City at World's End

by Edmond Moore Hamilton

  The woman interrupted. She was shivering a little, and she spoke now in a low, rapid voice. Piers Eglin told them, “She is Varn Allan, the Administrator of this—this sector. Here—” nodding to the sorrel-haired younger man—“is Norden Lund, the Sub-Administrator.” The words were hard for him to remember, harder still to shape. He added, “Varn Allan asks that we—we talk inside the city, where it is not so cold.”

  Kenniston had guessed that the woman held authority in the group.

  He was not surprised. Her vibrant forcefulness was striking.

  Mayor Garris, who was half frozen himself, was only too happy to ac-cede to that request. He turned toward the portal, behind which all the thousands of New Middletown were being held with difficulty. Their massed faces showed as a pale blur through the glass of the dome.

  “Make way, there!” Garris ordered, in his most important tone. He gestured at the sweating guardsmen and police who held the line. “Clear a way there, now, we’re coming in.” He raised his voice, speaking to the people beyond. “Stand back, will you? Everything’s fine, the other people have come at last, and they want to see our city. So let them through, let them through!”

  The crowd, with painful reluctance, made a narrow lane through itself, which was widened by the efforts of the guardsmen. Leading the way for the star-folk, the Mayor’s dignity was somewhat injured by the uneasiness that caused him to skip hastily ahead with nervous backward glances at Gorr Holl’s towering figure. But he kept up his jovial front as leader of his people, shouting to them that all was well, that there was nothing to fear, and begging them to keep back and refrain from pushing.

  Varn Allan was the first one to follow Garris through the portal. She hesitated, just an instant, as she and the jostling eager crowd caught sight of one another, and the crowd sent up a wild-throated roar of cheering that shook the dome. Behind her, Norden Lund grinned and shook his head, as a man might at the bad manners of children. Then Varn Allan smiled at the people and went on, and the edges of the crowd swayed and buckled inward and the guardsmen swore, and some irreverent soul whistled appreciatively at the tall, lithe woman with the golden hair.

  They shouted questions at her, a thousand all at once, and the half-hysterical greetings of people who have waited so long that they have lost hope and then find it suddenly fulfilled, and Kenniston hoped that they would not do anything violent, like carrying her and Norden Lund on their shoulders.

  He went in right beside Gorr Holl. The people had not seen him yet, except as a vague, dark figure beyond the wall of curving glass. When they did, their voice dropped dead still for a moment and then took up again on a rising note of incredulity and alarm. Women who had shoved and clawed to get in the first row now tried to scramble back out of harm’s way, and the edges of the crowd drew sharply apart. Kenniston walked close to the big furry Capellan, his hand resting on one mighty shoulder, to show the crowd that they had nothing to fear. And the people stared and stared.

  “What the devil is it? A pet?”

  “Look, it’s got clothes on! Don’t tell me it’s one of them!”

  “Keep it away from me! It’s showing its teeth…” Kenniston shouted explanations, and under his palm the dark thick fur was hot and alien, and he was almost as much afraid of Gorr Holl as they were. And then, from out of the crowd, a tiny girl came toddling directly into their path.

  Her eyes shining with childish glee, she ran toward Gorr Holl’s mighty, furry form. “Teddy-bear!” she shrieked joyfully. “Teddy-bear!” And she flung her arms around his leg.

  Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling laugh. He reached down his great paw to pat her head, and other children came running, breaking away from fearful mothers, clustering eagerly around the big Capellan as he trudged along. The little girl he hoisted to his shoulder and she rode there clinging to his ears, and after that it was impossible for anyone to fear him. The tension of the crowd relaxed and they grinned at each other and laughed.

  “Sure, it’s a pet! Hey, how do you like that? Walking on his hind legs, just like a man! Smart, ain’t he? Why, you’d almost think he was trying to talk!”

  Piers Eglin, who must have caught at least a part of this, peered sidelong at Gorr Holl, but he did not offer to translate.

  The crowd became a fluid mass flowing along the boulevards, following the strangers. Help and hope and companionship had come at last to New Middletown, and the relief and joy in the faces of the people were wonderful to see. But Kenniston watched the faces of the blue-eyed woman and the man Norden Lund, seeing their expressions change from incredulity to a startled acceptance.

  Pier Eglin was beside himself. A woman’s fur coat entranced him—quite ordinary cheap fur, but from a species of animal that Kenniston realized must have been extinct for millions of years. Cloth and leather became treasures unimaginable in his eyes. He talked incessantly, feverishly, pointing out this wonder and that to his companions, lapsing occasionally into his painful English to ask Kenniston some question. And when he saw an automobile he became perfectly hysterical with excitement.

  The automobile was of interest to them all. Varn Allan and Norden Lund stopped to examine it, and Gorr Holl, gently disengaging himself from his burden of children, joined them, The furry one’s quick eye apparently divined where the motive power was hidden away, and he made signs to Kenniston that he wanted to see inside. Kenniston lifted the hood. Immediately all four bent over to inspect the motor, and the crowd of Middletowners laughed to see the big tame pet animal imitat-ing its masters. The star-folk talked, in their swift unfamiliar tongue, and Norden Lund pointed to the engine assembly with the same half mock-ing wonder that a man of Kenniston’s day might have felt toward an oxcart. Gorr Holl spoke to Piers Eglin, and the little man turned to Kenniston.

  “So beautiful, so primitive,” he whispered, and clasped his hands.

  “They ask you make it—make it….” He was stumped for a word, but Kenniston got his meaning. The keys were in the lock. He started the motor. Gorr Holl was fascinated. There was a good bit of talking and then the last cupful of gas in the tank ran out, and the motor died. The star-folk looked at each other, and nodded, and went on.

  Mayor Garris was now in his finest form. He had lost his terror of Gorr Holl in his pride and his excitement. He showed the strangers from the stars the means by which New Middletown had been made livable, he babbled about it government, its schools and courts, the distribution of food. How much of it the strangers got through Pier Eglin’s stumbling translations, Kenniston could not know. But an unreasoning resentment was growing in him.

  For he and all the folk of Middletown shared Garris’ pride. They had had a hard time, but they had taken this alien city and with their own hands and ingenuity they had made a functioning decent habitation out of it, and they were proud of that. And all the while they were being proud, the strangers peered at the gasoline pumps and the improvised water system and the precious electric lights that had cost such labor, and were appalled at the crudity and ignorance of these things. They did not need to say so. It was plain in their faces.

  Presently they stopped and conferred at some length among themselves. Evidently they reached a decision, for Piers Eglin turned and spoke.

  “We have seen enough for this time,” he said. “Later—” and here he trembled with eagerness and his eyes shone moistly, like a hound’s—“later we will wish to see the old city, which you say still stands. But now Varn Allan says we will return to the ship, to report what we have found to Government Center.”

  “Listen!” said Kenniston urgently. “We need help. We need power, and our fuel is running low.”

  Hubble, who had been nearby through all the visit of the strangers, nodded and said, “If you could start up some of the atomic generators here…”

  Piers Eglin turned at once to consult Varn Allan, who glanced at Kenniston and Hubble and nodded. Piers Eglin said, “Of course. She says you should be made as comfortable as possible while you are still here. The crew of
the Thanis will help. They will work under Gorr Holl, who is our chief atomic technician.”

  The Mayor gasped. “That furry brute a technician?”

  Piers Eglin cleared his throat. “There will be—others, among the crew.

  They will be strange to you. But they are also friends. You had better assure your people.”

  Garris gulped, and said, “I’ll attend to it.”

  “I will act as—yes, interpreter. And now there is much to be done. I will return shortly, with the crew and the necessary—uh—objects.”

  The star-folk left then, going back as they had come, though the portal and out across the dusty plain. And as they went Mayor Garris gave the news to the crowd—power, more water, more lights, perhaps even heat.

  The wild, jubilant cheering startled the still heights of the towers and the dome rang with it and underneath that cry of joy, Hubble said to Kenniston, “What did he mean—while we are still here?” Kenniston shook his head. A cold doubt was in him, almost a foreboding, and it was based on nothing that had been said or done, but simply on the realization of the abyss that separated the civilization of old Middletown from civilization that had gone out among the stars so far and so long ago that Earth was almost forgotten.

  He wondered how well those two incredibly disparate cultures were going to understand each other. He stood for a long while, wondering, watching the crowd disperse, and even the thought that soon the big generators would be humming again could not dispel his worry.

  Chapter 11

  REVELATION

  The crew of the Thanis came into New Middletown that afternoon, and Kenniston and Carol, and all the rest of the city’s thousands, watched them come.

  There were two score of them—a hard-handed, alert, capable breed no different from all the sailors Kenniston had ever seen, though their seas were the incalculable deeps of outer space and their faces were darkened by the rays of alien Suns. Across the blowing dust of this world that had bred and lost them they came, and with them were the others Piers Eglin had spoken of—the strange children of other stars.

  Kenniston had explained about these aliens to Carol, who had seen no more than the tips of Gorr Holl’s furry ears and had supposed, like the others, that he was only a peculiar kind of pet. He didn’t think that she had really understood him, any more than the people of New Middletown had really understood the Mayor’s similar explanation.

  “From Vega,” Carol had said, and shivered, looking toward the dim sky where the stars showed even in daylight. “They can’t be like us, Ken.

  No human being could ever go out there, and still be like us.”

  Kenniston was startled to hear his own thoughts repeated in her voice, but he said reassuringly. “They can’t have changed too much. And the others, the humanoids—they may look queer, but they’re our friends.”

  It was what Mayor Garris had told his people. “Whatever these newcomers are like, they’ve got to be treated right, and there’s a jail cell waiting for anyone who makes trouble with them. Do you all get that? No matter what they look like, act as though they’re people!”

  Hearing is one thing, seeing another. And now Carol’s fingers closed tight on Kenniston’s hand and her body shrank against his, and the crowd who had gathered to watch this second entrance of the incredible into their midst, stared and whispered and moved uneasily.

  One of these aliens was big and bulky, walking stodgily on massive legs. His wrinkled gray skin hung in heavy folds. His face was broad and flat and featureless, with little, wise old eyes that glanced with shrewd understanding at the staring, silent crowd.

  Two were lean and dark, moving like conspirators wrapped in black cloaks. Their narrow heads were hairless, and their glance was bright and full of madcap humor. Kenniston realized with a shock that the cloaks they wore were wings, folded close around their bodies.

  There was another, who had peculiar gliding grace that hinted of unguessed strength and speed, and whose bearing was very cool and proud. He was handsome, with a mane of snow-white fur sweeping back from his brow, and there was only a faint touch of cruelty in his broad cheekbones and straight, smiling mouth.

  These four, and Gorr Holl were manlike but not men, children of far worlds walking with easy confidence on old Earth.

  “They’re horrible,” whispered Carol, drawing away. “Unholy! How can you stand to be near them?”

  Kenniston was fighting down much the same reaction. The Middletowners gaped and muttered and drew back, partly from a creeping fear of the unnatural, partly from sheer racial resentment. It was hard enough to accept the fact that such non-human people existed at all. It was harder still to accept them as equals. Beast was beast and man was man, and there was no middle ground…

  But not to Middletown’s children. They ignored the bronzed spacemen and clustered in droves around the humanoids. They had none of their elders’ preconceptions. These were creatures out of fairy tales come alive, and the children loved them.

  Piers Eglin came up to Kenniston. Kenniston said. “Hubble has the main generator rooms opened up. He’s waiting for us there. I’ll take you.”

  Eglin sighed. “Thank you,” he said. He seemed desperately unhappy.

  Kenniston said a hasty goodbye to Carol, and fell in beside the little historian.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “My orders,” said Piers Eglin. “I am to interpret, and to teach some of you our language.” He shook his head dismally. “It will take days, and that old city of yours—I should be in it every moment.”

  Kenniston smiled. “I’ll try to learn fast,” he said.

  He led the way to where Hubble was waiting by the generators, and behind him he heard the eerie footfalls of the creatures who were not human, and it was incredible to him that he was going to have to work beside these weird beings who gave him a cold shiver every time he came near them. Surely they could not behave like men!

  They went into the building, into an enormous room filled with the towering, dusty shapes of armored mechanisms that he and Hubble had not been able to make head nor tail of. The senior scientist joined them, looking askance at the humanoids.

  Kenniston said, “We supposed that these were the main generators.”

  He spoke to Pier Eglin, since Eglin must do the translating, but he was facing Gorr Holl and the four others who stood beside him. “If they can really repair and start them, we…”

  His voice trailed off. The five pairs of alien eyes regarded him, the five alien bodies breathed and stirred, and the crest of white fur on the proud one’s skull lifted in a way so beastlike that it was impossible for Kenniston to pretend any longer to accept them as human. Doubt, distrust, and just a hint of fear crept into his face. Piers Eglin frowned a little, and started to speak.

  With the suddenness of a bat darting out in the evening, one of the lean dark brothers whipped wide his wings and made a little spring at Kenniston, uttering a cry that sounded very much like “Boo!”

  Kenniston leaped backward, startled almost out of his skin. And the lean one promptly doubled up with laughter, which was echoed by the others. Even the large grey creature smiled. They all looked at Kenniston and laughed, and presently Hubble got it and began to laugh too, and after that there was nothing for Kenniston to do but join in. The joke was on him, at that. They had known perfectly well how he felt about them, and the lean one had paid him back in his own coin, but with humor and not malice.

  And somehow, after they had laughed together, the tension was gone.

  Laughter is a human sort of thing. Kenniston mumbled something, and Gorr Holl slapped his shoulder, nearly putting him on his face.

  But when he approached the dusty generators, Gorr Holl changed abruptly from a shambling, good-natured creature into a highly efficient technician. He operated hidden catches, and had a shield panel off one of the big mechanisms before Kenniston saw how he did it. He drew a flat pocket flash from a pouch on his harness, and used it for light as he poked
his hairy bullet-shaped head inside the machine. His low, rumbling comments came out of the bowels of the generator. Finally Gorr Holl withdrew his head from the machine, and spoke disgustedly.

  Eglin translated, “He says this old installation is badly designed and in poor condition. He says he would like to get his hands on the technician who would do a job like this.”

  Kenniston laughed again. The big, furry Capellan sounded like a blood brother to every repair technician on old Earth. While Gorr Holl examined the other generators, Piers Eglin fastened onto Hubble and Kenniston, deluging them with questions about their own remote time.

  They managed at last to ask a question of their own, one that was big in their minds but that they’d had no chance to ask before.

  “Why is Earth lifeless now? What happened to all its people?”

  Piers Eglin said, “Long ago, Earth’s people went out to other worlds.

  Not so much to the other planets of this System—the outer ones were cold, and watery Venus had too small a land surface—but to the worlds of other stars, across the galaxy.”

  “But surely some of them would have stayed on Earth?” said Kenniston.

  Eglin shrugged. “They did, until it grew so cold that even in these domed cities life was difficult. Then the last of them went, to the worlds of warmer Suns.”

  Kenniston said, “In our day, we hadn’t even reached the Moon.” He felt a little dazed by it all. “… to the worlds of other stars, across the galaxy…”

  Gorr Holl finally came back to them and rumbled lengthily. Eglin translated, “He thinks they can get the generators going. But it’ll take time, and he’ll need materials—copper, magnesium, some platinum—”

  They listened carefully, and Hubble nodded and said, “We can get all those for you in old Middletown.”

  “The old city?” cried Piers Eglin eagerly. “I will go with you! Let us start at once!”