City at World's End

Chapter 6 CARAVAN INTO TOMORROW

Kenniston lost track of his own emotions very quickly in the rush of urgent tasks. City Hall became the nerve center of the evacuation. The police and National Guard officers were already there, and other men were called in—the wholesale grocers, the warehouse men, the heads of trucking and bus and van lines. McLain, the big rawboned manager of the largest trucking company, proved a tower of strength. He had been a transport officer in the last war, and knew something about moving men and supplies.

“You’ll have a traffic madhouse, and won’t get these people out for weeks,” he said crisply. “It’s got to be organized by wards. There have to be quarters in your domed city assigned for each ward, so they can go into their own streets when they get there.”

Hubble nodded. “I can get a crew of twenty men ready to handle that.”

“Good. I figure the move will take three days. A third of the population is about all we can handle safely at one time. Civilian populations are the devil and all! Now, there’ll have to be a squad assigned to distribute fuel to the ones who have to wait here in Middletown, and to quarter them so as to conserve that fuel. Also…”

Hubble sighed. “You take a big load off my mind, McLain. Will you organize the march? Kenniston can lead the first contingent, when you’re ready.”

McLain nodded brusquely, sat down at someone else’s desk, and began to fire orders. Hubble departed with his twenty picked men, well armed, to set up a base in the domed city.

The radio chattered incessantly now, urging, soothing, cajoling, issuing instructions. Police and Guardsmen were dispatched to each ward, with a responsible man heading each squad. They were ordered to take the streets house by house, to assure complete evacuation, and also to ascertain how many private cars could be counted on for transportation.

The city buses could carry only a fraction of the evacuees.

McLain was the one who thought of the patients in the Middletown hospitals, and set men to collecting ambulances, hearses, whatever would carry the sick comfortably. The police patrol wagons and a few big army trucks from the Armory he assigned to move the prisoners in the jail who could not safely be released. Both they and the sick would be left until the last day, to ensure proper quarters for their reception.

Fleets of trucks were started to the warehouses, with hasty lists of the food and other emergency supplies that must go with them. “We can run a truck line back to Middletown for more supplies later,” McLain told Kenniston. “But this stuff we’ll need right away.”

The First and Second Wards were to go first, and that meant that Carol and her aunt would be in the first day’s evacuation. Kenniston managed to get away long enough to see them.

He was sorry he went. Mrs. Adams sat weeping in the living room, and Carol struggled alone with blankets and mattresses and suitcases, in a bitter, stonyfaced mood that Kenniston could not quite understand. He stayed longer than he should have done to help them pack, trying earnestly to penetrate Carol’s tight-lipped silence.

“I know it’s hard to leave your home,” he said, “but it’s hard for everybody. And after all, we’ll have shelter and warmth, and can stay alive.”

“Shelter and warmth?” said Carol. She looked around at the starched white curtains, the polished furniture, the pictures on the walls and the bits of fine china that were so lovingly placed, and she said bitterly, “We had those. We had them for generations, until we had to have scientific progress too.”

“I’ll admit you have a point there,” said Kenniston heavily, “but it’s too late to argue now.”

“Yes,” she said. “Too late.” Suddenly she began to cry, in a slow, painful way that was not in the least like Mrs. Adams’ whimpering. “Oh, Ken, my house and all the things I loved…” He had wit enough to know that it was not for glass and china that she wept, but for a way of life that was gone and could never possibly return. He felt a terrible pity for her, which almost smothered his irritation at the inability of the female mind to grapple with the essentials of a situation.

“It won’t be so bad,” he said reassuringly. “And I’ll be leading tomorrow’s first evacuation, and won’t be far from you at any time.”

It was before nine o’clock the next morning when Kenniston left City Hall with McLain, to check the progress of preparations. Under the cold red eye of the Sun, Middletown seethed with an excited activity that centered in the First and Second Wards.

Cars were being hastily loaded, piled high on roofs and fenders. Children were being called together, barking dogs being caught and leashed, families gathering in excited haste. Roar of motors filled the wintry air.

Motors of great trucks rumbling to and from the warehouse, motors of police cars dashing with sirens screaming, sputtering motors of old cars being agonizedly coaxed to life.

The people on the streets, the people hurrying with bundles and children and dogs, looked more dazed than frightened. Some of them were laughing, a false merriment edged with excitement. Only a few women were sobbing.

McLain and Kenniston rode down in the jeep to the center of town, the Square. This was the down town First Ward of Middletown.

“The First and Second Ward will move out in that order,” McLain told Kenniston. “You take charge of the First, since you’re to lead the way.”

Police and National Guardsmen were already forming up cars on South Jefferson Street. Cadillacs, Buicks, Fords, ancient Hupmobiles. City and school buses were crowded with those who had no cars, and piled high with their belongings. Policemen on motorcycles roared past.

McLain boomed rapid orders. “Get sidecars on those motorcycles—they won’t make it without them, over rough ground.

“Divide up the garage tow-trucks as they come in—divide them evenly between the wards, so they can haul any car that conks out!”

And, to a worried National Guard officer, “No! What the devil use would we have for your fieldguns? Leave ’em in the Armory and bring cots, blankets, camp equipment, instead!”

Then McLain commandeered a car, jumped in, and shouted back to Kenniston, “Have ’em ready to move out by noon! I’ll have the Tube Mill whistle sounded, for a starting signal!”

And he was gone, racing off to the other ward gathering point. Kenniston found himself faced by police, Guardsmen, deputies, officials, all clamoring for orders.

“What are we going to do with these cars? Half of them are so over-loaded they’ll never get anywhere!”

Kenniston saw that. The arriving cars were piled not only with bedding and other essentials, but with radios, musical instruments, big framed family portraits, hobby-horses, every sort of possession.

“Go along and tear some of that junk off,” he ordered. “Form up all the way down South Jefferson—but only two abreast, for some of those South Side streets are narrow.”

As he sweated to marshal the gathering cars, he watched for Carol’s blue coupe. When she came, driving with pale self-possession while her aunt looked scaredly at the jam, he got her as near the front of the form-up as he could, and then raced back to the Square.

The squad leaders rapidly reported in on their assigned streets.

“Everybody’s out of Adams Street! Everybody’s out of Perry Street! Lincoln Avenue—”

But—“We haven’t got ’em all out of North Street, Mr. Kenniston! Some of those old people just won’t go!”

Kenniston swore, and then jumped back into the jeep and drove around to North Street. It was the street of shabby ancient brick houses only two blocks off Main Street. And the first person he saw there was a grim-looking, shawled old woman standing with folded arms on her front porch.

“I’m not leaving my home,” she snapped to Kenniston before he could speak. “I’ve lived in this house all my life, and my mother before me. I’ll not leave it now.” She sniffed scornfully. “The idea of the whole town taking up and running away just because it’s got a little cold!”

Kenniston, baffled, saw a little girl of six peering at him from inside the window of the house.

“That your granddaughter?” he asked. “Listen. She’ll be dead in a few days. Stone, frozen dead. Unless you bring her and your warm clothes and blankets along now.”

The shawled old woman stared at him. Then, her voice suddenly dull, she asked, “Where do I go?”

He hastened on along the street. A peppery old man was being carried out in a wheelchair by two squad men, and was viciously striking at them with his cane.

“God-damned foolishness!” he was swearing. They got them into the waiting buses, and hastily loaded on their belongings. Then Kenniston raced back to the Square. His watch said eleven-ten, and he knew how far they were from ready.

On the Square, under the big sycamore tree, a gaunt, tall man with burning eyes was brandishing a Bible and shouting, to no one, “End of the world—punishment for sin—”

Lauber, the truck dispatcher whom McLain had left in charge of the First Ward caravan under Kenniston, came running up to him when he reached South Jefferson.

“These people are crazy!” he panted. “The ones already here want to start right now—and they don’t even know the way!”

Kenniston saw that the police had drawn a barricade of big trucks across the street some blocks southward. Cars were surging against it, motors roaring, drivers shouting, horns sounding in a deafening chorus.

Panic! He knew it was in the air. He, all of them, had known there was danger of it when the Mayor had made his broadcast. They had had to risk it, for only real fear could make people leave their lifelong homes.

But if it got out of hand—

He rode along the line, shouting, “Form up! Form in line! If you jam the street, you’ll be left behind!”

He couldn’t even be heard. Limousines, trucks, jalopies—they crowded each other, banged fenders, bumped and recoiled and pressed forward again. And the horns never stopped their shrieking cacophony.

Kenniston, sweating now despite the frozen chill of the air, prayed that the gathering panic would not burst into violence. At the front of the surging, roaring mass, he found Mayor Garris. And the Mayor’s pallid face showed that panic had infected him too.

“Shouldn’t we go?” he shouted to Kenniston over the uproar of horns and motors. “Everyone seems ready here!”

“McLain’s running the traffic movement, and we’ve got to stick to his orders!” he shouted back.

“But if these people break loose—” the Mayor began. He stopped. Over the shrieking horns and thundering motors, a new sound was rising. A distant, banshee wail, a faraway scream that swelled into a hoarse, giant howl. The auto horns, the shouting voices from the cars, fell silent. Only the sound of motors was background to that unending scream that wailed across Middletown like a requiem.

“That’s the Tube Mill whistle!” cried Lauber. “That’s the signal!”

Kenniston sent the jeep jumping ahead. “Okay, let those trucks roll!

But keep people in line, back of them! No stampeding!”

The big Diesels that barricaded the way began to snort and rumble, and then started to move out, as ponderously as elephants. Kenniston’s jeep swung in front. But almost at once, cars behind pressed to get around them.

“Run the trucks three abreast, in front!” he shouted to Lauber. “It’ll keep them from getting around!”

Down Jefferson Street, down over the muddy bed of the vanished river, past the old houses with their doors carefully shut and locked, past the playground that looked as forlorn as though it knew the children were going, never to return.

Past Home Street, past the silent mills, past the beer signs of South Street, where from an upstairs window a drunken man shouted and waved a bottle at them. Past the last rows of drab frame houses, the last brave little yards whose flowers were blackened now by frost.

Kenniston saw ahead of them the line of demarcation, the boundary between the past and what was now Earth. They reached it, passed it—

And then the rolling, ocher-yellow plains were all about them, barren and drab beneath the great, firelashed red eye of the Sun. The cold wind whooped around them, as they started to climb the easy slope toward the ridge. Behind his jeep, Diesels, jalopies, buses, shiny station wagons rolled with roaring, sputtering, purring motors.

Kenniston looked back down the slope at them. Already the other Ward was moving out, and he rode at the head of a huge caravan of vehicles crawling endlessly out of Middletown—a caravan out of the Earth that was gone forever, into this unguessable tomorrow.