City at Worlds End | Page 3

there. He's had us trying to call Washington, but the wires
are all dead and even the radio hasn't been able to get through yet."
Kenniston walked across the cluttered plant yard. Hubble, his chief, stood looking up at
the dusky sky and at the red dull Sun you could stare at without blinking. He was only
fifty but he looked older at the moment, his graying hair disordered and his thin face
tightly drawn.
"There isn't any way yet to figure out where that missile came from," Kenniston said.

Then he realized that Hubble's thoughts weren't on that, for the other only nodded
abstractedly.
"Look at those stars, Kenniston."
"Stars? Stars, in the daytime--?"
And then, looking up, Kenniston realized that you could see the stars now. You could see
them as faint, glimmering points all across the strangely dusky sky, even near the dull
Sun.
"They're wrong," said Hubble. "They're very wrong."
Kenniston asked, "What happened? Did their super-atomic really fizzle?"
Hubble lowered his gaze and blinked at him. "No," he said softly. "It didn't fizzle. It went
off."
"But Hubble, if that super-atomic went off, why--"
Hubble ignored the question. He went on into his own office in the Lab, and began to pull
down reference volumes. To Kenniston's surprise, he opened them to pages of
astronomical diagrams. Then Hubble took a pencil and began to scrawl quick calculations
on a pad.
Kenniston grabbed him by the shoulder. "For Christ's sake, Hubble, this is no time for
scientific theorizing! The town hasn't been hit, but something big has happened, and--"
"Get the hell away from me," said Hubble, without turning.
The sheer shock of hearing Hubble swear silenced Kenniston. Hubble went on with his
figures, referring often to the books. The office was as silent as though nothing had
happened at all. Finally, Hubble turned. His hand shook a little as he pointed to the
figures on the pad.
"See those, Ken? They're proof-- proof of something that cannot be. What does a scientist
do when he faces that kind of a situation?"
He could see the sick shock and fear in Hubble's gray face, and it fed his own fear. But
before he could speak, Crisci came in.
He said, "We haven't been able to contact Washington yet. And we can't understand-- our
calls go completely unanswered, and not one station outside Middletown seems to be
broadcasting."
Hubble stared at his pad. "It all fits in. Yes, it all fits in."
"What do you make of it, Doctor?" asked Crisci anxiously. "That bomb went off over
Middletown, even though it didn't hurt us. Yet it's as though all the world outside

Middletown has been silenced!"
Kenniston, cold from what he had seen in Hubble's face, waited for the senior scientist to
tell them what he knew or thought. But the phone rang suddenly with strident loudness.
It was the intercom from the watchman at the gate. Hubble picked it up. After a minute
he said, "Yes, let him come in." He hung up. "It's Johnson. You know, the electrician
who did some installations for us. He lives out on the edge of town. He told the
watchman that was why he had to see me-- because he lives on the edge of town."
Johnson, when he came, was a man in the grip of a fear greater than Kenniston had even
begun to imagine, and he was almost beyond talking. "I thought you might know," he
said to Hubble. "It seems like somebody's got to tell me what's happened, or I'll lose my
mind. I've got a cornfield, Mr. Hubble. It's a long field, and then there's a fence row, and
my neighbor's barn beyond it."
He began to tremble, and Hubble said, "What about your cornfield?"
"Part of it's gone," said Johnson, "and the fence row, and the barn... Mr. Hubble, they're
all gone, everything..."
"Blast effect," said Hubble gently. "A bomb hit here a little while ago, you see."
"No," said Johnson. "I was in London last war, I know what blast can do. This isn't
destruction. It's..." He sought for a word, and could not find it. "I thought you might know
what it is."
Kenniston's chill premonition, the shapeless growing terror in him, became too evil to be
borne. He said, "I'm going out and take a look."
Hubble glanced at him and then nodded, and rose to his feet, slowly, as though he did not
want to go but was forcing himself. He said, "We can see everything from the water
tower, I think-- that's the highest point in town. You keep trying to get through, Crisci."
Kenniston walked with him out of the Lab grounds, and across Mill Street and the
cluttered railroad tracks to the huge, stilt-legged water tower of Middletown.