Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/23

 From directly behind Arnold there came a woman's shriek with piercing intensity. It was a shriek filled with despair. A shriek that meant something was terribly wrong. Others around her began shouting and screaming too, pointing toward the great archway at the east entrance.

The low fog that had hung over the city all evening had broken momentarily revealing the rising moon. But it was a moon that no one there had ever seen before, a moon out of a nightmare, swollen and elongated as if viewed through a cylindrical lens. But even more unnatural than its shape was its color—a deep transparent blue.

Arnold was so intent upon the moon that he scarcely noticed when the floodlights came on again. Gradually he became aware of some change in the aspect of the coliseum itself; there seemed to be a soft waviness spreading everywhere warping some portions of the scene but leaving others untouched, like gelatin melting and flowing down a photographic plate. His eyes were unable to bring the mass, of humanity banked against the opposite wall of the coliseum into sharp focus. The tiers of seats kept blurring and shimmering as if the light were coming from a great distance through layers of heated air.

With a sickening sensation he perceived that the distortion in spacetime was beginning to affect objects right around him. The faces were undergoing some subtle alteration, noticeable particularly in the irregular position of the mouth with respect to the nose and eyes together with an apparent thickening and bending of the jaw and forehead, such as he had once seen in patients whose bony structure had undergone prolonged softening from osteitis deformons.

The night was deepening rapidly now closing in like the folds of a vast purple curtain. Simultaneously people were gripped by that primitive wholly unreasoning fear that is felt at a total solar eclipse the instant before totality, when the shadow of the moon suddenly looms on the horizon advancing with terrifying speed. Men and women clung to each other or ran frantically this way and that as if by fleeing they could escape a fate from which no escape was possible.

Stoddard and Arnold sat huddled together watching the groping figures grow dimmer and dimmer until the last ray of light was extinguished in the dense impenetrable blackness. But hours later they knew from the sound of voices and the pressure of hands and bodies, that thousands were still crouching in their seats waiting hopefully for the light that had always returned.

Arnold dozing against Stoddard's shoulder found himself repeating a phrase from Friedmann's last remark: "There is no hope—There is no hope—"

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