Who was going away? There was only Mom and Dick in the flat, and Henry who was twelve, four years older than Dick, and who took up more than his half of their bed. Dick pushed out to wake Henry, and his hand found only Bunched sheets.
Henry wasn't there!
The next minute Dick heard Henry out in the hall. “Sure, I'll come back soon. Don't you worry. This thing will be over in a jiffy, you'll see. We're just being called out because—because the last big drive is on, an’ they need us in the rear lines so's all the real soldiers can be free to do the fightin'. There ain't nothin’ to worry about, Mom. They can't lick us. Maybe they've licked the rest uh the world but they can't lick the good old U.S.A. We've won every war we were ever in an’ we'll win this one—
"Look Mom, I got to run. The radio said for my unit to be at the Eighth Street Armory at eleven o'clock, an’ it's four of, now. Goo'bye, Mom."
There was a kiss, and the flat-door slamming shut, and then there wasn't any sound coming in through the door at all and the flat seemed awful empty.
In through the window rang the clatter of feet running in the street. Dick heard it every night, listening to the big boys who didn't have to go to bed early and could play in the street after supper. But Dick knew they weren't playing now, because they all ran the one way and after a little while he didn't hear them any more.
Then Dick lay listening to the thunder that had been in the sky so long he usually didn't hear it. The thunder seemed a little louder tonight, and a little nearer, and more scary. The glass in the window kept rattling and that made Dick look at the window and at the square gold-starred flag that hung in the window.
The star was for Pop. It was to show everybody how proud we were that Pop was a hero. Only Dick didn't quite understand why we should be proud when every window in the block had a flag with a gold star, a lot of them even with two or three gold stars.
What was there to be proud about in your Pop being a hero when all the other kids’ fathers were heroes too, and their big brothers, and a lot of their sisters too, being Red Cross nurses and working in ammunishun plants that was blown up and all?
Dick wished Pop would stop being a hero and come home.
Mom and Henry said Pop wasn't ever going to come home, but Dick didn't believe that. Dick didn't believe Pop would go away from them forever and ever.
Now Henry was gone away too. But he was coming back soon. He had told Mom he was, hadn't he? He wouldn't lie to Mom, would he?
Dick heard the sound of feet again, coming down the street. The feet weren't running now. They were marching. Dick knew what feet sounded like when they were marching. He'd heard them before Pop went away, when you could hardly hear them for the crowds shouting and the bands braying soldier-music.
He'd heard the feet marching when Pop went away; there were no bands then, and no hurrahs, and there were hardly anybody in the street, only in the windows a lot of women, waving handkerchiefs, and then holding them up to their faces.
Yes, Dick had heard a lot of marching feet, but they had never sounded quite like these. The sound of them feet wasn't nearly as loud as the others.
Dick pushed back the covers and got to the window. The tops of the street lights were painted black, and the bottoms were blue; so that the gutter was like blue water, deep and awful, and across the street was only a black and dreadful wall.
Down the street came the marchers.
They were boys like Henry, some of them bigger and some smaller, but none of them very much bigger or very much smaller. Each had a gun slanted across his shoulder. Not one was in uniform. They were dressed in their everyday clothes, caps and jackets and pants. Some of the boys wore longies, most wore knickers or shorts, and a lot were barelegged down to the socks folded over the tops of their shoes. They were like a bunch of boys marching out of school on a fire-drill.
They were not playing soldiers. They were soldiers, real soldiers. The way they marched showed that, straight-backed, not talking or laughing. Their chins were lifted. Their eyes looked far ahead, to the end of the street and the end of the city and farther still, to the dark night out of which came the sound of thunder that never stopped.
Four abreast they marched, four and four and four, as far as Dick Carr could see. And alongside each tenth four marched a man in uniform; a man with one empty sleeve pinned to the breast of his coat: a man whose leg swung stiff so that Dick knew it was not a leg at all: a man whose face was broken so it was ugly and terrible as a Hallowe'en mask.
For a long time the boys and the broken men marched by, to where the thunder rolled and the black sky flickered with a lightning whose flashes Dick Carr could not see...
(And Dikar's dream faded into sleep's nothingness.)
...And into sleep's nothingness came a crash of thunder, shaking the ground. It shook Mom's arms that were tight around Dick Carr, and her body against which Dick's face was pressed. Out of the corner of his eye Dick could see the pin on Mom's black breast. The pin was oblong, and it had a blue border, and on the white inside the border there were two gold stars. There were two on the flag in the window now.
Dick was scared, but he wasn't bawling. He hadn't bawled when the siren waked him up, screaming in through the window, nor when Mom and he had jumped out of bed, all dressed like the radio said they should be. He hadn't bawled when, the siren screaming like a great devil in the black sky, they ran in the dark street, and then stopped running because all the women and kids were carrying them along in a rush faster than Dick could run.
No, Dick hadn't bawled even when he and Mom had fallen down the station steps and the old man had dragged them through the big, stiff curtains into the station.
The station was crowded with women and kids, and it was like an ogre's cave. A couple of electric lights made light enough to see them by, but not enough to keep back the shadows that reached out of the enormous black holes at each end of the station, like black arms pawing out to drag the women and the kids into a night that would never end.
The faces he saw were a queer white, and the eyes were too big; and they were sort of hunched, as if they were waiting for something terrible to pounce on them out of the dark.
It came!
Thunder! Thunder louder than before, thunder so loud that when it stopped Dick couldn't hear himself say, “Don't be scared, Mom. I'll take care of you.” But Mom must have heard him, because she squeezed him tighter to her and kissed him on top of his head. Then Dick could hear again. He could hear a woman say, “That must have been one them half-ton bombs. They tell me they can go right down through a ten-story building, and they don't blow up till they hit the cellar, and after they blow up there ain't nothin’ left of the building or anyone was in it. Nothin’ at all."
The old man, who stood by the brown curtain that hung over where the station steps came in, laughed. His laugh was like the cackle of the hens Dick used to hear when pop used to drive him and Henry and Mom out into the country.
"Yeah,” the old man cackled, his eyes kind of wild. “That's right. Ef'n one o’ them things hits overhead here they won't even be little pieces of us left ter pick up."
He had on a uniform, but it wasn't like Pop's uniform. It was very faded but you could see it had once been blue. It was ragged and much too big.
There was thunder again, not so loud. “Well,” said a woman sitting with a suckling baby in her heavy arms. “I wish one would hit right over us. That would be God's mercy."
"There ain't no God,” someone said. “God is dead.” Then whoever it was laughed, and Dick's insides cringed from the laughter. It was a woman in the middle of the platform, and she was standing as still as a rock—her mouth didn't move, and the eyes behind the hair that was down all over her face saw nothing at all. “The End of the World is come and it is too late to repent. We are doomed, doomed—"
Thunder again shattering the laughter, but far away now. The woman who sat next to Mom, with a little girl on her lap and another, brown-haired and brown eyed and prett
y, on the floor alongside of her whispered: “Poor thing, I hear tell she escaped from Philadelphia after it was surrendered. She got through the lines somehow. Did you hear how they went through all the houses that was left and dragged out-?"
"Hush,” Mom begged. “Hush. The children—"
The little girl's mother laughed quietly. “The children will know all about it soon. Yours too. girls or boys, it don't make no difference to those fiends."
"Not mine,” Mom said, very low, and she moved a little to show the other woman what was in her hand. It was a carving knife from their kitchen—
"Attention!" A loud voice shouted out of the place where you used to get your change before the subways stopped running. "Attention, all shelters!" Dick looked and he saw there was a radio behind the little hole where your money used to be pushed out. "The raid is over! The raid is over-"
"It's over,” the old man cackled. “And I'm still alive. Eighty-three years old and not dead yet. I allus said I was born ter be hanged."
"-where you are. Remain where you are. Gas-tests are being made. Remain where you are until gas-tests determine that it is safe to leave. Stand by."
"The Government should of gave us all gas masks,” grumbled a fat lady whom Dick knew. “Like they did in England.” She was Tom Ball's mother and Tom was behind her, hiding his face in her skirts.
"Much good that did England,” the woman with the baby said. “Much good anything did England—"
"Attention!" the radio shouted. "Attention all shelters. Important. An important announcement is about to be made. Stand by."
"Mom,” Dick asked. “What is an important annou—what the radio said?"
"News, son. Big news."
"Good news, Mom?"
"Maybe. Maybe we've won the battle. Maybe we're driving Them—"
"Attention! Attention, all shelters. The next voice you hear will be that of General Edward Albright, provost-marshal-general for this area."
"That's Ed Albright,” the old man cackled. “I remember when he was a buck private alone o’ me, the both of us down with dysentery at Key West. In the Spanish War that was, an—"
"Hush. Hush, you old fool."
The voice Dick heard now, coming into a quiet so deep he could hear Mom's heart beating in his ear, was thin and tired, awful tired. "Our lines are crumbling. Enemy infantry has already penetrated to the outskirts of the city, south and east. The boys, the young women, who have fought so heroically, are still fighting, but there is no longer any hope. Word has come that the columns that were marching to our aid have been completely wiped out by a phalanx of enemy planes."
CHAPTER III: AFTER ARMAGEDDON
The voice stopped, and there wasn't any sound at all. “We are beaten,” the voice began again. “But we shall not surrender. We shall not give over the mothers and the children of this city to the horror that has overtaken the other municipalities that have surrendered.
"My people, when our lines finally break, when the enemy hordes swarm in, I shall press a button on the desk before me to set off mines that have been laid underneath the streets. Every soul in the city will perish in that cataclysm; I, and you, and with us some thousands of those who have made this world of ours a hell."
"Good!" yelled the woman with the babe at her breast. “Good!"
Mom's arms were tight around Dick, and she was crying, but her eyes were shining. “We're going to see Henry soon, son, and your father,” she whispered. “Isn't that wonderful?"
And then everyone was quiet again, and the tired voice was still talking.
"To die like that will be, I know, no sacrifice to you who have laid fathers and husbands, sons and daughters, on the altar of your country. But there is one more sacrifice I must ask of you, for your country.
"Somehow, in the maneuvering of the past few hours, a gap has opened in the enemy lines, to the north. It is already being closed, but the terrain is such that a small and determined force may be able to keep it open long enough for a few to escape.
"No troops can be moved from their present positions. We have some arms, some ammunition, available, but no one to use them. No one—except you women who hear me. You mothers."
"That's funny,” Mrs. Ball sniffed. “We can escape through a hole if we get ourselves killed keepin’ the hole open. The man must be crazy."
"If you mothers can keep that gap open long enough, we may be able to take your children out through it, the tots who are all you have left.
"We may—the possibility is infinitesimal—be able to get them away to the hills north of the city. The chances are that they will die on the way. Even if they do not, it is possible that they will be hunted down and exterminated, that Nature, though less cruel than these hordes that have come out of the East and across the continent from the West and up from the South, will finish the work of our foes.
"But there is a million-to-one chance that the children will come through, and it rests with you to choose whether we shall give them that chance.
"I know that it is a bitter choice to make. I know, mothers, that you would rather that your little daughter, your little son, when I press this button on my desk, go with you into the Outer Darkness where there is peace at last.
"I know how dreadful it would be for you to die not knowing what fate awaits your children, and I should not ask you to make the choice save for this one thing.
"This is the dusk of our day, the dusk of democracy, of liberty, of all that has been the America we lived for, and die for. If there is to be any hope of a tomorrow, it must rest in them, in your sons and daughters.
"If they perish, America shall have perished. If through your sacrifice they survive, then, in some tomorrow we cannot foresee, America will live again and democracy, liberty, freedom shall reconquer the green and pleasant fields that tonight lie devastated.
"If you choose to give America this faint hope, if you decide to make this sacrifice, leave your children in charge of the warden of the shelter where you are, and come at once to headquarters to receive your weapons and your orders.
"We have no way of telling what your decision is until and unless enough of you come here to make the attempt we contemplate feasible. We wait for you. Will you come? Mothers, the choice is yours."
The voice stopped, and for a long time nobody moved, nobody said a thing. Then, all of a sudden, all the women were standing up. All the women were kissing their kids, and then they were going toward the curtain that hung over the bottom of the steps from the station.
They were pushing aside the brown curtain. They were going up the steps.
They were going fast, fast, and their faces were shining as Dick once had seen a bride's face shine as she walked, all in white, up the aisle.
They were all gone, and in the station there were only the kids, and the old, old man in the uniform of faded blue that was too big for him.
It seemed darker here in the ogre's cave. The dark reached out from the great black holes at the ends of the platform. A small, cold hand took hold of Dick's hand. “I'm frightened,” the little brown-haired girl whimpered.
"Aw,” Dick said, squeezing her hand. “There ain't nothin’ to be frightened about. I'll take care of you."
"Will you,” she asked in a very little voice. “Do you promise?"
"Cross my heart,” Dick said, “I'll take care of you, always and always,” and somehow he wasn't quite so frightened any more. “What's your name?"
"Mary Lee. What's yours?"
"Dick Carr."
"Dikar,” she murmured, and moved close to Dick, and her head dropped sleepily on his shoulder.
He liked the way she said it: “Dikar,” so he didn't bother to tell her it was two names. He said “Marilee” in his head, making one name out of her two, and he liked the sound of that...
And a shadow moved across Dick Carr ... A shadow moved across Dikar, and he stirred and came fully awake out of his dream, and it seemed to him that someone had passed him, moving silently in the night.
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CHAPTER IV: WE MEET IN THE NIGHT
Dikar lay in his cot, alert. The sloughing of the wind came to him, and the shrilling of the insects of the night and the breathing of the sleeping boys. There was no sound at all out of tune with the harmony of the dark forest.
Yet Dikar was troubled with an uneasy sense of something wrong.
He tried to quiet himself, tried to find sleep again, sleep and the dream out of which he had wakened. Dikar was desperate to find his dream again, for he knew it was one he had dreamed many times. But always before it had slipped from him in the instant of wakening and tonight it was still as vivid in his mind as yesterday.
The small boy of the dream, Dick Carr, was himself in the Long-Ago that had been only a mist of gray half-memories as shapeless as the dawn-haze that drifts in the waking forest. The dream had told Dikar something of himself and something of that Long-Ago, and if he could find it again it would tell him more.
But Dikar could not find sleep again, nor the dream, because his eagerness barred the way, and his sense of something wrong with the night. So he sighed and rose from his cot, making no sound.
He groped for his apron of woven leaves and tied it about his waist, and stole to the curtain of twined withes that closed the door, moving it a little to peer out.
The leafy boughs of a great oak made a roof that joined the roofs of the Boys’ House and the Girls’ House, at the end where they came nearest the woods. Beneath it the Fire was burning low on its Stone, and a little distance away from its heat Dikar saw the two Girls whose task it was tonight to tend the Fire.
The two Girls drowsed, arms about each other's waists. They had undone their braids, and the hair that cloaked one was black as the night, and the hair that cloaked the other was brown and shining. The black hair swallowed the light, but tiny red glints from the Fire danced merrily on the wavy fall of the brown.
The Girls wore short skirts of plaited grasses, and circlets of woven leaves covered their deepening breasts; but through their cloaks of long hair a shoulder peeped shyly, and a rounded knee, and curve of a thigh.
Dark Yesterday [The Classic Tomorrow Trilogy] Page 2