by Philip Wylie
“From the stuff in one truck?”
She stared at him as if he might have been joking. “The partly ‘burned-up’ tubes in a power reactor, it was. Going to New York State for recovery of unused fuel—uranium and plutonium. One truck, yes, its cargo spilled into a river at night. The people on the Ohio River were evacuated in time—clear to Cincinnati. Below there, they just kept away from the water, for weeks.”
He didn’t say anything.
“See what I mean? If you, personally, didn’t know what was moving on the highways, or what it could do if it was smashed open, as in this minor case, lots of people in your corporation knew. And you could have. After all, Hiroshima and—that other city—made the effects plain. And even you—”
“I knew,” Glenn said quietly. “In a way. About the haulage. Radioactive cargo—all the rest—acids—explosives. And about radiation burns, death. I knew, all right, and so did every informed person. We even knew there’d be trouble—perhaps as bad as that Ohio thing—sooner or later. Not what. Not when. Not where. We’d had lots of accidents in those days. Planes crashed. There were big fires. We’d gone through wars and had one going at the time I”—he paused. —“vanished. So, now, I think we were conditioned. There were the riots, too. Campus and other sorts. Bombings. Not to mention that we killed sixty thousand of ourselves in vehicular crashes that year, and bashed about two million, crippling maybe a quarter of them. And we remained unphased! Cost of having cars, we felt. Never happen to me in my car—that sort of feeling.”
“Would you call it slightly insane?”
“Maybe. Now.”
There was a pause. She clicked her remote-control program-selecting instrument.
“Next,” she said, “you’ll see something of the cold years?”
“Cold years?”
“In the Eighties. Yes. Three, in succession.”
On the screen now were pictures of cities, of vast fields under cultivation, forests, towns and suburbs. Leandra hadn’t switched on the sound. She explained while he watched the flow of ever more wintery scenes. One was of Manhattan, still identifiable in a long shot by some familiar skyscrapers; then, Chicago, similarly recognizable. Other cities, with unfamiliar, new structures. All under blizzards. And soon, some of these and many nonurban vistas appeared in weak sunshine, but they were not free of snow and ice.
“It was warming up, the earth, in 1970 to ’71,” he said.
“A tenth of a degree per year?”
“I seem to recall. Anyhow, there was an argument about which way the world temperature would go finally?” Her question was almost a statement.
“Yes, I know. I heard it all”—his grin was wry—“only yesterday, so to speak. The increasing load of dust and moisture in the air versus the rising carbon-dioxide amounts. One would surely overtopple the other—and the relative temperature balance we enjoyed at the time.”
“Well, the dust did and the earth finally got about five degrees colder than normal.”
“I see. And a two degree drop would have done it?”
“They said so. Five, did, anyhow.”
The sound came on and for fifteen minutes he sat, horrified but enthralled. Before his eyes his nation and the world froze up. Bits from TV newscasts were inserted as explanatory material, making the rest very lucid and very appalling. The display reminded Glenn that, once before, there had been a “year without summer”—after the explosion of Krakatoa, when its world-scattered dust had cut down the sunlight reaching the earth. Now he saw three such years, but worse ones.
He saw New York City under thirty feet of snow. He saw snowflakes drifting down on the Panama Canal. He saw the first “summer” come—and the great grain fields of the planet, along with the rice paddies, unplanted because they were still snow-covered or, if not, muddy and frozen in June and July; and when some melted that August they could not be planted because in a few weeks the snows fell again.
And the second summer was colder.
By then, half the world had starved or was starving. He was shown it, starvation in Africa, Asia, South America. The “have” nations were sharing nothing at all. They, too, were on short rations.
And he was witness to the conferences that began to take place when a second cold summer was certain—international gatherings in which political and scientific delegates united in attempts to end this icy slaughter of mankind. The results were displayed in due course—every attempt imaginable was made to reduce the causes of the atmospheric burden of dust and high altitude moisture. Jets and the SSTs were grounded. Smoke and steam emissions were either captured and solidified, condensed, or else their sources were forbidden to operate if that was possible. Otherwise, they were allowed to proceed on a basis of minimal essential production.
World economy came unstuck before the second spring. Nobody knew what the value of a dollar or a pound or a franc would be from one hour to the next. Banks closed. Trading ceased. Exchanges closed. Breadlines stretched into invisible distances even in USA. Glaciers began to form in valleys in the Catskills, Poconos, Ozarks. Where there were glaciers in the Rockies, Sierras, and elsewhere, they grew fantastically and began to menace centers of population. That happened in Europe, too, and in every continent, including Australia, to the smallest degree.
The third spring and summer of cold were represented by scenes of numbing horror: masses of dead and frozen bodies in big cities around the world, starvation on unbelievable scales; the spread of plagues long since regarded as conquered or at least under control: typhus on the East Coast, cholera in the Latin American nations, bubonic, in great splotches on a world map, the West Coast of USA among them.
Then the theme of doom began to change.
The worldwide effort to reduce the atmospheric load of sun-screening particles, of dust, of moisture, of myriad complex chemical sorts, began to pay off. The winter after the third nonsummer was mild, generally. With the spring, land areas that could be planted emerged from their frosted or snow-bound state. That next summer there were crops, and adequate crops, since the suddenly arable regions were extensive, but the mouths to feed had dwindled from five billion to far less than two billion.
This series ended with music and a vast spread of waving wheat, wide reaches of blossoming groves, ranges where cattle were on the increase, in sum, a sound and sight of victory—at the cost already made clear.
“That,” Leandra sighed as she turned the lights up, “was the biggest one because no later eco-calamity could kill as many. There weren’t as many left as the dead.”
He said nothing. His eyes were straight ahead and haunted.
“The time’s getting short,” she went on, unemotionally. “I think, next, the acid rains.”
He turned, then, saying nothing but with some sign of incomprehension or request in his haggard features.
“The chemical causes were so complex we can skip them. Yes, that’s what they were called. Sometimes the caustic rains weren’t actually ‘acid.’ But they were bad. Here.”
Clicks. Dimmed lights and Glenn was staring at a landscape fairly familiar. He placed it as the California Coast up near Big Sur. He was looking at what he would have called a “commune.” Adults and children, perhaps a hundred or more, living near the sea amongst the evergreens in tents and shacks, wearing all sorts of rather dirty clothes, but seemingly decently nourished people and evidently happy, or at least serene. They tended fires where whole hogs roasted on long spits of metal that young men and women turned by hand. The kids were running about, playing ball games, and a group was dancing in a sort of free style way, though a long-haired and quite lovely woman with a smudged nose was trying to lead that happy, unorganized ballet.
Then the camera and sound track brought distant thunder from the sea and with it, surprisingly anxious expressions for many of the grown people. The thunder grew louder and, with a series of cuts, the camera irised in on a little girl, about seven, with pretty red hair and blue eyes who was running and laughing but soon came
to a stop. She clasped her cheek and took away her hand as if her cheek were white hot. She screamed.
The camera now shifted and showed a wider scene—together with the child. She was standing, alone, on the ocean side edge of the group. She continued screaming but no one paid any heed. Instead, the adults were fleeing for cover and only some of them, in that flight, even tried to summon or carry children inside.
The child was shown closeup again. It was raining. She was screaming and now running in a small circle. Where each drop struck her skin, the place turned red instantly, and the red circle spread with the downward coursing of the raindrop. The rain was scalding the little girl. In a minute she tripped. When she had fallen, she kicked and rolled as if soaked in gasoline and lighted. In the next minute she lost consciousness.
The broad scene came back. Children lay everywhere, some screaming as they died, others already limp. The rain fell hard now. Thunder cracked and rolled and lightning stabbed occasionally through the swift-collected gloom. The tents were swaying and screams overrode the thunder as, evidently, people in the shacks were victims of leaky roofs. The first tent went—uncovering its dozen or more huddled and now-racing, rolling, yelling inhabitants. The thing was merciless, fantastic, horrible.
“That was the first time the acid rains hit this country,” she said quietly.
“I see.”
She looked at her watch.
Glenn made a gesture of protest: he’d seen too much.
She ignored it.
“Those rains were rare but they fell for some years. And finally the last thing happened. This excavated area was about half its present size. It was paid for by corporations and federal funds and dug as covertly as possible. The public refused to believe that ‘underground habitats’ made any sense. The acid rains grew rarer. Besides, no one could prove they’d be needed at all, let alone, when—if ever. By then, of course, the nation—what was left—was in bad shape, psychologically and politically. USA was under a sort of martial law. Whole States had had riots that put local governments down—murdered many people. Only the federal government at cabinet level, the biggest corporations and the military, by this time, were still workable and organized.”
“I see.”
He did, somewhat. The screen now showed him a broad street in Los Angeles, he thought, though there were buildings of sorts he had never seen. But most of the area was recognizable and several smaller business buildings along this boulevard seemed to date from before the Seventies. There was traffic in the foreground and middle distance—odd-looking cars and vans—non-air-polluting designs, he surmised. But, far off beyond the lense range, came a sound like wind in a cave, soon identifiable as a wail, a mass screech-and-groan.
Now, the scene shifted to a sort of kiosk in the foreground, a metal entry something like that of subways in New York. Here, there was swift action. People were arriving in the odd cars and showing some sort of passes to guards—men in uniform with short riflelike weapons.
A voice, a narrator’s, came over this scene as the growing sounds beyond were muted.
“This is the entrance to our present Los Angeles on the Western side. The great wind has started. By morning, those still alive in USA will be in such places as this. All others will be dead. At this moment, the people being allowed entrance are those, only, with credentials—a select group in every way—and in proper numerical balance for the continuation of subterranean life at its scientifically best levels. A half hour has passed since their warnings were sent out. You will soon see that the entry, which had been open for twenty minutes, approximately, will be stormed.”
Glenn saw that.
Something—the “great wind”?—was causing the distant commotion, the mass outcry, to draw nearer. Now, abruptly, about two hundred people, mostly male, many teen-agers, rushed the entry.
When they reached a distance of perhaps a hundred feet, they were hit by something invisible and they seemed to vibrate on their feet for seconds before falling. Dead, and dark-hued. He had no time to ask about the cause, the weapon. A bulldozer of enormous size, with a man in a high-up enclosed control-cabin pushed into the scene and scraped not only the mass of purplish bodies but the many abandoned cars out of camera range. To clear the kiosk for others, obviously.
Others came.
Families. Men, alone, of varying ages. Women, many with children. A few teen-agers, students, Glenn somehow assumed. If they had credentials, they were rushed into the kiosk, out of sight to—he assumed—elevators, stairs, some means of descent into the dug “city.”
Of these, some had no credentials to show, because they had failed to carry them on their persons. This growing group was hustled into a wood or metal walled pen where Glenn had thought till that moment, construction must have been in progress beyond the broad sidewalk. Not so. It was a pen, for just this sort of problem.
“It is now nearing noon,” the narrator broke into the din. “The fatal wind has reached the downtown area of LA. The crowd trying to outrun it is now but a few blocks from this entry. In the next moments it will be seen that the underground quarters are not going to be filled by their quota, by the chosen and permit-carrying ranks. Those who claimed to have such identification but not to have it on their persons were, as you see, set aside in a holding area. They will be admitted. After them, anybody who is able to be brought in and down will be accepted until the closing and final seconds.
The temporarily halted group streamed from a door in the walled area and out of sight beneath the kiosk.
A drunk was yanked in from the increasing flow of pedestrians. A busload of school kids was disembarked and hauled inside—mostly Oriental and Negro children and all, about seven or eight, scared to the edge of hysteria, or beyond. The guards, four or five in view, now, were rough but not unnecessarily. A prostitute came into view, painted, shouting, “It’s my street and no cop or soldier can spoil a girl’s business!” She was pulled to safety.
A couple of cops were taken in by force—the use of weapons at their backs. A carload of kids, who seemed high on something, was pushed inside. Soon, earlier rejectees were overwhelmed by the approaching masses and very soon, one of the guards fell. A steamy, brownish breeze stirred a lone, nearby pepper tree. The other guards donned masks but these proved useless.
The last shot was from the kiosk and, Glenn thought, made behind some airtight barrier.
What it showed was much like the Bombay scene, though the difference lay in the fact that these were fellow citizens, which, he eventually reflected, was not a decent distinction. The main mass of people rushing from the mist was brought down some forty yards short of the
The city became increasingly silent—outside microphones, Glenn thought crazily.
The browned fog came over the region in front of the kiosk.
Nothing moved. Glenn believed he glimpsed leaves falling in a slow shower from the pepper tree. Over this he heard the narrator say, quietly, now:
“The underground work was incomplete. Only half, or slightly more, of the assigned occupants were able to reach their four entries. All night, at an escalating speed, this brown wind sped eastward. By morning it had reached the Great Lakes and by noon it went on over the Atlantic. It was not anticipated by anyone. Its nature was never wholly determined. None of the prepared sites save for a few were in a wholly ready state. Several failed in the hours and days ensuing. Six hundred and ten of those who made it safely here, died in the next 48 hours. Use of facilities that were ready, along with the implementation of those not at that point, was enormously hampered by the failure of numbers of preselected specialists to reach safety. Nearly a third of those saved who survived the ensuing month were without valuable skills. The first years were, therefore, difficult. But Los Angeles survived.”
CHAPTER TEN
THE CITY WITH NO DAY: EVENING
The lights in the Mayor’s office came up.
Glenn sat with his head bowed, hands holding his jaws and temple bones, eyes shut.<
br />
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” the girl said softly. He made a motion of acknowledgement and then, involuntarily, watched her go. Lithe legs, neat, round bottom, straight back and rhythmic swing of that mixed gold-and-silver hair, the motions of a woman meant to allure, in his time, but now, unconscious? Habit? Training? Innocent and natural?
He was surprised to find himself able to consider any such matter after what he had just seen—been through, more accurately, he thought to himself.
This is how the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
If T. S. Eliot had said nothing else in his strange and difficult verse, those two words would stick for a while: bang and whimper.
But the poet hadn’t said scream.
And the world hadn’t ended—quite.
Glenn gave himself over to an agony of self-reproach in the form of questions driven at his conscience:
Why didn’t we pay attention to the little warnings?
Why didn’t we act when we knew that the atmosphere of the earth, the waters, salt and fresh, and the land and the snows and ice of the poles were pervaded with DDT, mercury, radioactive elements?
Why didn’t we even attempt to find out what other planet-wide poisons were present and what combinations of all the half-million chemical compounds man knew he was dumping into his living space were adding to that awful sum?
Were we mad?
Why was I shown these examples of what so soon and so catastrophically followed my last day, there?
(I was on my way to use my power and influence to demand just that: a complete survey of what I had at last seen as a near-fatal state of the environment—which it proved to be!)
Will they hold me accountable for the hideous sins of my era?
Is that why I had to bear these spectacles?
And were there more? Of course! She’d said as much! How many? Hundreds? Thousands? How many millions went to what kinds of screaming death, sacrifices to “progress?” “Technology?” “Civilization?”
