City at Worlds End | Page 4

The air had
grown colder. The red sunshine had no warmth in it, and when Kenniston took hold of
the iron rungs of the ladder to begin the climb, they were like bars of ice. He followed
Hubble upward, keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating soles of Hubble's shoes. It was a
long climb. They had to stop to rest once. The wind blew harder the higher they got, and
it had a dry musty taint in it that made Kenniston think of the air that blows from deep
rock tombs with dust of ages in them.
They came out at last on the railed platform around the big, high tank. Kenniston looked
down on the town. He saw knots of people gathered on the corners, and the tops of cars, a
few of them moving slowly but most of them stopped and jamming the streets. There was
a curious sort of silence.

Hubble did not bother to look at the town, except for a first brief glance that took it all in,
the circumference of Middletown with all its buildings standing just as they always had,
with the iron Civil War soldier still stiffly mounting guard on the Square, and the smoke
still rising steadily from the stacks of the mills. Then he looked outward. He did not
speak, and presently Kenniston's eyes were drawn also to look beyond the town.
He looked for a long time before it began to penetrate. His retinas relayed the image
again and again, but the brain recoiled from its task of making sense out of that image,
that unbelievable, impossible... No. It must be dust, or refraction, or an illusion created by
the dusky red sunlight, anything but truth. There could not, by any laws known to
Creation, be a truth like this one!
The whole countryside around Middletown was gone. The fields, the green, flat fields of
the Middle West, and the river, and the streams, and the old scattered farms-- they were
all gone, and it was a completely different and utterly alien landscape that now stretched
outside the town.
Rolling, ocher-yellow plains, sad and empty, lifted toward a ridge of broken hills that had
never been there before. The wind blew over that barren, lifeless world, stirring the ocher
weeds, lifting heavy little clouds of dust and dropping them back again to earth. The Sun
peered down like a great dull eye with lashes of writhing fire, and the glimmering stars
swung solemn in the sky, and all of them, the Earth, the stars, the Sun, had a look of
death about them, a stillness and a waiting, a remoteness that had nothing to do with men
or with anything that lived.
Kenniston gripped the rail tightly, feeling all reality crumbling away beneath him,
searching frantically for an explanation, for any rational explanation, of that impossible
scene.
"The bomb-- did it somehow blast the countryside out there, instead of Middletown?"
"Would it take away a river, and bring instead those hills and that yellow scrub?" said
Hubble. "Would any bomb-blast do that?"
"But for God's sake, then what--"
"It hit us, Kenniston. It went off right over Middletown, and it did something..." He
faltered, and then said, "Nobody really knew what a super-atomic bomb would do. There
were logical theories and assumptions about it, but nobody really knew anything except
that the most violent concentrated force in history would be suddenly released. Well, it
was released, over Middletown. And it was violent. So violent that..."
He stopped, again, as though he could not quite muster up the courage to voice the
certainty that was in him. He gestured at the dusky sky.
"That's our Sun, our own Sun-- but it's old now, very old. And that Earth we see out there
is old too, barren and eroded and dying. And the stars.... You looked at the stars, Ken, but
you didn't see them. They're different, the constellations distorted by the motions of the

stars, as only millions of years could distort them."
Kenniston whispered, "Millions of years? Then you think that the bomb..." He stopped,
and he knew now how Hubble had felt. How did you say a thing that had never been said
before?
"Yes, the bomb," said Hubble. "A force, a violence, greater than any ever known before,
too great to be confined by the ordinary boundaries of matter, too great to waste its
strength on petty physical destruction. Instead of shattering buildings, it shattered space
and time."
Kenniston's denial was a hoarse cry. "Hubble, no! That's madness! Time is absolute--"
Hubble said, "You know it isn't. You know from Einstein's work that there's no such
thing as time by itself, that instead there is a space-time continuum. And that continuum
is curved, and a great enough force