The Artificial Man and Other Stories. Clare Winger Harris

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СКАЧАТЬ all day to do it neither,” demanded Hovarder, coming to a full stop and eyeing me pugnaciously.

      “This is night, not day, Carl,” I replied quietly.

      “Don’t you ‘Carl’ me!” roared the bully. “Hand over that grub, and I don’t mean maybe!”

      I stooped to place the basket of provisions upon the walk between us, but at the same time I seized a can. As Carl bent to pick up the basket I threw the can with all the strength I possessed full at his head. He crumbled up with a groan and I snatched the precious burden and fled. When I was a block away I looked back and saw him rise and stoop uncertainly. He was picking up the can with which I had hit him. I did not begrudge him the food contained therein. That can had done me more good than it could ever possibly do Carl Hovarder.

      The last lap of my journey proved the most tedious, for I was suffering with cold, and depressed at the fate of humanity, but at last I spied the observatory.

      V.

      The grassy knoll upon which this edifice stood had an elevation of about twenty feet and the building itself was not less than forty feet high, so that an observer at the telescope had an unobstructed view of the heavens. The lower floor was equipped as a chemical laboratory, and in its two large rooms college classes had met during the school term in chemistry and astronomy. The second story, I thought, could be used as sleeping quarters for the nine souls who felt certain the observatory would eventually be their mausoleum.

      “All in?” I shouted as I ran into the building and slammed the door behind me. How welcome was the warmth that enveloped me!

      “Yes, we’re all in, and I suspect you are, too, judging from appearances,” laughed Vera.

      I looked from one to another of the little group and somehow I felt that though each tried to smile bravely, grim tragedy was stalking in our midst.

      Late in the afternoon I thought of our radio and televisio, and decided to run over to the house and get them. The streets were deserted and covered with several inches of snow, and the cold was intenser than I had ever experienced. A few yards from the observatory lay a dark object. I investigated and found it to be a dog frozen as stiff as though carved from wood, and that in a few hours! My lungs were aching now as I looked across the street at our home, and though I wanted the instruments badly I valued life more highly. I turned and retraced my steps to the observatory.

      The men were disappointed that we were to be so cut off from communication with the outside world, but the essentials of life were of primary importance. We swallowed our disappointment then and many times in the future when from time to time we missed the luxuries of modern life to which we had been accustomed.

      Later, while the children were being put to bed, we men ascended the steps to the telescope room where we gazed ruefully at the diminishing disk of the luminary that had given life to this old earth of ours for millions of years.

      “I suppose that’s the way old Sol looked to the Martians before the days of our system’s disruption,” commented Ed with a side glance in my direction.

      “The inhabitants of Mars saw a larger orb in their heavens than that,” replied Oscar, adjusting the instrument. “We are well beyond the confines of our solar system. What do you see there, boys?”

      We looked alternatively through the eyepiece and beheld a bright star slightly smaller than our once glorious sun now appeared to be.

      “That is Pluto,” explained Marden, “the outermost planet of the system.”

      “So we are entering the unknown! Whither are we bound, Marden?” I cried, suddenly overwhelmed with the awfulness of it all.

      The young astronomer shrugged his shoulders. “I do not know. But we shall not be the only dead world hurtling through space! The void is full of them. I think it was Tennyson who wrote—”

      “Never mind Tennyson!” I fairly shrieked. “Tell me, do you think this is the—the end?”

      He nodded thoughtfully and then repeated: “Lord Tennyson wrote, ‘Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanished race.’”

      “Say, this is as cheerful as a funeral service,” said Zutell. “I’m going down with the women. I can hear them laughing together. They’ve got more grit and pluck than we have. You two old pessimists can go on with your calamity-howling. I’m going to get a few smiles yet before I look like a piece of refrigerator meat.”

      “Ed’s right for once,” I laughed. “We can’t help matters this way.”

      VI.

      I should gain nothing by a detailed account of the flight of Earth through interplanetary space. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months lost their significance to the isolated inhabitants of a world that had gone astray. Since time had always been reckoned by the movements of the Earth in relation to the sun, there was no way to ascertain the correct passage of time. True, a few watches among the members of our group aided in determining approximately the passage of time in accordance with the old standards to which we had been accustomed. How we missed the light of day, no being can imagine who has never experienced what we lived through.

      “Is the moon still with us?” I asked one time of Marden.

      “I cannot ascertain definitely,” he replied. “With no sunlight to reflect to Earth from its surface, it has eluded my observation so far, but I have imagined a number of times that a dark object passes periodically between us and the stars. I shall soon have my observations checked up, however. How I do miss radio communication, for doubtless such questions are being discussed over the air pro and con! We are still turning on our axis, but once in every twenty-seven hours instead of twenty-four. I don’t understand it!”

      Oscar spent virtually all his time in the observatory. He did not always reward the rest of us with his discoveries there, as he was naturally taciturn. When he spoke it was usually because he had something really worthwhile to tell us.

      “You remember I told you that the Earth continued to rotate, though slowly, on its axis even though it no longer revolved around the sun,” he said on the day we completed approximately five months of our interstellar wandering. “I also told you that should such a calamity befall the Earth as its failing to rotate, the waters would pile up and cover the continents. I have not told you before, but I have calculated that Earth is gradually ceasing to rotate. However, we need not fear the oceans, for they are solid ice. I may also add that with this decrease in our rate of rotation there is a great acceleration in our onward flight. In less than a month we shall be plunging straight forward at many times our present rate of speed.”

      It was as Oscar Marden had predicted, and in a few weeks the positions of the heavenly bodies showed that Earth was hurtling straight onward at the speed of light. At the end of two years our provisions were running very low in spite of the scanty rations which we had allowed. The telescope had become our only solace for lonely hours, and through its gigantic lens we became aware of what the future held for us. I flatter myself that I was the first to whom Oscar revealed his fearful discovery.

      “Tell me what you see,” he said, resigning his seat at the eyepiece to me.

      “I see a very large star,” I replied, “considerably larger than any near it.”

      He nodded. “I will tell you something that need not be mentioned to the seven below, Jim, because I can trust you to keep СКАЧАТЬ