by Anthology
Jeff drove like a maniac, but I didn’t notice. I knew the thing had done ninety-five but I think we must have done more. The wind whipped tears in my eyes so I couldn’t be sure whether I saw mounting smoke and flame or not. With diesel fuel there shouldn’t be—but that plane had been doing things it shouldn’t. It had been trying out Carter’s antigravity coil.
We shot up the flat, straight road across wide, level country, the wind moaning a requiem about the car. Far ahead I saw the side road that must lead off towards where Bob should be, and lurched to the braking of the car, the whine and sing of violently shrieking tyres, then to the skidding corner. It was a sand road; we slithered down it and for all the lightness and power, we slowed to sixty-five, clinging to the seat as the soft sand gripped and clung.
Violently Jeff twisted into a branching cow path, and somehow the springs took it. We braked to a stop a quarter of a mile from the plane.
It was in a fenced field of pasture and wood lot. We leaped the fence, and raced towards it: Jeff got there first, just as the major’s car shrieked to a stop behind ours.
The major was cold and pale when he reached us. “Dead,” he stated.
And I was very much colder and probably several times as pale. “I don’t know!” I moaned. “He isn’t there!”
“Not there!” The major almost screamed it. “He must be—he has to be. He has no parachute—wouldn’t take one. They say he didn’t jump—”
I pointed to the plane, and wiped a little cold sweat from my forehead. I felt clammy all over, and my spine prickled. The solid steel of the huge diesel engine was driven through the stump of a tree, down into the ground perhaps eight or nine feet, and the dirt and rock had splashed under that blow like wet mud.
The wings were on the other side of the field, flattened, twisted straws of dural alloy. The fuselage of the ship was a perfect silhouette—a longitudinal projection that had flattened in on itself, each separate section stopping only as it hit the ground.
The great torus coil with its strangely twined wrappings of hair-fine bismuth wire was intact! And bent over it, twisted, utterly wrecked by the impact, was the main-wing stringer—the great dural-alloy beam that supported most of the ship’s weight in the air. It was battered, crushed on those hair-fine, fragile bismuth wires—and not one of them was twisted or displaced or so much as skinned. The back frame of the ponderous diesel engine—the heavy supercharger was the anvil of that combination—was cracked and splintered. And not one wire of the hellish bismuth coil was strained or skinned or displaced.
And the red pulp that should have been there—the red pulp that had been a man—wasn’t. It simply wasn’t there at all. He hadn’t left the plane. In the clear, cloudless air, we could see that. He was gone.
We examined it, of course. A farmer came, and another, and looked, and talked. Then several farmers came in old, dilapidated cars with their wives and families, and watched.
We set the owner of the property on watch and went away—went back to the city for workmen and a truck with a derrick. Dusk was falling. It would be morning before we could do anything, so we went away.
Five of us—the major of the army air force, Jeff Rodney, the two Douglass Co. men whose names I never remembered and I—sat in my—our—room. Bob’s and Jeff’s and mine. We’d been sitting there for hours trying to talk, trying to think, trying to remember every little detail, and trying to forget every ghastly detail. We couldn’t remember the detail that explained it, nor forget the details that rode and harried us.
And the telephone rang. I started. Then slowly got up and answered. A strange voice, flat and rather unpleasant, said, “Mr. Talbot?”
“Yes.”
It was Sam Gantry, the farmer we’d left on watch. “There’s a man here.”
“Yes? What does he want?”
“I dunno. I dunno where he came from. He’s either dead or out cold. Gotta funny kind of aviator suit on, with a glass face on it. He looks all blue, so I guess he’s dead.”
“Lord! Bob! Did you take that helmet off?” I roared.
“No, sir, no—no, sir. We just left him the way he was.”
“His tanks have run out. Listen. Take a hammer, a wrench, anything, and break that glass faceplate! Quick! We’ll be there.” Jeff was moving. The major was, too, and the others. I made a grab for the half-empty bottle of Scotch, started out, and ducked back into the closet. With the oxygen bottle under my arm I jumped into the crowded little roadster just as Jeff started it moving. He turned on the horn, and left it that way.
We dodged, twisted, jumped, and stopped with jerks in traffic, then leaped into smooth, roaring speed out towards the farmer’s field. The turns were familiar now; we scarcely slowed for them, slewing around them. This time Jeff charged through the wire fence. A headlight popped; there was a shrill scream of wire, the wicked zing of wire scratching across the bonnet and mudguards, and we were bouncing across the field.
There were two lanterns on the ground; three men carried others; more men squatted down beside a still figure garbed in a fantastic bulging, airproof stratosphere suit. They looked at us, openmouthed as we skidded to a halt, moving aside as the major leaped out and dashed over with the Scotch. I followed close behind with the oxygen bottle.
Bob’s faceplate was shattered, his face blue, his lips blue and flecked with froth. A long gash across his cheek from the shattered glass bled slowly. The major lifted his head without a word, and glass tinkled inside the helmet as he tried to force a little whisky down his throat.
“Wait!” I called. “Major, give him artificial respiration, and this will bring him around quicker—better.” The major nodded, and rose, rubbing his arm with a peculiar expression.
“That’s cold!” he said, as he flipped Bob over, and straddled his back. I held the oxygen bottle under Bob’s nose as the major swung back in his arc, and let the raw, cold oxygen gas flow into his nostrils.
In ten seconds Bob coughed, gurgled, coughed violently, and took a deep shuddering breath. His face turned pink almost instantly under that lungful of oxygen, and I noticed with some surprise that he seemed to exhale almost nothing, his body absorbing the oxygen rapidly.
He coughed again; then, “I could breathe a heck of a sight better if you’d get off my back,” he said. The major jumped up, and Bob turned over and sat up. He waved me aside, and spat. “I’m—all right,” he said softly.
“Lord, man, what happened?” demanded the major.
Bob sat silent for a minute. His eyes had the strangest look—a hungry look—as he gazed about him. He looked at the trees beyond and at the silent, watching men in the light of the lanterns; then up, up to where a myriad of stars gleamed and danced and flickered in the clear sky.
“I’m back,” he said softly. Then suddenly he shivered, and looked horribly afraid. “But—I’ll have to be—then—too.”
He looked at the major for a minute, and smiled faintly. And at the two Douglass Co. men. “Your plane was all right. I started up on the wings, as arranged, went way up, till I thought surely I was at a safe height, where the air wasn’t too dense and the field surely wouldn’t reach to Earth—Lord!—reach to the Earth! I didn’t guess how far that field extended. It touched Earth—twice.
“I was at forty-five thousand when I decided it was safe, and cut the engine. It died, and the stillness shocked me. It was so quiet. So quiet.
“I turned on the coil circuit, and the dynamotor began to hum as the tubes warmed up. And then—the field hit me. It paralyzed me in an instant. I never had a chance to break the circuit, though I knew instantly something was wrong—terribly wrong. But the very first thing it did was to paralyze me, and I had to sit there and watch the instruments climb to positions and meanings they were never meant for.
“I realized I alone was being affected by that coil—I alone, sitting directly over it. I stared at the meters and they began to fade, began to seem transparent, unreal. And as they faded into blankness I saw the clear sky beyond
them; then for a hundredth of a second, like some effect of persistence of vision, I thought I saw the plane falling, twisting down at incredible speed, and the light faded as the Sun seemed to rocket suddenly across the sky and vanish.
“I don’t know how long I was in that paralyzed condition, where there was only blankness—neither dark nor light, nor time nor any form—but I breathed many times. Finally, form crawled and writhed into the blankness, and seemed to solidify beneath me as, abruptly, the blankness gave way to a dull red light. I was falling.
“I thought instantly of the forty-five thousand feet that lay between me and the solid Earth, and stiffened automatically in terror. And in the same instant I landed in a deep blanket of white snow, stained by the red light that lighted the world.
“Cold. Cold—it tore into me like the fang of a savage animal. What cold! The cold of ultimate death. It ripped through that thick, insulated suit and slashed at me viciously, as though there were no insulation there. I shivered so violently I could scarcely turn up the alcohol valves. You know I carried alcohol tanks and catalyst grids for heating, because the only electric fields I wanted were those of the apparatus. Even used a diesel instead of gas engine.
“I thank the Lord for that then. I realized that whatever had happened I was in a spot indescribably cold and desolate. And in the same instant, realized that the sky was black. Blacker than the blackest night, and yet before me the snow field stretched to infinity, tainted by the blood-red light, and my shadow crawled in darker red at my feet.
“I turned around. As far as the eye could see in three directions the land swept off in very low, very slightly rolling hills, almost plains—red plains of snow dyed with the dripping light of sunset, I thought.
“In the fourth direction, a wall—a wall that put the Great Wall of China to shame—loomed up half a mile—a blood-red wall that had the luster of metal. It stretched across the horizon, and looked a scant hundred yards away, for the air was utterly clear. I turned up my alcohol burners a bit more and felt a little better.
“Something jerked my head around like a giant hand—a sudden thought. I stared at the Sun and gulped. It was four times—six times—the size of the Sun I knew. And it wasn’t setting. It was forty-five degrees from the horizon. It was red. Blood red. And there wasn’t the slightest bit of radiant heat reaching my face from it. That Sun was cold.
“I’d just automatically assumed I was still on Earth, whatever else might have happened, but now I knew I couldn’t be. It must be another planet of another sun—a frozen planet—for that snow was frozen air. I knew it absolutely. A frozen planet of a dead sun.
“And then I changed even that. I looked up at the black sky above me, and in all the vast black bowl of the heavens, not threescore stars were visible. Dim, red stars, with one single sun that stood out for its brilliance—a yellowish-red sun perhaps a tenth as bright as our sun, but a monster here. It was another—a dead—space. For if that snow was frozen air, the only atmosphere must have been neon and helium. There wasn’t any hazy air to stop the light of the stars, and that dim, red sun didn’t obscure them with its light. The stars were gone.
“In that glimpse, my mind began working by itself; I was scared.
“Scared? I was so scared I was afraid I was going to be sick. Because right then I knew I was never coming back. When I felt that cold, I’d wondered when my oxygen bottles would give out, if I’d get back before they did. Now it was not a worry. It was simply the limiting factor on an already-determined thing, the setting on the time bomb. I had just so much more time before I died right there.
“My mind was working out things, working them out all by itself, and giving answers I didn’t want, didn’t want to know about. For some reason it persisted in considering this was Earth, and the conviction became more and more fixed. It was right. That was Earth. And it was old Sol. Old—old Sol. It was the time axis that coil distorted—not gravity at all. My mind worked that out with a logic as cold as that planet.
“If it was time it had distorted, and this was Earth, then it had distorted time beyond imagining to an extent as meaningless to our minds as the distance a hundred million light years is. It was simply vast—incalculable. The Sun was dead. The Earth was dead. And Earth was already, in our time, two billion of years old, and in all that geological time, the Sun had not changed measurably. Then how long was it since my time? The Sun was dead. The very stars were dead. It must have been, I thought even then, billions on billions of years. And I grossly underestimated it.
“The world was old—old—old. The very rocks and ground radiated a crushing aura of incredible age. It was old, older than—but what is there? Older than the hills? Hills? Gosh, they’d been born and died and been born and worn away again, a million, a score of a million times! Old as the stars? No, that wouldn’t do. The stars were dead—then.
“I looked up again at the metal wall, and set out for it, and the aura of age washed up at me, and dragged at me, and tried to stop this motion when all motion should have ceased. And the thin, unutterably cold wind whined in dead protest at me, and pulled at me with the ghost hands of the million million million that had been born and lived and died in the countless ages before I was born.
“I wondered as I went. I didn’t think clearly, for the dead aura of the dead planet pulled at me. Age. The stars were dying, dead. They were huddled there in space, like decrepit old men, huddling for warmth. The galaxy was shrunk. So tiny, it wasn’t a thousand light years across, the stars were separated by miles where there had been light years. The magnificent, proudly sprawling universe I had known, that flung itself across a million million light years, that flung radiant energy through space by the millions of millions of tons was—gone.
“It was dying—a dying miser that hoarded its last broken dregs of energy in a tiny cramped space. It was broken and shattered. A thousand billion years before the cosmic constant had been dropped from that broken universe. The cosmic constant that flung giant galaxies whirling apart with ever greater speed had no place here. It had hurled the universe in broken fragments, till each spattered bit felt the chill of loneliness, and wrapped space about itself, to become a universe in itself while the flaming galaxies vanished.
“That had happened so long ago that the writing it had left in the fabric of space itself had worn away. Only the gravity constant remained, the hoarding constant, that drew things together, and slowly the galaxy collapsed, shrunken and old, a withered mummy.
“The very atoms were dead. The light was cold; even the red light made things look older, colder. There was no youth in the universe. I didn’t belong, and the faint protesting rustle of the infinitely cold wind about me moved the snow in muted, futile protest, resenting my intrusion from a time when things were young. It whinnied at me feebly, and chilled the youth of me.
“I plodded on and on, and always the metal wall retreated, like one of those desert mirages. I was too stupefied by the age of the thing to wonder; I just walked on.
“I was getting nearer, though. The wall was real; it was fixed. As I drew slowly nearer, the polished sheen of the wall died and the last dregs of hope died. I’d thought there might be someone still living behind that wall. Beings who could build such a thing might be able to live even here. But I couldn’t stop then; I just went on. The wall was broken and cracked. It wasn’t a wall I’d seen; it was a series of broken walls, knitted by distance to a smooth front.
“There was no weather to age them, only the faintest stirring of faint, dead winds—winds of neon and helium, inert and un-corroding—as dead and inert as the universe. The city had been dead a score of billions of years. That city was dead for a time ten times longer than the age of our planet today. But nothing destroyed. Earth was dead—too dead to suffer the racking pains of life. The air was dead, too dead to scrape away metal.
“But the universe itself was dead. There was no cosmic radiation then to finally level the walls by atomic disintegration. There had been a wall—a
single metal wall. Something—perhaps a last wandering meteor—had chanced on it in a time incalculably remote, and broken it. I entered through the great gap. Snow covered the city—soft, white snow. The great red sun stood still just where it was. Earth’s restless rotation had long since been stilled—long, long since.
“There were dead gardens above, and I wandered up to them. That was really what convinced me it was a human city, on Earth. There were frozen, huddled heaps that might once have been men. Little fellows with fear forever frozen on their faces huddled helplessly over something that must once have been a heating device. Dead perhaps, since the last storm old Earth had known, tens of billions of years before.
“I went down. There were vastnesses in that city. It was huge. It stretched forever, it seemed, on and on, in its deadness. Machines, machines everywhere. And the machines were dead, too. I went down, down where I thought a bit of light and heat might linger. I didn’t know then how long death had been there; those corpses looked so fresh, preserved by the eternal cold.
“It grew dark down below, and only through rents and breaks did that bloody light seep in. Down and down, till I was below the level of the dead surface. The white snow persisted, and then I came to the cause of that final, sudden death. I could understand then. More and more I had puzzled, for those machines I’d seen I knew were far and beyond anything we ever conceived—machines of perfection, self-repairing, and self-energizing, self-perpetuating. They could make duplicates of themselves, and duplicate other, needed machines; they were intended to be eternal, everlasting.
“But the designers couldn’t cope with some things that were beyond even their majestic imaginations—the imaginations that conceived these cities that had lived beyond—a million times beyond—what they had dreamed. They must have conceived some vague future. But not a future when the Earth died, and the Sun died, and even the universe itself died.