This Way to the End Times: Classic Tales of the Apocalypse Read online

  But Davis broke away and raced down the stairs, half carrying his terrified wife. Eastwood got his back against the door in time to prevent Alice from following them.

  “There’s nothing in this building that will burn, Miss Wardour,” he said as calmly as he could. “We had better stay here for the present. It would be sure death to get involved in that stampede below. Just listen to it.”

  The crowds on the street seemed to sway to and fro in contending waves, and the cries, curses, and screams came up in a savage chorus.

  The heat was already almost blistering to the skin, though they carefully avoided the direct rays, and instruments of glass in the laboratory cracked loudly one by one.

  A vast cloud of dark smoke began to rise from the harbor, where the shipping must have caught fire, and something exploded with a terrific report. A few minutes later half a dozen fires broke out in the lower part of the city, rolling up volumes of smoke that faded to a thin mist in the dazzling light.

  The great new sun was now fully above the horizon, and the whole east seemed ablaze. The stampede in the streets had quieted all at once, for the survivors had taken refuge in the nearest houses, and the pavements were black with motionless forms of men and women.

  “I’ll do whatever you say,” said Alice, who was deadly pale, but remarkably collected. Even at that moment Eastwood was struck by the splendor of her ethereally brilliant hair that burned like pale flame above her pallid face. “But we can’t stay here, can we?”

  “No,” replied Eastwood, trying to collect his faculties in the face of this catastrophic revolution of nature. “We’d better go to the basement, I think.”

  In the basement were deep vaults used for the storage of delicate instruments, and these would afford shelter for a time at least. It occurred to him as he spoke that perhaps temporary safety was the best that any living thing on earth could hope for.

  But he led the way down the well staircase. They had gone down six or seven flights when a gloom seemed to grow upon the air, with a welcome relief.

  It seemed almost cool, and the sky had clouded heavily, with the appearance of polished and heated silver.

  A deep but distant roaring arose and grew from the southeast, and they stopped on the second landing to look from the window.

  A VAST BLACK MASS SEEMED to fill the space between sea and sky, and it was sweeping toward the city, probably from the harbor, Eastwood thought, at a speed that made it visibly grow as they watched it.

  “A cyclone—and a waterspout!” muttered Eastwood, appalled.

  He might have foreseen it from the sudden, excessive evaporation and the heating of the air. The gigantic black pillar drove toward them swaying and reeling, and a gale came with it, and a wall of impenetrable mist behind.

  As Eastwood watched its progress he saw its cloudy bulk illumined momentarily by a dozen lightning-like flashes, and a moment later, above its roar, came the tremendous detonations of heavy cannon.

  The forts and the warships were firing shells to break the waterspout, but the shots seemed to produce no effect. It was the city’s last and useless attempt at resistance. A moment later forts and ships alike must have been engulfed.

  “Hurry! This building will collapse!” Eastwood shouted.

  They rushed down another flight, and heard the crash with which the monster broke over the city. A deluge of water, like the emptying of a reservoir, thundered upon the street, and the water was steaming hot as it fell.

  There was a rending crash of falling walls, and in another instant the Physics Building seemed to be twisted around by a powerful hand. The walls blew out, and the whole structure sank in a chaotic mass.

  But the tough steel frame was practically unwreckable, and, in fact, the upper portion was simply bent down upon the lower stories, peeling off most of the shell of masonry and stucco.

  Eastwood was stunned as he was hurled to the floor, but when he came to himself he was still upon the landing, which was tilted at an alarming angle. A tangled mass of steel rods and beams hung a yard over his head, and a huge steel girder had plunged down perpendicularly from above, smashing everything in its way.

  Wreckage choked the well of the staircase, a mass of plaster, bricks, and shattered furniture surrounded him, and he could look out in almost every direction through the rent iron skeleton.

  A yard away Alice was sitting up, mechanically wiping the mud and water from her face, and apparently uninjured. Tepid water was pouring through the interstices of the wreck in torrents, though it did not appear to be raining.

  A steady, powerful gale had followed the whirlwind, and it brought a little coolness with it. Eastwood inquired perfunctorily of Alice if she were hurt, without being able to feel any degree of interest in the matter. His faculty of sympathy seemed paralyzed.

  “I don’t know. I thought—I thought that we were all dead!” the girl murmured in a sort of daze. “What was it? Is it all over?”

  “I think it’s only beginning,” Eastwood answered dully.

  The gale had brought up more clouds and the skies were thickly overcast, but shining white-hot. Presently the rain came down in almost scalding floods and as it fell upon the hissing streets it steamed again into the air.

  In three minutes all the world was choked with hot vapor, and from the roar and splash the streets seemed to be running rivers.

  The downpour seemed too violent to endure, and after an hour it did cease, while the city reeked with mist. Through the whirling fog Eastwood caught glimpses of ruined buildings, vast heaps of debris, all the wreckage of the greatest city of the twentieth century.

  Then the torrents fell again, like a cataract, as if the waters of the earth were shuttlecocking between sea and heaven. With a jarring tremor of the ground a landslide went down into the Hudson.

  The atmosphere was like a vapor bath, choking and sickening. The physical agony of respiration aroused Alice from a sort of stupor, and she cried out pitifully that she would die.

  The strong wind drove the hot spray and steam through the shattered building till it seemed impossible that human lungs could extract life from the semi-liquid that had replaced the air, but the two lived.

  After hours of this parboiling the rain slackened, and, as the clouds parted, Eastwood caught a glimpse of a familiar form halfway up the heavens. It was the sun, the old sun, looking small and watery.

  But the intense heat and brightness told that the enormous body still blazed behind the clouds. The rain seemed to have ceased definitely, and the hard, shining whiteness of the sky grew rapidly hotter.

  The heat of the air increased to an oven-like degree; the mists were dissipated, the clouds licked up, and the earth seemed to dry itself almost immediately. The heat from the two suns beat down simultaneously till it became a monstrous terror, unendurable.

  An odor of smoke began to permeate the air; there was a dazzling shimmer over the streets, and great clouds of mist arose from the bay, but these appeared to evaporate before they could darken the sky.

  The piled wreck of the building sheltered the two refugees from the direct rays of the new sun, now almost overhead, but not from the penetrating heat of the air. But the body will endure almost anything, short of tearing asunder, for a time at least; it is the finer mechanism of the nerves that suffers most.

  ALICE LAY FACE DOWN AMONG the bricks, gasping and moaning. The blood hammered in Eastwood’s brain, and the strangest mirages flickered before his eyes.

  Alternately he lapsed into heavy stupors, and awoke to the agony of the day. In his lucid moments he reflected that this could not last long, and tried to remember what degree of heat would cause death.

  Within an hour after the drenching rains he was feverishly thirsty, and the skin felt as if peeling from his whole body.

  This fever and horror lasted until he forgot that he had ever known another state; but at last the west reddened, and the flaming sun went down. It left the familiar planet high in the heavens, and there was no darkness
until the usual hour, though there was a slight lowering of the temperature.

  But when night did come it brought life-giving coolness, and though the heat was still intense it seemed temperate by comparison. More than all, the kindly darkness seemed to set a limit to the cataclysmic disorders of the day.

  “Ouf! This is heavenly!” said Eastwood, drawing long breaths and feeling mind and body revived in the gloom.

  “It won’t last long,” replied Alice, and her voice sounded extraordinarily calm through the darkness. “The heat will come again when the new sun rises in a few hours.”

  “We might find some better place in the meanwhile—a deep cellar; or we might get into the subway,” Eastwood suggested.

  “It would be no use. Don’t you understand? I have been thinking it all out. After this, the new sun will always shine, and we could not endure it even another day. The wave of heat is passing round the world as it revolves, and in a few hours the whole earth will be a burnt-up ball. Very likely we are the only people left alive in New York, or perhaps in America.”

  She seemed to have taken the intellectual initiative, and spoke with an assumption of authority that amazed him.

  “But there must be others,” said Eastwood, after thinking for a moment. “Other people have found sheltered places, or miners, or men underground.”

  “They would have been drowned by the rain. At any rate, there will be none left alive by tomorrow night.

  “Think of it,” she went dreamily, “for a thousand years this wave of fire has been rushing toward us, while life has been going on so happily in the world, so unconscious that the world was doomed all the time. And now this is the end of life.”

  “I don’t know,” Eastwood said slowly. “It may be the end of human life, but there must be some forms that will survive—some micro-organisms perhaps capable of resisting high temperatures, if nothing higher. The seed of life will be left at any rate, and that is everything. Evolution will begin over again, producing new types to suit the changed conditions. I only wish I could see what creatures will be here in a few thousand years.

  “But I can’t realize it at all—this thing!” he cried passionately, after a pause. “Is it real? Or have we all gone mad? It seems too much like a bad dream.”

  The rain crashed down again as he spoke, and the earth steamed, though not with the dense reek of the day. For hours the waters roared and splashed against the earth in hot billows till the streets were foaming yellow rivers, dammed by the wreck of fallen buildings.

  There was a continual rumble as earth and rock slid into the East River, and at last the Brooklyn Bridge collapsed with a thunderous crash and splash that made all Manhattan vibrate. A gigantic billow like a tidal wave swept up the river from its fall.

  The downpour slackened and ceased soon after the moon began to shed an obscured but brilliant light through the clouds.

  Presently the east commenced to grow luminous, and this time there could be no doubt as to what was coming.

  Alice crept closer to the man as the gray light rose upon the watery air.

  “Kiss me!” she whispered suddenly, throwing her arms around his neck. He could feel her trembling. “Say you love me; hold me in your arms. There is only an hour.”

  “Don’t be afraid. Try to face it bravely,” stammered Eastwood.

  “I don’t fear it—not death. But I have never lived. I have always been timid and wretched and afraid—afraid to speak—and I’ve almost wished for suffering and misery or anything rather than to be stupid and dumb and dead, the way I’ve always been.

  “I’ve never dared to tell anyone what I was, what I wanted. I’ve been afraid all my life, but I’m not afraid now. I have never lived; I have never been happy; and now we must die together!”

  It seemed to Eastwood the cry of the perishing world. He held her in his arms and kissed her wet, tremulous face that was strained to his.

  THE TWILIGHT WAS GONE BEFORE they knew it. The sky was blue already, with crimson flakes mounting to the zenith, and the heat was growing once more intense.

  “This is the end, Alice,” said Eastwood, and his voice trembled.

  She looked at him, her eyes shining with an unearthly softness and brilliancy, and turned her face to the east.

  There, in crimson and orange, flamed the last dawn that human eyes would ever see.

  THE COMING

  OF THE ICE

  — G. PEYTON WERTENBAKER —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  HUGO GERNSBACK’S AMAZING STORIES, THE first English-language magazine devoted entirely to the publication of science fiction, made its debut with its April 1926 issue. In the beginning, Gernsback had great difficulty finding new stories for his magazine, because those few writers who specialized in science fiction for such pulp magazines as Argosy and All-Story in those days (Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Allan England, Murray Leinster, Ray Cummings, and a handful of others) were accustomed to faster and more generous pay than Gernsback was prepared to offer. His first issue and the one that followed it were made up entirely of reprinted material, easily and cheaply obtained—two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, two by H. G. Wells, the first installments of two different serialized novels by Jules Verne, and other stories taken from such magazines as All-Story and Gernsback’s own Science and Invention. Among the reprints in those first issues was a two-part serial called The Man from the Atom by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, which Gernsback had previously published in Science and Invention in 1923.

  Wertenbaker, born in Delaware in 1907, had been just sixteen when he sold the two Man from the Atom stories to Gernsback. And the first writer to whom Gernsback turned, three years later, when he finally acquired a story that had never been published anywhere else. This was “The Coming of the Ice,” in the third issue of Amazing Stories, June 1926. It is a story which, after nearly a hundred years, still holds its own for modern readers, something that is hard to say of most of the other new material that Gernsback would run in his nascent science-fiction magazine.

  What keeps the Wertenbaker story alive, apart from the visionary power of its picture of a world enfolded by a new ice age, is its human aspect: the insight into the psychology of an immortal man, remarkable for a nineteen-year-old author. Unlike most of Gernsback’s other contributors of new fiction in the next few years, whose work tended toward being dry scientific lectures illustrated by two-dimensional human characters, Wertenbaker was aware from the beginning of emphasizing emotions as well as technology in the newly developing field of science fiction. In “Science Versus Facts,” his editorial in the fourth issue of Amazing Stories, Gernsback quoted a letter from his stellar young contributor in which Wertenbaker observed that science fiction “goes out into the remote vistas of the universe, where there is still mystery and so still beauty. For that reason [it] seems to me to be the true literature of the future. The danger that may lie before Amazing Stories is that of becoming too scientific and not sufficiently literary. It is too early to be sure, but not too early for a warning to be issued amicably and frankly.”

  Despite Wertenbaker’s hope that science fiction would adopt a more literary orientation, Gernsback remained devoted to gadget-based stories and sugarcoated scientific lectures, and Wertenbaker soon drifted away from him. He wrote only three more science-fiction stories, the last of them in 1930, before turning his attention to mainstream fiction with the 1933 novel, Black Cabin, published under the pseudonym of “Green Peyton.” He went on to become an editor for Fortune and an authority on the American Southwest, producing such books as For God and Texas and America’s Heartland, the Southwest, but also retained his interest in matters futuristic, affiliating himself with NASA and the Air Force Systems Command as a technical writer before his death in San Antonio in 1968.

  —R. S.

  THE COMING OF THE ICE

  — G. PEYTON WERTENBAKER —

  Strange men these creatures of the hundredth century . . .

  IT IS STRANGE TO BE alone, and so cold.
To be the last man on earth. . . .

  The snow drives silently about me, ceaselessly, drearily. And I am isolated in this tiny, white, indistinguishable corner of a blurred world, surely the loneliest creature in the universe. How many thousands of years is it since I last knew true companionship? For a long time I have been lonely, but there were people, creatures of flesh and blood. Now they are gone. Now I have not even the stars to keep me company, for they are all lost in an infinity of snow and twilight here below.

  If only I could know how long it has been since first I was imprisoned upon the earth. It cannot matter now. And yet some vague dissatisfaction, some faint instinct, asks over and over in my throbbing ears: What year? What year?

  It was in the year 1930 that the great thing began in my life. There was then a very great man who performed operations on his fellows to compose their vitals—we called such men surgeons. John Granden wore the title “Sir” before his name, in indication of nobility by birth according to the prevailing standards in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir John’s, if I must be precise, for, while he had achieved an enormous reputation as a surgeon, he always felt that his real work lay in the experimental end of his profession. He was, in a way, a dreamer, but a dreamer who could make his dreams come true.

  I was a very close friend of Sir John’s. In fact, we shared the same apartments in London. I have never forgotten that day when he first mentioned to me his momentous discovery. I had just come in from a long sleigh-ride in the country with Alice, and I was seated drowsily in the window-seat, writing idly in my mind a description of the wind and the snow and the grey twilight of the evening. It is strange, is it not, that my tale should begin and end with the snow and the twilight.

  Sir John opened suddenly a door at one end of the room and came hurrying across to another door. He looked at me, grinning rather like a triumphant maniac.

  “It’s coming!” he cried, without pausing, “I’ve almost got it!” I smiled at him: he looked very ludicrous at that moment.