Time to Come

by August Derleth (ed)

  “We understand your modesty, Dr. Padgham, but this involves our national sovereignty. If we give in on one point, there’s no telling what new demands they’ll make.”

  “But a name means nothing! If they say it is the Lenin—” “It is the principle involved that we must consider, Dr. Padgham.”

  “Since this thing bears my name, will you grant that my opinion may have some value? I’m sure Dr. Varik saw the thing before I did. Can you publish that comment at an interview?”

  “It is entirely against our established editorial policy.” “When this situation began,” Dr. Padgham explained, “Mike Parron told me that no news could ever be suppressed because—”

  “Suppressed! Did you actually suggest—”

  “That’s neither here nor there. My point is this: if the original story had to be printed because newspapers publish all the news, what about my comment? Isn’t that in the same category?”

  ‘Truth, Dr. Padgham, is entirely relative; and the issue here involves our national interests. The situations are totally different. And now you must excuse me; I have my work to do.”

  Dr. Padgham departed, thoroughly frustrated. It was a cool afternoon. He walked back to the university.

  On all sides he saw evidence of the impact Padgham’s Planet was having upon his society. Bars advertised the Heliocentric Cocktail. Department store windows were crowded with gowns and accessories designed for the time “When the Planet Comes.” In a bookstore were pyramids of the latest best seller, a slim volume whipped out by a popular evangelist and entitled Afterward, What? Slightly smaller type on the scarlet dust jacket asked, “When the end comes, will YOU be ready?” Across the marquee of a theater dancing lights announced “First Pictures of Padgham’s Planet”; the line of patrons Was a block long. A garish sign in the window of a television shop proclaimed that every night at eight-thirty Padgham’s Planet was on the air, sponsored by Neuro’s Neutral Nerve Pills. At intervals along the street small telescopes had been put up; for twenty-five cents a customer could study the approaching disaster for a full three minutes, although it was now so close that it rode in the sky as large , as a silver dollar.

  It was all a form of madness; Dr. Padgham knew that. But it was not the particular kind of madness he had feared. It had never occurred to him that even catastrophe could be organized, commercialized, and exploited.

  The evening newspaper was on the lawn when he got home. He sat on the porch, thumbing through it. lust before he threw it aside, a story caught his eye. It was a description of Padgham’s_Planet written by Mike Parron. All the familiar phrases were there—non-radiant body ... beyond analysis. . . But something new had been added, Parron’s own impression that he was not looking at a material substance but at nothingness. He described it as a hole in the sky.

  Dr. Padgham suddenly recalled his own impression when he had first looked at the phenomenon through the observatory telescope. He dropped the paper and hurried across the lawn into his hobby room over the garage. Oddly enough, he had not seen the black disc since he had discovered it. He had been too depressed to want to use his telescope again. Nor did he own a television receiver, so he had not been able to enjoy the nightly telecasts. And, even though Padgham’s Planet loomed so large in the sky, his sight was apparently so poor that he was still unable to see it.

  Abruptly he wanted to study the phenomenon again. His hand trembled as he adjusted his telescope. Another thought occurred to him. The planet had never moved from its place in' the sky; yet the earth turned. And observatories in China and Russia, Europe and India were studying it simultaneously....

  . . . “Can it be done?” the President asked.

  “Yes and no,” the rocket expert answered. “We have the techniques and the know-how. I think we can convert our stock-pile of atomic weapons into power units, but—”

  “No,” the general broke in sharply. “Mr. President, we dare not strip ourselves of our defenses.”

  “The most trustworthy mathematicians give us twenty days,” the President said, ignoring the general “How many can we finish in that time?’

  “Very few,” the rocket expert admitted. “We can build two or three—maybe half a dozen. At most we can provide for a hundred men and women, certainly no more.”

  “We’ll have to select wisely, then.”

  “Even then it’s only a gamble. In theory we can use the atomic power, but we have never experimented with it.”

  “I cannot release anything from our stock-pile!” the general declared.

  “It will be done by executive order,” the President told him.

  “My responsibility is the defense of the nation,” the general said. “Do you think the enemy won’t jump us when he knows what we’re doing?”

  “The solution, then, is to ask them to take part. This, after all, is a threat to mankind itself. Our international bickering—”

  “Appeasement!” The general snorted that one word and stomped out.

  “It’s the thing I had in mind,” the rocket expert admitted. “If their technicians and ours could work together, if we can use their stock-pile as well as our own—well, we might provide escape rockets for as many as a million people.”

  The President sighed. “We’ll ask for a conference, then. It will mean publicity, and I rather hoped to avoid it as long as possible....”

  ... The son of the chief and his bride entered the clearing. The Reverend Colwaite interrupted his prayer to receive them, his thin body quivering with pleasure. “Into the fold! Into the fold!” he cried, but the son of the chief did not understand the white man’s tongue. As the praise and thanksgiving died away, the Reverend Colwaite asked in the native dialect, “You have come to me to have our kind of wedding ceremony?”

  “No, my white friend; we have run away from the hate dance.”

  “So Bwani Ngani’s trying that! It won’t do him any good.” “He tells our people of a sign in the sky. They begin to think the old gods are returning. It is bad for them; we ask your help.”

  “My God is stronger. Bwani Ngani will be destroyed.”

  “It is not that which we ask, white friend. Cannot the good in our gods live side by side with yours? Cannot you and Bwani Ngani talk and come to an understanding? We, too, have gods of Love and Kindness. Are they not the same as yours?”

  “Look into the sky, you black savage! See the sign of my God! It comes for vengeance on the unbelievers. Go back to your people and say to them to repent while there is time. My God will abide no others!”

  The bride spoke for the first time, timidly and softly, “In the mission school, white friend, you taught us Love and Brotherhood, not vengeance. You said there was good in all men. Is there not, then, some good even in Bwani Ngani?”

  The Reverend Colwaite threw back his magnificent head and began to pray to the sky. His staff knelt and their voices joined with his. The son of the chief and his bride stood watching for_ a moment before they stole away. They took another path through the jungle and shortly the pounding of the hate drums and the mission prayer faded away behind them. They found a cave high above a river, and they sat on the earth together....

  . . . “Escape Rockets Planned! Russian Delegation Flying to Washington!” Newsboys were shouting hoarsely on every corner when Dr. Padgham went back into the city. Stunned, frightened mobs jammed the streets.

  Emil Padgham knew the truth, but none of the men he tried to see had time to hear him. He went to the radio stations, but National Guardsmen surrounded the buildings. He had no pass that would admit him to a newspaper office. He tried talking to strangers on the street, but they shrugged him aside, glaring at him with glazed eyes.

  Dr. Padgham thoroughly understood the reason for the precautions. The government was aware that real panic would follow news of the projected escape rockets. The pleasant commercial binge Was over; the people faced reality. But for a time the tumult of a mob could be contained if there were no leader to orient the milling toward a single point o
f action. Consequently, the means of mass communication had to be rigidly controlled.

  But Dr. Padgham knew the truth! He had to be heard before it was too late! Desperately he tried to use the amateur radio transmitter in his hobby room. He talked into the microphone until he was hoarse; he could only hope that someone heard and understood him.

  After five hours a unit of guardsmen came and took his transmitter away. Twelve men stayed behind. Dr. Padgham was confined to his house. His telephone was ripped out. The guards were forbidden to talk to him.

  He was helpless, isolated like a dangerous fever germ. Mankind had chosen to immobilize the truth and embrace chaos. Only Milly understood, and she was as helpless as he was. For endless hours they sat on the porch, looking down into the city by the bay, two weak, old people who might have prevented the volcano building below them.

  But they were not cut off from news. For two weeks the negotiations with Russia went on in Washington. Always, at the point of agreement, the conference never quite achieved it, for the Russians insisted that the invader must be called Lenin and the Americans, bolstered by hysterical editorials and scare-headlines screaming appeasement, dared not give up the name of Padgham’s Planet. Meanwhile, the phenomenon grew to the size of a black cartwheel in the sky.

  After a fashion the rocket project moved forward. Two ships were gradually taking shape on the Mojave Desert. The general had reluctantly released one antiquated atomic weapon for experimental purposes, and the scientists had demonstrated a safe method for converting the weapons into atomic rocket power.

  Two great controversies raged in the newspapers. The first had to do with the destination of the escape rockets. Since Padgham’s Planet would clearly destroy the Solar System, it seemed necessary for the new civilization, if it managed to survive the flight, to be set up in another part of the Galaxy. The opposition claimed that distance made such a goal impossible; it proposed that the new world be created on Padgham’s Planet itself.

  The second controversy was far more violent. It revolved around the selection of the fortunate few who would survive. Only a nationwide lottery seemed democratic, yet that might people the new world with mad men or morons, criminals or perverts. One conservative newspaper wanted only successful men to be chosen, but it was unable to make a specific definition of success"; another proposed college professors; a third held out belligerently for “real Americans,” again, unfortunately, getting muggy in the matter of definition.

  As the days passed Dr. Padgham learned that a small rocket was being built on the university campus. It was not general news, and yet it was broadly hinted at in all the broadcasts. The professor guessed that the rocket was to contain the records and books from the university library, along with the laboratory equipment of the scientists. At least the new civilization was to be given a brave start, granting that any of the personnel chosen had the intelligence to use the accumulated records of man’s heritage.

  As long as the conference with the Russians continued, the public seethed with inner fear but there was no disorder. If the two nations could come to an agreement, a million people —possibly more—might escape. Each individual’s chance of survival was thereby that much greater.

  Evangelists exhorted everywhere and at all hours. The churches were crowded to overflowing. Very few people slept At night they lined the borders of the bay in their cars, staring silently and belligerently up at the black sky.

  And, suddenly, Padgham’s Planet was three times the size of the moon.

  Only when the Washington conference failed and the Russian delegation went home did the restrained tension shatter into chaos. The mob swarmed into the city, looting, burning, destroying. Emil Padgham and Milly stood at their front gate as the savage tide surged past. The mob fear beat at them, clutching at their minds, toying to draw them away from their lonely island of reason into the vortex of madness.

  Emil Padgham knew why the people were going to the university campus. There was a rocket there—an escape rocket Each individual in the mob wanted it for himself, every man was fighting every other for one futile chance of personal survival.

  Both Padgham and his sister tried to scream out the truth at the mob, but their words were tom from their lips and ground into nothingness by the hurricane of chaos. Suddenly Milly darted into the flood of humanity. She was brutally buffeted by a hundred stampeding feet and rudely east back on the lawn, like driftwood rejected by an angry sea.

  But she achieved her purpose: she had pulled to safety two small children who had been trapped in the throng. They sat on the grass beside her, quietly watching the turmoil.

  Emil Padgham bent over,his sister. She opened her eyes slowly; her body writhed in pain. “There is no way out,” she whispered, while a tiny froth of blood flowered on her lips. “It is easier for men to accept the madness and die with it than to believe the truth.”

  And so she died.

  Padgham stood up, his mind in an agony of grief. He heard a roaring overhead and looked up. Beyond the flames flickering over the city a thousand planes were rising from an airfield across the bay, soaring straight up into the sky, their silver wings glinting in the sunlight. As Dr. Padgham followed their flight, the sun dimmed and went out.

  He saw his namesake, then—for one brief instant of terror —a vast disk of black emptiness filling all the sky. He saw the tiny fleet of silver planes shatter and explode against the blackness, like fireflies gleaming in the depths of an endless night.

  From a great distance he heard the voices of the two children Milly had saved.

  “Where are all the people going?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “My Mommy told me the sun went out”

  “That’s silly; it didn’t. I can still see it”

  “Yes, so can I."

  The truth, Padgham thought: of course the children knew it. They saw reality, not the nightmare the adult mind created. With a sigh he took the children by the hand and led them into the house, away from the sound and the chaos. “Let’s see if We can find some milk and cookies,” he suggested. The children’s eyes shone with pleasure. ...

  . . . At dawn they looked out,on a quiet, green world, where dew still danced in the sunlight. The son of the chief frowned at the bright, blue sky, his eyes puzzled.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “The sign they said the gods had sent to destroy us.”

  His bride slipped her hand into his, smiling confidently.

  “They were just talking to frighten us—to make us obey. There was no sign. There is no god of hate—only the god of love, that you and I understand.”

  “But last night, when we were in the clearing, I thought I saw a—” He hesitated, unsure of his words. “—a kind of something in the sky. I know the Reverend Colwaite saw it; I know Bwana Ngani saw If.”

  “People will always see what they want to see. They twist truth to suit themselves. They make evil and terror just as real as—” She took him in her arms and pressed her lips, warm and sensuous, against his. “Just as real as this.” Some time after that, when the sun was higher in the sky, they walked back to the village. It puzzled them that both their native, settlement and the missionary compound had vanished. But they felt no fear—for their souls were too crowded with the fulfillment of their love for each other to admit even the tenuous waifs of the black evil.

  JON'S WORLD

  Philip K. Dick

  Kastner walked around the ship without speaking. He climbed the ramp and entered, disappearing cautiously inside. For a time his outline could be seen, stirring around. He appeared again, his broad face dimly alight.

  “Well?” Caleb Ryan said. “What do you think?”

  Kastner came down the ramp. “Is it ready to go? Nothing left to work out?”

  “It’s almost ready. Workmen are finishing up the remaining sections. Relay connections and feed lines. But no major problems exist. None we can predict, at least.”

  The two men stood together, looking
up at the squat metal box with its ports and screens and observation grills. The ship was not lovely. There were no trim lines, no chrome and rexeroid struts to ease the hull into a gradually tapering teardrop. The ship was square and knobby, with turrets and projections rising up everywhere.

  “What will they think when we emerge from that?” Kastner murmured.

  “We had no time to beautify it Of course, if you want to wait another two months—”

  “Couldn’t you take off a few of the knobs? What are they for? What do they do?”

  “Valves. You can examine the plans. They drain off the' power load when it peaks too far up. Time travel is going to be dangerous. A vast load is collected as the ship moves back. It has to be leaked off gradually—or we’ll be an immense bomb charged with millions of volts.”

  “I’ll take your word on it” Kastner picked up his briefcase.

  He moved toward one of the exits. League Guards stepped out of his way. “I’ll tell the Directors it’s almost ready. By the way, I have something to reveal.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve decided who’s going along with you.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m going. I’ve always wanted to know what things were like before the war. You see the history spools, but it isn’t the same. I want to be there. Walk around. You know, they say there was no ash before the war. The surface was fertile. You could walk for miles without seeing ruins. This I would like to see.”

  “I didn’t know you were interested in the past.”

  “Oh, yes. My family preserved some illustrated books showing how it was. No wonder USIC wants to get hold of Schonerman’s papers. If reconstruction could begin—” “That’s what we all want”