by Jerry
“Then, slowly, the news began to filter through that the same thing had happened to Asia, Africa and Europe. Every city throughout the world had been destroyed.
We began to realize that the same menace was striking at both war parties . . .
Then the ants came. By the billions, they came. They swept over us, destroying food, supplies, communications . . . and lastly us.”
“That’s all the story?” Gropper asked.
“Enough of it. I don’t like to think of my wife . . . of my friends . . . “Otis shuddered. “It’s enough to say that the world banded together against the onslaught of the ants too late. We here are the last survivors of a murdered world . . .”
There was a long silence while the bipeds reflected drearily on the swift, sure tactics of your Imperial Maternity’s troops that had brought them so low. At last the biped named Doctor Elmer Gropper spoke.
“And I,” he said, “murdered your world. No . . . don’t interrupt. I want to tell you. It won’t be long before none of us are alive to care . . . Well . . . The story starts twenty years ago at the close of the Second World War. It seemed to me that nothing could ever prevent another war except man himself, and I thought that man was too underdeveloped to ever do that. I decided to help man develop . . .”
“You’re crazy!” the red-haired biped, Ivar, said.
“No,” Gropper answered. “In theory I was right. I reasoned that some time in the far future when man had advanced enough intellectually, he would give up killing. My attempt was to speed up this advancement . . . this artificial evolution of man . . .
“Yes, it could be done. The history of the world bore me out. Evolution had not been a slow, steady progress. It had leaped forward in sudden advances . . . and I discovered what had caused those advances.”
The biped Reegan said: “What did?”
“Gas, strangely enough,” Gropper replied. “Radon gas. When it is present in the atmosphere in sufficient quantities, it acts as a catalyst on chromosomatic genes. It induces a chemical reaction in the molecules that are the characteristic carriers and causes those jumps in development that De Vries called mutations and Darwin called the Survival of the Fittest.”
“Yes,” the precise biped, Chung, said. “That is more than possible.”
“It’s a reality,” the female, Dinah, put in.
“Altogether too real,” Gropper continued. “I built that cavern twenty years ago and constructed my apparatus there. Those hills are rich in pitchblende. Twenty years ago the Radon gas began to pour forth and I was jubilant. I knew that within a decade, perhaps two, evolution would strike at man and advance him far beyond war and the destructive arts. But last year, when I hired Miss Shaw as my assistant and we descended to the cavern to check the equipment that had been operating for two decades, I realized the horrible error I had made.”
Reegan said: “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Evolution is mysterious,” Gropper said. “Some hundred and fifty million years ago the earth and the seas were dominated by the great reptiles. They were the masters of creation. But inhabiting the earth with them lived a small retiring rat-like creature, utterly insignificant in size. Yet in time . . . in evolution, that rat-like creature took over dominance from the reptiles . . . Became man . . . Became us.”
“We all know that,” Otis put in.
“But this you forget,” Gropper said. “Man conquered the reptiles because he had a quality they lacked. Intelligence. Intelligence conquered brawn, although brawn was more powerful. But intelligence is not the supreme goal of evolution; it is only one of its phases, and just as brawn gave way to intelligence, so our intelligence is giving way to a quality we don’t possess, but which is possessed by the species that will dominate the earth through it!”
In precise tones Chung said: “Thought transference!”
“That’s it,” Gropper cried. “Thought transference! The ants had it. Now, through artificial stimulation, it has been advanced and developed . . . Just as your own intelligence has been quickened noticeably. But though you become geniuses, all of you, you will not cope with the ants. That quality of thought-transferance will defeat you, just as our brains defeated the more powerful reptilian brawn.
How will you fight an army of billions that think as one?”
The biped with red hair said: “Take it easy. We can. Give intelligence just one more try and it may win out. Chung and I have finished our work. Come and see . . .”
FOLLOWED by Spy-zeta-prime, the group of bipeds arose and left the council room.
As they began to descend the vast ramp to the ground level, Spy-zeta-prime telecast to Spy-zeta to pick them up in the great square courtyard in the middle of the citadel. This was done and we tuned in on Spy-zeta.
The bipeds were clustering around a structure of high-polished metal which the red-hair and slant-eye were demonstrating. It was of the shape of a short earthworm, very straight and the length of twenty bipeds.
“Looks like a rocket,” Otis said.
“Exactly what it is. Double-skinned walls so that the blasted lice can’t get through. Room inside for two, plus supplies. We can go out in this and swoop over the countryside and blast them to hell with the rocket discharges.”
“What’s the fuel?” Gropper asked.
“Uranium 235. It breaks down under a cyclotron cross-fire. Practically, I think we’ve got atomic power. All I know is that one gram of fuel burns for one hour, emitting about six billion calories of heat and exerting a constant pressure of twenty six point five tons per square inch. The rear half is filled with fuel . . . Enough to blow this baby to Andromeda and back . . . Enough to burn every lousy ant twice out of the earth!”
At this message, Commander-lambda was extremely alarmed, and his unrest immediately permeated the rest of your Imperial Maternity’s troops. It would have been sheer folly for us to have waited sapiently for the attack of the bipeds, and consequently the Commander telecast orders for an immediate attack on the citadel. The red armies marching up from the south he ordered to attack as soon as they reached the citadel, without pause for rest.
It was a glorious hour for your Imperial Maternity. Thirty billions of us marched down the slope toward the citadel of the bipeds. And so great was the interest of the bipeds in the infernal machine that we were not sighted until our first waves reached the water trap that ringed the Citadel.
Without hesitation, our troops plunged into the deep ditches and swam toward the far side. Quickly, chains of living troops were made, and from these chains, living bridges were built. Across these bridges swarmed your Maternity’s loyal legions.
THE second water trap proved to be a trap indeed. Barely had we reached it when it flamed into the air to prodigious heights . . . a curtain of thick fire.
Commander-lambda telecast the battle-word: “Forward” and so our troops moved. By the hundreds of thousands they threw themselves into the pool of flame, glorious sacrifices for your Imperial Maternity. Within a short space the fires were smothered by the countless numbers of blackened, charred bodies. The troops reached the citadel walls.
They clambered up like a great rising black wave, directly in the face of the thundering torches which the bipeds wielded at the top. And though they fell backwards in a hail of infinite numbers, the commander knew we must break through this time or else fail forever.
Then, faintly, we received vibrations from the red armies that they had sighted the citadel. Quick to seize on opportunities, Commander-lambda ordered the red armies to advance with all possible speed and show themselves as soon as possible to the bipeds. Our own troops he ordered to concentrate at the south side.
As Commander-lambda planned, so it took place. Solid waves of our troops pressed at the south wall. The bipeds were forced to flame their torches incessantly without fail. Yet one looked up for an instant and saw the flashing approach of the red armies. He gasped and called to the biped next to him. Together they stared for less than a moment,
yet in that time hundreds of our troops had passed the crest of the battlements.
They died, Imperial Maternity, but in the moment when the bipeds were flaming them down along the wall-top, still other troops poured over the crest, and yet more and more until we had taken foothold at the parapet. We had forced a breach in the wall and from that moment, victory was ours.
Steadily we forced the bipeds back from the walls, and our billions swarmed through the citadel, routing them out of their corners and chambers. They fought well, but they fell. All of them.
It was when the bipeds were falling quickly and filling the citadel with their shrieks that Reegan and Dinah rushed to the lower courtyard. Spy-zeta was still there, reporting to us.
“It’s all up, Wes!” Ivar cried. “We’re finished. Get into the rocket ship . . . you and Dinah. Get to hell out of here!”
“Why us?” Reegan demanded. “Why not you and Chung? It’s your ship . . .”
“Chung is dead!” Ivar panted. “Otis is up there, screaming on the wall. Do what I say, will you? Get in! I’ve shown you how to operate her. Rocket to Hawaii . . .
To Mars . . . Anywhere, To Mars . . . Anywhere you like, only get only get away, Adam and Eve . . .”
The red-haired Ivar snatched up a torch, slung it over his shoulder and began flaming us back.
“For God’s sake!” he cried. “Will you go?”
They leaped into the mechanism and the heavy portal clanged shut. For a time there was silence. Then suddenly the earth and air was filled with flame and roaring, and the very walls of the bipeds’ citadel cracked and crushed down over us.
And when at last the dust and blackness were gone, the citadel was in ruins. The courtyard was merely overturned earth with fragments of broken stone protruding.
Of the mechanism, of the biped Ivar, or the others there was no sign.
Intelligence-mu of the Research Legions persists that the mechanism was a machine for piercing the skies to reach to the very light on high, and claims that it carried off the two bipeds and unfortunate Spy-zeta with it; but I cannot help believing that they have destroyed themselves.
So, if it please your Imperial Maternity, the day is won. On all earth there is no living biped. The earth, the air and the waters . . . all there is in the world is yours. Everything is yours, Imperial Maternity, as am I also . . . Your most humble and very obedient servant . . .
1942
VOICE IN THE VOID
Walter Kubilius
A voice from the past . . . a city of the dead . . . a man who dared gamble the secrets of the infinite—against his own life!
LADINAS sighed as he studied the quivering graph, then pushed aside the sheaf of papers that summed up months of painstaking recordings. He turned to his assistant.
“Sometimes,” he mused, “I wonder if we are mad. No progress. Nothing. Nothing beyond that click-click, click-click, repeated over and over again. No variations.”
Both of them looked at the graph, watched the red needle jump every other moment as it reacted to the invisible radiations from outer space. Ladinas reached over and adjusted the frequency dial.
“Stephen,” he murmured as the young man carefully noted the day’s work, “it may be that we are studying the matter from the wrong angle.”
The young man’s expression was one of quiet, sustaining optimism. “Some day we will get it. Perhaps tomorrow; perhaps next month; perhaps later. But one of these days the rays will give up their message.”
The older man grunted. “A message, you say? What if there isn’t any? Suppose the radiations are merely bursting stars, new born galaxies, the basic, ether of matter—or any of the other theories of our so-called practical scientists. What then?”
“Cosmic rays,” replied the other, “come from the depths of space—from infinity, perhaps. Can we localize infinity and point to new-forming star clusters as the source of the rays? Infinity is too vast; the rays must come from something vast as well. A thought is vast.”
He paused when the old man smiled, then continued. “The idea struck me that perhaps the rays are a message from another dimension saying, ‘Listen, we want to tell you something, tell you, tell you.’ And the idea would go over and over in my mind—that the rays are thoughts, trying to express something.”
Ladinas looked up at Stephen; then his glance rested at the little table with its mass of tubes and wires.
“How can a scientist deny a possibility? And who knows? Perhaps cosmic rays are rays of thought. A romantic theory, of course. But so many things we now know were once romantic theories . . .”
Click-click, went the machine, click-click.
KILANT roared with laughter as the grizzled figure stared at him, astonished. Taking off the protective lead sheathing, after switching off the circuit, he walked over to the waiting visitor, Varl, the soldier.
“Speak up,” Kilant said. “I am not a god.”
The soldier’s eyes stared at Kilant, then at the maze of glass wires and steel in the center of the room, watching where a moment before darts of electric fire had spat upon a crystal stand.
“What is that?”
“That,” replied Kilant, “is a machine.” Varl turned and strode about the machine, looking into the crystal stand as it shimmered with vari-colored lights. Kilant followed him, his eyes on the soldier’s unsheathed sword, symbol of authority.
“Did you make it?” he asked. “The Machines were broken a long time ago.”
“Not all of the Machines were destroyed,” replied Kilant. “I found this one in an old building beside the riverfall. The dust of years was upon it, but I nursed it tenderly and it grew to what you see now.”
“What does it do?” Varl asked, touching some wires gingerly, ready to spring back.
“Of that, I am not sure. But I shall find out.”
The soldier wheeled abruptly and faced Kilant. “Do not dabble long,” he said softly. “Others have tried.”
Kilant nodded. “I know. The Masters killed them and destroyed the Machines. But will an old friend accuse me, bring me to my death and destroy my work?”
The soldier turned again and walked to the door. “There is whispering in the town. It is said that one man is working to bring the Machines back.”
Kilant lifted his arms. “Look at my hands. They’re as scarred as yours from labor. I do not curse the people for their wars against the hill enemies. Why do they curse me in my war against ignorance?”
The soldier looked at him, thought of the young boy who played in the ruins while he and his other friends hunted the small animals of the field.
“Good Kilant,” he replied, “I come to pay a debt of gratitude to an old friend. And that payment is a warning: Beware of your work with the Machine.”
“And this is all the help I am to receive?”
“That is all. I am a soldier and the will of the Masters must be my will. I do not make the laws, Kilant; I only enforce them. And should I fail in my duty, you would still not be safe. I should be slain as a traitor, and others would finish what I refused to start.” He walked up the broken steps and out into the street.
They shall not stop this work, thought Kilant as he looked at the entity of steel and iron in the center of the room. Shaking off the passing mood of sadness, he stood up and walked past the door into the room where Mila was bent over the table. He picked up a handful of warm crystals from a basket.
“And these?”
“Very little power,” she answered. “But enough for an experiment.” She fingered the tiny grains and asked expectantly, “Tonight?”
“Perhaps.” He let the crystals fall to the table. “I was warned by one of the rabble’s soldiers, an old friend. They don’t like the Machine.”
“Knowledge is never loved. They are fools.”
“So are we all,” he replied, waving his hand toward the laboratory. “Here we have a mass of wreckage and we, two relics of the past, try to lift a veil. What idiocy!”
Mila smile
d and lifted a handful of crystals. “There is no idiocy in this. It may be the answer to everything. Think of it! All time and all space—and a step further to the concept of life itself.” Her eyes shone as she spoke. “For years we’ve assembled data, digging up wires and metal and glass from old ruins and buildings. We will soon be near the answer.”
“Yet, will there be time?” Kilant gazed at an empty spot in mid-air. “We are near the truth, but it may be snatched away from us by our barbarian brothers.”
“Only a few weeks more—a month, perhaps—then we will know.”
Kilant sighed. “A long time ago this was child’s play to those who lived here before us. We pick up, like children, their playthings, and dabble in their secrets.” As they worked, the daylight faded away.
VARL, the soldier, marched through the streets, crowds jostling about him. His cracked helmet caught the last fugitive rays of the sun; the rags of his uniform flapped with each breeze. Crude wagons, drawn by lumbering quadrupeds, rumbled through the streets to surrounding villages. Varl cursed as he tripped over a broken ledge on the sidewalk.
The city was rotting, he knew—ever since the Machines went. And now this new-found one would also be destroyed, and his friends, Kilant and Mila, smashed with it.
In the center of the ruined city was the dwelling of the Masters, its great bulk composed of crumbling walls, a few torn flags draped around the great door through which he entered.
In the hallway, whose dimness was broken only by the scattered light of torches, Varl could hear the dim rumble of a distant gathering. That was the great hall of the Masters.
He marched ahead, thinking of Kilant and Mila, and of the crackling Machine and the hope it might promise for the city. Vaguely he remembered the tales of waving banners that reached the clouds from the walls of a powerful metropolis, and of argosies that once sailed to other stars from a city where now only falling walls reminded the people that a great civilization was dead.
Shaking his head to clear his mind of these phantasies, he entered the Great Hall and paused underneath one of the flags that hung over the doorway. The marble floor on which he stood was cracked and caked with the dirt of many years. From the doorway would come gusts of air that set the stench around him moving.