The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  The tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks and she clung to his arm until the perfume of her breath swept his face and he felt the tremors racing through her body.

  “I had been shut up in my darkroom developing pictures of the comet which I took last night; when I came out—I saw the dead!

  “What has happened?” she cried again.

  He answered slowly:

  “Something—comet or devil—swept across the earth this morning and—many are dead!”

  “Many? Very many?”

  “I have searched and I have seen no other living soul but you.”

  She gasped and they stared at each other.

  “My—father!” she whispered.

  “Where is he?”

  “He started for the office.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the Metropolitan Tower.”

  “Leave a note for him here and come.”

  Then he stopped.

  “No,” he said firmly—“first, we must go—to Harlem.”

  “Harlem!” she cried. Then she understood. She tapped her foot at first impatiently. She looked back and shuddered. Then she came resolutely down the steps.

  “There’s a swifter car in the garage in the court,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to drive it,” he said.

  “I do,” she answered.

  In ten minutes they were flying to Harlem on the wind. The Stutz rose and raced like an airplane. They took the turn at 110th Street on two wheels and slipped with a shriek into 135th.

  He was gone but a moment. Then he returned, and his face was gray. She did not look, but said:

  “You have lost—somebody?”

  “I have lost—everybody,” he said, simply—“unless…”

  He ran back and was gone several minutes—hours they seemed to her.

  “Everybody,” he said, and he walked slowly back with something filmlike in his hand which he stuffed into his pocket.

  “I’m afraid I was selfish,” he said. But already the car was moving toward the park among the dark and lined dead of Harlem—the brown, still faces, the knotted hands, the homely garments, and the silence—the wild and haunting silence. Out of the park, and down Fifth Avenue they whirled. In and out among the dead they slipped and quivered, needing no sound of bell or horn, until the great, square Metropolitan Tower hove in sight. Gently he laid the dead elevator boy aside; the car shot upward. The door of the office stood open. On the threshold lay the stenographer, and, staring at her, sat the dead clerk. The inner office was empty, but a note lay on the desk, folded and addressed but unsent:

  Dear Daughter:

  I’ve gone for a hundred-mile spin in Fred’s new Mercedes. Shall not be back before dinner. I’ll bring Fred with me.

  J.B.H.

  “Come,” she cried nervously. “We must search the city.”

  Up and down, over and across, back again—on went that ghostly search. Everywhere was silence and death—death and silence! They hunted from Madison Square to Spuyten Duyvil; they rushed across the Williamsburg Bridge; they swept over Brooklyn; from the Battery and Morningside Heights they scanned the river. Silence, silence everywhere, and no human sign. Haggard and bedraggled they puffed a third time slowly down Broadway, under the broiling sun, and at last stopped. He sniffed the air. An odor—a smell—and with the shifting breeze a sickening stench filled their nostrils and brought its awful warning. The girl settled back helplessly in her seat.

  “What can we do?” she cried.

  It was his turn now to take the lead, and he did it quickly.

  “The long-distance telephone—the telegraph and the cable—night rockets and then—flight!”

  She looked at him now with strength and confidence. He did not look like men, as she had always pictured men; but he acted like one and she was content. In fifteen minutes they were at the central telephone exchange. As they came to the door he stepped quickly before her and pressed her gently back as he closed it. She heard him moving to and fro, and knew his burdens—the poor, little burdens he bore. When she entered, he was alone in the room. The grim switchboard flashed its metallic face in cryptic, sphinxlike immobility. She seated herself on a stool and donned the bright earpiece. She looked at the mouthpiece. She had never looked at one so closely before. It was wide and black, pimpled with usage; inert; dead; almost sarcastic in its unfeeling curves. It looked—she beat back the thought—but it looked,—it persisted in looking like—she turned her head and found herself alone. One moment she was terrified; then she thanked him silently for his delicacy and turned resolutely, with a quick intaking of breath.

  “Hello!” she called in low tones. She was calling to the world. The world must answer. Would the world answer? Was the world…

  Silence!

  She had spoken too low.

  “Hello!” she cried, full-voiced.

  She listened. Silence! Her heart beat quickly. She cried in clear, distinct, loud tones: “Hello—hello—hello!”

  What was that whirring? Surely—no—was it the click of a receiver?

  She bent close, she moved the pegs in the holes, and called and called, until her voice rose almost to a shriek, and her heart hammered. It was as if she had heard the last flicker of creation, and the evil was silence. Her voice dropped to a sob. She sat stupidly staring into the black and sarcastic mouthpiece, and the thought came again. Hope lay dead within her. Yes, the cable and the rockets remained; but the world—she could not frame the thought or say the word. It was too mighty—too terrible! She turned toward the door with a new fear in her heart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger,—with a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was awful! She must escape—she must fly; he must not see her again. Who knew what awful thoughts—

  She gathered her silken skirts deftly about her young, smooth limbs—listened, and glided into a side hall. A moment she shrank back: the hall lay filled with dead women; then she leaped to the door and tore at it, with bleeding fingers, until it swung wide. She looked out. He was standing at the top of the alley,—silhouetted, tall and black, motionless. Was he looking at her or away? She did not know—she did not care. She simply leaped and ran—ran until she found herself alone amid the dead and the tall ramparts of towering buildings.

  She stopped. She was alone. Alone! Alone on the streets—alone in the city—perhaps alone in the world! There crept in upon her the sense of deception—of creeping hands behind her back—of silent, moving things she could not see,—of voices hushed in fearsome conspiracy. She looked behind and sideways, started at strange sounds and heard still stranger, until every nerve within her stood sharp and quivering, stretched to scream at the barest touch. She whirled and flew back, whimpering like a child, until she found that narrow alley again and the dark, silent figure silhouetted at the top. She stopped and rested; then she walked silently toward him, looked at him timidly; but he said nothing as he handed her into the car. Her voice caught as she whispered:

  “Not—that.”

  And he answered slowly: “No—not that!”

  They climbed into the car. She bent forward on the wheel and sobbed, with great, dry, quivering sobs, as they flew toward the cable office on the east side, leaving the world of wealth and prosperity for the world of poverty and work. In the world behind them were death and silence, grave and grim, almost cynical, but always decent; here it was hideous. It clothed itself in every ghastly form of terror, struggle, hate, and suffering. It lay wreathed in crime and squalor, greed and lust. Only in its dread and awful silence was it like to death everywhere.

  Yet as the two, flying and alone, looked upon the horror of the world, slowly, gradually, the sense of all-enveloping death deserted them. They seemed to move in a world silent and asleep,—not dead. They moved in quiet reverence, lest somehow they wake these sleeping forms who had, at last, found peace. They moved in some solemn, worldwi
de Friedhof, above which some mighty arm had waved its magic wand. All nature slept until—until, and quick with the same startling thought, they looked into each other’s eyes—he, ashen, and she, crimson, with unspoken thought. To both, the vision of a mighty beauty—of vast, unspoken things, swelled in their souls; but they put it away.

  Great, dark coils of wire came up from the earth and down from the sun and entered this low lair of witchery. The gathered lightnings of the world centered here, binding with beams of light the ends of the earth. The doors gaped on the gloom within. He paused on the threshold.

  “Do you know the code?” she asked.

  “I know the call for help—we used it formerly at the bank.”

  She hardly heard. She heard the lapping of the waters far below,—the dark and restless waters—the cold and luring waters, as they called. He stepped within. Slowly she walked to the wall, where the water called below, and stood and waited. Long she waited, and he did not come. Then with a start she saw him, too, standing beside the black waters. Slowly he removed his coat and stood there silently. She walked quickly to him and laid her hand on his arm. He did not start or look. The waters lapped on in luring, deadly rhythm. He pointed down to the waters, and said quietly:

  “The world lies beneath the waters now—may I go?”

  She looked into his stricken, tired face, and a great pity surged within her heart. She answered in a voice clear and calm, “No.”

  Upward they turned toward life again, and he seized the wheel. The world was darkening to twilight, and a great, gray pall was falling mercifully and gently on the sleeping dead. The ghastly glare of reality seemed replaced with the dream of some vast romance. The girl lay silently back, as the motor whizzed along, and looked half-consciously for the elf-queen to wave life into this dead world again. She forgot to wonder at the quickness with which he had learned to drive her car. It seemed natural. And then as they whirled and swung into Madison Square and at the door of the Metropolitan Tower she gave a low cry, and her eyes were great! Perhaps she had seen the elf-queen?

  The man led her to the elevator of the tower and deftly they ascended. In her father’s office they gathered rugs and chairs, and he wrote a note and laid it on the desk; then they ascended to the roof and he made her comfortable. For a while she rested and sank to dreamy somnolence, watching the worlds above and wondering. Below lay the dark shadows of the city and afar was the shining of the sea. She glanced at him timidly as he set food before her and took a shawl and wound her in it, touching her reverently, yet tenderly. She looked up at him with thankfulness in her eyes, eating what he served. He watched the city. She watched him. He seemed very human,—very near now.

  “Have you had to work hard?” she asked softly.

  “Always,” he said.

  “I have always been idle,” she said. “I was rich.”

  “I was poor,” he almost echoed.

  “The rich and the poor are met together,” she began, and he finished:

  “The Lord is the Maker of them all.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly; “and how foolish our human distinctions seem—now,” looking down to the great dead city stretched below, swimming in unlightened shadows.

  “Yes—I was not—human, yesterday,” he said.

  She looked at him. “And your people were not my people,” she said; “but today…” She paused. He was a man,—no more; but he was in some larger sense a gentleman,—sensitive, kindly, chivalrous, everything save his hands and—his face. Yet yesterday…

  “Death, the leveler!” he muttered.

  “And the revealer,” she whispered gently, rising to her feet with great eyes. He turned away, and after fumbling a moment sent a rocket into the darkening air. It arose, shrieked, and flew up, a slim path of light, and scattering its stars abroad, dropped on the city below. She scarcely noticed it. A vision of the world had risen before her. Slowly the mighty prophecy of her destiny overwhelmed her. Above the dead past hovered the Angel of Annunciation. She was no mere woman. She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor. She was primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life. She looked upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong, vigorous manhood—his sorrow and sacrifice. She saw him glorified. He was no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be.

  He did not glimpse the glory in her eyes, but stood looking outward toward the sea and sending rocket after rocket into the unanswering darkness. Dark-purple clouds lay banked and billowed in the west. Behind them and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance that suffused the darkening world and made almost a minor music. Suddenly, as though gathered back in some vast hand, the great cloud-curtain fell away. Low on the horizon lay a long, white star—mystic, wonderful! And from it fled upward to the pole, like some wan bridal veil, a pale, wide sheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed the stars.

  In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his rockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord. He turned and looked upon the lady, and found her gazing straight at him.

  Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face—eye to eye. Their souls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love—it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid.

  Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other—the heavens above, the seas around, the city grim and dead below. He loomed from out the velvet shadows vast and dark. Pearl-white and slender, she shone beneath the stars. She stretched her jeweled hands abroad. He lifted up his mighty arms, and they cried each to the other, almost with one voice, “The world is dead.”

  “Long live the—”

  “Honk! Honk!” Hoarse and sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly up from the silence below. They started backward with a cry and gazed upon each other with eyes that faltered and fell, with blood that boiled.

  “Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk!” came the mad cry again, and almost from their feet a rocket blazed into the air and scattered its stars upon them. She covered her eyes with her hands, and her shoulders heaved. He dropped and bowed, groped blindly on his knees about the floor. A blue flame spluttered lazily after an age, and she heard the scream of an answering rocket as it flew.

  Then they stood still as death, looking to opposite ends of the earth.

  “Clang—crash—clang!”

  The roar and ring of swift elevators shooting upward from below made the great tower tremble. A murmur and babel of voices swept in upon the night. All over the once-dead city the lights blinked, flickered, and flamed; and then with a sudden clanging of doors the entrance to the platform was filled with men, and one with white and flying hair rushed to the girl and lifted her to his breast. “My daughter!” he sobbed.

  Behind him hurried a younger, comelier man, carefully clad in motor costume, who bent above the girl with passionate solicitude and gazed into her staring eyes until they narrowed and dropped and her face flushed deeper and deeper crimson.

  “Julia,” he whispered; “my darling, I thought you were gone forever.”

  She looked up at him with strange, searching eyes.

  “Fred,” she murmured, almost vaguely, “is the world—gone?”

  “Only New York,” he answered; “it is terrible—awful! You know,—but you, how did you escape—how have you endured this horror? Are you well? Unharmed?”

  “Unharmed!” she said.

  “And this man here?” he asked, encircling her droopi
ng form with one arm and turning toward the Negro. Suddenly he stiffened and his hand flew to his hip. “Why!” he snarled. “It’s—a—nigger—Julia! Has he—has he dared…”

  She lifted her head and looked at her late companion curiously and then dropped her eyes with a sigh.

  “He has dared—all, to rescue me,” she said quietly, “and I—thank him—much.” But she did not look at him again. As the couple turned away, the father drew a roll of bills from his pockets.

  “Here, my good fellow,” he said, thrusting the money into the man’s hands, “take that,—what’s your name?”

  “Jim Davis,” came the answer, hollow-voiced.

  “Well, Jim, I thank you. I’ve always liked your people. If you ever want a job, call on me.” And they were gone.

  The crowd poured up and out of the elevators, talking and whispering.

  “Who was it?”

  “Are they alive?”

  “How many?”

  “Two!”

  “Who was saved?”

  “A white girl and a nigger—there she goes.”

  “A nigger? Where is he? Let’s lynch the damned—”

  “Shut up—he’s all right—he saved her.”

  “Saved hell! He had no business—”

  “Here he comes.”

  Into the glare of the electric lights the colored man moved slowly, with the eyes of those that walk and sleep.

  “Well, what do you think of that?” cried a bystander; “of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger!”

  The colored man heard nothing. He stood silently beneath the glare of the light, gazing at the money in his hand and shrinking as he gazed; slowly he put his other hand into his pocket and brought out a baby’s filmy cap, and gazed again. A woman mounted to the platform and looked about, shading her eyes. She was brown, small, and toil-worn, and in one arm lay the corpse of a dark baby. The crowd parted and her eyes fell on the colored man; with a cry she tottered toward him.