CHAPTER IX

"Hi, Mac," said a weary voice. "This is Johnny Gibbons, in Frisco. No, they haven't been here, but they've hit half the big cities on the continent. Just heard that Mexico City's flat as a--my brother and his wife were in Mexico City. Vacation. Get away from it all."

"Cheers, Mac," said a deep sad voice. "Roscoe Toddy here. They bombed Chicago. Funny thing: some professors at Northwestern University here in Evanston turned their detectors on Chicago and couldn't get a whiff of radioactivity. Must be a new kind of A-bomb, or X-bomb, or GD-bomb or something."

"Mac," babbled a voice that verged on screaming lunacy, "Mac, you ought to see it. There's nothing left at all, not a thing, not a house or a tree, not a person in the whole place, nothing but waste, waste, Jesus, death all over, I tell you the universe has gone mad!" They never learned where this voice came from, or what city was gone.

"Well, McEldownie, old horse," said a voice, trained to unctuousness but laced now with intolerable sorrow and strain, "our station was partly wrecked but we finally got this thing in operating condition. Pittsburgh is gone, but we're out in East Liberty and didn't take too much of the blast. It was one bomb, Mac, one lousy big H-bomb or whichever letter they put on the biggest boom they can make. Mac, I'm beat to my socks." The voice coughed tightly. "I saw the Cathedral of Learning go. My God, Mac, what a mighty toppling that was! It folded in and over and you thought it'd make a hole five miles deep, but it's lying there now, just a heap of busted stone, and I went to school there. Dear old Pittsburgh, Alma Mater."

A dark voice that spoke from far away said, "It was the maddest thing I ever saw. This golden oval thing fell about as fast as a feather, and everybody went out of their heads. We all started to run like mice. Cars were jamming Cahuenga and Sunset and Vine, and people were scuttling.... I don't know why I wasn't killed. I just don't know."

"Yes," said a haunted and somber voice, "we ran. We all poured out into the streets and ran, and fell down and got stepped on and rose and ran and sweated and had heart attacks and died and lost our breath and panted and gulped and ran and ran and ran. Fort Worth is a shambles, a mucked-up mess."

"No," said a faintly insulted voice, "it wasn't a large bomb, not large at all. It didn't flatten more than four blocks. I was half a mile off when it hit but all I got was a skinned knee from falling. Hang it, why a large bomb on Los Angeles and only a little one on Toronto?"

"Seattle got it," said a smooth southern voice, "and your town, Mac, and L.A., and there isn't a peep out of Moscow but who can tell if they're playing possum? London is smashed; we're getting scraps from the hinterlands of England but London's had it. Paris is on the air. Johnny Jill, poor devil, is crying over there now, wanting to know if Hoboken is okay. We haven't seen the saucers yet in N'Orleans. So ol' Manhattan got the guts torn out of her? Rough, boy, darned rough. We're sorry."

"Austin's gone, gone, I tell you it's all all ALL GONE!" shrieked a slow-dying voice, and that was all it could say.

"Listen to this, Mac," urged a girl's voice, sounding strange and ethereal after the men had spoken so long. "We don't get how they did it, but those disks have thrown a force screen around every army encampment and station in the country, perhaps in the world. At Fort Bragg they mustered and marched out into an invisible wall. They can't penetrate it. It didn't hurt them, it just stopped them cold. Someplace in Pennsylvania the National Guard got into trucks and lit out for New York and ran into one of the walls that piled them up in heaps. It looks like we're all alone. Nobody's coming to help. We're all alone."

"This is London calling," said a cultured, horrified voice. "Hello, America. Can you hear me? We're not sure were getting across the Atlantic. We haven't heard anything from you yet. Are you there? Can't you send us some word? This is the B.B.C. calling. London is gone. Bombed out completely. This is actually--actually Greenwich. Are you there? Is all America gone? Oh, this is ghastly, this is the end. Is it the end of the whole world? Are you there?"