were beautiful only from a distance, squalid to one degree or another when experienced up close. However, this was a world without cities, without men,
“I don’t think we need to explore every room,” Bailey said. “If anyone were here, they’d respond. Whatever we find during a search is going to be one kind of funhouse pop-up or another, and we don’t need to put ourselves at risk just for the thrill of it.”
When they came out of Gary Dai’s apartment, the open elevator car remained empty, but murmuring voices in a foreign language issued from it—or more likely from the shaft in which it was suspended. They sounded just as Bailey had described them: portentous, urgent, ominous. In the world of the past, language was an exclusively human tool, but Kirby suspected that these voices were not those of people.
When they turned the corner into the long south hallway, a blue screen pulsed at the farther end, though no computer-simulated voice raised an alarm.
On the left were two apartments, the first belonging to Mac and Shelly Reeves. Kirby had little time to listen to radio, but the few occasions on which he’d heard the Reeveses’ show, it was amusing.
The door stood open. The first two rooms were like the desolate spaces they’d seen elsewhere. Nobody answered Bailey’s call.
“They might’ve been out to the theater or dinner when the leap occurred,” Kirby said.
“For their sake, let’s hope so.”
As they approached the door to 3-H, Fielding Udell’s apartment, the blue screen spoke: “
Inspired by Mickey Dime, Bailey shot the screen.
“Some kind of security system?” Kirby wondered.
“Seems like it.”
“Why would an abandoned building need one?”
“Beats me.”
“You think anyone’s still around to answer the call?”
“So far, I’d say no. So far.”
The door to Fielding Udell’s apartment was locked. The bell didn’t work. Bailey knocked loudly. No one answered.
Bailey shouted through the door: “Mr. Udell? Mr. Udell? It’s Bailey Hawks. I live in 2-C.” He waited. Then: “Mr. Udell, we’re all getting together in the Cupp apartment, riding this out together.”
When the only reply proved to be silence, Kirby said, “Maybe he was out of the building when it happened.”
“I don’t think he leaves his apartment much.”
“You want to break down the door, see if he’s in trouble?”
Bailey thought about it for a moment. “You know this guy?”
“I’ve run into him once or twice.”
“He’s pretty eccentric.”
“
“I’m thinking what if, like me and like Martha, he was packing a gun when the leap happened. The way Udell is, if we break down the door and he’s armed, either he might get shot, or me, maybe both.”
They went to the south stairs, at the west end of the hallway, and descended to the second floor.
He stood in what might once have been the library or the study, to one side of the open door to the living room, listening as the women helped one another to keep their courage strong.
Through the security-system communicator in his right ear, he heard the alarm and the call for extermination every time it sounded. There was a period, far in the past, when Witness was the one who did the required killing. Those few hardy souls who survived the Pogrom and subsequently survived the Fade tended to seek shelter in the Pendleton when they came upon it, for this building alone seemed to offer recognizable refuge in a changed world. But these final walls were for those people the walls of a trap. Witness made a good first impression on the ragged and weary survivors, because he looked like them, not like a Pogromite. Once millions in number, the Pogromites had dwindled to a few in those days, because they had massacred long and well, and therefore were without sufficient work to justify their existence in large numbers. He welcomed the people who escaped the Pogrom, invited them into his supposed fortress, and when they trusted him, he killed them ruthlessly.
No survivors had chanced by in many years, and he no longer killed. His only job for a long time had been to stand as witness, the sole repository of the history of the world before the Pogrom, and curator of this honored building.
Considering his solitude and the terrible unrelenting weight of his knowledge, his awareness of how the world had once been and his daily experience of what it had become, perhaps it should have been expected that he would change. Gradually he was overcome by a sense of grievous loss. Something like remorse arose in him, and even pity.
One hundred sixteen days previously, the melancholy routine of his isolated existence was interrupted. The first fluctuations began, those inexplicable flashbacks to the Pendleton as it had once been, in 1897, standing high on this hill but in a smaller version of the city that eventually grew. The fluctuations lasted two days, and for flickering moments the present and that particular moment of the past briefly occupied the same point on the continuum of time. Then the transition occurred, flinging Andrew North Pendleton, his wife, and their two children into this merciless future where the perpetually mutating denizens included no species that didn’t kill, a world of
