The Twelfth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: David H. Keller, M.D.
Page 24
So, on the second day began the flight from New York—a flight of cripples, not of eagles; a passage of humanity shaped like war-maimed soldiers. Their speed was not uniform, but the fastest could only crawl less than a mile an hour. Philosophers would have stayed where they were and died. Animals, thus tortured, would quietly wait the end, but these automobilists were neither philosophers nor animals, and they had to move. All their life they had been moving. The bridges were the first spaces to show congestion. On all of them were some automobiles, but traffic is not heavy at 2 in the afternoon. Gradually, by noon of the second day, these river highways were black with people crawling to get away from the city. There came congestion, and with congestion, stasis, and with stasis, simply a writhing without progression. Then on top of this stationary layer of humanity crawled another layer which in its turn reached congestion, and on top of the second layer a third layer. A dozen streets led to each bridge but each bridge was only as wide as a street. Gradually the outer rows of the upper layer began falling into the river beneath. Ultimately many sought this termination. From the bridges came, ultimately, a roar like surf beating against a rock- bound shore. In it was the beginnings of desperate madness. Men died quickly on the bridges, but before they died they started to bite each other. Within the city certain places showed the same congestion. Restaurants and cafes became filled with bodies almost to the ceiling. There was food here but no one could reach it save those next to it and these were crushed to death before they could profit by their good fortune, and dying, blocked with bodies, those who remained alive and able to eat.
Within twenty-four hours mankind had lost its religion, its humanity, its high ideals. Every one tried to keep himself alive even though by doing so he brought death sooner to others. Yet in isolated instances, individuals rose to heights of heroism. In the hospitals an occasional nurse remained with her patients, giving them food till she with them died of hunger. In one of the maternity wards a mother gave birth to a child. Deserted by everyone she placed the child to her breast and kept it there till hunger pulled down her lifeless arms.
It was into this world of horror that Miller walked as he emerged from the office building. He had provided himself with a stout club but hardly any of the crawling automobilists noticed him. So he walked slowly over to Fifth Avenue and then headed north, and as he walked he prayed, though on that first day he saw but little of what he was to see later on.
On and on he went till he came to water and that he swam and then again he went on and by night he was out in the country where he ceased to pray continuously. Here he met an occasional autoist, who was simply annoyed at his machine breaking down. No one in the country realized at first what had really happened; no one ever fully realized before he died in his farm house, just what it all meant. It was only the city dwellers that knew, and they did not understand.
The next day Miller rose early from the grass and started again, after carefully consulting the road map. He avoided the towns, circling them. He had learned the desire, constant, incessant, inescapable, to share his provisions with those starving cripples, and he had to keep his strength and save food for her, that pedestrian girl, alone among helpless servants, within an iron fence thirty miles long. It was near the close of the second day of his walk. For some miles he had seen no one. The sun low in the forest of oaks threw fantastic shadows over the concrete road.
Down the road, ever nearing him came a strange caravan. There were three horses tied to each other. On the backs of two were bundles and jugs of water fastened stoutly but clumsily. On the third horse an old man rested in a chair-like saddle and at this time he slept, his chin resting on his chest, his hands clutching, even in sleep, the sides of the chair. Leading the first horse walked a woman, tall, strong, lovely in her strength, striding with easy pace along the cement road. On her back was slung a bow with a quiver of arrows and in her right hand she carried a heavy cane. She walked on fearlessly, confidently; she seemed filled with power, confidence and pride.
Miller paused in the middle of the road. The caravan came near him. Then it stopped in front of him.
“Well,” said the woman, and her voice blended curiously with the sunlit shadows and the flickering leaves. “Well! Who are you and why do you block our way?”
“Why, I am Abraham Miller and you are Margaretta Heisler. I am hunting for you. Your father is safe and he sent me for you.”
“And you are a pedestrian?”
“Just as truly as you are!” and so on and on.
The professor woke from his nap. He looked down on the young man and woman, standing, talking, already forgetting that there was anything else in the world.
“Now, that is the way it was in the old days,” mused the professor to himself.
It was a Sunday afternoon some hundred years later. A father and his little son were sightseeing in the Museum of Natural Sciences in the reconstructed city of New York. The whole city was now simply a vast museum. Folks went there to see it but no one wanted to live there. In fact, no one wanted to live in such a place as a city when he could live on a farm.
It was a part of every child’s education to spend a day or more in an automobilist’s city, so on this Sunday afternoon the father and his little son walked slowly through the large buildings. They saw the mastodon, the bison, the pterodactyl. They paused for some time before a glass case containing a wigwam of the American Indian with a typical Indian family. Finally they came to a large wagon, on four rubber wheels, but there was no shaft and no way that horses or oxen could be harnessed to it. In the wagon on seats were men, women and little children. The boy looked at them curiously and pulled at his father’s sleeve.
“Look, daddy. What are that wagon and those funny people without legs. What does it mean?”
“That my son is a family of automobilists,” and there and then he paused and gave his son the little talk that all pedestrian fathers are required by law to give to their children.