Wales saw men around him become savage
beasts, shooting, looting, killing in frantic
hysteria. Men without hope, they awaited the—
A deep shudder shook Jay Wales. He wished now he hadn't had to come back here to Earth this last time. He wanted to remember the old world of man as it had been, not as it was now in its dying hour.
"It seems impossible that it will really happen," said Hollenberg, the docket captain.
He wasn't looking at Earth. He was looking beyond it at the glittering stars.
Wales looked too. He knew where to look. He saw the faint little spark of light far across the Solar System.
A spark, a pinpoint, an insignificant ray upon the optic nerves—that was all it was.
That—and the hand of God reaching athwart the universe.
"It'll happen," said Wales, without turning. "September 27th, 1997. Four months from now. It'll happen."
The rocket-ship was suddenly convulsed through all its vast fabric by the racking roar of brake-jets letting go. Both men exhaled and lay back in their recoil-chairs. The thundering and quivering soon ceased.
"People," said Hollenberg, then, "are wondering if it really will. Happen, I mean."
For the first time, Wales looked at him sharply. "People where?"
Hollenberg nodded toward the window. "On Earth. Every run we make, we hear it. They say—"
And here it was again, Wales thought, the rumors, the whispers, that had been coming out to Mars, stronger and more insistent each week.
There in the crowded new prefab cities on Mars, where hundreds of millions of Earth-folk were already settling into their new life, with millions more supposed to arrive each month, the rumors were always the same.
"Something's wrong, back on Earth. The Evacuation isn't going right. The ships aren't on schedule—"
Wales hadn't worried much about it, at first. He had his own job. Fitting the arriving millions into a crowded new planet, a new, hard way of life, was work enough. He was fourth in command at Resettlement Bureau, and that meant a job that never ended.
Even when the Secretary called him in to the new UN capital on Mars, he'd only expected a beef about resettlement progress. He hadn't expected what he got.
The Secretary, an ordinarily quiet, relaxed man, had been worn thin and gray and nervous by a load bigger than any man had ever carried before. He had wasted no time at all on amenities when Wales was shown in.
"You knew Kendrick personally?"
There was no need to use first names. Since five years before, there was only one Kendrick in the world who mattered.
"I knew him," Wales had said. "I went to school with both Lee and Martha Kendrick—his sister."
"Where is he?"
Wales had stared. "Back on Earth, at Westpenn Observatory. He said he'd be along soon."
The Secretary said, "He's not at the Observatory. He hasn't come to Mars yet, either. He's disappeared."
"But, why—"
"I don't care why, Wales. I want to know where. Kendrick's got to be found. His disappearance is affecting the Evacuation. That's the report I get from a dozen different men back on Earth. I message them, 'Why are the rocket-schedules falling behind?' I tell them, 'It's Doomsday Minus 122, and Evacuation must go faster.' I get the answer back, 'Kendrick's disappearance responsible—are making every effort to find him'."
After a silence the Secretary had added, "You go back to Earth, Wales. You find Kendrick. You find out what's slowing down Evacuation. We've got to speed up, man! There's over twelve million people still left on Earth."
And here he was, Wales thought, in a rocket-ship speeding back to Earth on one of the endless runs of the Marslift, and he still didn't know why Evacuation had slowed, or what Lee Kendrick's disappearance had to do with it, and he'd have precious little time to find out.
They were sweeping in in a landing-pattern now, and the turquoise had become a big blue balloon fleeced with white clouds. And Hollenberg was far too busy with his landing to talk now. The rocket-captain seemed, indeed, relieved not to be questioned.
The rush inward, the roar of air outside the hull, the brake-blasts banging like the triphammers of giants, the shadowed night side of the old planet swinging up to meet them....
When he stepped out onto the spaceport tarmac, Wales breathed deep of the cool night air. Earth air. There was none like it, for men. No wonder that they missed its tang, out there on Mars. No wonder old women in the crowded new cities out there still cried when they talked of Earth.
He braced back his shoulders, buttoned the tunic of his UN uniform. He wasn't here to let emotion run away with him. He had a job. He got onto one of the moving beltways and went across the great spaceport, toward the high, gleaming cluster of lights that marked the port headquarters.
Far away across the dark plain loomed the massive black bulks of rocket-ships. Dozens of them, hundreds of them. And more were coming in, on rigid landing-schedule. The sky above, again and again, broke with thunder and the great ships came riding their brake-jets of flame downward.
Wales knew, to the last figure, how many times in the last years ships had risen from this spaceport, and how many times, having each one carried thousands of people to Mars, they had returned. Tens of millions had gone out from here. And New Jersey Spaceport was only one of the many spaceports serving the Evacuation. The mind reeled at the job that had been done, the vast number who had been taken to that other world.
And it was still going on. Under colored lights, Wales saw the long queue of men, women, children moving toward one of the towering ships nearby. Signals flashed. Loudspeakers bawled metallically.
"—to Ship 778! All assigned to Ship 778 this way! Have your evacuation-papers ready!"
Wales went by these people, not looking at their faces, not wanting to see their faces.
The noise and crowded confusion got worse as he neared the Administration Building. Near it the buses were unloading, the endless cargoes of people, people—always people, always those pale faces.
An armed guard outside Administration's entrance looked at Wales' uniform and then at his credentials, and passed him through.
"Port Coordinator's office straight ahead," he said.
The interior of the building was a confusion of uniformed men, and women, of clicking tabulating machines, of ringing phones.
Wales thought that here you felt the real pulse of the Marslift. A pulse that had quickened now—like the pulse of a dying man.
Bourreau, the Port Coordinator, was a stocky, bald sweating man, who had thrown off his uniform jacket and was drinking coffee at his desk when Wales came in.
"Sit down," he said. "Heard you were coming. Heard the Secretary was sending you to burn our tails."
"Nothing like that," said Wales. "He just wants to know, why the devil are Evacuation schedules falling behind?"
Bourreau drained his cup, set it down, and wiped his mouth. "Listen," he said, "you don't want to talk to me."
"I don't?"
"No, I'm the Port Coordinator, that's all. I've passed millions of people through here. Evacuation Authority sends them in here, from the marshalling point over in New York. Good people, not-so-good people, and people that aren't worth saving. But to me, they're all just units. They reach here, I shoot them out. That's all. The man you want to talk to is John Fairlie."
"The regional Evacuation Marshal?"
"Yes. Talk to him, over in New York. I've got a car and driver ready for you."
Wales stood up. It was obvious that Bourreau had been all ready for him, and was not going to take a rap for anybody. It was equally obvious that he'd learn nothing about Kendrick's disappearance from this man.
"All right," he said. "I'll see Fairlie first."
The driver of the car, a UN private, turned off on a side road almost as soon as they left the spaceport.
"No use bucking all the buses and trucks on the evacuation thruways," he said. "We use the old roads when we want to hurry. No traffic on them now."
The old roads. The ribbons of concrete and asphalt that once had carried thousands of cars, day and night. Now they were dark and empty.
The car went through a village. It too was dark and empty. They swung on through countryside, without a light in it. And then there was a bigger village, and its dark windows stared at them like blind eyes.
"All evacuated," said the driver. "Every village, town, farm, between here and New York was closed out two-three years ago."
Wales, sitting hunched by the open window, watching the road unreel, saw an old farmhouse on the curve ahead. The headlights caught it, and he saw that all its window-shutters were closed. Someone, some family, had left that house forever and had carefully shuttered its windows—against doomsday.
The poplars and willows and elms went by, and now and again there was a drifting fragrance of flowers, of blossoming orchids. Old apple-trees, innocently ignorant of world's end, were preparing to fruit once more.
Wales felt a sharp, poignant emotion. He asked himself, as a world had been asking for five years, Why did it have to be?
There was only one answer. Far out in the dark lonesomeness of the solar system, far beyond man's new Martian colonies, the thousands of asteroids that swung in incredibly intricate and eccentric orbits—they were the answer. They had been shuttles, weaving fate's web.
Kendrick had been the first to see it, to note the one big asteroid whose next passage near Jupiter would make its eccentricity of orbit too great. With camera and telescope Kendrick had watched, and with the great electronic calculators he had plotted that orbit years ahead, and....
Wales had often wondered what Lee Kendrick had felt like when the first knowledge came to him, when the first mathematical formulae of doom came out on the calculator printing-tape. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, spelled out in an equation. An electronic computer, passionately prophesying the end of man's world....
"In five years, the eccentricity of the asteroid Nereus will bring it finally across Earth's orbit at a point where it will collide with Earth. This collision will make our planet uninhabitable."
He well remembered the first stupefaction with which the world had received the announcement, after Kendrick's calculations had been proved beyond all doubt.
"No force available to us can destroy or swerve an asteroid so big. But in five years, we should be able to evacuate all Earth's people to Mars."
Kendrick, Wales thought now, had been able to give Earth the years of advance warning that meant escape, the years in which the tens of thousands of great rocket-ships could be built and the Marslift get under way. If mankind survived, it would be due to Kendrick's warning. Why should he vanish now?
Wales suddenly became conscious that his driver was putting on the brakes. They were in the outskirts of Morristown.
The streets here were not all dark and dead. He saw the glimmer of flashlights, the movement of dark figures, and heard calling voices.
"I thought you said these cities were all closed out?" Wales said.
The driver nodded. "Yeah. But there's still people around some of them. Looters." He stopped. "We'd better detour around here."
"Looters?" Wales was astounded. "You mean, you don't stop them?"
"Listen," said the driver. "What difference does it make what they take, when the place is closed out?"
Wales had forgotten. What difference did it make, indeed? The nearly-deserted Earth was any man's property now, when inevitable catastrophe was rushing toward it.
A thought struck him. These folk couldn't expect to take loot with them when they were evacuated. So they didn't plan to be evacuated.
He said, "Wait here. I'm going to have a look at them."
"I wouldn't," said the driver hastily. "These people—"
"Just wait," said Wales crisply.
He walked away from the car, toward the flashlights and the shadows and the shouting voices.
The voices had a raw edge of excitement in them, and a few were thick with alcohol. They were mixed men and women, and a few yelping youngsters.
They weren't breaking windows. They simply used crowbars to force open doors. Many doors weren't even locked. Eager hands passed out a motley collection of objects, small appliances, liquor bottles, canned synthefood, clothing.
No wonder Evacuation was going off schedule, thought Wales! Letting people play the fool like this—
A flashlight beam flared beside him, a man's face peered at his uniform, and a loud voice bellowed close to his ears, "Look, everybody! It's an Evacuation Officer!"
There was a dead silence, and then the flashlights converged on him. Somewhere in the group, a woman screamed.
"They're after us! They're going to put us on the ships and take us away!"
"Kill the bastard, knock him down!" yelled a raging voice.
Wales, too astounded to defend himself, felt a sudden shower of clumsy blows that sent him to his knees.
CHAPTER II
It was the very number of Wales' attackers that saved him. There were too many of them, they were too eager to get at him. As he hit the pavement, they dropped their flashlights and crowded around in the dark, getting in each other's way, like frantic dogs chivvying a small animal.
A foot trampled his shoulder and he rolled away from it. All around him in the dark were trousered legs, stumbling over him. Voices yelled, "Where is he?" They yelled, "Bring the lights!"
The lights, if they came, would mean his death. A mob, even a small mob like this one, was a mindless animal. Wales, floundering amid the dark legs, kept his head. He shouted loudly,
"Here come the Evacuation trucks—here they come! We'd better beat it!"
He didn't think it would work, but it did. In that noisy, scuffling darkness, no one could tell who had shouted. And these people were already alarmed.
The legs around him shifted and stamped and ran away over the pavement. A woman screeched thinly in fear. He was alone in the dark.
He didn't think he would be left alone for long. He started to scramble to his feet, beside the curb, and his hand went into an opening—a long curbside storm-sewer drain.
A building was what he had had in mind, but this was better. He got down on his belly and wormed sidewise into the drain. He lay quiet, in a concrete cave smelling of old mud.
Feet came pounding back along the streets, he glimpsed beams of light angling and flickering. Angry voices yelled back and forth. "He's not here. He's got away. But there must be other goddamned Evacuation men around. They're going to round us up—"
"By God, nobody's going to round me up and take me to Mars!" said a deep bass voice right beside Wales.
Somebody else said, "All that nonsense about Kendrick's World—" and added an oath.
Wales lay still in his concrete hole, nursing his bruised shoulder. He heard them going away.
He waited, and then crawled out. In the dark street, he stood, muddy and bruised, conscious now that he was shaking.
What in the world had come over these people? At first, five years ago, it had been difficult to convince many that an errant asteroid would indeed ultimately crash into Earth. Kendrick's first announcement had been disbelieved by many.
But when all the triple-checking by the world's scientists had confirmed it, the big campaign of indoctrination that the UN put on had left few skeptics. Wales himself remembered how every medium of communication had been employed.
"Earth will not be destroyed," the UN speakers had repeated over and over. "But it will be made uninhabitable for a long time. The asteroid Nereus will, when it collides, generate such a heat and shock wave that nothing living can survive it. It will take many years for Earth's surface to quiet again after the catastrophe. Men—all men—must live on Mars for perhaps a whole generation."
People had believed. They had been thankful then that they had a way of escape from the oncoming catastrophe—that the colonization of Mars had proceeded far enough that it could serve as a sanctuary for man, and that modern manufacture of synthetic food and water from any raw rock would make possible feeding all Earth's millions out on that arid world.
They had toiled wholeheartedly at the colossal crash program of Operation Doomsday, the building of the vast fleet of rocket-ship transports, the construction and shipping out of the materials for the great new prefab Martian cities. They had, by the tens and hundreds of millions, gone in their scheduled order to the spaceports and the silver ships that took them away.
But now, with millions still left on Earth, there was a change. Now skepticism and rebellion against Evacuation were breeding here on Earth.
It didn't, Wales thought, make sense!
He was suddenly very anxious to reach New York, to see Fairlie.
He went back along the dark street to the main boulevard, where the little white route signs glimmered faintly. He looked for the car, but did not see it.
Shrugging, Wales started along the highway. He couldn't be too far from the big Evacuation Thruways.
He had gone only a few blocks in the dark, when lights suddenly came on and outlined him. He whirled, startled.
"Mr. Wales," said a voice.
Wales relaxed. He walked toward the lights. It was the car, and the driver in the UN uniform, parked back in an alley.
"I thought you were back at the spaceport by now," Wales said sourly.
The driver swore. "I wasn't going to run away. But no use tackling that crowd. Didn't I warn you? An Evacuation uniform sets them crazy."
Wales got in beside him. "Let's get out of here."
As they rolled, he asked, "When I left Earth four years ago, there didn't seem a soul who doubted Doomsday. Why are these people doubtful now?"
The driver told him, "They say Kendrick's World is just a scare, that it's not going to hit Earth after all."
"Who told them that?"
"Nobody knows who started the talk. Not many believed it at first. But then people began to say, 'Kendrick was the one who predicted Doomsday—if he really believed it, he'd leave Earth!'"
"What did Kendrick say to that?"
"He didn't say anything. He just went into hiding, they say. Leastwise, the officials admitted he hadn't gone to Mars. No wonder a lot of folks began to say, 'He knows his prediction was wrong, that's why he's not leaving Earth!'"
Wales asked, after a time, "What do you think, yourself?"
The driver said, "I'm going out on Evacuation, for sure. So maybe Kendrick and the rest are wrong? What have I got to lose? And if the big crash does come, I won't be here."
Dawn grayed the sky ahead as the car rolled on through more and more silent towns. It took to a skyway and as they sped above the roofs, the old towers of New York rose misty and spectral against the brightening day.
In the downtown city itself, they were suddenly among people again. They were everywhere on the sidewalks and they were a variegated throng. Workers and their families from the midwest, lumbermen and miners from the north, overweight businessmen, women, children, babies, dogs, birds in cages, a shuffling, slow-moving mass of humanity walking aimlessly up and down the streets, waiting their call-up to the buses and the spaceports and the leaving of their world.
Evacuation Police in their gray uniforms were plentiful, and to Wales' surprise they were armed. Only official cars were in the streets, and Wales noticed the frequent unfriendly looks his own car got from faces here and there in the throngs. He didn't suppose people would be too happy about leaving Earth.
The big new UN Building, towering over the city, had been built thirty years before to replace the old one. He had supposed it would be an empty shell, now that the whole Secretariat was out on Mars. But it wasn't. Here was Evacuation headquarters for a whole part of America, and the building was jammed with officials, files, clerks.
He was expected, it seemed. He went right through to the regional Evacuation Marshal's office.
John Fairlie was a solid, blond man of thirty-five or so, with the kind of radiant strength, health, and intelligence that always made Wales feel even more lanky and shy than he really was.
"We've been discussing your mission here," Fairlie said bluntly. He indicated the three other men in the room. "My friends and fellow-officials—they're assistants to Evacuation Marshals of other regions. Bliss from Pacific Coast, Chaumez from South America, Holst from Europe—"
They were men about Fairlie's age, and Wales thought that they were anxious men.
"We don't resent your coming, and you'll get 100 percent cooperation from all of us," Fairlie was saying. "We just hope to God you can get Evacuation speeded up to schedule again. We're worried."
"Things are that bad?" said Wales.
Bliss said gloomily, "Bad—and getting worse. If it keeps up, there's going to be millions still left on Earth when Doomsday comes."
"What," asked Wales, "do you think ought to be done first?"
"Find Kendrick," said Fairlie promptly.
"You think his disappearance that important?"
"I know it is." Fairlie strode up and down the office, his physical energy too restless to be still. "Listen, Wales. It's the fact that Kendrick, who first predicted the catastrophe, hasn't himself left Earth that's deepening all these doubts. If we could find Kendrick and show people how he's going to Mars, it would discredit all this talk that his prediction was a mistake, and that he knows it."
"You've already tried to find him?"
Fairlie nodded. "I've had the world combed for him. I wish I could guess what happened to him. If we could only find his sister, even, it might lead to him."
Yes, Wales thought. Martha and Lee Kendrick had always been close. And now they had vanished together.
He told Fairlie what had happened to him in the Jersey City. Neither Fairlie nor the others seemed much surprised.
"Yes. Things are bad in some of the evacuated regions. You see, once we get all the listed inhabitants out, we can't go back to those places. We haven't the time to keep going over them. So others—the ones who don't want to go—can move into the empty towns and take over."
"Why don't they want to go?" Wales studied the other's face as he asked the question. "Five years ago, everyone believed in the crash, in the coming of Doomsday. Now people here are skeptical. You say that Kendrick might convince them. But what made them skeptical, in the first place?"
Fairlie said, "I don't know, not for sure. But I can tell you what I think."
"Go ahead."
"I think it's secret propaganda at work. I think Evacuation is being secretly sabotaged by talk that Doomsday is all a hoax."
Wales was utterly shocked. "Good God, man, who would do a thing like that? Who would want millions of people to stay on Earth and die on Doomsday?"
Fairlie looked at him. "It's a horrible thought, isn't it? But fanatics will sometimes do horrible things."
"Fanatics? You mean—"
Fairlie said, "We've been hearing rumors of a secret organization called the Brotherhood of Atonement. A group—we don't know how large, probably small in numbers—who seem to have been crazed by the coming of Doomsday. They believe that Nereus is a just vengeance coming on a sinful Earth, and that Earth's sins must be atoned by the deaths of many."
"They're preaching that doctrine openly?" Wales said, incredulous.
"Not at all. Rumors is all we've heard. But—you wondered who would want millions of people to stay on Earth till Doomsday. That's a possible answer."
It made, to Wales, a nightmare thought. Mad minds, unhinged by the approach of world's end, cunningly spreading doubt of the oncoming catastrophe, so that millions would doubt, and would stay—and would atone.
Bliss said, "The damn fools, to believe such stuff! Well, if they get caught on Earth, it'll be the craziest, most ignorant and backward part of the population that we'll lose."
Fairlie said wearily, "Our job is not to lose anybody, to get them all off no matter who or what they are."
Then he said to Wales, with a faint smile, "Sorry if we seem to be griping too much. I expect your job on Mars hasn't been easy either. Things are pretty tough there, aren't they?"
"They're bound to be tough," said Wales. "All those hundreds of millions, and more still coming in. But we'll make out. We've got to."
"Anyway, that's not my worry," Fairlie said. "My headache is to get these stubborn, ignorant fools who don't want to go, off the Earth."
Wales thought swiftly. He said, after a time, "You're right, Kendrick is the key. I came here to find him and I've got to do it."
Fairlie said, "I hope to God you can. But I'm not optimistic. We looked everywhere. He's not at Westpenn Observatory."
"Lee and Martha and I grew up together in that western Pennsylvania town," Wales said. "Castletown."
"I know, we combed the whole place. Nothing."
"Nevertheless, I'll start there," said Wales.
Fairlie told him, "That's all evacuated territory, you know. Closed out and empty, officially. Which means—dangerous."
Wales looked at him. "In that case, I'll want something else to wear than this uniform. Also I'll want a car—and weapons."
It was late afternoon by the time Wales got the car clear of the metropolitan area, out of the congested evacuation traffic. And it was soft spring dusk by the time he crossed the Delaware at Stroudsburg and climbed westward through the Poconos.
The roads, the towns, were empty. Here and there in villages he saw gutted stores, smashed doors and windows—but no people.
As the darkness came, from behind him still echoed the boom-boom of thunder, ever and again repeated, of the endless ships of the Marslift riding their columns of flame up into the sky.
By the last afterglow, well beyond Stroudsburg, he looked back and thought he saw another car top a ridge and sink, swiftly down into the shadow behind him.
Wales felt a queer thrill. Was he being followed? If so, by whom? By casual looters, or by some who meant to thwart his mission? By the society of the Atonement?
He drove on, looking back frequently, and once again he thought he glimpsed a black moving bulk, without lights, far back on the highway.
He saw only one man that night, on a bridge at Berwick. The man leaned on the rail, and there was a bottle in his hand, and he was very drunk.
He turned a wild white face to Wales' headlights, and shook the bottle, and shouted hoarsely. Only the words, "—Kendrick's World—" were distinguishable.
Sick at heart, Wales went by him and drove on.
CHAPTER III
All that night, his car rolled across an unlighted, empty world. Wary of the great thruways, he followed the lesser roads. And every village, every town, every hillside or valley farm, was dark and silent. All this area that included Pennsylvania had been evacuated two years ago, and the people of these houses were now living the new life in the sprawling new cities on another planet.
Twice Wales stopped his car and cut the motor and lights, and waited, listening. Once he was sure that he heard a distant humming from far back along the highway, but it fell silent, and though he waited with gun in hand, no one came. So each time he drove on, but he could not rid himself of the conviction that someone followed him secretly.
With morning, his spirits lifted a little. He was only an hour's drive from the old Pennsylvania-Ohio line where the town of Castletown was. And there, if anywhere, he must find the trail to Lee and Martha Kendrick.
Kendrick, to the world, had become identified with the asteroid that was plunging ever nearer in its fateful orbit. It had, from the first, been called Kendrick's World. Kendrick, if anyone could, might convince those who had begun to doubt Doomsday. If Kendrick could be found....
Wales drove down a winding hillside road into the town of Butler, ten minutes later—and ran smack into a barricade.
The moment he saw the cars drawn up to block the highway, he tried to swing around fast. But he wasn't quick enough.
A voice said, "Kill the motor and get out."
Men had come out of the bushes that, in two years, had grown up close to the highway. They were unshaven men, wearing dirty jeans, with rifles in their hands. There were two on one side of the highway, and an older man on the other.
Wales looked at their dusty faces. Then he cut the motor and got out of the car.
They took his weapons, and the older man said, "You can put your hands down now. And come along with us."
"Where?"
"You'll see."
One man remained, searching Wales' car. The other two, their rifles on the ready, walked beside Wales down the long winding hill highway into the old town.
"I thought all these towns were evacuated," said Wales.
"They were, a long time ago," said the older man.
"But you men—"
"We're not from here. Now anything more you want to know, you ask Sam Lanterman. He'll have some things to ask you."
The main street of the town looked to Wales vaguely like a gypsy camp. Dusty cars were parked double along it, and there was a surprising number of men and women and kids about. The men all carried rifles or wore belted pistols. The children were pawing around in already-looted stores, and most of the women looked with a blank, tired stare at Wales and his guard.
They took him into the stone courthouse. In the courtroom, dimly lighted and smelling of dust and old oak, four men were seated around what had once been a press-table. One of Wales' captors spoke to the man at the head of the table.
"Got a prisoner, Sam," he said importantly. "This fellow. He was driving from the east."
"From the east, was he?" said Lanterman. "Well, now, he might just have come from the south and swung around town, mightn't he?"
He looked keenly at Wales. He was a gangling man of forty with a red face and slightly bulging blue eyes that had a certain fierceness in them. The others at the table were two heavy men who looked like farmers, and a small, dark, vicious-looking young man.
"You didn't," said Lanterman, "just happen to come from Pittsburgh, did you?" They all seemed to watch him with a certain tenseness, at this.
Wales shook his head. "I came from the east, all the way across state."
"And where were you heading?"
Wales didn't like the implications of that "were". He said, "To Castletown. I'm looking for my girl. It's where she used to live."
"People in Castletown been gone two years," Lanterman said promptly. "To Mars—the damn fools!" And he suddenly laughed uproariously.
More and more worried, Wales said, "She wrote me she wasn't going to leave till I came."
"You're not one of those Evacuation Officials, are you?" Lanterman asked shrewdly.
"A lot more likely he comes from Pittsburgh," said the dark young man.
Wales, sensing an increasing suspicion and danger, thought his safest bet was honest indignation. He said loudly,
"Look, I don't know what right you have to stop me when I'm trying to reach my girl! I'm not an Evac official and I don't know what all this talk about Pittsburgh means. Who made you the law around here?"
"Son," said Lanterman softly, "there isn't any law any more. The law left here when all the people left—all except a few who wouldn't be stampeded off Earth by a lot of moonshiny science nonsense."
Wales said, as though himself dubious, "Then you don't think there's really going to be Doomsday, like they say?"
"Do you think so?"
Wales pretended perplexity. "I don't know. All the big people, the Government people and all, have told us over and over on the teevee, about how Kendrick's World will hit the Earth—"
"Kendrick's so-and-so," said one of the farmer-looking men, disgustedly.
"I thought," said Wales, "that I'd see if my girl was going to leave, before I decided."
He wondered if he weren't laying on the stupid yokel a little too thick. But he had realized his danger from the first.
All the bands of non-evacuees who remained in closed-out territory, making their own law, were dangerous. He'd found that out in Morristown only last night. And Lanterman and his men seemed especially suspicious, for some reason.
"Look," said Lanterman, and then asked, "What's your name, anyway?"
"Jay Wilson," said Wales. His name had been in the news, and he'd better take no chances.
"Well, look now, Wilson," said Lanterman, "you don't always want to believe what people tell you. Me, I'm from West Virginia. Had a farm there. On the TV it told us how this Kendrick had found out Earth was going to be destroyed, how, everyone would have to go to Mars. My woman said, 'Sam, we'll have to go.' I said, 'Don't you get in a panic. People have always been predicting the end of the world. We'll wait a while and see.' Lot of our neighbors packed up and went off. People came to tell us we'd better get going too. I told them, I don't panic easy, I'm waiting a while."
Lanterman laughed. "Good thing I did. More'n a year went by, and the world didn't end. And then it turned out that this here Kendrick that started the whole stampede—he hadn't left Earth. Not him! Got all the fools flying out to Mars on his say-so, but wasn't fool enough to go himself. Fact is, people say he's hiding out so the Evacuation officials can't make him go. Well, if Kendrick himself won't go, that predicted it all, why should we go?"
And that, Wales thought despairingly, was the very crux of the problem. Where was Lee Kendrick anyway? He must know that his remaining on Earth was being fatally misinterpreted by people like these.
Lanterman added, with a certain complacency, "All the fools went, and left their houses, cars, cities. Left 'em to those of us who wasn't fools! That's why we gathered together. Figured we might as well pick up what they'd left. We got near a hundred men together, I said, 'Boys, let's quit picking over these empty villages and take a real rich town. Let's go up to Pittsburgh.'"
One of the farmer-men said gloomily, "Only this Bauder had the idea first. His bunch took over Pittsburgh, as we found out."
Lanterman's eyes flashed. "But they're not going to keep it! Since we first tried it, we've got a lot more men. One or two joining us every few days. We'll show Bauder's outfit something this time!"
Of a sudden, the strangeness of the scene struck at Wales. A few years before, this quiet old country courthouse had been the center of a busy, populous town, of a county, a nation, a world.
Now world and nation were drained of most of their people. An Earth almost de-populated lay quiet, awaiting the coming of the destruction from space. Yet men who did not believe in that destruction, men in little bands, were, with the passing of all law, contending for the possession of the great evacuated cities.
Lanterman stood up. "Well, what about it, Wilson? You want to join up with us and take Pittsburgh away from Bauder? Man, the loot there'll be—liquor, cars, food, everything!"
Wales knew he had no real choice, that even though it was a maddening interruption to his search for Kendrick, he must pretend to accede. But he thought it best not to agree too readily.
"About Pittsburgh, I don't care," he said. "It's Castletown I want to get to—and my girl."
"Ho," said Lanterman, "I'll tell you what. You join up with us and I'll give you Castletown, all for your own. Of course, I'll still be boss of the whole region."
Wales made another attempt for information. "I've heard of this Brotherhood of Atonement," he said. "Are you with that outfit?"
Lanterman swore. "That bunch is crazy. No sense to 'em at all. Hell, no, we're not Atoners."
Wales said, slowly, "Well, looks like if I and my girl decide to stay, we'd better be in your bunch. Sure, I'll join."
Lanterman clapped him on the back. "You'll never regret it, Wilson. I've got some big ideas. Those that stick with me will get more'n their share of everything. Pittsburgh is only the start."
He added impressively, "You're joining at a lucky time. For tonight's when we're taking Pittsburgh."
The young, dark man snarled, "If he's a spy, then letting him know that will—"
"You're too suspicious, Harry," said Lanterman. "He's no spy. He's come."
He looked down at the dark young man. "All right, Harry, you take your bunch along now. And you remember not to start things till you hear our signal."
Ten cars, with thirty-odd men in them, pulled out of the main street in the twilight. Harry was in the first car, and they headed south out of town.
Lanterman then told the others, "Rest of us better get going too, all except those that are staying to guard the women and kids. You stick along with me, Wilson."
Motors roared, all along the street. Lanterman climbed grandly into a long black limousine, and Wales followed him.
The car was full of men and gun-barrels when its driver, a leathery young chap who was chewing tobacco, pulled out along the street. The other cars, nearly a score of them, followed them. But they headed southeastward.
"We're going pretty far east," Wales protested. "Pittsburgh's south."
Lanterman chuckled. "Don't you worry, Wilson. You'll get to Pittsburgh, before the night's over."
For an hour the caravan of cars, without lights, rolled along silent roads and through dark villages.
They came to a halt in a little town that Wales couldn't recognize. But when he saw wooden piers, and the broad, glinting blackness of a river, he realized it must be one of the smaller towns a bit upriver from Pittsburgh on the Allegheny.
There were a dozen big skiffs tied to the piers, and a quartet of armed men guarding them. There were no lights, and the darkness was a confusion of shadowy men and of unfamiliar voices.
"Get your damned gun-butt out of my ribs, will you?"
Wales realized that the whole party was embarking in the boats. He followed Lanterman into one of them. Lanterman said,
"Now I don't want one bit of noise from any of you. Get going."
The boats were cast off and forged out into the dark, wide river. In the moonless night, the shore was only a deeper bulk of blackness. Lanterman's boat, leading, swung across to the southern shore, and then kept close to it as they went silently downstream.
Occasional creak of oars, the voices of frogs along the bank—these were the only sounds. The deep summery, rotten smell of the river brought a powerful nostalgia to Wales.
Impossible to think that all this must soon end!
The darkness remained absolute as they went on downriver. They had entered what was once the busiest industrial region of the world, but it was desolate and black and silent now.
Wales ventured to whisper, "Why this way, instead of using the bridges?"
Lanterman snorted. "They expect us to use the bridges. Wait, and you'll see." A moment later he called. "No more rowing. Drift. And no noise!"
They drifted silently along the bank. A huge span loomed up vaguely over them. Wales thought it would be the old Chestnut Street Bridge.
He was startled when, beside him, Lanterman hooted. It was a reasonably good imitation of a screech-owl, twice repeated.
A moment later, from the northern, farthest end of the big bridge, rifle-shots shattered the silence. There was a sudden confusion of firing and shouting there.
Lanterman chuckled. "Harry's right on time. He'll make enough row to bring the whole bunch there."
Presently there was a sound of motors. Cars without lights, many of them, were racing along the riverside highway from downtown Pittsburgh. They rushed over the bridge, toward the distant uproar of shooting.
"That decoyed them out," Lanterman said. He gave orders, quick and fierce. "Allerman, you and Jim take your boats in here. Block the bridges, so they can't get back in a hurry."
Two skiffloads of men darted toward the dim shore. And the rest, with Lanterman's skiff leading, moved under oars down along the riverside.
Now Wales glimpsed lights—a few dim, scattered gleams. With a shock, he saw big, black towers against the stars, and realized they were the skyscrapers of downtown Pittsburgh.
Their skiffs shot in, bumped and stopped. The men piled out, onto a cobbled levee that slanted up from the river.
Lanterman's voice rang out. "We've got 'em cold, with most of their men chasing Harry across the river! Come on! But remember—don't shoot anyone unless they show fight! Most of 'em'll join us, later."
The dark figures of the men, gun-barrels glinting in the starlight, went up the levee in a stumbling rush. Somewhere ahead, a voice yelled in alarm.
Wales, behind Lanterman, felt more than ever caught in a nightmare. These men, ignorant in their unbelief, battling for an empty city upon a world toward which doom was coming—it seemed a terrible dream from which he could not wake.
CHAPTER IV
They ran forward and were suddenly in a narrow street of tall, old business buildings. It was a gut of darkness in which the men stumbled and jostled each other, and now they heard an alarm-siren ahead.
Wales had no desire at all to become embroiled in this senseless struggle for an empty city. But with Lanterman just ahead, and men all around, he dared not try to slip away. Some of them were surely watching him.
They debouched into a broader street. A few blocks away along this wider avenue, a searchlight suddenly went into action, lighting up shop windows and building-fronts for a quarter-mile, and half-dazzling the dark, running figures of Lanterman's men. Instantly shots burst forth from beyond the searchlight. Bullets whined and whanged off stone-work, and there was the silvery crash of shattered plate-glass.
"Get back in here!" Lanterman yelled, and his men sucked back into the dark shelter of the narrower way.
One of them was holding his shoulder, and sobbing, "Damn them, they hit me—"
Wales, pressing close against a stone facade, looked out into the eery brilliance ahead and recognized it as Liberty Avenue. He saw, across it, a shopwindow in which impeccably dressed dummies looked out as though in wide-eyed amazement at what was going on.
Lanterman paid no attention to the wounded man. "They're up in that big hotel near the Post Office," he said quickly. "Can't be many men left here—but we got to get to them fast, before the others hear and start back."
He told one of the farmer-men,
"You, Milton—take a dozen men and get around to the back of that hotel. Rest of us will take it from the front."
Wales thought that however ignorant he might be in some ways, Lanterman was a born leader. No wonder that people who had been bewildered and lost in doubts followed the red-faced man.
Two men with Venn guns hurried into a building at the corner of Liberty. A minute later, from a third-floor window, they suddenly let go. The searchlight went out.
"Come on!" yelled Lanterman. They poured out into the wide avenue and raced along it, keeping on the sidewalks on either side.
There was, suddenly, a burst of firing from ahead, that sounded muffled and distant. Then silence. They were nearly to the big hotel.
"Hold it, Sam!" came Milton's yell from the dark building. "It's all done."
Flashlights began to come on, like fireflies waking. There was a sound of women screeching from inside the hotel. Men came out of it, their hands high.
One was a burly, shock-haired man who cursed Lanterman when he saw him. "Shot two of my men, you—"
"Now quiet down, Bauder," said Lanterman. In the angling flashlight illumination, his face was sweating and exultant. "No call for any more fighting here. Wouldn't have been any, if you hadn't been so big-feelinged when we first came. Pittsburgh's big enough for all of us—long as you know I'm boss."
He turned to his men. "Half of you get back over to those bridges—tell 'em we've got Bauder and we've got Pittsburgh. They'll give up. Take them, Milton."
Whooping with triumph, the men started after Milton, into one of the dark side streets leading toward the river.
Wales started along with them. He half expected Lanterman to call him back, but the leader was too occupied with his moment of victory to remember the suspicions of hours before.
It was, Wales knew, the best chance he'd be likely to get to escape from this band. He let himself drop behind the rest of Milton's men as they ran down Ninth Street. Then, passing the mouth of an alley, he dodged into it and ran alone in darkness, cutting south to Sixth.
Wales stretched his legs toward the levee. The bridges were impassable to him, and the skiffs were his only chance. He made sure of oars in one of them, then pushed it out onto the dark river.
From northward, from the bridges, came the sound of firing. But as Wales rowed, the shots straggled into silence.
He guessed that the fighting was over and that Sam Lanterman was master of Pittsburgh.
When Wales finally stood on the dark northern shore and looked back, he saw a scattered twinkling of little lights moving amid the towering black structures that once had been a city.
He suddenly found that he was shaking, from reaction and despair.
"Can anyone—anything—save people like that?"
To Wales, it suddenly all seemed hopeless—the mission on which he'd come back to Earth. Hopeless, to think that the ignorant, the short-sighted, the fearful, could ever be induced to leave Earth in time.
He looked up at the star-decked sky. Out there in the void, the massive asteroid that spelled world's end was swinging ever forward on the orbit that in four months would end in planetary collision. You couldn't see it, though. And that was the trouble. People like these, influenced by someone's secret propaganda, wouldn't believe it until Kendrick's World loomed dreadful in the heavens. And then it would be too late....
Wales turned and started up the street from the river. He'd been given a mission and he had to carry it out. Not only for the sake of all those ignorant ones who might be trapped on a doomed world, but also for the sake of his friends. Something had happened to Lee and Martha Kendrick, and he had to find them.
He went through the Northside district until, beyond the old Planetarium, he found a big garage. There were plenty of cars in it. In ten minutes, Wales was driving north.
He kept his lights off, and his speed down. He looked back often. No one followed him now.
"Whoever was trailing me," he thought, "will be a while discovering that I'm not still with Lanterman."
Again, he wondered who the secret trailers were. They hadn't tried to overtake him. They had just followed him. Was it someone who also wanted to find Kendrick? And for what reason?
He thought of the Brotherhood of Atonement that was still only a name to him, and felt a chill.
It was fifty miles to Castletown, and he dared not drive too fast without lights lest he run suddenly upon a block in the road. But after a while the moon rose and Wales was able to push the car a little faster.
The countryside dreamed in the moonlight. It was only in towns that the awful emptiness of the world crushed you down. Out here between fields and hills, things were as they had always been, and it did indeed seem mad folly for men to quit their planet. It was small wonder that some of them refused to do so.
Everything you saw, Wales thought, wrung your heart with a feeling of futility. That little white house with the picket fence that he swept past so swiftly—someone had labored hard to build that fence, to plant the flowers, to coddle a green lawn into being. And it had all been for nothing, the little houses, the mighty cities, all the care and toil and planning of centuries for nothing....
He would not let himself get into that frame of mind. It had not been for nothing. Out of it all, man had won for himself the knowledge that was now saving him. The cities that now seemed so futile had built the rocket-fleets that for years had been taking the millions out to Mars. They had built the atomic power-plants, the great electronic food-and-water synthesizers, that would make life on Mars possible for all Earth's folk. No, man's past was not a failure, but a success.
Of a sudden, Wales' brooding was shattered as he drove into the town of Brighton Falls.
There was no town.
He pulled up, startled. In the moonlight, a blackened devastation stretched around him, a few ruined walls still standing, the rest a shapeless mass of blackened debris.
Wales, after a moment, got over his first shock. "Lightning could easily start a fire," he thought. "And with nobody to put it out—"
It seemed logical enough. Yet he still felt shocked as he drove hastily on out of the blackened ruins.
As the moon rose, he drove faster. Castletown was very near. He would soon know if he had come all this way for nothing.
In this old town, Wales had grown up with Lee and Martha Kendrick. In Westpenn College here, they'd been classmates. Lee, making astronomy his career, had stayed here at the small but famous Westpenn Observatory, to make finally the astronomical discovery of approaching Doomsday. And, Wales knew, Martha had stayed with him, keeping the old Kendrick house for him.
He knew too that the Kendricks had stayed on here, even after the whole region was evacuated. And then they'd disappeared.
Fairlie had said that his men had searched here and hadn't found them. But Wales clung to the conviction that his quest of them must begin here.
CASTLETOWN
A Good Place to Live
The sign at the edge of town, unintentionally ironic now, went past him. It had been a long way from here, Wales thought, to the Rocket Service school out west, a long way farther to Mars, and yet here he was, after all these years, back again.
His own boyhood home was here but there was no reason at all to visit it. He was glad there was no reason, he was glad now that his parents had died before Doomsday came.
He turned off the highway. The campus of Westpenn College was on the hills east of Castletown. The buildings were dark and silent. On the loftiest eminence, the dome of the Observatory shouldered the stars. There was no light there, either.
Wales drove past the campus to the big, square, old-fashioned Kendrick house. It was dark and quiet as everything else. He stopped his car, made sure of the pistol in his jacket pocket, and ascended the steps.
He felt, after all these years, like a ghost coming back to a dead town, to a dead world. Impatient of fancies, he pushed at the front door and it swung quietly inward.
Wales flashed his light around the hall inside. Then he began going through the rooms.
Over an hour later he was back in the front hall, disappointed and baffled. He had found no one in the house, and no evidence that either Lee or Martha had been here recently.
As he stood, anxious and frustrated, Wales suddenly noticed a smear of red on the inner side of the white-painted front door.
He flashed his light on it. Two words were written in lipstick on the door, in a feminine hand. "The Castle." Nothing more.
Wales' thoughts leaped. He pulled open the door and went out to his car fast. In a moment he was driving on downtown, his hopes suddenly high.
"The Castle." That was what, when they were all kids, they had called the old hilltop mansion of an ancient great-aunt of the Kendricks'. They had given it that name because of its 1900-ish wooden tower with a crenellated top, that had fascinated them.
Of a sudden, checking his elation, there came to Wales the sure knowledge that Martha had been afraid, when she wrote that direction.
Afraid to leave a more definite clue, than that one that only a few people could possibly understand.
"But she didn't leave that for me—" Wales thought, puzzledly. "As far as they knew, I was still on Mars. But then, for whom?"
He began to worry more deeply than before. He had found a clue to the Kendricks, a clue that Fairlie's agents had been unable to understand, but the careful obscurity of it made their disappearance suddenly more sinister.
Wales drove fast through the familiar old hometown streets. He noticed, as he swung around the Diamond, that one store had a brave sign chalked on its window, "Closed for Doomsday".
He swung right, up North Jefferson Street, then on up the steep hill that was the highest point of Castletown. He was wire-tense with hope when he parked in front of the old wooden monstrosity of a mansion.
Everything was dark here, too. His hopes fell a little as he went up the tree-lined walk. Still, people would be careful about showing light—
Something exploded in the back of Wales' head, and his face hit the ground hard.
CHAPTER V
Wales regained a foggy consciousness, to become aware that someone close to him was sobbing.
He felt that he had to get up. There was something he must do. He had very little time, the end of Earth was rushing upon him, and there was someone he must find. He must move, get up....
"Jay," said a voice somewhere. "It's me. Me! Martha."
Wales got his eyes open, and saw a dark figure bending over him, and he threshed his arms numbly, trying to push it away, trying to get up, to fight.
"Jay!"
A flashlight beam suddenly sprang into being right above him, almost dazzling him. Then, his vision clearing, he saw that the beam was not on his face but on the face that bent above him.
A girl's face, quite familiar, framed by dark, hair, but with tears running down it. Martha Kendrick's face.
The beam went out and the darkness was upon them again.
Wales found he was lying on damp grass, one hand resting on a concrete walk. He saw trees and a big house with a crenellated wooden tower, against the stars.
"Martha," he muttered. "So you were here. But there's someone else—someone slugged me—"
Her voice came uncertainly. "That was me, Jay. I—I might have killed you—"
He didn't understand at all. But, as his brain began to clear a little, he became aware of a pounding headache.
He sat up. Martha had her arm around his shoulders, but she seemed more to cling to him than to support him. She was sobbing again.
"How could I know?" she was saying. "I didn't even know you were on Earth. When your car came, when you came up the walk in the dark, I knew it wasn't Lee. Not tall enough. I thought it was one of them. I didn't dare shoot, so I used the gun to hit you—"
He gripped her arm. "Martha, where is Lee?"
"Jay, I don't know. I've been waiting for him here, hoping he'd come. I've been nearly crazy, by myself. And afraid—"
Wales perceived that she was near hysteria. And her fear communicated to him.
He got unsteadily to his feet. "We'd better go inside. Where we can talk, and have a light, without anyone seeing it."
His head felt big as a pumpkin, but he navigated the steps of the old mansion successfully. In the dark interior of the house, he heard Martha lock and chain the door. Then her hand gripped his wrist.
"This way. I have one room blacked out—the kitchen."
He let her lead him through the darkness, heard her close another door. Then her flashlight came on again, illuminating the barny old kitchen.
He looked at her. He had remembered Martha Kendrick as a small, dark girl, something of a spitfire. There was no chip on her shoulder now. She looked near collapse, her face dead white, her hands trembling.
She insisted on putting cold wet cloths on his head. Holding them there, feeling at the same time painful and a little ridiculous in appearance, Wales made her sit down with him at the kitchen table. The flashlight, lying on the table, threw angular shadows against the walls.
"How long have you been hiding here, Martha?"
"Five weeks. It seems like five years." Her lips began to quiver. "It's been like a terrible dream. This old house, the town, everything you knew all your life, deserted and strange. The little sounds you hear at night, the glow in the sky from the burnings—"
"But why have you hidden here? Why didn't you—and Lee too—report to New York for evacuation to Mars, like everyone else?"
Martha Kendrick seemed to get a little control of herself. She spoke earnestly.
"When Castletown, like the rest of this whole region, was evacuated two years ago, Lee wanted to stay on a while. He was working each night over at the Observatory, keeping a constant watch on Nereus. I think he kept hoping that he'd discover some change in its orbit, some hope. But—he found nothing. He'd been right. It would hit Earth."
"But why did you stay, too?" Wales demanded. Martha looked at him in surprise.
"Somebody had to take care of Lee. I wasn't going to Mars until he went. It was lonesome, after everybody left Castletown. Lee said we'd soon go, ourselves. But then—he changed. He began to seem terribly worried about something, terribly afraid."
"We've all been afraid," Wales said somberly, but she shook her head.
"It wasn't the crash, it wasn't Doomsday, Lee was afraid of. It was something else. He said he feared all Earth's people weren't going to get away. He said there were men who didn't want everyone to get away, men who wanted to see a lot of people trapped here when Doomsday comes!"
Wales was electrified out of his headachy grogginess by her statement. He grasped her wrist. "Martha, Lee said that? Who did he say they were—those who wanted to trap millions into staying here?"
Again she shook her head. "He didn't say who they were. He said he wasn't sure, it was only a suspicion. But it worried him. He went to New York once to see John Fairlie about—the regional Evacuation Marshal."
Wales thought hard. "Yes. Fairlie told me he suspected some deliberate, secret effort going on to induce millions of people to stay on Earth till it was too late. Either Fairlie got that idea from Lee, or Lee got it from him—" He broke off, then asked, "Did Lee ever talk about the Brotherhood of Atonement?"
Martha nodded. "Oh, yes, quite often. We've been afraid of them, ever since everyone else left Castletown."
Again, Wales was astonished. "What do you know about that Brotherhood, Martha?"
She seemed surprised by his excitement. "Why, Jay, they're fanatics, a superstitious movement that started long before evacuation was carried out here. People whose minds became unhinged by the coming of Doomsday. They preached, down in the Diamond, I heard them, terrible ravings that Doomsday was sent us for our sins, that only sacrifice and atonement of lives and treasures would save the world. Then, when evacuation went on, here, all the Brotherhood hid in the country so they wouldn't have to go."
"And they're here now?" he exclaimed.
Martha shuddered. "Not here. It's the one thing I've feared most these last weeks, that they'd burn Castletown."
"Burn Castletown? Good God—why?"
Martha looked at him. "Jay, they're burning the empty cities, one by one. A sacrifice. An atonement. I'm afraid Sharon was burned two nights ago—the glow in the sky seemed to come from there. And I've seen other fire-glows in the south—"
Wales, with a sudden cold feeling, remembered the blackened desolation of Brighton Falls. Then it had been no accident? Then it had been deliberate, a purposeful thing, a sacrifice—
He suddenly saw Earth as it was. A nearly-empty planet reeling toward crazy anarchy. In New York, where there was still law and order and you could see the rocket-fleets of the Marslift coming and going methodically in the sky, it had still seemed like a civilized world. But out here in the black, blind evacuated regions was deepening chaos, with law gone and all the most atavistic passions of humanity let loose. With the ignorant and mad who refused to leave battling for the possession of deserted cities, or setting the torch to unpeopled towns in superstitious sacrifice....
He asked Martha, "Did Lee think that the Brotherhood of Atonement was behind the plot to trap people into staying on Earth?"
That seemed to startle her. "He didn't say so. But could they be the ones? Mad people like that—?"
"It would take a fanatic to perpetrate a horror like getting people trapped in Doomsday," Wales said. "But let it pass, for the moment. I want to know what happened to Lee."
Her dark eyes filled with tears again. "I can't tell you. It was like this. Each night, Lee went to the Observatory. I stayed in our home but I had a portable radiophone and he had one, always open, so I could call him if I needed him. But, one night five weeks ago, he called me. He was shouting, hoarse. He said, 'Martha, men breaking in—I think they know I suspect their plan—you get out of the house, quick! If I get away, I'll find you—'"
Her face was white and haunted, as she went on. "Jay, I didn't know what to do! I had to hide but I had to leave some word for Lee so, if he got back, he'd know where to find me. That's why I wrote "The Castle" on the door. Nobody but he would know I meant this old house. I ran out and was only a few blocks away when I heard cars, at our house, and men calling. I kept in the back streets, in the dark, and got here. I—I've been waiting here since then. Weeks. Eternities. And—Lee hasn't come. Do you think they killed him?"
Wales gave her an honest answer. "Martha, I don't know. We'll hope they didn't. We'll try to find him. And the first question is, Who took him? Who are 'they'?"
She spoke more slowly. "I've had time to think. Lots of it. When Lee said, 'I think they know I suspect their plan—' Was he referring to his suspicion that there was a terrible plot to keep many people trapped on Earth till Doomsday? Did they realize Lee suspected them, and seize him?"
Wales' fist clenched slowly. "It's the only possible answer. Lee somehow suspected who was behind the secret propaganda that's been swaying people to remain on Earth. They grabbed him, to prevent him from telling."
He added, suddenly, "And it would serve their purpose another way! It would enable them to point out that Lee Kendrick hadn't left Earth—so that Kendrick's World must be a hoax!"
An expression of pain crossed Martha's white face. "Jay, don't call it that."
"What?"
"Kendrick's World. It's not fair. Lee discovered its new orbit, he gave the whole Earth a lifesaving warning. It's not fair to give his name to the thing that's bringing Doomsday."
He reached out and clasped her hand. "Sorry, Martha. You're right. But we still have that question to answer. Who are 'they'—the 'they' who took Lee? Are they the Brotherhood of Atonement? Or somebody else? Who else would have any motive?"
His head suddenly swayed drunkenly, and he brushed his hand across his eyes. Martha uttered a little cry of distress.
"Jay, you're still not over it—the blow I gave you. Here, let me make fresh compresses."
He held her back. "No, Martha, it's not that. I'm just out, dead tired. Since I reached Earth on this mission, I've had it—and only a few hours sleep in my car, last night."
She took his wrist. "Then you're going to sleep right now. I'll keep watch. This way—I have to put the light out when we leave the kitchen—"
Wales, following her through the dark house, felt that he was three parts asleep by the time he reached the bedroom to which she led him. His head still ached, and the headache and the exhaustion came up over him like a drowning wave.
When he woke, afternoon sunlight was slanting into the dusty bedroom. He turned, and discovered that Martha sat in a chair beside the bed, her hands folded, looking at him.
She said, "I wasn't sleepy. And it's been so long since I've had anyone—"
She stopped, faintly embarrassed. Wales sat up, and reached and kissed her. She clung to him, for a moment.
Then she drew back. "Just propinquity," she said. "You would never even look at me, in the old days."
Wales grinned. "But now you're the last girl in town."
Martha's face changed and she suddenly said, with a little rush of words, "Oh, Jay, do you sometimes get the feeling that it just can't happen, no matter what Lee and all the other scientists say, no matter what their instruments say, that everything we've known all our lives just can't end in flame and shock from the sky—?"
He nodded soberly. "I've had that feeling. We've all had it, had to fight against it. It's that feeling, in the ignorant, that'll keep them here on Earth until it's too late—unless we convince them in time."
"What'll it really be like for us, on Mars?" she asked him. "I don't mean all the cheery government talks about the splendid new life we'll all have there. I mean, really."
"Hard," he said. "It's going to be a hard life, for us all. The mineral resources there are limitless. Out of them, with our new sciences of synthesis, we can make air, water, food. But only certain areas are really habitable. Our new cities out there are already badly crowded—and more millions still pouring in."
He still held her hand, as he said, "But we'll make out. And Earth won't be completely destroyed, remember. Someday years from now—we'll be coming back."
"But it won't be the same, it'll never be the same," she whispered.
He had no answer for that.
Packaged food made them a meal, in the kitchen. It was nearly sunset, by the time they finished.
Martha asked him then, with desperate eagerness, "We're going to try to find Lee now?"
Wales said, "I've been thinking. We'll get nowhere by just searching blindly. Fairlie's agents did that, and found no trace of Lee at all. I think there's only one way to find him."
"What?"
"Since I left New York on this mission, I was followed," Wales told her. He described the shadowy, unseen trailers who had tracked him until he fell into the hands of Lanterman's men. "Now, my mission to find Lee could well have been known. Only reason anyone would follow me is to make sure I didn't find him. So those who tracked me must be some of the 'they' who took Lee. The Brotherhood of Atonement, it seems sure."
He paused, then went on. "So my shadows must know what happened to Lee, where he is. If I could catch one of them, make him talk—"
"We could find out what they've done with Lee!" Martha exclaimed. Then her excitement checked. "But you said they must have lost your trail, at Pittsburgh."
He nodded. "Sure. But what would they do, when they made sure I wasn't with Lanterman's band in Pittsburgh, that I'd slipped away? Knowing that I was headed for Castletown in the first place, they'll come here to look for me. And I'll be waiting for them."
A little pallor came into Martha's face. "What are you going to do, Jay?"
"I'm going to set up a little ambush for them, right down in the center of town," he said grimly. "You'll be quite safe here, until—"
She interrupted passionately. "No. I'm going with you." He started to argue, and then he saw the desperation in her eyes. "Jay, you don't know what it's been like to be so alone. I'm not letting you go without me."
He said, after a moment, "Maybe you're right. But we'd better get started. Do you have a gun?"
She produced an ancient revolver. "I found this, in the house next door. I wanted something—I was so afraid the Brotherhood would come here—"
Wales nodded. "We'll get you something better than that. Now listen, Martha. You must keep silent, you must do what I say. There's no one at all to help us, if things go wrong."
She nodded. He opened the back door and they went out of the old house, and across its ragged back yard to the alley.
Wales, his gun in his hand, led the way down the alley. Where it crossed Grant Street, he stopped, stuck his head out and peered both ways. The street of old houses was still and dead. The maples along it drowsed in the dying sunlight. A little breeze whispered, and was quiet again.
Wales and Martha darted across the street fast, into the shelter of the alley again. As they went down it, hugging the backs of buildings, heading toward the Diamond, Wales had again that fantastic feeling of unreality.
He remembered every foot of these blocks. How many times, carrying a newspaper route as a boy, he had short-cutted along this alley. And how would a boy dream that he would come back to it someday, when the familiar town lay silent and empty before approaching world's end?
They reached the Diamond, an oval of grass with benches and a Civil War monument and with the three-story storefronts all around it, their dusty windows looking down like blind eyes. "KEEP RIGHT" said a big sign at each end of the Diamond, but nothing moved along the wide street, nothing at all.
Wales peered from a doorway, then took Martha's wrist and hurried across. Dutton's Hardware, with its windows still full of fishing-tackle displays, was on the other side. But when he tried the door, it was locked.
He could smash the plate-glass of the door but that would be to advertise his presence inside. He hurried, tense and sweating now, around to the alley in back of the store. The back door by the little loading platform was locked too, but he broke a window with his gun-butt.
The shattering of the glass sounded in the silent town like an avalanche. Wales swore under his breath, waited, listened.
There was no sound. He got the window open, and drew Martha in after him into the dim interior of the store.
"Why here?" she whispered, now.
"Anyone who comes searching Castletown for me is bound to come to the Diamond sooner or later," he told her. "It's our best place to watch."
He had another reason. He went forward through the obscurity of the store, through sheaves of axe-handles and rural mail-boxes in piles, with the hardware-store smell of oil and leather and paint strong in his nostrils.
He found a gun-rack. All rifles and pistols were gone but there were still a row of shotguns, the barrels gleaming in the dimness like organ-pipes. In the worn, deep wooden drawers beneath, he found shells.
"I seem to remember you used to go after pheasant with Lee," he said.
Martha nodded, and took one of the pumpguns.
"Just don't use it, until I tell you," he said.
They went on, toward the front of the store. Then they sat down, and through the show-windows they could look out on the Diamond.
The sun sank lower. The man on the monument cast a longer and longer shadow across empty benches where once old men of Castletown had gossiped.
Nothing happened.
Wales, waiting, thought how outraged crusty Mr. Dutton would have been by what they'd done. It had been like him to carefully lock up the store, front and back, before he left it forever.
He looked across the Diamond, at the Busy Bee Cafe, at the Electric Shoe Repair Shop, at the old brick YWCA.
Twilight deepened. Martha moved a little, beside him. He hoped she wasn't losing her nerve.
Then he realized she had been nudging him. She whispered, "Jay."
At the same moment he heard a thrumming sound. Even here inside the store, it seemed unnaturally loud in the silent town. He crouched lower.
A long green car came down the street and swung around the Diamond, and then with squealing brakes it came to a stop.
The hunters had come to Castletown.
CHAPTER VI
Three men got out of the car and stood there in the dusk, at the south side of the Diamond.
They wore windbreakers and slacks. One of them was short and pudgy, the other two were average-looking men. All of them carried Venn guns.
They talked, briefly. One of the average men seemed to be the leader, Wales thought, from the way he gesticulated and spoke.
"What are they going to do?" whispered Martha.
"Look for me," Wales said. "A hundred to one they've left a man at the Observatory, and at your home—in case I come there. And these three are going to search downtown for me."
The three separated. One walked east along Washington Street. The other one got back into the car and drove off on North Jefferson. The remaining man—the dark-haired pudgy one, started going around the Diamond, keeping close to the fronts of the stores, ready to dart into cover at any moment.
An idea came to Wales, and he acted upon it at once. He crept to the front door of the hardware store, unlocked it, and silently opened it a few inches.
He came back, rummaged frantically in the dimness of the shelves till he found a spool of wire. Then he told Martha,
"Come on, now—get down behind this counter. And stay there."
"Jay, he's coming this way!" she protested. "He'll see the door ajar—"
He interrupted. "Yes. I want him to. Do as I say."
Her face white in the dusk, she got down behind the counter, back in the middle of the store.
Wales crept swiftly to the front of the store, whipped behind the counter there, and crouched down.
Now, with the door ajar, he could hear the pudgy man coming along the sidewalk. Then he saw him, his heavy, doughy face turning alertly from side to side as he came along.
The man stopped and the tommy-gun in his hands came up fast. He had seen the hardware-store door was a little open.
With the gun held high, the pudgy man came slowly to the door. His foot kicked it wide open. He peered into the dimness of the store, poised on his feet like a dancer, ready to turn instantly.
Wales' fingers closed on a little carton of hinges, under the counter. He suddenly hurled the little box toward the other side of the store. It struck a display of tinware with a tremendous clatter.
The pudgy man whirled toward that direction, in a flash.
With a movement as swift, Wales darted out in the same moment and jammed his pistol into the pudgy man's back.
"Let go of that gun," Wales said, "or I'll blow your spine out!"
He saw the pudgy man stiffen and arch his back, in a convulsive movement. Wales' finger tightened on the trigger. But, before he pulled it, the tommy-gun clattered to the floor.
"Martha," said Wales.
She came, fast, her face white and scared in the dusk.
"Take this wire and tie his wrists behind him," Wales said. "Don't get in front of my gun."
With shaking fingers, she did as he ordered. "Now shut the front door."
Wales turned the pudgy man around. "Now sit down, on the floor. First sound you make above a whisper, you're dead."
The pudgy man spoke, in a high falsetto whisper. "You're dead, right now. Whatever happens to me, you won't get out of Castletown."
"Don't worry about us," Wales advised. "Worry about yourself. Where's Lee Kendrick?"
The pudgy man looked at him calmly. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Martha whispered, with astounding fierceness, "Make him tell, Jay."
Wales first searched their prisoner. He found no papers on him at all, nothing but clips for the gun. Pudgy seemed quite unperturbed.
"All right, where's Kendrick?" Wales said again.
Pudgy said, "You talking about the Kendrick that discovered Doomsday coming? The Kendrick? How should I know?"
"Who are you working for?" Wales persisted. "Who took Kendrick, who sent you to follow me here from New York? The Brotherhood?"
Pudgy looked at him in blank surprise. "Huh?"
"The Brotherhood of Atonement," Wales said. "You're one of them, aren't you? They've got Kendrick, haven't they? Where?"
Pudgy's face split in the beginnings of a guffaw. Wales raised his pistol quickly, and the man choked off the laugh. But his sides shook.
"Me one of that Brotherhood? You're funny. You're really funny, Wales."
"So you know me," Wales snapped. "You know all about me, you came trailing me when I started to hunt for Kendrick. Who sent you?"
A queer gleam came into the eyes of Pudgy, but he remained silent.
Something in that look made Wales whirl around. Their prisoner sat facing the store-front.
Out there in the dusk, one of the two other men had come back into the Diamond.
"Martha," whispered Wales.
"Yes?"
"Take your shotgun. If he tries to open his mouth, bring it down on his head."
Promptly, she picked up the shotgun and stood with it raised. Pudgy looked up at her, and winced.
Wales crept back to the front of the store and looked out. The other man out there seemed worried, holding his Venn gun high and looking slowly all around the Diamond. That he was worried by Pudgy's absence, Wales knew.
The man out there got into cover behind the pedestal of the monument, and waited. Waiting, obviously, for the man with the car to come back.
Minutes passed. The twilight was deepening into the soft May darkness. Suddenly Martha whispered.
"Jay!"
He swung around. Her face was a queer white blur in the darkness. "What?"
"I hear singing," she said. "Someone is singing, a way off."
"Just the wind in the wires," he said. "There's no one in the whole town but us—and them. You keep your eye on that fellow, I think we're due for trouble soon."
He waited again. From outside, he could hear the sound of the wind rising and falling. Then a strange conviction crept over him.
It was not the wind. It was the rise and fall of distant voices, many of them. Now the breeze brought it through the night a little louder, now it ebbed back to a murmur. Carefully, Wales opened the door a crack to listen.
He exclaimed, "It's from up on North Hill, but what in the world—"
He suddenly crouched lower again, his pistol raised. Down the hill along North Jefferson came the long green car, racing fast.
It swung around the Diamond. The man in it leaned out and called. The man behind the monument ran out to meet him, talking fast and gesticulating.
But the driver of the car pointed northward and shouted. Wales could not see his face but he could hear the raw tone of his voice, and caught the one final word, "—coming!"
The other man leaped into the car, after a last look around the empty Diamond. The car shot away down Washington, heading east.
"Why, they've gone, run away!" Martha exclaimed. "They left their partner here and—"
Wales held up his hand. "Listen!"
As the roar of the receding car died away, the sound of singing came again—and this time it was louder, much louder, and there was a steady throb of drums beneath it.
It rolled down from the north and he thought now he could hear the words of a chorus, endlessly repeated.
"Halle-lu-jah! Halle-lu-jah—"
Lights suddenly sprang into being up there on the crest of North Jefferson Street hill. They were not steady lights, they were moving, tossing and shaking, and there were dozens, scores of them. They were torches.
A long, thick snake of burning torches came down the wide street into the dark and lifeless town. Wales could see no people, only the torches, scores of them, hundreds of them. But he could hear the loud chanting of the people who carried those lighted brands.
"Halle-lu-jah—"
Crash-crash-boom, thundered drums from the forefront of the river of torches, and Wales felt a wild quickening of their beat and of the chanting voices, that checked his breathing.
Martha uttered a low cry. "Jay, it's the Brotherhood coming! The fanatics coming here now, to—"
The hair bristled on Wales' neck. She did not need to finish the horrified exclamation. The nightmare shape of the looming event was only too clear.
From town to town the Brotherhood of Atonement marched, those weak, crazed minds unhinged by the coming of Doomsday. Brighton Falls they had burned, and Sharon, and God knows how many other deserted towns. And now it was the turn of Castletown to be a sacrifice and an atonement....
He wanted to turn and flee from that mad, oncoming parade. But he did not. He crouched, watching, and he felt Martha, beside him, shivering.
"Jay, if they have Lee—he might be with them!"
"That's what I'm hoping for," he whispered.
Now the torches were coming down into the Diamond, and now he could see the people who carried them. They started around the oval, and the tossing of the red burning brands was flashed back from the windows all around, that shone like big eyes watching in amazement.
First, ahead of the torches, marched a half-dozen men and women with drums, beating a heavy, absolutely unvarying rhythm. After them came the main mass. He thought there might be two to three hundred of them.
Men, women, children. Torn and dusty clothes, unkempt hair, unshaven faces, but eyes glittering with a wild, rapt emotion, voices shouting the endless chorus of
The Brotherhood of Atonement....
Halle-LU-jah!
These crazed fanatics were gripped by no religious passion. The religious folk of the world had seen God's hand in the saving of Earth's peoples by man's newly-won knowledge. But these shouting marchers had gone back to dark barbarism, to pagan propitiation of a threatening fate, back beyond all civilization.
Boom-boom crashed the drums, right in front of the Dutton store, as the van of the mad parade swept past, following a tightening path around the oval, making room for more and more of the torch-bearers here in the center of the old town. And presently they were all in the Diamond, a packed mass of wild faces and shaken torches, all turned toward the center where the monument stood.
A man with a white face and burning eyes leaped up onto the pedestal of the monument, and the drums banged louder and a great cry went up from the Brotherhood. He began to speak, his voice shrill and high.
"Jay, do you see Lee? I don't—"
"No," Wales said. "He's not with them."
From out there, across the waving torches, came the screeching voice. "—burn the places of sin, and the powers of night and space will see the shining signs of our Atonement, and withhold their wrath—"
Martha said, "Oh, Jay, they're going to burn Castletown. Can't we stop them, somehow—"
He took her by the shoulders. She had had too much, but he could have no hysteria now.
"Martha, we can't stop them, they'd tear us to shreds! And what difference does it make now? Don't you realize—in four months this town and all towns will be destroyed anyway!"
Their prisoner, back in the darkness, suddenly raised his voice. Wales leaped back, pressed his pistol against the pudgy man's body.
"You call out and you get it now!" Wales warned savagely.
Pudgy looked up at him, and said hoarsely, "Are you crazy? Those maniacs aren't friends of mine! They're going to burn this whole town like they burned others—we got to get out of here!"
The frantic fear in the man's voice was utterly sincere. And to Wales, crouching beside the captive, came a shattering enlightenment.
He said, "Then you and your pals aren't working for the Brotherhood? Then it wasn't the Brotherhood that took Lee Kendrick, after all?"
"They're maniacs!" said Pudgy, again. "For Christ's sake, Wales, are you going to let them burn us alive?"
Wales stooped, grabbed the man by the throat. "It's not the Brotherhood who took Kendrick, then. All right—who was it? Who wants to see millions of people trapped on Earth? Who sent you after me? Who?"
Pudgy's voice turned raw and raging. "Get me out of here, and I'll tell you. But if we stay here, we're goners."
"You'll tell me right now!"
Pudgy remained sullenly silent. Then, of a sudden, the single high screeching voice out in the diamond ended, on a frenzied note.
Boom-boom, crashed out the drums again. The Brotherhood roared, as with the single voice of a mighty beast. The men with torches began to mill, to split off from the main mass, to run into the four main cross streets, shaking their firebrands and shouting.
One yelling woman applied her torch to the faded canvas awning in front of the Electric Shoe Repair Parlor. The canvas blazed up, and the drums rolled again.
"Jay!" cried Martha.
Wales forced Pudgy to his feet, faced him toward the front windows, and the torch-blazing chaos out beyond them.
"Martha and I are going, out the back way," Wales said. "We're leaving you here tied and helpless—unless you tell!"
CHAPTER VII
A throbbing, lurid light beat in through the front windows of the store, as the flames across the Diamond swept up the fronts of old buildings. The hoarse hallelujah-chorus of the Brotherhood, the quickened booming of the drums, was louder. And the fiery light illumined the bloodless, distorted face of their prisoner as he stared up at Wales and Martha.
Wales still felt the shock of terrible surprise. He had been so sure that only the mad Brotherhood could possibly be behind the plot to seize Kendrick, the ghastly scheme to keep millions of people on Earth until Doomsday crashed down upon them. Who else but madmen would do such a thing? Who else would have any motive?
He didn't know. But their pudgy prisoner knew. And, even at the risk of trapping Martha and himself in the holocaust of Castletown, he meant to find out.
"Please," panted Pudgy. "We haven't got a chance if we stay here longer. I've seen these maniacs and their Atonements. They won't leave a building standing here!"
Wales looked at Martha's white face. "All right, Martha, we'll get going. We'll leave this fellow here." He started to turn away.
"No, it's murder!" screamed Pudgy. "You can't leave me here, my hands tied—"
"Then tell," Wales pressed. "Who seized Kendrick? Who's behind all this?"
Beads of sweat stood out on Pudgy's dough-white face. His eyes rolled horribly, and then he said hoarsely,
"Fairlie. John Fairlie. And others—"
"Fairlie? The regional Evacuation Marshal? What about him?" Wales demanded.
"He—and friends of his, other Evacuation officials—they're the ones," Pudgy said. "They've got Lee Kendrick. They're the ones that want a lot of people left on Earth."
Furious, Wales took their prisoner by his fat throat and shook him. "All right, you had your chance," he raged. "And you tell us a brazen lie like that. By God, we are leaving you—"
Pudgy's voice rose almost to a scream. "It's the truth! You made me tell you, now I've done it, and you won't believe me! There's a bunch of them in it, I don't know how many. I know that besides Fairlie, there's a couple of assistant Evacuation Marshals in other countries and some minor officials and some others I don't know. I've seen them, up near New York. It's where they've got Lee Kendrick. They'd kill me for telling, and now I've told and you won't believe—"
Martha said uncertainly, "Oh, Jay, maybe he is telling the truth—maybe that's where Lee is!"
Wales exclaimed, "Don't you see what a lie it is? John Fairlie is one of the men charged with evacuating all the people off Earth—why would he and other Evacuation officials want to trick millions into staying here?"
"Because they don't want them on Mars, because they think they're scum and ought to be left on Earth!" Pudgy cried. "I heard them talk, didn't I? Talk about how hard it's going to be for years on Mars with too many people there, already. And about how it'd be better for everyone if a lot of ignorant crumb-bums and their families weren't taken to Mars to be a load on everyone else. Didn't I hear them—"
Wales' rage at their prisoner receded, swept away by an icy tide of terrible doubt that despite himself was rising now in his mind.
He remembered things, now. He remembered Fairlie's grim face as he'd spoken broodingly of how hard a life it would be on Mars, with every one of Earth's millions there. He remembered the bitterly contemptuous way in which Fairlie—and Bliss and Chaumez and Holst—had spoken of the looters, the ignorant resisters, the crazy folk, whom it would be difficult to evacuate from Earth.
"Only fanatics would want to trap millions on Earth—" He, Wales, had said that. He'd been thinking then of the Brotherhood. But suppose there were other and more terrible fanatics? Fanatics who ruthlessly decided that the more backward and ignorant of Earth's millions would only be a burden in the hard years ahead, on Mars—and who secretly planned to trick those millions into staying until it was too late?
Such things had been planned and done before, by egotistical, self-appointed guardians of the public interest! And if—if this was the truth, it explained why he, Wales, had been followed, it explained why Fairlie had made him suspect the Brotherhood, it explained many things—
Halle-lu-jah! roared the chorus of howling voices, out in the streets. And the ruddy, throbbing light increased in intensity suddenly.
"Jay!" cried Martha, in tones of horror. He whirled around.
The front of the hardware store was on fire, with flames writhing around the edges of the windows, outside.
"You've got us killed!" sobbed Pudgy.
Wales, his thoughts now a chaos, realized that he dared delay no longer. He picked up the Venn gun, and then yanked their prisoner to his feet.
"Come on, Martha," he said. "Out that back window."
Pudgy stumbled awkwardly, his hands still bound behind him. They hurried back through the old store, with the firelight beating brighter from behind them, and got through the window into the alley.
To their left flames shot skyward with a roar from the Penn Hotel, showers of sparks sailing into the darkness. A glance told Wales that the Brotherhood had fires going along whole blocks of Mercer and South Jefferson Streets.
"This way," he cried, starting down the alley that ran southward between the streets. He had Pudgy by the shoulder, but there was no need to make their terrified prisoner hurry.
Wales put everything from his mind, but the necessity of escape from the holocaust of this latest flaming Atonement. And the new suspicion in his mind was so shocking that he didn't want to think of it until he had to.
He knew the alleys and streets of Castletown, even in darkness. And they had light to guide them—more and more light throbbing up into the night sky behind them.
He cut across Mill Street, and on up southeastward to a residential street of cottages. Here, he gave Martha his pistol and had her stand guard over Pudgy while he himself looked for a car.
He found one, in the garage attached to the first cottage. He had to break through the house itself to enter the garage. The rooms were just as someone had left them, the furniture, the rugs, all the things they could not take with them in Evacuation, still in place.
Again, Wales felt a pang. Someone had toiled and planned for this little house and the things in it. And now it would not even endure until the common Doomsday—it would perish in the senseless flames.
He drove out into the street, and pushed Pudgy into the back seat. Taking no chances, he tied their prisoner's ankles too. Then, with Martha beside him, Wales drove fast up the steep streets southeast.
"Jay—look!" she cried, when they reached a crest. She was looking back. He stopped the car, and looked back with her.
The whole downtown section of Castletown blazed high toward the stars. The wind whirled sparks away in burning clouds, and a great pall of smoke lay toward them.
Southward from the center of town moved a river of torches. And from those streets, only now just kindling, above the crackle of flames came the distant boom of the Brotherhood drums, and their rising and falling chant.
Martha was crying. He put his arm around her, and turned her away from the sight.
"It doesn't mean anything, Martha. It would have only lasted the few months till Doomsday, anyway."
Yet he could understand her emotion. It had been a long time since he had lived in Castletown. But he wished his last look at the old town had not been like this.
He turned toward Pudgy. "Now you can talk. Let's have it."
Pudgy said sullenly, "I've already talked too much. You didn't believe me, anyway."
Wales' face hardened. He said, "All right. The flames will reach this residential section in an hour. We'll leave you here."
It was enough. Their prisoner's doughy face seemed to fall apart a little.
"All right!" he cried. "But what's the use telling you when you just say I'm lying?"
"Nevertheless, give it to me from the first," Wales ordered.
Pudgy said, "Look, this whole scheme to keep the crummy no-goods here on Earth—that wasn't my idea. Five years ago, when they were first organizing Operation Doomsday, I got a job in the Evacuation Police. I did all right. Pretty soon I was a sergeant. Then—I began to hear things about the Evacuation from one of the other sergeants."
The man paused, then went on. "Eugene—that was my friend in the Police—told me that Fairlie and some other Evacuation officials needed some men for special secret police work. Said the work was so important and so secret nobody must know about it. I said okay, I'd like to be one of these special secret Evacuation Police. So they took me in. And Fairlie himself talked to me and a couple of others."
Wales, watching Pudgy narrowly, saw him mop the sweat off his brow. "Fairlie told us, that they weren't going to be able to get everybody off Earth before Doomsday. He said it was impossible, there was bound to be millions would get left. He told us that he and some of the other officials in key places in the Evacuation had decided that since they were going to have to leave people, it'd be better to leave a lot of crummy hillbillies and share croppers and ignorant trash. He said they'd only make things tougher for everyone on Mars, anyway. It was better, Fairlie said, to weed them out and leave them here."
An icy feeling of terrible conviction began to grow in Wales, despite all his attempts to repel it.
He'd heard just that kind of talk, before. Not openly, but in sly whispers and hints. People who felt sure of escaping from Earth themselves had expressed aristocratic regret that all Earth's people must be saved, that they must be burdened on the new world by the "backward."
No one had quite dared to advocate such ideas publicly. But there were those who secretly held them. And those who did, very well might have secretly decided to see that the "useless, backward" ones didn't escape Earth. Fairlie—and others like him—could be among them—
"Fairlie told us," Pudgy went on, "that they wouldn't prevent anyone leaving that wanted to leave. But, he said, lots of the dumber ones wouldn't want to leave if things were managed right, and that would solve the whole problem."
Martha interrupted. "But my brother—what of him? You said they had Lee?"
Pudgy nodded. "I was coming to that. Fairlie called some of us in real worried one night and told us we had to go to Castletown and grab Lee Kendrick. He said they'd been sounding Kendrick out about helping along the scheme, and that Kendrick wouldn't play ball."
"You mean," Wales said quickly, "that Fairlie and his group wanted Kendrick to help them trap the 'backward ones' here on Earth?"
Pudgy's head bobbed. "Near as I got it, that was it. Kendrick could make a statement kind of throwing doubt on whether Doomsday would happen—and the boobs would decide to stay. But I guess when Fairlie sounded him out a little, Kendrick was horrified at the idea, and Fairlie had to cover up fast and say he didn't mean it."
Martha clutched Wales' arm. "Jay, that's why Lee was so terribly worried, so anxious—that's why he wouldn't leave Earth! He was afraid such a scheme was really being planned!"
Wales could imagine that. He knew Lee Kendrick, and he knew that even a breath of suspicion of a plan so ruthless and terrible would have had a shattering effect on him.
"So," Pudgy finished, "before Kendrick could get too suspicious and start talking, we went to Castletown and grabbed him, and took him to New York. And his disappearance was nearly as good as his statement would have been—the boobs all figured Kendrick hadn't left Earth, so they would not."
"But he's alive?" Martha cried. "They haven't killed him."
Pudgy shrugged. "Not so far. Fairlie still wants him to make that statement, so all the scum will feel sure it's safe and will stay on Earth till too late."
Wales suddenly felt a revulsion from all that he had heard, from the shocking nightmare quality of it.
"It's not true, it can't be true!" he exclaimed. "Martha, this man had to tell some story to save his skin, and that's all he's done!"
Her face was white in the distant firelight. "Jay, people have done things like that, terrible as it is. They have killed millions, in the past, for just such reasons."
He knew that, too, and it was a knowledge he fought against—struggling against a cold conviction that he could not quite down.
"If Lee is still alive, Lee could tell us!" she was saying. "If we could reach him, rescue him—"
Wales turned back to the sullen-faced Pudgy. "You said that Fairlie and the others were holding Kendrick near New York. Just where?"
"Where he's right handy and near, yet where nobody can walk in on him," said Pudgy. "Bedloe's Island, in New York harbor. You know, the old Statue of Liberty island."
Wales thought, his mind a turmoil. Now the flames were marching up the hillside streets toward them, and now the sound of drums and distant chanting came from away southward.
The Brotherhood were leaving Castletown, on their way to make some other lifeless city a fiery sign of their atonement.
"I still," said Wales, "can't believe it. But we'll prove it, one way or another. We'll go back to New York, and see if Lee is really on that island."
"You haven't got a prayer!" said Pudgy, his voice rising into a high whine. "They've got him guarded there."
"And you," Wales said, "can tell us just where the guards are and how best to pass them. Yes, you're going with us."
He ignored the man's frantic objections, and started the car. He headed eastward, to skirt the flaming city at a safe distance.
The danger ahead, the hunters who would still be seeking him, Wales ignored. What was there anywhere but danger, on an Earth rocking toward Doomsday?
CHAPTER VIII
Thunder rolled and bellowed across the night sky, mounting to a deafening crescendo. Up into the starry heavens rose a great black bulk, climbing starward on a column of fading fire. And hardly had its echoes ebbed than the dull explosions came again, and another rocket-ship took off in the unending Marslift.
Crouching with Martha in the darkness of an old pier, with the murmuring black vagueness of the Upper Harbor in front of them, Wales looked over his shoulder at the fiery finger that pointed out to man's new home in the sky. He turned back to Martha, as she whispered to him. She was staring out over the dark water.
"I don't see any lights, Jay. Not one."
"They wouldn't show lights," he said. "They'd not advertise the fact that they're there."
"If they're there," she said. "If Lee's there."
He took her roughly by the shoulders. "Martha, don't lose your nerve now. Think what depends on this."
He jerked his head in the direction of the distant New Jersey Spaceport, as still another Mars-bound ship rode up in majestic thunder and flame.
"There should be twice as many ships, twice as many evacuees, going out now as there are! All the people who doubt, who hold back, who refuse to go—Lee is the key to saving them."
"But if we only had help, Jay! The authorities—"
Wales said, "Fairlie, as regional Evacuation Marshal, is the top local authority here now. And don't you see—if that story is true, Fairlie is the last man we dare let know we're here."
He took her hand. "Come on. We've still got to find a skiff of some kind."
They started along the dark waterfront. They were, Wales figured, somewhere in the southern Jersey City docks. Out in the dark harbor lay Bedloe's Island, and it was past midnight and there was little time.
He and Martha, with their prisoner, had come across Pennsylvania by unused, deserted back roads during the day. The circuitous route had taken time, and a few hours of sleep snatched in a thicket off the road had taken more time. But Wales had not dared to risk being seen.
If Pudgy's story was true, Fairlie was the enemy. Fairlie was the man who had sent hunters after him. And it would be so easy for the Evacuation Marshal, with his regional authority, to have Wales proclaimed an outlaw on some phony charge, and set every Evacuation Police post around New York looking for him.
They dared seek aid of no one. If Kendrick was a prisoner on the little island, they must attempt the rescue themselves. And that would not be easy, judging from what Pudgy had said.
Wales had driven into an alley in deserted Jersey City, and had dragged their bound prisoner into an empty store.
"Now," said Wales, "we're going to leave you here."
"Tied hand and foot?" cried Pudgy. "Why not kill me and get it over with? This town is closed out, I could yell all day and nobody would hear me. I'll starve! No one will ever come—"
"We'll come, and free you," Wales said. "After we've got Kendrick off that island. But of course, if we fail, if they get us, then we'll never be back. I want you to think about that."
Pudgy had thought about it, and it was clear that he did not like that thought at all. When it had sunk in, Wales said,
"Now you tell us all you know about the set-up on that island. How many guards, where they usually are, how they're armed, where Kendrick is kept. Everything. If you brief us well enough, we may succeed—and then we'll be back for you."
Pudgy had got the point. He had talked long and rapidly, feverishly giving Wales every scrap of information he possessed.
They had left him there, and had come by foot to the waterfront, and now if they had a boat, the island was only a little way ahead.
But there was no boat, not a canoe even, along these dark docks. Wales led the way farther along the waterfront. He dared not flash a light, and they might search all night amid these dark piers without success.
He was beginning to despair, when they came to a small boatyard. He found a skiff by stumbling over it in the dark. There were no oars, but he soon forced the door of the dark office-shack and found those.
"Now before we start, Martha—" He was fitting the oars into locks that he'd made as silent as possible by rag mufflings. "—when we reach the island, I want you to stay on the shore and wait."
"I'm not afraid—" she began, but Wales cut her short.
"Listen, it's not that. I'll be in the dark there. If I have to shoot, I want to be sure I'm not shooting you by mistake."
He pushed out onto the water, and bent to the oars, rowing steadily. The tide was running, and he had to allow for that, but there was only a little choppiness on the Upper Harbor.
Wales thought again how unreal everything on Earth seemed by now. And this scene most of all! This harbor had once been the busiest in the world, and by night the lights of shipping, of docks, of bridges, had flared everywhere, with the electric glow of Manhattan blazing over everything.
And now there was silence and darkness on the waters. All the millions who had lived around these shores had left Earth long ago, and their cities were dark and still. Only the downtown tip of Manhattan still showed patterns of lighted windows, where the ceaseless activities of Operation Doomsday centered.
Wales rowed on, and then rested his oars a moment and turned and peered ahead in the darkness. He saw a lofty shadow now against the stars, and knew that it was the great Statue. He lifted the oars again, rowing now with infinite care to make no sound.
Brr-rumble—oom—oom—oom—
Up into the sky westward rose another of the mighty Marslift rocket-ships, and then in quick succession, two more.
The flare of them in the heavens sent a wild, shaking light over the waters, over the little skiff.
"Get down!" Wales whispered frantically, and he and Martha crouched low in the little craft.
The oom—oom—oom faded away in muttering echoes. Wales could but pray that they had not been seen from the island ahead, and row on.
He hoped desperately that there would be no more rocket-ships taking off, no more flares in the sky, until he reached the island. It seemed to him that he rowed eternally, and got nowhere.
Then, in the darkness, Martha whispered warning. The skiff bumped land. Wales made out a low bank rising above them. He picked up the Venn gun and climbed ashore.
He whispered, "Stay in the skiff, Martha. You can push off if I fail." And added quickly, "Don't you see, if I do fail, you'll be the last hope left."
He gave her no time to argue. He gripped the Venn gun, and started through the darkness.
There was no doubt about directions. Huge now against the stars loomed the Statue. And in it, if Pudgy had told truth, were Lee Kendrick—and the four of Fairlie's secret police who guarded him.
Wales crossed the park with his stubby gun held high. The grass was tall and ragged from long lack of care. And there was not a sound, or a light, on the little island.
He circled around to the front of the Statue, and stared up at the parapet of the mighty pedestal, and the entrance to the giant figure.
Nothing. No light, no sound of movement.
Wales felt a chill of dismay. He had not realized how much he had begun to hope, until now.
Brr-rumble—
He heard the first preliminary roar from the west, and immediately he dropped flat behind a shrub.
The full thunderous diapason of take-off broke around him, and the flaming exclamation point in the heavens blazed brightly.
And Wales saw a man, with a gun under his arm, standing on the parapet.
The flare of light died, and the rocket-roar grumbled away.
But now, as he rose to his feet, Wales felt a wild triumph. The guard was there, as Pudgy had said, and that meant—
He moved forward, and started up the steps. He was more than halfway up them, moving softly, when he heard a movement above.
Wales froze. The guard above might not have heard him. But he could take no chances, with all that depended on him now.
He crouched waiting on the steps, the Venn gun raised. It seemed to him that hours went by.
Rumble-boom-boom—
As the distant rocket-roar crashed again, as the column of fire streaked across the sky, by its light Wales saw the man on the parapet peering down toward him with his gun alertly raised.
Instantly, Wales shot him. He shot to kill.
The man dropped. Wales raced on up the steps, hoping that the brief burst of his Venn gun would not have been heard in the rocket-roar.
But a door above swung open, and light spilled out from inside the base of the giant Statue. Two men appeared in the doorway, drawing pistols.
"What—" one cried.
Wales fired, a prolonged burst. He had no intention whatever of taking extra risks by sparing life. These men, and the men they worked for, would have taken the lives of millions. There was no mercy in him.
One of the two in the doorway fell. The other, blood welling from his shoulder, tried to shift his pistol to his other hand.
Wales, racing up to them, heard pounding footsteps inside the statue, and he took no time to shoot again. He clubbed the Venn gun's barrel down over the head of the wounded man, and sprang over him and the dead one in the doorway, right into the base of the lofty figure.
A light burned in here. He ran to the foot of the winding stair that led upward. Frantic feet running up above him made reverberating echoes. He glimpsed a pair of legs on the stair—
He shot, and the legs crumpled and a man came sliding back down the stair, screaming and trying to aim his gun. Wales triggered again, and when the scream of richocheting steel and the echoes of gunfire died away, there was silence unbroken.
He started running up the stair. In a minute he heard Martha's voice calling, from down beneath.
"Jay!"
He shouted back down, and ran on, his heart pounding, his lungs pumping.
He came into the grotesque room of angled steel that was the inside of the giant head. There was a carefully shaded light here. And a man huddled on the floor near it, shackled to the wall.
Wales turned the light full on him. A bearded face looked at him, with wild dark eyes—a face he could hardly recognize.
"Lee?" he said. And then suddenly, he was sure. "Lee Kendrick."
Kendrick said, hesitantly, "Why it's Jay Wales. But you were on Mars. How—" And then Kendrick's eyes suddenly flamed and he shouted hoarsely. "Wales, you don't know what's happened, what they're planning—"
"I know," Wales said, stooping by him. "Take it easy. Please—"
Kendrick clutched him, babbling, pleading. Not until Martha came in, and stooped beside her brother, crying, could Wales get away.
He said, "Try to quiet down. There must be a key to these shackles somewhere."
He went back down the stair. The man he had shot in the shoulder and then stunned, was now stirring and groaning.
Wales made a rough bandage for the bleeding shoulder, and then tied the man's wrists with his own belt. He thought it would hurt, when the man came to. He hoped it would.
He searched pockets until he found keys, and then went back up. Kendrick seemed to have got control of himself. He talked feverishly as Wales tried keys.
"There's still time before Doomsday, isn't there?" he pleaded. "Still time to get everybody off Earth? It isn't too late?"
"I think there may be time enough," Wales said. He got the shackles unlocked, and helped Kendrick to his feet. "But we've still Fairlie to reckon with."
Kendrick broke into raging curses, and Wales stopped him sharply. "Cut it, Lee. I feel exactly the same way about it but we've no time for hysteria. It'll be tricky trying to get to Fairlie in his own stronghold, over in New York. Tell me—has he come here often?"
"He hasn't been here for two weeks," Kendrick said. "He—and Bliss and the others in it with him—you know what they wanted of me? They wanted me to issue statements saying that Nereus might not hit Earth after all. They said they'd leave me here for Doomsday, if I didn't. Damn them—"
Again, Wales calmed him down. "Those guards didn't go over to New York to report to him, did they? Did they use radiophone?"
Kendrick looked startled. "Why, yes, they did. I've heard them. But I don't know what secret wavelength they used."
"Maybe," said Wales tightly, "we can find that out. Martha, you help him down the stairs. A few steps at a time, till his legs steady."
He hurried back down again. The wounded man he had tied up had recovered consciousness. He sat, his face a pallor of pain, and looked up at Wales with wide, fearful eyes.
"Yes," said Wales softly. "I'd love to kill you. You're right about that. But maybe I won't. What's your name?"
"Mowler."
"You know how to call Fairlie, on the portable radiophone? Well, you're going to call him. You're going to tell him just what I say."
By the time he found the radiophone and brought it, Kendrick was coming shakily down the last steps with Martha steadying him.
Wales asked Mowler, "What's the wavelength for Fairlie's private phone?"
Mowler, looking up into his face, shivered and told him. He set the dial.
Then he told the wounded man what to say. He finished, "Don't do it wrong."
Again looking into Wales' face, Mowler said, "I won't."
Wales touched the call-button. He held the instrument in front of Mowler. And presently a voice came from it.
"Fairlie speaking."
"Mowler here," said Mowler. "Our guest wants to see you. He says he's ready to make that statement now—any statement you want."
"About time," growled Fairlie's voice. "All right, I'll come."
Wales switched off the instrument and took it away. He went out on the parapet, and waited in the darkness with the Venn gun in his hands.
Martha and Kendrick came out, and as another Marslift ship flamed up across the sky, he saw that her face was white and strained.
She said, "Don't kill him, Jay."
He said, without turning, "The Evacuation has been delayed, and there may not be enough time to make up that delay. We may not get everyone off Earth in time. And every one of those who are left to face Doomsday will have been killed by Fairlie and his pals."
"I know," she said. "But don't, Jay."
He would make no promise, or answer. He waited. And they heard the purr of the fast power-boat, less than an hour later.
Dawn was gray in the eastern sky when Fairlie, and one armed man in Evacuation Police uniform, came up the steps to the pedestal.
Wales stepped out, the Venn gun levelled, and Kendrick came out behind him.
Fairlie stopped. The Police officer with him made an uncertain sound and movement.
"Don't be stupid," Fairlie said. "He's got us cold."
He came up a few more steps. He looked up at Wales, and there was in his powerful face an immense disgust.
"You're proud, aren't you, Wales?" said Fairlie. "You think you've done something big and gallant. You've saved, or tried to save, a lot of human lives and that makes you happy." He suddenly raged. "Human refuse! The weak, the unfit, the no-damned-good, that we've been saddled with all our lives here on Earth—and now we must take them with us to drag us all down on Mars."
"Don't, Jay," whispered Martha, and her voice was a painful sound.
Fairlie said:
"Let him. I'd sooner go out now as see all human civilization dragged down out there by the weight of the useless rabble who would be better dead."
Wales said, "You're so sure, just who should live and who should die. You felt such a big man, making secret decisions like that, didn't you? Fairlie, who knows what's best for everybody. You and your pals liked that feeling, didn't you? There have always been characters like you—"
He paused, and then he said, "We're going over to New York. We're going to have Kendrick tell his story to all the millions still on Earth, and it's a story that two of your own men will back up. We're going to try to get every last soul off Earth before Doomsday. But if we don't—"
"If you don't?" sneered Fairlie.
"You'll know it," said Wales, and now he was shaking. "Because you, Fairlie, will not leave Earth till every last soul is evacuated. If any human being faces Doomsday here, you'll face it right with him."
CHAPTER IX
Over New York there hung in the sky a new moon, big and red and terrifying.
Once it had been a mere track, on an astronomical photo, a figure in a calculation. Once it had been a threat, but an abstract one. Now it was real at last. Week by week, it had grown from a spark to a speck to a little moon, and now Kendrick's World was rushing in fast toward the fatal rendezvous with its bigger, sister world.
Wales sat at his desk in the office high in the UN tower, and looked out the window at the skyscrapers looming strange in the bloody light. There was a great silence everywhere. The frantic thunder of the Marslift was stilled at last. The last-but-one rockets had left at dusk, and now as night advanced it seemed that the whole Earth was hushed and waiting.
He felt a weariness that smothered all happiness of success. For they had succeeded, in these four frantic months. After Lee Kendrick had told his story to the world, after the plotters who had ruthlessly condemned millions "for the good of the race" had been exposed and arrested, those millions of dubious folk had suddenly felt the full panicky shock of truth, had realized at last that Doomsday was real.
They had poured into New York, in fear-driven mobs that could hardly be handled. And Wales, as the hastily appointed new Evacuation Marshal, had felt in his soul that it was too late, that some would surely be left.
He had reckoned without that quality in human beings that draws their greatest strength out of peril. The Marslift had been speeded up, speeded up farther, speeded up until rocket-crews fainted of fatigue at their posts. But it had, at last, been done....
The door opened, and Martha came across the office to where Wales sat hunched and weary with his hands spread out on the empty desk.
"It's time, Jay," she said. "Lee and the others are waiting."
He looked slowly up at her. "We got them all off," he said.
"Yes. We got them all off."
"About one thing," he said, "Fairlie was right. It'll be hard on Mars for us, harder because of all those last millions. But I don't think anyone will ever complain."
He thought of the people who had streamed through New York, into the Marslift rockets, these last weeks and days.
He thought of Sam Lanterman and his people from Pittsburgh, and Lanterman complaining, "Hell, I got to own a whole city and what happens—I get scared out of it! Oh well, I guess it won't be so bad out there."
Martha touched his shoulder gently. "Come, Jay."
He got to his feet and walked heavily with her to the lift.
They went down through the silent, empty building to the empty street. Empty, except for the car in which Kendrick and the two others waited, looking up silently at the crimson face of the thing that was coming fast, fast, toward Earth.
The car bore them fast through the empty streets, and the lifeless metropolis fell behind them and they rushed across a countryside already wearing a strange and ominous new aspect, to the Spaceport.
The last rocket waited, a silvery tower flashing back the red light from the sky. They got out of the car and walked toward it.
Hollenberg had won the honor of being the last rocket-captain to leave Earth. But he did not look as though he enjoyed that honor now.
"We're ready," he said.
Wales asked, "Is Fairlie aboard?"
Hollenberg nodded grimly. "Aboard, and locked up. He was the last evacuee taken on, as per orders."
They stood, looking at each other. It came to Wales what was the matter. They stood upon Earth, and it was the last time that they might ever stand upon it.
He said harshly, "If we're ready, let's go."
The rocket-ship bore them skyward on wings of flame and thunder, and an Earth empty of man lay waiting.
A million miles out in space, they watched from the observation port. They could see the planetoid only as a much smaller, dark mass against the blue, beautiful sphere of Earth.
"One minute, fifteen seconds," said Kendrick, in a dry, level voice.
Martha sobbed, and hid her face against Wales' shoulder, and he held her close.
"Thirty seconds."
And all Wales could think of was the cities and their silent streets, the little houses carefully locked and shuttered, the quiet country roads and old trees and fields, with the red moon looming over them, coming down upon them, closer, closer—
"She's struck," said Kendrick. And then, "Look—look—"
Wales saw. The blue sphere of Earth had suddenly changed, white steam laced with leaping flames enwrapped it, puffing out from it. Giant winds tore the steam and he glimpsed tortured continents buckling, cracking, mountains rising—
He held Martha close, and watched until he could watch no more, and turned away. Kendrick, with his telescope set up, was talking rapidly.
"The continental damage isn't too bad. The seas are all steam now, but they'll condense again in time. Terrific volcanoes, but they'll not last too long. In time, it'll cool down—"
In time, Wales thought. In their time? Maybe not until their children's time?
He looked ahead, at the red spark of Mars, the world of refuge. It would be hard living on Mars, yes, for all the millions of men. But there were other worlds in space, and they had the knowledge and the ships. He thought they would go farther than Mars, much farther. He thought that they could not guess now, how far.
But someday, they or their children would come back to old Earth again. Of that, he was very sure.