And yes, now it—the distortion in his sense of balance—had begun affecting his hearing, as he had anticipated. It was fascinating, how the eye and the ear joined to produce a Gestalt; first his eyesight, then his balance, now he heard things askew.
He heard, as he walked, a dull, deep echo which rose from his own footsteps, from his shoes striking the pavement; not the sharp brisk noise that a woman’s shoe might make, but a shadowy, low sound, a rumble, almost as if it rose from a pit or cave.
It was not a pleasant sound; it hurt his head, sending up reverberations that were acutely painful. He slowed, altered his pace, watched his shoes strike the pavement so as to anticipate the sound.
I know what this is due to, he said to himself. He had experienced it in the past, this echoing of normal noises in the labyrinths of his ear-passages. Like the distortion in vision it had a simple physiological basis, although for years it had puzzled and frightened him. It was due—simply—to tense posture, skeletal tension, specifically at the base of the neck. In fact, by turning his head from side to side, he could test his theory out; he heard the neck-vertebrae give a little crack, a short, sharp sound that set up immediately the most immensely painful reverberations in his ear-channels.
I must be dreadfully worried today, Bruno Bluthgeld said to himself. For now an even graver alteration in his sense-perceptions was setting in, and one unfamiliar to him. A dull, smoky cast was beginning to settle over all the environment around him, making the buildings and cars seem like inert, gloomy mounds, without color or motion.
And where were the people? He seemed to be plodding along totally by himself in his listing, difficult journey up Oxford Street to where he had parked his Cadillac. Had they (odd thought) all gone indoors? As if, he thought, to get out of the rain … this rain of fine, sooty particles that seemed to fill the air, to impede his breathing, his sight, his progress.
He stopped. And, standing there at the intersection, seeing down the side street where it descended into a kind of darkness, and then off to the right where it rose and snapped off, as if twisted and broken, he saw to his amazement—and this he could not explain immediately in terms of some specific physiological impairment of function—that cracks had opened up. The buildings to his left had split. Jagged breaks in them, as if the hardest of substances, the cement itself which underlay the city, making up the streets and buildings, the very foundations around him, were coming apart.
Good Christ, he thought. What is it? He peered into the sooty fog; now the sky was gone, obscured entirely by the rain of dark.
And then he saw, picking about in the gloom, among the split sections of concrete, in the debris, little shriveled shapes: people, the pedestrians who had been there before and then vanished—they were back now, but all of them dwarfed, and gaping at him sightlessly, not speaking but simply poking about in an aimless manner.
What is it? he asked himself again, this time speaking aloud; he heard his voice dully rebounding. It’s all broken; the town is broken up into pieces. What has hit it? What has happened to it? He began to walk from the pavement, finding his way among the strewn, severed parts of Berkeley. It isn’t me, he realized; some great terrible catastrophe has happened. The noise, now, boomed in his ears, and the soot stirred, moved by the noise. A car horn sounded, stuck on, but very far off and faint.
Standing in the front of Modern TV, watching the television coverage of Walter and Mrs. Dangerfield’s night, Stuart McConchie saw to his surprise the screen go blank.
“Lost their picture,” Lightheiser said, disgustedly. The group of people stirred with indignation. Lightheiser chewed on his toothpick.
“It’ll come back on,” Stuart said, bending to switch to another channel; it was, after all, being covered by all networks.
All channels were blank. And there was no sound, either. He switched it once more. Still nothing.
Up from the basement came one of the repairmen, running toward the front of the store and yelling, “Red alert!”
“What’s that?” Lightheiser said wonderingly, and his face became old and unhealthy-looking; seeing it, Stuart McConchie knew without the words or the thoughts ever occurring in his mind. He did not have to think; he knew, and he ran out of the store onto the street, he ran onto the empty sidewalk and stood, and the group of people at the TV set, seeing him and the repairman running, began to run, too, in different directions, some of them across the street, out into traffic, some of them in circles, some of them away in a straight line, as if each of them saw something different, as if it was not the same thing happening to any two of them.
Stuart and Lightheiser ran up the sidewalk to where the gray-green metal sidewalk doors were which opened onto the underground storage basement that once, a long time ago, a drugstore had used for its stock but which now was empty. Stuart tore at the metal doors, and so did Lightheiser, and both of them yelled that it wouldn’t open; there was no way to open it except from below. At the entrance of the men’s clothing store a clerk appeared, saw them; Lightheiser shouted at him, yelled for him to run downstairs and open up the sidewalk. “Open the sidewalk!” Lightheiser yelled, and so did Stuart, and now so did several people all standing or squatting at the sidewalk doors, waiting for the sidewalk to open. So the clerk turned and ran back into the clothing store. A moment later a clanking noise sounded under Stuart’s feet.
“Get back,” a heavy-set elderly man said. “Get off the doors.” The people saw down into cold gloom, a cave under the sidewalk, an empty cavity. They all jumped down into it, falling to the bottom; they lay pressed against damp concrete, rolling themselves up into balls or flattening themselves out—they squirmed and pressed down into crumbly soil with the dead sowbugs and the smell of decay.
“Close it from above.” a man was saying. There did not seem to be any women, or if there were they were silent; his head pressed into a corner of the concrete, Stuart listened but heard only men, heard them as they grabbed at the doors above, trying to shut them. More people came down now, falling and tumbling and yelling, as if downed from above.
“How long, oh Lord?” a man was saying.
Stuart said, “Now.” He knew it was now; he knew that the bombs were going off—he felt them. It seemed to occur inside him. Blam, blam, blam, blam, went the bombs, or perhaps it was things sent up by the Army to help, to stop the bombs; perhaps it was defense. Let me down, Stuart thought. Low as I can be. Let me into the ground. He pressed down, rolled his body to make a depression. People lay now on top of him, choking coats and sleeves, and he was glad; he did not mind—he did not want emptiness around him: he wanted solidness on every side. He did not need to breathe. His eyes were shut; they, and the other openings of his body, his mouth and ears and nose, all had shut; he had walled himself in, waiting.
Blam, blam, blam.
The ground jumped.
We’ll get by, Stuart said. Down here, safe in the earth. Safe inside where it’s safe; it’ll pass by overhead. The wind.
The wind, above on the surface, passed by at huge speed; he knew it moved up there, the air itself, driven along altogether, as a body.
In the nose cone of Dutchman IV, Walt Dangerfield, while still experiencing the pressure of many gravities on his body, heard in his earphones the voices from below, from the control bunker.
“Third stage successful, Walt. You’re in orbit. We’ll fire off the final stage at 15:45 instead of 15:44, they tell me.”
Orbital velocity, Dangerfield said to himself, straining to see his wife. She had lost consciousness; he looked away from her at once, concentrating on his oxygen supply, knowing she was all right but not wanting to witness her suffering. Okay, he thought, we’re both okay. In orbit, waiting for the final thrust. It wasn’t so bad.
The voice in his earphones said, “A perfect sequence so far, Walt. The President is standing by. You have eight minutes six seconds before the initial corrections for the fourth-stage firing. If in correcting minor—”
Static erased
the voice; he no longer heard it.
If in correcting minor but vital errors in attitude, Walter Dangerfield said to himself, there is a lack of complete success, we will be brought back down, as they did before in the robot-runs. And later on we will try it again. There is no danger; reentry is an old story. He waited.
The voice in his earphones came on again. “Walter, we are under attack down here.”
What? he said. What did you say?
“God save us,” the voice said. It was a man already dead; the voice had no feeling, it was empty and then it was silent. Gone.
“From whom?” Walt Dangerfield said into his microphone. He thought of pickets and rioters, he thought of bricks, angry mobs. Attacked by nuts or something, is that it?
He struggled up, disconnected himself from the straps, saw through the port the world below. Clouds, and the ocean, the globe itself. Here and there on it matches were lit; he saw the puffs, the flares. Fright overcame him, as he sailed silently through space, looking down at the pinches of burning scattered about; he knew what they were.
It’s death, he thought. Death lighting up spots, burning up the world’s life, second by second.
He continued to watch.
There was, Doctor Stockstill knew, a community shelter under one of the big banks, but he could not remember which one. Taking his secretary by the hand he ran from the building and across Center Street, searching for the black and white sign that he had noticed a thousand times, that had become part of the perpetual background of his daily, business existence on the public street. The sign had merged into the unchanging, and now he needed it; he wanted it to step forward so that he could notice it as he had at the beginning: as a real sign, meaning something vital, something by which to preserve his life.
It was his secretary, tugging at his arm, who pointed the way to him; she yelled in his ear over and over again and he saw—he turned in that direction and together they crossed the street, running out into the dead, stalled traffic and among the pedestrians, and then they were struggling and fighting to get into the shelter, which was the basement of the building.
As he burrowed down, lower and lower, into the basement shelter and the mass of people pressed together in it, he thought about the patient whom he had just seen; he thought about Mr. Tree and in his mind a voice said with clarity, You did this. See what you did, you’ve killed us all.
His secretary had become separated from him and he was alone with people he did not know, breathing into their faces and being breathed on. And all the time he heard a wailing, the noise of women and probably their small children, shoppers who had come in here from the department stores, mid-day mothers. Are the doors shut? he wondered. Has it begun? It has; the moment has. He closed his eyes and began to pray out loud, noisily, trying to hear the sound. But the sound was lost.
“Stop that racket,” someone, a woman, said in his ear, so close that his ear hurt. He opened his eyes; the woman, middle-aged, glared at him, as if this was all that mattered, as if nothing was happening except his noisy praying. Her attention was directed on stopping him, and in surprise he stopped.
Is that what you care about? he wondered, awed by her, by the narrowness of her attention, by its mad constrictedness. “Sure,” he said to her. “You damn fool,” he said, but she did not hear him. “Was I bothering you?” he went on, unheeded; she was now glaring at someone else who had bumped or shoved her. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, you stupid old crow, you—” He cursed at the woman, cursing instead of praying and feeling more relief by that; he got more out of that.
And then, in the middle of his cursing, he had a weird, vivid notion. The war had begun and they were being bombed and would probably die, but it was Washington that was dropping the bombs on them, not the Chinese or the Russians; something had gone wrong with an automatic defense system out in space, and it was acting out its cycle this way—and no one could halt it, either. It was war and death, yes, but it was error; it lacked intent. He did not feel any hostility from the forces overhead. They were not vengeful or motivated; they were empty, hollow, completely cold. It was as if his car had run over him: it was real but meaningless. It was not policy, it was breakdown and failure, chance.
So at this moment, he felt himself devoid of retaliatory hatred for the enemy because he could not imagine—did not actually believe in or even understand—the concept. It was as if the previous patient, Mr. Tree or Doctor Bluthgeld or whoever he had been, had taken in, absorbed all that, left none of it for anyone else. Bluthgeld had made Stockstill over into a different person, one who could not think that way even now. Bluthgeld, by being insane, had made the concept of the enemy unbelievable.
“We’ll fight back, we’ll fight back, we’ll fight back,” a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did the man intend to fall back upward into the sky in some kind of revenge? Would he reverse the natural forces at work, as if rolling a film-sequence backward? It was a peculiar, nonsensical idea. It was as if the man had been gripped by his unconscious. He was no longer living a rational, ego-directed existence; he had surrendered to some archetype.
The impersonal, Doctor Stockstill thought, has attacked us. That is what it is; attacked us from inside and out. The end of the cooperation, where we applied ourselves together. Now it’s atoms only. Discrete, without any windows. Colliding but not making any sound, just a general hum.
He put his fingers in his ears, trying not to hear the noises from around him. The noises appeared—absurdly—to be below him, rising instead of descending. He wanted to laugh.
Jim Fergesson, when the attack began, had just gone downstairs into the repair department of Modern TV. Facing Hoppy Harrington he saw the expression on the phocomelus’ face when the red alert was announced over the FM radio and the conalrad system went at once into effect. He saw on the lean, bony face a grin like that of greed, as if in hearing and understanding, Hoppy was filled with joy, the joy of life itself. He had become lit up for an instant, had thrown off everything that inhibited him or held him to the surface of the earth, every force that made him slow. His eyes burst into light and his lips twitched; he seemed to be sticking out his tongue, as if mocking Fergesson.
To him Fergesson said, “You dirty little freak.”
The phoce yelled, “It’s the end!” The look on his face was already gone. Perhaps he had not even heard what Fergesson had said; he seemed to be in a state of self-absorption. He shivered, and the artificial manual extensors emanating from his cart danced and flicked like whips.
“Now listen,” Fergesson said. “We’re below street-level.” He caught hold of the repairman, Bob Rubenstein. “You moronic jackass, stay where you are. I’ll go upstairs and get those people down here. You clear as much space as you can; make space for them.” He let go of the repairman and ran to the stairs.
As he started up the steps two at a time, clutching the handrail and using it as a fulcrum, something happened to his legs. The bottom part of him fell off and he pitched backward, rolled back and down, and onto him rained tons of white plaster. His head hit the concrete floor and he knew that the building had been hit, taken away, and the people were gone. He was hurt, too, cut into two pieces, and only Hoppy and Bob Rubenstein would survive and maybe not even they.
He tried to speak but could not.
Still at the repair bench Hoppy felt the concussion and saw the doorway fill up with pieces of the ceiling and the wood of the steps turned into flying fragments and among the fragments of wood something soft, bits of flesh; it, the pieces, were Fergesson—he was dead. The building shook and boomed, as if doors were shutting. We’re shut in, Hoppy realized. The overhead light popped, and now he saw nothing. Blackness. Bob Rubenstein was screeching.
The phoce wheeled his cart backward, into the black cavity of the basement, going by the touch of his extensors. He felt his way among the stock inventory, the big tele
vision sets in their cardboard cartons; he got as deep as possible, slowly and carefully burrowed in all the way to the back as far from the entrance as he could. Nothing fell on him. Fergesson had been right. This was safe, here, below the street level. Upstairs they were all rags of flesh mixed with the white, dry powder that had been the building, but here it was different.
Just not time, he thought. They told us and then it began; it’s still going on. He could feel the wind moving over the surface upstairs; it moved unimpeded, because everything which had stood was now down. We must not go up even later, because of radiation, he realized. That was the mistake those Japs made; they came right up and smiled.
How long will I live down here? he wondered. A month? No water, unless a pipe breaks. No air after a while, unless molecules filtering through the debris. Still, better than trying to come out. I will not come out, he reiterated. I know better; I’m not dumb like the others.
Now he heard nothing. No concussion, no rain of falling pieces in the darkness around him: small objects jarred loose from stacks and from shelves. Just silence. He did not hear Bob Rubenstein. Matches. From his pocket he got matches, lit one; he saw that TV cartons had toppled to enclose him. He was alone, in a space of his own.
Oh boy, he said to himself with exultation. Am I lucky; this space was just made for me. I’ll stay and stay; I can go days and then be alive, I know I was intended to be alive. Fergesson was intended to die right off the bat. It’s God’s will. God knows what to do; He watches out, there is no chance about this. All this, a great cleansing of the world. Room must be made, new space for people, for instance myself.
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