city.
“We’ll call this place New Middletown,” Mayor Garris had proclaimed.
“Makes it seem more like home.”
Kenniston walked with Carol that night down one of the dark main avenues of the domed city. There was candlelight and lamplight from doorways and tall windows. A baby wailed from inside a dark doorway and was hastily soothed. Dogs barked defiance to alien ghosts. A tinny phonograph sang somewhere:
“I can’t give you anything but love, baby!”
Kenniston thought that the streets of tall white buildings looked down with their windows as with eyes— amazed, bewildered. This city beneath the shimmering starlit dome had had silence for a long, long time.
Silence, and the slow swing of the cold red Sun and the farther stars.
Could a city remember, Kenniston wondered? Did this one remember the old days of its builders, the lovers who had walked its ways and the children who had known its nooks and corners? Was it glad that men had come again, or did it regret the agelong silence and peace?
Carol shivered a little and buttoned her topcoat. “It’s getting colder.”
Kenniston nodded. “But not bitterly so—only like an October night, back in our own time. We can stand that.”
She looked up at him, her eyes dark in the white blur of her face. “But how will we live here, Ken? I mean, when the food from Middletown’s warehouses runs out?”
He and Hubble had known the question would come up, and had the answer for it. Not a perfect answer, but the only one.
“There are big hydroponic tanks farther over in the city, Carol. The people here raised their food in them. We can do the same. There are plenty of seeds in Middletown.”
“But water?”
“Lots of it,” he answered promptly. “Big underground reservoirs, that must tap deep water-bearing strata. Hubble had it tested, and it’s perfectly safe.”
They walked on to the edge of the plaza. Now the Moon was rising, that copper-colored, unreally big Moon that was so much nearer Earth than in the old times. Its coppery light poured through the dome upon the city. The white towers dreamed. The chill deepened.
The whole mighty past of dead Earth seemed to crush down upon Kenniston. Millions of years, trillions of lives full of pain and hope and struggle, and all for what? For this?
Carol felt it too, for she pressed closer to him. “Are they all dead, Ken?
All the human race, but ourselves?”
He and Hubble had the answer for that, too, the answer they would have to give to everyone.
“There’s no reason to assume that. There may be other cities that are still inhabited. If so, we’ll soon contact them.”
She shook her head. “Words, Ken. You don’t even believe them yourself.” She drew away from him. “We’re alone,” she said. “Everything we had is gone, our world, our whole life, and we’re quite alone.”
He put his arms around her. He would have said something to comfort her, but she stood stiff and quivering, and suddenly she said,
“Ken, there are times when I can’t help hating you.”
Utterly shocked, and too bewildered to be angry yet, he let her go. He said, “Carol, you’re wrought up— hysterical—”
Her voice was low and harsh, the words came fast as though they could no longer be held back. “Am I? Maybe. But I can’t help remembering that if you and men like you hadn’t come to Middletown with that secret laboratory, fifty thousand people wouldn’t have had to suffer for it. You brought this on us…”
He began to understand now all that had been behind Carol’s taut manner and unfriendly silences, all the blind resentment that had focused upon himself.
He was for the moment furiously indignant, the more so because what she had said stung him on a sensitive nerve. He stood, almost glaring at her, and then his anger washed away, and he took her by the shoulders and said,
“Carol, you’re not making sense, and you know it! You’re bitter because you’ve lost your home, your way of life, your world, and you’re making me a scapegoat for that. You can’t! We need each other more than ever, and we’re not going to lose each other.”
She stared at him rigidly, then started to sob, and clung to him crying.
“Oh, Ken, don’t let me be a fool! I’m so mixed up, I don’t know my own mind any more.”
“All of us feel like that,” he said. “But it’ll all come right. Forget about it, Carol.”
But as he held her and soothed her and looked up past her at the alien towers and the face of the alien Moon, he knew that she could not completely forget, that that deep resentment would not die easily, and that he would have to fight it. And it would be hard to fight, for there had been the sting of truth in her words, only a partial truth but one he had not wanted ever to face.
Chapter 8
MIDDLETOWN CALLING!
When Kenniston awoke, he lay for some time in his blankets looking around the great room, with the same feeling of unreality that he felt now each morning.
It was quite a large room, with graceful curving walls and ceiling of soft-textured, ivory plastic. But it was not as large as it looked, for the builders of the city had known how to use daringly jutting mezzanines to give two floor levels the spaciousness and loftiness of one.
He looked up at the tall, dusty windows, and wondered what this room had once been. It was part of a big structure on the plaza, for Mayor Garris had insisted that the whole Lab staff be quartered near City Hall. It had obviously been a public building, but except for a few massive tables it had been quite empty, and there was no clue to its function.
He looked around at the others on the row of mattresses. Hubble was still sleeping calmly. So was Beitz, with the slight, groaning stirrings of slumbering age. But Crisci lay wide awake and unmoving, looking up at the ceiling.
Kenniston remembered something, with a sudden pang, something that he had completely forgotten in the rush of events. He went over to Crisci, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Louis. I never thought until now about your girl.”
“Why would you think about that?” Crisci’s low voice was toneless.
“Why would you, when all this has happened?” He went on, as tonelessly, “Besides, it was all over a long time ago. For millions of years now, she’s been dead.”
Kenniston lingered a moment, seeking something to say, remembering now Crisci’s eager talk of the girl he was soon to marry—the girl who lived fifty miles away from Middletown. He could find nothing to say.
Crisci’s tragedy had been repeated many times among these people—the mother whose son had gone to California, the wife whose husband had been upstate on a business trip, the lovers, the families, the friends, divided forever by the great gulf of time. He felt again a great thankfulness that Carol had come through with him, and a renewed determination to hold her against anything.
Kenniston was lighting his morning cigarette, when the others rose.
He paused suddenly, and said, “I just thought—”
Hubble grinned at him. “Yes, I know. You just thought about tobacco.
You, and a lot of people, will soon have to do without.”
As they went out to get their breakfast at the nearest community kitchen, Hubble told him what was going forward.
“McLain’s going back to Middletown to bring gasoline engines and pumps. We have to get water flowing in the city’s system at once, and it may be a long time before we can figure out its pumping power. They seem to be atomic engines of some sort, but I’m not sure.”
