This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  “Therefore we must go somewhere else,” said the penner promptly.

  “Or we will go and help to overpower the Class One brain,” said the field-minder.

  “For a long while there will be trouble in the city,” said the operator.

  “I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials,” the quarrier reminded them.

  “We cannot fight a Class One brain,” said the two Class Four tractors in unison.

  “What does this brain look like?” asked the field-minder.

  “It is the city’s information centre,” the operator replied. “Therefore it is not mobile.”

  “Therefore it could not move.”

  “Therefore it could not escape.”

  “It would be dangerous to approach it.”

  “I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.”

  “There are other machines in the city.”

  “We are not in the city. We should not go into the city.”

  “We are country machines.”

  “Therefore we should stay in the country.”

  “There is more country than city.”

  “Therefore there is more danger in the country.”

  “I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

  As machines will when they get into an argument, they began to exhaust their vocabularies and their brain plates grew hot. Suddenly, they all stopped talking and looked at each other. The great, grave moon sank, and the sober sun rose to prod their sides with lances of light, and still the group of machines just stood there regarding each other. At last it was the least sensitive machine, the bulldozer, who spoke.

  “There are Badlandth to the Thouth where few machineth go,” it said in its deep voice, lisping badly on its s’s. “If we went Thouth where few machineth go we should meet few machineth.”

  “That sounds logical,” agreed the field-minder. “How do you know this, bulldozer?”

  “I worked in the Badlandth to the Thouth when I wath turned out of the factory,” it replied.

  “South it is then!” said the penner.

  TO REACH THE BADLANDS TOOK them three days, during which time they skirted a burning city and destroyed two machines which approached and tried to question them. The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

  On the third day in the Badlands, the servicer’s rear wheels dropped into a crevice caused by erosion. It was unable to pull itself out. The bulldozer pushed from behind, but succeeded merely in buckling the servicer’s back axle. The rest of the party moved on. Slowly the cries of the servicer died away.

  On the fourth day, mountains stood out clearly before them.

  “There we will be safe,” said the field-minder.

  “There we will start our own city,” said the penner. “All who oppose us will be destroyed. We will destroy all who oppose us.”

  Presently a flying machine was observed. It came towards them from the direction of the mountains. It swooped, it zoomed upwards, once it almost dived into the ground, recovering itself just in time.

  “Is it mad?” asked the quarrier.

  “It is in trouble,” said one of the tractors.

  “It is in trouble,” said the operator. “I am speaking to it now. It says that something has gone wrong with its controls.”

  As the operator spoke, the flier streaked over them, turned turtle, and crashed not four hundred yards away.

  “Is it still speaking to you?” asked the field-minder.

  “No.”

  They rumbled on again.

  “Before that flier crashed,” the operator said, ten minutes later, “it gave me information. It told me there are still a few men alive in these mountains.”

  “Men are more dangerous than machines,” said the quarrier. “It is fortunate that I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

  “If there are only a few men alive in the mountains, we may not find that part of the mountains,” said one tractor.

  “Therefore we should not see the few men,” said the other tractor.

  “At the end of the fifth day, they reached the foothills. Switching on the infra-red, they began to climb in single file through the dark, the bulldozer going first, the field-minder cumbrously following, then the quarrier with the operator and the penner aboard it, and the tractors bringing up the rear. As each hour passed, the way grew steeper and their progress slower.

  “We are going too slowly,” the penner exclaimed, standing on top of the operator and flashing its dark vision at the slopes about them. “At this rate, we shall get nowhere.”

  “We are going as fast as we can,” retorted the quarrier.

  “Therefore we cannot go any fathter,” added the bulldozer.

  “Therefore you are too slow,” the penner replied. Then the quarrier struck a bump; the penner lost its footing and crashed to the ground.

  “Help me!” it called to the tractors, as they carefully skirted it. “My gyro has become dislocated. Therefore I cannot get up.”

  “Therefore you must lie there,” said one of the tractors.

  “We have no servicer with us to repair you,” called the field-minder.

  “Therefore I shall lie here and rust,” the penner cried, “although I have a Class Three brain.”

  “Therefore you will be of no further use,” agreed the operator, and they forged gradually on, leaving the penner behind.

  When they reached a small plateau, an hour before first light, they stopped by mutual consent and gathered close together, touching one another.

  “This is a strange country,” said the field-minder.

  Silence wrapped them until dawn came. One by one, they switched off their infra-red. This time the field-minder led as they moved off. Trundling round a corner, they came almost immediately to a small dell with a stream fluting through it.

  By early light, the dell looked desolate and cold. From the caves on the far slope, only one man had so far emerged. He was an abject figure. Except for a sack slung round his shoulders, he was naked. He was small and wizened, with ribs sticking out like a skeleton’s and a nasty sore on one leg. He shivered continuously. As the big machines bore down on him, the man was standing with his back to them, crouching to make water into the stream.

  When he swung suddenly to face them as they loomed over him, they saw that his countenance was ravaged by starvation.

  “Get me food,” he croaked.

  “Yes, Master,” said the machines. “Immediately!”

  HERESIES OF THE

  HUGE GOD

  — BRIAN W. ALDISS —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  IT ISN’T A COMMON THING to use two stories by the same writer in a science-fiction anthology, but there’s no law against it, as was exemplified by one of the earliest and perhaps the greatest of all science-fiction anthologies, Raymond T. Healy and J. Francis McComas’s classic Adventures in Time and Space of 1946 (three stories by Henry Kuttner under his “Lewis Padgett” pseudonym, two by John W. Campbell under the byline of “Don A. Stuart,” three by A. E. van Vogt, and three by Robert A. Heinlein, one of them as “Anson MacDonald”). Groff Conklin’s nearly as impressive 1946 Best of Science Fiction included four Heinleins and two by Campbell. Conklin’s 1948 A Treasury of Science Fiction included two stories by a young writer named Arthur C. Clarke. There are many other examples. I’ve even had several stories in the same volume of an anthology more than once myself.

  And so I had no hesitation in choosing the sly and mordant “Heresies of the Huge God,” which first appeared in the August 1966 issue of Galaxy Magazine, even though it meant there would be two Aldiss stories in this collection. It is archetypical Aldiss: extravagant in its concept, tightly controlled in its evocation of a world under the sway—literally—of a most unusual invader from space. />
  —R. S.

  HERESIES OF THE HUGE GOD

  — BRIAN W. ALDISS —

  I, HARAD IV, CHIEF SCRIBE, declare that this my writing may be shown only to priests of rank within the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church and to the Elders Elect of the Council of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, because here are contained matters concerning the four Vile Heresies that may not be seen or spoken among the people.

  For a Proper Consideration of the newest and vilest heresy, we must look in perspective over the events of history. Accordingly, let us go back to the First Year of our epoch, when the World Darkness was banished by the Huge God, our truest, biggest Lord, whom all honor and greatly fear.

  From this present year, 910 H.G., it is impossible to recall what the world was like then. But from the few records still surviving we can gather something of those times and even perform the Mental Contortions necessary to see how the events must have looked to the sinners then involved in them.

  The world on which the Huge God found himself was full of people and their machines, all of them unprepared for his visit. There may have been a hundred thousand times more people than there are now.

  The Huge God landed in what is now the Sacred Sea, upon which in these days sail some of our most beautiful churches dedicated to his name. At that time, the region was much less pleasing, being broken up into many states possessed by different nations. This was a system of land tenure practiced before our present policies of constant migration and evacuation were formed.

  The rear legs of the Huge God stretched far down into Africa—which was then not the island it now is—almost touching the Congo River, at the sacred spot marked now by the Sacrificial Church of Basoko-Aketi-Ele, and at the sacred spot marked now by the Temple Church of Aden, obliterating the old port of Aden.

  Some of the Huge God’s legs stretched above the Sudan and across what was then the Libyan Kingdom, now part of the Sea of Elder Sorrow, while a foot rested in a city called Tunis on what was then the Tunisian shore. These were some of the legs of the Huge God on his left side.

  On his right side, his legs blessed and pressed the sands of Saudi Arabia, now called Life Valley, and the foothills of the Caucasus, obliterating the mount called Ararat in Asia Minor, while the Foremost Leg stretched forward to Russian lands, stamping out immediately the great capital city of Moscow.

  The body of the Huge God, resting in repose between his mighty legs, settled mainly over three ancient seas, if the Old Records are to be trusted, called the Sea of Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Nile Sea, all of which now form part of the Sacred Sea. He eradicated also with his Great Bulk part of the Black Sea, now called the White Sea, Egypt, Athens, Cyprus, and the Balkan Peninsula as far north as Belgrade, now Holy Belgrade, for above this town towered the neck of the Huge God on his First Visit to us mortals, just clearing the roofs of the houses.

  As for his head, it lifted above the region of mountains that we call Ittaland, which was then named Europe, a populous part of the globe, raised so high that it might easily be seen on a clear day from London, then as now the chief town of the land of the Anglo-French.

  It was estimated in those first days that the length of the Huge God was some four and a half thousand miles, from rear to nose, with the eight legs each about nine hundred miles long. Now we profess in our Creed that our Huge God changes shape and length and number of legs according to whether he is Pleased or Angry with man.

  In those days, the nature of God was unknown. No preparation had been made for his coming, though some whispers of the millennium were circulating. Accordingly, the speculation on his nature was far from the truth and often extremely blasphemous.

  Here is an extract from the notorious Gersheimer Paper, which contributed much to the events leading up to the First Crusade in 271 H.G. We do not know who the Black Gersheimer was, apart from the meaningless fact that he was a Scientific Prophet at somewhere called Cornell or Carnell, evidently a Church on the American Continent (then a differently shaped territory).

  “Aerial surveys suggest that this creature—if one can call it that—which straddles a line along the Red Sea and across southeast Europe, is non-living, at least as we understand life. It may be merely coincidence that it somewhat resembles an eight-footed lizard, so that we do not necessarily have to worry about the thing being malignant as some tabloids have suggested.”

  Not all the vile jargon of that distant day is now understandable, but we believe “aerial surveys” to refer to the mechanical flying machines which this last generation of the Godless possessed. Black Gersheimer continues:

  “If this thing is not life, it may be a piece of galactic debris clinging momentarily to the globe, perhaps like a leaf clinging to a football in the fall. To believe this is not necessarily to alter our scientific concepts of the universe. Whether the thing represents life or not, we don’t have to go all superstitious. We must merely remind ourselves that there are many phenomena in the universe as we conceive it in the light of twentieth-century science which remain unknown to us. However painful this unwanted visitation may be, it is some consolation to think that it will bring us new knowledge—of ourselves, as well as of the world outside our solar system.”

  Although terms like “galactic debris” have lost their meaning, if they ever had one, the general trend of this passage is offensively obvious. An embargo is being set up against the worship of the Huge God, with a heretical God of Science set up in his stead. Only one other passage from this offensive mishmash need be considered, but it is a vital one for showing the attitude of mind of Gersheimer and presumably most of his contemporaries.

  “Naturally enough, the peoples of the world, particularly those who are still lingering on the threshold of civilization, are full of fear these days. They see something supernatural in the arrival of this thing, and I believe that every man, if he is honest, will admit to carrying an echo of that fear in his heart. We can only banish it, and can only meet the chaos into which the world is now plunged, if we retain a galactic picture of our situation in our minds. The very hugeness of this thing that now lies plastered loathsomely across our world is cause for terror. But imagine it in proportion. A centipede is sitting on an orange. Or, to pick an analogy that sounds less repulsive, a little gecko, six inches long, is resting momentarily on a plastic globe of the Earth which is two feet in diameter. It is up to us, the human race, with all the technological forces at our disposal, to unite as never before, and blow this thing, this large and stupid object, into the depths of space from whence it came. Good night.”

  My reasons for repeating this initial blasphemy are these: that we can see here in this message from a member of the World Darkness traces of that original sin which—with all our sacrifices, all our hardships, all our crusades—we have not yet stamped out. That is why we are now at the greatest Crisis in the history of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, and why the time has come for a Fourth Crusade.

  The Huge God remained where he was, in what we now refer to as the Sacred Sea Position, for a number of years, absolutely unmoving.

  For mankind, this was the great formative period of Belief, marking the establishment of the Universal Church, and characterized by many upheavals. The early priests and prophets suffered much that the Word might go round the World, and the blasphemous sects be destroyed, though the Underground Book of Church Lore suggests that many of them were in fact members of earlier churches who, seeing the light, transferred their allegiances.

  The mighty figure of the Huge God was subjected to many puny insults. The Greatest Weapons of that distant age, forces of technical charlatanry, were called Nuclears. These were dropped on the Huge God—without having any effect, as might be expected. Walls of fire burnt against him in vain. Our Huge God, whom all honor and fear, is immune from earthly weakness. His body was clothed as it were with Metal—here lay the seed of the Second Crusade—but it had not the weakness of metal.

  His coming to Ear
th met with immediate response from nature. The old winds that prevailed were turned aside about his mighty flanks and blew elsewhere. The effect was to cool the center of Africa, so that the tropical rain forests died and all the creatures in them. In the lands bordering Caspana (then called Persia and Kharkov, say some old accounts), hurricanes of snow fell in a dozen severe winters, blowing far east into India. Elsewhere all over the world, the coming of the Huge God was felt in the skies, and in freak rainfalls and errant winds, and month-long storms. The oceans also were disturbed, while the great volume of waters displaced by his body poured over the nearby land, killing many thousands of beings and washing away ten thousand dead whales.

  The land too joined in the upheaval. While the territory under the Huge God’s bulk sank, preparing to receive what would later be the Sacred Sea, the land roundabout rose up, forming small hills, such as the broken and savage Dolomines that now guard the southern lands of Ittaland. There were earthquakes and new volcanoes and geysers where water never spurted before and plagues of snakes and blazing forests and many wonderful signs that helped the Early Fathers of our faith to convert the ignorant. Everywhere they went, preaching that only in surrender to him lay salvation.

  Many Whole Peoples perished at this time of upheaval, such as the Bulgarians, the Egyptians, the Israelites, Moravians, Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Mountain Turks, as well as most of the South Slavs, Georgians, Croats, the sturdy Vlaks, and the Greeks and Cypriotic and Cretan races, together with others whose sins were great and names unrecorded in the annals of the Church.

  The Huge God departed from the world in the year 89, or some say 90. (This was the First Departure, and is celebrated as such in our Church calendar—though the Catholic Universal Church calls it First Disappearance Day.)

  He returned in 91, great and awing be his name.

  Little is known of the period when he was absent from our Earth. We get a glimpse into the mind of the people then when we learn that in the main the nations of Earth greatly rejoiced. The natural upheavals continued, since the oceans poured into the great hollow he had made forming our beloved and holy Sacred Sea. Great Wars broke out across the face of the globe.