City at Worlds End | Page 5

could hurl matter from one part of the curve to
another."
He raised a shaking hand toward the deathly, alien landscape outside the town.
"And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into
another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into
this dying, future Earth!"




Chapter 2
-- the incredible
The rest of the staff was waiting for them when they came back into the Lab grounds. A
dozen men, ranging in age from Crisci to old Beitz, standing shivering in the chill red
sunlight in front of the building. Johnson was with them, waiting for his answer. Hubble
looked at him, and at the others. He said, "I think we'd better go inside."
They did not ask the questions that were clamoring inside them. Silently, with the jerky
awkward movements of men strung so taut that their reflex centers no longer function
smoothly, they followed Hubble through the doorway. Kenniston went with them, but not
all the way. He turned aside, toward his own office, and said, "I've got to find out if Carol
is all right."
Hubble said sharply. "Don't tell her, Ken. Not yet."

"No," said Kenniston. "No, I won't."
He went into the small room and closed the door. The telephone was on his desk, and he
reached for it, and then he drew his hand away. The fear had altered now into a kind of
numbness, as though it were too large to be contained within a human body and had
ebbed away, carrying with it all the substances of strength and will as water carries sand.
He looked at the black, familiar instrument and thought how improbable it was that there
should still be telephones, and fat books beside them with quantities of names and
numbers belonging to people who had lived once in villages and nearby towns, but who
were not there any more, not since-- how long? An hour or so, if you figured it one way.
If you figured it another...
He sat down in the chair behind the desk. He had done a lot of hard work sitting in that
chair, and now all that work had ceased to matter. Quite a lot of things had ceased to
matter. Plans, and ideas, and where you were going to go on your honeymoon, and
exactly where you wanted to live, and in what kind of a house. Florida and California and
New York were words as meaningless as "yesterday" and "tomorrow." They were gone,
the times and the places, and there wasn't anything left out of them but Carol herself, and
maybe even Carol wasn't left, maybe she'd been out with her aunt for a little drive in the
country, and if she wasn't in Middletown when it happened she's gone, gone, gone...
He took the phone in both hands and said a number over and over into it. The operator
was quite patient with him. Everybody in Middletown seemed to be calling someone else,
and over the roar and click of the exchange and the ghostly confusion of voices he heard
the pounding of his own blood in his ears and he thought that he did not have any right to
want Carol to be there, and he ought to be praying that she had gone somewhere, because
why would he want anybody he loved to have to face what was ahead of them. And what
was ahead of them? How could you guess which one, out of all the shadowy formless
horrors that might be...
"Ken?" said a voice in his ear. "Ken, is that you? Hello!"
"Carol," he said. The room turned misty around him and there was nothing anywhere but
that voice on the line.
"I've been trying and trying to get you, Ken! What on earth happened? The whole town is
excited-- I saw a terrible flash of lightning, but there wasn't any storm, and then that
quake... Are you all right?"
"Sure, I'm fine..." She wasn't really frightened yet. Anxious, upset, but not frightened. A
flash of lightning, and a quake. Alarming yes, but not terrifying, not the end of the world...
He caught himself up, hard. He said, "I don't know yet what it was."
"Can you find out? Somebody must know." She did not guess, of course, that Kenniston
was an atomic physicist. He had not been allowed to tell that to anyone, not even his
fiancŽe. To her, he was merely a research technician in an industrial laboratory, vaguely
involved with test tubes and things. She had never questioned him very closely about his
work, apparently content to leave all that up to him, and he had been grateful because it

had spared him the