Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (105 page)

In that direction, sixty miles away, yet thrusting high above minor sprawls of the Rockies, was the cloud. It was not mushroom-shaped as other ominous clouds had been. It was twisted and dark and still growing. It had become an awful pillar that reached to the very floors of heaven and sought to thrust through like a gaseous fungus rooted in hell; a great, ghastly erection of swirling, flowing, sullen clouds poised like a visible column of earthly woe and lamentations.

The noise! The noise of that far phenomenon was infinitely terrible even though muted by distance; a sound of tortured, disrupted air; a sound as if something insane and gargantuan were running amok through the cosmos, ripping, tearing, rending everything on which it could lay its mammoth hands. Titan on a bender!

All faces were pale, uncomprehending, while that far column poked its sable finger into the belly of the void, and from the void came an eldritch yammering like stentorian laughter booming through the caverns of beyond. Then, abruptly, the cloud collapsed.

Its gaseous crown continued to soar while its semi-solid base fell back. It dropped from sight with all the shocking suddenness of a condemned felon plunging through a trap. The thing was gone, but its swollen soul still rose and drifted westward, while its hellish rumbles and muffled roars persisted for several seconds before they faded and died away.

The hypnotized hundred stirred, slowly, uncertainly, as in a dream. Five officials moved stupidly toward the idling stratplane, their minds confused by the vision in the south. To one side of the concrete area, a private flyer resumed his walk toward his sports machine. Graham beat him to it.

“Quick! Take me to Silver City—government business!”

“Eh?” The flyer regarded him with a preoccupied air.

“Silver City,” repeated Graham, urgently. His powerful fingers gripped the other’s shoulder, shook it to emphasize his words. “Get me to Silver City as swiftly as you can.”

“Why should I?”

“Dammit!” Graham roared, looking dangerous, “d’you want to argue at a time like this? You can take me—or have your machine confiscated. Which is it to be?”

The note of authority in his voice had its effect. The flier came to life, said hastily, “Yes, sure! I’ll take you.” He did not ask who Graham was, nor demand his purpose. Clambering hurriedly into his highly streamlined, two-seater, ten-jet job, he waited for his passenger to get in, then blew fire from the tail. The sports model raced along the concrete, lifted, screamed at a sharp angle into the blue.

Their destination lay beneath an obscuring pall of dust that was settling sluggishly as they progressed. It was just as they roared immediately overhead that a vagrant blast of wind cleared away the desiccated murk and bared the site of what had been Silver City.

Looking down, the pilot yelled something which became lost in the bellow of the stern tubes, fought to regain the controls that momentarily had slipped from his grasp. With cherry-red venturis vomiting fire and long streams of vapor, the ship zoomed close to the ground, brought into near view a scene that made Graham’s stomach contract sickeningly.

Silver City was gone; the area it once had occupied was now an enormous scar on the face of Idaho, a five-mile-wide wound dotted with wreckage through which crept, crawled and limped a pathetically small number of survivors.

Jittery with shock, the pilot made an impromptu landing. Choosing a smooth stretch of sand on the north fringe of the scar, he brought his machine down, touched, lifted, touched, tilted, dug the starboard wingtip into soft soil. The machine reeled in a semicircle, tore off its wing, fell on its starboard side with the port wing sticking grotesquely into the air. The pair scrambled out unhurt. They stood side by side and studied the scene in complete silence.

Only one hour ago this had been a neat, clean and busy city of some thirty-five thousand souls. Now it was a field torn from the domain of hell, a crater-pitted terrain relieved only by low mounds of shattered bricks, tangles of distorted girders. Pale cobras of smoke still waved and undulated to the tune of distant groans. Here and there, a stone parted raspingly from its neighbor, a girder contracted in iron agony.

There were other things; things from which eyes avert and minds recoil; things photographed, but not for publication. Gaudy gobs and crimson clots inextricably mixed with tatters of wool and shreds of cotton. A jello shape in shredded denims. A parboiled head still exuding steam. A hand stuck to a girder, fingers extended, reaching for what it never got—and giving God the high-sign.

“Worse than the Krakatoa explosion,” declared Graham, his voice soft, low. “Even worse than the Mont Pele disaster.”

“What a blast! What a blast!” recited the pilot, gesturing in nervous excitement. “This is atomic. Nothing less than an atom bomb could have done it. You know what that means?”

“You tell me.”

“It means that every inch of this ground is deadly. We’re being sprayed every second we stand here.”

“That’s too bad.” Graham nodded at the wrecked plane. “Maybe you’d better take to the air, eh?” He made his voice more tolerant. “We don’t know that it’s atomic—and by the time we find out it’ll be too late, anyway.”

A figure emerged laboriously from behind a pyramid of twisted girders in the middle distance. It limped around craters, side-stepped shapeless but infinitely terrible obstructions, made a lopsided, lurching run toward the waiting pair.

It was a human being, a man whose rags flapped around his raw legs as he progressed. He came up to them showing dirt and blood camouflaging an ashen face that framed a pair of glowing, half-mad optics.

“All gone,” announced the newcomer, waving a trembling hand toward the place whence he had come. “All gone.” He chuckled crazily. “All but me and the little flock who are worthy in the sight of the Lord.” Squatting at their feet, he rolled his red-rimmed eyes upward, mumbled in tones too faint to be understood. Blood seeped through rags dangling on his left hip. “Listen!” he ordered, suddenly. He cupped a quivering hand to his ear. “Gabriel sounded his horn and even the song of the birds was stilled.” He giggled again. “No birds. They came down in a dead rain. Out of the sky they fell, all dead.” He rocked to and fro on his heels, mumbled again.

The pilot went to his plane, returned with a pocket-flask. Taking the flask, the sitting man gulped potent brandy as if it were water. He gasped, gulped some more. Emptying it, he handed it back, resumed his rocking. Slowly the light of sanity returned to his eyes.

Struggling to his feet, he teetered while he gazed at the others and said, in tone a little more normal, “I had a wife and a couple of kids. I had a real good wife and two damn fine kids. Where are they now?” His eyes blazed anew as they shifted from one to the other, desperately seeking the answer that none could give.

“Don’t lose hope,” soothed Graham. “Don’t lose hope until you know for certain.”

“Tell us what happened,” suggested the pilot.

“I was fixing a patent no-draft cowl on a chimney on Borah Avenue, and I was just reaching for a piece of wire when the entire universe seemed to go bust. Something grabbed me, threw me all over the sky, then dropped me. When I got up, there wasn’t any Silver City anymore.” He put his hands over his eyes, held them there a moment. “No streets, no houses. No home, no wife and kids. And dead birds falling all around me.”

“Have you any idea of what caused it?” Graham inquired.

“Yes,” declared the man, his voice pure venom.” It was the National Camera Company, fooling around with something they’d no right to touch. Looking for another ten percent, and damn the consequences. May everybody connected with it be blasted body and soul, now and forever more!”

“You mean that the explosion was located in their plant?” put in Graham, stemming the tirade.

“Sure!” The speaker’s orbs mirrored his hate. “Their tanks blew up. They had a battery of cylinders holding a million gallons of silver nitrate solution, and every gallon of it went up at once, and sent everything straight to Hades. Why do they let ’em keep stuff like that in the middle of a city? Where’s their right—and who says so? Somebody ought to be swung for that! Somebody ought to be hoisted higher than the city went!” He spat fiercely, rubbed his swollen lips. Death was in the set of his jaw. “Wiped out peaceful homes, and happy families, and—”

“But silver nitrate in solution won’t disrupt like that.”

“Won’t it, mister?” retorted the victim, his tones sheer sarcasm. He gestured all-embracingly. “Look!”

His listeners looked. They found nothing to say.

Cars began to pour along the road from Boise, the van-guard of a veritable cavalcade that was to continue for a week. A plane swooped overhead, another and another. An autogyro bumped to earth half a mile away. Two helicopter ambulances floated inward, prepared to follow suit.

Temporarily disregarding causes, and reckless of consequences, a thousand pairs of feet trod through the graveyard of the West, a thousand pairs of hands pulled cautiously at wreckage, plucked maimed but living creatures from the soil. In his haste to rescue the living, no man thought of tormented atoms spitting invisibly, of hard radiations piercing his own body time and time again.

Ambulances, wheeled and winged, official or rush-converted, raced in, departed only to come again and again. Stretcher-bearers stamped a broad, firm path that later was to become the exact route of Mercy Street, flying journalists hovered in hastily hired helicopters a few hundred feet above, their televisors recording the horror below, broadcasting agony and pathos in extravagant adjectives not one-tenth so moving as the photographic reality depicted on the screens of a hundred million telenews receivers.

Graham and his pilot slaved with the rest, slaved long after dusk had fallen and night had spread its able shroud over the dead that yet remained. A gibbous moon crawled up, spewed its beams over the sights below. The hand on the girder maintained its gesture.

A gore-smeared gyrocar, with silent driver, carried Graham back to Boise. Finding a hotel, he washed, shaved, put a call through to Colonel Leamington.

The news of the disaster had shaken the world, said Leamington. Already the president had received messages of sympathy from fifteen foreign governments as well as From countless individuals.

“We’re taking every necessary action to determine as soon and as definitely as possible whether this is another Hiroshima, Black Tom, or Texas City,” he continued. “That is to say, whether its cause is attributable to assault, sabotage or accident.”

“It’s no Hiroshima,” Graham told him. “It wasn’t an atomic explosion—or not in any sense we understand. It was an ordinary, commonplace bang, a molecular disruption, but on a gigantic scale.”

“How d’you know that?”

“They’ve rushed in Geiger counters from all directions. I questioned a bunch of operators just before I left. They say radiation is not abnormal as far as they’ve searched. The area seems safe. If anything is radiating, it’s something not detectable by the means being employed.”

“Humph!” growled Leamington. “I guess we’ll get that report here shortly.” He was silent for a few seconds, then said, “If it so happens that you come across anything suggesting a connection between this awful disaster and your investigation, you must drop everything forthwith and get in touch with me. In such circumstances, the whole affair would be far too great for one man to handle.”

“There is no evidence of such a connection,” Graham pointed out.

“Nothing—until you uncover something!” Leamington riposted. “In view of what has gone before, I feel mighty suspicious. Unless he is one of the few survivors, Beach is now the twentieth on the list exactly as you feared. He is a mouth closed before you could reach him precisely as all the others were closed. I don’t like it!”

“Maybe, sir, but—”

“Graham, I repeat most emphatically that if you stumble on any sort of a link between this holocaust and the work on which you’re engaged, you must give up at once and report to me without delay.”

“Very well sir.”

“In that event, the best brains in the country must be conscripted to meet the issue.” Colonel Leamington’s voice trailed off, then came back strongly. “What do you think of the situation yourself?”

Graham hesitated before replying. He knew that he was as far from the truth as he’d been at the start, but he could not force aside the strange, uncanny feeling that had obsessed him since the death of Mayo. It seemed ridiculous to attach importance to sensations which, though strong and persistent, were elusively vague. Was that feeling akin to the hunch which had put him on the track of something yet to be found? Were those psychic warnings somehow related to his investigatory insight? Was it intuition, or empty superstition, or merely jumpy nerves?

Coming to a decision, he spoke slowly and deliberately. “Chief, I’ve still not the slightest idea of what is behind all this, but I’ve a notion that there are times when it’s dangerous to talk about it.” A thought became born in his mind, and he added, “I believe there are times when it’s dangerous even to
think
about it.”

“Absurd!” scoffed Leamington. “True telepaths don’t exist, hypnotism is very much overrated, and there are no known mechanical means of tapping anyone’s secret thoughts. Besides, how the devil can any investigation be conducted without thought?”

“That’s the hell of it,” responded Graham, dryly. “It cannot. Therefore I must take the risk.”

“Are you serious, Graham?”

“Never more so! I believe, or rather I feel that there are times when I can stew this affair in my mind, freely and with profit. Just as positively, I feel that there are inexplicable moments when to think would be sticking out my neck with a vengeance. Why I feel that way is something I can’t explain. Maybe I’m nuts—but the deeper I get into this case the more I respect my own nuttiness.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Graham, “I’m still perpendicular—while the others are horizontal!”

He put down his receiver, a queer light in his eyes. Somehow, he knew that he was right in his estimate of danger. He must take a risk, an awful risk, against odds infinitely terrible because completely unknown.
Eternal vigilance is the impossible price of liberty.
If he, like Webb, must succumb in vain effort to pay that price, well, so be it!