incomprehensible, staggering vastness of the civilization out there which this woman and this man represented.
He said, exasperated, “Can’t you understand that to these people the stars are just points of light in the sky? That your Suns and worlds and Governors mean nothing to them?”
Norden Lund chose that moment to intervene. He said smoothly to Varn Allan, “Perhaps, in an impasse of this nature, we should consult Government Center?”
She gave him a hot look. “You would like me to admit my incapacity by doing that. No. I’ll carry this matter through, and when it’s done I’ll have words to say to Gorr Holl for precipitating things prematurely.”
She turned to Kenniston, and said, “Your people must comprehend that this is not a cruel thing we’re doing. Explain to them what life would be like on this dead planet—isolated, precarious, increasingly difficult, with nothing to look forward to but an ultimate dying out of attrition and sheer hopelessness. Perhaps they’ll realize then that what they’re asking me to do is to abandon them to a very ugly fate.”
“Perhaps,” said Kenniston, “but I wouldn’t count on it. You don’t know us yet. As a people, we’re neither soft nor easily frightened.”
He spoke with hostility, because of the truth that he had recognized in Varn Allan’s words, and did not want to recognize.
She gave him a level glance, as though she were taking his measure and through him the measure of all Middletown. Then she said quietly,
“Bear in mind that a formal decree passed by the Board of Governors is a law which must be respected and complied with. The evacuation has been ordered, and will be carried out.”
She nodded to Lund, who shrugged and fell in beside her. They went down the steps and across the plaza, and the muttering crowd, alarmed and confused but not yet hostile, moved apart to let them through.
Kenniston turned to Hubble. “What are we going to do?” he said, and the older man shook his head.
“I don’t know. But I know one thing we must not do, and that is to let any violence occur. That would be fatal. We’ve got to calm people down before that evacuation staff arrives and brings things to a head.”
Kenniston did his best, during the rest of that day. He repeated Varn Allan’s plea for understanding, but it fell on unreceptive ears. The city was functioning, they had light and water, they were not alone in the universe, and life today seemed pretty good. With the irrepressible op-timism of the human race, they were convinced that they could make tomorrow even better. And they were not going to leave Earth. That was like asking them to leave their bodies.
The shock of losing their own time and the pattern of life that went with it had been terrible enough. It might have overwhelmed them completely, Kenniston knew, except that in a measure the shock had been softened. For a while they had kept their own old city, and it was still there beyond the ridge, an anchor in their memories. To a certain extent, they had brought their own time with them, for life in the alien city had been adapted as much as possible to the pattern of life in old Middletown. They had oriented themselves again, they had built a fac-simile of their familiar existence. It had been hard, but they had done it.
They could not now, quite suddenly, throw it all away and start again on something utterly divorced from everything they had ever known.
Kenniston realized perfectly that it was not only an atavistic clinging to the Earth that had bred them which made them reject the idea of leaving it so fiercely. It was the physical and immediate horror of entering a perfectly unknown kind of ship and plunging in it out beyond the sky, into—into what? Night and nothingness and sickening abysses that ran on for ever, with only the cold stars for beacons and the Earth, the solid, understandable, protecting Earth lost forever! His own mind recoiled from the very imagining. Why couldn’t the woman understand? Why couldn’t she realize that a people to whom the automobile was still quite recent were not psychologically capable of rushing into space!
The great ship brooded on the plain, and all that afternoon and evening the people drifted restlessly toward the wall of the dome to look at it, and stand in little groups talking angrily, and move away again. The streets seethed with a half-heard murmur of voices and movement.
Crowds gathered in the plaza, and a detachment of National Guardsmen in full kit went marching down to mount guard at the portal. Dejected, oppressed, and more than a little sick with worry, Kenniston faced the unavoidable and went to Carol.
She knew, of course. Everybody in New Middletown knew. She met him with the drawn, half-bitter look that had come more and more often on her face since the June day their world had ended, and she said,
“They can’t do it, can they? They can’t make us go?”
“They think they’re doing the right thing,” he said. “It’s a question of making them understand they’re wrong.”
She began to laugh, quite softly—laughter with no mirth in it. “There isn’t any end to it,” she said. “First we had to leave Middletown. Now we have to leave Earth, Why didn’t we stay in our homes and die there, if we had to, like decent human beings? It’s all been madness ever since—this city, and now…” She stopped laughing. She looked at him and said calmly, “I won’t go, Ken.”
“You’re not the only one that feels that way,” Kenniston told her.
“We’ve got to convince them of that.” Restlessness rode him, and he got up and said, “Let’s take a walk. We’d both feel better.”
She went out with him into the dusk. The lights were on, the lovely radiance that they had greeted with such joy. They walked, saying very little, burdened with their own thoughts, and Kenniston was conscious again of the barrier that seemed always between them now, even when they agreed. Their silence was not the silence of understanding, but the silence which is between two minds that can communicate only with words.
They drifted toward the section of the dome through which the distant starship was visible. The unease in the city had grown, until the air quivered with it. There was a mob around the portal. They did not go close to it. Through the curved, transparent wall the lighted bulk of the
“I don’t want to look at it,” she said. “Let’s go back.”
“Wait,” said Kenniston. “There’s Hubble.”
The older man caught sight of him and swore. “I’ve been hunting the hell and gone over town for you,” he said. “Ken, that bloody fool Garris has blown his top completely, and is getting the people all stirred up to fight. You’ve got to come with me and help soothe him down!”
Kenniston said bitterly, “No wonder Varn Allan thinks we’re a bunch of primitives! Oh, all right, I’ll come. We’ll walk you back home on the way, Carol.”
They started back through the streets, whose towers now shone time-lessly beautiful in the calm white radiance. But the people in those streets, the little tense, talking groups, the worried faces and questions, the angry expletives, jarred against that supernal calm.
The pulse of unease in the city seemed to quicken. A low cry ran along the streets. People were calling something, a shout was running along the ways, hands pointed upward, white faces turned and looked at the shimmer of the great dome above.
“What—” Hubble began impatiently, but Kenniston silenced him.
“Listen!”
They listened. Above the swell of distant voices, growing louder every moment, they heard a sound that they had heard only once before. A vibration, more than a sound, a deep, bass humming from the sky, too deep to be smothered even by the dome.
It came downward, and it was louder, and louder, and then quite suddenly it stopped. People were running now toward the portal and the words they shouted came drifting confusedly back.
“Another starship,” said Kenniston. “Another starship has come.”
Hubble’s face was gray and haggard. “The evacuation staff. She said they’d arrive soon. And the whole town ready to blow off—Ken, this is it!”
Chapter 13
EMBATTLED CITY
