Kenniston realized that this town was dying as it stood. Fuel would run out fast, and without it life could not survive these bitter nights. A feeling of utter hopelessness swept over him. It seemed ironic that Middletown should have come safely through the most staggering cataclysm in history, only to perish miserably of cold.
Dimly, in the back of his mind, a thought began to form. It tempered his hopelessness a little, but before he could get it clear, he had made the turn into Vine Street, and the Keystone coal yard lay before him. And at that place in this still and deathly city, there was life and noise enough.
Policemen and National Guardsmen formed a cordon around the yard and its great black heaps of coal. They faced a crowd-- an ugly crowd, still only muttering, but bound for trouble. Kenniston saw people he knew in that crowd, people who sat on their front porches in the warm summer nights and talked with neighbors and laughed. Mill hands, merchants, housewives-- solid, decent folk, but turned wolfish now with the cold and the fear of dying.
Hubble met him inside the yard. A worried police sergeant was with him, and Borchard, who owned the yard.
"They were starting to loot the coal piles," Hubble said. "Poor devils, it was summer and they didn't have much fuel. Some of them burned their furniture last night to keep alive."
Borchard said anxiously, "We don't want to have to kill anyone. And right now, they'll believe you scientists before anyone else."
Hubble nodded. "You talk to them, Ken. You've gotten to know them better than I have, and they'll trust you more."
Kenniston said, "The hell they will. And anyway, what'll I say to them? 'Go home and freeze to death quietly, like gentlefolk, and let's not have any nasty scenes.' They'll love that."
"Maybe they don't have to freeze," said Hubble. "Maybe there's an answer to that."
The half-formed thought in the back of Kenniston's mind leaped forward. He looked at Hubble, and he knew that the older man had had that same thought, but sooner and clearer. A small flicker of hope began to stir again in Kenniston.
"The domed city," he said.
Hubble nodded. "Yes. It retains heat to a considerable degree, at night. We saw that. That's why the dome was built-- how long ago? No matter. It's our only half-warm refuge. We have to go there, Ken, all of us. And soon! We can't go through many more nights here!"
"But will they go? And if they do, what'll happen when they see that city and realize Earth is a dead world?"
Hubble made an impatient gesture. "We'll have to take care of that when it comes. The thing now is to give these people some hope. Tell them to wait in their homes, that soon they'll be safe. Tell them anything you like, but make them go!"
Kenniston scrambled up a black ridge of coal, to stand above the crowd. From outside the cordon they snarled at him when he began. But he shouted them down, calling out the names of the ones he knew, ordering them to listen-- being masterful, while his heart pounded with the same dread that drove the men and women in the street.
"Don't talk to us about law when it's the end of the world!" yelled a hard-faced woman.
"It's the end of nothing unless you lose your heads," Kenniston hammered. "The Mayor is arranging now to give you what you want-- an answer to how you're going to live and be safe. Your lives and the lives of your families depend on how you cooperate. Go home to your radios and wait for the orders."
"Will they give us coal?" shouted a burly mill-hand.
"Coal, food, everything you need. Nobody's going to cheat anyone. We're all in the same boat. We'll stay in, or get out, together. Now go home and keep your families together and wait."
He called suddenly to the men on guard, "You, too! Get out of here and report back to your headquarters! The orders coming up are more important than this coal!"
He climbed back down from the black heap, wondering whether his feeble attempt at psychology would work. Borchard started angry remonstrance about dismissal of the guards, but Hubble shut him up.
"It worked," he said. "Look, they're going." As the crowd dispersed, Chief of Police Kimer arrived. His unshaven face was gray from lack of sleep, his eyes red-rimmed. He did not seem to be much excited by the trouble at the coal yard.
"We've had a lot more than this on our hands, during the night," he said.
Kenniston learned then what had gone on in Middletown since the Mayor had finished speaking-- the deaths from shock, the scattering of suicides, the outbreaks of looting in the downtown streets, quickly checked. A dozen people, mostly drunks, had died of cold.
"But the barricades at the edge of town were the worst," Kimer said tiredly. "You know, a good number of people from outside Middletown were trapped here by this thing. They, and some of our own people gone panicky, tried to stampede out of town." He added, as he turned back to his car, "They tell me more than two thousand people were baptized last night."
"We'll go with you to City Hall," Hubble told him. "Yes, you too, Ken. I'll need your help with the Mayor."
It seemed impossible that the pudgy little Mayor could be a problem. He had been so docile, so pathetically eager to take advice and follow orders. But when, in City Hall, Hubble confronted him with the plan to evacuate Middletown, Mayor Garris' face took on a mulish look.
"It's crazy," he said. "Take up a whole city of fifty thousand people and transport them to another place we don't know anything about? It's insane!"
"There are enough cars, buses and trucks to transport the population and supplies. There's enough gasoline to run them."
"But this other city-- what do we know about it? Nothing. There might be any kind of danger there. No. I was born in Middletown. I've lived here all my life. I've worked hard to get where I am. I just spent five thousand dollars to redecorate my house, and I'm not going to leave it."
He glared at them, and his plump body trembled. Hubble said gently, "We're all afraid, Mr. Garris. It's a hard thing to do. People have their roots, and they can't break them easily all at once. But we must go. We must seek shelter, or die."
The Mayor shook his head. "My wife and daughter-- they've been hysterical all night, pleading with me to do something, to make things go as they always have. This has been an awful shock to them. I don't think they could stand any more."
"Slap their faces, Mr. Garris," Hubble said brutally. "This has been a shock to all of us. Now what are you going to do? Will you call in the City Council or won't you?"
"I can't, not on that proposal." Garris' face crinkled like that of a child about to cry. "Honestly, gentlemen, I can't."
Kenniston thought of Carol shivering in her fur coat, struggling with the last shovels of coal, and the thought made him grasp Garris savagely by the shirtfront.
"All right, don't," he snapped. "The people are waiting for an announcement from you, but I'll make one myself. I'll tell them that there's a way to save them, but that Mayor Garris won't hear of it. I'll tell them they must die of cold because their Mayor won't give up his big fine house with its cellar-ful of coal. Would you like me to tell them that, Mr. Garris?"
Kenniston thought he had never seen a man turn so white. "They'd tear me to pieces," whispered Garris. "No. No, don't." He looked piteously from one to the other, and then he said, "I'll call in the Council."
The men of the Council reacted, at first, very much as the Mayor had done. Kenniston did not entirely blame them. The difficulties of uprooting a population of fifty thousand and moving it bodily in a short space of time to a place it had never seen nor heard of were enough to daunt anybody. But Hubble's arguments were unanswerable. It was move or die, and they knew it, and in the end the decision was made. A crushed, frightened little man, Mayor Garris went to make his announcement.
On the way to the broadcasting station, Kenniston looked at Middletown. The big houses, standing lordly on the North Side. The little houses, in close-set rows, with their tiny gardens. It was going to be hard, very hard. The people who lived in those houses would not want to leave them.
In a low, tired vo
ice, bereft now of pomposity and guile, the Mayor spoke to the people of Middletown.
"So we must leave Middletown, temporarily," he concluded. And he repeated the word. "Temporarily. The domed city out there will be a little cold too, but not so cold as unprotected Middletown. We can live there, until-- until things clear up. Stay by your radios. You will be given instructions. Please cooperate, to save all our lives. Please--"
Chapter 6
caravan into tomorrow
Kenniston lost track of his own emotions very quickly in the rush of urgent tasks. City Hall became the nerve center of the evacuation. The police and National Guard officers were already there, and other men were called in-- the wholesale grocers, the warehouse men, the heads of trucking and bus and van lines. McLain, the big rawboned manager of the largest trucking company, proved a tower of strength. He had been a transport officer in the last war, and knew something about moving men and supplies.
"You'll have a traffic madhouse, and won't get these people out for weeks," he said crisply. "It's got to be organized by wards. There have to be quarters in your domed city assigned for each ward, so they can go into their own streets when they get there."
Hubble nodded. "I can get a crew of twenty men ready to handle that."
"Good. I figure the move will take three days. A third of the population is about all we can handle safely at one time. Civilian populations are the devil and all! Now, there'll have to be a squad assigned to distribute fuel to the ones who have to wait here in Middletown, and to quarter them so as to conserve that fuel. Also..."
Hubble sighed. "You take a big load off my mind, McLain. Will you organize the march? Kenniston can lead the first contingent, when you're ready."
McLain nodded brusquely, sat down at someone else's desk, and began to fire orders. Hubble departed with his twenty picked men, well-armed, to set up a base in the domed city.
The radio chattered incessantly now, urging, soothing, cajoling, issuing instructions. Police and Guardsmen were dispatched to each ward, with a responsible man heading each squad. They were ordered to take the streets house by house, to assure complete evacuation, and also to ascertain how many private cars could be counted on for transportation. The city buses could carry only a fraction of the evacuees.
McLain was the one who thought of the patients in the Middletown hospitals, and set men to collecting ambulances, hearses, whatever would carry the sick comfortably. The police patrol wagons and a few big army trucks from the Armory he assigned to move the prisoners in the jail who could not safely be released. Both they and the sick would be left until the last day, to ensure proper quarters for their reception.
Fleets of trucks were started to the warehouses, with hasty lists of the food and other emergency supplies that must go with them. "We can run a truck line back to Middletown for more supplies later," McLain told Kenniston. "But this stuff we'll need right away."
The First and Second Wards were to go first, and that meant that Carol and her aunt would be in the first day's evacuation. Kenniston managed to get away long enough to see them.
He was sorry he went. Mrs. Adams sat weeping in the living room, and Carol struggled alone with blankets and mattresses and suitcases, in a bitter, stony-faced mood that Kenniston could not quite understand. He stayed longer than he should have done to help them pack, trying earnestly to penetrate Carol's tight-lipped silence.
"I know it's hard to leave your home," he said, "but it's hard for everybody. And after all, we'll have shelter and warmth, and can stay alive."
"Shelter and warmth?" said Carol. She looked around at the starched white curtains, the polished furniture, the pictures on the walls and the bits of fine china that were so lovingly placed, and she said bitterly, "We had those. We had them for generations, until we had to have scientific progress too."
"I'll admit you have a point there," said Kenniston heavily, "but it's too late to argue now."
"Yes," she said. "Too late." Suddenly she began to cry, in a slow, painful way that was not in the least like Mrs. Adams' whimpering. "Oh, Ken, my house and all the things I loved..." He had wit enough to know that it was not for glass and china that she wept, but for a way of life that was gone and could never possibly return. He felt a terrible pity for her, which almost smothered his irritation at the inability of the female mind to grapple with the essentials of a situation.
"It won't be so bad," he said reassuringly. "And I'll be leading tomorrow's first evacuation, and won't be far from you at any time."
It was before nine o'clock the next morning when Kenniston left City Hall with McLain, to check the progress of preparations. Under the cold red eye of the Sun, Middletown seethed with an excited activity that centered in the First and Second Wards.
Cars were being hastily loaded, piled high on roofs and fenders. Children were being called together, barking dogs being caught and leashed, families gathering in excited haste. Roar of motors filled the wintry air. Motors of great trucks rumbling to and from the warehouse, motors of police cars dashing with sirens screaming, sputtering motors of old cars being agonizedly coaxed to life.
The people on the streets, the people hurrying with bundles and children and dogs, looked more dazed than frightened. Some of them were laughing, a false merriment edged with excitement. Only a few women were sobbing.
McLain and Kenniston rode down in the jeep to the center of town, the Square. This was the down town First Ward of Middletown.
"The First and Second Ward will move out in that order," McLain told Kenniston. "You take charge of the First, since you're to lead the way."
Police and National Guardsmen were already forming up cars on South Jefferson Street. Cadillacs, Buicks, Fords, ancient Hupmobiles. City and school buses were crowded with those who had no cars, and piled high with their belongings. Policemen on motorcycles roared past.
McLain boomed rapid orders. "Get sidecars on those motorcycles-- they won't make it without them, over rough ground.
"Divide up the garage tow-trucks as they come in-- divide them evenly between the wards, so they can haul any car that conks out!"
And, to a worried National Guard officer, "No! What the devil use would we have for your fieldguns? Leave 'em in the Armory and bring cots, blankets, camp equipment, instead!"
Then McLain commandeered a car, jumped in, and shouted back to Kenniston, "Have 'em ready to move out by noon! I'll have the Tube Mill whistle sounded, for a starting signal!"
And he was gone, racing off to the other ward gathering point. Kenniston found himself faced by police, Guardsmen, deputies, officials, all clamoring for orders.
"What are we going to do with these cars? Half of them are so overloaded they'll never get anywhere!"
Kenniston saw that. The arriving cars were piled not only with bedding and other essentials, but with radios, musical instruments, big framed family portraits, hobby-horses, every sort of possession.
"Go along and tear some of that junk off," he ordered. "Form up all the way down South Jefferson-- but only two abreast, for some of those South Side streets are narrow."
As he sweated to marshal the gathering cars, he watched for Carol's blue coupe. When she came, driving with pale self-possession while her aunt looked scaredly at the jam, he got her as near the front of the form-up as he could, and then raced back to the Square.
The squad leaders rapidly reported in on their assigned streets. "Everybody's out of Adams Street! Everybody's out of Perry Street! Lincoln Avenue--"
But-- "We haven't got 'em all out of North Street, Mr. Kenniston! Some of those old people just won't go!"
Kenniston swore, and then jumped back into the jeep and drove around to North Street. It was the street of shabby ancient brick houses only two blocks off Main Street. And the first person he saw there was a grim-looking, shawled old woman standing with folded arms on her front porch.
"I'm not leaving my home," she snapped to Kenniston before he could speak. "I've lived in this house all my life, and my m
other before me. I'll not leave it now." She sniffed scornfully. "The idea of the whole town taking up and running away just because it's got a little cold!"
Kenniston, baffled, saw a little girl of six peering at him from inside the window of the house.
"That your granddaughter?" he asked. "Listen. She'll be dead in a few days. Stone, frozen dead. Unless you bring her and your warm clothes and blankets along now."
The shawled old woman stared at him. Then, her voice suddenly dull, she asked, "Where do I go?"
He hastened on along the street. A peppery old man was being carried out in a wheelchair by two squad men, and was viciously striking at them with his cane.
"God-damned foolishness!" he was swearing. They got them into the waiting buses, and hastily loaded on their belongings. Then Kenniston raced back to the Square. His watch said eleven-ten, and he knew how far they were from ready.
On the Square, under the big sycamore tree, a gaunt, tall man with burning eyes was brandishing a Bible and shouting, to no one, "End of the world-- punishment for sin--"
Lauber, the truck dispatcher whom McLain had left in charge of the First Ward caravan under Kenniston, came running up to him when he reached South Jefferson.
"These people are crazy!" he panted. "The ones already here want to start right now-- and they don't even know the way!"
Kenniston saw that the police had drawn a barricade of big trucks across the street some blocks southward. Cars were surging against it, motors roaring, drivers shouting, horns sounding in a deafening chorus.
Panic! He knew it was in the air. He, all of them, had known there was danger of it when the Mayor had made his broadcast. They had had to risk it, for only real fear could make people leave their lifelong homes. But if it got out of hand--
He rode along the line, shouting, "Form up! Form in line! If you jam the street, you'll be left behind!"
He couldn't even be heard. Limousines, trucks, jalopies-- they crowded each other, banged fenders, bumped and recoiled and pressed forward again. And the horns never stopped their shrieking cacophony.
The Worlds of Edmond Hamilton Page 5