Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  She smiled a little sadly, but the laugh did not cover her worn, tired look. It seemed more like a gesture of obedience than anything else. "Yes. We came to an understanding."

  "I'm Jim Wilson," the big man boomed. "I was in the Chicago Avenue jug for slugging a guy in a card game. They kind of overlooked me when they cleaned the joint out." He winked again. "I kind of helped them overlook me. Then I found Minna." There was tremendous relish in his words.

  Frank started introductions which Nora Spade cut in on. "Maybe you know what happened?" she asked.

  Wilson shook his head. "I was in the jug and they didn't tell us. They just started cleaning out the joint. There was talk in the bullpen--invasion or something. Nobody knew for sure. Have some beer and meat."

  Nora turned to the quiet Minna. "Did you hear anything?"

  "Naw," Wilson said with a kind of affectionate contempt. "She don't know anything about it. She lived in some attic dump and was down with a sore throat. She took some pills or something and when she woke up they were gone."

  "I went to work and--" Minna began, but Wilson cut her off.

  "She swabs out some joints on Chicago Avenue for a living and that was how she happened to be sitting in that tavern. It's payday, and Minna was waiting for her dough!" He exploded into laughter and slapped the table with a huge hand. "Can you beat that? Waiting for her pay at a time like this."

  Frank Brooks set down his beer bottle. The beer was cold and it tasted good. "Have you met anybody else? There must be some other people around."

  "Uh-uh. Haven't met anybody but Minna." He turned his eyes on the woman again, then got to his feet. "Come on, Minna. You and I got to have a little conference. We got things to talk about." Grinning, he walked toward the rear of the restaurant. Minna got up more slowly. She followed him behind the counter and into the rear of the place.

  Alone with Nora, Frank said, "You aren't eating. Want me to look for something else?"

  "No--I'm not very hungry. I was just wondering--"

  "Wondering about what?"

  "When it will happen. When whatever is going to happen--you know what I mean."

  "I'd rather know what's going to happen. I hate puzzles. It's hell to have to get killed and not know what killed you."

  "We aren't being very sensible, are we?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "We should at least act normal."

  "I don't get it."

  Nora frowned in slight annoyance. "Normal people would be trying to reach safety. They wouldn't be sitting in a restaurant drinking beer. We should be trying to get away. Even if it does mean walking. Normal people would be trying to get away."

  Frank stared at his bottle for a moment. "We should be scared stiff, shouldn't we?"

  It was Nora's turn to ponder. "I'm not sure. Maybe not. I know I'm not fighting anything inside--fear, I mean. I just don't seem to care one way or another."

  "I care," Frank replied. "I care. I don't want to die. But we're faced with a situation, and either way it's a gamble. We might be dead before I finish this bottle of beer. If that's true, why not sit here and be comfortable? Or we might have time to walk far enough to get out of range of whatever it is that chased everybody."

  "Which way do you think it is?"

  "I don't think we have time to get out of town. They cleaned it out too fast. We'd need at least four or five hours to get away. If we had that much time the army, or whoever did it, would still be around."

  "Maybe they didn't know themselves when it's going to happen."

  He made an impatient gesture. "What difference does it make? We're in a situation we didn't ask to get in. Our luck put us here and I'm damned if I'm going to kick a hole in the ceiling and yell for help."

  Nora was going to reply, but at that moment Jim Wilson came striding out front. He wore his big grin and he carried another half-dozen bottles of beer. "Minna'll be out in a minute," he said. "Women are always slower than hell."

  He dropped into a chair and snapped the cap off a beer bottle with his thumb. He held the bottle up and squinted through it, sighing gustily. "Man! I ain't never had it so good." He tilted the bottle in salute, and drank.

  * * * * *

  The sun was lowering in the west now, and when Minna reappeared it seemed that she materialized from the shadows, so quietly did she move. Jim Wilson opened another bottle and put it before her. "Here--have a drink, baby."

  Obediently, she tilted the bottle and drank.

  "What do you plan to do?" Frank asked.

  "It'll be dark soon," Wilson said. "We ought to go out and try to scrounge some flashlights. I bet the power plants are dead. Probably aren't any flashlights either."

  "Are you going to stay here?" Nora asked. "Here in the Loop?"

  He seemed surprised. "Why not? A man'd be a fool to walk out on all this. All he wants to eat and drink. No goddam cops around. The life of Reilly and I should walk out?"

  "Aren't you afraid of what's going to happen?"

  "I don't give a good goddam what's going to happen. What the hell! Something's always going to happen."

  "They didn't evacuate the city for nothing," Frank said.

  "You mean we can all get killed?" Jim Wilson laughed. "Sure we can. We could have got killed last week too. We could of got batted in the can by a truck anytime we crossed the street." He emptied his bottle, threw it accurately at a mirror over the cash register. The crash was thunderous. "Trouble with you people, you're worry warts," he said with an expansive grin. "Let's go get us some flashlights so we can find our way to bed in one of those fancy hotels."

  He got to his feet and Minna arose also, a little tired, a little apprehensive, but entirely submissive. Jim Wilson said, "Come on, baby. I sure won't want to lose you." He grinned at the others. "You guys coming?"

  Frank's eyes met Nora's. He shrugged. "Why not?" he said. "Unless you want to start walking."

  "I'm too tired," Nora said.

  As they stepped out through the smashed window, both Nora and Frank half-expected to see other forms moving up and down Madison Street. But there was no one. Only the unreal desolation of the lonely pavement and the dark-windowed buildings.

  "The biggest ghost town on earth," Frank muttered.

  Nora's hand had slipped into Frank's. He squeezed it and neither of them seemed conscious of the contact.

  "I wonder," Nora said. "Maybe this is only one of them. Maybe all the other big cities are evacuated too."

  Jim Wilson and Minna were walking ahead. He turned. "If you two can't sleep without finding out what's up, it's plenty easy to do."

  "You think we could find a battery radio in some store?" Frank asked.

  "Hell no! They'll all be gone. But all you'd have to do is snoop around in some newspaper office. If you can read you can find out what happened."

  It seemed strange to Frank that he had not thought of this. Then he realized he hadn't tried very hard to think of anything at all. He was surprised, also, at his lack of fear. He's gone through life pretty much taking things as they came--as big a sucker as the next man--making more than his quota of mistakes and blunders. Finding himself completely alone in a deserted city for the first time in his life, he had naturally fallen prey to sudden fright. But that had gradually passed, and now he was able to accept the new reality fairly passively. He wondered if that wasn't pretty much the way of all people. New situations brought a surge of whatever emotion fitted the picture. Then the emotion subsided and the new thing became the ordinary.

  This, he decided, was the manner in which humanity survived. Humanity took things as they came. Pile on enough of anything and it becomes the ordinary.

  Jim Wilson had picked up a garbage box and hurled it through the window of an electric shop. The glass came down with a crash that shuddered up the empty darkening street and grumbled off into silence. Jim Wilson went inside. "I'll see what I can find. You stay out here and watch for cops." His laughter echoed out as he disappeared.

  Minna stood waitin
g silently, unmoving, and somehow she reminded Frank of a dumb animal; an unreasoning creature with no mind of her own, waiting for a signal from her master. Strangely, he resented this, but at the same time could find no reason for his resentment, except the feeling that no one should appear as much a slave as Minna.

  Jim Wilson reappeared in the window. He motioned to Minna. "Come on in, baby. You and me's got to have a little conference." His exaggerated wink was barely perceptible in the gloom as Minna stepped over the low sill into the store. "Won't be long, folks," Wilson said in high good humor, and the two of them vanished into the darkness beyond.

  Frank Brooks glanced at Nora, but her face was turned away. He cursed softy under his breath. He said, "Wait a minute," and went into the store through the huge, jagged opening.

  Inside, he could barely make out the counters. The place was larger than it had appeared from the outside. Wilson and Minna were nowhere about.

  Frank found the counter he was looking for and pawed out several flashlights. They were only empty tubes, but he found a case of batteries in a panel compartment against the wall.

  "Who's there?"

  "Me. I came in for some flashlights."

  "Couldn't you wait?"

  "It's getting dark."

  "You don't have to be so damn impatient." Jim Wilson's voice was hostile and surly.

  Frank stifled his quick anger. "We'll be outside," he said. He found Nora waiting where he'd left her. He loaded batteries into four flashlights before Jim Wilson and Minna reappeared.

  Wilson's good humor was back. "How about the Morrison or the Sherman," he said. "Or do you want to get real ritzy and walk up to the Drake?"

  "My feet hurt," Minna said. The woman spoke so rarely, Frank Brooks was startled by her words.

  "Morrison's the closest," Jim Wilson said. "Let's go." He took Minna by the arm and swung off up the street. Frank and Nora fell in behind.

  Nora shivered. Frank, holding her arm, asked, "Cold?"

  "No. It's just all--unreal again."

  "I see what you mean."

  "I never expected to see the Loop dark. I can't get used to it."

  A vagrant, whispering wind picked up a scrap of paper and whirled it along the street. It caught against Nora's ankle. She jerked perceptibly and kicked the scrap away. The wind caught it again and spiralled it away into the darkness.

  "I want to tell you something," she said.

  "Tell away."

  "I told you before that I slept through the--the evacuation, or whatever it was. That wasn't exactly true. I did sleep through it, but it was my fault. I put myself to sleep."

  "I don't get it."

  "I tried to kill myself. Sleeping tablets. Seven of them. They weren't enough."

  Frank said nothing while they paced off ten steps through the dark canyon that was Madison Street. Nora wondered if he had heard.

  "I tried to commit suicide."

  "Why?"

  "I was tired of life, I guess."

  "What do you want--sympathy?"

  The sudden harshness in his voice brought her eyes around, but his face was a white blur.

  "No--no, I don't think so."

  "Well, you won't get it from me. Suicide is silly. You can have troubles and all that--everybody has them--but suicide--why did you try it?"

  A high, thin whine--a wordless vibration of eloquence--needled out of the darkness into their ears. The shock was like a sudden shower of ice water dashed over their bodies. Nora's fingers dug into Frank's arm, but he did not feel the cutting nails. "We're--there's someone out there in the street!"

  * * * * *

  Twenty-five feet ahead of where Frank and Nora stood frozen there burst the booming voice of Jim Wilson. "What the hell was that?" And the shock was dispelled. The white circle from Wilson's flash bit out across the blackness to outline movement on the far side of the street. Then Frank Brook's light, and Nora's, went exploring.

  "There's somebody over there," Wilson bellowed. "Hey, you! Show your face! Quit sneaking around!"

  Frank's light swept an arc that clearly outlined the buildings across the street and then weakened as it swung westward. There was something or someone back there, but obscured by the dimness. He was swept by a sense of unreality again.

  "Did you see them?"

  Nora's light beam had dropped to her feet as though she feared to point it out into the darkness. "I thought I saw something."

  Jim Wilson was swearing industriously. "There was a guy over there. He ducked around the corner. Some damn fool out scrounging. Wish I had a gun."

  Frank and Nora moved ahead and the four stood in a group. "Put out your lights," Wilson said. "They make good targets if the jerk's got any weapons."

  They stood in the darkness, Nora holding tightly to Frank's arm. Frank said, "That was the damndest noise I ever heard."

  "Like a siren?" Frank thought Jim Wilson spoke hopefully, as though wanting somebody to agree with him.

  "Not like any I ever heard. Not like a whistle, either. More of a moan."

  "Let's get into that goddam hotel and--"

  Jim Wilson's words were cut off by a new welling-up of the melancholy howling. It had a new pattern this time. It sounded from many places; not nearer, Frank thought, than Lake Street on the north, but spreading outward and backward and growing fainter until it died on the wind.

  Nora was shivering, clinging to Frank without reserve.

  Jim Wilson said, "I'll be damned if it doesn't sound like a signal of some kind."

  "Maybe it's a language--a way of communication."

  "But who the hell's communicating?"

  "How would I know?"

  "We best get to that hotel and bar a few doors. A man can't fight in the dark--and nothing to fight with."

  They hurried up the street, but it was all different now. Gone was the illusion of being alone; gone the sense of solitude. Around them the ghost town had come suddenly alive. Sinister forces more frightening than the previous solitude had now to be reckoned with.

  "Something's happened--something in the last few minutes," Nora whispered.

  Frank leaned close as they crossed the street to the dark silent pile that was the Morrison hotel. "I think I know what you mean."

  "It's as though there was no one around and then, suddenly, they came."

  "I think they came and went away again."

  "Did you actually see anyone when you flashed your light?"

  "No--I can't say positively that I did. But I got the impression there were figures out there--at least dozens of them--and that they moved back away from the light. Always just on the edge of it."

  "I'm scared, Frank."

  "So am I."

  "Do you think it could all be imagination?"

  "Those moans? Maybe the first one--I've heard of people imagining sounds. But not the last ones. And besides, we all heard them."

  Jim Wilson, utterly oblivious of any subtle emanations in the air, boomed out in satisfaction: "We don't have to bust the joint open. The revolving door works."

  "Then maybe we ought to be careful," Frank said. "Maybe somebody else is around here."

  "Could be. We'll find out."

  "Why are we afraid?" Nora whispered.

  "It's natural, isn't it?" Frank melted the beam of his light with that of Jim Wilson. The white finger pierced the darkness inside. Nothing moved.

  "I don't see why it should be. If there are people in there they must be as scared as we are."

  Nora was very close to him as they entered.

  The lobby seemed deserted. The flashlight beams scanned the empty chairs and couches. The glass of the deserted cages threw back reflections.

  "The keys are in there," Frank said. He vaulted the desk and scanned the numbers under the pigeon holes.

  "We'd better stay down low," Jim Wilson said. "Damned if I'm going to climb to the penthouse."

  "How about the fourth floor?"

  "That's plenty high enough."

  Frank
came out with a handful of keys. "Odd numbers," he said. "Four in a row."

  "Well I'll be damned," Jim Wilson muttered. But he said no more and they climbed the stairs in silence. They passed the quiet dining rooms and banquet halls, and by the time they reached the fourth floor the doors giving off the corridors had assumed a uniformity.

  "Here they are." He handed a key to Wilson. "That's the end one." He said nothing as he gave Minna her key, but Wilson grunted, "For crissake!" in a disgusted voice, took Minna's key and threw it on the floor.

  Frank and Nora watched as Wilson unlocked his door. Wilson turned. "Well, goodnight all. If you get goosed by any spooks, just yell."

  Minna followed him without a word and the door closed.

  Frank handed Nora her key. "Lock your door and you'll be safe. I'll check the room first." He unlocked the door and flashed his light inside. Nora was close behind him as he entered. He checked the bathroom. "Everything clear. Lock your door and you'll be safe."

  "Frank."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm afraid to stay alone."

  "You mean you want me to--"

  "There are two beds here."

  His reply was slow in coming. Nora didn't wait for it. Her voice rose to the edge of hysteria. "Quit being so damned righteous. Things have changed! Can't you realize that? What does it matter how or where we sleep? Does the world care? Will it make a damn bit of difference to the world whether I strip stark naked in front of you?" A sob choked in her throat. "Or would that outrage your morality."

  He moved toward her, stopped six inches away. "It isn't that. For God's sake! I'm no saint. It's just that I thought you--"

  "I'm plain scared, and I don't want to be alone. To me that's all that's important."

  Her face was against his chest and his arms went around her. But her own hands were fists held together against him until he could feel her knuckles, hard, against his chest. She was crying.

  "Sure," Frank said. "I'll stay with you. Now take it easy. Everything's going to be all right."

  Nora sniffled without bothering to reach for her handkerchief. "Stop lying. You know it isn't going to be all right."