City at World's End, page 59 by Edmond Hamilton
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60
ried too. "They're so sure there are other people-- that it's only a matter of contacting them."
Kenniston looked at him. "Do you believe there are any others? I'm beginning to doubt it, Hubble. If they couldn't live in this city, they couldn't anywhere."
"Perhaps," Hubble admitted uneasily. "But we can't be sure of anything. We have to try, and keep trying."
Kenniston started the transmitter that night, using it for only ten minutes each hour, to conserve gasoline as much as possible. "Middletown calling!" he spoke into the microphone, "Middletown calling!"
No use of adding more-- they could not yet operate a receiver to hear an answer. They could only call to make known their presence, and wait and hope that any others left on dying Earth would hear and come.
Crowds watched from outside the door, as he called. They were there through the night, when Beitz took over, and there again the next day, and the next. They were quite silent, but the hope in their faces made Kenniston sick. He felt, as another day and another passed, the mockery of the words he kept repeating.
"Middletown calling!"
Calling to what? To an Earth dying, devoid of human life, to a cold and arid sphere that had done with humanity long ago? Yet he had to keep sending it out, the cry of man lost in the ages and seeking his kind, the cry that he felt there were no ears on Earth to hear.
"Middletown calling-- calling--"
Chapter 9
-- out of the silence
No answer. Weeks had gone by, while Kenniston and Beitz called and called, and out of the silence of the dying Earth had come no reply. Every hour they had spoken the words that had become meaningless. And between calls, they had fumbled with the strange receivers that they did not know how to tune. And nothing at all had happened.
Kenniston came to dread the times when he must leave the building and walk through the little crowd of hopeful Middletowne