Thieves and looters became a terrible threat to the inhabitants of the city, since they found ideal conditions for their deeds in the general collapse of society. It is said that some of them came to Star City from foreign countries. Some of them simulated madness in order to escape punishment. Other didn’t even consider it necessary to conceal their looting. Gangs of thieves brazenly entered abandoned stores and carried away the more valuable goods, they broke into private apartments and demanded money and they halted pedestrians and robbed them of their valuables, watches, rings, bracelets. Violence was adding to looting and above all, violence against women. The Chief of the City sent whole squads of police against the criminals but they were so audacious they fought pitched battles with the police. There were horrible incidents when the disease of Contradiction appeared among the looters or the police and the affected turned their weapons against their comrades. At first the Chief of the City exiled the looters from the city, but the citizens freed them from the prison trains to take their place. Then the Chief of the City was compelled to sentence robbers and criminals to death. And so, after three hundred years, capital punishment returned to the earth.
In June a shortage of essential commodities became apparent. There was not enough food nor medicine. Shipments over the railroad lines were reduced and manufacturing within the city had nearly ceased. DeVille organized municipal bakeries and bread and meat distribution centers for the entire population. Public cafeterias were set up on the model of those which already existed in the factories. But it was impossible to find enough workers to staff them. Volunteers served to the point of exhaustion, but their number was on the decline. The municipal crematoria burned the day around, but the number of the corpses in the morgues was not reduced, but rather increased. Bodies now were found in private residences and on the streets. Fewer and fewer workers labored at the municipal telegraph, telephone, light, water, and sewer services. DeVille’s activity was astonishing. He followed everything, managed everything. Judging from his reports he knew no rest, and all the survivors of the catastrophe were unanimous in their opinion that his actions were above praise.
In the middle of June the lack of workers on the railroads became palpable. There were not enough locomotive engineers and conductors to serve all the trains. On June 17, the first disaster occurred on the Southwestern Line, the result of an engineer falling victim to Contradiction. Seized by the disease the engineer took an entire train off its elevated tracks from a height of forty feet onto an ice-covered plain. Nearly all the passengers were killed or injured. The news of the catastrophe delivered by the next train hit the city like a peal of thunder and a medical rescue train was sent out. It brought back the dead and the mutilated survivors. But the evening of the same day brought the news that a similar disaster had befallen the First Line. The two major railroad routes connecting Star City with the outside world were now disabled. Teams were sent from both the city and Northern Harbor to repair the lines, but work was almost impossible during the winter months. Any hope of restoring the lines within a brief period of time had to be abandoned.
These two catastrophes were only the first of many. The more concern the engineers displayed for their occupation, the more likely they were to repeat the deeds of their predecessors. Just because they feared to wreck their trains, they brought them to disaster. In a five day period from June 18 through June 22, seven trains crowded with passengers left the rails. Thousands of people found their deaths from either injuries or starvation on the snow-swept plains. Very few of them had the strength to return to the city. Now all the six lines connecting Star City with the outside world were cut. Even earlier, travel by means of dirigible had ceased. One of them had been destroyed by an enraged mob infuriated by the fact that only the very rich could escape by air. All the remaining dirigibles, one after another, were lost, probably destroyed as the result of the same factors which caused the railroad disasters. The city’s population, now reduced to 600,000, was isolated from the rest of humanity. For a time the only link with the outer world was the telegraph line.
On June 24 all traffic on the city’s transportation system halted as the result of a lack of workers. On June 26 telephone service failed. On June 27 all pharmacies were closed, with the exception of the central one in the city. On July 1 the Chief of the City ordered all the inhabitants to move to the city’s center, abandoning the periphery to facilitate the maintenance of order and the supply of food and medical services. The citizens left their apartments and transferred to those abandoned by their previous owners. The idea of property disappeared. No one hesitated to abandon his belongings and no one hesitated to use those of others. It is true, there were still robbers and looters, but now we would consider them insane. They continued their thefts and at the present time hoards of gold and valuables are still being found in the abandoned houses, and near them the rotting corpses of the thieves.
It is remarkable, however, that in spite of the general destruction, life retained its usual pattern. Merchants still could be found who opened their stores, selling—for some reason at incredible prices—various goods: gourmet foods, flowers, books, weapons…. Customers without hesitation put down their useless gold and the avaricious merchants hid it, no one knows why. There were still underground dives—gambling, alcohol and women—which unhappy individuals frequented to forget the awful present. There the sick mingled with the healthy, and no one maintained a chronicle of the terrible scenes which took place. Two or three newspapers were still published whose editors sought to preserve the meaning of the printed word in the general panic. Copies of these newspapers are now being sold at prices ten or twenty times higher than their original cost and they are destined to become the greatest bibliographical rarities. In their columns written in the midst of madness and set by half-demented compositors, one can see a vivid and horrifying reflection of the unfortunate city’s sufferings. There were still reporters who wrote “City News,” writers who heatedly commented on the situation, and even humorists who tried to amuse their readers in those tragic days. And those telegrams which arrived from other countries describing a real and healthy life must have filled with despair the hearts of the readers doomed to destruction.
Hopeless attempts were made to escape the city. Early in July a huge mob of men, women and children, under the leadership of one John Dew set out on foot for the nearest inhabited place, Londontown. DeVille realized the undertaking was insane, but he couldn’t stop them and even provided warm clothing and food supplies. The entire group of about 2000 individuals became lost and perished in the snowy plains of the polar country during the night which is without light for six months. A certain Whiting proposed another yet more heroic solution. He suggested that all the victims of the disease be destroyed after which the epidemic would cease. He found not a few followers, for in those dark days any insane or inhuman proposal which might promise relief would have found its adherents. Whiting and his friends ranged the entire city, breaking into buildings and killing the sick. They perpetrated massacres in the hospitals. In their frenzy they killed anyone they suspected of the disease. Those who murdered on principle were joined by the insane and looters. The entire city became a battlefield. In these difficult days, Horace DeVille collected his associates, inspired them, and personally led them against Whiting’s forces. The pursuit continued for several days. Hundreds of individuals fell on both sides, but finally Whiting himself was captured. He was found to be in the last stages of Contradiction and he was therefore not executed but taken to a hospital where he soon died.
On June 8 one of the heaviest blows fell on the city. The men responsible for the central power plant destroyed all the generators in a fit of madness. The electric lights failed and the entire city, all its streets, all private homes, were plunged into total darkness. Because this was the only source of light and heat in the city, all the residents found themselves in an absolutely hopeless situation. DeVille, foreseeing such a danger, had prepared supplies of torche
s and fuel. Fires were lighted everywhere on the streets. Thousands of torches were distributed to the city’s inhabitants. But these meager blazes could not illuminate Star City’s enormous linear panoramas which extended for tens of miles and the threatening heights of its thirty-story buildings. With the darkness collapsed the last vestiges of discipline in the city. Horror and madness finally overwhelmed the city’s residents and the healthy could not be distinguished from the diseased. Despairing men and women began a terrible orgy.
The moral collapse of all the city’s inhabitants became apparent with remarkable speed. Civilization, like a thin layer of bark grown slowly for thousands of years, fell off these people, and there emerged the wild man, the animal man, as he had roamed the virginal earth long ago. Any conception of justice was lost—only force was recognized. For women the only law was the thirst for pleasure. The most seemly matrons behaved like prostitutes, going eagerly from man to man and speaking the obscene language of the bordellos. Girls ran through the streets offering their innocence to strangers, taking their favorites to the nearest door and giving themselves in unknown beds. Drunkards caroused in cellars, disregarding the corpses which lay forgotten around them. The situation of children abandoned to their fate by their parents was pitiful. Some were violated by disgusting libertines, others were tortured by sadists who now appeared in considerable numbers. Children died from hunger in their nurseries and from shame and injury after they were violated; they were slaughtered intentionally and accidentally. It was even said that human monsters hunted down children to eat their flesh to satisfy their awakening cannibalistic instincts.
In the last days of the tragedy Horace DeVille, of course, could not help all people. But he set up a refuge in the City Hall for those who were still sound in mind. The entrances to the building were barricaded and constantly guarded. Food and water for 3000 people for forty days was available. But DeVille was joined by only 1800 individuals, both men and women. Certainly there were others in the city who were still healthy, but they didn’t know about DeVille’s refuge and they remained hidden in their homes. Many individuals were afraid to go out onto the streets and even now the bodies of those who died of hunger alone in their rooms are still being found. It’s remarkable that there were so few cases of Contradiction among those locked up in the City Hall. DeVille knew how to maintain discipline within his small group. Until his last day on earth, DeVille maintained a journal, and this journal, along with DeVille’s telegrams is our best source of information concerning the catastrophe. The journal was found in a secret cabinet in the City Hall which was reserved for valuable papers. Its last entry is dated July 20. DeVille wrote that an enraged mob had begun to storm the City Hall, and that he had been forced to drive them away with revolver fire. “I don’t know what hope there is,” wrote DeVille. “We can’t expect help until spring. But we’ll never survive that long on the supplies which I have at my disposal. But I will do my duty to the end.” Those were his last noble words!
We must assume that the City Hall was taken on July 21 and its defenders killed or scattered. DeVille’s body has not yet been found. We have no reliable information about what happened in the city after July 21. From the evidence which has been found as the city is being cleaned up, we must assume that anarchy reached its final limits. You can imagine the gloomy streets dimly lighted by the glow from bonfires of burning furniture and books. The fires were ignited by striking flint against steel. Around the fires caroused crowds of drunken and insane people. A cup was passed from hand to hand, with both men and women drinking. Here too scenes of animal sensuality were enacted. Some kind of dark atavistic emotions stirred in the souls of these city people and half-naked, unwashed, unkempt, they danced the dances of their remote ancestors, the contemporaries of cave bears, and they sang the same wild songs as the hordes who fell onto mammoths with stone axes. With the songs, with incoherent speeches, with idiotic laughter could be heard the insane cries of the stricken who had even lost the ability to express their delirious dreams in words, and the groans of the dying who lay writhing in the midst of rotting corpses. Sometimes fighting took the place of the dances—for a barrel of wine, for a beautiful woman or simply for no reason at all, in a burst of madness which drove a man to absurd, contradictory acts. There was nowhere to flee: everywhere the same terrible scenes, everywhere orgies, fighting, animal joy and animal rage—or absolute darkness which seemed even more terrible, even more unbearable to the shattered imagination.
Star City became a huge, black box where a few thousand survivors in human form were imprisoned in the stench of hundreds of thousands of decaying corpses, where among the living there was not one individual who was aware of his situation. This was the city of the mad, a gigantic institution for the insane, the most gigantic and repulsive Bedlam the world had ever seen. And these madmen were destroying each other, striking with daggers, biting at each other’s throats, dying from madness, dying from terror, dying from hunger and all the maladies which reigned in the infected air.
Of course the government of the Republic did not remain an indifferent spectator of the cruel misfortune which had struck the capital. But very soon it had to abandon any hope of providing assistance. Physicians, nurses, military units and government servants categorically refused to go to Star City. When the electric trains and dirigibles ceased to function, direct contact with the city was lost since the severe climate precluded any other means of communication. In addition, the government’s attention was soon captured by the cases of Contradiction which appeared in other cities of the Republic. At times these occurrences also threatened to become epidemics and panic began in a manner similar to what had occurred in Star City. This led to a mass emigration from all the Republic’s population centers. Work ceased at all factories and the country’s industrial life declined. But, thanks to decisive and timely measures the epidemic was halted in other cities and nowhere did it reach the dimensions it had achieved in the capital.
The anxiety with which the entire world followed the misfortunes of the young Republic is well known. At first, when no one expected the disaster to grow to its monstrous proportions, the most common attitude was one of curiosity. The leading newspapers of all countries (and this includes our own Northern European Evening Herald) sent special correspondents to Star City to report on the epidemic’s course. Many of these brave knights of the pen fell victims to their professional responsibilities. When news was received concerning the dangerous nature of the epidemic, various governments and private societies offered their services to the Republic’s government. Some sent troops, others teams of doctors, yet others gave financial contributions, but events moved with such speed that the greater part of these measures could not be executed in full. When railroad communication with Star City was broken off, the only source of information about life in the city was the telegrams sent by the Chief of the City. These telegrams were immediately disseminated to all ends of the earth in millions of copies. After the failure of the city’s electrical system, the telegraph continued to function for a few more days on battery power. The exact reason why the telegraph service failed completely is not known: perhaps the equipment was sabotaged. Horace DeVille’s final telegram was dated June 17. From that time for a period of nearly six weeks humanity had no word from the Republic’s capital.
Several attempts were made to reach Star City by air during the month of July. Several new dirigibles and flying machines were sent to the Republic. However, for a long period of time these attempts ended in failure. Finally an aviator, Thomas Billy, succeeded in reaching the unfortunate city. He picked up two individuals from the city roof who had long since lost their reason and who were half dead from cold and hunger. Through the ventilators Billy could see that the streets were plunged in absolute darkness and he could hear wild cries which indicated that living beings were still in the city. Billy decided not to descend into the city itself. Late in August one of the electric railroad lines was opened as far as Lissis, sixty
five miles from the city. A detachment of well-armed men equipped with food and emergency medical supplies entered the city through the Northwest Gates. This squad, however, could not penetrate beyond the first blocks of buildings as a consequence of the terrible stench. It was necessary to advance step by step, removing corpses from the streets and freshening the air by artificial means. All the people they met alive in the city were completely irresponsible. They were like frenzied animals and they had to be physically restrained. Finally, in the middle of September, regular communications were opened with the city and its systematic renovation was begun.
At the present time the greater part of the city has been cleared of the dead. Electric light and heat has been restored. Only the American quarter remains untouched, but it is assumed that no one remains alive there. Nearly 10,000 people survived, but most of them suffer from incurable mental afflictions. Those who have more or less recovered are very unwilling to talk about their experiences in those calamitous days. Moreover, their accounts are full of contradiction and very often they are not supported by documentary evidence. In some locations various copies of newspapers have been found which were published in the city before the end of July. The last of those which has been found, dated July 22, contains a description of the death of Horace DeVille and a call to restore the refuge in the City Hall. It is true that a sheet was found dated in August, but its contents are such that one must identify its author (who, probably, also set his raving into type) as totally irresponsible. Horace DeVille’s journal, which provides a regular chronicle of events from June 28 to July 20, has been found in the City Hall. On the basis of the terrible discoveries on the streets and inside buildings it is possible to recreate a vivid picture of the frenzied events in those last days in the city. Terribly mutilated corpses have been found everywhere: people who died of starvation, people strangled and tortured, people murdered by madmen in a fit of fury, and finally—half eaten bodies. Corpses have been found in the most unexpected locations: in subways, sewers, storerooms, boilers: men who had lost their reason fled the terror around them everywhere. Almost all buildings had been pillaged and the goods which turned out to be useless to the looters had been hidden in secret rooms or in cellars.
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