City at World's End

Chapter 8 MIDDLETOWN CALLING!

When Kenniston awoke, he lay for some time in his blankets looking around the great room, with the same feeling of unreality that he felt now each morning.

It was quite a large room, with graceful curving walls and ceiling of soft-textured, ivory plastic. But it was not as large as it looked, for the builders of the city had known how to use daringly jutting mezzanines to give two floor levels the spaciousness and loftiness of one.

He looked up at the tall, dusty windows, and wondered what this room had once been. It was part of a big structure on the plaza, for Mayor Garris had insisted that the whole Lab staff be quartered near City Hall. It had obviously been a public building, but except for a few massive tables it had been quite empty, and there was no clue to its function.

He looked around at the others on the row of mattresses. Hubble was still sleeping calmly. So was Beitz, with the slight, groaning stirrings of slumbering age. But Crisci lay wide awake and unmoving, looking up at the ceiling.

Kenniston remembered something, with a sudden pang, something that he had completely forgotten in the rush of events. He went over to Crisci, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Louis. I never thought until now about your girl.”

“Why would you think about that?” Crisci’s low voice was toneless.

“Why would you, when all this has happened?” He went on, as tonelessly, “Besides, it was all over a long time ago. For millions of years now, she’s been dead.”

Kenniston lingered a moment, seeking something to say, remembering now Crisci’s eager talk of the girl he was soon to marry—the girl who lived fifty miles away from Middletown. He could find nothing to say.

Crisci’s tragedy had been repeated many times among these people—the mother whose son had gone to California, the wife whose husband had been upstate on a business trip, the lovers, the families, the friends, divided forever by the great gulf of time. He felt again a great thankfulness that Carol had come through with him, and a renewed determination to hold her against anything.

Kenniston was lighting his morning cigarette, when the others rose.

He paused suddenly, and said, “I just thought—”

Hubble grinned at him. “Yes, I know. You just thought about tobacco.

You, and a lot of people, will soon have to do without.”

As they went out to get their breakfast at the nearest community kitchen, Hubble told him what was going forward.

“McLain’s going back to Middletown to bring gasoline engines and pumps. We have to get water flowing in the city’s system at once, and it may be a long time before we can figure out its pumping power. They seem to be atomic engines of some sort, but I’m not sure.”

“What about food rationing?”

“Food and medicine will all go into guarded warerooms. Ration tickets will be printed at once. Use of cars is forbidden, of course. Everybody is restricted to their own Ward district temporarily, to prevent accidents in exploration. We’ve already organized crews to explore the city.”

Kenniston nodded. He drew the last drags of a cigarette suddenly precious, before he spoke.

“That’s all good. But the main problem will be morale, Hubble.” He thought of Carol, as he added, “I don’t believe these people can take it, if they find out they’re the last humans left.” Hubble looked worried. “I know. But there must be people left somewhere. This city wasn’t abandoned because of sudden disaster. They may just have gone to other, better cities.”

“There wasn’t a whisper on the radio from outside Middletown,” Kenniston reminded.

“No. But I believe they used something different from our radio system. That’s what I want you for this morning, Ken. Beitz last night found a communication system in a building near here. It has big apparatus that he thinks was for televisor communication. That’s more in your field than ours.”

Kenniston felt a sharp interest, the interest of the technician that not even world’s end could completely kill. “I’d like to see that.”

As they walked through the cold red morning, Kenniston was surprised by the unexpectedly everyday appearance of this alien city beneath the dome.

Families were trooping toward the community kitchens, with the air of going on picnic. A little band of children whooped down the nearest street, a small, woolly dog racing beside them with frantic barking. A bald, red-faced man in undershirt and trousers smoked his pipe and looked down the mighty street with mild curiosity. Two plump women, one of whom was buttoning a reluctant small boy into his jacket, called to each other from neighboring doorways.

“—and they say that Mrs. Biler’s feeling better now, but her husband’s still poorly—”

“Human beings,” said Hubble, “are adaptable. Thank God for that.”

“But if they’re the last? They won’t be able to adapt to that.”

Hubble shook his head. “No. I’m afraid not.”

After breakfast, Beitz led them to a big square building two blocks off the plaza. Inside was a large, shadowy hall, in which bulked a row of tall, square blocks of apparatus. They were, obviously, televisor instruments. Each had a square screen, a microphone grating, and beneath that a panel of control switches, pointer dials, and other less identifiable instruments.

Kenniston found and opened a service panel in the back of one. Brief examination of the tangled apparatus inside discouraged him badly.

“They were televisor communication instruments, yes. But the principles on which they worked are baffling. They didn’t even use vacuum tubes—they’d apparently got beyond the vacuum tube.”

“Could you start one of them transmitting again?”

Kenniston shook his head. “The video system is absolutely beyond me. No resemblance at all to our primitive television apparatus.”

Hubble asked, “Would it be possible then to use just the audio system—use one of them as a straight sound-radio transmitter?”

Kenniston hesitated. “That might be done. It’d be mostly groping in the dark. But there are some familiar bits of design—” He pondered, then said, “The power leads come from outside. See anything around here that looks like a power station?”

Old Beitz nodded. “Only a block away. Big, shielded atomic turbines of some kind, coupled to generators.”

“We might spend years trying to learn how to operate their atomic machinery,” Kenniston said.

“We could couple gasoline engines to those generators,” Hubble suggested. “It’d furnish power enough to try one of these transmitters.”

Kenniston looked at him. “To call to the other people still left on Earth?”

“Yes. If there are any of them, they’d not hear our kind of radio calls. But this is their own communication setup. They’d hear it.”

Kenniston said finally, “All right Give me power, and I’ll try.”

In the next few days, Kenniston was so immersed in the overmastering fascination of the technical problem set him, that he saw little of how Middletown’s people were adapting to New Middletown. He could hear the trucks rumbling constantly under the dome, as McLain indefatigably pushed the work of bringing supplies from the deserted town beyond the ridge.

They brought the gasoline engines needed, not only to pump water from the great reservoirs but also to turn one of the generators in the power station. Once he had power, Kenniston began to experiment. Realizing the futility of trying to fathom the principles of the strange super-radio transmitters, he tried merely to deduce the ordinary method of operating them.

The trucks brought other things—more food, clothing, furniture, hospital equipment, books. McLain began to talk of organizing a motor expedition to explore the surrounding country. And meanwhile, the crews already organized to explore New Middletown itself were searching every block and building. Already, they had made two surprising discoveries.

Hubble took Kenniston away from his work to see one of these. He led down through a chain of corridors and catacombs underneath the city.

“You know that it’s a few degrees warmer here in New Middletown than the Sun’s retained heat can account for,” Hubble said. “We found big conduits that seem to bring that slightly wanner air up into the city, so I had the men trace the conduits down to their source.”

Kenniston felt sudden excitement. “The source? A big artificial heating plant?”

“No, not that,” Hubble said. “But here we are now. Have a look for yourself.”

They had suddenly emerged onto a railed gallery in a vast underground chamber. The narrow gallery was the brink of an abysmal pit—a great, circular shaft that dropped into unplumbed blackness. Kenniston stared puzzledly. He saw that big conduits led upward out of the pit, and then diverged in all directions. “The slightly warmer air comes up from this shaft,” Hubble said, nodding toward the pit. He added, “I know it sounds impossible, to our engineering experience. But I believe this shaft goes downward many, many miles. I believe it goes down into Earth’s core.”

“But Earth’s core is incredibly hot!” Kenniston objected. “It was hot, millions of years ago,” Hubble corrected. “And as it grew cooler, as the surface grew cold, they built this domed city and maybe others like it—and sank a great shaft downward to bring up heat from the core. But Earth’s core is even cooler now, almost cold. And now there is only a trifle of heat from it to warm the city a little.”

“So that’s why they couldn’t live here any more—it was the Earth heat they depended on, and that ran out,” said Kenniston, a little hopelessly.

The second discovery was made by Jennings, a young auto salesman who headed one of the exploration crews. He brought news of it to the scientists, and Kenniston went with Beitz and Crisci to see it.

It was simply a big, semicircular meeting hall in one of the larger buildings, with tiers of several hundred seats.

“A council room, or lecture hall, maybe,” said Beitz. “But what’s unusual about it?”

“Look at those seats in the second tier,” said Jennings. They saw then what he meant. The seats in that tier were not ordinary metal chairs like the others. They were different—different from the chairs, and different from each other. Some of them hardly looked like seats at all. One row of them were very wide and flat and low, with broad backs that flared in a little inward. Another row were very narrow seats, that had no backs at all. Still others looked a little like curved lounging chairs, but the curve was an impossibly deep one.

“If they’re seats,” said Jennings, “they weren’t intended for ordinary human people to sit in.”

Kenniston and the others looked at each other, startled. He had a sudden grotesque vision of this hall crowded with an audience, an audience partly human, and partly—what? Had humanity, in the last ages, shared the Earth with other races that were not human?

“We are all jumping to conclusions.” Beitz’ voice broke the spell. “They may not be seats at all.” But he added to Jennings as they left, “Better not tell the people about this. It might upset them.”

What the other exploration crews had found was summarized in a short speech by Hubble at the big town meeting of Middletown’s people held in the plaza on Sunday afternoon.

There had been church services that morning—services without bells or organs or stained glass, but held in lofty, shadowy rooms of cathedral solemnity. The first town meeting of New Middletown followed. Loudspeakers had been set up so that all in the big plaza might hear, and Mayor Garris, an older-looking, humbled Mayor Garris, spoke to them.

He was stumblingly encouraging.

The ration system was working well, he told them. There was no danger of starvation, for hydroponic farming would soon be started.

They could live in New Middletown indefinitely, if necessary.

“Doctor Hubble,” he added, “will tell you of what has been found in New Middletown by the exploring crews.”

Hubble was concise. He emphasized first that the original inhabitants of New Middletown had apparently left it deliberately.

“They took their personal belongings, their books, their clothing, their smaller apparatus, instruments, and furnishings. What they left were things too massive for easy transportation. That includes certain machinery which we think was atomically powered, but which must be studied with great care before attempts at operation can be made. We feel sure that in time, study will make it possible to use all such equipment.”

Mayor Garris rose to add eagerly, “And at least one piece of equipment is now ready to use! Mr. Kenniston has got one of the radio transmitters here going, and will now start calling to contact the other people of the Earth.”

A great cheering rose instantly from the gathered Middletowners.

Kenniston, after the gathering broke up, found himself besieged by excited questioners. Yes, they would start calling, right away.

He was worried when he got a moment alone with Hubble. “Garris shouldn’t have announced that! These people are dead sure now that we’ll soon be talking to other, peopled cities!”

Hubble looked worried too. “They’re so sure there are other people—that it’s only a matter of contacting them.”

Kenniston looked at him. “Do you believe there are any others? I’m beginning to doubt it, Hubble. If they couldn’t live in this city, they couldn’t anywhere.”

“Perhaps,” Hubble admitted uneasily. “But we can’t be sure of anything. We have to try, and keep trying.”

Kenniston started the transmitter that night, using it for only ten minutes each hour, to conserve gasoline as much as possible.

“Middletown calling!” he spoke into the microphone, “Middletown calling!”

No use of adding more—they could not yet operate a receiver to hear an answer. They could only call to make known their presence, and wait and hope that any others left on dying Earth would hear and come.

Crowds watched from outside the door, as he called. They were there through the night, when Beitz took over, and there again the next day, and the next. They were quite silent, but the hope in their faces made Kenniston sick. He felt, as another day and another passed, the mockery of the words he kept repeating.

“Middletown calling!”

Calling to what? To an Earth dying, devoid of human life, to a cold and arid sphere that had done with humanity long ago? Yet he had to keep sending it out, the cry of man lost in the ages and seeking his kind, the cry that he felt there were no ears on Earth to hear.

“Middletown calling—calling—”