by Damon Knight
My final war would have to be fought with weapons so devastating, so unprecedently awful, that man would never recover from it.
It was.
On the fifth day, riding the gale, I could look down on a planet stripped of its forests, its fields, even its topsoil: there was nothing left but the bare rock, cratered like the moon. The sky shed a sickly purple light, full of lightnings that flickered like serpents’ tongues. Well, I had paid a heavy price, but Man was gone.
Not quite. There were two left, a man and a woman. I found them alive and healthy, for the time being, on a crag that overhung the radioactive ocean. They were inside a transparent dome, or field of force, that kept out the contaminated air.
You see how near I had come to final defeat? If they had managed to distribute that machine widely before my war started… But this was the only one they had made. And there they were inside it, like two white mice in a cage.
They recognized me immediately. The woman was young and comely, as they go.
“This is quite an ingenious device,” I told them courteously .
In actuality, it was an ugly thing, all wires and tubes and so on, packed layers deep under the floor, with a big semicircular control board and a lot of flashing lights. “It’s a pity I didn’t know about it earlier; we might have put it to some use.”
“Not this one,” said the man grimly. “This is a machine for peace. Just incidentally, it generates a field that will keep out an atomic explosion.”
“Why do you say, “just incidentally”?” I asked him.
“It’s only the way he talks,” the woman said. “If you had held off another six months, we might have beaten you. But now I suppose you think you’ve won.” ”
“Oh, indeed,” I said. “That is, I will have, before long. Meanwhile, we might as well make ourselves comfortable.”
They were standing in tense, aggressive attitudes in front of the control board, and took no notice of my suggestion. “Why do you say I ‘think’ I’ve won?” I asked.
“It’s just the way I talk. Well, at least we gave you a long fight of it.”
The man put in, “And now you’re brave enough to show yourself.” He had a truculent jaw. There had been a good many like him in the assault planes, on the first day of the war.
“Oh,” I said, “I’ve been here all the time.”
“From the very beginning?” the woman asked.
I bowed to her. “Almost,” I said, to be strictly fair.
There was a little silence, one of those uncomfortable pauses that interrupt the best of talks. A tendril of glowing spray sprang up just outside. After a moment, the floor settled slightly.
The man and woman looked anxiously at their control board. The coloured lights were flashing. “Is that the accumulators?” I heard the woman ask in a strained, low voice.
“No,” the man answered. “They’re all right—still charging. Give them another minute.”
The woman turned to me. I was glad of it, because there was something about their talk together that disturbed me. She said, “Why couldn’t you let things alone? Heaven knows we.weren’t perfect, but we weren’t that bad. You didn’t have to make us do that to each other.”
I smiled. The man said slowly, “Peace would have poisoned him. He would have shrivelled up like a dried apple.” It was the truth, or near enough, and I did not contradict him. The floor lurched again.
“You’re waiting to watch us suffer,” the woman said.” Aren’t you?”
I smiled.
“But that may take a long time. Even if we fall into the ocean, this globe will keep us alive. We might be in here for months before our food gives out.”
“I can wait,” I said pleasantly.
She turned to her husband. “Then we must be the last,” she said. “Don’t you see? If we weren’t, would he be here?”
“That’s right,” said the man, with a note in his voice that I did not like. He bent over the control board. “There’s nothing more to keep us here. Ava, will you…” He stepped back, indicating a large red-handled switch.
The woman stepped over and put her hand on it. “One moment,” I said uneasily. “What are you doing? What is that thing?”
She smiled at me. “This isn’t just a machine to generate a force field; she said.
“No?” I asked. “What else?”
“It’s a time machine,” the man said.
“We’re going back,” the woman whispered, “to the beginning.”
Back, to the beginning, to start all over.
Without me.
The woman said, “You’ve won Armageddon, but you’ve lost Earth.”
I knew the answer to that, of course, but she was a woman and had the last word.
I gestured toward the purple darkness outside. “Lost Earth? What do you call this?”
She poised her hand on the switch.
“Hell,” she said.
And I have remembered her voice, through ten thousand lonely years.