Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Penderby climbed in, and in ten minutes was wearing a tweed jacket, flannel trousers, a gray shirt, light underwear, clean socks, and a yellow belt. He took a pair of brown shoes from a store nearly opposite, and then sought the effect in a mirror in the dim rear.

  "I don't look too bad," he commented, "considering everything."

  He went back to the street.

  "And now to see what's become of the rest of the eight million."

  Penderby had begun to utter his thoughts.

  But it was not in fear—so far as he knew, at least. Nor was he lonely after this inexplicable departure of his fellow creatures.

  He picked his way among the dead for about half a mile. The number decreased as he neared Fleet Street, and he took a bicycle from the doorway of a store and rode, with little difficulty, into London's Newspaper Row.

  The stare of what had been a police man at a lamppost near the court buildings brought him up with a jerk that nearly threw him off the machine. For a moment, he thought that another had been spared. But the eyes did not move. Only for a wastepaper-bin, shoulder-high, on the pole, and his straddling legs, the policeman would have fallen as he died.

  Penderby was slightly hungry when he came to a corner lunch-counter; so he climbed over the bar, mixed a milk-shake as he had seen attendants do, and drank it between bites of a stale ham sandwich. He rode on, and dismounted at a newspaper office. He walked in. The front office contained twelve or fourteen bodies, three or four those of clerks. He climbed the marble-and-concrete stairs two at a time. He had searched two corridors when he opened a door marked "News Room."

  There were bodies at nearly half the desks, and one had fallen beside the half-opened door of a telephone booth, in which the instrument hung the full length of the cord. A head pressed the keys of a typewriter on a desk near, and some of the type-bars were in midair. Penderby pulled a sheet of paper from the machine. The word "Churchill" and the number "3" were in the top left corner.

  He read:

  "Mr. Churchill declared that he did not favor any 'attitude, policy, or frame of mind' that could be construed as 'containing even the germ of what has been called' encirclement, but that, he would oppose any atte——"

  No more.

  "Good God!" murmured Penderby.

  He moved to the desk alongside. A young man had begun a story about loan failure. He had typed a line of hyphens through "said," and substituted "asserted."

  Penderby went to all the other desks occupied. No one had been writing of death.

  "How could they have known, after all?" he reasoned. "It probably got everyone at the same time. It must have."

  He wandered through the composing room and down a spiral, metal staircase to the pillared press-room. The remote bulbs still glared. In the light diluted by mud-spattered, wire-netted windows, they did little but bring glints to the shiny parts of the machines.

  One press had run off an early edition. It had continued to run, it seemed, long after those who had tended it died. A hill of papers hid the little gate out of which they had come.

  A man in dungarees had been leaning against a steel pillar of another machine. A face-high metal button shone on the pillar; it had been handled often. Penderby pressed it, and the machine began to roll. He retreated to the door as the rush of paper merged with a thunderous hammering; then returned, and lifted one of the papers already carried out.

  The main story was about Russia and Germany.

  "If they could have waited," he said, "they'd have had a bigger story than that. But I suppose they couldn't. They had to go with the rest."

  The press still ran, and the concrete floor vibrated. The sight and the sound of it, with the recollection of what he had seen in the news room, stirred something akin to pity in the man. Brains, hands, metal here had been working when death had come, and if ever the product of journalism had been of fleeting value it was now.

  Penderby did not know how to stop the press, and the noise irritated him after awhile. He found the rear exit, a grimy, steel-grilled door that opened onto a lane. He turned right, the direction in which a number of tracks had been turned, and found himself on Fleet Street again.

  His throat was parched, and he decided to look for more drink. Beer would be best, for the forenoon was hot. He filled two big glasses in a saloon, brought them out, placed them on the curb, and sat beside them in the sunlight.

  This time, he drank slowly. He had slipped a newspaper into a jacket pocket, and he idly read and drank for half an hour. The day was serene, and had brought an air purer than London had breathed in a century.

  The man to whom all London—if not all Britain—had passed dropped the paper. For he had noted that purity of the air. He wondered how long it would last. The street contained enough corpses to start a plague after another day or so. He could not bury them, not to mention the rest of the eight million in Greater London.

  "I suppose," Penderby decided, "I'll have to leave. Well, it wouldn't take long to get out by car."

  But whither? The countryside, in all likelihood, would be as perilous as the city; no district in Britain was thinly-populated.

  "Oh, the hell with it!" was his conclusion. Having dismissed the problem for the moment, he went into the saloon for more beer.

  He was tired, and it was nearly noon when he stretched himself and decided to explore farther; only a little farther, for the heat was intense. He cycled across Ludgate Circus, at the end of Fleet Street, and up Ludgate Hill. Dead, as he had expected, everywhere; silence complete, save for the faint noise of the bicycle.

  He was in the financial center. This region of swarming clerks and dull buildings had interested him little at any other time, and only the coolness of narrow streets between high, gray walls induced him to go in now. The bodies he saw were few; life normally had left the district with the closing of offices at 5 p.m.

  Ahead was a bank. He dismounted at the curb in front of it. A gate stood between sidewalk and door. The windows were high, deep, and barred.

  "If I weren't so tired," Penderby reflected, "I'd go in—even if it took a month."

  The place could tell him nothing, he saw. As he rode back to the Strand, he pondered the fact—the most illuminating so far as his new life was concerned—that the district of money was the least useful in all London.

  Penderby was sleepy now, though it still was early afternoon. The stimulus of wine and beer had worn off, and the alcohol made him drowsy. He cycled as far as a luxury hotel before which taxis and limousines had been busy the night before, left the machine tilted against one of the glass doors, and walked in.

  Some of the well-dressed guests had died in armchairs, others on divans. More, standing, had fallen in groups that even now, somehow, told of their easy, unvexed lives of conversation and travel. Penderby, glancing round, was glad that the bitterness in him had not died.

  The first door he opened after he went upstairs moved only a few inches; something had fallen against it. On the floor of the next room was the body of a man. A woman and a little girl had died in another.

  The fourth was empty. A door in it led to a bathroom. He turned the hot water on. It still was at boiling-point, and as he waited till it had cooled he shaved with a good sharp razor someone had left on the dressing-table.

  Penderby, despite the luxury of steam and soap and water to his chin, did not linger in the bath. He had begun to hurry. For what? He did not know. But the cool sheets soothed him. The comfort of the bed was so exquisite that, to sense it as long as possible, he tried to stay awake. The sleep into which he soon fell was dreamless, and lasted till 7 p.m.

  He made tea in the big kitchen, below street-level, and brought butter and cold roast chicken from a refrigerator and fine bread from a chrome-and-white cupboard. When he left the hotel, he was munching a sandwich made of remnants of the meal.

  The Strand was gray and, in corners and gaping store-fronts here and there, black. Rain had made scattered pools that gave the street a shabby,
defeated look. The only light they reflected was the little in the sky. All the street-lamps had failed now, and the store-lights that had outlived the day were few and ineffectual.

  It was as Penderby looked round Trafalgar Square, somber and a little frightening, that he felt his first bewilderment, apart from the shocks of surprise, of the day. He sat on a balustrade outside South Africa House, and tried to plan the suddenly monstrous-appearing future.

  He could not stay in the vast charnelhouse London had become. A day or two more, as he already had warned himself, and plague would ride every breath of air. But his food was in London; he could not turn farmer at short notice, and the supplies in stores and hotels would last very long.

  The Continent? But he hardly could manage a boat even on the short Dover-Calais voyage, could he? Then, he had not heard nor seen aircraft since the afternoon before. If air-liners had come from France and other countries, and landed at a dead airdrome, the pilots, undoubtedly, would have flown from Croydon on to London. Had everyone in France, Germany, Spain, Italy died? Was he the only one spared? Were there French, German, Spanish, Italian Edward Penderbys?

  The Square was cold, lonesome. He left his perch stiffly, and turned onto the Strand once more. He tumbled over a body now and then. Clouds that had scudded from the west broke in a short, heavy shower, and it brought a damp smell from the heaps of wet clothes on every side.

  The hotel was in darkness, and he leaned against a bronze-encased pillar outside and began to smoke a cigar he had found in the bedroom. The dead he did not fear, but he was uneasy in the midst of so vast a number of them; besides, the excitement of the day had left him a little nervous. And hours of wakefulness would be the price of his evening's sleep.

  Penderby began to wonder about the Thames. What had happened to the ships on the river, the men who had lived in them? A street nearby led to the water, and in five minutes he was leaning over the wall and trying to count the vessels in the dark. Two were little holiday steamers, heeled over slightly. One of the four or five motorboats had rubbed along the wall as the tide ebbed, and was held in the angle of the nearer bridge.

  Warehouses and other buildings beyond the river were forbidding masses that added to the gloom of the water and hid all but a few mud-gleams, here and there.

  Penderby was sorry for having come. The scene was the most mournful the dead city had shown him. But he would not go back to the hotel yet. Approach of night seemed to have sharpened his senses, and the early-afternoon restlessness had returned.

  A body lay sixty or seventy yards away, in the direction of Trafalgar Square. It was the only one in sight. The spread-eagled symmetry of it stirred his curiosity, and he walked quickly toward it. But something held him back, and his pace became slow, then very slow. And then he was trembling.

  He stooped over the body. Recognition came without a shock. He was looking at Edward Penderby, lanky, ill-shaven, in ragged clothes. But the eyes, wide open, were quiet, and the lines beside the mouth had softened.

  The man who had lived dropped on one knee, and touched the angular forehead with an objective pity.

  "So you went, too," he said.

  * * * * *

  There still were some traces of what had been London when life came back to the earth; green, creeper-tied heaps of concrete and steel, for instance, and flooded steel vaults beneath banks, and a few big guns in arsenals, and presses, now in rust, under Fleet Street ruins. Rain, wind, heat, and cold had seen to the rest, and the two bodies—one well-dressed, the other shabbily—on a street beside the Thames had been dust many a year.

  * * *

  Contents

  ALL DAY WEDNESDAY

  By Richard Olin

  Practically everybody would agree that this is Utopia....

  Ernie turned the dial on his television. The station he had selected brightened and the face of the set turned from dark to blue. Ernie sipped his can of beer. He was alone in the room, and it was night.

  The picture steadied and Jory looked out of the set at him. Jory's face was tired. He looked bad.

  "Hello, Ernie," Jory said.

  Ernie turned the dial to the next station.

  "Hello, Ernie," the face of Jory said.

  At the next spot on the dial: "Hello, Ernie." The next: "Hello, Ernie."

  There were five stations that Ernie's set was able to receive. When the fifth station said "Hello, Ernie," and Jory's tired face looked out at him, Ernie shrugged, took another sip from his can of beer and sat down to watch the set.

  That happened Wednesday night. Wednesday morning began like this:

  Ernie woke feeling bored. It seemed he was always bored these days. An empty can of beer and a crumpled pack of cigarettes rested on top of the dead television. All he did nights was watch TV.

  Ernie sighed and thanked God that today was Wednesday. Tonight, when he came home from work, he would be over the hump ... only two days left and then the week end. Ernie didn't know for sure what he would do on his week end--go bowling, maybe--but whatever he did it was sure to be better than staying home every night.

  Oh, he supposed he could go out, just once in a while, during the work week. Some of the guys at the plant did. But then, the guys that did go out week nights weren't as sharp at their jobs as Ernie was. Sometimes they showed up late and pulled other stuff like that. You couldn't do things like that too often, Ernie thought virtuously. Not if it was a good job, a job that you wanted to keep. You had to be sharp.

  Ernie smiled. He was sharp. A growing feeling of virtue began to replace his boredom.

  Ernie glanced at his watch and went sprawling out of his bed. He was late. He didn't even have time for breakfast.

  His last thought, as he slammed out of his apartment, was an angry regret that he had not had time to pack a lunch. He would have to eat in the plant cafeteria again. Cafeteria lunches cost money. Money concerned Ernie. It always did. But right now he was going to need money for the week end; payday was another week away.

  * * * * *

  Ernie punched in twelve minutes late.

  His foreman was waiting beside the time clock. He was a big man, and what was left of his red hair matched in color the skin of his neck. And the color of his face, when he grew angry.

  His name was Rogers. He smiled now as Ernie nervously pushed his time card into the clock. His voice was warm and jovial as he spoke.

  "Well ... good morning, Mr. Stump. And did we have a nice, late, cozy little sleep-in this morning?"

  Ernie smiled uncertainly. "I'm sorry, Rogers. I know I'm late, but the time just sort of got away from me--"

  Rogers laughed lightly. "Think nothing of it, Mr. Stump. These things happen, after all."

  "Uh, yeah. Well, like I said, I'm sorry and--"

  Rogers went on, unheeding. "Of course, complications can develop when your number three wrist-pin man decides that he just isn't feeling sharp this morning and he needs a little extra sleep to put him right. If you're the foreman for Sub-Assembly Line 3-A, for example, Mr. Stump, one wonders if the rush order that must be filled by this morning is going to be finished any time before next Christmas. One wonders where the wrist-pin man is, Mr. Stump. Does he intend to come in at all, or will he just snooze his little head off all day? One wonders what to say to the plant manager, Mr. Stump. How do you tell him that twenty men are standing idle on Sub-Assembly Line 3-A because, through a laughable oversight, there is no one to put in a wrist-pin? How do you explain it so he will understand, Mr. Stump?"

  Rogers stopped and caught his breath. His face began growing red. He said slowly, "You don't, Mr. Stump. You don't explain it so he will understand. I just tried!"

  Ernie swallowed. Hurriedly, he said, "Look I'm sorry. I'll get right in there--"

  Rogers smiled. "That would be nice, Mr. Stump. I imagine there are quite a few Sub-Assembly 3-A's stacked up in there by now. You just trot in there and get them cleaned up."

  Ernie nodded doubtfully. "You ain't mad?"

  Rogers
' smile grew broader. "Mad, Mr. Stump? Why, being chewed out by the manager is a trifle. It's something a foreman must expect. It happens to some of them every day--for a while. And when it does, it doesn't matter because in just a little while they are no longer foremen. Sometimes, they aren't even workmen, any more. And then they have nothing at all to worry about, so don't let it concern you, Mr. Stump. Do you take the streetcar to work?"

  "Huh? Uh, yeah, I do."

  "I thought so." Rogers nodded his head benignly. "Well, just as a suggestion, the next time you see you're going to be late it might be better if you saved your car-fare and used it to buy a newspaper."

  Ernie smiled uncertainly. "O.K. Uh, why?"

  "Because," Rogers said slowly, no longer smiling, "the next time you leave me in a crack like that, you're going to be reading the 'Help Wanted' section! Now get in there and get to work!"

  Ernie did.

  He worked the rest of the morning in a sullen mood. For one thing, with the extra time that Rogers had taken up, Sub-Assembly Line 3-A was a mess. Incomplete sub-assemblies were stacked on the floor all around Ernie's spot on the line. He would have to pin them and slip them into the production line as best he could.

  Next to him on the line, Broncewicz said: "Ernie, we'll never get this job out. Where were you?"

  And Ernie told him about the beef with Rogers. He worked as he talked, but the more he talked the angrier he got. Rogers had been unfair. He asked Broncewicz, "How can anybody do a good job with that guy all the time riding 'em?"

  Broncewicz nodded. "You should take it to the union."

  Ernie snorted. "That's a hot one. Rogers used to be our shop steward."

  "Yeah, I forgot." Broncewicz scratched at a hairy ear. "Anyway, you should tell him off."

  "Yeah, I should tell...." Ernie laid aside a wrench to phrase exactly what he wished to say to Rogers, and the next sub-assembly slipped past. Both he and Broncewicz grabbed it hastily.