by Fred Hoyle
‘Wow,’ he said to Cathy, ‘this is it. What shall we do?’
‘I want to go off by myself now,’ she replied. ‘Let’s meet here at twelve. I’ll have done what I want to do by then, and you can walk about and tell me how it goes.’
To his question of what was she going to do she made no answer. With a wave of her hand she crossed Whitehall and made off towards the direction of the Strand.
Conway saw that he had only three-quarters of an hour to kill. He wondered what Cathy was up to. He’d had an idea that she was going to go and talk to the Government, but apparently not, for that would 'have taken them down to Westminster. Maybe she was going to persuade some newspaper editor in Fleet Street to make an announcement of some sort. But that didn’t seem right either. It was much too feeble. He thought he would go and look at the pictures in the National Gallery, but then decided to stroll in the direc
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tion of Seven Dials. You could still see a little of the London of the twentieth century here. He stood for a moment on the edge of the pavement, looking reflectively at a recently changed skyline. It was curious the way they took away one building and put another in its place, and yet still kept to the same pattern of streets. His thoughts flicked back to the recent changes in his own life. It was rather like the way the atoms changed in your body. Their identity was never quite the same two minutes running, and over the yeans they changed completely. But it didn’t make any difference to the structure, it didn’t make any difference to you. Why should it? After all, one atom of oxygen was exactly the same as another. It didn’t matter in the least swopping them round as long as you didn’t change the pattern. It was of course the pattern that really counted, and this must be what had hapened to Cathy. Part of the pattern, only a part, had been changed. And now both parts, the new and the old, were growing in confidence. For the first few hours, he realized, the changes must have produced a pretty numb state of affairs. Now he had the feeling that Cathy’s brain had reshuffled itself and that all the parts were working together in complete harmony.
He heard a growing murmur from Trafalgar Square. Something seemed to be happening, probably a new bulletin had come through. Bloody nonsense of course, but he might as well find out what was going on. He began to stroll slowly back, his mind still occupied with his new train of thought. The noise ahead of him was increasing. A vehicle came tearing down the street at a breakneck pace. Bloody fool, thought Conway, they’ll roast him for that. People began to pass him, heading out of the Square. They were hurrying, some of them running. He asked one elderly man, who was limping more slowly along, what it was all about.
‘It’s War. They’ve started.’
Conwayvstood still. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t be true. He knew they were fools but not such fools. It had to be a big last-minute scare, just to frighten the wits out of the
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people, so the Governments could give themselves manoeuvring room. The scene around him 'had all the aspects of a major panic, but this would be what the Governments wanted. t
A woman carrying a young child ran past him, her face streaming with tears. It took quite a while before he could make his way against the human current that came against him, but at last he reached the Square. People were erupting out of the buildings, so that in spite of those who had managed to get away, some towards the river, others in the direction of Piccadilly, and others along the way he had come, the Square was still as full as ever. It was like an ants’ nest, except that ants move in orderly columns. He wondered if there was any chance that he could get control of the speaker system and tell them that it was all a lot of bull. Two days earlier the thought wouldn’t have occurred to him, but with Cathy to stand behind him he wouldn’t need to worry much about the reprisals of bureaucracy.
It was odd that the thought of Cathy hadn’t occurred to him before. Instead of being worried sick aboout her, as he had been in the big arena at the time of the landing, he felt now that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself. It would be as much as he could do himself to fight his way across the Square and to get back to their agreed spot by twelve o’clock.
The speakers boomed out again. A list of cities now under evacuation was being read out — Washington, Moscow, Paris, and all the rest of them. Another piece of civil defence thought Conway. Then came the announcement that the first bomb had fallen on New York, and for the first time Conway knew that this was really it. They’d played around for a century, they’d played around with tensions and counter-tensions, and now at last it had got out of control. Pandora’s box was wide open.
There was a blinding chaos in the streets of New York. The southern tip of Manhattan had been wiped clean.
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From Twentieth Street south it was a mass of rubble and twisted hot metal. An area on the west side from about Ninetieth Street as far up as the George Washington Bridge had also been bitten out of the city as if a giant thumb had suddenly pressed down on it. Almost a million had been killed by the blast, the very suddenness had caught them unawares. Bodies were strewn around in outrageous postures, like sawdust dolls, from north to south and from east to west. Otherwise the human form was absent from the streets. There was life still in New York, there were ten million lives, but they were not to be found in the streets. They were in the prepared fall-out shelters, wondering, desperately wondering, what had happened.
Why hadn’t the warning come sooner? Why hadn’t the complexed interlocking warning system given them more than a couple of minutes’ grace? For the reason that it had had to be checked and cross-checked before anybody had dared to announce that this was the real thing. A warning system cannot possibly be expected to work if it is only called on to operate once. Especially if it is constantly being abused by false warnings.
Why hadn’t the wonderfully delicate, computer-cion- trolled system of antimissile missiles worked properly? The answer was that it had worked. It had intercepted almost seventy per cent of the attacking rockets, which was more than anybody in informed circles had expected.
New York was not the only city where these things were happening. Mushroom-shaped clouds were already rising to monstrous heights above Chicago and Washington. Tons of radioactive material had already been injected into the stagnant pool of air that overlay Los Angeles. All passes across the mountains were blocked by columns of vehicles. Soon the grisly toll would be exacted from cities of lower and lower rank.
The American reply had been delayed because the President’s final O.K. had been delayed. The information had reached his office on the special communication circuit it
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is true, but the President had just not happened to be in his
office at that particular moment. The planners, deep in their prepared shelters, now realized that it had been a big mistake not to fit all relaxing rooms with the latest of communication devices.
But now the Western reply had been made, it was moving at upwards of twenty thousand miles per hour through the air, the very thin air high above the Earth. A few moments later it would reach its targets, the nerve centres of the Soviet Union. Watchers far down the long avenue leading out of Red Square would see the Lenin Mausoleum, and the Kremlin itself, disappear inside a towering column of flame.
The chief launching areas of either side were hit and hit again. The operational personnel was halved, halved again, and yet again, buit still the missiles continued to rise from the ground. They were no longer under human control. The master computer, buried deep inside the Earth, out of reach of all attack, continued to direct activities. Doors opened, rockets were assembled by mechanical and electrical controls, supplied with their fuels by automatic means, and transported by a moving platform to the inclined launching ramp, from which they rose into the air with a deafening roar. This was the ultimate deterrent, a deterrent that, on
ce activated, could never be stopped, except through the exhaustion of the whole complete stockpile. There were hundreds of such sites both in the West and in the East. Unmoved by events, by death and by suffering, they all continued, like the obedient servants they were, to project their grisly human-designed pencils of destruction in an unbroken stream across the sky.
Conway saw the first bomb explode, about three miles away, he judged, in the direction of the City. He could hardly have missed seeing it, for the air was filled with a vast white flash, a vast whiteness that blinded him for the moment. Then the blast knocked him to the ground. He heard stones and blocks of concrete falling around him.
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Miraculously he was not severely hit. Then caine the suction. His only link with life now was the oxygen that he happened to have in his lungs. He could last for about three minutes, but by that time it might be over. The thudding became dull in his ears, and lights formed themselves before his eyes. Then it eased and he found himself able to breathe again.
Very slowly and wearily, his chest heaving, he managed to get to his feet. Wrecked vehicles and wrecked bodies were strewn around the Square. He noticed that there were far more bodies away on the left than there were over by the Strand. He realized that this must have been due to the blast, which had lifted many of its victims far through the air. He rested for a moment against a doorway, keeping a little inside lest he be hit from above. He tested his arms and legs, incredibly they seemed all right.
Then the stark horror of his position hit him. So far from being all right he was already a dead main. In the moment of the flash he must have been drenched with gamma rays. Everything was all right for the moment, but in a few hours the cells would begin to disintegrate. His hair would fall out and the skin would open up till over his body. After a few days of intense agony he would die.
Then he knew that it wouldn’t happen that way. He had a few hours, plenty of time, to find a bottle of sleeping tablets. A big overdose, and he would be dead before the disintegration started. He wondered if it might be possible to get out of London, perhaps even to get home. It would be best if he could fall asleep back there high on the Downs. With a sharp pang he realized that he would never see Cathy again. He could hardly expect that she would be able to find her way back here now. There must be thousands of millions like him who would never see their husbands, wives, sweethearts, and children again.
Then the second bomb struck. It was much closer this time, and Conway was thrown high in the air by the blast. He hit the ground with a sickening thud. The suction passed again and he was vaguely aware of being still alive. His eyes
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had been almost burnt out by the big flash and now he could only see rather vaguely those things that were quite close by. Looking around very slowly he found himself staring into the face of the woman who had run past him on the street. The woman who had been clutching the young child. She was still clutching it and they were both dead. He could tell that by the grotesque pile into which they had been pitched by the blast.
It was then that the first suspicions came to him. How could the woman have got to where he now saw her? It had to be, it just had to be, that he was seeing things again. It explained the woman, for she was the only person he had looked at at all carefully since Cathy left him. This of course was what Cathy had come to do. He realized that it was useless to worry about his aches and pains, the best thing was just to lie there and wait.
The scene began to clear and he could focus again right across to the far side of the Square. For a moment he didn’t realize that the vision was gone, that this was return to reality. It was the lack of debris that gave it away. The ghastly qualities of the scene had gone, but what the scene had lost in horror it had gained in grotesqueness. He saw vehicles piled here, there and everywhere, in an incredible tangle. It was lucky that traffic was always forced to crawl through the Square these days, for otherwise many people would have been badly hurt. Thousands of them were lying on the ground, some twitching, some moaning, some just lying supine. Every now and then someone would get up, take a run, and then deliberately crash down on the ground. He rubbed his shoulder and supposed that that was just what he himself had done.
Articles of every description were scattered as ffcr as his eyes could see, down Whitehall, right to Parliament Square, up towards St James’s Street, and down the Strand. Everywhere traffic was stopped, everywhere people were still in the grip of the vision. He picked his way carefully among the sprawling, writhing figures. A couple of smartly-dressed
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women, straight from a beauty salon, but now with their sculptured hair covered in dust, were staring up at the sky. Saliva was dribbling out of their mouths and they were making faint moaning sounds.
He worked his way round the body of a man dressed in immaculate City clothes. The fellow was clutching his own throat and making sounds like water gurgling down a pipe. His rolled umbrella and bowler hat were lying not far away, his brief-case burst open to disgorge a neat packet of sandwiches, at which pigeons were placidly pecking.
He reached the place where he 'had agreed to meet Cathy. He wondered how the devil she’d been able to do it. It was all very well to make you see something that was already in your own head. It was only a matter of disturbing the memory storage areas, but he didn’t see how she’d been able to do the same thing to everybody. But perhaps they weren’t 'all seeing the same thing. Perhaps each person had his own private vision. That was the way it must be. Then he saw her coming towards him, a grim little smile on her face.
‘I’m glad you’re on time,’ she said.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Down into the City. I went into the narrow streets where the crowd was densest. That was the best place to get it started. But I had to walk back because there is nothing running.’
‘I should think not. It’s complete chaos. My God, you’ve started something now.’
‘You see why I said it would be best to get back home by mid-afternoon.’
‘It looks as though we shall have to walk unless I can get one of these cars started.’
He found a taxi with its engine still running. It had careered off the road into a traffic direction signal. The front was horribly buckled - a triple-century job as the garage men would say. He bundled Cathy into it and drove up towards St James’s Street. There wasn’t a vehicle moving
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anywhere so he had it all to himself. He took the shortest way back, ignoring all traffic lights and one-way-street signs. The time had gone for small things. They got back to the car and within a couple of minutes were running down Kensington High Street.
‘At this rate we’re going to break the record for the shortest time home.’
After that they didn’t say much to each other and Conway had a feeling that Cathy was almost as overwhelmed as he was himself. They were half-way to Reading before she said, ‘I knew that everybody was strongly charged up. In a way I’m sorry, but they had only themselves to blame, hadn’t they?’
Conway realized that it was indeed true, they were to blame, all of them, for entertaining such outrageous notions. He looked across at Cathy and nodded. She hadn’t put ideas into anybody’s head. She’d simply made them see what was there already. He saw that everybody was really guilty, not only for having such ideas, but even for permitting the constant discussion of them - by the sort of commentators they had seen on the television the previous night. He saw now what Cathy had meant by saying she would teach them a lesson. He hadn’t enjoyed the lesson 'himself but he knew it had been deserved. ‘Did you actually see anything yourself? I don’t mean the real thing, but the visions.’
‘I couldn’t avoid it. There was some of it inside me already, and in any case the discharge was so intense that some of it came into me from outside.’
Conway didn’t really understand
this, but he felt that in a general way he got the drift of what she was saying. ‘How far do you think the effect spread out ?’
She looked at him with a faint smile, there seemed to be an implied compliment behind it.
About ten miles east of Reading they ran into the outward-moving traffic jam. Quickly he worked out a route in his mind along the side roads. There was a turning that would do it about five miles farther along. It was a tiny road
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to the left, which he did not think many of the drivers ahead would know about.
‘Looks as if the effect has spread as far as this.’
‘Yes, these are the people living on 'the outskirts of the city who have been planning to get away into the country if anything happened. They think it has.’
‘Pity you had to do all this here you know. Really you should have done it in Paris, and in New York, and in Moscow.’
‘There’s more than a chance that it’s happened there already.’
Conway could begin to see it all now. It was a psychological chain reaction, it only needed a small nucleus of people to really believe that it had happened and the whole thing would spread out like a tidal wave until it engulfed the world. He leaned out of the window of the car and shouted at the occupants of the off-side front seat in the car on his immediate right, ‘What goes on?’ The man looked at him in some surprise, ‘You’ve got a big surprise coming, Charlie. It’s started, the big show’s started.’ Conway wished that the man could have been with him in Tragalfar Square. It was a bit uncharitable, but he felt that he would have liked to see the man bashing his head against the nearest stone wall. This was the sort of bloody fool that made it all possible.
An hour later they reached the turn-off point. Conway was immediately able to accelerate the car along the small twisting road. They didn’t talk much, probably both of them were wondering what the news bulletins would say. Another hour and he was pulling up the car outside their own house.