That broke the ice. One after another they spoke, and when they finished, it was plain that all save Heisler were hostile, antagonistic and merciless. Miller turned to him—
“What is your verdict?”
“I am going to keep quiet. These men know it all. You have heard them. They are a unit. What I would say can make no difference. In fact, I don’t care. For some time I have ceased to care about anything.”
Miller turned in his swivel chair and looked out over the city. In some ways it was a pretty city, if one liked such a place. Under him, in the city streets, in the beehives, over twenty million automobilists spent their lives on wheels. Not one in a million had a desire beyond the city limits; the roads connecting the metropolis with other cities were but urban arteries wherein the automobiles passed like corpuscles, the auto-trucks proceeded like plasma. Miller feared the city, but he pitied the legless pigmies inhabiting it.
Then he turned again and asked for silence.
“I wanted to make a peaceful adjustment. We desire no more bloodshed, no more internecine strife. You who lead public sentiment have by your recent talk shown me that the pedestrian can expect no mercy at the hands of the present Government. You know and I know that this is no longer a nation where the people rule. You rule. You elect whom you please for senators, for presidents; you snap your whip and they dance. That is why I came to you men, instead of making a direct appeal to the Government. Feeling confident what your action would be, I have prepared this short paper which I will ask you to sign. It contains a single statement:
‘The Pedestrians cannot return.’
“When you have all signed this, I will explain to you just what we will do.”
“Why sign it?” said the first man, the one seated to the right of Miller. “Now my idea is this!” and he crumpled the paper to a tight ball and threw it under the table. His conduct was at once followed by applause. Only Heisler sat still. Miller looked out the window till all was quiet.
Finally he spoke again.
“In our colony we have perfected a new electro-dynamic principle. Released, it at once separates the atomic energy which makes possible all movement, save muscle movement. We have tested this out with smaller machines in limited space and know exactly what we can do. We do not know how to restore the energy in any territory where we have once destroyed it. Our electricians are waiting for my signal transmitted by radio. In fact, they have been listening to all this conversation, and I will now give them the signal to throw the switch. The signal is our motto, ‘We will come back.’
“So that is the signal?” sneered one of the men. “What happened?”
“Nothing much,” replied Heisler, “at least I see no difference. What was supposed to happen, Abraham Miller?”
“Nothing much,” said Miller, “only the destruction of all mankind except the pedestrians. We tried to imagine what would happen when our electricians threw the switch and released this new principle, but even our sociologists could not fully imagine what would be the result. We do not know whether you can live or die—whether any of you can survive. No doubt the city dwellers will die speedily in their artificial bee-hives. Some in the country may survive.”
“Hello, hello!” exclaimed a multi-millionaire, “I feel no different. You are a dreamer of dreams. I am leaving and will report you at once to the police. Open your damn door and let us out!”
Miller opened the door.
Most of the men pressed their starting button and took hold of the steering rod. Not a machine moved. The others startled, tried to leave. Their auto cars were dead. Then one, with a hysterical curse, raised an automatic at Miller and pulled the trigger. There was a click—and nothing more. Miller pulled out his watch.
“It is now 2:40 P. M. The automobilists are beginning to die. They do not know it yet. When they do, there will be a panic. We cannot give any relief. There are only a few hundred of us and we cannot feed and care for hundreds of millions of cripples. Fortunately there is a circular inclined plane or ramp in this building and your autocars are all equipped with brakes. I will push you one at a time to the plane, if you will steer your cars. Obviously you do not care to remain here and equally obviously the elevators are not running. I will call on my stenographer to help me. Perhaps you suspected before that he was a pedestrian trained from boyhood to take female parts. He is one of our most efficient spies. And now we will say goodbye. A century ago you knowingly and willingly tried to exterminate us. We survived. We do not want to exterminate you, but I fear for your future.”
Thereupon he went behind one of the autocars and started pushing it towards the doorway. The stenographer, who had reappeared as a pedestrian, and in trousers, took hold of another car. Soon only Heisler was left. He held up his hand in protest.
“Would you mind pushing me over to that window?”
Miller did so. The automobilist looked out curiously.
“There are no airplanes in the sky. There should be hundreds.”
“No doubt,” replied Miller, “they have all planed down to earth. You see they have no power.”
“Then everything has stopped?”
“Almost. There is still muscle power. There is still power produced by the bending of wood as in a bow and arrow—also that produced by a metal coil like the main spring in a watch. You notice your watch is still running. Of course, domestic animals can still produce power—that is just a form of muscle power. In our valley we have grist mills and saw mills running by water power. We can see no reason why they should not keep on; all other power is destroyed. Do you realize it? There is no electricity, no steam, no explosions of any kind. All those machines are dead.” Heisler pulled out a handkerchief, slowly, automatically and wiped the sweat from his face as he said:
“I can hear a murmur from the city. It rises up to this window like distant surf beating rhythmically against a sandy shore. I can bear no other noise, only this murmur. It recalls to my mind the sound of a swarm of bees leaving their old hive and flying compactly through the air with their queen in the center, trying to find a new home. There is a sameness to the noise like a distant waterfall. What does it mean? I think I know, but I cannot bear to say it with words.”
“It means,” said Miller, “that below us and around us twenty million people are beginning to die in office buildings, stores and homes; in subways, elevators and trains; in tubes and ferry boats; on the street, and in the restaurant twenty million people suddenly realize that they cannot move. No one can help them. Some have left their cars and are trying to pull themselves along on their hands, their withered legs helplessly trailing behind them. They are calling to each other for help, but even now they cannot know the full extent of the disaster. By tomorrow each man will be a primitive animal. In a few days there will be no food, no water. I hope they will die quickly—before they eat each other. The nation will die and no one will know about it, for there will be no newspapers, no telephones, no wireless. I will communicate with my people by carrier pigeons. It will be months before I can rejoin them. Meanwhile I can live. I can go from place to place. The sound you hear from the city is the cry of a soul in despair.”
Heisler grabbed Miller’s hand convulsively. “But if you made it stop, you can make it start?”
“No—we stopped it with electricity. There is now no more electricity. I presume our own machines were at once put out of power.”
“So we are going to die?”
“I believe so. Perhaps your scientists can invent a remedy. We did a hundred years ago. We lived. Your nation tried by every known scientific art to destroy us, but we lived. Perhaps you can. How can I tell? We wanted to arbitrate. All we asked for was equality. You saw how those other men voted and how they thought. If they had had the power, they would instantly have destroyed my little colony. What we did was simply done in self-protection.”
Heisler tried to light his cigar. The electric lighter would not work, so he held it dry in his mouth, in one corner, chewing it.
“You say your name is Abraham Miller? I believe we are cousins of some sort. I have a book that tells about it.”
“I know all about that. Your great-grandfather and my great-grandmother were brother and sister.”
“I believe that is what the professor said, except that at that time we did not know about you. What I want to talk about, however, is my daughter.”
The two men talked on and on. The murmur continued to mount from the city, unceasing, incessant, full of notes new to the present generation. Yet at the distance—from the earth below to the hundredth story above, it was all one sound. Though composed of millions of variants, it blended into unity. Miller finally began walking up and down, from one office wall to the window and back again.
“I thought no one more free from nerves than I was. My whole life has been schooled in preparation for this moment. We had right, justice, even our forgotten God on our side. I still can see no other way, no other way, but this makes me sick, Heisler; it nauseates me. When I was a boy I found a mouse caught in a barn door, almost torn in two. I tried to help it and the tortured animal bit my finger so I simply had to break its neck. It couldn’t live—and when I tried to help it, it bit me, so, I had to kill it. Do you understand? I had to, but, though I was justified, I grew deadly sick; I vomited on the barn floor. Something like that is going on below there. Twenty million deformed bodies all around us are beginning to die. They might have been men and women like those we have in the colony but they became obsessed with the idea of mechanical devices of all kinds. If I tried to help—went into the street now—they would kill me. I couldn’t keep them off me—I couldn’t kill them fast enough. We were justified—man—we were justified, but it makes me sick.”
“It does not affect me that way,” replied Heisler, “I am accustomed to crushing out my opponents. I had to, or they would crush me. I look on all this as a wonderful experiment. For years I have thought about our civilization—on account of my daughter. I have lost interest. In many ways I have lost my fighting spirit. I don’t seem to care what happens, but I would like to follow that cur down the circular spiral plane and wrap my hands around his neck. I don’t want him to die of hunger.”
“No. You stay here. I want you to write a history of it all—just how it happened. We want an accurate record to justify our action. You stay here and work with my stenographer. I am going to find your daughter. We cannot let a pedestrian suffer. We will take you back with us. With suitable apparatus you could learn to ride a horse.”
“You want me to live?”
“Yes, but not for yourself. There are a dozen reasons. For the next twenty years you can lecture to our young people. You can tell them what happened when the world ceased to work, to sweat, when they deliberately exchanged the home for the automobile and toil and labor for machinery. You can tell them that and they will believe you.”
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Heisler. “I have made Presidents and now I become a legless example for a new world.”
“You will attain fame. You will be the last automobilist.”
“Let’s start,” urged Heisler. “Call your stenographer!”
The stenographer had been in New York one month prior to the meeting of Miller and the representatives of the automobilists. During that time, thanks to his early training in mimicry as a spy, he had been absolutely successful in deceiving all he came in contact with. In his autocar, dressed as a stenographer, his face perfumed and painted, and rings on his fingers, he passed unnoticed amid the other thousands of similar women. He went to their restaurants and to their theatres. He even visited them in their homes. He was the perfect spy; but he was a man.
He had been trained to the work of a spy. For years he had been imbued with loyalty to an enthusiasm for his republic of pedestrians. He had sworn to the oath—that the republic should come first. Abraham Miller had selected him because he could trust him. The spy was young, with hardly a down on his cheeks. He was celibate. He was patriotic.
But for the first time in his life, he was in a big city. The firm on the floor below employed a stenographer. She was a very efficient worker in more ways than one and there was that about the new stenographer that excited her interest. They met and arranged to meet again. They talked about love, the new love between women. The spy did not understand this, having never heard of such a passion, but he did understand eventually, the caresses and kisses. She proposed that they room together, but he naturally found objections. However, they had spent much of their spare time together. More than once the pedestrian had been on the point of confiding to her, not only concerning the impending calamity, but also his real sex and his true love.
In such cases where a man falls in love with a woman the explanation is hard to find. It is always hard to find. Here there was something twisted, a pathological perversion. It was a monstrous thing that he should fall in love with a legless woman when he might, by waiting, have married a woman with columns of ivory and knees of alabaster. Instead, he loved and desired a woman who lived in a machine. It was equally pathological that she should love a woman. Each was sick—soul-sick, and each to continue the intimacy deceived the other. Now with the city dying beneath him, the stenographer felt a deep desire to save this legless woman. He felt that a way could be found, somehow, to persuade Abraham Miller to let him marry this stenographer—at least let him save her from the debacle.
So in soft shirt and knee trousers he cast a glance at Miller and Heisler engaged in earnest conversation and then tiptoed out the door and down the inclined plane to the floor below. Here all was confusion. Boldly striding into the room where the stenographer had her desk, he leaned over her and started to talk. He told her that he was a man, a pedestrian. Rapidly came the story of what it all meant, the cries from below, the motionless autocars, the useless elevators, the silent telephones. He told her that the world of automobilists would die because of this and that, but that she would live because of his love for her. All he asked was the legal right to care for her, to protect her. They would go somewhere and live, out in the country. He would roll her around the meadows. She could have geese, baby geese that would come to her chair when she cried, “Weete, weete.”
The legless woman listened. What pallor there might be in her cheeks was skillfully covered with rouge. She listened and looked at him, a man, a man with legs, walking. He said he loved her, but the person she had loved was a woman; a woman with dangling, shrunken, beautiful legs like her own, not muscular monstrosities.
She laughed hysterically, said she would marry him, go wherever he wanted her to go, and then she clasped him to her and kissed him full on the mouth, and then kissed his neck over the jugular veins, and he died, bleeding into her mouth, and the blood mingled with rouge made her face a vivid carmine. She died some days later from hunger.
Miller never knew where his stenographer died. Had he time he might have hunted for him, but he began to share Heisler’s anxiety about the pedestrian girl isolated and alone amid a world of dying automobilists. To the father she was a daughter, the only child, the remaining and sole branch of his family. To Miller, however, she was a symbol. She was a sign of nature’s revolt, an indication of her last spasmodic effort to restore mankind to his former place in the world. Her father wanted her saved because she was his daughter, the pedestrian because she was one of them, one of the race of pedestrians.
On that hundredth floor kegs of water, stores of food had been provided. Every provision had been made to sustain life in the midst of death. Heisler was shown all these. He was made comfortable and then Miller, with some provisions, a canteen of water, a road map, and a stout club in his grasp, left that place of peace and quiet and started down the spiral stairway. At the best it was simply difficult walking, the spirals being wide enough to prevent dizziness. What Miller feared was the obstruction of the entire passage at some point by a tangled mass of autocars, but evidently all cars which had managed to reach the plane had been able to descend. He paused now
and then at this floor or that, shuddered at the cries he heard and then went on, down, down into the street.
Here it was even worse than he expected. On the second the electro-dynamic energy had been released from the Ozark valley—on that very second all machinery had ceased. In New York City twenty million people were in automobiles or autocars at that particular second. Some were working at desks, in shops; some were eating in restaurants, loafing at their clubs; others were going somewhere. Suddenly everyone was forced to stay where he was. There was no communication save within the limits of each one’s voice; the phone, radio, newspapers were useless. Every autocar stopped; every automobile ceased to move. Each man and woman was dependent on his own body for existence; no one could help the other, no one could help himself. Transportation died and no one knew it had happened save in his own circle, as far as the eye could see or the ear could hear, because communication had died with the death of transportation. Each automobilist stayed where he happened to be at that particular moment.
Then slowly as the thought came to them that movement was impossible, there came fear and with fear, panic. But it was a new kind of panic. All previous panics consisted in the sudden movement of large numbers of people in the same direction, fleeing from a real or an imaginary fear. This panic was motionless and for a day the average New Yorker, while gripped with fear, crying with fright, remained within his car. Then came mass-movement but not the movement of previous panics. It was the slow tortuous movement of crippled animals dragging legless bodies forward by arms unused to muscular exercise. It was not the rapid, wind-like movement of the frenzied panic stricken mob, but a slow, convulsive, worm-like panic. Word was passed from one to another in hoarse whisperings that the city was a place of death, would become a morgue, that in a few days there would be no food. While no one knew what had happened everyone knew that the city could not live long unless food came regularly from the country, and the country suddenly became more than long cement roads between sign-boards. It was a place where food could be procured and water. The city had become dry. The mammoth pump throwing millions of gallons of water to a careless population had ceased to pump. There was no more water save in the rivers encircling the city and these were filthy, man-polluted. In the country there must be water somewhere.
The Twelfth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: David H. Keller, M.D. Page 23