Speaker 1: In just a moment X minus one.
Speaker 2: But first, if you're planning to join the family for
this holiday weekend, remember you have a friend who will
keep you company through the long hours on the road.
That friend is your car radio, and it brings you
a full weekend of the most stimulating variety entertainment when
you tune in to NBC's Monitor. Yes, you set your
dial just once for hours and hours of refreshing variety
news as it happens, sports coverage everything from baseball to
skin diving, interviews with the stars, plus lots of the
relaxing music you like to hear. It's all on Monitor
this weekend, and I'll stay tuned for X minus one
on NBC.
Speaker 3: Come down for blast off X minus five, four three
two X minus one. Fire from the far horizons of
the Unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time
and space. These are stories of the future adventures in
which you'll live in a million, could be years, on
a thousand, maybe worlds. The National Broadcasting Company, and cooperation
with Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine presents HE minus one.
Speaker 4: To Night Story A Pale of Air by Fritz liber.
Speaker 1: It was pretty quiet in the nest. Paul was just
sitting by the fire, staring into it like he does
these days. And Ma was asleep. That's why it was
so quiet. Well, I has some pretty bad times when
she just screams and screams and huddles back against the
blankets that line the nest chis was looking at herself
in the mirror that hangs next to the bookshelf. I
don't know what she finds to look at so long,
but then she's a girl.
Speaker 5: She just looks at herself.
Speaker 1: Saturdays, when Pap puts a couple of extra lumps of
coal on the fire and we take a bath, she
looks at herself in the mirror, and sometimes she cries.
I dropped the book I was reading, and I guess
that woke mau hah.
Speaker 4: What pick up the book?
Speaker 1: But I'm sorry, Paus, come back, hasn't it, Afreed, It's
come back?
Speaker 4: It was just Bud, he dropped his book.
Speaker 6: Come back.
Speaker 7: Wait.
Speaker 6: It's out there now, isn't it. I feel a.
Speaker 4: Lot warmer now, Ethel.
Speaker 6: It's up there in the sky, just the way it
always was. I know I had a dream, Alfred.
Speaker 4: I know, dear Sis, melt your mother a cup of water.
Speaker 8: I'm combing my hair.
Speaker 5: Sis.
Speaker 6: Oh, all right, got to get up.
Speaker 1: I know it's there.
Speaker 9: There'll be crocusses and the spring bulbs and daffodils.
Speaker 1: What are daffodils?
Speaker 6: Ma, Well, buddy there.
Speaker 10: Oh they're a flower and they're very pretty yellow on
a tall green stalk.
Speaker 6: Oh. I want to go out. I want to take
the children.
Speaker 4: Out, all right now, ethelt here's some water.
Speaker 9: Come on, children, we'll all go out and you can
play in the sun.
Speaker 1: Sure, Ma, here drink the water.
Speaker 6: Ma, it's cold. You wrap on the pipes and make
that super send up some more.
Speaker 1: What's a superpa?
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter, bud. There aren't any anymore.
Speaker 6: Oh, Pa. The pails running low.
Speaker 11: But you better get into your things and go out
and get an extra pail of air.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of pails behind the first blankets.
Speaker 4: Go on, get into your things.
Speaker 5: It isn't back, is it.
Speaker 4: No? It isn't.
Speaker 6: There's no sun in the sky, No sun is there?
Speaker 9: No?
Speaker 6: Mo?
Speaker 1: What was it like?
Speaker 7: The sun says, don't get your mobset.
Speaker 9: The sun was yellow and so bright you couldn't look
at it, burning hot, so hot, But when you stretched
out in it made you feel warm all over tingly warm.
Speaker 6: It's been so long since I've been that warm.
Speaker 8: I was warm last year on my birthday when Pap
put all that extra col on.
Speaker 10: And then every morning it would come out of the east,
make the clouds all pink and yellow, and the mist
would rise in.
Speaker 6: The ground, and then.
Speaker 9: Everything would blow warmer, warmer, and then it would be
up there in the sky.
Speaker 6: Shining warm.
Speaker 1: Hurry up, Bud, I'm almost ready for.
Speaker 6: I want the sun.
Speaker 12: I want the Sumwhere.
Speaker 6: Alfred get me the.
Speaker 4: Sun, scar Ethel.
Speaker 7: There's nothing I can do but Christmas on my birthday.
Speaker 11: Go ahead, Bud, take the big pail and get it
full this time. There's no sense in taking the trip
for only half a bucket of air.
Speaker 1: I spilled it the last time. Dog, God, Dog, go ahead,
Bud strapped down the helmet. Well you, says, stand.
Speaker 6: Up straight, Okay, all right, I'll be right back.
Speaker 11: Don't hold the blankets open too long, all right, Ethel,
They're all safe.
Speaker 4: But he'll be right back with another pail of air.
It's all right.
Speaker 1: I went through the thirty or so blankets Paw hung
up to slow down the air escaping from the nest.
Of course, I knew the way. I've been going out
for air since I was a kid. Still I get
a funny crawley feeling every time I go out of
the nest. You got to go up to the fifth floor,
which is just above the blanket of frozen air. You see,
when the earth got cold, all the water in the
air froze. First. I made a blanket about ten feet
thick or so, and then down on top of that
dropped all the crystals of frozen air, making another blanket
sixty or seventy feet thick. I came out of the
window we use on the fifth floor and started to
scoop up the air into my pail. I had it
about full, but when my fingers are getting pretty cold.
But I saw something. Hey, that's a light, and I
kicked over the bucket. There can't be a light moving
around in a window like that. There can't be Come on, Pad,
says her back in the nest. I'm up here, and
there can't be anyone else. Everybody on Earth is dead
except us. I had an idea how Ma must feel sometimes,
the way she sees things. But there it was moving
around in the building across the way. I stood there, shaking,
and I almost froze my feet. I did froust my
helmet so solid on the inside I couldn't see anything.
So I hurried up and scooped up another bucket of
air and headed back for the nest as fast as
I could.
Speaker 11: Pa Pa, I saw something, and hang those outside close
up by the fire, Pa.
Speaker 1: I saw something, I did.
Speaker 7: Mother's quiet, Now, don't upset, Paw.
Speaker 1: It was a light.
Speaker 7: Wait till I get this air next to the fire.
Speaker 6: Give me the closes, Shall I put another call on pot?
Speaker 13: No?
Speaker 11: No, no, The oxygen from this bucket will get the
fire up when it begins to melt there, Pauh.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to tell you I saw something up there.
Speaker 7: Light.
Speaker 8: There's lots of lights stars.
Speaker 1: I know what stars look like.
Speaker 5: Dope.
Speaker 1: There are big, steady white lights in the sky. This
was down here in a building.
Speaker 6: What is it, Alfred?
Speaker 5: What is nothing?
Speaker 4: Nothing? Ef No? What is this?
Speaker 1: But well, first I thought it was a lady, a
young lady. I mean it like in one of those
old magazines. I thought I saw it in a window.
But then all I saw was a light. You watched
it for some time, long enough work to pass five
windows and go to the next floor.
Speaker 7: And it didn't look like stray electricity.
Speaker 1: No, Pa, I know what that looks like, or a.
Speaker 11: Star refracted through an icicle sometimes if you catch it
at the right angle, at Paw.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I never saw anything like it before.
Speaker 7: All right, I'll go out with you and you show me.
Speaker 13: No, no, Alfred, you can't go and leave it alone,
not both of you.
Speaker 4: It's all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 6: Here's she helmet.
Speaker 5: Pad.
Speaker 13: If there's something out there, well, we've known there was
something out there waiting to get it.
Speaker 1: Hand me my glove.
Speaker 13: Something that's part of the cold, hates all warm, wants
to destroy the nest and watching us all this time.
Now it's coming after us and it'll get you, and
then it'll come to me.
Speaker 6: Oh don't go, Alfred, Please don't go.
Speaker 11: Everything will be all right, Yes, Pa, you come watch
the fire. Keep an eye on that air too. If
it gets too low. It doesn't seem to be boiling
fast enough. Get another bucket behind the blanket.
Speaker 8: Oh, don't go, I'll take care of it, Pad. Could
there really be anybody out there?
Speaker 11: I don't see how we heard the last radio voices
a year before Bud was born, there hasn't been anything
since then.
Speaker 8: Then What could it be?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 11: Probably just a reflection a nice crystal cracking. Come on, buddy,
got your helmet on.
Speaker 1: It's funny. When I go out alone, I'm not scared
or anything, But when I go out with Pie, I
always hang on to his belt like I used to
when I was a little kid. Habit. I guess it's
the same no matter what trip we take. On the
fifth floor, we stopped to rest just before we went out.
We were in the room with the frozen people, the
lady sitting looking at the door, the man holding his
hands over that funny metal thing Paul calls a radiator.
It was like a fire, I guess, But I don't
see any place for the cold. We put our helmets
together so we could talk.
Speaker 7: Your breath, son, pauh.
Speaker 1: Would it be possible, I mean, for any of the
frozen people to come to life like the ones down
in the basement around the furnace when we go for water.
Speaker 7: No, they're dead. They were caught too quickly when it happened.
Speaker 1: Oh pah, how do we know we're the only ones?
Speaker 7: We don't.
Speaker 11: Well, there's a feeling you get because it's always night.
There used to be some of that feeling every night
in the old days, but the sun chased it away
every morning.
Speaker 7: You wouldn't know about that. You weren't born.
Speaker 11: When the dark star pulled us away from the sun,
you wouldn't know, and less you'd see the sun.
Speaker 1: I've seen the sun. It's that big start, the end
of the big Dipper. I've seen it.
Speaker 7: It isn't the same. Come on, they're wasting time.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the city looked like in the
old days, but now it's beautiful starlight. Let's you see
it pretty well. We're up on a hill and the
plane slopes down away from us. Some taller buildings push
up out of the feathery plane, topped by rounded caps
of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant
because a lot of the buildings are badly twisted by
the quakes and everything when a dark star pulled the
earth away from the Sun. That's why Paul can't seal
up the nest air tight. The building's twisted too bad. Besides,
we have to keep the chimney open. We touched our
helmets together so we could talk.
Speaker 7: Is that where you saw it?
Speaker 5: Sun?
Speaker 1: It isn't there anymore? Uh huh, but it feels different.
I mean as if there's something out here waiting.
Speaker 11: Bud, If you see something like that again, don't tell
the others.
Speaker 6: Huh?
Speaker 5: Why not?
Speaker 11: Well, you're I sort of nervous these days, and we
owe her all the feeling of safety we can give.
A Once, it was when your sister was born. I
was ready to give up and die, but your mother
kept me trying. Another time, she kept the fire going
a whole week all by herself when I was sick.
Speaker 1: She couldn't do that now, not the way she is.
Speaker 11: But you know that game we sometimes play tossing a
ball around, Well, courage is like a ball. A person
can hold it only so long, and when he's got
to toss it to someone else. When it's tossed your way,
you've got to catch it and hold it tight and
hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when
you get tired of being brave.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 7: Come on, we'll fill up the pails and get back.
Speaker 1: But what about whatever it is out here?
Speaker 7: We'll just have to wait and see. Come on, before
the helmet's frost.
Speaker 1: Over, it's pretty hard to hide your feelings in the nest.
I mean there's just room for the four of us.
The blanket overhead just touches when Paul stands up straight.
The floor is all covered with thick wooly rugs. PA says,
it's inside a much bigger room, but I've never seen
the real walls or ceiling. Well anyway, Paul laughed and
kidded about what I'd seen. He said I had an imagination,
but we could tell he took it serious. It was
Sunday morning, by the clocks that Pau kept all wound
up on a shelf, so it was time for the story.
We all sat around in a circle, the way we
always do, except I noticed that Pau casually took a
hammer from the shelf and put it beside him. I
always liked the story, of course, listen, I know it
by heart, but now I mean every Sunday since we
were kids. But every once in a while Pa surprises
us by telling it a little different or throwing in
some extras. It starts out with the song My used
to sing it, but she forgets the words sometimes and
now pass sings it mostly.
Speaker 14: Oh beauty for for spacious guies for and the waves
of grain, th perple Mountain, magious jeez above the fruited planet.
Speaker 1: Of course, the words don't mean anything. I mean, the
skies are spacious enough, but there aren't any ways of grain,
and a plane is all covered with a blanket of
frozen air. But it's part of the story ceremony, and
Karl likes it, says it reminds me of the old days.
After the song pass starts the story.
Speaker 11: In the days of my youth, the sun hung above,
golden and warm, and the earth was fruitful and multiplied,
and the fields were green, and the day was glorious,
and the wind blew across the hilltops, and the air
was free and good to breathe.
Speaker 1: That's the part of the story I liked best about
how it was with the sun nice and warm. It's
hard to believe Rollo's people living without having to worry
about cold and air. They were waking up, sweating and
screaming because he dreamed of fire went out. It's impossible
to believe. But Pa was a good storyteller, and he
made it seem real.
Speaker 11: And then the dark star came rushing out of space.
In the beginning, they tried to keep the news from
the people. But when the floods and the earthquake started,
the truth came out. At first they thought the dark
Star would hit the Sun, and then they were afraid
it would strike the Earth itself.
Speaker 5: But it didn't. It only came close.
Speaker 1: Paw tells it like the Sun and the dark Star
fought for the Earth like two dogs over a bone.
I know what he means, because I've seen a picture
of a dog in a magazine. And then the dark
Star won and carried us off, but the Sun kept
the moon. There were earthquakes and floods. Pat says that
mountains fell and oceans slopped over oceans. That's a lot
of melted water lying around loose. It's hard to imagine,
Paus says it was. So then came the open question
time in the story. Sis asked a question about what
girls wore for clothes, and I asked Pa how people
acted in those days when the earth was twisted and
jerked almost apart.
Speaker 11: Well, but I was too busy to notice much. A
friend of mine, doctor Wisebroke, and Kelly, the geophysistant, Walter's
the astronomer. We knew what was going to happen, and
we were working to fix up a place with air
tight walls and insulation and big supplies of food and
bottled air. But the place got smashed up in the
earthquakes and they were all killed. So I put the
nest together at the last minute in the living room
of our apartment.
Speaker 4: It's a four room apartment.
Speaker 1: You must have seen some of the people like the
frozen ones downstairs.
Speaker 5: At that time.
Speaker 11: But I only thought of one thing, your mother, and survival.
If I had stopped to think, I wouldn't have even
tried to make the nest would have seemed ridiculous. Blankets
and a coal fire against the cold and vacuum of
space that I didn't think I survived.
Speaker 1: I wasn't listening carefully as Paul went on about the
building of the nest. I kept thinking about something else,
but that light ain't seen outsir. I kept asking myself,
what if the frozen people were coming to life? What
if they were like the liquid helium that curls toward
heat when it should be frozen solid. What if something
were coming from the dark star to get us, Something
making the frozen people move, not by themselves. That would
fit with what I'd seen A young lady's face and
the moving light. They sat there and shivered, thinking of
the frozen people with minds from the dark star creeping, crawling,
snuffing their way, following the heat to the nest, and
then over from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard
a tiny noise.
Speaker 11: So I asked myself, Then, what's the use of going on?
Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold
and loneliness. The human race is done, the earth is done.
Why not give up, I asked myself.
Speaker 1: And then I did hear the noise flouder, this time,
a kind of shuffling tread, coming closer.
Speaker 4: And then I got the answer.
Speaker 11: The Earth's always been a lonely place, millions of miles
from the next planet. No matter how long the human
race might have lived, the end would have come some night.
Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good.
There's a lovely texture, like some rich cloth of fur,
or the petals of flowers, crocuses, daffodils, or the fire's glow.
And that's as true for the last man as the first.
Speaker 1: Still, those steps kept shuffling closer. Pa was talking, and
Ma was dreaming with her eyes closed, and Sis was
looking at herself sideways in the mirror, and I was
the only one who heard the noise, a noise outside.
Speaker 11: So right then and there, I told myself that I
was going on as if we had all eternity ahead
of us. I'd have children, and I'd teach them all
I could. I'd get them to read books, try to
enlarge and seal the nest. I'd try to keep everything
beautiful and alive. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder,
even at the cold and.
Speaker 4: The dark and the distant stars.
Speaker 1: Pah, pah, I hear.
Speaker 6: I know what is it, Alfred?
Speaker 5: What is it?
Speaker 6: What's going on?
Speaker 1: I've got to tell me.
Speaker 6: Pa, I'm scared.
Speaker 5: Quiet, but.
Speaker 4: You heard it.
Speaker 1: Kind of shuffling coming towards the nest.
Speaker 11: Sis, take care of your mother. I'll take the hammer,
you take the hatchet.
Speaker 4: What is it, Pa, what is it? I don't know. Listen,
it's closer.
Speaker 9: Mush, pah, the blanket is moving.
Speaker 4: Ready with your.
Speaker 5: Ex Hello, who's there is? There's somebody in there?
Speaker 6: Come in.
Speaker 5: It's all right. They're alive, alive.
Speaker 1: Who are you?
Speaker 11: Alfred, Alfred Hutchinson, Doctor Alfred Hutchinson. You can take off
your helmets in here, but we have air.
Speaker 1: And we bring it in in pails.
Speaker 12: Come on, Ralph, let's take off the helmets.
Speaker 7: It's impossible.
Speaker 5: Where are you from.
Speaker 11: We thought we were the only ones Los Alamos, the
nuclear laboratory.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right.
Speaker 12: We get our power from the reactor, using the stockpile
of bombs for fuel.
Speaker 5: Then there are others. There are there are other men,
There are other bird pack Is it all right?
Speaker 1: Should I put the acc down?
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, it's all right. You can put it down.
Speaker 8: You mean you come from another nest.
Speaker 15: It's a little bigger than this. We've got a small
air tight city with air locks.
Speaker 12: We generate our electricity food from hydroponics.
Speaker 5: I can't believe it.
Speaker 4: I can't.
Speaker 15: I can't believe this. It's impossible. You can't maintain an
air supply without hermetic ceiling.
Speaker 5: It's impossible.
Speaker 1: No, No, it's simple, as long as you keep the
fire going to melthy air and enough air boiling to
keep the fire burning.
Speaker 5: How did you come here? Why?
Speaker 15: Well, we keep scouting around for survivors. There are a
number of colonies Brookhaven, oak Ridge and Harwell in England,
and the Argon Lapratory in France. We didn't expect to
find anything in this city, though, but our detectors picked
up a heat tray, so we tracked it down.
Speaker 6: Alfred, you're forgetting your manners.
Speaker 11: We have company, of course, of course, Sis. Throw a
handful of coal.
Speaker 4: On the fire.
Speaker 8: Pah, a whole handful.
Speaker 11: It doesn't matter now, and but bring out another pail
of air. It's incredible, and you have laboratories and transport.
Speaker 12: We only have a two seated scout. But if we
rip out the bulkhead to the storage compartment, we can
make it all right.
Speaker 15: We can have you back at Los Alamos in four hours.
Speaker 1: What's the matter?
Speaker 11: I guess we really hadn't thought about it that way, but.
Speaker 9: Uh, I wouldn't know how to act there and decides
I haven't any clothes.
Speaker 11: Just doesn't seem right to let this fire go out.
It's been eighteen years burning every minute.
Speaker 15: But you can't stay here, ral But after all, Ralph, oh.
Speaker 4: Look, doctor Hutchinson.
Speaker 15: We'll go out of the ship and bring back a
small power heater. I know this is very sudden and
upsetting to you.
Speaker 4: You need a chance to.
Speaker 15: Just we'll be back in a few minutes. It's incredible.
Speaker 4: Fucker's here.
Speaker 1: Well, they didn't think the nest smelt so good. I
could tell she.
Speaker 6: Had a wave in earlier. Did you see that? And lipstick?
Speaker 4: I suppose we have to decide what to do.
Speaker 8: Pah, at Lost, Los Alamos and those other places. There
will be lots of people, won't there. Yes, I mean
not just your father or a brother.
Speaker 11: That's right, boys, I suppose so. But somehow I feel
a little empty of.
Speaker 6: Offred. It's different now that we no others are alive.
You don't have to feel the responsibility for keeping the
human race going.
Speaker 1: Poh, I'd like to see those rockets and laboratories, wouldn't you.
Speaker 4: Poor, I suppose so.
Speaker 1: It won't be easy leaving the nest. I mean, it's
just riding. There's only four of us. It's kind of
a scary idea big place with a lot of strangers.
Speaker 11: You'll get over that feeling, son. The trouble with the
world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller till
it ended with just the nest. Now it'll be good
to have a real huge world again, the way it
was in the beginning.
Speaker 1: And so we're gonna leave the nest in the morning.
By pause clocks. We've got the power heater going. Now
it seems funny to be this warm when it isn't
Christmas or somebody's birthday. But still it's hard for me
to realize that this is the last time I'll go
out of the nest, through all the blankets to get
a pail of air.
Speaker 3: You have just heard X minus one, presented by the
National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
Speaker 7: Your announcer, Fred Collins.
Speaker 3: X minus one was an NBC Radio Network production