because he gave you a fight? That’s the lousiest excuse for killing a man I ever heard, let alone a kid. You give me any more of that, I’ll take a poke at you myself.”
“Ah, shaddup, will you?” the other voice said surlily. “Anyhow we got the dog—”
“You loud-mouthed—
Two men grabbed Chris, one from each side, as he surged to his feet. He struggled fiercely, but all the fight left in him was in his soul, not any in his muscles.
“What a bunch of flap-jaws. No wonder you can’t hold your own with a kid. Huggins, put your hat on. Red, don’t you listen to that slob, he’s been all mouth all his life. Your dog ran away, that’s all.”
The lie was kindly meant, no matter how clumsy it was, but it was useless. Chris could see Kelly, not far away. Kelly had done the best he could; he would never have another chance.
The youngster the press-gang dragged stumbling toward Scranton had a heart made of stone.
CHAPTER TWO: A Line of Boiling Dust
THE CITY inside the perimeter of raw earth was wavery and unreal. It did not hum any more, but it gave a puzzling impression of being slightly in shadow, though the July sun was still blazing over it. Even in his grief and anger, Chris was curious enough to wonder at the effect, and finally he thought he saw what caused it: The heat waves climbing the air around the town seemed to be detouring it, as though the city itself were inside a dome. No, not a dome, but a bubble, only a part of which was underground; it met the earth precisely at the cleared perimeter.
The spindizzy field was up. It was invisible in itself, but it was no longer admitting the air of the Earth.
Scranton was ready.
Thanks to the scrapping, the patrol was far behind schedule; the leader drove them all through the scabrous, deserted suburbs without any mercy for his own torn leg. Chris grimly enjoyed watching him wince at every other step, but the man did not allow the wound to hold him up, nor did he let any of the lesser bruises and black eyes in the party serve as excuses for foot dragging.
There was no way to tell, by the normal human senses, when the party passed through the spindizzy screen. Midway across the perimeter, which was a good five hundred feet wide, the leader unshipped from his belt a device about as big as an avocado, turned it in his hands until it whined urgently, and then directed the group on ahead of him in single file, along a line which he traced in the dry red ground with the toe of his boot.
As his two guards left his side, Chris crouched instinctively. He was not afraid of them, and the leader apparently was going to stay behind. But the big man saw the slight motion.
“Red, I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said quietly. “If you try to run back this way after I turn off this gadget—or if you try to go around me—you’ll go straight up in the air. Look back and see the dust rising. You’re a lot heavier than a dust speck, and you’ll go up a lot farther. Better relax. Take it from me.”
Chris looked again at the dubious boundary line he had just crossed. Sure enough, there was a hair-thin ruling there, curving away to both sides as far as he could see, where the inert friable earth seemed to be turning over restlessly. It was as though he were standing inside a huge circle of boiling dust.
“That’s right, that’s what I meant. Now look here.” The press-gang leader bent and picked up a stone just about as big as his fist—which was extraordinarily big—and shied it back the way they had come. As the rock started to cross the line above the seething dust, it leaped skyward with an audible screech, like a bullet ricocheting. In less than a second, Chris had lost sight of it.
“Fast, huh? And it’d throw you much farther, Red. In a few minutes, it’ll be lifting a whole city. So don’t go by how things look. Right where you stand, you’re not even on the Earth any more.”
Chris looked at the mountains for a moment, and then back at the line of boiling dust. Then he turned away and resumed marching toward Scranton.
And yet they were now on a street Chris had traveled a score of times before, carrying fifty cents for the Sunday paper’s Help Wanted ads, or rolling a wheel-barrow not quite full of rusty scrap, or bringing back a flat package of low-grade ground horsemeat. The difference lay only in the fact that just beyond the familiar corner the city stopped, giving place to the new desert of the perimeter—and all in the overarching shadow which was not a shadow at all.
The patrol leader stopped and looked back. “We’ll never make it from here,” he said finally. “Take cover. Barney, watch that red-neck. I’ll take the kid with me; he looks sensible.”
Barney started to answer, but his reply was drowned out by a prolonged fifty-decibel honking which made the very walls howl back. The noise was horrifying; Chris had never before heard anything even a fraction so loud, and it seemed to go on forever. The press-gang boss herded him into a doorway.
“There’s the alert. Duck, you guys. Stand still, Red. There’s probably no danger—we just don’t know. But something might just shake down and fall—so keep your head in.”
The honking stopped; but in its place Chris could again hear the humming, now so pervasive that it made his teeth itch in their sockets. The shadow deepened, and out in the bare belt of earth the seething dust began to leap into the air in feathery plumes almost as tall as ferns.
Then the doorway lurched and went askew. Chris grabbed for the frame; and just in time, for a second later, the door jerked the other way; and then, back again. Gradually, the quakes became periodic, spacing themselves farther apart in time, and slowly weakening in violence.
After the first quake, however, Chris’s alarm began to dwindle into amazement, for the movements of the ground were puny compared to what was going on before his eyes. The whole city seemed to be rocking heavily, like a ship in a storm. At one instant, the street ended in nothing but sky; at the next, Chris was staring at a wall of sheared earth, its rim looming clifflike, fifty feet or more above the new margin of the city; and then the blank sky was back again—
These huge pitching movements should have brought the whole city down in a roaring avalanche of steel and stone. Instead, only these vague twitchings and shudderings of the ground came through, and even those seemed to be fading away. Now the city was level again, amidst an immense cloud of dust, through which Chris could see the landscape begin to move solemnly past him. The city had stopped rocking, and was now turning slowly. There was no longer even the slightest sensation of movement; the illusion that it was the valley that was revolving around the city was irresistible and more than a little dizzying.
But now the high rim of the valley was sinking. In a breath, the distant roadbed of the railroad embankment was level with the end of the street; then the lip of the street was at the brow of the mountain; then with the treetops … and then here was nothing but blue sky, becoming rapidly darker.
The big press-gang leader released an explosive sigh. “By thunder,” he said, “we got her up.” He seemed a little dazed. “I guess I never really believed it till now.”
“Not so sure I believe it yet,” the man called Barney said. “But I don’t see any cornices falling—we don’t have to hang around here any longer. The boss’ll have our necks for being even this late.”
“Yeah, let’s move. Red, use your head and don’t give us any more trouble, huh? You can see for yourself, there’s no place to run to now.”
There was no doubt about that. The sky at the end of the street, and overhead too, was now totally black; and even as Chris looked up, the stars became visible—at first only a few of the brightest, but the others came out steadily in their glorious hundreds. From their familiar fixity Chris could also deduce that the city was no longer rotating on its axis, which was vaguely reassuring, somehow. Even the humming had faded away again; if it was still present, it was now inaudible in the general noise of the city.
Oddly, the sunlight was still as intense as ever. From now on, “day” and “night” would be wholly arbitrary terms aboard the city: Scranton had emerged into the realm of Eternal Daylight-Saving Time.
The party walked two blocks and then stopped while the big man located a cab post and pulled the phone from it. Barney objected at once.
“It’ll take a fleet of cabs to get us all to the Hall,” he complained. “And we can’t get enough guys into a hack to handle a prisoner, if he gets rough.”
