The Day After Doomsday

by Poul Anderson

  The rest of the planet was worse.

  Nevertheless, after forty-eight hours in camp, Donnan had to get away or go crazy. He and Arnold Goldspring loaded their packboards and started off. No use asking the captain’s permission. Strathey was disintegrating as fast as his crew, which was becoming a rabble.

  “Makes no sense to land in the first place,” Donnan had grumbled. “They talk about a rest after being cooped in the ship. Hell, they’ll be more cooped in a bunch of tents down there, and a lot less comfortable. All we want to do is make an orbital satellite and leave a radio note in it . . . once we’ve decided where we want to go from here.”

  “I said as much to the crew’s committee,” the captain answered. He wouldn’t meet the engineer’s eyes. “They insisted. I can’t risk mutiny.”

  “Huh? You’re the skipper, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a Navy man, Mr. Donnan.

  The personnel aboard are seventy-five per cent civilians.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “That’s enough!” Strathey said, raw-voiced. “Get out of here.”

  Donnan got. But from then on he carried his gun in a shoulder holster beneath his coverall.

  Endless, hysterical debate reached no decision on what to say in the recording. Should the Franklin find some primitive world, a safe hiding place . . . safe, also, from discovery by any other humans that might still be alive and looking for their kindred? Go to a planet in this nucleus of civilization? If so, which planet—when any might be the secret enemy? (Ramri now had two marines as a permanent guard. They had already had to discourage a few men who said no filthy alien was fit to live. But they were his jailers as well; everyone understood that, even if no one came right out and said so.) Or ought the Franklin to go across thousands of light-years to an altogether different group of spacefaring peoples? That wouldn’t be too long a trip for her. But the sheer number of such clusters and the thinness of contact between them would make it unlikely that other humans searching at random would ever come upon word of the Americans.

  As the shrillness mounted, Donnan finally said to hell with it and left camp.

  GOLDSPRING would once have been a cheerful companion. He had been, throughout the past three years, on scores of worlds. (Including a certain uncharted one, lonely and beautiful, almost another Earth, which they had excitedly discussed as a future colony. But that was before they came home.) Now he was sunk in moodiness. He spent his abundant free time among books and papers, making esoteric calculations. The work was an escape for him, Donnan knew; the Goldsprings had been a close-knit family. But when he began shaking so badly that he spilled half his food at mess, Donnan decided something else was indicated. He persuaded Goldspring to come along on the hike.

  Eventually, one night under two hurtling moons, Goldspring cracked open. What he said was mostly reminiscence, and no one else’s business. Donnan helped him through the spell as best he could. Thereafter Goldspring felt better. They started walking back.

  It was good to have someone to talk with again. “What’s this project of yours, Am?” Donnan asked conversationally. “All the figuring you’ve been doing?”

  “A theoretical notion.” Like most of the ship’s personnel, Goldspring was a scientist rather than a career spaceman. His specialty was field physics, and his doubling in brass as detector officer was incidental.

  He tilted back his hat to mop his forehead. The nearby sun glowered on them, two specks in a rolling red immensity. Puffs of dust marked every step they made. The air shimmered. Nothing else moved.

  “Yeh?” Donnan hitched his pack to a more comfortable position. “Can you put it in words a plain M.E. can understand?”

  “I don’t know. How familiar are you, really, with the concept the superlight drive is based on? The mathematical depiction of space as having a structure equivalent to a set of standing waves in an n-dimensional continuum?”

  “Well, I’ve read some of the popular accounts. Let’s see if I remember. Where these waves interfere, you can slip from one to another. Out between the stars, where there isn’t much gravitational distortion, the interference fringes come so close together that instead of taking the entire straight-line distance, as light does, you can skip most of it. The whole business is the other side of the galactic-recession phenomenon. Galaxies recede from each other because space is generated between them. A ship in super-light brings the stars closer, in effect, by using those zones where space is being canceled out. Have I got it straight?”

  Goldspring winced. “Never mind. I’m sorry I asked.” For a time there was only the scrunch of their boots in sand. Then he shrugged. “Let’s just say the possibility occurred to me of inverting the effect. Instead of passing a material object through the fringes, keep the object still and make it generate fringes artificially. Oh, not on anything like the cosmic scale. We haven’t the mass or energy to affect more than a few thousand kilometers of radius. However, the result should be measurable. So far, developing the idea, I haven’t seen any holes in my reasoning. I’d like to make an experimental test as soon as possible.”

  “DON’T bother,” Donnan said.

  “Look up the results in some scientific journal. Surely, in the thousands of years that there’s been space travel, somebody else thought of this.”

  “No doubt,” said Goldspring. “But not any local scientists. And by local I don’t mean just this immediate civilization-cluster, but everything within ten thousand light-years. I’ve studied a lot of nonhuman texts, both in translation and—in Tantha and Uru, anyhow—in the original. M.I.T. had quite a file of such books and journals. Nowhere have I seen mention of any such phenomenon.

  “Besides,” he added, “the applications would be so revolutionary that if the effect were known (assuming it really exists, of course!), we’d be using a lot different machines for a lot different purposes.”

  “Whoa! Wait a minute,” Donnan objected. “That doesn’t make sense. The Monwaingi discovered Earth only twenty years ago. Three years back, the first Earth-built spaceships were finally completed. Monwaing itself was discovered something like a hundred and fifty years ago. And the ships that started up modern civilization there were from a planet that’d been exploring space for God knows how many centuries. D’you mean to tell me a bunch of newcomers like us can show the Galaxy something it hasn’t known since our ancestors were hunting mammoths?”

  “I do,” said Goldspring. “Don’t confuse science with technology. Most intelligent species that Man’s encountered to date don’t think along identical lines with man. Why should they? Different biology, different home environment, different culture and history. Look what happened on Earth whenever two societies met. The more backward one would try to modernize, but it never quite became a carbon copy of the other. Compare the different versions of Christianity that evolved as Christianity spread through Europe; think of the ingenious new wrinkles in industry that the Japanese developed after they decided to industralize. And that involved strictly human beings. The tendency toward parallel development is still weaker between wholly distinct species. Do you think we could ever . . . could ever have borrowed the Monwaingi concept of the nation as a mere framework for radically different civilizations to grow in? Or that we’d ever have had any reason, economic or otherwise, to developed pure biotechnics as far as them?”

  “Okay, Arn, okay. But still—”

  “NO, let me finish. On Earth we seemed rather slow to assimilate the technology of galactic civilization. That’s highly understandable. We had to find ways of attracting outworld traders, develop stuff they wanted, so that we in exchange could buy books and machines, get scholarships for our bright young men, rent spaceships for our own initial ventures. Our being divided into rival nations didn’t help us, either. And the sheer job of tooling up required time. I’ll give you an analogy. Suppose some imaginary time traveler from around the year you were born had gone back to . . . oh, say 1930 . . . and told the General Electri
c researchers of that time about transistors. It’d have taken those boys years to develop the necessary auxiliary machines, and develop the necessary skills, to use the information. They’d have to make up a quarter century of progress in a dozen allied arts. And—there wouldn’t have been any demand for transistors! No apparatus in use in 1930 demanded such miniature electronic valves. The very need—the market—would have had to be slowly created.”

  “Shucks, I know that. I am an engineer, they tell me.”

  “But my point is,” Goldspring said, “there would not have been any corresponding difficulty in assimilating the theory of the transistor. Any good physicist could have learned everything about solid-state phenomena in a few months. All he’d need would be the texts and a few instruments.

  “Likewise, when the Monwaingi came, Terrestrial science leap-frogged a thousand years or more, almost overnight. Terrestrial technology was what lagged. And not by much, at that. Ramri’s often remarked to me how astonished he was at our rate of modernization.”

  “Okay, then, I concede,” Donnan said. “I’ll assume you brought a fresh viewpoint to this interference fringe subject and really have stumbled onto something that none of our neighbors ever thought of. But you can’t make me believe that in the entire Galaxy, throughout its history, you are unique.”

  “Oh, no, certainly not. My discovery (if, I repeat, it is a discovery and not a blind alley) must have been duplicated hundreds of times. It just didn’t happen to have been duplicated locally. And the knowledge hasn’t spread into our part of the Galaxy. That’s not surprising either. Who could keep up with a fraction of the intellectual activity on several million civilized planets? Why, I’ll bet there are a billion professional journals—or equivalent thereof—published every day.”

  “Yeah.” Donnan smiled rather sadly. “Y’ know,” he remarked, “when I was a kid in my teens, just before the Monwaingi came, I went on a science-fiction kick. I must’a read hundreds of stories where there were races traveling between the stars while humans had barely reached the nearer planets of their own system. But I can’t recall one that ever guessed the bloody simple obvious truth. Always, if the Galactics noticed us, they were benevolent secret guardians; or not-so-benevolent keepers; or kept strictly hands off. In some stories they did land openly, as the Monwaingi and the rest actually did. But as near as I remember, in the stories this was always a prelude to inviting Earth into the Galactic Federation.

  “Hell, why should there be a Federation? Why should anyone give a hoot about us? Couldn’t those writers see how big the universe is?”

  BIG indeed. The diameter of this one Galaxy is some hundred thousand light-years, the maximum width about ten thousand. It includes on the order of a hundred billion stars, at least half of which have at least one life-bearing planet. A goodly percentage of these latter also sustain intelligent life.

  Sol lies approximately thirty thousand light-years from galactic center, where the stars begin to thin out toward emptiness: a frontier region, which the most rapidly expanding civilization of space travelers would still be slow to reach. And no such civilization could expand rapidly anyhow. There are too many stars.

  At some unknown time in some unknown place, someone created the first superlight spaceship. Or perhaps it was created independently, many times and places. No one knows. Probably no one will ever know; there are too many archives in too many languages to search. But in any event, the explorers went forth. They visited, studied, mapped, traded. Most of the races they found were primitive—or, if civilized, were not interested in space travel for themselves. Some few had the proper degree of industrialization and the proper attitude of outwardness. They learned from the explorers. Why should they not? The explorers had nothing to fear from these strangers, who paid them well for instruction. There is plenty of room in space. Besides, a complete planet is self-sufficient, both economically and politically.

  From these newly awakened worlds, then, a second generation of explorers went forth.

  They had to go further than the first. Planets of interest to them lay far and far away, lost in a wilderness of suns whose worlds were barren, or savage, or too foreign for intercourse. But eventually someone, at an enormous distance from their home, learned space technology in turn from them.

  Thus the knowledge radiated, through millennia: but not like a wave of light from a single candle. Rather it spread like dandelion seeds, blown at random, each seed which takes root begetting a cluster of offspring. A newly civilized planet (by that time, “civilization” was equated in the minds of spacefarers with the ability to travel through space) would occupy itself with its nearer neighbors. Occasionally there was contact with one of the other loose astro-politico-economic clumps.

  But the contact was sporadic.

  There was no economic force to maintain it; and culturally, these clusters soon diverged too much.

  And once in a while, some daring armada—traders looking for a profit, explorers looking for knowledge, refugees looking for a home, or persons with motives less comprehensible to a human—would make the big jump and start yet another nucleus of civilization.

  WITHIN each such nucleus, a certain unity prevailed. There was trading; for, while no planet had to supply another with necessities, the materials of comfort, luxury, amusement, and research were in demand. There was tourism. There was a degree of interchange in science, art, religion, fashion. Sometimes there was war.

  But beyond the nucleus, the cluster, there was little or nothing. No mind could possibly deal with all the planets in space. The number was too huge.

  A spacefaring people must needs confine serious attention to their own vicinity, with infrequent small ventures beyond.

  Anything more would have been impossible. The civilization-clusters were never hostile to each other. There was nothing to be hostile about. Conflicts occurred among neighbors, not among strangers who saw each other once a year, a decade or a century.

  Higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, civilization spread out among the stars. A million clusters, comprising one to a hundred planets each, furnished the only pattern there was. Between the clusters as wholes, no pattern whatsoever existed. A spaceship could cross the Galaxy in months; but a news item, if sensational enough to make the journey at all, might take a hundred years.

  There was little enough pattern within any given cluster. It was no more than a set of planets, not too widely separated, which maintained some degree of fairly regular contact with each other. These planets might have their own colonies, dependencies, or newly discovered spheres of influence, as Earth had been for Monwaing. But there was no question of a single culture for the whole cluster, or any sort of overall government. And never forget: any planet is a world, as complex and mysterious in its own right, as full of its own patterns and contradictions and histories, as ever Earth was.

  No wonder the speculative writers had misunderstood their own assumptions. The universe was too big for them . . .

  Donnan shook himself and forced his mind back to practicalities. “Think we might find some use for this prospective gadget of yours?” he asked.

  “For a whole series of gadgets, you mean,” Goldspring said. “Sure. That was why I tackled the math so hard after . . . after we came back and saw. If we aren’t simply to become a bunch of hirelings, we’ll need something special to sell.” He paused. One hand went to his beard and tugged until the physical pain outweighed what was within. “Also,” he said, “one day we’ll know who killed five billion human beings. I don’t think whoever that was should go unpunished.”

  “You’ll vote, then, to stay in this local cluster? The guilty party must belong to it. Nobody from another cluster would mount a naval operation like that. Too far; no reason to.”

  “That’s obvious.” Goldspring nodded jerkily. “And out of the planets that even knew Earth existed, there are really only three possible suspects. Kandemir, Vorlak, and the Monwaing complex. The last two don’t make sense either.” He bit
his lip. “But what does, in this universe?”

  “I’ll buck for sticking around myself,” Donnan agreed, “though I got a kind of different reason. You see—hullo, there’s the end of our stroll.”

  THEY had mounted a high dune overlooking the sheltered valley in which the men had pitched camp. Even from this distance, the tents around the upright spears of the auxiliary boats looked slovenly. A dust cloud hung in the air above. A lot of movement, to raise that much . . . Donnan broke out his field glasses.

  He stared for so long that Goldspring began to fidget. When he lowered them, the physicist snatched them while Donnan’s mouth formed a soundless whistle.

  “I don’t understand,” Goldspring said. “Looks like an assembly. Everyone seems to be gathered near Boat One. But—”

  “But they’re boiling around like ants whose nest was just stove in,” Donnan snapped. “Seems as if we got back barely in time. Come on!”

  His stocky form broke into a jogtrot. Goldspring braced himself and followed. For the next few miles they made no sound but footfalls and harshening breath.

  The camp was near riot when they arrived. Three hundred men surged and yelled around the lead boat. Its passenger lock, high

  in the bows, stood open. The gangladder had been partially extended to form a rostrum, where Lieutenant Howard, the second mate, jittered among a squad of marines. Now and then he fumbled at a microphone. But the P.A. only amplified his stutters and the growling and shouting on the ground soon overwhelmed him. The marines stood alert, rifles ready. Under the overshadowing battle helmets, their faces looked white and very young.

  Men clamored. Men talked to their fellows, argued, shouted, stamped off in a rage or struck blows which drew blood. Here and there a man who happened to have a gun stood as a sullen shield for a few of the timid. Two corpses sprawled near a tent. One had been shot. The other was too badly trampled for Donnan to be sure what had happened. Occasionally, above the hubbub, a pistol cracked. Warning shots only, Donnan hoped.