The Disappearance Read online

  “. . . no trend toward the disappearance of women had been observed,” Averyson was saying, “hence the initial methodology of ascertaining trend is not merely impracticable but offers no feasible approach whatsoever.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Averyson,” Blake cut in as the man paused for rhetorical effect.

  “Now—”

  “I have not yet made my point,” Averyson retorted peevishly. “Some explanatory remarks are essential to lay the groundwork—”

  Blake waved his hand. “Exactly. And you can make them initially to your group.”

  Blake quickly recognized a huge, melancholy-looking man who was standing in the midst of the biologists. “Dr. Steadman. You all know, gentlemen, of Steady’s contributions to genetics. Dr. Amos Steadman, of California Institute of Technology.”

  The enormous, sad-visaged man had a somber voice. “Admitting,” he said to the assembly, “that I haven’t one single intelligent notion on the whole situation—and in appreciation of the fact that all of you are probably as tired as I am, as sleepy, as depressed and saddened— I move we elect our several chairmen, avoid blathering, get some rest, and go to work, as committees, tonight.”

  “Second the motion!” several called.

  But others rose.

  Blake smiled at the geneticist. “Gentlemen, I’m inclined to agree. However—Dr.

  Tateley? Dr. Tateley is an astronomer. I hardly need to tell you of his work.”

  The thin, white-haired scientist was in a front row so he turned to face the auditorium. “My friends, colleagues and associates,” he began, “all the way down here from Boston, where I happened to be last evening, I reflected upon our dilemma. I had the opportunity, yesterday, to make various inquiries. I learned what you have been told. I learned that even ultraspeed motion-picture films being made of the posture of a female dancer, for instruction purposes, show the woman intact in one frame, gone in the next-a difference of something of the order of one one-hundredth of a second. I found that a female technical assistant engaged in temperature and pressure experiments at Radcliffe vanished, in a chamber equipped with many recording instruments, none of which showed any change whatever. Automatically registering stroboscopic devices under the control of women show the ending of their management to have been instantaneous. I realize that these are gross measurements from the standpoint of most of us.

  Nevertheless, I cannot help but reflect that this may not be a problem for physical scientists. Not, at least, one which will yield to our present formulations and instruments.

  I would like to suggest, therefore, that we have a word from another branch of scientific inquiry, namely, psychology, and a further word from a still more speculative field. Put it this way. With whom, I asked myself on the train, would I like most to converse at this time? My answers were swift and firm: Dr. Elgin Willis Tolliver, the psychiatrist, whom I know only by reputation, and my very good I bend, William Percival Gaunt, who calls himself a philosopher, but who is as able a mathematician and nearly as good a theoretical physicist as anyone in this august body.”

  Tateley sat down. Heads turned.

  Gaunt found himself overcome with embarrassment. He was glad that the astronomer had mentioned Tolliver first.

  Blake, meanwhile, replied: “An excellent suggestion. Dr. Tolliver, would you care to contribute?”

  The psychiatrist was very short and sturdy, five feet one or two. The thickness of his glasses denoted eyesight so feeble as to approach blindness. As he rose, a tic convulsed one side of his face. And when he spoke it was with so formidable a speech impediment as to make it difficult to understand what he said. His shyness was painful to behold. All in all, Gaunt thought, he looked in desperate need of psychiatric assistance rather than a man eminently able to render it. What he said, however, kept the auditorium in strained attention:

  “I c-c-c-c-think, c-c-c-gentlemen, that Dr. c-c-c-Tateley is on the r-r-r-right track.”

  The mind itself, he went on, is capable of sustaining every imaginable kind of illusion, even of producing, in one and the same body, two discrete personalities. It was not inconceivable to psychology, as it appeared to be to the physical sciences, that some factor—psychic or physical or “j-j-j-j-call it what you may”—could set up a single illusion in a large group. That had been done, partially, often enough through hypnotism.

  Partial achievement suggested, at least, possibility of complete achievement; that, in turn, hinted at a universal achievement. The world could be, he meant, in a state of total illusion, a state, perhaps, of actual hypnotic sleep, in which it merely seemed to each sleeping male that what appeared to have taken place was real.

  Silence followed the statement.

  “Are you prepared,” Blake at last inquired, “to suggest how such a universal

  ‘sleep,’ as you call it, might have been produced?”

  Dr. Tolliver shook his square, close-cropped head. “I am not.”

  Another silence. The man on the platform nodded, as if to himself. “Dr. Gaunt?”

  he then said. “Are you there, Bill? I haven’t seen you.”

  So Gaunt stood—towered up, his six feet and three inches emphasized by the shortness of the previous speaker. Unlike some of those who had addressed the audience, he had no confidence in himself at this moment. He did not even know, he had been unable to decide, what he was going to say. For perhaps fifteen seconds his eyes ranged over the men, rested briefly on Blake, moved to the flags and the uniformed band behind them.

  “I’m here, Bob,” he said, “or—with Tolliver’s correction—I think I am here.”

  They laughed a little at that.

  Gaunt waited. “Shortly after the—Disappearance—I made a list of possible hypotheses. They include Tolliver’s suggestion. They are, I fear, such ideas as have already occurred to most of us, with perhaps an exception or two. I hold with Steady—

  with Dr. Steadman—that we need rest, that we are wasting time here, and that we should divide into our several groups to set forth divergent plans of inquiry. However, I would like to make one suggestion. Let us not be too hidebound in the execution of any project.

  Let us examine, not just history, which has no precedent for our predicament, but the myths and legends, in which miracles and miraculous disasters abound. And let us try, as we bend ourselves to our task, to think, as Ouspensky has suggested, ‘in other categories.’ Neither we, nor women, and not sex itself, may be what we have assumed them to be. Mathematics and physics have reached the point where we can contemplate the effect upon a whole human being of a single quantum of energy touching an atom in one gene. But we know, actually, nothing of the relationship of sexuality to energy. We have, merely, a language that has skirted close to the border of formulations in the field.

  All I have to suggest at this time, therefore, gentlemen, is that we allow our imaginations full play and, while we check what we imagine empirically, let us not permit empirical methods to inhibit our minds.”

  Gaunt sat down. There was scattered applause. Blake was smiling. “That,” he said, “is the substance of what I’d planned as my own final advice for the day. And since it’s been given, I’m ready to take a vote on the motion to elect chairmen and adjourn, pro tern. I hope there will be no questions. I nevertheless invite them.”

  One or two men rose. It proved that their questions related to matters of personal need—domiciling, financing, and the like. These were speedily answered and the meeting was recessed. The men immediately broke into groups. Flashlights began to flicker in the auditorium. Gaunt, shaking hands with old friends and strangers who introduced themselves, was seized upon by a man who said merely, “Slack. Chicago. Tribune. How soon do you expect results, Dr. Gaunt?”

  “How soon,” Gaunt replied, “do you expect to have an inspiration, wake up with a sonnet written in your mind, or dream true?”

  The reporter persisted. “All I could gather from the palaver was that you smart boys were as baffled as everybody else.”r />
  Gaunt grinned. “Anybody who gathered more would have invented it!”

  “Apparently, you don’t mind having the world told that its experts are punko in this crisis?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “What about the Russian angle?”

  “Ask a Russian.” Gaunt laughed. The reporter gave him up.

  Somebody handed Blake a gavel. He pounded for order again and ballots were presented to the members of the conference. In reasonably good time, nominations were made and votes were tabulated. To his discomfort, Gaunt found himself elected chairman of the group that was to appraise and integrate the work of all the others. Then the meeting adjourned.

  It was a gray afternoon outdoors and sharply cold. In the limousine assigned to him, Gaunt was hurried through guarded streets. As he rode, he looked at the winter-stained buildings, the cold sidewalks, the soldiers, and the few hurrying men and boys—

  at snow patches and ice that had been slush for a few midday hours, at the bare trees and the murk-hung distances. His world was ended. Yet if all men were dreaming, he and his colleagues were supposed to waken them. If men were paralyzed by some unknown force, he and his associates were expected to learn the nature of the force. If another planet had attacked. they were to find that out. If the women had vanished into immaterial and everlasting nothing, they were to deal with that. If humanity was dead and did not know it, his was the task of recognizing death for whatever that was.

  He thought about it with melancholy. Never before, said his mind, in the echo of a desperate, old phrase, had man been faced with so much to think about and so little with which to think.

  The Hand of God lay heavily on the land.

  These words came from nowhere, from Space beyond the somber backdrop of the nation’s capitol, from Time, from his remembered youth.

  The hand of God was heavier, by far, than the sternest of his Calvinist ancestors had guessed.

  This was like Old Testament days: an epoch for prophets.

  Gaunt supposed that in small towns, in the mountains, on winter-swept prairies, men with the faith of their forebears were looking at the plain beds where their wives had slept and into prim hushed parlors where their daughters had been courted, with just such sensations. Praying to a God they consciously feared (and hence often, unconsciously, so hated as to be themselves the lifelong and hateful responses) to lift His heavy hand, to ease the burden, the “burthen.”

  He felt something not far from fright at the thought that any attitude of the spirit called “faith” could breed such resignation; and his alarm grew even more real as he wondered if, perhaps, that masochistic-sadistic symbology were nearer to the truth than his own concepts.

  The limousine waited for a red light as senseless as signals continuing after Doomsday. Nothing approached. Nothing crossed. The city was a wintry void; the wind intoned to itself; nude branches bent against a barren sky—not just beleaguered but abandoned. The car moved. Lights showed ahead. He felt relieved.

  I’ll talk it over as soon as I get home, he found himself thinking. With Paula.

  She’ll have some suggestions.

  And then, although he remembered that was impossible, he clung to the idea—as if by imagining what was contrary to fact he could somehow not delude, but refresh himself.

  He let the notion she was beside him invade his mind—stirred with the spontaneous memories—pretended that, out of the corner of his eye, he could see her gloved hands folded in her lap. I do contain, still, something of her, he thought. And when she was here, what I then contained was (in many ways) little more—my own sense of her, not her sense of herself, and not, certainly, whatever she truly was that was perfectly sensed by neither of us.

  What was she, then?

  And what am I—what was I—that was able to capture in itself a sense of her?

  And how did what I guessed and sensed, felt and knew of her, that held me, represent possession of her, and also, a thing possessed by her that she could use, as if part of herself was part of me and we both knew it?

  How much, he went on thinking—trying to simplify the idea—of what I call “me”

  was made of her, belonged to her, and had a female essence?

  There was something. He groped after it and had a rise of near exultation, a sense of being on a significant Verge which was banished as the limousine braked hard to permit the passage of three soldiers in a jeep.

  As he entered the ornate lobby of his hotel he heard his name chanted by the loudspeaker. He hurried to the bell-captain’s desk and, after identifying himself, was ushered to a phone booth.

  “Bill? Bill Gaunt?”

  “Yes?”

  “Bob Blake! I’m at the White House offices. There’s been a new development.

  Something unforeseen—urgent! I’ve been requested to have the committee heads meet here right away!”

  Gaunt had dismissd the limousine. He asked at the desk for a taxi, explained who he was and told where he wanted to go. A cab was procured.

  He rode the short way, hurriedly and with agitation.

  “What else could it be? Bob was worried—or worse.

  Soldiers, secretaries, Secret Service men, rooms, corridors, it seemed to take a long while. And then, with the others, he was waiting in a sitting room hung with pictures. The President himself appeared, with Blake, at the end of a long time.

  A President lacking any sign of his customary cheer, even of aplomb. A desperate man. He stopped beside a table, put his hand on it, gestured to the men to sit down, for they had risen, and spoke mechanically:

  “Gentlemen. I’ll leave you in a moment with Dr. Blake. As the heads of the committees appointed this afternoon, I think you should be informed of everything. My Cabinet”—he jerked his head—”meeting with me now, disagrees. I overruled them.” He smiled a little, snappily, without any amusement. “We have just received word from the Soviet government of a decision to destroy the free world on the grounds that the disappearance of Soviet women is unquestionably the work of the democracies.”

  Someone said, “Good God!” No other sound was made and soon the President went on.

  “There is one very shocking matter in the statement handed to me a little while ago by the Soviet representative. The document claims that the harbors of several American cities—it does not say which ones or how many—have, for some time, been mined with hydrogen bombs. The United States of America is ‘ordered’ not to interfere in any way with Soviet operations on pain of the explosion of those mines. I may add that we have no idea whether the claim is true or a bluff. I would like your reactions.”

  He looked at them, stiffened his shoulders, and marched from the room.

  PART II

  ARMAGEDDON

  6

  THE ONSLAUGHT.

  One man walked to a window and gazed out at the cold dusk. Because he moved, others looked at him and they saw, by and by, a shudder pass over his body. Gaunt let his eyes range over the walls which were solidly hung with paintings—paintings of many schools and with many subjects—gifts to Presidents who were remembered only through lists of names and gifts to Presidents whose words and acts had kindled flame in history’s niches—pictures of people and ships and buildings, of flowers and landscapes and the sea.

  “Well, gentlemen?” Blake said it softly.

  Someone—Gaunt did not identify the speaker—muttered, “Retaliation?”

  “At what price?” Blake asked.

  Another man, an industrialist, Gaunt recalled, but he could not remember which one, said vehemently, “It’s up to you experts, now, to sweep the mines from the harbors!”

  Blake was impatient but he took a chair first, curled one foot upon the other, relaxed. “It can be tried, of course, Mr. Ames. But the bombs aren’t, themselves, sufficiently radioactive to be detected by instruments. It would mean, simply, blind dragging, in big bays and harbors, in sounds and estuaries, where we’ve already dumped thousands upon thousands of bargeloads of ju
nk. Every sizable object encountered by the draggers would have to be raised to the surface where the water was deep or inspected by divers where it was not. I should say, for example, that to drag the waters around New York City alone, if every available rig in the nation were concentrated there, would take perhaps six months. And nobody could be sure even in that period that one hydrogen bomb had not been missed.”

  “Evacuate, then,” Ames said. He was a solid-looking man of about sixty with gray eyes and a broad forehead. His manner was not arbitrary or truculent, but very vigorous.

  The other men were paying this discussion their concentrated attention. Blake shrugged.

  “Again—take New York. Weeks would be needed merely to get the population of Manhattan off the island. And that population would only be added to millions of fugitives from the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Where would they go? By what transportation? How would they be housed in wintertime? How would they be fed?

  How would their sick be dealt with? If the full facilities of the nation were used to handle them as well as possible, and it wouldn’t be very well, how would the nation also evacuate Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, here—the West Coast cities—

  Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland—?”

  “Those last,” Ames interrupted, “aren’t seaports.”

  “But they are ports.” Blake tugged at his socks, thrust a finger behind the counter of a shoe, hunched his shoulders, waved his free hand. “Have we checked every boat that has moved on the Great Lakes, down to fifty-tonners, say, during the past few years? No.

  Have we watched every truck and every freight car that might reach all such vessels by land, during the same period? Of course not. We haven’t even had a radar screen around the continent.” He smiled faintly. “You will recall, Mr. Ames, that hundreds of tons of alcoholic beverages were daily smuggled into this country during Prohibition. I infer, from that, it would not be impossible nowadays to smuggle objects weighing a few tons, either whole or piecemeal, into the same country. Note that I do not say it has been done.