The Disappearance Read online

  “A cruel one?”

  “One who’d violate natural laws. But of course we don’t know all the laws.

  Perhaps not even many of them.”

  “I feel so utterly helpless.”

  “Maybe that’s the idea.” Paula’s voice now had a grim edge. “Maybe we always were. Maybe we just stopped being aware of the fact.”

  “Don’t go, Paula!”

  “I’ll be back soon. If you want, you could call people we know. The dials are probably still working.”

  “I will! Everybody!”

  A few minutes later Paula stood at the point where her street emerged from the Australian pines, the cabbage palms and the strangler figs to join the wide boulevard. She saw several cars in the distance, on lawns, crashed into houses, or piled up against trees.

  Around one, women were bending over a prone figure. Farther away, an unidentifiable house was burning. There was no fire engine and no crowd. As she stood, cars screamed crazily past. All were driven by girls and women; all the drivers were pale and possessed with an emotion that made their eyes glitter. Horror. Hysteria. Panic.

  She walked back rapidly to her drive and up to the house.

  Edwinna, in a red silk print—her own—was pacing the porch. “That jerk!” she said. “He’s an hour late!” She shook her smooth shoulders angrily. “Mother, for heaven’s sake stop going around as if you’d seen spooks!”

  Paula found that she wanted to laugh. But she was afraid that if she laughed a little she would laugh too much. “Your date,” she said, “isn’t coming. Not now. Listen, Edwinna. You’ve always been difficult to instruct. But maybe you can learn this one thing.” She set forth calmly, almost monotonously, the relevant sights and events of the past hour. “So you see, darling, your date probably won’t arrive. Maybe you’ll never have another date. The men—even the boys—are gone.”

  “That,” said the daughter, “is utterly unthinkable!”

  “As your father used to say, Edwinna, it is only the unthinking mind that finds anything unthinkable. To use the word is just to show your membership card in the society of morons.”

  “It can’t be everywhere,” Edwinna said, making a concession against her instincts.

  “I was going to try to find out,” Paula replied.

  She went to the hall, picked up the phone and dialed. She waited for minutes, lighting a cigarette with one hand, her elbow on the packet of matches. She wondered how long cigarettes would last.

  Finally she said in a swift tone, “Long Distance? I want to call New York.” She waited and Edwinna, at last in a state of cogent emotion, waited queasily beside her.

  Paula said, “Yes? . . . Are they? . . . Is it? . . . Thanks.” She hung up. She breathed out smoke. “According to Long Distance—the circuits are jammed now—but the men vanished in New York too, and in every other city they can reach. They can’t reach many, because the wires are down in most places. They found out by radiophone.”

  “How could she just calmly sit there—?” Edwinna asked in a raging tone.

  “The operator? Habit. Training. She’s telling people—as fast as they decide to make calls on Long Distance.”

  Edwinna’s hysterics began suddenly. She screamed that if it was true and there were no men she would kill herself. She ran from the hall. She grabbed up Alicia and shook the child, bawling, into her face that her daddy was dead and everybody’s daddy.

  Paula reached her at that point, hit her as hard as she could with an open palm, caught the relinquished, appalled three-year-old, and sat down, holding Alicia until she stopped howling.

  The sun went lower.

  Edwinna sat quivering in a porch chair for five minutes. Then she left for a moment and returned with a glass and a bottle of whisky. Paula looked at her. “That’s the first sensible idea you’ve had all day. And it’s only half an idea, at that.”

  The younger woman was crestfallen. “Oh, mother!” she said. She started out for another glass, halted, poured a drink in the one she had brought, handed it to Paula, and left. When she came back, tears had streaked her mascara and she was sobbing, very softly, at long intervals.

  Paula gazed at her with a kindness she had not shown Edwinna that day. Sip by sip, while she watched her daughter weep, she finished her drink. She kept patting Alicia and murmuring to her. And she wondered, while she did these things, what had really happened, and why, and whether or not she had acted sensibly from minute to minute, in view of what appeared to have occurred. She couldn’t be sure. But who could be?

  3

  A PHILOSOPHER IN A QUANDARY—A CITY IN DESPAIR

  Before the Disappearance, persons who called themselves intelligent and were generally presumed so to be would doubtless have imagined that any such event would throw the world into instant and permanent chaos. But the very limitations of persons regarded as intelligent by Western society (or by the Orient, for that matter), along with the unprecedented nature of the phenomenon, produced other and different results from those which even the most informed might have anticipated.

  There was panic, to be sure, in abundance—catastrophe upon catastrophe, murder and arson and insurrection. Looting became a way of life for multitudes. Entire nations (small ones) fell prey to a variety of ritualistic hysterias. But in some larger, better organized societies the shock was partly counterbalanced by habitude, and the very frightfulness of what had happened stunned millions into a sort of awed supernormalcy.

  The further fact that it was not what had been fearfully anticipated presented other myriads from behaving in the ultra terrible way they had subconsciously expected to behave in, following the detonation of the first atomic bombs.

  The Disappearance also precipitated such a multitude of alarms and emergencies.

  which required swift action for the mere preservation of life, that nearly every man, as William Gaunt and his neighbors were soon to discover, was soon busied to the point of exhaustion.

  At first, however, Gaunt continued to act from the inertia of his own personality and from private habit—as did innumerable other persons. The fact that so many did just that, preserved, through the early hours of crisis, a skeleton of familiar organization and behavior.

  Firemen, although they could not immediately deal with all the sudden fires that ensued upon the vanishing of the women, went hooting and clanging to such fires as they could. The operators of “wreckers” rushed hither and thither through landscapes of smashed cars, setting back on the road whatever vehicles were usable and hauling others to repair shops. Emergency crews, frightened like all men about their loved ones, nevertheless hurtled to the nearest points of disaster and commenced to string new lines on telegraph poles, mend bridges, shut off gas mains, and the like. Habit, indeed, influenced even the most highly placed persons. It was later reported that the first question asked by the President of his hastily assembled Cabinet concerned the possible effect of the absence of all women upon the next elections.

  Professors and teachers, in many cases, continued to hold (if not to instruct) classes suddenly and incomprehensibly reduced. Surgeons, inexplicably bereft of nurses, went on as best they could with operations. Ordinary laymen turned from the inexplicable to the salvage of boy babies who had been dropped onto floors and bare earth, down flights of stairs or into fishponds. The news reached embattled troops. Firing ceased on the earth’s face. Guerrillas fraternized with the enemy. Soldiers straggled from the line.

  Gaunt, naturally enough, at first philosophized.

  He walked up his drive, forgetting it was his intention to check his house for incipient perils. Unconsciously, he may have noted the absence of smoke or of ominous electrical humming and so dismissed that errand altogether. Certainly he was aware that a sense of tragedy and loss would sooner or later overwhelm him. But he was even more aware Cat that point) of his possession of a mind both potent and unique and of the duty to bring it to bear upon the problem.

  Characteristically, he went to his study and,
characteristically, he determined to jot down his thoughts in the form of notes. Tens, hundreds of thousands began diaries soon after the Disappearance and regular diary keepers continued to make their routine entries. But it is quite possible that Gaunt was the first man of all to do so after what the radio announcer had repeatedly called, in a fatuous, quasi-military fashion, “four-oh-five.”

  At five-oh-five, or thereabouts, in his bold, tidy hand, Gaunt set down a fairly detailed description of the events to which he had just been witness and of his impressions. At some time after six, aware that the room had grown quite dark, he turned in his chair and switched on the lamp behind his back. The fact that it lighted and that its steady glow meant many things (such as, that the power plant in Cutler was operating and that the lines between his residence and the plant either had not been knocked down or had been repaired) never entered his head. He took the light for granted—at the moment.

  He was focusing the full powers of his mind elsewhere.

  He had selected, to write in, a large “dummy” of blank pages bound in leather like a book-a handsome affair, a gift from the dean of Wake Forest College which Gaunt had saved for some special writing occasion. On the page he had numbered 16, he wrote:

  “Hypotheses.”

  He sat awhile.

  He underlined the word—and sat again, scowling. Finally, swiftly, he set down the following:

  A) A nightmare. Objection: I respond to every test for being awake.

  B) Insanity. Objection: None—in fact. No man can test himself for sanity.

  Intellectually plausible but emotionally unacceptable.

  C) Mass hypnosis-mass, posthypnotic suggestion, and so forth. Objections: No hypnotist has ever been successful with the whole of any audience, even a small one; no person, group, or entity known on earth has access to everybody—I, for instance, have not listened to radio until this day for weeks, rarely read a paper, and so on; if the force of mind is here involved, it can hardly be human mentality.

  D) Enemy action. Objections: Those above; also—what point, if “enemy’s” own females also have vanished? If not, why did their radios cease, their women broadcasters fall silent at the critical moment?

  E) A space-time, i.e., “physical” phenomenon. Objection: Again, none. Quién sabe? Certain legends, Rider Haggard’s She, William Sloane’s To Walk the Night, suggest imaginatively a bizarre connection between the conscious (or unconscious) entity of femaleness with mathematics, space, time, and the mystery involving these. No scientific material exists in respect to either the legends or the fiction.

  F) Lysistrata. A trick, that is, learned by and disseminated amongst women to bring to heel the currently idiotic activities of men. Objection: Tenable as an idea but beyond the capacity of women to agree upon, to keep secret, and to perform unanimously and simultaneously.

  G) Precedent, i.e., Elliot’s “Laecocidiaean women.” Objection: Never heard of them—or King Lestentum. More of Elliot’s probing into pseudo history, myth, intellectual balderdash.

  H) God. Well?

  Gaunt set the journal aside. Having got to that point, he felt for the moment that he could carry theorizing no further. He went out of his study, across his porch and onto his lawn.

  The night was clear with a tuft of cloud here and there. There was no moon. The stars, as they so often did on warm Miami evenings, held perfectly still without sign of shimmer, so that it was as if they were all planets; Sirius, which was high, could not be told from

  Mars, which would rise later, save that Sirius was bluish and Mars would seem reddish. Gaunt looked up at the stars for some minutes, thinking about God.

  Many times in the past five years he had also looked at the great, round rock of the moon with the thought that the earth might soon resemble it—or looked at the remote, secretive stars with the idea that the earth might soon blaze as they did. In the midst of such reflections he had often wondered if God—if any Consciousness in Universe—

  would be disappointed over the collapse of so interesting and nearly successful an experiment as that of Life on Earth.

  Probably not. Probably, if there were more Awareness in Cosmos than man owned (instead of, as Gaunt sometimes suspected, only colonies of such consciousness as man and his animal antecedents had painfully brought into being), that Vast Awareness, having tried Life under terrestrial conditions, would decide (if Life exterminated itself) that the local conditions had been wrong. An atomic dissolution of the earth would then be merely a short cut to a new mixture. Man, or other life forms that might be waiting to supersede him, did not matter. It would always be what Life became aware of, and what Life did owing to such awareness, that mattered. Man uncooperative, afraid, hateful, suicidal, was, after all, death-incipient. If the trend went too far that way, human hope was vanity. The wisest hope in such a case was for a recooled planet and new germ plasm, to try it all over in a new two or three billions of years.

  Now his thoughts ran parallel but were of different content. He paced his deep lawn, smelled the opened jasmine and heard unheeding the early call of a chuck-will’s-widow.

  Perhaps the masses, the energies, the light years overhead (and underfoot and all about) could intervene when some valuable experiment went awry. And perhaps such intervention would be as strange as this one.

  He had pocketed his spectacles in order the better to look at the stars, and like a boy who is about to enter a classroom or to walk up on a platform to receive a prize, he carefully smoothed his thin, undistinguished hair. With just such embarrassment, he pinched his long nose, tweaked it, pulled it. But finally, with reluctance and in humility, he knelt. He did not pray. He did not even shut his eyes. Instead—a minute node in the presence of the stars, the illumined engines of infinity—Gaunt looked almost straight up—at things that might not be there, things the very light whereof had left them thousands of centuries before-and said, “I hope so.”

  He hoped, he meant to signify, in all his inconsequentiality, that what lay about him was concerned a little with him and with the planet that was inhabited by others like himself.

  The expression relieved him.

  It was as close to prayer as he’d come since adolescence. It was, he felt, such an expression—and only such—that men of honesty had any right to utter: not even Faith, but only Hope; and Hope in the mere unknown and undiscovered, the undefined and the uncomprehended. To imagine one’s self made loftier or more knowing by any “Faith”

  was, Gaunt believed, the stuff of Original Sin itself.

  A racket broke off this effort at communion.

  Gaunt stood.

  A gray car, unknown to him, jolted toward the house, missing the driveway turns.

  It slid to a stop, its bumper buried in Paula’s solanum, inches from the brick wall on which the vine grew. Out leaped a man, and the breadth of his shoulders in the gloom, the easy gait with which he ran, identified him as Teddy Barker before he called, “Bill! You here?”

  “Out in front.”

  “Horrible thing happened to me! Horrible! Don’t know what to make of it! Came straight to you and Paula-cleverest people I know!” These words issued from Teddy as he rushed up the walk, through one screen door of the porch, out the other, and onto the lawn. They were spoken loudly, with a nervous punctuation between them, a giggling.

  The accent was that of a well-bred Easterner, an affected quasi-British. He held out his hand, which Gaunt first shook and then used as a lever to tum him back toward the house.

  They sat down together on the porch; the older man switched on a lamp.

  “Well, tell me about it. Paula’s not here, though. Didn’t you know. . . ?” His voice trailed off. Evidently Teddy did not know.

  The younger man—Barker was thirty-six—looked, in the lamplight, like that prototype of manly handsomeness, of groomed virility, of go-getting geniality, for which magazine illustrators strive and which is realized more often in full-color, full-page advertisements of such luxury goods and services
as yachts, round-the-world tours, dude-ranch vacations and expensive dinner clothes. Deep-chested, broad-shouldered, tanned—

  in all but flagrant “good condition”—he had the guileless but direct blue eyes, the bronze, cropped, curly hair, the prominent chin, a boyishness belied by a baritone voice, the immaculate profile and even that slightly characterless aspect which prevents magazine readers from discovering in the pictured males traces of individuality that might be identified unfavorably with real persons and so reflect upon the illustrated story or the advertised product.

  Gaunt stared at him and he had ample opportunity to do so for Barker was busy with pipe lighting-taking his time, while, apparently, he decided how, or whether, to go on with his tale.

  Gaunt thought with an inner smile that Teddy was what another generation would have called a cad: broker, bachelor, a former backfield man at Dartmouth, a customers’

  man-a ladies’ man above all else-perennial fourth at bridge and an eternal third in countless triangles, whispered about but never quite becoming the subject of open scandal. Never, Gaunt knew, because husbands had long since come to regard Teddy as the nearest thing to harmlessness in the wide range of wifely harm. His sins had a juvenile innocence about them; they partook of the nature of misplaced good deeds.

  Besides, they were so numerous and evanescent that the involved ladies, flattered but rarely overwhelmed, regarded their own part as mere indulgences—like new, unneeded (but pretty) frocks. Furthermore, for various married males, Teddy had supplied the unspoken quid pro quo which eased hidden matrimonial tensions in matters of night-club blondes, tailored secretaries, others among the selfsame wives, and less reputable young ladies too.

  There was, Gaunt next reflected, a Teddy Barker in every sizable social “set” and in nearly every country club, simply because the handsomest philanderer in each became accepted as the facsimile. That, in turn, implied several things, such as a general need, the immaturity of a society that could turn out innumerable Teddys to supply the immature need, the divergence between code and conduct, and so on. The special appreciation Teddy showed for attractive women past thirty, and chic ones past forty, added to his unspoken but acknowledged value. It could also be construed, the philosopher went on to himself (noting the pipe was at last in full, cherry-red bloom), as evidence that Teddy’s libido was oriented toward the unconscious memory of his mother, though to have told Teddy that would have been to invite a knockdown, if the teller were virile enough, and ending of all friendship, even if not.