"No use bucking all the buses and trucks on the evacuation thruways," he said. "We use the old roads when we want to hurry. No traffic on them now."
The old roads. The ribbons of concrete and asphalt that once had carried thousands of cars, day and night. Now they were dark and empty.
The car went through a village. It too was dark and empty. They swung on through countryside, without a light in it. And then there was a bigger village, and its dark windows stared at them like blind eyes.
"All evacuated," said the driver. "Every village, town, farm, between here and New York was closed out two-three years ago."
Wales, sitting hunched by the open window, watching the road unreel, saw an old farmhouse on the curve ahead. The headlights caught it, and he saw that all its window-shutters were closed. Someone, some family, had left that house forever and had carefully shuttered its windows—against doomsday.
The poplars and willows and elms went by, and now and again there was a drifting fragrance of flowers, of blossoming orchids. Old apple-trees, innocently ignorant of world's end, were preparing to fruit once more.
Wales felt a sharp, poignant emotion. He asked himself, as a world had been asking for five years, Why did it have to be?
There was only one answer. Far out in the dark lonesomeness of the solar system, far beyond man's new Martian colonies, the thousands of asteroids that swung in incredibly intricate and eccentric orbits—they were the answer. They had been shuttles, weaving fate's web.
Kendrick had been the first to see it, to note the one big asteroid whose next passage near Jupiter would make its eccentricity of orbit too great. With camera and telescope Kendrick had watched, and with the great electronic calculators he had plotted that orbit years ahead, and....
Wales had often wondered what Lee Kendrick had felt like when the first knowledge came to him, when the first mathematical formulae of doom came out on the calculator printing-tape. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, spelled out in an equation. An electronic computer, passionately prophesying the end of man's world....