over to slam my wrist down on our own horn, hearing the hoarse bellow of it leap into life. The world was full of tremendous motion and the stunning sound of horns filling the road and the air and the sky.

  The next moment the leviathan before us hit the barricade.

  The sound was enormous—high, hollow, booming. All the horns stopped on the same note and the world was full of that tremendous booming and nothing else at all. We saw the trucks that made up the barricade hurtle left and right as the huge battering-ram thundered forward, plowing its path through their ranks and leaving a broad space open across the road. Then slowly, solemnly, it began to heave over toward one side. There was something awesome and deliberate about its overturning. It leaned, leaned past the balance point, leaned solemnly and crashed. …

  We hadn’t time to pause or look back. The Prowler was already gunning into life as we hurtled through the opening the nameless rebels had made for us and shot straight toward the center of town at close to a hundred miles an hour, Corby streaming back on both sides of us like a town made of water.

  Pod threw on the brakes. The soundtruck skidded and shrieked, tires smoking on the pavement until we rocked at last to a standstill and the houses around us turned solid again and we had stopped in the center of Corby.

  I looked at the street before us and blinked and looked again. All I could see was the color of Comus—bright red. Two of the three helicopters we had seen laboring over us above the road sat now in the middle of the main street of Corby, glinting crimson in the light. Drawn up before the helicopters were the men who had come down in them, red-coated men with guns in their hands, waiting for us. Comus knew. And Comus had got here first.

  For a moment it seemed to me that after we stopped the world went right on streaming backward on both sides, and the ground still seemed to be heaving under us. Walking across the heaving ground came a familiar figure in a familiar checkered shirt.

  Guthrie’s face was as red as the coats of the men behind him. Anger made the veins beat in his temples.

  He called up at me in a tight voice, “All right, Rohan, come out with your hands up. I made a mistake with you, but it’s not to late to catch it. Where’s the Anti-Com fuse?”

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  BEHIND ME I heard a sudden brisk motion inside the sound truck. I
didn’t turn my head. I was looking at the town of Corby and wondering where its people were. I was sure I’d heard gunfire from back there on the road. I was doubly sure there had been fighting here to slow down the house-to-house searchers. It came to me only now, in a sudden blaze of realization, that we’d made it into Corby and the Anti-Com hadn’t yet blown up. I thought, Then they can’t have found it yet. There’s still time——

  But was there? Time for what? Time to be arrested and searched, outnumbered by the Comus men before us. I wondered if Guthrie would shoot if we tried to run him down. Gunfire might rouse the local rebels, call them to the rescue. Alone, we’d shot our bolt. We couldn’t do much from here on in without help that I saw no way to get. Guthrie said, “You heard me, Rohan. Come on down.” For a moment I was acutely aware of my own weakness, the pain in my arm, the dizziness in my head. I drew a breath and started to mutter to Pod Henken. All I could think of was to start the truck again and force their gunfire. It was all I could think of. But behind us in the truck better wits were at work.

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  I heard from the roof of our cab a sudden, hollow, metallic coughing sound, loud and carrying. Then a voice amplified all out of recognition, a woman’s voice that sounded a little flat with age, shouted to the silent town.

  “Hey, Charlie!” the amplifiers on the roof of the sound truck roared. HEY, CHARLIE! The enormous scream went rolling into the dark. HEY, CHARLIE! The flat-faced houses around us picked up the words, flung them from echo to echo until they diminished down the streets of Corby in overlapping patterns of sound. HEY, CHARLIE! the housefronts seemed to be shouting. HEY, CHARLIE—CHARLIE—CHARLIE!

  The whole town heard it. The sound soared up and made a dome above the rooftops, and even the stars must have been listening.

  Guthrie’s gun arm swung up and I saw his lips move, but I couldn’t hear anything he said in the amplified screaming that filled the whole air. I did hear his gun bark, and then the twang of the bullet on metal, and one of the two amplifiers above us coughed and went silent.