by Jack Dann
"What's the catch?" asked the man.
"None whatever. You've solved a problem of great weight for me."
"I'm not going to have to kill a man, am I?"
"No, no! What's your name, man?"
"Bumppo," he said.
"Well, Bumppo, make this shot, you have all I named before and free hunting on my land besides, in perpetuity. What say?"
"But, sir—" said McCartney.
"Untie the man, McCartney," said Sir Robert, "so he can shake hands on the deal." Then he danced a little jig on the edge of the road.
The ropes came off. Humbly, Bumppo shook Sir Robert's hand.
They set up the apparatus for the Great Experiment in a field near the woods two miles from the house. It was a quarter mile from an old Indian mound which Sir Robert thought would serve as an excellent vantage point for the spectators.
The experiment had many stops, all leading to the great glass globe which was at the center of the setup. It was surrounded by charcoal buckets, basins and jars. Over all they had erected canvas to protect it from the elements.
The invitations had been posted for the morning of the twenty-first, weather permitting.
On the afternoon of the nineteenth, they were linking the last of the equipment in place. There came to them a far-off noise, like low thunder or fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Sir Robert came out from under a basin he was installing. "What's that?"
Hampton turned to the south, from where the noise rose.
He smiled. "Pigeons," he said.
The rumble heightened like a great wind from a storm.
"Here they come," said Hamp.
To the south was a ragged blot on the horizon which wound in on itself, then spread.
"Pigeons?" asked Curwell, his face covered with soot from a charcoal bucket. "That noise?"
He stood beside the black man, who pointed.
"Passenger pigeons," he said. "Coming north again to nest. This time every year."
The line covered a quarter of the southern horizon. The sound was like a droning flutter, and the shape moved toward them with the inexorability of the rising tide. It seemed a solid mass which only resolved itself as they drew near the zenith.
They were brown and blue specks which flashed pink. They were packed more densely than Curwell had ever seen birds, ten or twenty sleek shapes to the cubic yard. They flew in a column thirty feet thick and two miles wide and—Curwell tried to count. "What's their rate of flight?"
"A mile to the minute," said Hamp, who watched a hawk diving at one of the edges of the flock. Where the predator flew the pigeons eddied and swirled, but still the column came on.
Curwell looked at his watch. The sun was blotted out as the pigeons passed over, and the fluttering roar was omnipresent.
"Under the awning!" said Hamp, and pulled Curwell back. White flashes like snow, and occasional feathers began to drift down. Passenger pigeon excrement dotted the ground in spots, then more, and fell like a gentle white rain.
Through the flutter of wings, shots could be heard from the neighboring estates. Curwell saw great clumps of pigeons drop a mile away on a surrounding farm.
Then one fell a few feet outside the canvas, struggled and lay still. It must have been hit some distance away and flown this far.
Curwell ran out, picked it up and brought it inside the tent.
It was the most beautiful bird he had ever seen, even in death. Its back was blue, its neck and stomach bronze, its chest pink and dull red, with an iridescent sheen to all the feathers. Its beak was dark, and its legs, feet and eyes were a brilliant orange-red. He placed it on the bench and examined it minutely.
Still the fluttering roared overhead, and the ground was as white as in a snow flurry. The sky outside was an interrupted play of darkness and light where the cloud of birds went in transit across the sun.
Curwell went back to work in the artificial gloom, occasionally looking out to make sure the flock was still traveling. Gunshots came more frequently from the nearby roads and fields.
Sometime later, the sound subsided. Curwell came out of the tent in time to see the last of the flock rocket overhead. The late evening sun began to shine again.
He looked at his watch. Two hours and forty minutes had elapsed. The column had been one hundred and sixty miles long. At ten birds to the yard, ten yards thick, 1,700 yards to the mile, two miles wide . . .
Sir Robert looked at Curwell. "About sixteen million birds, I'd say."
"I've seen more," said Hamp. "When I was a boy I saw a flock that took from noon to dusk to pass. It got dark at midday, and we never saw the sun go down. We had only morning that day." He pounded a copper pipe in place with a maul. He stopped to look at the encrusted ground for a moment.
Then they all went back to work.
All was in readiness.
The spectators, scientific men for the most part, had begun arriving in the early hours of the morn. Dawn was approaching. Then men on the Indian mound waited while Curwell, Hampton and Sir Robert Athole walked up the intervening field from the apparatus, which looked to be a jumble of metal and glass to the unaided eye at this distance.
Bumppo stood well back from the others. McCartney kept an eye on him. The leather-clad man was testing the feel of his new Philadelphia rifle, swinging it up and down from his shoulder.
Sir Robert came to the top of the mound and stood beside Lady Margurite.
"Gentlemen," he said. "Lady. Others."
"You are here to witness what I hope is a grand event in scientific progress. On yonder field," he pointed, "are working apparatus for the generation of gases and airs—of dephlogisticated, or eminently respirable, air; of flammable gas, of sulfur air, of phosphorus. They are all working and generating as we stand here, and shall be in fruition soon.
"They enter into conduits taken to the glass globe which you see at the center. They will enter the glass when Mr. Bumppo . . ." Here Bumppo held up his hand shyly, and a ragged cheer went up from the spectators, ". . . fires at his target disk. These phlogiston-rich gases and liquids will rush together. They should produce the essence of fire, of combustion, of calcination viz. phlogiston itself. A clockwork will then be put in motion, and fifteen seconds later, the mixture will be sparked by means of a circuit from a Leyden jar. This should fix the phlogiston itself, much as common air becomes fixed air in the presence of the electric principle, and allow us the examination for the first time, of one of the principles, of one of the elements itself.
"That is my Great Experiment."
Some applauded.
"Question?"
"Yes?"
"You're mixing inflammable air, dephlogisticated air and phosphorus in the presence of common air, and sparking it?"
"That is my plan."
"Then what you'll get," said the voice, after a moment's reckoning, "is a gentle explosion, a small quantity of fixed air, and a small field fire to fight."
Some laughed.
"I doubt that," said Sir Robert Athole. "I have taken the precaution of removing us to this distance in case of some apparatus failure, and the leakage of noxious fumes."
The sun topped the small ridge to the east, and the field and mound were bathed in a frosty light.
"Win or lose," said Sir Robert, "I feel on the edge of great things."
"And I," said Curwell.
"I, too," said Lady Margurite, and took her husband's hand.
"Mr. Bumppo," said Sir Robert. "You see your target?"
"That I do," said Bumppo.
"Then earn your crown, man!"
The leather-clad man stepped to the front of the mound. Smoothly he raised the weapon as if it were part of him, pulled back the dog-ear hammer, aimed and fired.
The smoke from the muzzle wafted away.
Even without his spyglass, Sir Robert saw the great globe turn milky white. But it was not the milk-white of residue gases. It roiled and swirled slowly. An "ooh" went up from the small crowd. Winks of lig
ht seemed to play across the equipment from the globe. All the apparatus was bathed in a white light.
Sir Robert felt the muscles of his stomach twitch.
For the requisite few more seconds, nothing happened.
Then it did.
Shaken and dazed, Sir Robert pulled himself from the ground in the blinding light. He was near the bottom of the mound. Some of the others were getting up as well as they could. One man lay with a branch through his chest. A few lay unmarked but unmoving. Hampton, near him, held his arm crookedly the wrong way.
There was a roaring in their ears, and it did not subside. Sir Robert stumbled back to the top of the mound, shielding his eyes.
To the west was a great roiling white cloud, too bright to be looked at directly. Bright blooms and bursts of light flew out from it like those from a pan of burning phosphorus. Sir Robert could tell that it was moving slowly away from him to the westward.
He turned. The cloud stretched to north and south, horizon to horizon, moving laterally to its progress westward. Ribbons of red flame shot through the bright white wall.
The smell of burnt wood permeated all the air. As the cloud moved away, it continued to grow in height.
The wind rose from the east, first gently, then in gusts, then faster and faster. The earth to the west was charred to the surface. Matchstick trees poked up. As Sir Robert watched, a puff of wind blew them to ash before his eyes.
The numbed scientists were milling around behind the mound. The wind rose to gale force.
"It's moving west with the rotation of the earth," said Hampton Hamilton. He knew, as did any schoolboy, that the air moves with the surface under it falling behind, from whence rise winds.
Sir Robert turned to see Curwell helping Lady Margurite up. They both seemed safe, though Lady Margurite's skirts flapped immodestly in the racking wind. Sir Robert noticed his wig was gone as he saw Hamp's wig blow off and be lost in the western distance toward the bright cloud. They climbed down the Indian mound against the force of the wind.
"How long will it burn?" asked Curwell.
"I have no idea," said Sir Robert. "It was not supposed to burn at all. It was supposed to fix in the globe. I just don't understand."
"It may burn until it reaches the Western Ocean," said Hampton, and he had voiced all their fears.
"Surely, surely not," said Athole, yelling to be heard above the wind.
"But you must have succeeded," said someone else. "You must have released all the phlogiston in the mixed matter. There's no telling what will happen with it. It could burn that far!"
"Then the water will put it out. The water!" said Sir Robert. He felt a spasm go through him and he lost consciousness.
He awakened with smoke and the smell of soot in his nostrils. The light outside was murky. A wind whistled around the rafters outside the house, but it was no longer the gale it had been. A brown darkness of smoke lapped against the windows.
He sat up on the couch where they had lain him.
Lady Margurite was crying on the sofa opposite.
"Everything to the west is gone, Robert," she said quietly when she saw him rouse.
"Everything?"
"As far as a horse and man can ride, before it becomes too hot to continue. And that was hours ago, when the scout from the township came back from his reconnoiter."
"The barometer," said Lawrence Curwell, tapping the great Dresden instrument atop the mantlepiece. "The barometer has dropped a full six inches since this morning, and is still falling."
"Oh, great Jehovah!" said Sir Robert. "What have I done?"
"Nothing any of us wouldn't have done," said Hampton Hamilton tiredly from another chair. "It only seems you succeeded much better than you had planned."
"Why didn't you stop me?"
"I don't know" said Hampton. "I doubt you would have slopped me."
"What time is it?"
"A little after five."
"We'll know in fourteen hours, then," said Curwell. He continued to stare at the barometer, as if to drag secrets from it.
They tried to eat after darkness fell, but no one was hungry. Tins of molasses had begun to pop their lids in the pantry. Sir Robert imagined it was harder to breathe, but knew better.
They sat in the parlor until no one could stand the waiting and the heat any longer.
"Damn it!" Sir Robert jumped to his feet. "If it's going to happen, I want to look it in the face. We'll go to the ocean."
They looked at him a moment, then climbed from their chairs. It was better than waiting here, where each ticking of the clock sounded loud as a carpenter's hammer to them.
The wagon bounced on the rutted road. The horse labored.
Sir Robert drove in front with Hampton; Curwell and Lady Margurite were in back with a picnic basket and blankets.
It was nearing midnight. The air was filled with the odors of burning—of a thousand things, burnt wood, grass, feathers, calcined metals, gunpowder smells. The wind brought warmth. Through rifts in the smoky sky they saw the stars—larger and colder than they had ever looked before, and they hardly twinkled.
The temperature was still rising, and the barometer had bottomed out an hour ago. It was now decidedly harder to breathe.
They topped the hill overlooking the port town of New Sharpton. Candles burned in the houses, torches moved in the streets as knots of people formed together and dispersed. An occasional rider left on the road down the coast.
"Over here will be fine," said Sir Robert, guiding the horse to a spot beneath a group of trees atop the hill.
They spread the blankets on the seaward side of the hill and lay back, watching the still Atlantic.
Sir Robert drifted in and out of sleep as from fatigue. The air was hot and close, as if he were shut up in a chimney in the middle of summer.
Curwell had gone down the hill toward the bay. It had taken him a long time to go the few hundred yards. He had stopped frequently and rested.
The horse, which had been unhitched from the wagon, was in distress, as if it had been galloped miles, instead of being walked the few from the estate to the sea.
"The water temperature is rising, and the streams coming to it are out of their banks from melted snow," said Curwell, when he had labored up the hill and lay down. "There are shoals of dead fish away from the stream outlet. There are so many we could smell from here were it not for this infernal smoke."
"It just can't be true," said Sir Robert. "It just cannot. Water will not burn!"
"Maybe," said Hampton, where he lay on the ground above them, holding his splinted and broken arm. "Maybe the New Chemistry has some truths. Perhaps water is not an element. Perhaps it, too, contains phlogiston, or inflammable gas, which . . ." For the first time in his life, Hampton was having trouble following a line of thought. He shook his head to clear it. ". . . Inflammable gas. Perhaps a constituent like the oxygine principle. Perhaps it was separated by the heat from the land. Perhaps the fire is fueled from it. Maybe it will have to pass over the Earth innumerable times before it is all combusted with phlogiston . . ."
Sir Robert lay back on the blanket. He held Lady Margurite's hand.
"All gone," he said at last.
"The buffalo. The Indians," said Margurite.
"The Chinese. The bold Russians. The Turks," said Hampton.
"The French. Britain!" said Curwell.
"Now us," said Hampton Hamilton, and pointed.
The east was beginning to lighten, though it was still an hour before dawn. The wind blew toward the sea, but it was still a gentle wind, a thin wind. It had very little force.
From north to south the bright white boiling line appeared, like the sun breaking through under a late afternoon storm. But much brighter.
"Shall we be burned?" asked Lady Margurite. Her arm sprouted gooseflesh. "The thought of burning is the worst."
"I think not," said Curwell. "Like the martyrs, I think the air will be too saturated with phlogiston for us to breathe before the
fire reaches us." He paused as a great tongue of flame licked out of the roil toward them.
The hill and the village were bathed in the glaring artificial dawn. Screams came from the town from those who were still able to scream.
The thin wind rose more.
They watched the burning line quietly, each locked in their thoughts. The edge of the great combusting cloud was still more than two hundred miles away.
"Phlogiston!" said Sir Robert Athole and turned and passed away.
"I want to stand up," said Hamp. They heard him stir and fall behind them.
"The French were right, partly . . ." said Curwell.
"Robert . . . ?" asked Lady Margurite.
Curwell looked at the enormous burning wall.
"It's the end of . . ."
The sentence was the only thing left unfinished.
THE PEACEMAKER
Gardner Dozois
And, of course, after all but the most potent of those Armageddons that we can bring down on ourselves, whether it is war or plague or environmental disaster, there will be survivors, survivors who will have to pick up the pieces and try to start again—survivors, as the Nebula-winning story that follows suggests, who will also have to deal with their own guilt for having survived . . .
Gardner Dozois has won two Nebula Awards for his own short fiction, as well as ten Hugo Awards as the year's Best Editor: He is the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and also the editor of the annual anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, now up to its Fifteenth Annual Collection. He is the author or editor of over seventy books, including a long string of Ace anthologies co-edited with Jack Dann. His own short fiction was most recently collected in Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois.
Roy had dreamed of the sea, as he often did. When he woke up that morning, the wind was sighing through the trees outside with a sound like the restless murmuring of surf, and for a moment he thought that he was home, back in the tidy brick house by the beach, with everything that had happened undone, and hope opened hotly inside him, like a wound.