City at Worlds End | Page 5

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 fianc?e. 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 necessity of lying to her. Now he was even more grateful, because she would not dream that he might have special information. That way, he could spare her a little longer, get himself in hand before he told her. "I'll do my best," he told her. "But until we're sure, I wish you and your aunt would stay in the house, off the street. No, I don't think your bridge-luncheon will come off anyway. And you can't tell what people will do when they're frightened. Promise? Yes-- yes, I'll be over as soon as I can."
He hung up, and as soon as that contact with Carol was broken, reality slipped away from