Things are exactly what they seem? Life is real? Life is
earnest? Well, that depends.
* * * * *
On the day the Earth vanished, Herman Raye was earnestly fishing for
trout, hip-deep in a mountain stream in upstate New York.
Herman was a tall, serious, sensitive, healthy, well-muscled young man
with an outsize jaw and a brush of red-brown hair. He wore spectacles
to correct a slight hyperopia, and they had heavy black rims because
he knew his patients expected it. In his off hours, he was fond of
books with titles like _Personality and the Behavior Disorders_,
_Self-esteem and Sexuality in Women_, _Juvenile Totem and Taboo: A
study of adolescent culture-groups_, and _A New Theory of Economic
Cycles_; but he also liked baseball, beer and bebop.
This day, the last of Herman's vacation, was a perfect specimen: sunny
and still, the sky dotted with antiseptic tufts of cloud. The trout
were biting. Herman had two in his creel, and was casting into the
shallow pool across the stream in the confident hope of getting
another, when the Universe gave one horrible sliding lurch.
Herman braced himself instinctively, shock pounding through his body,
and looked down at the pebbly stream-bed under his feet.
It wasn't there.
He was standing, to all appearances, in three feet of clear water with
sheer, black nothing under it: nothing, the abysmal color of a
moonless night, pierced by the diamond points of a half-dozen
incredible stars.
He had only that single glimpse; then he found himself gazing across
at the pool under the far bank, whose waters reflected the tranquil
imagery of trees. He raised his casting rod, swung it back over his
shoulder, brought it forward again with a practiced flick of his
wrist, and watched the lure drop.
Within the range of his vision now, everything was entirely normal;
nevertheless, Herman wanted very much to stop fishing and look down to
see if that horrifying void was still there. He couldn't do it.
Doggedly, he tried again and again. The result was always the same. It
was exactly as if he were a man who had made up his mind to fling
himself over a cliff, or break a window and snatch a loaf of bread, or
say in a loud voice to an important person at a party, "I think you
stink." Determination was followed by effort, by ghastly, sweating,
heart-stopping fear, by relief as he gave up and did something else.
_All right_, he thought finally, _there's no point going on with it_.
_Data established: hallucination, compulsion, inhibition._ _Where do
we go from here?_
The obvious first hypothesis was that he was insane. Herman considered
that briefly, and left the question open. Three or four selected
psychoanalyst jokes paraded through his mind, led by the classic,
"You're fine, how am I?"
There was this much truth, he thought, in the popular belief that all
analysts were a little cracked themselves: a good proportion of the
people who get all the way through the man-killing course that makes
an orthodox analyst--a course in which an M.D. degree is only a
beginning--are impelled to do so in the first place by a consuming
interest in their own neuroses. Herman, for example, from the age of
fifteen up until the completion of his own analysis at twenty-six, had
been so claustrophobic that he couldn't force himself into a subway
car or an elevator.
But was he now insane?
Can a foot-rule measure itself?
Herman finished. At an appropriate hour he waded ashore, cleaned his
catch, cooked it and ate it. Where the ground had been bare around his
cooking spot, he saw empty darkness, star-studded, rimmed by a tangled
webwork of bare rootlets. He tried to go on looking at it when he had
finished eating the fish. He couldn't.
After the meal, he tried to take out his notebook and pen. He
couldn't.
In fact, it occurred to him, _he was helpless to do anything that he
wouldn't normally have done_.
Pondering that discovery, after he had cleaned his utensils and
finished his other chores, Herman crawled into his tent and went to
sleep.
Burying the garbage had been an unsettling experience. Like a lunatic
building a machine nobody else can see, he had lifted successive
shovels-full of nothing, dropped the empty cans and rubbish ten inches
into nothing, and shoveled nothing carefully over them again....
* * * * *
The light woke him, long before dawn. From where he lay on his back,
he could see an incredible pale radiance streaming upward all around
him, outlining the shadow of his body at the ridge of the tent,
picking out the under-surfaces of the trees against the night sky. He
strained, until he was weak and dizzy, to roll over so that he could
see its source; but he had to give up and wait another ten minutes
until his body turned "naturally," just as if he had still been
asleep.
Then he was looking straight down into a milky transparency that
started under his nose and continued into unguessable depths. First
came the matted clumps of grass, black against the light, every blade
and root as clear as if they had been set in transparent plastic. Then
longer, writhing roots of trees and shrubs, sprouting thickets of
hair-thin rootlets. Between these, and continuing downward level by
level, was spread an infinity of tiny specks, seed-shapes, spores.
Some of them moved, Herman realized with a shock. Insects burrowing
in the emptiness where the Earth should be?
In the morning, when he crawled out of the tent and went to the
bottomless stream to wash, he noticed something he had missed the day
before. The network of grasses gave springily under his feet--not like
turf, but like stretched rubber. Herman conceived an instant dislike
for walking, especially when he had to cross bare ground, because when
that happened, he felt exactly what he saw: nothing whatever
underfoot. "Walking on air," he realized, was not as pleasant an
experience as the popular songs would lead you to expect.
Herman shaved, cooked and ate breakfast, washed the dishes, did the
chores, and packed up his belongings. With a mighty effort, he pried
out the tent stakes, which were bedded in nothing but a loose network
of roots. He shouldered the load and carried it a quarter of a mile
through pine woods to his car.
The car stood at ground level, but the ground was not there any more.
The road was now nothing more than a long, irregular trough formed by
the spreading roots of the pines on either side. Shuddering, Herman
stowed his gear in the trunk and got in behind the wheel.
When he put the motor into gear, the sedan moved sedately and normally
forward. But the motor raced madly, and there was no feeling that it
was taking hold. With screaming engine, Herman drove homeward over a
nonexistent road. Inwardly and silently, he gibbered.
Six miles down the mountain, he pulled up beside a white-painted fence
enclosing a neat yard and a fussy little blue-shuttered house. On the
opposite side of the fence stood a middle-aged woman with a floppy hat
awry on her head and a gardening trowel in one of her gloved hands.
She looked up with an air of vague dismay when he got out of the car.
"Some more eggs today, Dr. Raye?" she asked, and smiled. The smile was
like painted china. Her eyes, lost in her fleshy face, were clearly
trying not to look downward.
"Not today, Mrs. Richards," Herman said. "I just stopped to say
good-by. I'm on my way home."
"Isn't that a shame?" she said mechanically. "Well, come again next
year."
Herman wanted to say, "Next year I'll probably be in a strait-jacket."
He tried to say it. He stuttered, "N-n-n-n--" and ended, glancing at
the ground at her feet, "Transplanting some petunias?"
The woman's mouth worked. She said, "Yes. I thought I might's well put
them along here, where they'd get more sun. Aren't they pretty?"
"Very pretty," said Herman helplessly.
The petunias, roots as naked as if they had been scrubbed, were
nesting in a bed of stars. Mrs. Richards' gloves and trowel were
spotlessly clean.
* * * * *
On Fourth Avenue, below Fourteenth Street, Herman met two frightful
little men.
He had expected the city to be better, but it was worse; it was a
nightmare. The avenues between the buildings were bottomless troughs
of darkness. The bedrock was gone; the concrete was gone; the asphalt
was gone.
The buildings themselves were hardly recognizable unless you knew what
they were. New York had been a city of stone--built on stone, built of
stone, as cold as stone.
Uptown, the city looked half-built, but insanely occupied, a forest of
orange-painted girders. In the Village the old brick houses were
worse. No brick; no mortar; nothing but the grotesque shells of rooms
in lath and a paper-thickness of paint.
The wrought-iron railings were gone, too.
On Fourth Avenue, bookseller's row, you could almost persuade yourself
that nothing had happened, provided you did not look down. The
buildings had been made of wood, and wood they remained. The
second-hand books in their wooden racks would have been comforting
except that they were so clean. There was not a spot of dirt anywhere;
the air was more than country-pure.
There was an insane selective principle at work here, Herman realized.
Everything from bedrock to loam that belonged to the Earth itself had
disappeared. So had everything that had a mineral origin and been
changed by refinement and mixture: concrete, wrought iron, brick, but
steel and glass, porcelain and paint remained. It looked as if the
planet had been the joint property of two children, one of whom didn't
want to play any more, so they had split up their possessions--this is
yours, this is yours, this is _mine_....
The two little men popped into view not six feet in front of Herman as
he was passing a sidewalk bookstall. Both were dressed in what looked
like workmen's overalls made of lucite chain-mail, or knitted
glow-worms. One of them had four eyes, two brown, two blue, with
spectacles for the middle pair. Ears grew like cabbages all over his
bald head. The other had two eyes, the pupils of which were
cross-shaped, and no other discernible features except when he opened
his gap-toothed mouth: the rest of his head, face and all, was
completely covered by a dense forest of red hair.
As they came forward, Herman's control of his body suddenly returned.
He was trying his best to turn around and go away from there, and that
was what his body started to do. Moreover, certain sounds of a
prayerful character, namely "Oh dear sweet Jesus," which Herman was
forming in his mind, involuntarily issued from his lips.
Before he had taken the first step in a rearward direction, however,
the hairy little man curved around him in a blur of motion, barring
the way with two long, muscular, red-furred arms. Herman turned. The
four-eyed little man had closed in. Herman, gasping, backed up against
the bookstall.
People who were headed directly for them, although showing no
recognition that Herman and the little men were there, moved stiffly
aside like dancing automatons, strode past, then made another stiff
sidewise motion to bring them back to the original line of march
before they went on their way.
"Olaph dzenn Harm Rai gjo glerr-dregnarr?" demanded Hairy.
Herman gulped, half-stunned. "Huh?" he said.