Dome Around America Read online

  DOME AROUND AMERICA

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  DOME AROUND AMERICA

  Copyright, 1955, by Ace Books, Inc.

  Magazine version copyright, 1941, by Better Publications, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in U.S.A.

  ONE

  Ring around America…

  Like the rim of a great glass bowl clapped down over the continent, it divided the brown arctic barrens from a more deadly desolation. It dammed in what was left of the Atlantic, where the Gulf Stream once had flowed. Thinner than a cobweb and taller than the clouds, it held shocking death at bay across the mountains of Mexico. It contained the air above America, and sliced off the narrow new Pacific.

  Barry Thane first saw it the summer he was nine. He had come alone on the beamway to visit his Grandfather Barry. It was a thrilling thing to have a seat of his own next to the window in the shining coaster that skimmed so fast along its path of unseen energy between the power towers.

  Grandfather Barry lived in a small blue plastoid bungalow on the shore of California Corporation, not a mile from where the Ring sliced in from the sea. He was a thin little brown-eyed elf, spry for his age, with a ring-shaped medal bright on his chest.

  “Hi, Grampa.” Barry shook his lean, trembly hand, and demanded at once: “Can I go down to the Ring?”

  The hostess had pointed it out to him, before the coaster slid through the focusing tubes into the tower station, and he was fascinated. Inside the Ring, Grampa’s spotted cows were grazing green alfalfa, and waves were dancing on the beach, and a white sail was moving up the narrow lane of water.

  Outside, there was no water. Dark strange valleys sloped endlessly away, where the ocean had lain.

  “Can I touch the Ring?”

  “Better not.” The old man smiled. “Come in the house. Let’s look in the cookie jar.”

  He wasn’t diverted from the wonder of the Ring.

  “Would it hurt me, to touch it?”

  “No. It’s smooth as glass.”

  “Then why—”

  “There are things Outside a little boy wouldn’t want to Se“What things?”

  “There’s a fence you mustn’t cross.” Grampa’s cracked old voice was suddenly commanding. “And there’s* the Guard, to see that you don’t”

  “Grampa—”

  He was choking up, but Grampa smiled again.

  “The Guard protects the Ring, to save all our lives,” Grampa said. “I was a Guardsman.”

  “What could hurt the Ring?”

  They had started toward the cottage with his luggage, but Grampa stopped to look across the alfalfa field into that bottomless dead valley beyond.

  “There was a man named Brock,” Grampa said. “He made a kind of screen to cast a shadow on the Ring. The Ring is radiated, and the shadow made a hole. This Brock had built a metal door to fit the hole, so that he could go Outside, but he must have miscalculated the pressure of the air—that’s a ton and more, on every square foot.”

  Barry felt afraid, and he caught Grampa’s hand.

  “This Brock was blown Outside, door and all,” Grampa said. “But his screen kept working. And the air kept blowing out. It was a terrible tornado, that sucked in trees and animals and buildings, and the first men who came to stop it—”

  “But you did it, Grampa!” Barry shouted with excitement. “That was old Dr. Brock. Mother used to tell me a story about how you stopped that storm. That’s how you got your medal.”

  “I was a Guardsman, doing my duty.” Grampa touched the medal proudly. “I managed to crash my patrol copter into the screen machine. That took the shadow off the Ring, and stopped the wind.” He sighed. “It happened fifty years ago.”

  “Want to know something?” Barry spoke up suddenly. "I've just made up my mind. When I grow up, Grampa, I’m going in the Guard!”

  “Your father will have something to say about that.” Grampa’s warm brown eyes turned oddly sad. “He’ll want you to be a director of Chicago Corporation, and Chairman of the Board of General Nucleonics, the way he is. Me, I’d be proud to see you in the Guard. I think your mother would. But Patterson Thane will never let you give up all his millions, for anything so foolish.”

  “Doesn’t anybody go Outside?” he asked. “Ever?”

  “Brock wasn’t the first to try, or the last. They’ve all been killed—and a lot of innocent bystanders, besides. But still they keep trying, in spite of the fence and the Guard."

  Grampa was starting toward the house again, but Barry hung behind, looking out at the strange dead world beyond the invisible wall of the Ring.

  “Want to know something?” he inquired. “When I grow up, I’m going Outside.” When Grampa frowned, he added hastily, “But I’ll find a safer way. A way to save the air, and cause no harm.”

  Next day, playing with his kite, he went down toward the Ring, for its forbidden mystery drew him like a magnet. A hundred yards within that transparent barrier, the green fields stopped. On a tall wire fence hung signs that read:

  KEEP OUT!

  ORDER OF THE RING GUARD

  Beyond the fence was a dusty road, still within the Ring. Waiting on his own side of the fence, he watched two guards come down the road beneath the ring, in a little gray electric jeep. At the beach, where the road ended and the Ring went on around the sea, they turned the jeep and came back past him again. When they were safely out of sight, he slipped under the fence and ran across the road. Beyond the road was a fringe of weeds— and the Ring!

  He crouched down in the weeds, to hide while he studied the Ring. He couldn’t really see it, because its dustless transparency was so completely clear. He could feel it, though, harder and slicker than any kind of glass, but neither hot nor cold.

  He tried it with his pocketknife, as boldly as another Dr. Brock. It broke the point of the blade, and it was still unscarred. He looked up, trembling guiltily, and saw the things Outside.

  Horrible things, brown and dead, sprawled among the lifeless rocks. They had been men and women and babies and donkeys, but they were skeletons now, in shrunken brown casings or mummified flesh, half covered with torn and faded rags. One bony arm lay pointing across a sheet of torn newspaper.

  With his face pressed against that hard, invisible wall, Barry tried to spell out the faded headlines. The words looked strange; he decided they were Spanish. These people must have come out of Mexico to the shelter of the Ring-too late.

  Suddenly he felt ill, and almost sorry he had slipped away from Grampa. He turned hastily to look at something inside the Ring. Even the green weeds around him seemed lovely to him now, because they were alive.

  But soon his eyes went back to the Outside again. The wonder and the terror of it wouldn’t let him go. Even its sky was strangely black, because there was no air to make it blue. Every shadow was a sharp-edged pool of mysterious midnight.

  He looked across the dead plains of cracked sea-mud that slanted down and down forever into the empty chasm where the ocean had been. He couldn’t see the bottom of it, but someday, he promised himself, he could find out what was there.

  He tried not to look at the things that had been people. Grampa was right. They were things that a small boy should not see. But he couldn’t help himself. His eyes came uneasily back, across the scattered possessions they had spilled; die faded blankets, the cooking pots, a broken bottle and a baby’s doll.

  He saw the skull—and screamed.

  It lay in a pile of bones, half covered with leathery shreds of skin and tufts of sun-bleached hair. One eye socket was open and empty. The other looked straight at him, with a bright cold eye.

  For a moment he was frozen. He couldn’t move or breathe. He waited for that staring eye to look away, but it didn’t even wink.

  “Barry!” It was Grampa’s distant voice, shouting for him. “Barry, boy!”

  He put his hands in front of his face, to hide that dreadful eye. When he could move, he ran sobbing through the weeds back to the road, with his heart pounding hard against his throat. Grampa was standing at the fence, frowning at him sternly.

  “Don’t—don’t be mad!” he gasped. “I didn’t hurt the “Of course you meant no harm.” The thin old guardsman smiled. “I was a boy once, and I think I know why you crawled under the fence. But you had better get back on this side, before another patrol car comes along.”

  “Not yet, Grampa!” He clung to the fence, panting and trembling. “There’s something Outside! Something alive!”

  “Now, Barry—”

  “But I saw it, Grampa! Something hiding in a dead man’s skull, watching me with just one eye. Let me show you!”

  Grampa shook his head. “People imagine things,” he said. “Flashing lights and moving shapes, mostly. I checked a hundred reports, while I was in the Guard, and never found a sign of anything alive.”

  “I saw that eye!”

  “I told you not to look—” Grampa hesitated, searching his frightened face. “Show it to me. It’s probably nothing— but we can’t take chances, with the protection of the Ring.”

  Grampa was still in the Guard Reserve, and he had a key that opened a gate in the fence. They crossed the road and pushed through the tall weeds. There Outside was the skull, still grinning at the Ring—with both staring sockets empty now.

  “It’s gone!” Barry gasped. “It’s hiding from us now!”

  “Oh perhaps you just i
magined it.”

  “I—I hope so!”

  But he was still afraid, and he clung to Grampa’s hands as they went back across the road. That hidden eye was watching them, in his imagination. Shivering, he tried to keep from wondering what sort of one-eyed thing could live Outside, and why it should hide in a skull, and what it could do to the Ring.

  “What is the Ring?” he asked uneasily, as Grampa locked the gate. “It felt like glass.”

  “But it isn’t glass.” Grampa stood looking back across the fence, at the Outside’s black horizon. “Long years ago, at the Ring Academy, I studied the theory of it. Big books crammed with educated guesswork about standing waves and spherical force-fields and exchange-force reversal layers and statistical anomalies. But all anybody really knows is what it does.”

  His gnarled hands began to fill his smelly old pipe.

  “Power goes into a certain kind of machine-made of great electromagnets and vibrating crystals and gravitonic radiators. The power comes out as what we call the Ring. A kind of globe-shaped shell—one of my instructors used to call it a three-dimensional lank in multidimensional space—that reflects part of the incident energy.

  “The reflection follows a special law, based on the wavelength of the energy. Heat goes through, and nearly all the visible light, and a variable part of the gravitation. But the special form of energy we call matter is nearly all reflected.”

  Barry nodded gravely, though the long words confused him. He couldn’t forget what he had seen Outside, and he kept close to Grampa as they started back across the fields toward the blue cottage.

  “The people Outside—” He glanced back uncomfortably. “What happened to them?”

  “The dwarf came,” Grampa said. “A burnt-out cinder of a star, smaller than Earth, but heavier than Jupiter. It passed too near. Its tidal forces stripped the air and the old oceans off the Earth. The people Outside died.”

  “Why didn’t they have a Ring of their own?”

  “There was a war. The Cold War—you’ll be hearing about it in school. People called Reds were fighting America.”

  “So we shut them out of our Ring?”

  “In the end, we had to.” The old man nodded sadly, puffing on his pipe. “They hated America. They wouldn’t trust us, not even when we tried to help them. But the story of it begins two hundred years ago, when Major Victor Barry reached the Moon.”

  “Mother says I’m named for him.” Barry Thane straightened proudly. “But tell me about the Moon.”

  “Another little world, that used to move around the Earth,” Grampa said. “Airless as the Outside today, and just right for astronomers—air isn’t good for telescopes. The major’s men set up a telescope and found the dwarf, before the Reds attacked them—”

  “Why?"

  “The Reds wanted the Moon for a fort. So did we, till the major got back with his news. After that, the Moon didn’t matter so much. All our greatest scientists were gathered into Project Lifeguard, to find an escape from the dwarf.”

  “And that was the Ring?”

  “They found a clue in the spectrum of the dwarf itself,” Grampa said. “Its faint light was queerly changed, by its terrific gravitation. They studied that change, and worked out the science of gravitonics. It made the Ring possible— as well as the beamway you rode from Chicago.”

  Barry nodded again, even though he didn’t entirely understand how the light of a star had brought him here to the coast of the California Corporation.

  “So what did the Reds do then?”

  “We tried to save them,” Grampa said. “We assembled ten Ring generators, and offered nine of them to other nations. But the Reds wouldn’t have ’em. They were slow to believe in the dwarf, because it was still invisible from Earth. And you can’t much blame them for being suspicious of us, after what happened in Australia.”

  “What did happen?”

  “The Australians accepted a Ring generator. They set it up on the desert, near the center of the island continent, and they tested it. For some reason, the radius was set at twenty miles instead of two thousand. Maybe that was sabotage. More likely, it was some sort of accident. Nobody knows exactly how it happened.

  “But somehow they turned on too much power for the radius. Their twenty-mile Ring screened off too much gravitation. It sailed off into space, with the generator and the Australian engineers and a twenty-mile bite out of the Earth.”

  “Are they still drifting?” Barry’s eyes grew big.

  Sadly, Grampa shook his head. “They had rigged up a temporary power plant for the test, and it must have failed. Astronomers saw a little puff of dust, a million miles out toward the dwarf, when their Ring burst. They died—and the Reds yelled minder.”

  Grampa sighed.

  “After that, the Reds kept us from saving anybody. They persuaded all the other nations to refuse our Ring generators—they were promising to supply survival devices of their own, that they said were safer. They even tried to wreck our generator. We finally had to close the Ring to keep their missiles out.”

  “What did they do then?”

  “There wasn’t much they could do.” Grampa’s face looked grim. “Evidently their survival devices didn’t work. You’ve just seen the sort of thing that happened to everybody caught Outside.”

  “I’m glad!” Barry muttered suddenly. “About the Reds. They got what they deserved.”

  “Don’t say that.” Grampa stopped, smiling at him gently. “The Reds were human too, remember. I think they were following a false philosophy, but most of them must have been sincere. I don’t like to think about the way they died.”

  He looked back across the vast dead chasm where the ocean had been, beyond the spotted cows and the green alfalfa and the weeds that hid those dreadful things Outside.

  “Even here in the Ring, things were plenty bad,” he said. “We couldn’t screen out all the gravitation of the dwarf. It caused terrible quakes and floods. But the Ring did protect us from that awful tide Outside, which rose higher and higher until finally it swept the oceans and the air off the rest of the Earth.

  “But that was two hundred years ago.” Grampa took Barry’s hand again, and they went on toward the blue cottage. “The dwarf passed. It carried the old Moon away into space, and it left most of the Earth as airless and dead as the Moon had been. But here in the Ring, our modern history began.

  “The Age of Isolation—you’ll be studying about it. Our troubles hadn’t ended with the passing of the dwarf. America had suffered. The coastal cities were all destroyed, and half the population was dead. Even the survivors had a hard time learning how to live in total isolation.

  “Slowly, they built our modern world out of the wreckage. They organized our modern Corporations, when the old state and federal governments collapsed. They found substitutes for most of the raw materials that the rest of the world had supplied. They kept the Ring going—and formed the Ring Guard, to protect it from men like Brock.”

  They were coming up to the cottage door, but Barry hung back for another long look at the wonder of the Ring.

  “Want to know something?” he suddenly inquired. “When I’m grown and in the Guard, I’ll find a way Outside. A better way than Brock’s, so I won’t hurt anybody. And I’ll go out there.”

  He shivered, clinging harder to Grampa’s hand.

  "I'm going to find out what was in that dead man’s skull, watching the Ring with one queer eye!”

  Barry Thane’s vacation was over much too soon. He went back on the beamway to his father’s big house in Chicago Corporation, back to his books and his teachers. But he couldn’t forget that staring eye.

  Three years later, his father let him come back.

  Once more he waited inside the fence for the patrol jeep to come and go. Eagerly, yet half afraid, he slipped across the dusty road again. This time he broke off a handful of tall grass and used it to brush out his tracks.

  He crouched in the fringe of weeds again, with his face against the Ring. He found the same sun-faded, vacuum-dried human things that he had seen before. The bones and the broken bottle, the bleached rags, the scattered cooking pans, the scrap of newspaper. He looked for the skull where he had seen that staring eye—or thought he had.