CHAPTER IV
They ran forward and were suddenly in a narrow street of tall, old business buildings. It was a gut of darkness in which the men stumbled and jostled each other, and now they heard an alarm-siren ahead.
Wales had no desire at all to become embroiled in this senseless struggle for an empty city. But with Lanterman just ahead, and men all around, he dared not try to slip away. Some of them were surely watching him.
They debouched into a broader street. A few blocks away along this wider avenue, a searchlight suddenly went into action, lighting up shop windows and building-fronts for a quarter-mile, and half-dazzling the dark, running figures of Lanterman's men. Instantly shots burst forth from beyond the searchlight. Bullets whined and whanged off stone-work, and there was the silvery crash of shattered plate-glass.
"Get back in here!" Lanterman yelled, and his men sucked back into the dark shelter of the narrower way.
One of them was holding his shoulder, and sobbing, "Damn them, they hit me—"
Wales, pressing close against a stone facade, looked out into the eery brilliance ahead and recognized it as Liberty Avenue. He saw, across it, a shopwindow in which impeccably dressed dummies looked out as though in wide-eyed amazement at what was going on.
Lanterman paid no attention to the wounded man. "They're up in that big hotel near the Post Office," he said quickly. "Can't be many men left here—but we got to get to them fast, before the others hear and start back."
He told one of the farmer-men,
"You, Milton—take a dozen men and get around to the back of that hotel. Rest of us will take it from the front."
Wales thought that however ignorant he might be in some ways, Lanterman was a born leader. No wonder that people who had been bewildered and lost in doubts followed the red-faced man.
Two men with Venn guns hurried into a building at the corner of Liberty. A minute later, from a third-floor window, they suddenly let go. The searchlight went out.
"Come on!" yelled Lanterman. They poured out into the wide avenue and raced along it, keeping on the sidewalks on either side.
There was, suddenly, a burst of firing from ahead, that sounded muffled and distant. Then silence. They were nearly to the big hotel.
"Hold it, Sam!" came Milton's yell from the dark building. "It's all done."
Flashlights began to come on, like fireflies waking. There was a sound of women screeching from inside the hotel. Men came out of it, their hands high.
One was a burly, shock-haired man who cursed Lanterman when he saw him. "Shot two of my men, you—"
"Now quiet down, Bauder," said Lanterman. In the angling flashlight illumination, his face was sweating and exultant. "No call for any more fighting here. Wouldn't have been any, if you hadn't been so big-feelinged when we first came. Pittsburgh's big enough for all of us—long as you know I'm boss."
He turned to his men. "Half of you get back over to those bridges—tell 'em we've got Bauder and we've got Pittsburgh. They'll give up. Take them, Milton."
Whooping with triumph, the men started after Milton, into one of the dark side streets leading toward the river.
Wales started along with them. He half expected Lanterman to call him back, but the leader was too occupied with his moment of victory to remember the suspicions of hours before.
It was, Wales knew, the best chance he'd be likely to get to escape from this band. He let himself drop behind the rest of Milton's men as they ran down Ninth Street. Then, passing the mouth of an alley, he dodged into it and ran alone in darkness, cutting south to Sixth.
Wales stretched his legs toward the levee. The bridges were impassable to him, and the skiffs were his only chance. He made sure of oars in one of them, then pushed it out onto the dark river.
From northward, from the bridges, came the sound of firing. But as Wales rowed, the shots straggled into silence.
He guessed that the fighting was over and that Sam Lanterman was master of Pittsburgh.
When Wales finally stood on the dark northern shore and looked back, he saw a scattered twinkling of little lights moving amid the towering black structures that once had been a city.
He suddenly found that he was shaking, from reaction and despair.
"Can anyone—anything—save people like that?"
To Wales, it suddenly all seemed hopeless—the mission on which he'd come back to Earth. Hopeless, to think that the ignorant, the short-sighted, the fearful, could ever be induced to leave Earth in time.
He looked up at the star-decked sky. Out there in the void, the massive asteroid that spelled world's end was swinging ever forward on the orbit that in four months would end in planetary collision. You couldn't see it, though. And that was the trouble. People like these, influenced by someone's secret propaganda, wouldn't believe it until Kendrick's World loomed dreadful in the heavens. And then it would be too late....
Wales turned and started up the street from the river. He'd been given a mission and he had to carry it out. Not only for the sake of all those ignorant ones who might be trapped on a doomed world, but also for the sake of his friends. Something had happened to Lee and Martha Kendrick, and he had to find them.
He went through the Northside district until, beyond the old Planetarium, he found a big garage. There were plenty of cars in it. In ten minutes, Wales was driving north.
He kept his lights off, and his speed down. He looked back often. No one followed him now.
"Whoever was trailing me," he thought, "will be a while discovering that I'm not still with Lanterman."
Again, he wondered who the secret trailers were. They hadn't tried to overtake him. They had just followed him. Was it someone who also wanted to find Kendrick? And for what reason?
He thought of the Brotherhood of Atonement that was still only a name to him, and felt a chill.
It was fifty miles to Castletown, and he dared not drive too fast without lights lest he run suddenly upon a block in the road. But after a while the moon rose and Wales was able to push the car a little faster.
The countryside dreamed in the moonlight. It was only in towns that the awful emptiness of the world crushed you down. Out here between fields and hills, things were as they had always been, and it did indeed seem mad folly for men to quit their planet. It was small wonder that some of them refused to do so.
Everything you saw, Wales thought, wrung your heart with a feeling of futility. That little white house with the picket fence that he swept past so swiftly—someone had labored hard to build that fence, to plant the flowers, to coddle a green lawn into being. And it had all been for nothing, the little houses, the mighty cities, all the care and toil and planning of centuries for nothing....
He would not let himself get into that frame of mind. It had not been for nothing. Out of it all, man had won for himself the knowledge that was now saving him. The cities that now seemed so futile had built the rocket-fleets that for years had been taking the millions out to Mars. They had built the atomic power-plants, the great electronic food-and-water synthesizers, that would make life on Mars possible for all Earth's folk. No, man's past was not a failure, but a success.
Of a sudden, Wales' brooding was shattered as he drove into the town of Brighton Falls.
There was no town.
He pulled up, startled. In the moonlight, a blackened devastation stretched around him, a few ruined walls still standing, the rest a shapeless mass of blackened debris.
Wales, after a moment, got over his first shock. "Lightning could easily start a fire," he thought. "And with nobody to put it out—"
It seemed logical enough. Yet he still felt shocked as he drove hastily on out of the blackened ruins.
As the moon rose, he drove faster. Castletown was very near. He would soon know if he had come all this way for nothing.
In this old town, Wales had grown up with Lee and Martha Kendrick. In Westpenn College here, they'd been classmates. Lee, making astronomy his career, had stayed here at the small but famous Westpenn Observatory, to make finally the astronomical discovery of approaching Doomsday. And, Wales knew, Martha had stayed with him, keeping the old Kendrick house for him.
He knew too that the Kendricks had stayed on here, even after the whole region was evacuated. And then they'd disappeared.
Fairlie had said that his men had searched here and hadn't found them. But Wales clung to the conviction that his quest of them must begin here.
CASTLETOWN
A Good Place to Live
The sign at the edge of town, unintentionally ironic now, went past him. It had been a long way from here, Wales thought, to the Rocket Service school out west, a long way farther to Mars, and yet here he was, after all these years, back again.
His own boyhood home was here but there was no reason at all to visit it. He was glad there was no reason, he was glad now that his parents had died before Doomsday came.
He turned off the highway. The campus of Westpenn College was on the hills east of Castletown. The buildings were dark and silent. On the loftiest eminence, the dome of the Observatory shouldered the stars. There was no light there, either.
Wales drove past the campus to the big, square, old-fashioned Kendrick house. It was dark and quiet as everything else. He stopped his car, made sure of the pistol in his jacket pocket, and ascended the steps.
He felt, after all these years, like a ghost coming back to a dead town, to a dead world. Impatient of fancies, he pushed at the front door and it swung quietly inward.
Wales flashed his light around the hall inside. Then he began going through the rooms.
Over an hour later he was back in the front hall, disappointed and baffled. He had found no one in the house, and no evidence that either Lee or Martha had been here recently.
As he stood, anxious and frustrated, Wales suddenly noticed a smear of red on the inner side of the white-painted front door.
He flashed his light on it. Two words were written in lipstick on the door, in a feminine hand. "The Castle." Nothing more.
Wales' thoughts leaped. He pulled open the door and went out to his car fast. In a moment he was driving on downtown, his hopes suddenly high.
"The Castle." That was what, when they were all kids, they had called the old hilltop mansion of an ancient great-aunt of the Kendricks'. They had given it that name because of its 1900-ish wooden tower with a crenellated top, that had fascinated them.
Of a sudden, checking his elation, there came to Wales the sure knowledge that Martha had been afraid, when she wrote that direction.
Afraid to leave a more definite clue, than that one that only a few people could possibly understand.
"But she didn't leave that for me—" Wales thought, puzzledly. "As far as they knew, I was still on Mars. But then, for whom?"
He began to worry more deeply than before. He had found a clue to the Kendricks, a clue that Fairlie's agents had been unable to understand, but the careful obscurity of it made their disappearance suddenly more sinister.
Wales drove fast through the familiar old hometown streets. He noticed, as he swung around the Diamond, that one store had a brave sign chalked on its window, "Closed for Doomsday".
He swung right, up North Jefferson Street, then on up the steep hill that was the highest point of Castletown. He was wire-tense with hope when he parked in front of the old wooden monstrosity of a mansion.
Everything was dark here, too. His hopes fell a little as he went up the tree-lined walk. Still, people would be careful about showing light—
Something exploded in the back of Wales' head, and his face hit the ground hard.