Grave predictions : tales of mankind’s post-apocalyptic, dystopian and disastrous destiny

by Drew Ford

  “Here, my good fellow,” he said, thrusting the money into the man’s hands, “take that,—what’s your name?”

  “Jim Davis,” came the answer, hollow-voiced.

  “Well, Jim, I thank you. I’ve always liked your people. If you ever want a job, call on me.” And they were gone.

  The crowd poured up and out of the elevators, talking and whispering.

  “Who was it?”

  “Are they alive?”

  “How many?”

  ‘Two!”

  “Who was saved?”

  “A white girl and a nigger—there she goes.”

  “A nigger? Where is he? Let’s lynch the damned——”

  “Shut up—he’s all right—he saved her.”

  “Saved hell! He had no business——”

  “Here he comes.”

  Into the glare of the electric lights the colored man moved slowly, with the eyes of those that walk and sleep.

  “Well, what do you think of that?” cried a bystander; “of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger!”

  The colored man heard nothing. He stood silently beneath the glare of the light, gazing at the money in his hand and shrinking as he gazed; slowly he put his other hand into his pocket and brought out a baby’s filmy cap, and gazed again. A woman mounted to the platform and looked about, shading her eyes. She was brown, small, and toil-worn, and in one arm lay the corpse of a dark baby. The crowd parted and her eyes fell on the colored man; with a cry she tottered toward him.

  “Jim!”

  He whirled and, with a sob of joy, caught her in his arms.

  THE PEDESTRIAN

  RAY BRADBURY

  TO ENTER out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of 2053 A.D., or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar.

  Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open.

  Mr. Leonard Mead would pause, cock his head, listen, look, and march on, his feet making no noise on the lumpy walk. For long ago he had wisely changed to sneakers when strolling at night, because the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barkings if he wore hard heels, and lights might click on and faces appear and an entire street be startled by the passing of a lone figure, himself, in the early November evening.

  On this particular evening he began his journey in a westerly direction, toward the hidden sea. There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose and made the lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside; you could feel the cold light going on and off, all the branches filled with invisible snow. He listened to the faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves with satisfaction, and whistled a cold quiet whistle between his teeth, occasionally picking up a leaf as he passed, examining its skeletal pattern in the infrequent lamplights as he went on, smelling its rusty smell.

  “Hello, in there,” he whispered to every house on every side as he moved. “What’s up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?”

  The street was silent and long and empty, with only his shadow moving like the shadow of a hawk in mid-country. If he closed his eyes and stood very still, frozen, he could imagine himself upon the center of a plain, a wintry, windless Arizona desert with no house in a thousand miles, and only dry river beds, the streets, for company.

  “What is it now?” he asked the houses, noticing his wrist watch. “Eight-thirty P.M.? Time for a dozen assorted murders? A quiz? A revue? A comedian falling off the stage?”

  Was that a murmur of laughter from within a moon-white house? He hesitated, but went on when nothing more happened. He stumbled over a particularly uneven section of sidewalk. The cement was vanishing under flowers and grass. In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time.

  He came to a cloverleaf intersection which stood silent where two main highways crossed the town. During the day it was a thunderous surge of care, the gas stations open, a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far directions. But now these highways, too, were like streams in a dry season, all stone and bed and moon radiance.

  He turned back on a side street, circling around toward his home. He was within a block of his destination when the lone car turned a corner quite suddenly and flashed a fierce white cone of light upon him. He stood entranced, not unlike a night moth, stunned by the illumination, and then drawn toward it.

  A metallic voice called to him:

  “Stand still. Stay where you are! Don’t move!”

  He halted.

  “Put up your hands!”

  “But——” he said.

  “Your hands up! Or we’ll shoot!”

  The police, of course, but what a rare, incredible thing; in a city of three million, there was only one police car left, wasn’t that correct? Ever since a year ago, 2052, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one. Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets.

  “Your name?” said the police car in a metallic whisper. He couldn’t see the men in it for the bright light in his eyes.

  “Leonard Mead,” he said.

  “Speak up!”

  “Leonard Mead!”

  “Business or profession?”

  “I guess you’d call me a writer.”

  “No profession,” said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

  “You might say that,” said Mr. Mead. He hadn’t written in years. Magazines and books didn’t sell any more. Everything went on in the tomb-like houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.

  “No profession,” said the phonograph voice, hissing. “What are you doing out?”

  “Walking,” said Leonard Mead.

  “Walking!”

  “Just walking,” he said simply, but his face felt cold.

  “Walking, just walking, walking?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “‘Walking where? For what?”

  “Walking for air. Walking to see.”

  “Your address!”

  “Eleven South Saint James Street.”

  “And there is air in your house, you have an air conditioner, Mr. Mead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have a viewing screen in your house to see with?”

  “No.”

  “No?” There was a crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation.

  “Are you married, Mr. Mead?”

  “No.”

  “Not married,” said the police voice behind the fiery beam. The moon was high and clear among the stars and the houses were gray and silent.

  “Nobody wanted me,” said Leonard Mead with a smile.

>   “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to!”

  Leonard Mead waited in the cold night.

  “Just walking, Mr. Mead?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you haven’t explained for what purpose.”

  “I explained; for air, and to see, and just to walk.”

  “Have you done this often?”

  “Every night for years.”

  The police car sat in the center of the street with its radio throat faintly humming.

  “Well, Mr. Mead,” it said.

  “Is that all?” he asked politely.

  “Yes,” said the voice. “Here.” There was a sigh, a pop. The back door of the police car sprang wide. “Get in.”

  “Wait a minute, I haven’t done anything!”

  “Get in.”

  “I protest!”

  “Mr. Mead.”

  He walked like a man suddenly drunk. As he passed the front window of the car he looked in. As he had expected, there was no one in the front seat, no one in the car at all.

  “Get in.”

  He put his hand to the door and peered into the back seat, which was a little cell, a little black jail with bars. It smelled of riveted steel. It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic. There was nothing soft there.

  “Now if you had a wife to give you an alibi,” said the iron voice. “But—”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  The car hesitated, or rather gave a faint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes. “To the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.”

  He got in. The door shut with a soft thud. The police car rolled through the night avenues, flashing its dim lights ahead.

  They passed one house on one street a moment later, one house in an entire city of houses that were dark, but this one particular house had all of its electric lights brightly lit, every window a loud yellow illumination, square and warm in the cool darkness.

  “That’s my house,” said Leonard Mead.

  No one answered him.

  The car moved down the empty river-bed streets and off away, leaving the empty streets with the empty sidewalks, and no sound and no motion all the rest of the chill November night.

  NO MORNING AFTER

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  “BUT this is terrible!” said the Supreme Scientist. “Surely there is something we can do!”

  “Yes, Your Cognizance, but it will be extremely difficult. The planet is more than five hundred light-years away, and it is very hard to maintain contact. However, we believe we can establish a bridgehead. Unfortunately, that is not the only problem. So far, we have been quite unable to communicate with these beings. Their telepathic powers are exceedingly rudimentary—perhaps even non-existent. And if we cannot talk to them, there is no way in which we can help.”

  There was a long mental silence while the Supreme Scientist analyzed the situation and arrived, as he always did, at the correct answer.

  “Any intelligent race must have some telepathic individuals,” he mused. “We must send out hundreds of observers, tuned to catch the first hint of stray thought. When you find a single responsive mind, concentrate all your efforts upon it. We must get our message through.”

  “Very good, Your Cognizance. It shall be done.”

  Across the abyss, across the gulf which light itself took half a thousand years to span, the questing intellects of the planet Thaar sent out their tendrils of thought, searching desperately for a single human being whose mind could perceive their presence. And as luck would have it, they encountered William Cross.

  At least, they thought it was luck at the time, though later they were not so sure. In any case, they had little choice. The combination of circumstances which opened Bill’s mind to them lasted only for seconds, and was not likely to occur again this side of eternity.

  There were three ingredients to the miracle: it is hard to say if one was more important than another. The first was the accident of position. A flask of water, when sunlight falls upon it, can act as a crude lens, concentrating the light into a small area. On an immeasurably larger scale, the dense core of the Earth was converging the waves that came from Thaar. In the ordinary way, the radiations of thought are unaffected by matter—they pass through it as effortlessly as light through glass. But there is rather a lot of matter in a planet, and the whole Earth was acting as a gigantic lens. As it turned, it was carrying Bill through its focus, where the feeble thought-impulses from Thaar were concentrated a hundredfold.

  Yet millions of other men were equally well placed: they received no message. But they were not rocket engineers: they had not spent years thinking and dreaming of space, until it had become part of their very being.

  And they were not, as Bill was, blind drunk, teetering on the last knife-edge of consciousness, trying to escape from reality into the world of dreams, where there were no disappointments and setbacks.

  Of course, he could see the Army’s point of view. “You are paid, Dr. Cross,” General Potter had pointed out with unnecessary emphasis, “to design missiles, not—ah—spaceships. What you do in your spare time is your own concern, but I must ask you not to use the facilities of the establishment for your hobby. From now on, all projects for the computing section will have to be cleared by me. That is all.”

  They couldn’t sack him, of course: he was too important. But he was not sure that he wanted to stay. He was not really sure of anything except that the job had backfired on him, and that Brenda had finally gone off with Johnny Gardner—putting events in their order of importance.

  Wavering slightly, Bill cupped his chin in his hands and stared at the white-washed brick wall on the other side of the table. The only attempt at ornamentation was a calendar from Lockheed and a glossy six by eight from Aerojet showing L’il Abner Mark I making a boosted takeoff. Bill gazed morosely at a spot midway between the two pictures, and emptied his mind of thought. The barriers went down. . . .

  At that moment, the massed intellects of Thaar gave a soundless cry of triumph, and the wall in front of Bill slowly dissolved into a swirling mist. He appeared to be looking down a tunnel that stretched to infinity. As a matter of fact, he was.

  Bill studied the phenomenon with mild interest. It had a certain novelty, but was not up to the standard of previous hallucinations. And when the voice started to speak in his mind, he let it ramble on for some time before he did anything about it. Even when drunk, he had an old-fashioned prejudice against starting conversations with himself.

  “Bill,” the voice began. “Listen carefully. We have had great difficulty in contacting you, and this is extremely important.”

  Bill doubted this on general principles. Nothing was important any more.

  “We are speaking to you from a very distant planet,” continued the voice in a tone of urgent friendliness. “You are the only human being we have been able to contact, so you must understand what we are saying.”

  Bill felt mildly worried, though in an impersonal sort of way, since it was now rather hard to focus onto his own problems. How serious was it, he wondered, when you started to hear voices? Well, it was best not to get excited. You can take it or leave it, Dr. Cross, he told himself. Let’s take it until it gets to be a nuisance.

  “O. K.” he answered with bored indifference. “Go right ahead and talk to me. I won’t mind as long as it’s interesting.”

  There was a pause. Then the voice continued, in a slightly worried fashion.

  “We don’t quite understand. Our message isn’t merely interesting. It’s vital to your entire race, and you must notify your government immediately.”

  “I’m waiting,” said Bill. “It helps to pass the time.”

  Five hundred light-years away, the Thaarns conferred hastily among themselves. Something seemed to be wrong, but they could not decide precisely what. There was no doubt that they had established contact, yet this was
not the sort of reaction they had expected. Well, they could only proceed and hope for the best.

  “Listen, Bill,” they continued. “Our scientists have just discovered that your sun is about to explode. It will happen three days from now—seventy-four hours, to be exact. Nothing can stop it. But there’s no need to be alarmed. We can save you, if you’ll do what we say.”

  “Go on,” said Bill. This hallucination was ingenious.

  “We can create what we call a bridge—it’s a kind of tunnel through space, like the one you’re looking into now. The theory is far too complicated to explain, even to one of your mathematicians.”

  “Hold on a minute!” protested Bill. “I am a mathematician, and a darn good one, even when I’m sober. And I’ve read all about this kind of thing in the science-fiction magazines. I presume you’re talking about some kind of short-cut through a higher dimension of space. That’s old stuff—pre-Einstein.”

  A sensation of distinct surprise seeped into Bill’s mind.

  “We had no idea you were so advanced scientifically,” said the Thaarns. “But we haven’t time to talk about the theory. All that matters is this—if you were to step into that opening in front of you, you’d find yourself instantly on another planet. It’s a short-cut, as you said—in this case, through the thirty-seventh dimension.”

  “And it leads to your world?”

  “Oh no—you couldn’t live here. But there are plenty of planets like Earth in the universe, and we’ve found one that will suit you. We’ll establish bridgeheads like this all over Earth, so your people will only have to walk through them to be saved. Of course, they’ll have to start building up civilization again when they reach their new homes, but it’s their only hope. You have to pass on this message, and tell them what to do.”

  “I can just see them listening to me,” said Bill. “Why don’t you go and talk to the President?”

  “Because yours was the only mind we were able to contact. Others seemed closed to us: we don’t understand why.”

  “I could tell you,” said Bill, looking at the nearly empty bottle in front of him. He was certainly getting his money’s worth. What a remarkable thing the human mind was! Of course, there was nothing at all original in this dialogue: it was easy to see where the ideas came from. Only last week he’d been reading a story about the end of the world, and all this wishful thinking about bridges and tunnels through space was pretty obvious compensation for anyone who’d spent five years wrestling with recalcitrant rockets.