The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (45 page)

She said, “I think it changed you, a little. I think it would change anybody.”

And she shivered a little, as though even in the touch of him now was a freezing breath of alien deeps, a taint of unearthly worlds.

“No, Carol,” he said. “I’m not changed! But I can’t stay now. I have to get back—every minute is precious—”

As he hurried back to the others, Kenniston saw that New Middletown had become a rushing, surging swirl of excitement. Voices called to him, hands grabbed to delay him, men and women tried to reach him with questions. He was glad to rejoin the others around the lip of the great heat shaft.

Gorr Holl grinned his frightening grin at him. “Now, get ready to work!”

For what seemed an eternity, Kenniston worked. Machinists and sheet metal workers of Middletown were called in, every available man and piece of equipment. Great loads were brought in from the ship. Hammers rang with a deafening clamor, shaping metal on improvised forges. Riveting machines gave out their staccato thunder.

And gradually, painfully, shaped out of the sweat and effort of their bodies, a scaffolding of steel girders rose above the mouth of the great shaft.

Magro labored with the technicians over the complicated and delicate electrofuses, and the timing devices, and the radio control that from a distance would drop and detonate the charge.

Kenniston had little time to think of anything but the work. Yet his mind reverted strangely often to Varn Allan, locked in her cabin aboard the cruiser, and he wondered what her thoughts were.

Morning came. The city was to be cleared by noon, and the men and women of Middletown were gathering their children in readiness. They would not take much out of the city with them. They would not need much, either way.

The cryptic black ovoid was wheeled into position by the shaft. And with it were brought four small round objects of a different look.

“Capper bombs, that we made in the ship’s laboratory on the way here,” explained Arnol. “They will drop an instant after the energy bomb and will explode in the shaft just before it detonates below, sealing the shaft to prevent backlash.”

Kenniston watched while the technicians set the capper bombs in their racks, one above the other, inside the frame of girders. The racks would be tripped by electronic relay, from the remote control box.

Kenniston felt an increasing dread, as the fateful moment loomed close. His dread was for the trusting thousands of Middletown, who accepted the powers of scientists with the same unquestioning faith with which men had once accepted the powers of wizards.

He hoped that, if the experiment were a disastrous failure, he would not survive to know it.

A crane had been rigged to handle the energy bomb. The electronics crew were working desperately to finish the intricate wiring of the rack mechanisms, the split second timing of the relays. One of the cantilever support girders had flawed, and steel workers were sweating away to replace it.

A few more hours now, and the thing would be done. By noon, or a little after, they would know whether Earth was to live or die.

Then one of Arnol’s men came running. He had run all the way from the starcruiser. He was breathless, and his eyes were wild.

He cried out to Arnol, “A message on the televisor from a Control Squadron! They say they are approaching Earth, and order us to cease operations at once!”

Kenniston felt the impact of the news as a catastrophe crushing all their desperate hopes. He stood sagging, looking at the technicians who stared frozenly back.

Like an ominous echo, Varn Allan’s warning came back into his mind.

“You cannot fight Federation law!”

But Jon Arnol, raging at seeing the dream of a lifetime threatened at this last moment, rushed forward to the messenger.

He grabbed the man’s collar. “Did you think to use a distance gauge on the message from those ships?”

The man nodded hastily. “Yes. The readings were—”

“The devil with readings! How far from Earth are those ships?”

“I’d estimate that they’re three or four hours away, if they come at full speed.”

“They’ll come at full speed, don’t worry,” said Arnol grimly. His face was a sweating mask, the bones of it standing out gauntly, as he turned to the others. “Can we be ready in time?”

“The rack-trip controls are in,” answered a technician. “It’ll take an hour or more to prepare the timers.”

Kenniston had regained a little hope, when he heard of the time limit they faced.

“Surely we can be ready in time, Arnol! I’ll start them moving out the people, at once!”

Mayor Bertram Garris was not far to seek. Round-eyed and pale with worry, the pudgy Mayor had been watching their work around the great shaft.

Kenniston ran up to him. “Get the people started out at once, to the ridge of the hills. Only the sick and old to go in cars—the rest must walk. We can’t risk a traffic tangle now!”

“Yes,” gasped the Mayor. “Yes, right away.” He caught Kenniston’s arm, looking past him at the black ovoid bulk of the bomb. As though ashamed to show the terror he felt, Garris stammered, “How much danger is there, Kenniston?”

Kenniston gave him a reassuring shake. “Don’t worry. Go along and get those people out of the city!” He wished he could find reassurance himself.

The next hours were nightmarish. Working under pressure, grudging every second, it seemed that everything conspired against them. The metal, the mechanisms, the very tools seemed determined to betray them.

And yet, at last, the dark shape of the energy bomb swung it its rack over the mouth of the shaft. The last of the timers was set, and it was done.

“Get your equipment ready,” Kenniston told them tautly. “Let’s go. There’s still a lot to be done.”

He went out with Hubble and Arnol and the rest. The city was as he had first seen it—empty, still, lifeless. The people had gone. As he passed out the portal he could see the dark, trailing mass of them already far across the plain, the thousands streaming slowly up the slope of the distant ridge.

Anxiously he scanned the sky. There was no sign yet of the Control Squadron.

Arnold sent his technical crew ahead to the ridge, with the remote control mechanisms and recording instruments. Gorr Holl and Margo and Hubble went with them. Then Kenniston and Arnol ran toward the starcruiser.

There was a little knot of people standing beside it in the dust and cold—the Middletowners who were leaving Earth.

Kenniston stared at them in amazement. Out of the two hundred, only a score had actually come to the cruiser.

Arnol told them curtly, “You can come aboard now.”

A few of them picked up their bundles and stood irresolutely glancing from their companions to Kenniston and back, wanting to speak. Then they turned and went aboard.

Kenniston counted. Two men, three women, and a child.

“Well,” he snapped at those who were left, “what are you waiting for? Get aboard!”

“I guess,” said one man, and then stopped to clear his throat. “I guess I’d rather stay with all the rest.”

He grabbed his bundle and started away, hurrying after the distant crowd.

Another and another followed him until all were gone, a small hastening group in the immense desolation of the plain.

Arnol smiled. “Among your people, Kenniston, even the cowards are brave. It must be even harder, in some ways, for those who have decided to go.”

They entered the cruiser, and released Mathis and Norden Lund and Varn Allan from their locked cabins. Varn Allan did not speak, but the Coordinator said icily, “So you are really going to do it?”

“We are,” said Arnol. “My chief pilot is about to take this ship off. You’ll be safe.”

Norden Lund said bitterly, “I hope it blows you all to fragments! But even if it doesn’t, even if it succeeds, you won’t win. You’ll still have Federation law to face. We’ll see to that!”

“I don’t doubt it. And now we must go.”

He turned, but Kenniston paused, still looking at Varn Allan. Her face was a little pale but in it was no such anger as Lund’s. She was looking at him with a searching, level gaze.

He wanted to speak to her, he wanted to voice something that was in him, but he could find no words. He could only say, finally, “I’m sorry things had to be this way, Varn. Goodbye—”

“Wait, Kenniston.”

He stopped, and she came up to him, pale and calm, her blue eyes very steady on his face. She said, “I’m staying here, while you do this thing.”

He stared at her, dumb with astonishment. And he heard Mathis exclaim, “Are you mad? What are you thinking of?”

She told Mathis slowly, “I am Administrator of this world’s sector. If my mistakes have caused this crisis, I will not evade its consequences. I will stay.”

Lund cried to Mathis, “She’s not thinking of her responsibility! She’s thinking of this primitive, this Kenniston!”

She turned, as though to make furious reply. But she did not speak. She looked instead at Kenniston, her face white and strained.

Mathis was saying to her coldly, “I will not order you to come with us. But be sure that your conduct will be remembered when your fitness for office is re-examined.”

She bowed silently to that, and turned and went out of the ship. And Kenniston, following her, felt a wondering, incredulous emotion that he dared not let himself recognize.

They stepped out into the red sunlight, and with a soft humming the starcruiser mounted into the sky and was lost to view.

The last, dark, trailing mass of people was disappearing over the ridge, as Kenniston and Varn Allan and Arnol started that way.

“Hurry!” urged Arnol. “Even yet, we might be too late—”

When they reached the ridge, Gorr Holl and Margo and Hubble were waiting there with the young technicians and their apparatus. And Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling exclamation when he saw them.

“I thought you’d stay, Varn!”

Her head went up and she said half angrily, “But why should you—” She stopped abruptly, and was silent a moment, then asked, “How soon?”

“We’re all set now,” the big Capellan answered. Kenniston saw that the radio control box and the panels of strange instruments were ready. He glanced at Arnol.

The scientist’s face was filmed with sweat. All the color had gone from it, and his hands shook. In this moment, he was facing the climax of his whole life, all the years and the pain and the effort.

He said in a strangely toneless voice, “You’d better warn them, Kenniston. Now.”

Below them, on the far slope of the ridge, waited the thousands of Middletown’s people.

Kenniston went down toward them. He cried out to them, and his voice carried thin and unreal on the chill wind, across the dead rocks and the dust.

“Keep down behind the ridge! Pass the word to keep down! We’re going to blow it!”

They looked toward him, all the massed white faces pale in the dim light of the Sun—the dying Sun that watched them with its red uncaring eye.

A great silence fell upon them. By ones and twos, and then by hundreds, they knelt to pray. And others, by the hundreds, stood unspeaking, looking solemnly upward to the crest of the ridge. Here and there, a child began to cry.

Slowly, gripped as in a strange and fateful dream, Kenniston mounted again to where Arnol and the others stood. Far beyond them he saw the dome of the city, still glowing with light as they had left it, lonely in the vast barrenness of the plain.

He thought of the black thing waiting alone in the city to make its nightmare plunge, and a deep tremor shook him. He reached out and took Varn Allan’s hand.

In that last minute before Arnol’s fingers pressed the final pattern on the control board, Varn Allan looked past Kenniston, down at the silent, waiting thousands who were the last of all the races of old Earth.

“I see now,” she whispered, “that in spite of all we have gained since your day, we have lost something, too. A courage, a blind, brave something—I’m glad I stayed!” Arnol drew a sharp and painful breath. “It is done,” he said.

For a long, eternal moment, the dead Earth lay unstirring. Then Kenniston felt the ridge leap under his feet—once, twice, four times. The sharp grinding shocks of the capper bombs, sealing the great shaft.

Arnol watched the quivering needles of the dials. He had ceased his trembling now. It was too late for anything, even emotion.

Deep, deep within the buried core of the Earth a trembling was born, a dilating shudder that came slowly upward to the barren rocks and touched them and was gone.

It was as though a dead heart had suddenly started to beat again. To beat strongly, exultantly, a planet reborn…

The pointers on the panel of dials had gone quite mad. Gradually they quivered back to normal. All but one row of them, at which Arnol and his crew stared with intensity.

Kenniston could bear the terrible silence no longer.

“Has it…” His voice trailed away into hoarseness.

Arnol turned very slowly toward him. He said, as though it was difficult for him to speak. “Yes. The reaction is begun. There is a great flame of warmth and life inside Earth now. It will take weeks for that warmth and life to creep up to the surface, but it will come.”