The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

The Dome

Kyle Braden sat in his comfortable armchair and stared at the switch in the opposite wall, wondering for the millionth—or was it the billionth?—time whether he was ready to take the risk of pulling it. The millionth or the billionth time in—it would be thirty years today, this afternoon.

It meant probable death and in just what form he didn’t know. Not atomic death certainly—all the bombs would have been used up many many years ago. They’d have lasted long enough to destroy the fabric of civilization, yes. There were more than enough bombs for that. And his careful calculations, thirty years ago, had proven that it would be almost a century before man got really started on a new civilization—what was left of him.

But what went on now, out there, outside the domelike force field that still shielded him from horror? Men as beasts? Or had mankind gone down completely and left the field to the other and less vicious brutes? No, mankind would have survived somewhere; he’d make his way back eventually. And possibly the record of what he had done to himself would remain, at least as legend, to deter him from doing it a second time. Or would it deter him even if full records remained to him?

Thirty years, Braden thought. He sighed at the weary length of them. Yet he’d had and still had everything he really needed and lonesomeness is better than sudden death. Life alone is better than no life at all—with death in some horrible form.

So he had thought thirty years ago, when he had been thirty-seven years old. So he still thought now at sixty-seven. He didn’t regret what he had done, not at all. But he was tired. He wondered, for the millionth—or the billionth?—time whether he wasn’t ready to pull that lever.

Just maybe, out there, they’d have struggled back to some reasonable, if agrarian, form of living. And he could help them, could give them things and knowledge they’d need. He could savor, before he was really old, their gratitude and the good feeling of helping them.

Then too he didn’t want to die alone. He’d lived alone and it had been tolerable most of the time—but dying alone was something else. Somehow dying alone here would be worse than being killed by the neo-barbarians he expected to find out there. The agrarians were really too much to hope for after only thirty years.

And today would be a good day for it. Exactly thirty years, if his chronometers were still accurate, and they wouldn’t be far wrong even in that length of time. A few more hours to make it the same time of day, thirty years to the minute. Yes, irrevocable as it was, he’d do it then. Until now the irrevocability of pulling that switch had stopped him every time he’d considered it.

If only the dome of force could be turned off and then on again the decision would have been easy and he’d have tried it long ago. Perhaps after ten years or fifteen. But it took tremendous power to create the field if very little power to maintain it. There’d still been outside power available when he’d first flashed it on.

Of course the field itself had broken the connection—had broken all connection—once he’d flashed it into being, but the power sources within the building had been enough to supply his own needs and the negligible power required to maintain the field.

Yes, he decided suddenly and definitely, he’d pull that switch today as soon as the few hours were up that would make the time exactly thirty years. Thirty years was long enough to be alone.

He hadn’t wanted to be alone. If only Myra, his secretary, hadn’t walked out on him when… It was too late to think of that—but he thought of it as he had a billion times before. Why had she been so ridiculous about wanting to share the fate of the rest of humanity, to try to help those who were beyond help? And she’d loved him. Aside from that quixotic idea she’d have married him. He’d been too abrupt in explaining the truth—he’d shocked her. But how wonderful it would have been had she stayed with him.

Partly the fault was that the news had come sooner than he’d anticipated. When he’d turned the radio off that morning he’d known there were only hours left. He’d pressed the button that summoned Myra and she’d come in, beautiful, cool, unruffled. You’d think she never listened to the newscasts or read the papers, that she didn’t know what was happening.

“Sit down, my dear,” he’d told her. Her eyes had widened a bit at the unexpected form of address but she’d gracefully seated herself in the chair in which she always sat to take dictation. She poised her pencil.

“No, Myra,” he said. “This is personal—very personal. I want to ask you to marry me.”

Her eyes really widened. “Dr. Braden, are you—joking?”

“No. Very definitely not. I know I’m a bit older than you but not too much so, I hope. I’m thirty-seven although I may seem a bit older right now as a result of the way I’ve been working. You’re—is it twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-eight last week. But I wasn’t thinking of age. It’s just—well. ‘This is so sudden,’ sounds like I’m joking, but it is. You’ve never even”—she grinned impishly—“you’ve never even made a pass at me. And you’re about the first man I’ve ever worked for who hasn’t.”

Braden smiled at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was expected. But, Myra, I am serious. Will you marry me?”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “I—don’t know. The strange thing is that—I guess I am in love with you a little. I don’t know why I should be. You’ve been so impersonal and businesslike, so tied up in your work. You’ve never even tried to kiss me, never even paid me a compliment.”

“But—well, I don’t like this sudden and—unsentimental—a proposal. Why not ask me again sometime soon. And in the meantime—well, you might even tell me that you love me. It might help.”

“I do, Myra. Please forgive me. But at least—you’re not definitely against marrying me? You’re not turning me down?”

She shook her head slowly. Her eyes, staring at him, were very beautiful. “Then, Myra, let me explain why I am so late and so sudden in asking you. First I have been working desperately and against time. Do you know what I’ve been working on?”

“Something to do with defense, I know. Some—device. And, unless I’m wrong you’ve been doing it on your own without the government backing you.”

“That’s right,” Braden said. “The high brass wouldn’t believe my theories—and most other physicists disagreed with me too. But fortunately I have—did have—private wealth from certain patents I took out a few years ago in electronics. What I’ve been working on has been a defense against the A-bomb and the H-bomb—and anything else short of turning Earth into a small sun. A globular force field through which nothing—nothing whatever—can penetrate.”

“And you…”

“Yes, I have it. It is ready to flash into existence now around this building and to remain operative as long as I wish it to. Nothing can get through it though I maintain it for as many years as I wish. Furthermore this building is now stocked with a tremendous quantity of supplies—of all kinds. Even chemicals and seeds for hydroponic gardens. There is enough of everything here to supply two people for—for their lifetimes.”

“But—you’re turning this over to the government, aren’t you? If it’s a defense against the H-bomb…”

Braden frowned. “It is, but unfortunately it turns out to have negligible, if any, military value. The high brass was right on that. You see, Myra, the power required to create such a force field varies with the cube of its size. The one about this building will be eighty feet in diameter—and when I turn it on the power drain will probably burn out the lighting system of Cleveland.”

“To throw such a dome over—well, even over a tiny village or over a single military camp would take more electric power than is consumed by the whole country in weeks. And once turned off to let anything or anybody in or out it would require the same impracticable amount of power to recreate the field.”

“The only conceivable use the government could make of it would be such use as I intend to make myself. To preserve the lives of one or two, at most a few individuals—to let them live through the holocaust and the savagery to come. And, except here, it’s too late even for that.”

“Too late—why?”

“There won’t be time for them to construct the equipment. My dear, the war is on.”

Her face grew white as she stared at him.

He said, “On the radio, a few minutes ago. Boston has been destroyed by an atomic bomb. War has been declared.” He spoke faster. “And you know all that means and will lead to. I’m closing the switch that will put on the field and I’m keeping it on until it’s safe to open it again.” He didn’t shock her further by saying that he didn’t think it would be completely safe within their lifetimes. “We can’t help anyone else now—it’s too late. But we can save ourselves.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry I had to be so abrupt about this. But now you understand why. In fact, I don’t ask you to marry me right away, if you have any doubt at all. Just stay here until you’re ready. Let me say the things, do the things, I should have said and done.”

“Until now”—he smiled at her—“until now I’ve been working so hard, so many hours a day, that I haven’t had time to make love to you. But now there’ll be time, lots of time—and I do love you, Myra.”

She stood up suddenly. Unseeingly, almost blindly, she started for the doorway.

“Myra!” he called. He started around the desk after her. She turned at the door and held him back. Her face and her voice were quite calm.

“I’ve got to go, Doctor, I’ve had a little nurse’s training. I’m going to be needed.”

“But, Myra, think what’s going to happen out there! They’re going to turn into animals. They’re going to die horribly. Listen, I love you too much to let you face that. Stay, please!”

Amazingly she had smiled at him. “Good-bye, Dr. Braden. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to die with the rest of the animals. I guess I’m crazy that way.”

And the door had closed behind her. From the window he had watched her go down the steps and start running as soon as she had reached the sidewalk.

There’d been the roar of jets overhead. Probably, he thought, this soon, they were ours. But they could be the enemy—over the pole and across Canada, so high that they’d escaped detection, swooping low as they crossed Erie. With Cleveland as one of their objectives. Maybe somehow they’d even know of him and his work and had made Cleveland a prime objective. He had run to the switch and thrown it.

Outside the window, twenty feet from it, a gray nothingness had sprung into being. All sound from outside had ceased. He had gone out of the house and looked at it—the visible half of it a gray hemisphere, forty feet high and eighty feet broad, just big enough to clear the two-story almost cubical building that was his home and his laboratory both. And he knew that it extended forty feet into the earth to complete a perfect sphere. No ravening force could enter it from above, no earthworm crawl through it from below.

None had for thirty years.

Well, it hadn’t been too bad a thirty years, he thought. He’d had his books—and he’d read his favorite ones so often that he knew them almost by heart. He’d kept on experimenting and—although, the last seven years, since he’d passed sixty, he’d gradually lost interest and creativeness—he’d accomplished a few little things.

Nothing comparable to the field itself or even his inventions before that—but there hadn’t been the incentive. Too slight a probability that anything he developed would ever be of use to himself or to anybody else. What good is a refinement in electronics to a savage who doesn’t know how to tune a simple radio set, let alone build one.

Well, there’d been enough to keep him sane if not happy.

He went to the window and stared through it at the gray impalpability twenty feet away. If only he could lower it and then, when he saw what he knew he would see, restore it quickly. But once down it was down for good.

He walked to the switch and stood staring at it. Suddenly he reached up and pulled it. He turned slowly to the window and then walked, almost ran, to it. The gray wall was gone—what lay beyond it was sheerly incredible.

Not the Cleveland he’d known but a beautiful city, a new city. What had been a narrow street was a wide boulevard. The houses, the buildings, were clean and beautiful, the style of architecture strange to him. Grass, trees, everything well kept. What had happened—how could it be? After atomic war mankind couldn’t possibly have come back this far, this quickly. Else all of sociology was wrong and ridiculous.

And where were the people? As if in answer a car went by. A car? It looked like no car he’d ever seen before. Much faster, much sleeker, much more maneuverable—it barely seemed to touch the street, as though anti-gravity took away its weight while gyroscopes gave it stability. A man and woman rode in it, the man driving. He was young and handsome, the woman young and beautiful.

They turned and looked his way and suddenly the man stopped the vehicle—stopped it in an incredibly short distance for the speed at which they’d been traveling. Of course, Braden thought—they’ve driven past here before and the gray dome was here and now it’s gone. The car started up again. Braden thought, they’ve gone to tell someone.

He went to the door and outside, out onto the lovely boulevard. Out in the open he realized why there were so few people, so little traffic. His chronometers had gone wrong. Over thirty years they were off by hours at least. It was early morning—from the position of the Sun between six and seven o’clock.

He started walking. If he stayed there, in the house that had been thirty years under the dome, someone would come as soon as the young couple who had seen had reported. And yes, whoever came would explain what had happened but he wanted to figure it out for himself, to realize it more gradually than that.

He walked. He met no one. This was a fine residential part of town now and it was very early. He saw a few people at a distance. Their dress was different from his but not enough so as to make him an object of immediate curiosity. He saw more of the incredible vehicles but none of their occupants chanced to notice him. They traveled incredibly fast.

At last he came to a store that was open. He walked in, too consumed by excited curiosity by now to wait any longer. A young man with curly hair was arranging things behind the counter. He looked at Braden almost incredulously, then asked politely, “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Please don’t think I’m crazy. I’ll explain later. Just answer this. What happened thirty years ago? Wasn’t there atomic war?”

The young man’s eyes lighted. “Why, you must be the man who’s been under the dome, sir. That explains why you…” He stopped as though embarrassed.

“Yes,” Braden said. “I’ve been under the dome. But what happened? After Boston was destroyed what happened?”

“Space-ships, sir. The destruction of Boston was accidental. A fleet of ships came from Aldebaran. A race far more advanced than we and benevolent. They came to welcome us into the Union and to help us. Unfortunately one crashed—into Boston—and the atomics that powered it exploded, and a million were killed. But other ships landed everywhere within hours and explained and apologized and war was averted—very narrowly. United States air fleets were already en route, but they managed to call them back.”

Braden said hoarsely, “Then there was no war?”

“Of course not. War is something back in the dark ages now, thanks to the Galactic Union. We haven’t even national governments now to declare a war. There can’t be war. And our progress, with the help of the Union, has been—well, tremendous. We’ve colonized Mars and Venus—they weren’t inhabited and the Union assigned them to us so we could expand. But Mars and Venus are just suburbs. We travel to the stars. We’ve even…” He paused.

Braden held tightly to the edge of the counter. He’d missed it all. He’d been thirty years alone and now he was an old man. He asked, “You’ve even—what?” Something inside him told him what was coming and he could hardly hear his own voice.

“Well, we’re not immortal but we’re closer to it than we were. We live for centuries. I wasn’t much younger than you were thirty years ago. But—I’m afraid you missed out on it, sir. The processes the Union gave us work only on humans up to middle age—fifty at the very most. And you’re—”

“Sixty-seven,” Braden said stiffly. “Thank you.”

Yes, he’d missed everything. The stars—he’d have given almost anything to go there but he didn’t want to now. And Myra.

He could have had her and they’d both still be young.

He walked out of the store and turned his footsteps toward the building that had been under the dome. By now they’d be waiting for him there. And maybe they’d give him the only thing he’d ask of them—power to restore the force field so he could finish what was left of his life there under the dome. Yes, the only thing he wanted now was what he’d thought he wanted least—to die, as he had lived, alone.