Railton left.
Tompkins sat without moving. Garth, Lee Garth. Atomic power. He didn't
dare take a chance. Too much was at stake. He had to know. He picked up
the phone. His secretary got the connection for him.
"Sullivan? This is Tompkins. There's a fellow out at Valley Park by
the name of Lee Garth. I don't know but I suspect that somewhere in
his house you would find blueprints, if you look. If I were you, I
would have one of your boys do a little looking. Yes, the financial
arrangements will be taken care of to your satisfaction."
Tompkins hung up the phone. He turned his mind to other matter.
Sullivan ran a detective agency. If you didn't like your wife, he would
make it easy for you to get a divorce. If your employees were demanding
a higher wage rate, he could handle that too. Divorces, strikes,
anything.
* * * * *
Dawn world or dusk world?
Overhead the sun slanted westward, and the night, black and ominous,
came out of the east. The birds sang their songs as the day closed, and
the animals that moved in the night awakened, and ranged abroad. And on
the hills there was the sound of mournful howling, like the baying of
lost and lonely dogs seeking their masters; but not finding them, not
ever.
* * * * *
Scoop Martin twisted in his sleep. Or was he asleep? It was hard to
know, when you were sleeping. You might be awake. Or you might be
dreaming. But how would you know for certain?
He sat up in bed, stared at the window. The moon was shining through
the window, casting a thin, ambiguous light into the room.
"Two million years," he whispered.
Hell, yes, he was asleep, he was having a nightmare. He laid down and
rolled over. Suddenly he was wide awake.
* * * * *
The house was dark, Mike Ritter saw. Good. The boss wanted some
blueprints, or plans, out of that house. Fifty bucks for them. They
must be important if the boss was willing to pay that much for them.
Well, his job was to get them.
He slipped through the darkness toward the house. Over to the right,
at a distance of about three hundred yards, there was a lot of lights.
He stopped to stare. A building of some kind was going up. Trucks were
coming up a lane, dumping gravel and cement. Under the lights men were
pouring concrete until hell wouldn't have it.
"What's the hurry?" Mike wondered.
Well, it wasn't his affair. His job was to get into that house. He
turned. The beam from a flashlight struck him in the face.
"Buddy," a voice growled at him. "You better get out of here a damned
sight faster than you got in."
Mike blinked. The boss hadn't said anything about guards. What the
hell....
"Get going. And don't come back. Or is it a poke in the snoot you'll be
wanting now?"
Mike got going. This would require some careful planning.
* * * * *
Tompkins picked up the morning _Globe_. The war was still going on.
Raids on Britain. The blitz was coming. He read the accounts through.
What was this?
"Prominent scientist forecasts doom of earth in two million years. Lee
Garth...."
He read the article through. He thought heavily for a few moments. Then
he spoke into the box on his desk.
"Get me Sullivan on the phone."
* * * * *
The bell of an invisible alarm clock was ringing in Lee Garth's mind.
He turned over, tried to go back to sleep. Sleep was such a wonderful
sensation, especially when you were so tired. He wanted to sleep
forever, and forever. There wasn't enough time left for him to get
rested. Days and yet more days the driving pressure of screaming energy
had run through him. It had burned out his muscles, put a flutter in
his heart. His whole body screamed for rest. He had to rest. He tried
to go back to sleep.
The invisible alarm clock rang again.
Abruptly, Garth rolled over and sat up. Yawning, he flexed his arms.
Every nerve ending in his body told him to lie down again, called to
him to lie down, begged him. He was going to lie down.
The alarm bell in his mind rang again.
What did it mean, he wondered.
Oh, yes, now he knew. It was August 21.
Today United Electric began making deliveries. The construction work
was already finished, the concrete dry, the forms already off.
Suddenly he was wide awake. Suddenly he was out of bed, and dressing
frantically.
* * * * *
Jimmie Blake excused himself from dinner. His dad and mother smiled
wistfully as he dashed upstairs.
Jimmie whistled as he shaved. Shaving was really not necessary, but
he imagined it was, and in consequence it was a ritual not to be
neglected. For he was a man now. Next week he was going off to college
again. He would be a sophomore this year. No more green caps, no more
hazing. The whistle swelled in prideful strength.
He looked out of the bathroom window. The sun, already at the edge
of the horizon, flung its rays over the suburb of Valley Park. The
grass was dry and the leaves were beginning to change color. It was
September, September 8, 1940. Jimmie burst into song. One more week and
he would be off to college.
Over there, perhaps half a mile away, he could see the sunlight shining
on fresh concrete. Garth's Folly, they were calling it already. Garth
had spent a fortune building a house that would stand to the end of the
world. Two million years, that newspaper article had said.
Too bad. Garth had gone off the deep end, of course. Just when he was
really becoming distinguished, he had cracked. Why didn't they have him
in an asylum, Jimmie wondered, staring from the window.
Oddly, the landscape shifted. It blurred and twisted, just like it did
when you looked through a pane of bad glass. But he wasn't looking
through glass.
The air was tinged with a deep violet color. From somewhere, from
nowhere and from everywhere, came a shrill whining note, a screaming
frequency that lifted rapidly up the scale. It went quickly out of
hearing.
The violet deepened to black and the light was gone. Suddenly knives
were tearing at his flesh. His body was racked by a thousand pains.
Jimmie Blake screamed. The scream was choked off into horrible silence.
His father came to the foot of the stairs.
"What's wrong, son?" he called.
There was no answer.
His father went upstairs. Mystified, perplexed, he began to search.
"Jimmie!" he called. "_Jimmie!_"
There was no answer.
Jimmie's mother came up the stairs. Her face was suddenly white. One
hand was pressed over her heart.
"What--" she began.
Her husband was standing in their son's room. She had not known he was
so old, so haggard, and so tired looking.
"Jimmie's gone," he whispered.
He barely managed to catch her as she fell.
* * * * *
Lee Garth's face was white, drawn, pinched. Bloodless. His hair was
twisted and tangled, there was a stubble on his face.
He lifted blood-clotted eyes from the screen in front of him, the
screen that had suddenly gone blank as he flipped a dial set in the
control-studded table on which his hands rested.
Deep in the heart of the tower of steel and concrete a lion-roar went
into silence.
"God," Garth whispered. "Dear God."
His voice was cracked and chipped and lined with pain.
His head slumped forward, rested on the table.
Behind him there was a tiny creak as a door opened. He lifted his head
to stare dully at the person who stood there.
"Stella? I thought I told you I didn't need a secretary any longer, to
write yourself a check and go away?"
"Yes, Mr. Garth."
She came forward holding a tray.
"But I think you need me now more than ever. And so I stayed. I will
leave if you order it."
He stared at her. She wasn't pretty, or he had never thought she was.
But on her face at this moment was something that made her beautiful.
Her eyes were filled with a deep glowing.
He remembered the years she had been his secretary, the years of hard
work perfectly performed. If they worked until midnight, she had never
complained. Summer, winter, spring, and autumn. Why she had never had a
vacation! But then Lee Garth had never had a vacation. He didn't know
what the word meant.
He stared at her, at the radiant glowing that was transforming her.
"But--but you must not stay here. You _must not_. Don't you understand?
This is the end."
She set the tray in front of him.
"You must eat something. You haven't had a good meal in weeks. Here is
a sandwich and a glass of milk."
He was vaguely aware of a gnawing in his stomach, a persistent ache.
"Why--thanks--Yes, I am hungry!" He looked at the tray.
The door creaked as she left the room.
He wolfed the food. He turned again to the table in front of him. He
pressed buttons.
Under him, in the belly of the squat tower of concrete and steel, a
lion began to roar. The roar increased until the whole structure was
shaking with the pressure of inconceivable energies seeking release. It
became a whirling, roaring, thundering torrent of sound, a screaming
pulse of incalculable force.
* * * * *
Madeline Brown went out into the garden. Her mother watched her go. Not
much longer, her mother thought, would she have a daughter. The girl
was blooming into womanhood. Within a year or two some young fellow
would claim her. The boys were already becoming a bother with their
phone calls. Madeline Brown's mother wondered how it would feel to be a
grandmother. Lord, she was getting old.
As from a great distance, she heard her daughter call. She rushed into
the garden, recognizing the panic in that call.
Madeline was gone. There wasn't a sign of her anywhere. There was only
the night coming down.
The mother's scream ripped through the gathering darkness.
"Madeline!"
There was no answer.
* * * * *
A winding river ran through Valley Park, and beside the winding river,
in the star-sprinkled September night, John Bruce walked with Jennie
West. The browning leaves were beginning to fall. Soon it would be
autumn, soon it would be October, and after October, there would not
be any Jennie West. There would be Mrs. John Bruce. John hoped that a
clerk's salary would support her, but if it wouldn't, he'd darned well
get another job.
They stopped beside the river wherein the stars up in the sky were
reflected, and it was in his mind to kiss her, but she was in a
mood for teasing and she slipped away from him into the soft night.
Laughing, he started after her.
Suddenly she screamed in fright.
"Jennie! What is it? Where are you?" John Bruce shouted.
She didn't answer. He started running in the direction from which her
scream had come.
He couldn't find her.
"Jennie!"
The stars shifted, the trees bent, the earth twisted, heaved, and
rolled. His body was cut with a million knives. There was a whistle in
the air.
Then there was silence.
* * * * *
Scoop Martin almost jumped out of bed. He could have sworn the
telephone was ringing. But it wasn't. Or was it?
Just another of those nightmares, he decided. He hadn't been sleeping
well for over a month. It was hell not to be able to sleep.
He laid down again.
The telephone lifted him out of bed like a jumping-jack coming out of
its box.
"Who is it? Oh, I'm sorry, chief, I didn't know it was you. What do you
want? Working for you, hasn't a man got any rights at all?--Huh?--I'm
sorry. Huh!--_Thirty-eight people gone, just like they had walked off
the face of the earth?_ And more reports coming in all the time? All
right, all right; I'm on my way to Valley Park right now."
* * * * *
Outside the police station, the street was jammed by a silent crowd, a
tense, straining, shifting mass of people. Scoop fought his way through
them.
Inside, the station was alive with reporters, A.P. men, specials, U.P.
men, a leg man from every sheet in the city. They were all asking
questions. A brawny man, with his uniform coat flung open, was trying
to answer them. The phone kept interrupting him. Every time it rang,
the room dived into silence.
"Madam, I'm sorry. Yes--yes--We'll send a detail right away. You look
around the neighborhood yourself. Perhaps she has just gone to the drug
store. Yes.... I'm sorry, but I don't know what to tell you. We'll do
the best we can."
"Another one?" a reporter queried as the phone went back on the hook.
The chief of police nodded.
The strained silence was broken by the harsh breathing of frightened
men.
"Lord!" a reporter whispered. "That's seventy-three now. And nobody
knows how many may have vanished without being reported!"
The phone rang again. The chief of police grabbed it.
"Hello ... Oh ... Governor. You're right we want the guard. We want
them as fast as we can get them."
* * * * *
Martin found a reporter he knew, plugged questions at him.
"They just go out of sight, that's all," the reporter told him. "How
it happens, why it happens, nobody knows, least of all the police.
When the first two reports came in, they thought it was a couple of
snatches, but they've been scared out of that idea now. There's no rime
or reason to it. Youngsters, nineteen, twenty years old; boys, girls,
couples. Somebody hears them scream, but by the time anybody gets
there, they're gone. God knows where they've gone or what has happened
to them. Jack Lecroy, heir to the biggest fortune in this town, is
gone. Two Polish factory workers, brothers, were in their room. Their
old man went in to ask them something. They weren't there. College
girls, shirt factory girls. It doesn't discriminate. Talk about the
Pied Piper!--What's that?"
Outside the building a voice had begun to screech.
"It's the end of the world. The angel Gabriel is blowing his horn and
the goats are being separated from the sheep. I'm ready, Lord, I'm
ready. Come and take me--"
The reporter's face went a shade whiter. "That's another one gone off
his nut. But he may be right, for all I know. Where you going?"
Scoop Martin was shoving his way toward the desk of the chief of
police. In his mind a phrase had clicked.
"Chief, I'm Martin, of the _Globe_. Listen to me.... I know you don't
want to answer any more questions, but I've got an idea. About a
month ago I interviewed a scientist living here in Valley Park, Lee
Garth. Did you read the story I wrote? He prophesied the end of the
world. Then he got busy and built himself a castle that a regiment of
artillery couldn't blast down.... Listen, maybe he knows more about
this than he told."
The harassed officer stared at Martin, then grabbed his phone.
Eventually he laid the receiver back on its hook.
"Garth doesn't answer," he said.