One and Wonder Read Online Free PDF

inner valve. The emergency power system didn't work the elevators. We climbed down a black ladder-well, into the silent citadel.
    III
    Fort America was dead.
    The thrumming of the little emergency engine was muffled, as we climbed on down, and finally lost. We descended into appalling silence. So long as we moved, there was a comfortable rustle and clatter. When westopped to listen, there was nothing at all.
    Everywhere, power lines were dead. Midnight shadows retreated grudgingly from our little battery lamps, and lay in wait at every turning. Beyond was total dark.
    The heating system must have been shut off, months or years before, for the cold was numbing. Sweat had dampened my wool lined suit, in the heated armor, and now it was icy on my back. The chill of the rung sank through my thin gloves; my fingers were stiff and aching long before we reached a horizontal passage.
    Gruesome expectations haunted me. I looked for frozen corpses, twisted with agony from quick biotoxins, or charred with atomic heat. Queerly, however, we found no mark of violence, nor any evidence of human death.
    “They're just— gone! ” Even the deep voice of Captain Doyle held a certain huskiness of dread. “Why—I can't imagine. Nothing wrong, no sign of any trouble.” He caught his breath, squared his shoulders. “We've got to find the answer. Let's try the commandant's office.”
    He led the way along a black and soundless lateral tunnel, and opened an unlocked door. The series of rooms beyond was deserted—and quite in order. Empty chairs were neatly set behind the empty desks. Dead telephones were neatly racked in their cradles. Pens in their stands were neatly centered on green blotters, With the ink dried up. Doyle rubbed a dark mark in thin gray dust. “They've been gone a long time.” His voice seemed oddly hushed, yet too loud in those silent rooms.
    I began to open the drawers of desks and filing cabinets. They were empty. Bulletin boards had been stripped, floors swept clean. Even the wastebaskets had been neatly emptied.
    A large portrait of Tyler in the commandants office had slipped askew on the wall. Doyle moved without thinking to set it properly straight. Cameron followed his movement, I noticed, with a curious sardonic expression, but silently.
    “The evacuation must have been quite orderly.” Doyle shook his head, his eyes dark with bewilderment. “No sign of haste or panic. Now what could have caused them to go?”
    We moved on, in search of the answer.
    It wasn't famine. We walked through an empty mess hall. The long tables were all in line, filmed with dust. Clean trays and silver lay in geometric order, where the last KP's had left them for the last inspection. The warehouse beyond was stacked high with crates and bags and cans of food, frozen now, still preserved.
    Nor was it any biological killer, gone wild. We found hundreds of beds in a hospital tunnel, empty, their dusty sheets still neat and smooth. Thepharmacy shelves were loaded with drugs, untouched.
    “Power failure?” Cameron suggested. “If the pile had gone dead—”
    Rory Doyle found the way, down a black and bottomless ladder-well, to the main power-pile. The massive concrete safety-wall shut us away from all the actual mechanism, but Cameron scanned the long banks of recording instruments and remote controls. He flashed his light on a distant conveyor-belt, motionless, still laden with bright aluminum cans.
    “Nothing wrong,” he said. “The last operator discharged the pile—dumped the canned uranium out of the lattice, into the processing canyon underneath. There's plenty of metal left, but it wasn't charged again.”
    On another black and silent passage, a little above, we came to the steel-walled dungeons of the guardhouse and the military prison. The armored doors stood open. The records had been removed. The prisoners were gone.
    “Revolt, perhaps,” Doyle suggested. “Perhaps the prisoners escaped, and touched off a mutiny in the