The clerk studied him closely. Finally he said, «Keep your hands up.» He lowered the shotgun down to the counter, but kept his hand on it and his finger inside the trigger guard while, with his free hand he took a pistol out of a drawer behind the desk. «Turn around—your back toward me. I’ll be sure you’re not armed.»
Keith turned and stood still while he heard the clerk come around the end of the counter. He stood even stiller while the business end of the pistol pressed into the small of his back and the clerk’s hand ran over his pockets.
«Okay,» the clerk said. «I guess you’re all right; I’ll take a chance. I would hate to send a dog out into—that.»
Keith sighed with relief, and turned. «How much for the window, and a room.’»
«A hundred creds will cover both. That rack of magazines and pocket books—give me a hand to put it in front of the door. It’s high enough—it’ll block off the break in the glass.»
He took one end of the rack and Keith the other. The rack blocked off the door perfectly. Keith’s eye was caught by the titles of some of those pocket books—one in particular. He noticed the price too—2 ½ cr. Apparently the rule of one credit to ten cents held pretty well.
And a hundred credits—ten dollars—for the pane of glass and a room for the night was reasonable enough. Not that he would have quarreled at a thousand credits, rather than go out again into the horror that was Forty-second Street.
He followed the clerk back to the desk and signed a registration card. He took a hundred-credit note and a fifty from his wallet. He said, «I’m going to pick out two or three of those pocket books to read. You keep the change.»
«Sure, thanks. Here’s your key. Threeo-seven—third floor front. You’ll have to walk up and find it yourself. I’ve got to stay here on guard.»
Keith nodded and pocketed the key. He walked quickly back to the book rack and picked a book called Is the Mist-out Worth It? That one, for sure.
His eye ran over the other titles. Some of them were familiar, others were not. H. G. Wells’ Outline of History—he grabbed that one quickly. He could get a lot he needed to know out of that book. What for third choice? There was lots of fiction but he didn’t want that. He wanted redder, more concentrated meat. Dopelle, the Man, The Story of Dopelle, Dopelle, Hero of Spacewar.
There were half a dozen books on Dopelle—and where had he heard that name before? Oh, sure—in the newspapers, the general in charge of Terrestrial space fleets. Well, if there were that many books about him out of only a few dozen titles, then maybe it would be well to skim through one of them. He picked The Story of Dopelle—it didn’t even surprise him to notice that it was by Paul Gallico.
The walk up to the third floor told him how tired he was. His wounded shoulder was beginning to ache. So, for that matter, did the knuckles of his right hand. The glass had not cut them by a miracle but they were bruised and sore.
He found the room by the dim light in the hall, went in and turned on the light. It was a pleasant, comfortable room, with a nice soft bed that he looked at longingly. But he didn’t dare get into it until he’d found out a few things he might learn from the books he’d bought in the lobby.
He undressed enough to be comfortable and sat down to read. First, Is the Mist-out Worth It? That one he was going to skim fast but he wanted to find out what the mist-out was. Luckily its history was fairly well summarized in the opening chapter.
The mist-out, he learned, had been perfected by a German professor in 1934, shortly after the destruction—by Arcturian action—of Chicago and Rome. The destruction of Chicago—in which eight million people had died—had happened early in 1933.
Immediately, every large city in the world had enforced a strict blackout but, later in that same year, another Arcturian vessel slipped the cordon and Rome—perfectly blacked-out—had been destroyed. Fortunately, however, that particular Arcturian ship had been captured with a few members of the crew still alive.
Through the use of something or someone called Mekky—the author assumed that all of his readers knew all about Mekky, and failed to explain—it had been learned from the surviving Arcturians that they had detectors which picked up hitherto unknown rays—other than light rays—emitted by electrical incandescence.
They could thus locate a city through the lights burning within closed buildings, for the buildings were as transparent to the so-called epsilon rays as they were to radio waves.
For a while it seemed that the only safety for Earth’s cities lay in going back to candles or gaslight for illumination at night. (Electric lights could be used for interior daylight lighting, for sunlight damped out the epsilon rays before they left the atmosphere.)
But Dopelle had retired to his laboratory and worked on the problem. From his findings of the nature of epsilon rays a German professor had worked out the epsilon gas which constituted the mist-outs which were now required by the Greater Earth Council for all cities larger than a hundred thousand population.
It was a substance of strange properties indeed. Odorless, harmless to life, it was impervious to light and to epsilon rays. Inexpensively made from coal tar, one plant could turn out enough in a few hours each evening to mix with the air and blanket a city completely. Sunlight disintegrated it at dawn in the space of a few minutes.
Other Arc ships had been through the cordon since then but no major city of Earth had been damaged. Undoubtedly the mist-out had saved many millions of lives. There was no sure way of knowing how many Earth cities would have been destroyed without it.
But it had taken lives too. Law enforcement agencies in many major cities had found themselves almost completely helpless to combat growing crime waves. Under cover of the mist-out, the streets of big cities had become no-man’s-lands. In New York, for example, five thousand policemen had died.
The situation was aggravated by the strong tendency of combat veterans who had fought in space to turn to crime, a psychosis to which possibly a third of them succumbed. Finally, in many of the larger cities, attempts to maintain order at night had been abandoned.
Respectable citizens were simply warned to keep off the streets at night. Even the police stayed under cover from dusk to dawn and vicious gangs held sway. Some gangs, such as the Nighters of New York, the Bloodies of London and the Lennies (Keith wondered if the name came from Lenin’s) in Moscow, had adopted specialized techniques and seemed fairly well organized.
Hundreds died nightly. The situation would have been worse except for the fact that the hoodlums killed and robbed one another more often than honest citizens, who stayed home.
The mist-out was, therefore, a big price to pay for immunity to space attack. Possibly a million people had died in the mist-out—but probably twenty to fifty million lives had been saved. The author pointed out the destruction by Arcturian ships of fifteen towns and small cities—too small to have mist-outs, too small to be not expendable—and reasoned, that except for the mist-outs, those fifteen flaming hells would have been cities of from a million, to ten million people.
Keith shivered a little as he put down Is the Mist-out Worth It? If he’d bought that book in Greeneville he’d have known better than to have left Grand Central Station. He’d have taken a cot there or slept on the floor. Night life on Broadway wasn’t what it had been where he’d come from.
He walked to the window and stood looking—well, not out, exactly, but at the blank blackness that was the pane. The curtain wasn’t pulled down, but that didn’t matter on any but a first floor window.