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.