Children of the Void

by William Dexter

  He lifted his lean brown face and looked at the house. “They were attacked in there, those Vogel men, I’d say. See— windows boarded up from the inside. Commies set folk against ’em, and then someone burns down the house. Vogel men, eh?

  . . . Say! There’s a lead for us! C’mon! We got to look into this!”

  He hefted one of the axes from the back seat of the jeep and in a moment was hacking at the door of the house with great swinging strokes.

  Inside, the house was in darkness, with only a gleam of light here and there where the setting sun shone through shattered windows and broken shutters. The place had certainly been secured against seige, but of the former occupants there was no sign, not even the usual bundle of clothing we were so accustomed to finding.

  We went through several rooms without coming upon anything to tell us more about the “Vogel men,” and then Karim went out and brought back a battery lamp from the jeep. He shone it round the dark, grimy rooms, heavily powdered with dust. Its light showed us an open wall safe and a small pile of documents strewn about the floor. We went upstairs to the attics, still without finding any trace of the people who had lived there, and now rather idly pursuing what seemed like another false lead.

  As we came to the top floor, we saw a door flapping on loose hinges. Beyond it lay the roofs of the terraced houses.

  “So they got away—good for them!” breathed Harry.

  “Across the roofs, eh? That accounts for the ladder against the parapet. Firemen saw ’em and thought they needed saving.”

  But the Vogel men—if it were they we were tracking—had not got away, of course. We found the remains of one of them curled up in a cranny by the chimneys, where the shock wave of the Vogel bomb had overtaken him. The other we found in the parapet gully.

  As we stirred the pitiful heap of clothes, there was a clang. A pistol went slithering along the gutter to a lower slope of the roof.

  Whatever the mystery of the two fugitives may have led to, we saw no reason for disturbing their remains any further, and turned to descend the stairs again.

  Karim methodically closed the flapping door, and his light caught something white behind the door. He stooped to pick it up. “Hah! A letter!” he said, scornfully. “Thought maybe I was finding a five-pound note!” And he gave a needless laugh at the joke. After all, what were five-pound notes to us, who had all the money we wanted, for the picking up? But Karim carefully put the letter in his pocket. A hoarder and a picker-up of odd useless things, Karim could not resist taking home an oddment or two for consideration together with his equally curious wife Rachelle.

  It was not until we were seated in the jeep again that he took out the letter and opened it. Much of the letter was illegible, thanks to the rains of years soaking it where it had lain.

  One passage, though, caught my eye. Across the middle of the page, where the fold had somewhat protected the writing, were the words: “. . . pity Vogel had to persist when we were so . . .” Then there was a gap of several lines, and the letter went on: “. . . at the Fog Factory on Saturday, when we shall be . . . Don’t forget, you . . .” And the dim lettering gave out in a heavy smear of dust and rain-soaked paper.

  What led us to that Earls Court street and up those dusty stairs? What force compelled Karim to pick up a useless bit of paper and pocket it? And what inspired us to follow up this slender clue and visit the “Fog Factory?”

  The Fog Factory was a tall, handsome building, crowned with a graceful square tower, on the site of the old Crystal Palace. When it was first opened in 1959 I had written about its work. Its correct title was “The Metropolitan Atmospheric Research Station,” corrupted at once into “The Fog Factory.”

  Next day saw us driving-^-with strong hopes—up Anerley Hill with two trucks loaded with the usual equipment of detection apparatus and protective clothing.

  When the Government had built the Fog Research Station, they had—wisely—made no attempt to follow the design of the old Crystal Palace, although popular demand had nagged unceasingly at them. The building they put up was topped by a starkly beautiful tower commanding the whole of the London Basin, and providing a landmark visible from almost any point in London and away to the foothills of the Downs. From the summit of the tower delicate recording apparatus had ticked away for twenty-four hours a day, assessing atmospheric purity and ceaselessly passing the information it gathered down to the laboratories on the lower floors. When the human supervisors of the elaborate mechanism died, it ticked on for a few weeks untended, until somewhere a valve burned out or a fuse blew, and then it all ticked to a standstill.

  Now the great gleaming black tower stood silent and lifeless as we drew up at the main entrance, and our footsteps stirred up a small whirlwind of dust when we left the cars. The bronze and glass doors—there had been a keen public outcry at the expense bestowed on the project in 1959—were firmly closed to us, and we had to explore a little before we made an entrance by an unobtrusive side door.

  All was dark inside the building until our lamps were switched on. The wide sweeps of windows that once commanded views across London and half of Kent and Surrey were heavily coated with grime, though the fog the project had once battled with long ago ceased to plague London.

  There was a faint but positive reaction from the Geiger counter when we switched it on, and we spent more than an hour trying to develop it. We examined every floor of the building, and found that the higher we went, the less frequent and insistent became the chatterings of the counter.

  Two basement floors we examined, too, and the Geiger counter at once took up its busy ticking again, but nowhere did we reach a practical optimum.

  “There must be lower levels yet,” said Arabin, as we searched for an entrance to a third basement. “Somewhere down there we shall find whatever it is that hits the Geiger so steadily.”

  But the closest check found no entrance to lower basements. At last we gave up for rest, and Arabin and I climbed the long stairs to the top of the tower. We sat looking over London as we ate the food we had brought with us. It was a London without a puff of smoke, or any movement, but still, from there, it was a great, fine city. There it lay, stretching away to the northward roll of hills, with the Thames gleaming through the middle of it in wide curves—and its life was gone. Perhaps some day in the remote future, men would return and make London the proud city it once had been, but that could not be for centuries. In the meantime, what would happen to this grand, tragic desert of brick and stone? Who would find it in the future, and in what state would it be when they found it?

  It was a question we had often discussed, and always we came to an infinitely sad answer. London—the London we had known—would rot and corrode, crumble and topple, before mankind was big enough to inhabit such a city again. And so we often used to retire to the high places overlooking the city, to sit and admire and dream—and to mourn.

  As Arabin and I scanned the city below us, this mood of despondency settled heavily again, until at last Leo shook himself and turned towards the stairs.

  “Aaah! It’s not a bit of good, Denis,” he groaned. “We’ve gone over it all before. In the meantime” nodding towards the city spread out there—“that’s all we shall ever have of London in our time ... I wish these lifts were still working. I don’t fancy walking down all those stairs again.”

  He crossed to the centre of the wide concourse that crowned the tower, and idly pressed the button that should have summoned one of the lifts. There was, of course, no response from the long-dead mechanism.

  Like a mischievous boy, he walked moodily along the line of lift entrances—there were four of them—and pressed each call button before heading for the stairs. We started the long walk down, when we heard a faint shout from the bottom. Almost at the same instant there was a muffled whining sound from our left. We stopped and turned toward it.

  “Fifteen years ago,” I murmured, “I’d have said that was a lift coming up . . .”

  The soun
d increased in volume and pitch, and then stopped with a click.

  “It is a lift,” shouted Arabin, leaping towards the row of elevator doors. Before he got there, the end door slid open jerkily, and a dim shaft of electric light shone out.

  We stood on the brink of the lighted compartment and stared in, as we looked at each other, the same thought in each mind.

  “No,” I said. “Who knows whether the mechanism is working after all these years? It might come up empty, but would it go down—with a load in it? Let’s make sure first.”

  Leo thrust a seating bench into the folding door of the lift, jamming it open.

  “Call the others up here,” he panted. “If this thing’s working, we’re going down in it.”

  There was no need to call the others, though, for already they came clattering up the wide, winding staircase.

  Karim was first up. “Machinery working somewhere,” he puffed. “We heard it down there . . . Somewhere a machine works, something goes phwee like an ascenseur. . .

  And he stood gaping at the open lift door.

  “It was, then, an ascenseur!” he whispered. “Lights, also! People, too, somewhere, you think?”

  But Arabin shook his head. Scores of times in the past years we had thought we had found evidence of the existence of other humans besides ourselves. Machinery had gone into operation somewhere before this, for no apparent reason at all. Lights had sometimes flashed on—and then off again. Doors we had kept closed had been found open. But each time we had traced the cause. A disturbance of sensitive mechanism had sometimes set an automatically controlled piece of machinery to work, or a wind-driven lighting system to trip a switch. And the uncanny power of unused doors to spring open with the changing temperature had long been a familiar phenomenon to us.

  Now, this lift might be—indeed, must be—a repetition of our previous alarms. Somewhere, no doubt, a long-forgotten emergency battery had sprung to life on the touch of a button. Somewhere, a neglected relay had closed. It was sufficient for us that the lift had worked.

  But as for people . . . “No Casimir. No people,” said Leo. “I’m sure of that, worse luck. But, tell me, how many lift entrances are there down on the ground floor?”

  Nobody could remember, so we descended again, leaving Leo on the top. Each floor showed us three lift doors, and three only^They were wide sliding portals, and the racks in which they hung covered the whole width of the structure in which they operated. And yet, we felt, if we measured, we should find space to spare, space to allow for that fourth lift that had mysteriously whined to the top of the tower.

  It was indeed so. When we measured, we found that a cunning extension “of. each portal disguised the true width of the entrances to the lifts. The construction of the doorways, sliding further than necessary on each opening, successfully hid the fact that at one end was a shaft with no entrance except on the top floor.

  But—it must have another entrance somewhere, and the only place could be below the second basement. For some reason the designers of the building had included a secret lift, or perhaps a private elevator, or even one for use only in emergency. Why?

  Back on the top floor, we debated whether to risk going down in the open car. We must make sure where the shaft ended, but would the cable, or the rack, or whatever powered the lift, stand the unaccustomed strain?

  We dare not hazard any one of us without a test, and so we piled heavy metal seating benches into the lift, stepping gingerly on its floor as we carried them in. We filled it to the door, and then closed the lift. But now we had the problem of how to start it moving downwards. We could not summon it from the other end, and we could not press the button inside the lift.

  Reluctantly, we opened the gate again and took out the ballast.

  There was nothing else for it: one of us would have to go down in the lift.

  Only by doing so could we get nearer to that unknown store of radio-activity deep in the hillside. I suppose now, looking back, that we must have been inspired by something beyond our ken, for normally we would never have dreamed of risking one of us like that. We would even walk a mile, if necessary, to avoid passing close to a rickety building. We would never travel beyond calling distance from our homes without two-way radio, and we would rarely go anywhere alone. So tiny was our population, and so weak our hold on our planet, that we normally exercised ridiculous precautions in all our daily life.

  But now we seemed to forget these, and one after another of us at the top of the tower offered to be the first down the lift. At last we drew lots for it.

  It was I who drew the short match that was to indicate the winner—or maybe the loser: we did not then know which it would turn out to be.

  Although there was little chance of the radio-active source being unshielded, I was firmly laced into a screened suit that had been breathlessly lugged up the stairs. They slung the Geiger counter round my neck and on one shoulder hung the haversack containing its power pack. An axe was thrust into my hand, in case I should find the lower door jammed, and the “escape kit” was hung on my other shoulder. This was another haversack containing spare batteries for the lamp, a coil of nylon rope, a heavy reel carrying something like four miles of twine, a knife, chalk, and a dozen other items which we had found from experience to be of use in exploring deserted buildings.

  There was talk, too, of loading me with another bag—a bag containing one of the Esoes. But I firmly objected to this. Although by now we were pretty well used to the presence of the bat-men, I had no fancy to be confronted with one down there in the depths of that hill in whatever vaults lay below it

  I should have liked a companion of my own race, but this we vetoed in case our combined weight should be too much for the lift. Then again, I thought a few seconds later, it would be better to lose one than two, if there was no way of return.

  I entered the cage and took a quick look at the control panel. There were only two buttons there, instead of one for each floor. I nodded to the others, and pressed the “Down” button.

  As the gate creaked shut, I had a sudden and horrible fear that the cage might stick and the mechanism fail halfway down, and I thought to return and try to produce a plan for this eventuality. But by then the lift was moving.

  It descended in jerks, and more than once seemed to wheeze to a stop, while the unseen mechanism groaned with the load being placed on it after all this time.

  Each time, though, it moved again before finally stopping, until, after what seemed like many minutes but can only have been seconds, it stopped with a jolt.

  And this time, the whine of the motor stopped too. The light in my cage flickered, and then went out.

  For a second I was mad with fear as I fumbled for my lamp, and kicked the lift door.

  I was in darkness. The lift had stopped. And the door would not open.

  XVI

  For a moment, panic gripped me as the automatic door failed to open. Then there was a flicker as the light flashed on in the cage, and the door grated open with a harsh rattle. For years it had not operated, and doubtless the lubrication had set nearly solid with disuse.

  The light from the lift shone out into a larger chamber in which the dust eddied and whirled after the piston-effect of the descending lift. I waited for it to settle and then switched on my powerful hand light. The hall I found myself in was a wide passage, with doors leading off it on either side.

  In slots on each door were cards showing the names of the former occupants and stating, in some cases, their functions.

  I walked slowly down the passage, looking back often to make sure that the lift still remained there with the door open, and then returned when I had reached the end. Meanwhile my Geiger counter was ticking rapidly away, with little variation at either end of the long passage. Somewhere along here, or perhaps in some lower vault, was the source of the radiations • that were activating the counter.

  I started my search by opening each door in turn. There was a large drawing office oc
cupying several rooms, and here the counter showed a falling off of several degrees, so I spent no time in the drawing office.

  The next suite held eight banks of an electronic computer, and here I thought the Geiger counter might speed up its action, but I was disappointed. I looked curiously at the vast complexity of the machine here before passing on to the next door. This was marked “Assistant Director,” and over the lintel was one of those devices that were once the delight of the important business tycoon—an electrically-lit sign that could be switched to “Engaged," “Wait,” or “Come In.” Here, for the first time, I found traces of human remains, in the form of a pile of clothing. After these years there was no way of telling which was the dust of Man and which was the dust of Time.

  I moved on, each room producing little of interest to the Geiger counter, and still less to a man in a hurry. Then, well down the corridor, I found a door that was unmarked.

  I opened it, and saw a flight of metal stairs. For a minute, I wondered whether to descend further, or whether to return. I took a few steps down, and at each step the needle of the counter slid further across the dial, while the busy chattering of the Geiger’s internal mechanism accelerated excitedly.

  I shone my lamp down over the hand rail, but there was little to see. One thing, though, was sure: this was the store of radioactive material that was activating the Geiger. Each step that I took nearer to floor level set its needle dithering further across the dial, and twice I had to alter the setting to enable me to get any reading at all.

  It was a long climb down the stairs, and the great hall I found myself in was wide and deep. From wall to wall it seemed empty, and then my light caught a glimmer of brightness on one wall where moisture had cleared the thick layer of dust. I smeared my sleeve, across the wall and found that it was tiled with porcelain. A wider clearing showed a door with no handle, set deep in the wall, and carrying three sunken holes on its surface. The door shone out in bright red against the white of the surrounding wall when I had cleared it with my sleeve, and here the Geiger became almost frantic.