Published 2017
All rights reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cataclysm
The incredible
Dying planet
Dead city
In the red dawn
Caravan into tomorrow
Under the dome
Middletown calling!
Out of the silence
From the stars
Revelation
Crisis
Embattled city
Last appeal
Mission for earth
At Vega
Judgment of the stars
Fateful return
Middletown decides
Appointment with destiny
Waking world
Kenniston realized afterward that it was like death. You knew you were going to die someday, but you didn't believe it. He had known that there was danger of the long-dreaded atomic war beginning with a sneak punch, but he hadn't really believed it.
Not until that June morning when the missile came down on Middletown. And then there was no time for realization. You don't hear or see a thing that comes faster than sound. One moment, he was striding down Mill Street toward the plant, getting ready to speak to the policeman coming toward him. The next moment, the sky split open.
It split wide open, and above the whole town there was a burn and blaze of light so swift, so violent, that it seemed the air itself had burst into instantaneous flame. In that fraction of a second, as the sky flared and the ground heaved wildly under his feet, Kenniston knew that the surprise attack had come, and that the first of the long-feared super-atomic bombs had exploded overhead… .
Shock, thought Kenniston, as his mouth crushed against the grimy sidewalk. The shock that keeps a dying man from feeling pain. He lay there, waiting for the ultimate destruction, and the first eye-blinding flare across the heavens faded and the shuddering world grew still. It was over, as quickly as that.
He ought to be dead. He thought it very probable that he was dying right now, which would explain the fading light and the ominous quiet. But in spite of that he raised his head, and then scrambled shakily to his feet, gasping over his own wild heartbeats, fighting an animal urge to run for the mere sake of running. He looked down Mill Street. He expected to see pulverized buildings, smoking craters, fire and steam and devastation. But what he saw was more stunning than that, and in a strange way, more awful.
He saw Middletown lying unchanged and peaceful in the sunlight.
The policeman he had been going to speak to was still there ahead of him. He was getting up slowly from his hands and knees, where the quake had thrown him. His mouth hung open and his cap had fallen off. His eyes were very wide and dazed and frightened. Beyond him was an old woman with a shawl over her head. She, too, had been there before. She was clinging now to a wall, the sack of groceries she had carried split open around her feet, spilling onions and cans of soup across the walk. Cars and street-cars were still moving along the street in the distance, beginning erratically to jerk to a halt. Apart from these small things, nothing was different, nothing at all.
The policeman came up to Kenniston. He looked like a young, efficient officer. Or he would have, if his face had not gone so slack and his eyes so stunned. He asked hoarsely:
"What happened?"
Kenniston answered, and the words sounded queer and improbable as he said them. "We've been hit by a bomb— a super-atomic."
The policeman stared at him. "Are you crazy?"
"Yes," said Kenniston, "I think maybe I am. I think that's the only explanation."
His brain had begun to pound. The air felt suddenly cold and strange. The sunshine was duskier and redder and did not warm him now. The woman in the shawl was crying. Presently, still weeping, she got painfully down upon her thick old knees and Kenniston thought she was going to pray, but instead she began to gather up her onions, fumbling with them as a child does, trying to fit them into the broken paper bag.
"Look," said the policeman, "I've read stuff about those super-atomic bombs, in the papers. It said they were thousands of times more powerful than the atom-bombs they used to have. If one of them hit any place there wouldn't be anything left of it." His voice was getting stronger. He was convincing himself. "So no super-atomic bomb could have hit us. It couldn't have been that."
"You saw that terrific flash in the sky, didn't you?" said Kenniston.
"Sure I did, but—" And then the policeman's face cleared. "Say, it was a fizzle. That's what it was. This super-atomic bomb they've been scaring the world with— it turned out to be just a fizzle." He laughed noisily, in vast relief. "Isn't that rich? They tell for years what terrible things it's going to do, and then it just makes a big fizz and flash like a bad Fourth of July firecracker!"
It could be true, Kenniston thought with a wild surge of hope. It could be true.
And then he looked up and saw the Sun.
"It was maybe a bluff, all the time," the policeman's voice rattled on. "They maybe didn't really have any super-atomic bomb at all."
Kenniston, without lowering his gaze, spoke in a dry whisper. "They had them, all right. And they used one on us. And I think we're dead and don't know it yet We don't know yet that we're only ghosts and not living on Earth any more."
"Not on Earth?" said the policeman angrily. "Now, listen—"
And then his voice trailed away to silence as he followed Kenniston's staring gaze and looked up at the Sun.
It wasn't the Sun. Not the Sun they and all the generations of men had known as a golden, dazzling orb. They could look right at this Sun, without blinking. They could stare at it steadily, for it was no more than a very big, dull-glowing red ball with tiny flames writhing around its edges. It was higher in the sky now than it had been before. And the air was cold. "It's in the wrong place," said the policeman. "And it looks different." He groped in half-forgotten high-school science for an explanation. "Refraction. Dust that that fizzle-bomb stirred up—"
Kenniston didn't tell him. What was the use? What was the good of telling him what he, as a scientist, knew— that no conceivable refraction could make the Sun look like that. But he said, "Maybe you're right."
"Sure I'm right," said the policeman, loudly. He didn't look up at the sky and Sun, any more. He seemed to avoid looking at them.
Kenniston started on down Mill Street. He had been on his way to the Lab, when this happened. He kept on going now. He wanted to hear what Hubble and the others would say about this.
He laughed a little. "I am a ghost, going to talk with other ghosts about our sudden deaths." Then he told himself fiercely, "Stop that! You're a scientist. What good is your science if it cracks up in the face of an unexplained phenomenon?"
That, certainly, was an understatement. A super-atomic bomb went off over a quiet little Midwestern town of fifty thousand people, and it didn't change a thing except to put a new Sun into the sky. And you called that an unexplained phenomenon.
Kenniston walked on down the street. He walked fast, for the air was unseasonably cold. He didn't stop to talk to the bewildered-looking people he met. They were mostly men who had been on their way to work in Middletown's mills when it had happened. They stood now, discussing the sudden flash and shock. The word Kenniston heard most often was "earthquake." They didn't look too upset, these men. They looked excited and a little bit glad that something had happened to interrupt their drab daily routine. Some of them were staring up at that strange, dull-red Sun, but they seemed more perplexed than disturbed.
The air was cold and musty. And the red, dusky sunlight was queer. But that hadn't disturbed these men too much. It was, after all, not much stranger than the chill and the lurid light that often foreshadow a Midwestern thunderstorm.
Kenniston turned in at the gate of the smoke-grimed brick structure that bore the sign, "Industrial Research Laboratories." The watchman at the gate nodded to him unperturbedly as he let him through.
Neither the watchman nor any of Middletown's fifty thousand people, except a few city officials, knew that this supposed industrial laboratory actually housed one of the key nerve centers of America's atomic defense setup.
Clever, thought Kenniston. It had been clever of those in charge of dispersal to tuck this key atomic laboratory into a prosaic little Midwestern mill town.
"But not clever enough," he thought.
No, not quite clever enough. The unknown enemy had learned the secret, and had struck the first stunning blow of his surprise attack at the hidden nerve center of Middletown.
A super-atomic, to smash that nerve center before war even started. Only, the super-atomic had fizzled. Or had it? The Sun was a different Sun. And the air was strange and cold.
Crisci met Kenniston by the entrance of the big brick building. Crisci was the youngest of the staff, a tall, black-haired youngster— and because he was the youngest, he tried hard not to show emotion now.
"It looks like it's beginning," said Crisci, trying to smile. "Atomic Armageddon— the final fireworks." Then he quit trying to smile. "Why didn't it wipe us out, Kenniston? Why didn't it?"
Kenniston asked him, "Don't the Geigers show anything?"
"Nothing. Not a thing."
That, Kenniston thought numbly, fitted the crazy improbability of it all. He asked, "Where's Hubble?"
Crisci gestured vaguely. "Over there. He's had us trying to call Washington, but the wires are all dead and even the radio hasn't been able to get through yet."
Kenniston walked across the cluttered plant yard. Hubble, his chief, stood looking up at the dusky sky and at the red dull Sun you could stare at without blinking. He was only fifty but he looked older at the moment, his graying hair disordered and his thin face tightly drawn.
"There isn't any way yet to figure out where that missile came from," Kenniston said.
Then he realized that Hubble's thoughts weren't on that, for the other only nodded abstractedly.
"Look at those stars, Kenniston."
"Stars? Stars, in the daytime—?"
And then, looking up, Kenniston realized that you could see the stars now. You could see them as faint, glimmering points all across the strangely dusky sky, even near the dull Sun.
"They're wrong," said Hubble. "They're very wrong."
Kenniston asked, "What happened? Did their super-atomic really fizzle?"
Hubble lowered his gaze and blinked at him. "No," he said softly. "It didn't fizzle. It went off."
"But Hubble, if that super-atomic went off, why—"
Hubble ignored the question. He went on into his own office in the Lab, and began to pull down reference volumes. To Kenniston's surprise, he opened them to pages of astronomical diagrams. Then Hubble took a pencil and began to scrawl quick calculations on a pad.
Kenniston grabbed him by the shoulder. "For Christ's sake, Hubble, this is no time for scientific theorizing! The town hasn't been hit, but something big has happened, and—"
"Get the hell away from me," said Hubble, without turning.
The sheer shock of hearing Hubble swear silenced Kenniston. Hubble went on with his figures, referring often to the books. The office was as silent as though nothing had happened at all. Finally, Hubble turned. His hand shook a little as he pointed to the figures on the pad.
"See those, Ken? They're proof— proof of something that cannot be. What does a scientist do when he faces that kind of a situation?"
He could see the sick shock and fear in Hubble's gray face, and it fed his own fear. But before he could speak, Crisci came in.
He said, "We haven't been able to contact Washington yet. And we can't understand— our calls go completely unanswered, and not one station outside Middletown seems to be broadcasting."
Hubble stared at his pad. "It all fits in. Yes, it all fits in."
"What do you make of it, Doctor?" asked Crisci anxiously. "That bomb went off over Middletown, even though it didn't hurt us. Yet it's as though all the world outside Middletown has been silenced!"
Kenniston, cold from what he had seen in Hubble's face, waited for the senior scientist to tell them what he knew or thought. But the phone rang suddenly with strident loudness.
It was the intercom from the watchman at the gate. Hubble picked it up. After a minute he said, "Yes, let him come in." He hung up. "It's Johnson. You know, the electrician who did some installations for us. He lives out on the edge of town. He told the watchman that was why he had to see me— because he lives on the edge of town."
Johnson, when he came, was a man in the grip of a fear greater than Kenniston had even begun to imagine, and he was almost beyond talking. "I thought you might know," he said to Hubble. "It seems like somebody's got to tell me what's happened, or I'll lose my mind. I've got a cornfield, Mr. Hubble. It's a long field, and then there's a fence row, and my neighbor's barn beyond it."
He began to tremble, and Hubble said, "What about your cornfield?"
"Part of it's gone," said Johnson, "and the fence row, and the barn… Mr. Hubble, they're all gone, everything… "
"Blast effect," said Hubble gently. "A bomb hit here a little while ago, you see."
"No," said Johnson. "I was in London last war, I know what blast can do. This isn't destruction. It's… " He sought for a word, and could not find it. "I thought you might know what it is."
Kenniston's chill premonition, the shapeless growing terror in him, became too evil to be borne. He said, "I'm going out and take a look."
Hubble glanced at him and then nodded, and rose to his feet, slowly, as though he did not want to go but was forcing himself. He said, "We can see everything from the water tower, I think— that's the highest point in town. You keep trying to get through, Crisci."
Kenniston walked with him out of the Lab grounds, and across Mill Street and the cluttered railroad tracks to the huge, stilt-legged water tower of Middletown. The air had grown colder. The red sunshine had no warmth in it, and when Kenniston took hold of the iron rungs of the ladder to begin the climb, they were like bars of ice. He followed Hubble upward, keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating soles of Hubble's shoes. It was a long climb. They had to stop to rest once. The wind blew harder the higher they got, and it had a dry musty taint in it that made Kenniston think of the air that blows from deep rock tombs with dust of ages in them.
They came out at last on the railed platform around the big, high tank. Kenniston looked down on the town. He saw knots of people gathered on the corners, and the tops of cars, a few of them moving slowly but most of them stopped and jamming the streets. There was a curious sort of silence.
Hubble did not bother to look at the town, except for a first brief glance that took it all in, the circumference of Middletown with all its buildings standing just as they always had, with the iron Civil War soldier still stiffly mounting guard on the Square, and the smoke still rising steadily from the stacks of the mills. Then he looked outward. He did not speak, and presently Kenniston's eyes were drawn also to look beyond the town.
He looked for a long time before it began to penetrate. His retinas relayed the image again and again, but the brain recoiled from its task of making sense out of that image, that unbelievable, impossible… No. It must be dust, or refraction, or an illusion created by the dusky red sunlight, anything but truth. There could not, by any laws known to Creation, be a truth like this one!
The whole countryside around Middletown was gone. The fields, the green, flat fields of the Middle West, and the river, and the streams, and the old scattered farms— they were all gone, and it was a completely different and utterly alien landscape that now stretched outside the town.
Rolling, ocher-yellow plains, sad and empty, lifted toward a ridge of broken hills that had never been there before. The wind blew over that barren, lifeless world, stirring the ocher weeds, lifting heavy little clouds of dust and dropping them back again to earth. The Sun peered down like a great dull eye with lashes of writhing fire, and the glimmering stars swung solemn in the sky, and all of them, the Earth, the stars, the Sun, had a look of death about them, a stillness and a waiting, a remoteness that had nothing to do with men or with anything that lived.
Kenniston gripped the rail tightly, feeling all reality crumbling away beneath him, searching frantically for an explanation, for any rational explanation, of that impossible scene.
"The bomb— did it somehow blast the countryside out there, instead of Middletown?"
"Would it take away a river, and bring instead those hills and that yellow scrub?" said Hubble. "Would any bomb-blast do that?"
"But for God's sake, then what—"
"It hit us, Kenniston. It went off right over Middletown, and it did something… " He faltered, and then said, "Nobody really knew what a super-atomic bomb would do. There were logical theories and assumptions about it, but nobody really knew anything except that the most violent concentrated force in history would be suddenly released. Well, it was released, over Middletown. And it was violent. So violent that… "
He stopped, again, as though he could not quite muster up the courage to voice the certainty that was in him. He gestured at the dusky sky.
"That's our Sun, our own Sun— but it's old now, very old. And that Earth we see out there is old too, barren and eroded and dying. And the stars… . You looked at the stars, Ken, but you didn't see them. They're different, the constellations distorted by the motions of the stars, as only millions of years could distort them."
Kenniston whispered, "Millions of years? Then you think that the bomb… " He stopped, and he knew now how Hubble had felt. How did you say a thing that had never been said before?
"Yes, the bomb," said Hubble. "A force, a violence, greater than any ever known before, too great to be confined by the ordinary boundaries of matter, too great to waste its strength on petty physical destruction. Instead of shattering buildings, it shattered space and time."
Kenniston's denial was a hoarse cry. "Hubble, no! That's madness! Time is absolute—"
Hubble said, "You know it isn't. You know from Einstein's work that there's no such thing as time by itself, that instead there is a space-time continuum. And that continuum is curved, and a great enough force could hurl matter from one part of the curve to another."
He raised a shaking hand toward the deathly, alien landscape outside the town.
"And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into this dying, future Earth!"
The rest of the staff was waiting for them when they came back into the Lab grounds. A dozen men, ranging in age from Crisci to old Beitz, standing shivering in the chill red sunlight in front of the building. Johnson was with them, waiting for his answer. Hubble looked at him, and at the others. He said, "I think we'd better go inside."
They did not ask the questions that were clamoring inside them. Silently, with the jerky awkward movements of men strung so taut that their reflex centers no longer function smoothly, they followed Hubble through the doorway. Kenniston went with them, but not all the way. He turned aside, toward his own office, and said, "I've got to find out if Carol is all right."
Hubble said sharply. "Don't tell her, Ken. Not yet."
"No," said Kenniston. "No, I won't."
He went into the small room and closed the door. The telephone was on his desk, and he reached for it, and then he drew his hand away. The fear had altered now into a kind of numbness, as though it were too large to be contained within a human body and had ebbed away, carrying with it all the substances of strength and will as water carries sand. He looked at the black, familiar instrument and thought how improbable it was that there should still be telephones, and fat books beside them with quantities of names and numbers belonging to people who had lived once in villages and nearby towns, but who were not there any more, not since— how long? An hour or so, if you figured it one way. If you figured it another…
He sat down in the chair behind the desk. He had done a lot of hard work sitting in that chair, and now all that work had ceased to matter. Quite a lot of things had ceased to matter. Plans, and ideas, and where you were going to go on your honeymoon, and exactly where you wanted to live, and in what kind of a house. Florida and California and New York were words as meaningless as "yesterday" and "tomorrow." They were gone, the times and the places, and there wasn't anything left out of them but Carol herself, and maybe even Carol wasn't left, maybe she'd been out with her aunt for a little drive in the country, and if she wasn't in Middletown when it happened she's gone, gone, gone…
He took the phone in both hands and said a number over and over into it. The operator was quite patient with him. Everybody in Middletown seemed to be calling someone else, and over the roar and click of the exchange and the ghostly confusion of voices he heard the pounding of his own blood in his ears and he thought that he did not have any right to want Carol to be there, and he ought to be praying that she had gone somewhere, because why would he want anybody he loved to have to face what was ahead of them. And what was ahead of them? How could you guess which one, out of all the shadowy formless horrors that might be…
"Ken?" said a voice in his ear. "Ken, is that you? Hello!"
"Carol," he said. The room turned misty around him and there was nothing anywhere but that voice on the line.
"I've been trying and trying to get you, Ken! What on earth happened? The whole town is excited— I saw a terrible flash of lightning, but there wasn't any storm, and then that quake… Are you all right?"
"Sure, I'm fine… " She wasn't really frightened yet. Anxious, upset, but not frightened. A flash of lightning, and a quake. Alarming yes, but not terrifying, not the end of the world… He caught himself up, hard. He said, "I don't know yet what it was."
"Can you find out? Somebody must know." She did not guess, of course, that Kenniston was an atomic physicist. He had not been allowed to tell that to anyone, not even his fiancŽ. To her, he was merely a research technician in an industrial laboratory, vaguely involved with test tubes and things. She had never questioned him very closely about his work, apparently content to leave all that up to him, and he had been grateful because it had spared him the necessity of lying to her. Now he was even more grateful, because she would not dream that he might have special information. That way, he could spare her a little longer, get himself in hand before he told her. "I'll do my best," he told her. "But until we're sure, I wish you and your aunt would stay in the house, off the street. No, I don't think your bridge-luncheon will come off anyway. And you can't tell what people will do when they're frightened. Promise? Yes— yes, I'll be over as soon as I can."
He hung up, and as soon as that contact with Carol was broken, reality slipped away from him again. He looked around the office, and it became suddenly rather horrible, because it had no longer any meaning. He had an urgent wish to get out of it, yet when he rose he stood for some while with his hands on the edge of the desk, going over Hubble's words in his mind, remembering how the Sun had looked, and the stars, and the sad, alien Earth, knowing that it was all impossible but unable to deny it. The long hall of time, and a shattering force… He wanted desperately to run away, but there was no place to run to. Presently he went down the corridor to Hubble's office.
They were all there, the twelve men of the staff, and Johnson. Johnson had gone by himself into a corner. He had seen what lay out there beyond the town, and the others had not. He was trying to understand it, to understand the fact and the explanation of it he had just heard. It was not a pleasant thing, to watch him try. Kenniston glanced at the others. He had worked closely with these men. He had thought he knew them all so well, having seen them under stress, in the moments when their work succeeded and the others when it did not. Now he realized that they were all strangers, to him and to each other, alone and wary with their personal fears.
Old Beitz was saying, almost truculently, "Even if it were true, you can't say exactly how long a time has passed. Not just from the stars."
Hubble said, "I'm not an astronomer, but anyone can figure it from the tables of known star-motions, and the change in the constellations. Not exactly, no. But as close as will ever matter."
"But if the continuum were actually shattered, if this town has actually jumped millions of years… " Beitz' voice trailed off. His mouth began to twitch and he seemed suddenly bewildered by what he was saying, and he, and all of them, stood looking at Hubble in a haunted silence.
Hubble shook his head. "You won't really believe, until you see for yourselves. I don't blame you. But in the meantime, you'll have to accept my statement as a working hypothesis."
Morrow cleared his throat and asked, "What about the people out there— the town? Are you going to tell them?"
"They'll have to know at least part of it," Hubble said. "It'll get colder, very much colder, by night, and they'll have to be prepared for it. But there must not be any panic. The Mayor and the Chief of Police are on their way here now, and we'll work it out with them."
"Do they know yet, themselves?" asked Kenniston, and Hubble said, "No."
Johnson moved abruptly. He came up to Hubble and said, "I don't get all this scientific talk about space and time. What I want to know is— is my boy safe?"
Hubble stared at him. "Your boy?"
"He went out to Martinsen's farm early, to borrow a cultivator. It's two miles out the north road. What about him, Mr. Hubble— is he safe?"
That was the secret agony that had been riding him, the one he had not voiced. Hubble said gently. "I would say that you don't have to worry about him at all, Johnson."
Johnson nodded, but still looked worried. He said, "Thanks, Mr. Hubble. I'd better go back now. I left my wife in hysterics."
A minute or two after he left, Kenniston heard a siren scream outside. It swung into the Lab yard and stopped. "That," said Hubble, "would be the Mayor."
A small and infirm reed to lean upon, thought Kenniston, at a time like this. There was nothing particularly wrong about Mayor Garris. He was no more bumbling, inefficient, or venal than the average mayor of any average small city. He liked banquets and oratory, he worried about the right necktie, and he was said to be a good husband and father. But Kenniston could not, somehow, picture Bertram Garris shepherding his people safely across the end of the world. He thought so even less when Garris came in, his bones well padded with the plump pink flesh of good living, his face the perfect pattern of the successful little man who is pleased with the world and his place in it. Just now he was considerably puzzled and upset, but also rather elated at the prospect of something important going on. Kimer, the Chief of Police, was another matter. He was a large angular man with a face that had seen many grimy things and had learned from them a hard kind of wisdom. Not a brilliant man, Kenniston thought, but one who could get things done. And he was worried, far more worried than the Mayor. Garris turned immediately to Hubble. It was obvious that he had a great respect for him and was proud to be on an equal footing with such an important person as one of the nation's top atomic scientists. "Is there any news yet, Doctor Hubble? We haven't been able to get a word from outside, and the wildest rumors are going around. I was afraid at first that you might have had an explosion here in the laboratory, but… "
Kimer interrupted him. "Talk is going around that an atomic bomb hit here, Doctor Hubble. Some of the people are getting scared. If enough of them get to believe it, we'll have a panic on our hands. I've got our officers on the streets soothing 'em down, but I'd like to have a straight story they'll believe."
"Atomic bomb!" said Mayor Garris. "Preposterous. We're all alive, and there's been no damage. Doctor Hubble will tell you that atomic bombs… "
For the second time he was cut short. Hubble broke in sharply. "We're not dealing with an ordinary bomb. And the rumors are true, as far as they go." He paused, and went on more slowly, making every word distinct, "A super-atomic was exploded an hour ago, for the first time in history, right here."
He let that sink in. It was a lingering and painful process, and while it was going on Kenniston looked away, up through the window at the dusky sky and the sullen red Sun, and felt the knot in his stomach tighten. We were warned, he thought. We were all warned for years that we were playing with forces too big for us.
"It didn't destroy us," Hubble was saying. "We're lucky that way. But it did have certain— effects."
"I don't understand," said the Mayor piteously. "I simply don't— Certain effects? What?"
Hubble told him, with quiet bluntness.
The Mayor and the Chief of Police of Middletown, normal men of a normal city, adjusted to life in a normal world, listening to the incredible. Listening, trying to comprehend— trying, and failing, and rejecting it utterly.
"That's insane," said Garris angrily. "Middletown thrown into the future? Why, the very sound of it… What are you trying to do, Doctor Hubble?"
He said a great deal more than that. So did Kimer. But Hubble wore them down. Quietly, implacably, he pointed to the alien landscape around the town, the deepening cold, the red, aged Sun, the ceasing of all wire and radio communication from outside. He explained, sketchily, the nature of time and space, and how they might be shattered. His scientific points they could not understand. But those they took on faith, the faith which the people of the Twentieth Century had come to have in the interpreters of the complex sciences they themselves were unable to comprehend. The physical facts they understood well enough. Too well, once they were forced to it.
It got home at last. Mayor Garris sank down into a chair, and his face was no longer pink, and the flesh sagged on it. His voice was no more than a whimper when finally he asked, "What are we going to do?"
Hubble had an answer ready, to a part of that question, at least. "We can't afford a panic. The people of Middletown will have to learn the truth slowly. That means that none of them must go outside the town yet— or they'd learn at once. I'd suggest you announce the area outside town is possibly radioactive contaminated, and forbid anyone to leave."
Police Chief Kimer grasped with pathetic eagerness at the necessity of coping with a problem he could comprehend. "I can put men and barricades at all the street-ends, to see to that."
"And our local National Guard company is assembling now at the Armory," put in Mayor Garris. His voice was shaky, his eyes still stunned.
Hubble asked, "What about the city's utilities?"
"Everything seems to be working— power, gas and water," the Mayor answered.
They would, Kenniston thought. Middletown's coal-steam electric generation plant, and its big watertower, and its artificial gas plant, had all come through time with them.
"They, and all food and fuel, must be rationed," Hubble was saying. "Proclaim it as an emergency measure."
Mayor Garris seemed to feel a little better at being told what to do. "Yes. We'll do that at once." Then he asked, timidly, "Isn't there any way of getting in touch with the rest of the country?"
"The rest of the country," Hubble reminded him, "is some millions of years in the dead past. You'll have to keep remembering that."
"Yes— of course. I keep forgetting," said the Mayor. He shivered, and then took refuge in the task set him. "We'll get busy at once."
When the car had borne the two away, Hubble looked haggardly at his silent colleagues.
"They'll talk, of course. But if the news spreads slowly, it won't be so bad. It'll give us a chance to find out a few things first."
Crisci began to laugh, a little shrilly. "If it's true, this is a side-splitting joke! This whole town flung into the end of the world and not even knowing it yet! All these fifty thousand people, not guessing yet that their Cousin Agnes in Indianapolis has been dead and dust for millions of years!"
"And they mustn't guess," Hubble said. "Not yet. Not until we know what we face in this future Earth."
He went on, thinking aloud. "We need to see what's out there, outside the town, before we can plan anything. Kenniston, will you get a jeep and bring it back here? Bring spare gasoline, and some warm clothing, too. We'll need it out there. And Ken— bring two guns."
Kenniston walked back down Mill Street, toward the garage where he had left his car a billion years ago when such things were still important. He knew they kept a jeep there for road service, and he knew also that they would not have any need for it now because there were no longer any roads. He wished he had a topcoat. At the rate the air was chilling off it would be below zero by nightfall.