Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  On the last day before the end, Katy came home. "I knew you'd still be here," she said, collapsing into my arms and sobbing. It was just like a film.

  She was filthy and her blouse was all torn. She'd walked it all the way from her house. It had taken all yesterday, all night and most of the morning. It had been slow going because of all the gangs - they were on the lookout for anyone with food or weapons. Women were especially in danger. Worst of all were the gangs of the undead, the ones who hadn't eaten or had a woman for many long, cold years. She'd come crosscountry, hiding in ditches and crawling on her belly past campfires which rang with laughter and screams.

  "Where's Steve?" I said when she'd calmed down a bit.

  "Gone," she said. "Three days ago. You know his parents were part of that weird Christian sect? Steve had never been bothered with it, but when they decided to lock themselves in their church and his mum and dad told him that they'd built a huge bunker underground and filled it with food and water, he suddenly found his faith again."

  "Didn't you fancy it?"

  Katy dissolved into tears again, burying her head in my shoulder. "I begged him to take me," she sobbed. "They refused. Just left me in the house with no food, nothing to defend myself with. Oh, God. What's going to happen to us?"

  Mum shuffled out of the kitchen. She looked at us and frowned. She'd never liked Katy much. "Oh," she said. "One more for tea, is it?"

  Mum had made a pie. From what, God only knows. At the mention of food, the others came out of the sitting room. Dad was followed by grandad and grandma, uncle George, aunty Linda, cousin Alfie, and then a raft of stern-looking people in stiff Edwardian collars. It was getting pretty busy here.

  "Let's go for a walk," I said.

  Everyone was out in the street, pointing at the sky. You could see the asteroid in daylight now, a blazing orb in the atmosphere. "As big as Milton Keynes," I said, wonderingly.

  "When's it going to hit?" asked Katy, hugging my arm.

  I pondered for a moment, revelling in the closeness of her body. "If I've worked it out right from the first reports, tomorrow."

  She swooned dramatically into my arms. "Oh, God," she said in a small voice.

  Mr Ogden the lay preacher was suddenly beside us. "Indeed," he said. "The fiery judgment of heaven is upon us. We are having a vigil in the street this evening, begging for forgiveness and asking to be admitted through the gates of paradise when the calamity strikes. You'll join us?"

  "Will there be rat stew?" I asked.

  Mr Ogden frowned and walked away, clutching his Bible. People had become quite a bit more serious over the last couple of days. I suppose approaching apocalypse does that to a person. That and the lack of water for a good bath. Most of us were beginning to smell, not least the risen dead.

  "Do you fancy it?"

  "What?" said Katy.

  "The meeting. Begging for forgiveness and all that."

  Katy wrinkled her nose at me like she used to do. "What else is there to do?"

  I thought for a moment. "We could go to Blackpool," I said.

  She looked at me. "Blackpool?"

  "Yeah, you know. Candy floss and sticks of rock. We could go on the log flume and walk along the prom. Stroll to the end of the North Pier. Watch the world end. That kind of thing."

  Katy gestured at the barricade of cars at the end of the street, the distant sounds of gunfire. "How would we get there?"

  I fished the keys to Bob's MG out of my pocket and dangled them in front of her face. "In style."

  It only took us a couple of hours. Most of the fighting and looting seemed to have stopped. I suppose people probably wondered what the point was. Everyone seemed to be in their houses, waiting for the end. Blackpool was deserted.

  We broke into an empty bed and breakfast place near the front and managed to find some bread that was not totally stale and a few tins of beans. Then we found the best bedroom and made slow, quiet love.

  It was midday. The sky was pretty clear. We couldn't see the asteroid any more, so presumed it was about to hit Australia. The tide was in, and we sat on a bench at the end of the North Pier, me crunching rock and Katy sucking on a lollipop in the shape of a baby's dummy.

  "Should we talk about where it all went wrong for us?" I said.

  She thought about it and shook her head. "No point now, is there?"

  Far, far away there was a thud that reverberated along the pier. Katy held my hand. The horizon rippled and there was a distant roar.

  "This is it, then," I said. I felt all right, really. Pretty good, in fact.

  Katy closed her eyes. There were tears running down her cheeks. Her hair was a mess and her face was filthy. She was beautiful.

  "Kiss me quick," she whispered.

  FERMI AND FROST

  Frederik Pohl

  Frederik Pohl is one of the grand masters of science fiction with a career spanning over sixty years, both as a writer and an editor. He is adept whether writing on his own or in collaboration. His partnership with Cyril M. Kornbluth, which produced such classics as The Space Merchants (1953) and Wolfbane (1959), is legendary. He has also collaborated with Jack Williamson, whose work is also present in this anthology, and I believe he is the only writer to have collaborated with both Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. For much of the 1960s Pohl was tied up editing several SF magazines, most notably Galaxy and Worlds of If, but when he returned to writing fiction in the 1970s he produced a series of memorable books, including the Heechee series, which began with Gateway (1977), as well as Man Plus (1976), The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986) and The World at the End of Time (1990). His work has won him many awards and accolades, including the following which won the Hugo in 1986. It takes us into the depths of the nuclear winter.

  * * *

  ON TIMOTHY CLARY'S ninth birthday he got no cake. He spent all of it in a bay of the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, sleeping fitfully, crying now and then from exhaustion or fear. All he had to eat was stale Danish pastries from the buffet wagon and not many of them and he was fearfully embarrassed because he had wet his pants. Three times. Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were 2,800 people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away! Climb the highest mountain! Drop yourself splat, spang, right in the middle of the widest desert! Run! Hide!—

  And pray. Pray as hard as you can, because even the occasional plane-load of refugees that managed to fight their way aboard and even take off had no sure hope of refuge when they got wherever the plane was going. Families parted. Mothers pushed their screaming children aboard a jet and melted back into the crowd before screaming, more quietly, themselves.

  Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.

  Timothy knew little of this, but there would have been nothing he could have done about it - except perhaps cry, or have nightmares, or wet himself, and young Timothy was doing all of those anyway. He did not know where his father was. He didn't know where his mother was, either, except that she had gone somewhere to try to call his father; but then there had been a surge that could not be resisted when three 747s at once had announced boarding, and Timothy had been carried far from where he had been left. Worse than that. Wet as he was, with a cold already, he was beginning to be very sick. The young woman who had brought him the Danish pastries put a worried hand to his forehead and drew it away helplessly. The boy needed a doctor. But so did a hundred others, elderly heart patients and hungry babies and at least two women close to childbirth.

  If the
terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded,

  Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to pre-empt, and destroy the other, and save itself, Timothy forty years later might have been a greying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit.) Or if his mother had pushed just a little harder earlier on, he might have wound up in the plane of refugees that reached Pittsburgh just in time to become plasma. Or if the girl who was watching him had become just a little more scared, and a little more brave, and somehow managed to get him through the throng to the improvised clinics in the main terminal, he might have been given medicine, and found somebody to protect him, and take him to a refuge, and live...

  But that is in fact what did happen!

  Because Harry Malibert was on his way to a British Interplanetary Society seminar in Portsmouth, he was already sipping Beefeater Martinis in the terminal's Ambassador Club when the unnoticed TV at the bar suddenly made everybody notice it.

  Those silly nuclear-attack communications systems that the radio stations tested out every now and then, and nobody paid any attention to any more - why, this time it was real! They were serious! Because it was winter and snowing heavily Malibert's flight had been delayed anyway. Before its rescheduled departure time came, all flights had been embargoed. Nothing would leave Kennedy until some official somewhere decided to let them go.

  Almost at once the terminal began to fill with would-be refugees. The Ambassador Club did not fill at once. For three hours the ground-crew stew at the desk resolutely turned away everyone who rang the bell who could not produce the little red card of admission; but when the food and drink in the main terminals began to run out the Chief of Operations summarily opened the club to everyone. It didn't help relieve the congestion outside, it only added to what was within. Almost at once a volunteer doctors' committee seized most of the club to treat the ill and injured from the thickening crowds, and people like Harry Malibert found themselves pushed into the bar area. It was one of the Operations staff, commandeering a gin and tonic at the bar for the sake of the calories more than the booze, who recognized him.

  "You're Harry Malibert. I heard you lecture once, at Northwestern."

  Malibert nodded. Usually when someone said that to him he answered politely, "I hope you enjoyed it," but this time it did not seem appropriate to be normally polite. Or normal at all.

  "You showed slides of Arecibo," the man said dreamily. "You said that radio telescope could send a message as far as the Great Nebula in Andromeda, two million light-years away - if only there was another radio telescope as good as that one there to receive it."

  "You remember very well," said Malibert, surprised.

  "You made a big impression, Dr Malibert." The man glanced at his watch, debated, took another sip of his drink. "It really sounded wonderful, using the big telescopes to listen for messages from alien civilizations somewhere in space - maybe hearing some, maybe making contact, maybe not being alone in the universe any more. You made me wonder why we hadn't seen some of these people already, or anyway heard from them -but maybe," he finished, glancing bitterly at the ranked and guarded aircraft outside, "maybe now we know why."

  Malibert watched him go, and his heart was leaden. The thing he had given his professional career to - SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence - no longer seemed to matter. If the bombs went off, as everyone said they must, then that was ended for a good long time, at least-

  Gabble of voices at the end of the bar; Malibert turned, leaned over the mahogany, peered. The Please Stand

  By slide had vanished, and a young black woman with pomaded hair, voice trembling, was delivering a news bulletin:

  "—the president has confirmed that a nuclear attack has begun against the United States. Missiles have been detected over the Arctic, and they are incoming. Everyone is ordered to seek shelter and remain there pending instructions—"

  Yes. It was ended, thought Malibert, at least for a good long time.

  The surprising thing was that the news that it had begun changed nothing. There were no screams, no hysteria. The order to seek shelter meant nothing at John F. Kennedy Airport, where there was no shelter any better than the building they were in. And that, no doubt, was not too good. Malibert remembered clearly the strange aerodynamic shape of the terminal's roof. Any blast anywhere nearby would tear that off and sent it sailing over the bay to the Rockaways, and probably a lot of the people inside with it. But there was nowhere else to go.

  There were still camera crews at work, heaven knew why. The television set was showing crowds in Times Square and Newark, a clot of automobiles stagnating on the George Washington Bridge, their drivers abandoning them and running for the Jersey shore. A hundred people were peering around each other's heads to catch glimpses of the screen, but all that anyone said was to call out when he recognized a building or a street.

  Orders rang out: "You people will have to move back! We need the room! Look, some of you, give us a hand with these patients." Well, that seemed useful, at least. Malibert volunteered at once and was given the care of a young boy, teeth chattering, hot with fever. "He's had tetracycline," said the doctor who turned the boy over to him. "Clean him up if you can, will you? He ought to be all right if-"

  If any of them were, thought Malibert, not requiring her to finish the sentence. How did you clean a young boy up? The question answered itself when Malibert found the boy's trousers soggy and the smell told him what the moisture was. Carefully he laid the child on a leather love seat and removed the pants and sopping undershorts. Naturally the boy had not come with a change of clothes. Malibert solved that with a pair of his own jockey shorts out of his briefcase - far too big for the child, or course, but since they were meant to fit tightly and elastically they stayed in place when Malibert pulled them up to the waist. Then he found paper towels and pressed the blue jeans as dry as he could. It was not very dry. He grimaced, laid them over a bar stool and sat on them for a while, drying them with body heat. They were only faintly wet ten minutes later when he put them back on the child-

  San Francisco, the television said, had ceased to transmit.

  Malibert saw the Operations man working his way toward him and shook his head. "It's begun," Malibert said, and the man looked around. He put his face close to Malibert's

  "I can get you out of here," he whispered. "There's an Icelandic DC-8 loading right now. No announcement. They'd be rushed if they did. There's room for you, Dr Malibert."

  It was like an electric shock. Malibert trembled. Without knowing why he did it, he said, "Can I put the boy on instead?"

  The Operations man looked annoyed. "Take him with you, of course," he said. "I didn't know you had a son."

  "I don't," said Malibert. But not out loud. And when they were in the jet he held the boy in his lap as tenderly as though he were his own.

  If there was no panic in the Ambassador Club at Kennedy there was plenty of it everywhere else in the world. What everyone in the super-power cities knew was that their lives were at stake. Whatever they did might be in vain, and yet they had to do something. Anything! Run, hide, dig, brace, stow ... pray. The city people tried to desert the metropolises for the open safety of the country, and the farmers and the exurbanites sought the stronger, safer buildings of the cities.

  And the missiles fell.

  The bombs that had seared Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck matches compared to the hydrogen-fusion flares that ended eighty million lives in those first hours. Firestorms fountained above a hundred cities. Winds of 300 kilometers an hour pulled in cars and debris and people, and they all became ash that rose to the sky. Splatters of melted rock and dust sprayed into the air.

  The sky darkened.

  Then it grew darker still.

  When the Icelandic jet landed at Keflavik Airport Malibert carried the boy down the p
assage to the little stand marked Immigration. The line was long, for most of the passengers had no passports at all, and the immigration woman was very tired of making out temporary entrance permits by the time Malibert reached her. "He's my son," Malibert lied. "My wife has his passport, but I don't know where my wife is."

  She nodded wearily. She pursed her lips, looked toward the door beyond which her superior sat sweating and initialing reports, then shrugged and let them through. Malibert took the boy to a door marked Snirting, which seemed to be the Icelandic word for toilets, and was relieved to see that at least Timothy was able to stand by himself while he urinated, although his eyes stayed half closed. His head was very hot. Malibert prayed for a doctor in Reykjavik.

  In the bus the English-speaking tour guide in charge of them - she had nothing else to do, for her tour would never arrive - sat on the arm of a first-row seat with a microphone in her hand and chattered vivaciously to the refugees. "Chicago? Ya, is gone, Chicago. And Detroit and Pittis-burrug - is bad. New York? Certainly New York too!" she said severely, and the big tears rolling down her cheek made Timothy cry too.

  Malibert hugged him. "Don't worry, Timmy," he said. "No one would bother bombing Reykjavik." And no one would have. But when the bus was ten miles farther along there was a sudden glow in the clouds ahead of them that made them squint. Someone in the USSR had decided that it was time for neatening up loose threads. That someone, whoever remained in whatever remained of their central missile control, had realized that no one had taken out that supremely, insultingly dangerous bastion of imperialist American interests in the North Atlantic, the United States airbase at Keflavik.

  Unfortunately, by then EMP and attrition had compromised the accuracy of their aim. Malibert had been right. No one would have bothered bombing Reykjavik - on purpose - but a forty-mile miss did the job anyway, and Reykjavik ceased to exist.