6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Read online

  Apart from the curious cold pink glow in the room, there was a smell of hot iron. Mixed with this smell was a faint odor of ozone, a sort of seashore smell. There was also a feeling of warmth—not heat, just warmth, like that felt from the shortwave diathermy treatment that doctors used to give sometimes for a strained back. I had the feeling of being enveloped in a blanket of powerful, almost palpitating warmth. I remember thinking: Are these the fatal radioactive waves that we read about? A writer whose name I cannot recall had written a magnificent description of the bombing of Hiroshima in a magazine called The New Yorker, which, though it was a magazine of sophisticated humor, devoted a whole issue to his report. His description gave us a standard of comparison.

  We now dared to look out of the window. The McGraw-Hill Building was still standing, and so was the Holland Hotel, but beyond them there was only an incandescent orange redness against which they were blackly silhouetted. This redness was the center of what can only be described as a frightful, cream-colored, cauliflower-shaped cloud. Branches of white and butter-yellow broccoli seemed to grow writhing out from this center in mushroom layers. The whole thing was vegetablelike, a vivid, livid, mushroom-cauliflower-broccoli that formed great branches which grew, changing into white trees growing out of the scarlet central heart, against a background of thick brown smoke. Everything writhed and churned, the branches becoming intricate tendrils of marblelike delicacy—orange-pink, scarlet, amber-yellow, citron; and then the veins thickened into arms so that the vegetable simile failed and one thought of the writhing arms of an octopus.

  Having watched this tree of death grow, having seen it mount into the firmament, break into two parts and drift in majesty toward the west, we turned our attention to our home, which we knew already to be shattered, cracked like a mended cup which seems, as it is dropped for the last time, to retain its shape for an instant so that a memory of it can be fixed before it breaks into tiny shards.

  Meanwhile, other things had happened, as we found out when we looked around more carefully. The kinkajou had stopped screaming and had gone to sleep. This was her answer to all problems and corresponded to our method of anesthesia by means of drink, drugs, or women. But some of the tropical fish were dead, floating with their white bellies in the air; and the plants which filled the big studio window had their leaves browned on the edges. Why only the edges? Why had only some of the fish died? I forget which now, but all of two or three varieties were dead while the others swam at ease, seeking food in the corners of the tank. We picked out the dead fish to feed to Edward when she woke, as was our habit. We scattered some food in the feed ring and watched the multicolored fish cluster near the surface to eat. I said, “Put on the kettle and we’ll have some tea”; a cup of tea being my answer to any crisis—tea and aspirin.

  Then suddenly I felt weak. I saw how we were going through the motions of life: feeding the animals, making tea. Mildred must have felt the same, because she said from the kitchen, “The gas is all right.”

  I said, “And the water?” though I had heard her fill the kettle and knew that the water was still running.

  “The water’s all right, too,” she said.

  It won’t be for long, I thought; and got up and put the plug into the bath and filled it. That would give us fifty gallons or so—enough for a few days anyway. I was trying to bridge the gap between a technological past of half an hour ago and the future, trying to think what would work and what wouldn’t, and making decisions that seemed very wise at the time—conditioned reflexes to disaster brought out of the past from African droughts, from memories of the last war, from stories and letters I had had about London in the blitz. The next minute I was being violently sick. Lucky I’m in here, I thought. If one had to be sick it was a good thing to be in the place where it was easiest to be sick. It all comes back to me very clearly as I relive that day. Again I hear my wife’s voice saying, “Are you all right?” And my answer: “Yes, I’m all right.”

  And now I became aware of the smoke and the smell. Smoke was coming in through the shattered window of the bedroom. Fires must have broken out everywhere, I thought. Probably the destruction of the explosion, though it must have caused the fires, had banked them, as it were, with falling buildings, and only now were they breaking out with real severity. I heard a great crash as something fell on the flat roof and, looking out, saw it was a big wooden beam; more things fell, half bricks, tiles, dust, something that looked as if it had once been a man. I must get that away—overboard—before Mildred saw it.

  I did later, when things had stopped falling, and wondered as I handled the broken body if it was radioactive. I wondered how things had stayed in the air so long. Or was it not long; had it all happened so fast, in minutes— and what did it matter, anyway? I thought of what we had done, of filling the bath and the kettle, and decided that the debris falling on the roof was the result of a later explosion. There would no doubt be many of them. The kettle began to whistle.

  I said, “Let’s make the tea. We’ll feel better when we’ve had tea.”

  Mildred said, “Yes,” and we went into the kitchen together with the dog between us, right on our heels so that when we stopped, she bumped into us. The very act of making tea was calming.

  Things still kept falling, and the air was filled with papers that rose sailing like kites on the currents between the high buildings. It was very dark and there was no light when I tried to turn on the table lamp. Neither of us said anything. The wind continued to rise, assuming almost whirlwind proportions. I began to be aware of the noise of sirens. Fire engines and ambulances and police cars were evidently out on the streets. We both said, “Listen to the fire engines.” Then there was a shot and Mildred said, “Is that a shot?” and I said, “Yes.” There were to be plenty more later. Then we heard a scream. The paralysis of fear was now changing to hysteria. Terrified people were rushing out to escape from themselves, to find out. We’d have to go out ourselves sometime—but not yet.

  We had a second cup of tea. I was surprised how very calm I seemed; my hand hardly trembled. That amused me, not because it showed my lack of fear but because it showed my ability to control most of it. Probably the only people who were not frightened at that moment were lunatics, to whom this must all have seemed very logical and predestined. Perhaps that is why I was not more frightened, having been classified, because I had expected something of this kind to happen, as a lunatic. I was, in a way, psychologically prepared for the end of the world, but there was little satisfaction in being able to say, “I told you so,” and, at the moment, no one to whom I could say it except my wife, who always believed everything I said and thought me an altogether remarkable man, thus tempering her criticism with her charm.

  I went into the bedroom to try the telephone. The room was very smoky but not so bad as it might have been, for the wind had changed again. I did not know whom I was going to call. It was just that I wanted to see if the telephone worked. I had always hated the telephone—the network of copper threads that tied all civilized mankind together in a web of misunderstanding. If there had been no telephones and no airplanes and no electricity, there would have been no atomic bomb. I held the receiver to my ear. It was dead. No phone. That, after all, was not surprising after the failure of the electric light. But as the discovery of the telephone had been hailed as a great advance of our civilization, its end—for there was no doubt in my mind that it had ended—was a definite sign that our civilization was disintegrating.

  I went to look in the kitchen to see what we had to eat. There was quite a lot of stuff: cans of baked beans, boned chicken, soups, glass jars of tongue.

  There were other factors that were to the good. Once the first shock had worn off, I began to consider the possibilities of life as well as I was able—began to look and see if there was anything to reconstruct with. As I say, there was a fair amount of canned food in the kitchen and there were, in addition, about ten large parcels of food that we had wrapped and were going to
send to friends in England and France. It was remarkable how distant England and France seemed and how little our dearest friends now mattered. I was grateful to them for my own good impulse that had made me buy the food, and delighted with the habit of procrastination which had prevented my sending it to them.

  Another good thing, though I did not realize it fully at the time, was that I had a thousand rounds of .22 ammunition for the Mauser, because we had been intending to go on a holiday and I had meant to do some target shooting. I must have thought of this, though subconsciously, because my next move was to go and see the manager of the hotel, a great deer hunter who lived in the adjoining penthouse, and ask him if he would let me have one ol his heavier rifles and some ammunition. I was already aware that there would be a necessity for weapons, that civilization in terms of protection had broken down and that it must be every man for himself.

  I obtained a rifle and fifty rounds of 303 ammunition without much difficulty—the manager had more guns than he could use—in exchange for a case of whisky that I had just bought. We talked around the subject of the bomb and our predicament, more or less ignoring it, which was fantastic, since the air was filled with smoke. Like me, he must have had the feeling that this was the end of everything. Actually, of course, there was nothing to say. And to talk would probably only have torn the last shreds of self-control from our naked fear. We got no further than saying it was terrible, that neither of us had been out, that we had better be careful, and that it would probably be all right.

  My wife fixed some food. We had meat in the icebox, which by this time had stopped working; we had potatoes and soup. Surprisingly, the gas was still on; our supply had evidently been unaffected. And we had water; it was still running, probably from the reserve tank on the roof above us, and we did not have to use the reserve in the bath. We gave the kinkajou the dead fish from the tank and a banana, the last, and a bit of bread, and Annie had our leavings. The day passed somehow. I forget how. Night came —a night like those of the blackouts of the war but without air-raid wardens or police. The streets were dark and lighted only by the light reflected down from the low ceiling of cloud and smoke which was illuminated by those parts of the city that were still burning. It was a night filled with strange happenings—screams, cries, shouts, shots, the noise of doors being forced; a night of black horror edged by the glare of the buildings that still burned to the south of us. The McGraw-Hill Building still stood out like a great black pinnacle against the glow of the sky. There was still the sound of sirens as fire engines and police tried to keep some semblance of order, but it was all sporadic. There was no sleep for us, but we lay down with the dog between us and tried to rest. I had the deer rifle loaded beside me, and I had a Gurkha kukri in its sheath under my pillow; I had sharpened it till it was like a razor. I have it still, having carried it since that day. I say we did not sleep, but we must have dozed off, for at dawn we were wakened by a sound truck.

  An impersonal voice was giving out the news. It made me think of the town crier who had in the old days brought the news of war, of victory or disaster. It appeared that Washington was completely obliterated and that, since the federal government no longer existed, New York and all the other states were on their own. The Governor advised calm and patience. He said he would undertake to keep order and restore vital utilities. People were advised to stay where they were and wait and not rush off to the country. This news, of course, succeeded in achieving the purpose opposite to that desired and stampeded everyone, so that later in the day there was a veritable exodus of such cars as had gas in their tanks. The rest of the news was that, bad as things were, there was no cause for panic or alarm and, though the casualties in New York City were estimated to be more than seven hundred thousand, the fires were under control and we should remain calm.

  The voice went on and on. Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and every other major city had been severely damaged. But everything would be all right; this foolish catch phrase was reiterated and we were again advised to remain calm, stay at home if possible, until normalcy was restored. How this was to be done with seven hundred thousand casualties and a quarter of Manhattan destroyed was not revealed.

  There were a great number of suicides. Within an hour of the blast, we saw one woman throw her child out of a high window in the Lincoln Hotel, stand naked for an instant on the parapet and then follow her child in a headfirst dive. Most suicides, however, were on the fashionable upper East Side—the working poor being more able to stand disaster; having so little, they had little to lose.

  Forced by curiosity and the knowledge that the longer we waited, the harder it would be to go out, we made our way down the stairs from our eleventh-floor apartment to the street. I had often called dwellers in apartment houses “troglodytes,” and I remember thinking how right I had been as we climbed down the concrete stairs and crossed the paved passages that divided one flight from the next, pausing to rest and to listen to the strange sounds we heard. There was some drunken singing, the sound of quarrels, a hysterical woman blaming her husband for what had happened and asking him why he did not do something about it. He did. He struck her; she fell down and got up screaming she’d “have the law on him for that”; at which he laughed and she burst out crying loudly because now there was no law. On another floor, people were having a prayer meeting and singing hymns. There was no one in the office, and the lobby was deserted.

  We went into the street and found it empty. It was rather like a Sunday afternoon with everyone away, or a Saturday—a week-end—because a car was being loaded with things from a house almost opposite the hotel entrance. I had with me a heavy blackthorn stick that I always carry on account of the lameness caused by an old wound, and since we had money with us, we thought we might as well go up to the corner and see if we could buy more food. Obviously, money was no good any more, but here was the possibility the grocer would not have come to that conclusion yet; he might not have had the sense to load up his stock and take it home with him. This guess proved to be right, and we were able to buy fifty dollars’ worth of canned goods: sardines, herring, salmon, tuna fish, and potted meat. We obtained a gunny sack and staggered back with our wealth.

  On the way home there was the body of a man—his head had been bashed in—lying in the gutter on the corner of 45th Street, opposite a liquor store which had been raided and was completely empty. And, as we were getting our stuff in the grocery store, a girl ran screaming past us pursued by a gang of young hooligans. I judged from the noise that followed that they must have pulled her down in the next block. It was this incident which decided me to cut off Mildred’s hair (she wore it long, more than shoulder length) and make her dress in dungarees. With short hair, dungarees, and a dirty face, she would pass for a youngish, rather queer-looking boy, but everyone looked queer now and she would certainly be safer.

  ~ * ~

  We lay low for a few days. This was the time that the sediment of the underworld rose to the surface and took over. The streets were the scene of unrestricted pillage, murder and fights between rival gangs. From our roof we saw some amazing sights. But by degrees, in a matter of four or five days, things improved. My friend the manager told me that he had heard that the city was full of wounded and crazed people. He asked if I had seen any and I said no. He said they were flooding up Lexington and Park avenues. He told me more of the exodus, of how the routes out of the city were packed with refugees in cars and on foot. The police were making no effort to control them, since control was impossible. But what could they have done, anyway? Given tickets? Made arrests? Broken cars were jamming the roads. People were being run down and robbed, girls abducted; other people were jumping off bridges and out of windows. But still they were moving outward like the spokes running from the shattered hub of a wheel. He asked me what I was going to do. I said I was going to stay.

  Though my memory of the sequence of events that followed is somewhat confused, certain incidents stand out very clearly, the firs
t among them being the destruction of our pets. The fish went first, since they could not live without the light in the tank. But then they did not count as pets; they were merely a decoration and an interest—no more than that. The kinkajou was different. She was very affectionate and never bit hard enough to draw blood. Looking back on it, it seems funny now; but I had been away from farming for fifteen years or so and had gotten out of the habit of killing things. It was only with the greatest difficulty that, holding her in the crook of my left arm, I made myself hit her on the back of the head with a two-pound ball hammer. She stretched out the way animals do when struck, her legs quivered, and then she went limp. I skinned her while she was still warm, as it’s much easier then, and then I cut her up for a stew. Mildred cried. The dog looked on, not at all sorry to see the kink go. She had never understood our interest in it. It was difficult to think of Annie going the same way, which she did two days later.

  Dogs have been associated with man for so long, a million years perhaps, that they no longer, in the full sense, count as animals; they are extensions of man, inventions of many like the spinning jenny, the Queen Mary and the atomic bomb. Breeding livestock has always interested me, and I have learned a great deal about it since I have lived alone in the world with animals. Domestic dogs, as we knew them, were bred by continually discarding dogs that were not tractable, but my dogs now are bred two ways: the dogs of my hunting pack, which have been bred for strength and courage alone, would be capable of pulling me down if they were really starving, while my personal dogs are almost human, having been bred for both brains and courage.