Before the Universe Page 7

  But the awnings were torn and flapped by the wind’s tugging fingers, and the bleaching cars stood on flat tires, rusting away where they were parked.

  Camp strode along the main street of the village, searching, hunting, looking through the windows of the little specialty shops and the larger general stores, some of them empty and gaping like blind eyes where old-fashioned glass had shattered or fallen out. The stores were unlocked, all of them, indicating that whatever had befallen the populace had occurred during the daytime, and though Camp opened several doors, yet some undefined fear kept him from entering any of the shops. Dust was thick on the floors, eddied into drifts and strange designs by vagrant winds, yet in the food stores meats and fruits seemed solid and sweet enough beneath their vacuum-exhausted glass housings.

  He hurried to the other side of the street, looking nervously over his shoulder as he went, to a print shop whose sign read, “The Meshuggeh Junction, Advertiser.” He poked tentatively at the door. Like all the others he had tried, it swung open beneath his touch, and its hinges protested loudly in the thick silence.

  An ancient Goss power press was the chief feature of the press-room, dwarfing a single monotype, and racks of fonts and job presses for smaller work. And in the rolls of the Goss was a stream of paper midway between blank and finished page. It seemed to Camp that the operator of the Goss had had barely time enough to shut off the power before he—went away.

  Camp forced himself to bend over and read the date of the paper in the press. It was the issue of the “Advertiser” for Monday, May 22, 1995… and today, the stunned Camp thought, is Wednesday, the seventeenth of September, 1997!

  He feverishly scanned what little of the paper was made up, finding no clue to the nightmare he was experiencing. He stepped from the shop, at last, and stood blinking for a moment in the bright afternoon sunshine.

  Then he heard the silence … what silence! Silence deep and unbroken, unending, terrifying… silence blanketing a world! He whirled suddenly and shouted, flinching as the echo bounced eerily back from the nearby hills. He went on down the street, looking around at every step. He felt that if he could turn quickly enough, he would see somebody peering stealthily over a window-sill or around a door. His hurried pace turned into a run.

  “You’re crazy, Camp,” Marvin jeered from his pocket.

  Camp found himself at the village docks. There were boats moored there, the gay-bannered cruisers and motor-yachts of vacationers who had been there for the spring fishing and camping when it—whatever unimaginable thing the single syllable implied—happened.

  Only the larger and newer craft, those with the duraloy hulls so popular before Camp had left for another planet, were still afloat, and all of these, he soon discovered, needed repairs of one sort or another before they would run. He finally chose, after thorough inspection, a sturdy cabin cruiser. Its tanks were slopping-full of oil, but Camp wasn’t quite sure how good this would be after its two-year ripening. He drained the tanks accordingly, and refilled them from sealed cans he had found.

  He started the motors, grimacing as thick clouds of black smoke vomited from the twin exhausts and backfire popped sharply once or twice, indicating vital need of a tune-up.

  He worked grimly and silently, the only sounds breaking the heavy quiet being the clicking of his tools and the strident buzz of a battery charger. Dimly apparent in the back of his mind was an awareness of inimically circling shadows, of a vague menace watching him as he worked, and he shivered uncontrollably.

  At last it was too dark to continue the repairs. He straightened his aching back and tossed his wrench aside, wiping a gob of grease from his face with a bit of waste. He stepped into the darkness of the battery-room, a darkness relieved only by the spasmodic, cold, blue flickering spark of the charger. The door closed behind him.

  Camp pried one eye open a terrific trifle and yawned. Halfway through the yawn he sat bolt-upright, his heart pounding against his ribs like a frightened steam hammer, and stared about the small, bare room.

  “Well?” a jeering voice demanded, and Camp jumped. Memory returned to him with a rush.

  Unwilling, in his unfamiliarity, to leave the batteries charging all night, he had turned off the charger; finding this couch in an adjoining room, the gas station had seemed as good a place as any to bed down for the night. And the voice? Marvin, of course.

  He had but to connect a starter-wire or so and clean up the resultant mess in the motor-well of the cruiser, and carry a few cases of canned food aboard. A map he had found indicated that this was Lake Nipigon, in Ontario. Nipigon, he knew, connected with Lake Superior; once in the Great Lake he could head for Isle Royale and the town of Johns. Why he decided on his old summer home he didn’t know, but familiar surroundings would be better than the terrifying stillness of this deserted, unknown village. He carefully steered through the maze of moored and awash craft before him, and once out in the lake, set the course for the mouth of the Nipigon River and left it up to the automatic steering gear….

  The Nipigon River opened up into Lake Superior, and a large island—Isle Royale, by his map—loomed ahead, its bays offering comfortable harbor for his small craft. Camp paralleled its shore, searching for recognizable landmarks. At last he spotted the old, familiar buoy, and on the island, just over a clump of trees, the red roof of the hotel he had patronized in the old days. He put in to shore and tied up at the dock.

  Quite suddenly Camp realized that he’d only a very sketchy breakfast and no lunch, and that he was hungry. He slung Marvin into a pocket again and said, “Come on, Marvin. We’re off to see the wizard.”

  Marvin snuggled into a comfortable ball and sleepily corrected. “Lizard … petrosaurus parlante veneris .”

  Camp soon found Broadway, the central avenue of the town, and wandered disconsolately past dusty alleys and snug little homes, all silent and dead. There was a cafeteria ahead, the only one the town boasted, and he listlessly entered, wondering vaguely if he should take one of the checks protruding from the dispenser.

  He stepped behind the long counter, feeling singularly guilty, and saw plastic containers of milk stacked up by the score. He took one, broke the seal, and drained it. It was warm, of course, but pure, though the cream had formed a solid chunk at the top of the container; the sterile milk would not sour under any conditions or range of temperature once it had been imprisoned behind its translucent shell. A vacuum-trap container yielded a slice of cake, marbled with pink and green streaks, to his questing fingers. He bit into it and found it sound and firm, but powder-dry in his mouth. He set the slice down unfinished and coughed.

  Repressing his resurgent panic with a distinct effort he walked slowly from the grave-quiet cafeteria—it was too spooky, that place which should have resounded with the clatter of knife and fork and plate quiet with the stillness of a deserted tomb, too spooky even for a ghost—and headed down the street to the public library. He had thought to find some hint, some clue to the disappearance of every living thing, but the library’s doors were locked, and he walked on.

  Far down the street something flickered … and again. Camp stared stupidly, waiting for a recurrence of the flash of motion. “Red,” he said vaguely. “Red fabric.” Had it been a banner of some sort, writhing under the caress of the afternoon breeze? No, he thought not. He quickened his pace. The flash had seemed to come from the door of a bookshop …

  Cautiously Camp trotted to the other side of Broadway. The windows of the shop were smudged and dirty; he strained his eyes to peer past the streaky glass into the dark interior.

  “Must have imagined it,” he mumbled.

  And then the door of the shop opened, and a girl stepped out to the bright sidewalk.

  III. Girl Alone

  Camp’s eyes bulged dangerously. He knew her! “Lois—Lois Temple!” he exclaimed, and ran across the street.

  He grabbed her shoulders, shouting incoherent, near-hysterical questions at her, almost unsettled by his joy and relief at f
inding another human being. But she stared blankly at him, and yet—no! There was such a concentration of intense life in her eyes that for a moment he felt almost as though he had received a physical blow. Her eyes, for all that, were uniquely vacuous, and yet they seemed as penetrating as a powerful fog-light. Her lips worked slightly, as though she were reading an extraordinarily difficult passage in some obscurely written book, and Camp felt, as he later phrased it, as though someone were stirring his brains with a stick. Then her taut, white face relaxed, and she murmured, “August Camp!”

  “Yeah,” he babbled. “I just got back from Venus; came down on the other side of the border, by Lake Nipigon. But there was nobody there. There’s nobody at all! Lois, what’s happened?”

  “August Camp,” she said once more, as though to reassure herself. “One morning, two years ago, I woke up and found that everybody was gone. I’ve been alone ever since.”

  “Isn’t anybody left?”

  She shook her head, sending amber-colored ringlets tumbling about her pale face. “I’ve tried to work the telephones and a transmitting set I found,” she said, “and there is never any answer.”

  He stared at her, suddenly noticing that she was dripping wet. “What the devil happened to you?” he demanded, indicating her soaked clothing.

  “Fell in the lake.”

  Camp was puzzled by her costume. It was somewhat the same as the gown she had worn when last he’d seen her—but there was a subtle difference. It had been at a party then, the party for the Expedition members, and her dress had been fashionably modest. The lines of her present frock were the same, he saw, but the intent was somehow different. The dress was backless, and moreover, dipped sharply in front, baring more of her neck and slim, shapely shoulders than was strictly proper for the afternoon. The skirt apparently reached her ankles, but as she turned a trifle he saw that it was slit from hem to thigh.

  “I landed in Canada,” he repeated, “near Meshuggeh Junction. I was—scared—by the silence, and promoted myself a boat and buzzed over here to Johns. It’s awfully odd that I should find the one person left on my first attempt.”

  The girl’s attractive lips twitched in a smile.

  “I don’t understand it myself. Did you say that you came over by boat? There’s not a single piece of machinery turning on the Earth today; all the generators have stopped. They’ve run out of fuel or broken down, or something.”

  Camp fished a flat case from the breastpocket of his coverall and popped a cigarette between his thin, crooked lips. “Odd,’ he commented. “My boat started easily enough after a minor overhaul, considering that the oil was all of two years old. Wonder the stuff didn’t thicken or gum up.”

  “Your boat’s a Diesel?” she asked irrelevantly.

  Camp cast a covert glance at her. Her eyes were wide and staring; she looked far from well. There was a strange note to her low voice, a note of—effort, he thought. That, her odd, lonely survival, her inexplicable, though quite agreeable clothing—he decided to ask her….

  “Lois … I want you to tell me whatever you can about this.”

  “Yes?” she said, with white, even teeth flashing in a smile that he had remembered through all his three years of voluntary exile.

  “I want you to tell me how you happened to keep alive—or here, rather—though everyone else has vanished. Tell me that, and how you managed to survive the past two years.” This, he thought with some satisfaction, was a fair test.

  He watched her face closely as she began to answer. Then—again that sensation of physical force, that feeling of mind-muddling probing that he’d experienced a few minutes before … and the girl slumped to the ground like a devitalized zombie. “Damn me for a stupid, thoughtless ass!” Camp swore, and felt her Pulse. She was alive, and her heartbeat was strong and regular; it seemed an ordinary faint, but he didn’t dare take any chance.

  There was the awful possibility that the only other human being on the Earth might die!

  She had received a bad drenching when she had fallen into the lake, he thought; her skin was still wet. That, and the shock of their sudden encounter, must have taken heavy toll of her strength. He gathered her up in his strong arms—she was so like a little child!—and carried her to the boat.

  As he set her down he thought vaguely that she must have lost weight. Her hair was a little longer, too, as he would have wished it to be. Altogether she was nearer to his ideal than she had been when last he saw her, and in no way had the certain privations of her solitude affected her beauty.

  He placed her gently in one of the small bunks, drawing the blankets up around her chin, and set canned broth heating on the incredibly tiny electric stove. He had noticed, during the trip over, that the generator seemed to be out of kilter, and he took this opportunity of repairing it.

  It was getting rather dark now, and working partly by touch, partly by the illumination of a droplight, he had jerry-rigged the cruiser’s generator to operate satisfactorily. Fumbling a bit in the cramped space of the motor-well he reconnected the mechanism and started the motor. Tiny sparks inside the housing of the generator assured him that his work was serviceable, and he turned away satisfied.

  He stiffened as he heard a little moan from Lois’s bunk. She must be coming to, he thought. A full-grown scream yanked him bodily from the hatch, and he skidded madly into the cabin.

  Lois was tossing feverishly in the narrow bunk, writhing in the nastiest convulsions Camp had ever seen. He grasped her wrist.

  “There, there,” he crooned soothingly, smoothing the damp hair back from her sweat-slicked face. Her eyes opened wide, and she stared agonizedly at him. Another raw scream ripped her throat, and she clawed wildly at Camp’s restraining grip.

  Insane or delirious, he thought. He muttered what he hoped to be calming words as he frantically rummaged through the lockers in search of a medicine kit, intending to give her a sedative. Looking back at her as her screams whispered away, he saw that her normally creamy skin was darkening.

  “What the hell?” he whispered. His quick mind, accustomed to instantly analyzing the split-second phases of Venusian botany, tore the situation apart and reintegrated it satisfactorily. Her spasms had begun when he started the motors. Was it possible that the stale oil in the fuel tanks had suffered a deterioration causing it to emit poisonous fumes? With an exclamation he hurried to the controls and switched off both motors. Almost at once the girl’s moans were stilled and her wild tossings ceased, with no more movement than an occasional twitch of relaxing muscles. Her tawny eyes closed, and her breathing again became regular and effortless.

  If the motors were throwing off dangerous gases … Camp dragged a mattress and blankets from the other bunk and fixed a fairly comfortable bed on deck, on the windward side of the twin motors and out of range of any potential fumes.

  Back in the cabin, he took Lois’s wrist to check her pulse; she had fallen into a quiet, easy sleep. Pulse normal again, he thought, and thank God for that! But—her wrist was still wet! She’d had plenty of time to dry off since he had found her. Curiously he wiped away the film of moisture from her skin, and felt it again. Cold, rather, and not a little slimy. No—not slimy, he decided, but slippery … like a seal’s smooth hide.

  With a baffled shake of his blond head he picked the girl up and easily carried her up the short ladder to the deck. Gently he deposited her on the mattress and returned to his work.

  The starter switch stared at him like a cold, unwinking, metallic eye. He petulantly stabbed the button. The motors purred again.

  And again the air was torn by that shrill scream! One desperate leap pulled Camp over the hatch coaming to the deck. For a split-second too long he stared at an empty mattress—and out of the corner of his eye saw something slither over the side of the boat. He dashed to the rail and stared through gathering darkness into the water; there was nothing to be seen but a widening series of ripples….

  The black night pressed closer upon him, and a chill wind
sowed through the trees on the shore. But it was quiet—so very quiet! Then Marvin’s raucous tones sounded, somewhere aboard the cruiser, pushing the heavy, menacing stillness aside and shaking Camp from his shocked immobility.

  Something had reached aboard the cruiser—slipped aboard at a point not three meters from an alert, quick-nerved man whose existence had previously depended on his ability to scent danger … something was out there now, chuckling inhumanly as it lugged the girl off to whatever doom had overtaken the rest of the Earth’s teeming millions….

  He was sure that he had seen a bit of the bright red skirt that the girl had worn, and a slim arm crooked over the side of the boat … but something, he felt, was wrong, and he wished devoutly for the automatic he had left back at the space-sphere.

  Had the thing really abducted Lois? Somehow he doubted that the girl had been seized against her will. So close together had been her body and the thing’s blurred form, he thought that they might have been fervidly embracing each other.

  IV. Twin Trouble

  Camp stirred restlessly and awoke from a night filled with uneasy dreams. No solution of the preceding day’s insane events had occurred to him while he slept, or if one had, he failed to recall it. Philosophically he turned on the stove and prepared for breakfast. He decided, after running an exploratory hand over his chin, to skip that day’s shaving, and began to tumble through the cruiser’s supplies, bringing to light a sealed tin of bacon. He opened it with the aid of a screwdriver, being unable to locate a can-opener, and carefully inhaled the aroma of the meat. He hadn’t come several million kilometers to die of simple food poisoning.

  A frying pan was placed on the stove, and the bacon arranged in careful rows on the hot surface. He smiled almost happily as the cabin became filled with the crisp breakfast smell, and set coffee to boil. He had found that given a good morning meal, a man could tackle almost anything with a fair hope of success.