A soldier and a woman wearing the armband of the Red Cross, carrying a stretcher to the blocked entrance of a partially-razed church. Unable to enter, they bore the stretcher around to the side, and the soldier kicked in one of the stained-glass windows—
An artist's basement studio, open to the sky; its walls still intact and covered with abstract paintings. In the center of the room stood the easel, but the artist was gone. What was left of him was smeared across the canvas in a dripping mass, as though the artist had finally succeeded in putting something of himself into his picture—
A welter of glassware that had once been a chemical laboratory, and in the center of it a smocked figure slumped over a microscope. On the slide was a single cell which the scientists had been intently observing when the world crashed about his ears—
A woman with the face of a Vogue model, spread-eagled in the street. Apparently she had been struck down while answering the call of duty, for one slim, aristocratic hand still gripped the strap of her hatbox. Otherwise, due to some prank of explosion, the blast had stripped her quite naked; she lay there with all her expensive loveliness exposed—
A thin man, emerging from a pawnshop and carrying an enormous tuba. He disappeared momentarily into a meat market, next door, then came out again, the bell of his tuba stuffed with sausages—
A broadcasting studio, completely demolished, its once immaculate sound stage littered with the crumpled cartons of fifteen different varieties of America's Favorite Cigarette and the broken bottles of twenty brands of America's Favorite Beer. Protruding from the wreckage was the head of America's Favorite Quizmaster, eyes staring glassily at a sealed booth in the corner which now served as the coffin for a nine-year-old boy who had known the batting-averages of every team in the American and National Leagues since 1882—
A wild-eyed woman sitting in the street, crying and crooning over a kitten cradled in her arms—
A broker caught at his desk, his body mummified in coils of ticker-tapes—
A motor-bus, smashed into a brick wall; its passengers still jamming the aisles; standees clutching straps in rigor mortis—
The hindquarters of a stone lion before what had once been the Public Library; before it, on the steps, the corpse of an elderly lady whose shopping-bag had spewed its contents over the street—two murder-mysteries, a rental copy of Peyton Place, and the latest issue of the Reader's Digest—
A small boy wearing a cowboy hat, who levelled a toy pistol at his little sister and shouted, "Bang! You're dead!"
(She was.)
He walked slowly now, his pace impeded by obstacles both physical and of the spirit. He approached the building on the hillside by a circuitous route; avoiding repugnance, overcoming morbid curiosity, shunning pity, recoiling from horror, surmounting shock.
He knew there were others about him here in the city's core, some bent on acts of mercy, some on heroic rescue. But he ignored them all, for they were dead. Mercy had no meaning in this mist, and there was no rescue from radiation. Some of those who passed called out to him, but he went his way unheeding, knowing their words were mere death-rattles.
But suddenly, as he climbed the hillside, he was crying. The salty warmth ran down his cheeks and blurred the inner surface of his helmet so that he no longer saw anything clearly. And it was thus he emerged from the inner circle; the inner circle of the city, the inner circle of Dante's hell.
His tears ceased to flow and his vision cleared. Ahead of him was the proud outline of the Federal Building, shining and intact—or almost so.
As he neared the imposing steps and gazed up at the facade, he noted that there were a few hints of crumbling and corrosion on the surface of the structure. The freakish blast had done outright damage only to the sculptured figures surmounting the great arched doorway; the symbolic statuary had been partially shattered so that the frontal surface had fallen away. He blinked at the empty outlines of the three figures; somehow he never had realized that Faith, Hope and Charity were hollow.
Then he walked inside the building. There were tired soldiers guarding the doorway, but they made no move to stop him, probably because he wore a protective garment even more intricate and impressive than their own.
Inside the structure a small army of low clerks and high brass moved antlike in the corridors; marching grim-faced up and down the stairs. There were no elevators, of course—they'd ceased functioning when the electricity gave out. But he could climb.
He wanted to climb now, for that was why he had come here. He wanted to gaze out over the city. In his gray insulation he resembled an automaton, and like an automaton he plodded stiffly up the stairways until he reached the topmost floor.
But there were no windows here, only walled-in offices. He walked down a long corridor until he came to the very end. Here, a single large cubicle glowed with gray light from the glass wall beyond.
A man sat at a desk, jiggling the receiver of a field telephone and cursing softly. He glanced curiously at the intruder, noted the insulating uniform, and returned to his abuse of the instrument in his hand.
So it was possible to walk over to the big window and look down.
It was possible to see the city, or the crater where the city had been.
Night was mingling with the haze on the horizon, but there was no darkness. The little incendiary blazes had been spreading, apparently, as the wind moved in, and now he gazed down upon a growing sea of flame. The crumbling spires and gutted structures were drowning in red waves. As he watched, the tears came again, but he knew there would not be enough tears to put the fires out.
So he turned back to the man at the desk, noting for the first time that he wore one of the very special uniforms reserved for generals.
This must be the commander, then. Yes, he was certain of it now, because the floor around the desk was littered with scraps of paper. Maybe they were obsolete maps, maybe they were obsolete treaties. It didn't matter now.
There was another map on the wall behind the desk, and this one mattered very much. It was studded with black and red pins, and it took but a moment to decipher their meaning. The red pins signified destruction, for there was one affixed to the name of this city. And there was one for New York, one for Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles—every important center had been pierced.
He looked at the general, and finally the words came.
"It must be awful," he said.
"Yes, awful," the general echoed.
"Millions upon millions dead."
"Dead."
"The cities destroyed, the air polluted, and no escape. No escape anywhere in the world."
"No escape."
He turned away and stared out the window once more, stared down at Inferno. Thinking, this is what it has come to, this is the way the world ends.
He glanced at the general again, and then sighed. "To think of our being beaten," he whispered.
The red glare mounted, and in its light he saw the general's face, gleeful and exultant.
"What do you mean, man?" the general said proudly, the flames rising. "We won!"
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Deep Range
Writer, lecturer, skin diver, travel expert, and interpreter of science for the lay audience, Arthur Clarke is not quite all things to all men but he is giving it a good try. He helped British pilots outwit the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. He was one of the founders of the British rocket society. He has had no fewer than six sightings of UFOs (all of which he explains in non-saucerian terms). And, in general, he has shown a remarkable capacity for being where the excitement is, and coming back to tell the rest of us about it. He is also a science fiction writer at the very rarefied level of general excellence shared by only a few. You already know this, of course; but if you didn't you would soon learn in reading—