6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Read online

  All public services broke down, including fire and police, key men having been killed, water mains destroyed, telephone and telegraph communication ruined beyond repair. Our technological back was broken; our civilization writhed like a wounded snake, unable to advance and incapable of retreat. We were too complex to return to simplicity; and only then, when it was too late, did it become apparent to the man in the street on what a fragile base his life had rested and how tenuous had been his hold upon existence. “One world or no world,” our greatest men had said, but no one had believed them. Having refused one world, we now had no world, and each man reacted according to his nature. Some, as I say, committed suicide, not merely because they were wounded or burned but because they were terrified. They bolted like animals, leaping from the housetops of the vast circle of buildings that surrounded the empty center of devastation. Some prayed, some cursed, some raped and murdered, their lusts liberated in final orgy. The police tried in certain parts to keep order, and shot looters and assassins till their ammunition gave out, when they were lynched by police-hating mobs. All the jewelry stores were broken into, and rings and ornaments were scattered everywhere. But now, of course, diamonds and gold were useless.

  For forty-eight hours, there was madness and murder, screams, shots and shouts; the parading of loose women in stolen ermine cloaks, mink coats, stone marten stoles, with diamond tiaras on their bleached blond hair. For forty-eight hours, cars roared through the streets and tommy guns spat from the cars. Then the gasoline began to give out in the filling stations, and the ammunition began to give out for the tommy guns as it had earlier for the police, and there was no one to hold up. Gangsters could go into any store and take anything. Their women dripped with jewels, their cars were stacked with valuable furs and piled with cases of Scotch and gin and rye. They had eaten their fill of steak cooked by trembling chefs at the point of a gun. But now there were neither steaks nor chefs left, and there was no water to wash the grime from their faces and the blood from their hands. And then, as suddenly as their reign of terror had begun, it ended in terror on their part. Here was a new world that they could not understand, where all that they had ever wanted was theirs and they were carrying it off. But to where, and for what? In this world they were the suckers, and, like wild animals betrayed by this new environment, they turned upon one another in a kind of gang war of extinction.

  This, of course, is all somewhat academically stated, the drama having lost its sharp cutting edge with the passing years. But there are incidents, vignettes that still stand out, separated from the general mass of somewhat amorphous memory and theory and rationalization, like the red-capped figure to be found in almost every Corot landscape. There was the girl who ran into Grand Central Station pursued by two men, whom I shot. It was as simple as that. I was going out to get canned goods from the basement of a ruined store and had a rifle in my hand. I knew the girl by sight; she was a dancer in a nearby musical show. She smiled at me and said thank you as if I had opened a door for her. And I, regretting the expenditure of my two shells, wondered if it had been worthwhile. The shots on my part, and the smile on the girl’s, were out of their context here.

  In a book published a few years before it happened, a number of scientists had predicted what might occur, and one of them had explained what would take place if an atomic bomb were dropped in Gramercy Park. The fact that the explosion actually did take place in Gramercy Park could have been a matter of coincidence, or luck, or it might have been suggested by the chapter in question. The depositor of the bomb may have said, “Well, if they want it there, let them have it there.” He may even have had a kind of perverted sense of humor, like the guards at Buchenwald who gave towels to those of their victims who were about to be gassed, telling them the Murder House was for baths; or again, with that tidy Nazi mind, he may have wished to make fact conform to fiction. The point, however, is that the explosion did not operate quite as was expected, because, for some unknown reason, the blast did not fade out and get weaker and weaker as the distance from its center increased. Instead, it ended as if it were cut off by an invisible wall.

  The best way to describe it would be to imagine the force of the blast as something tied to a string that was being swung round and round. Everything within the area covered by the string was destroyed, and everything only a few yards beyond it was left—with the exception of such minor damage as some broken windows—intact. The blast at that point appeared to take an upward direction, so that in the area beyond the destroyed center there was no further destruction except that due to fires caused by the falling debris. This destruction was somewhat haphazard; certain buildings escaped all damage while whole areas were completely gutted.

  After the original reign of disorder and mayhem, the city started to reorganize itself. Emergency repairs were effected to water supplies, and local authorities were linked by provisional army field telephones. Citizens formed themselves into troops of vigilantes, and though there was some street fighting between different groups which took each other for bandit bands, order was in some degree restored. But there was no sense of security or continuity, for if there is no reason to expect tomorrow to dawn, today loses its validity. Were more bombs going to go off? What was going to happen about food, or work, or money?

  People began to evacuate the city in cars, on foot, on bicycles. They left the island of Manhattan, endless black caterpillars of humanity creeping over every bridge, appearing from under the ground in every tunnel. They were migrating like lemmings. Driven by fear, they were going into the unknown where they would inevitably die.

  They swarmed over the land like locusts, devastating it, marching till they were halfway to Canada. Some even reached the Canadian border, where they met Canadians marching down from Montreal and Toronto. What had taken place in New York was not an isolated phenomenon. Every big city in North America had suffered the same experience. No city except Washington was completely destroyed, but the population of all had been panicked, and the cumulative effect of these multiple bombings was much more serious than the total destruction of any single city, because all the urban populations fled to the country—which they destroyed; to the small towns and villages where, when once what was happening was understood, the villagers defended themselves with guns and even pitchforks, ex-soldiers fighting from tractors as if they were tanks. It was civil war, mass suicide. North America as a power, as a civilization, ceased to exist.

  But as if even this were not enough, disaster was piled upon disaster, and the sickness hit us. First came diseases that were caused, it was said, by radioactivity. Then came the Red Death. The Red Death appears to have been general all over the civilized world.

  The news of the period, naturally, was garbled; but there was some news. A few radio hams were able to receive messages. Ships at sea relayed frantic and conflicting reports. Naturally, within hours of the disaster, our air fleets set out for Europe and in a series of retaliatory raids blotted out many centers of military and industrial strength. Every big town in England had been blown up at the same time that ours were: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, all had ceased to exist. But fortunately the United States, anticipating the possibility of such an attack, had the foresight to be ready for it and had several fleets of immense bombers, complete with atomic bombs and personnel hidden in secret underground hangers. Anticipating the destruction of central authority, the commanding officers of these areas had sealed instructions to be opened if communication broke down.

  When the attack came, the wings of retaliation were soon in the air and within hours of the first blast our world was gone. There was never in anyone’s mind, apparently, the idea that any country other than Russia could have been responsible for the attack upon us.

  What was forgotten was that Germany was our enemy— the enemy of Russia and America and England—and that nothing would please Germany better than the mutual destruction of the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies. The Germans hoped this would h
appen and, in my opinion, engineered it—perhaps even by setting off the explosions in America, knowing that we, in our fear and bewilderment, would attack Russia in a retaliatory reflex. What the Germans did not foresee (or perhaps they did not care) was that such a war would extinguish them with the rest of mechanized mankind. Or again they—the Germans—may have had such confidence in their Spenglerian myth that they assumed they could survive.

  And so, perhaps, they could have—until the Red Death came along. Then they died along with all the others.

  I had thought till today that it had killed every living human being in the Western Hemisphere with the exception of myself and perhaps some Indians in the forests of the upper Amazon or Orinoco. Some of the last news that we got through was that the same disease had broken out in both Buenos Aires and Rio. This makes me think now, looking back on it, that the bacteriological war the attackers planned for us got completely out of control.

  What happened in the Far East, in Australia and Asia, I have no idea. We never heard anything from there, and perhaps they, too, survived. Perhaps a new empire of Orientals arose. I doubt it, though, because I feel that they would surely have established some kind of communication with the East coast of the United States. I think it is safe to assume that sickness and death overtook everyone in the Far East as well, except for isolated tribesmen and perhaps the inhabitants of such a remote place as Lhasa, the sacred city of Tibet.

  ~ * ~

  The two girls I saw were standing on a small hill on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23d Street. I saw them clearly silhouetted against the skyline. They had long spears in their hands and were leading horses. One horse was a bay and the other a chestnut. The girls were staring north, shading their eyes with their hands, while the horses cropped the grass beside them. Both girls were blond. Their hair was knotted on their necks and they wore what looked like buckskin shirts and trousers. I had trouble with the dogs, Vixen and Bodo; the girls were upwind and the dogs had never smelled a woman before—or any other human being but me, for that matter—and they probably thought of me as one of themselves, since I had bred them and their parents before them and they were never separated from me, even sleeping on the same heap of skins in the cave I had built in the ruined Chelsea Hotel.

  Having described the girls, I suppose I had better describe myself.

  I was born in Paris, just in time to serve in the first World War. I was severely wounded and went to live in South Africa, where I farmed cattle for ten years. I then took to writing, returned to England and came from there to the United States, where I remained, apart from a few trips to England, France and the Bahamas, till the second World War, when I married a charming American girl, an artist, and continued writing while I waited for the war to end. My age and disabilities prevented my doing anything more active. Among others, I wrote and talked of the dangers of our Anglo-American retention of the bomb secret, maintaining that manufacture should cease and control be given to the United Nations. I also said that our civilization, as we knew it, was finished; and that as others were saying and writing at the same time the future presented only two alternatives: the liberation of man through atomic power or the destruction of our civilization, either by great nations in an undeclared war, which was what we feared, or by atomic bandits or nihilists.

  My wife and I lived in a small studio penthouse on the eleventh floor of the Whitby Apartments on West 45th Street, opposite the Martin Beck Theater. I was over there yesterday and it is still almost intact, having been extremely well constructed sometime in the twenties. As a matter of fact, I shot a mountain lion that my dogs had driven into a basement apartment which had, when we lived there, been occupied by a drummer. Hunting big game in old apartment houses is the most dangerous form of shooting there is and makes any African safari look like child’s play, because the animals are likely to attack from the immediate flank—that is, from any apartment—as you move down a passage. Hunting under such conditions would be quite impossible without dogs that first investigate the building and bay up the den of any animal that is lurking there. The losses in dogs are heavy; but I am continually breeding new ones—huge animals of mixed Saint Bernard, Newfoundland, great Dane, Irish wolf hound, bloodhound, mastiff, police dog and Husky blood —which generation by generation become larger, fiercer, and better hunters. The feral dogs—the wild stock that has survived and bred itself by mongrelization—are not much bigger than jackals or coyotes.

  When I am out for a stroll, as I was today, I usually take only a couple of well-trained dogs as guards to inform me of any danger that I do not see myself, which was lucky for the girls and their horses. For had I been hunting with my pack, as I do every second day or so, the girls would undoubtedly have been torn to pieces, since this is my way of feeding my dogs. They are trained to pull down any living thing and, having done so, to break it up as English hounds did a fox. Of course, when hunting the mutations such as the giant wolf and mink and a kind of wild ox that resembles the extinct European aurochs, I use a rifle—a 450 express that I selected at Abercrombie and Fitch—which has immense striking power. The dogs, instead of attacking game that is too big for them, merely bring it to bay and hold it till I come.

  From my point of view, there is a certain interest in the change in my own character because, when I first went to Africa as a young man, I was an ardent hunter. Then, at the age of thirty-five, I gave up shooting altogether. Now I, like my dogs, have reverted atavistically, and hunting is my only pleasure. My mind is less disciplined than it was when I used to write for the magazines. It drifts along strange paths, as I dig among my memories seeking for incidents and examples that will elucidate or explain what has happened. This is not a story. It has no plot. It is a testament, a form of history, a literary curiosity written for myself as a form of justification, as a debt that I, the last man of the past, must owe to an unborn future.

  My narrative must drift back and forth to catch memories that are like butterflies as they flick through my mind, for I am an old man. How can I write about the death of my wife? I can’t. But the description of her death will be there, threaded like every twentieth bead on the string of my life. I cannot coldly discuss killing and eating Annie, my pet dog. Nevertheless, I did kill and eat her.

  We also ate Edward, the kinkajou we had had for four years, in a stew. There was no food for pet animals, and it was necessary to dispose of them all. I have never had a nicer pet than a kinkajou, a South American animal resembling, though not connected with, a lemur. It has a long prehensile tail, a soft fur, and charming snuggly habits. It is about the size of a cat and is more or less nocturnal. We never took to cannibalism, though both cannibalism and infanticide were widely practiced and probably, under such conditions, to be condoned. Morality can exist only in a social framework. A man alone cannot be good or bad. He cannot steal, fight, lie, or murder.

  Now I return to animals because it is among animals that the last twenty years of my life have been lived. In addition to the giant mutations, there was an immense increase in the wild animals indigenous to New York State, such as the timber wolf, beaver, black bear, lynx, mountain lion, deer, moose and bobcat. There were even some bison and caribou. There were also many game birds: pheasant, ptarmigan, grouse, and a new kind of American jungle fowl which evolved from ordinary poultry. The inmates of the Central Park zoo now roamed wild, too. Some lunatic, very shortly after the explosion, had thrown open every cage in the zoo, and since no one had time to deal with the liberated animals, a number of them survived and became acclimated. Now there are tigers in New York, which, in their long winter coats, resemble the great tigers of Manchuria. There are also leopards, Jaguars and a wide variety of buck and antelope which, despite the severity of the winters, have managed to survive. As happened elsewhere where their ranges overlapped, the lions were soon exterminated by the tigers. There is at least one herd of zebra and another of donkeys. Occasionally they hybridize. There are no horses, and the two that I saw today are the first
I have seen for twenty years. Grizzly bears have spread from the West and are very large-even bigger, I should say, than the Kodiak bears. I have seen marks where they sharpened their claws against a tree in Central Park more than twenty feet from the ground. There are several families of polar bears living along both the Hudson and East rivers. There is a great colony of seals at Ellis Island.

  The great bald eagle now nests in the abandoned cliffs of every skyscraper. There are pigeons by the millions; and ducks, wild geese and swans in all the ponds and rivers. Buzzards and kites circle everywhere.

  Many of the larger carnivora live in the drains, which is probably how those from more tropical countries survived their first winter. It is of course for the same reason that I live in a cave, where the temperature is more or less stable, rather than in an apartment, of which there is certainly no shortage. It occurred to me when I moved in here that, after all, a cave was man’s natural habitat, and that a house was only an artificial cave.

  At least one more thing is necessary to supply a picture of this area as it is now. New York was always famous for its skyline. This skyline is now vastly changed. There are a number of large buildings—blocks of flats, hospitals and hotels—more or less intact. Rockefeller Center stands; so does the pinnacle of the Empire State Building, an eagles’ aerie now. The Chrysler Building stands, but its pinnacle hangs from it at any angle. The bomb blast area is completely bare and almost as flat as a polo field. A curious thing, however, has occurred. The debris that landed on the housetops, combined with the guano from the countless birds that took to roosting on them, has formed a soil so fertile that trees and shrubs cover the flat tops of higher buildings. This fertility accounts for the amount of game found here.