To Outlive Eternity

by Poul Anderson

  "No hope if we do that either," said Hollister. "I'd rather take my chances back on Earth; they can't do worse there than treat my mind."

  "Are you still keeping up that farce?" inquired Karsov. But he wasn't sure of himself, that was plain. He couldn't understand how an Un-man could have gotten past his quiz. Hollister had no intention of enlightening him.

  "What have you got to lose by letting us go?" asked the Earthman. "So we tell a horror story back home. People there already know you rule with a rough hand."

  "I am not going to release you," said Karsov. "You are finished. That second party of yours will not last long, even if they make it outside as I suppose they intend—they will suffocate. I am going to call the spaceship captain on the emergency circuit and explain there is a fight going on and he had better recall his boat. That should settle the matter; if not, the boat will be shot down. As for your group, there will be sleep gas before long."

  "I'll blow my brains out before I let you take me," said Hollister sullenly.

  "That might save a lot of trouble," said Karsov. He turned and walked away. Hollister was tempted to kill him, but decided to save that pleasure for a while. No use goading the police into a possible use of high explosives.

  He went back to the shack and called the Evening Star again. "Hello, Captain Brackney? U.N.I. speaking. The bosses down here are going to radio you with a pack of lies. Pretend to believe them and say you'll recall your ferry. Remember, they think just one is coming down. Then—" He continued his orders.

  "That's murder!" said the captain. "Pilot One won't have a chance—"

  "Yes, he will. Call him now, use spacer code; I don't think any of these birds know it, if they should overhear you. Tell him to have his spacesuit on and be ready for a crash landing, followed by a dash to the second boat."

  "It's still a long chance."

  "What do you think I'm taking? These are U.N.I. orders, Captain. I'm boss till we get back to earth, if I live so long. All right, got everything? Then I'll continue recording."

  After a while he caught the first whiff and said into the mike: "The gas is coming now. I'll have to close my helmet. Hollister signing off."

  His men and the technies slapped down their cover. It would be peaceful here for a little time, with this sector sealed off while gas poured through its ventilators. Hollister tried to grin reassuringly, but it didn't come off.

  "Last round," he said. "Half of us, the smallest ones, are going to go to sleep now. The rest will use their oxygen, and carry them outside when we go."

  Someone protested. Hollister roared him down. "Not another word! This is the only chance for all of us. No man has oxygen for much more than an hour; we have at least an hour and a half to wait. How else can we do it?"

  They submitted unwillingly, and struggled against the anaesthetic as long as they could. Hollister took one of the dead men's bottles to replace the first of his that gave out. His band was now composed of three sleeping men and three conscious but exhausted.

  He was hoping the cops wouldn't assault them quickly. Probably not; they would be rallying outside, preparing to meet the ferry with a mobile cannon if it should decide to land after all. The rebels trapped in here would keep.

  The minutes dragged by. A man at the point of death was supposed to review his whole life, but Hollister didn't feel up to it. He was too tired. He sat watching the telescreen which showed the space field. Dust and wind and the skeleton cradles, emptiness, and a roiling gloom beyond.

  One of the wakeful men, a convict, spoke into the helmet circuit: "So you are U.N.I. Has all this been just to get you back to Earth?"

  "To get my report back," said Hollister.

  "There are many dead," said one of the Latins, in English. "You have sacrificed us, played us like pawns, no? What of those two we left back at Last Chance?"

  "I'm afraid they're doomed," said Hollister tonelessly, and the guilt which is always inherent in leadership was heavy on him.

  "It was worth it," said the convict. "If you can smash this rotten system, it was well worth it." His eyes were haunted. They would always be haunted.

  "Better not talk," said Hollister. "Save your oxygen."

  One hour. The pips on the radarscopes were high and strong now. The spaceboats weren't bothering with atmospheric braking, they were spending fuel to come almost straight down.

  One hour and ten minutes. Was Barbara still alive?

  One hour and twenty minutes.

  One hour and thirty minutes. Any instant—

  "There, señor! There!"

  Hollister jumped to his feet. Up in a corner of the screen, a white wash of fire—here she came!

  The ferry jetted slowly groundward, throwing up a blast of dust as her fierce blasts tore at the field. Now and then she wobbled, caught by the high wind, but she had been built for just these conditions. Close, close—were they going to let her land after all? Yes, now she was entering the cradle, now the rockets were still.

  A shellburst struck her hull amidships and burst it open. The police were cautious, they hadn't risked spilling her nuclear engine and its radioactivity on the field. She rocked in the cradle. Hollister hoped the crash-braced pilot had survived. And he hoped the second man was skillful and had been told exactly what to do.

  That ferry lanced out of the clouds, descending fast. She wasn't very maneuverable, but the pilot rode her like a horseman, urging, pleading, whipping and spurring when he had to. She slewed around and fell into a shaky curve out of screen range.

  If the gods were good, her blast had incinerated the murderers of the first boat.

  She came back into sight, fighting for control. Hollister howled. "Guide her into a cradle!" He waved his gun at the seated technics. "Guide her safely in if you want to live!"

  She was down.

  Tiny figures were running toward her heedless of earth still smoking underfoot. Three of them veered and approached the radio shack. "O.K.!" rapped Hollister. "Back into the corridor!" He dragged one of the unconscious men himself; stooping, he sealed the fellow's suit against the poison gases outside. There would be enough air within it to last a sleeper a few minutes.

  Concussion smashed at him. He saw shards of glass and wire flying out the door and ricocheting nastily about his head. Then the yell of Venus' wind came to him. He bent and picked up his man. "Let's go!"

  They scrambled through the broken wall and out onto the field. The wind was at their backs, helping them for once. One of the dynamiters moved up alongside Hollister. He saw Barbara's face, dim behind the helmet.

  When he reached the ferry, the others were loading the last boxes of food. A figure in space armor was clumping unsteadily toward them from the wrecked boat. Maybe their luck had turned. Sweeping the field with his eyes, Hollister saw only ruin. There were still surviving police, but they were inside the city and it would take minutes for them to get out again.

  He counted the men with him and estimated the number of food boxes. Fifteen all told, including his two erstwhile captives—Barbara's party must have met opposition—but she still lived, God be praised! There were supplies enough, it would be a hungry trip home but they'd make it.

  Fernandez peered out of the air lock. "Ready," he announced. "Come aboard. We have no seats, so we must rise at low acceleration, but the pilot says there is fuel to spare."

  Hollister helped Barbara up the ladder and into the boat. "I hope you'll like Earth," he said awkwardly.

  "I know I will—with you there," she told him.

  Hollister looked through the closing air lock at the desolation which was Venus. Some day it would bloom, but—

  "We'll come back," he said.

  AFTER DOOMSDAY

  I

  For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

  —Ecclesiastes, ix, 12

  "Earth is dead.
They murdered our Earth!"

  Carl Donnan didn't answer at once. He remained standing by the viewport, his back to the others. Dimly he was aware of Goldspring's voice as it rose toward a scream, broke off, and turned into the hoarse belly-deep sobs of a man not used to tears. He heard Goldspring stumble across the deck before he said, flat and empty:

  "Who are 'they'?"

  But the footfalls had already gone out the door. Once or twice in the passageway beyond, Goldspring evidently hit a bulkhead, rebounded and lurched on. Eventually he would reach the stern, Donnan thought, and what then? Where then could he run to?

  No one else made a sound. The ship hummed and whispered, air renewers, ventilators, thermostats, electric generators, weight maintainers, the instruments that were her senses and the nuclear converter that was her heart. But the noise was no louder in Donnan's ears than his own pulse. Nor any more meaningful, now. The universe is mostly silence.

  There was noise aplenty on Earth, he thought. Rumble and bellow as the crust shook, as mountains broke open and newborn volcanoes spat fire at the sky. Seethe and hiss as the oceans cooled back down from boiling. Shriek and skirl as winds went scouring across black stone continents which had lately run molten, as ash and smoke and acid rain flew beneath sulfurous clouds. Crack and boom as lightning split heaven and turned the night briefly vivid, so that every upthrust crag was etched against the horizon. But there was no one to hear. The cities were engulfed, the ships were sunk, the human race dissolved in lava.

  And so were the trees, he thought, staring at that crescent which hung gray and black and visibly roiling against the stars; so were grass in summer and a shout of holly berries in snow, deer in the uplands of his boyhood, a whale he once saw splendidly broaching in a South Pacific dawn, and the beanflower's boon, and the blackbird's tune, and May, and June. He turned back to the others.

  Bowman, the executive officer, had laid himself on the deck, drawn up his knees and covered his face. Kunz the astronomer and Easterling the planetographer were still hunched over their instruments, as if they would find some misfunction that would give the lie to what they could see with unaided eyes. Captain Strathey had not yet looked away from the ruin of Earth. He stood with more-than-Annapolis straightness and the long handsome countenance was as drained of expression as it was of color.

  "Captain," Donnan made himself say. "Captain, sir—" He waited. The silence returned. Strathey had not moved.

  "Judas in hell!" Donnan exploded. "Your eyeballs gone into orbit around that thing out there?" He made three strides across the bridge, clapped a hand on Strathey's shoulder and spun him around. "Cut that out!"

  Strathey's gaze drifted back toward the viewscreen. Donnan slapped him, a pistol noise at which Kunz started and began to weep.

  "Look here," Donnan said between his teeth, "men in the observatory satellites, in the Moon bases, in clear space, wouldn't'a been touched. We've got to raise them. Find out what happened and—and begin again, God damn us." His tone wobbled. He swore at himself for it. "Bowman! Get on the radio!"

  Strathey stirred. His lips went rigid, and he said in almost his old manner, "I am still the master of this ship, Mr. Donnan."

  "Good. I thought that'd fetch you." Donnan let him go and fumbled after pipe and tobacco. His hands began to shake so badly that he couldn't get the stuff out of his pockets.

  "I—" Strathey squeezed his eyes shut and knuckled his forehead. "A radio signal might attract . . . whoever is responsible." The tall blue-jacketed body straightened again. "We may have to risk it later. But for the present we'll maintain strict radio silence. Mr. Kunz, kindly make a telescopic search for Earth satellites and have a look at the Moon. Mr. Bowman—Bowman!—prepare to move ship. Until we know better what's afoot, I don't want to stay in an obvious orbit." He blinked with sudden awareness. "You, Mr. Donnan. You're not supposed to be here."

  "I was close by, fetching some stuff," the engineer explained. "I overheard you as you checked the date." He paused. "I'm afraid everybody knows by now. Best order the men to emergency stations. If I may make a suggestion, that is. And if you'll authorize me to take whatever measures may be needed to restore order, I'll see to that for you."

  Strathey stared at him for a while. "Very good," he said, with a jerky sort of nod. "Carry on."

  Donnan left the bridge. Something to do, he thought, someone to browbeat, anything so as to get over these shakes. Relax, son, he told himself. The game's not necessarily over.

  Is it worth playing further, though?

  By God, yes. As long as one man is alive and prepared to kick back, it is. He hurried down the passageway with the slightly rolling gait that remained to him of his years at sea: a stocky, square-shouldered man of medium height in his mid-thirties, sandy-haired, gray-eyed, his face broad and blunt and weathered. He wore the blue zipsuit chosen for comfort as well as practicality by most of the Franklin's crew, but a battered old R.A.F. beret slanted athwart his brow.

  Other men appeared here and there in the corridor, and now he could hear the buzz of them, like an upset beehive, up and down the ship's length—three hundred men, three years gone, who had come back to find the Earth murdered.

  Not just their own homes, or their cities, or the United States of America. Earth. Donnan checked himself from dwelling on the distinction. Too much else to do. He entered his cabin, loaded his gun and holstered it. The worn butt fitted his palm comfortably; he had found use for this Mauser in a lot of places. But today it was only a badge, of course. He could not shoot perhaps one three-hundredth of the human species. He opened a drawer, regarded the contents thoughtfully, and took out a little cylinder of iron. Clasped in his fist, it would add power to a blow, without giving too much. He dropped it in a pocket. In his days on the bum, when he worked for this or that cheap restaurant and expected trouble, the stunt had been to grab a roll of nickels.

  He went out again. A man came past, one of the civilian scientists. His mouth gaped as he walked. Donnan stepped in front of him. "Where are you going, Wright?" he asked mildly. "Didn't you hear the hooter?"

  "Earth," Wright cried from jaws stretched open. "The Earth's been destroyed. I saw. In a viewscreen. All black and smoking. Dead as the Moon!"

  "Which does not change the fact that your emergency station is back that-a-way. Come on, now, march. We can talk this over later on."

  "You don't understand! I had a wife and three children there. I've got to know—Let me by, you bastard!"

  Donnan put him on the deck with a standard devil's handshake, helped him up, and dusted him off. "Be some use to what's left of the human race, Wright. It was your family's race too." The scientist moved away, quaking but headed in the proper direction.

  A younger man had stopped to watch. He spat on the deck. "What human race?" he said. "Three hundred males?"

  The siren cut loose again, insanely.

  "Maybe not," Donnan answered. "We don't know yet. There were women in space as well as men. Get on with your job, son."

  He made his way aft, arguing, cajoling, once or twice striking. Strathey told him over the intercom that the other decks were under control. Not that there had been much trouble. Most personnel had gone to their posts as directed . . . the way Donnan had seen cattle go down a stockyard chute. A working minority still put some snap into their movements. He might have been astonished, in some cases, at what people fitted which category—big Yule, for instance, who had saved three men's lives when the storm broke loose on Ubal, or whatever the heathenish name of that planet had been, now uselessly wailing, and mild little Murdoch the linguist locating someone else to man Yule's torpedo tube—but Donnan had knocked around too much in his day to be surprised at anything people did.

  When he felt the quiver and heard the low roar as the U.S.S. Benjamin Franklin got under way, he hesitated. His own official post was with his instruments, at the No. 4 locker. But—

  There was little sense of motion. The paragravitic drive maintained identical pseudo-weight inboard,
whether the ship was in free fall or under ten gravities' acceleration . . . or riding the standing waves of space at superlight quasi-speed, for that matter. Everything seemed in order. Too much so, even. Donnan preferred more flexibility in a crew. With sudden decision, he turned on his heel and went down the nearest companionway.

  Ramri of Monwaing's Katkinu rated a suite in officer country, though much of this was devoted to storage of the special foods which he required and which he preferred to cook for himself. Donnan tried the door. It opened. He stepped through, closed and latched it behind him, and said, "You bloody fool."

  The being who sat in a spidery aluminum framework rose with habitual gracefulness. Puzzlement blurred, for a moment, the distress in the great golden eyes. "What is the complaint, Carl-my-friend?" he trilled. His accent was indescribable, but made English a sound of beauty.