When The Future Dies

by Nat Schachner

  The old man swerved on him with a bull-like roar. It sounded terribly loud to Fran's newly fastidious ears. Then, abruptly, it cut off.

  Fran turned his head languidly, stared, and jumped violently to his feet. Sem was no longer in the room. That is, not the Sem he knew. There was a man, it was true, in exactly the same spot where the indignant patriarch had stood, but—but—he was a beardless youth, with smooth, delicate features, a mere boy not over fifty.

  "Why—where—what—" He spluttered. "Sem, where are you?" he shouted, fear clutching at his heart. Had that long-vanished Orb started functioning again, transported Sem to another level of probability?

  The stranger stood as one in a daze, as one emerging from a clogging dream. His eyes lifted with a puzzled expression to Fran; he did not know him.

  "Why," he said haltingly, in a thin, fluted voice, "I am Sem—Sem 15. But who are you, and what is this place?"

  Fran fell back a step, groaned. Was he mad? Was this beardless unknown who had appeared unaccountably in the patriarch's place also mad? It was impossible; it was—

  He came closer. Something in that tone, something in the line of those delicate features— He clapped his hand to a fevered brow, twitched shoulders and soared out into the Sector. The youth who had called himself Sem 15 watched him go with bewildered amazement. He had not oriented himself yet.

  Fran went headlong for Vic 21's vista. Fear fled with him, a terrible clutching fear of this new and more dreadful manifestation. Had anything happened to Vic, too?

  But Vic 21 was still Vic 21. Thank heavens for that! The young man looked up slowly at his disordered friend.

  "You look," he remarked placidly, unstirring, "as if you have seen a—what the primitives called a ghost."

  "I have," Fran cried, and poured out his story. Sem 15 had vanished, yet Sem 15 was back there, in his vista. But a different, younger Sem; a Sem of almost a thousand years ago.

  "I am not mad," Fran insisted. "I saw it with my own eyes. The features, a certain intonation in the voice, were the same. But he did not know me. Naturally"—he caught himself up at the new thought—"for I hadn't been born yet."

  Vic smiled, a faintly irritating, superior smile. "You need your Tending Machine," he said.

  Then everything seemed to fall away from them. Only the instinctive twitching of their shoulders and the spreading of their Gravity Vanes saved them from a fatal hundred-foot drop.

  The vista had puffed out of existence; so had the surrounding buildings for a space of half a mile. They floated to an earth that was strange and unfamiliar. Far off they saw the normal vistas of the Sector, tall and crystalline; still farther off, the recently erected Machine City.

  But around them was warm brown earth, thick with unknown smells. Tall grass, light yellow in color, and tasseled with queer, elongated seeds, waved in a billowing sea. Little brown bodies, seemingly alive, with long, bent-back ears, scattered fearfully from under their feet. And, strangest phenomenon of all, an outlandish Machine approached them with great noise and clatter. Before it the tall grass waved; behind it lay long, cut swaths. Two huge beasts, gray of body, pulled it with thudding hooves. A human being sat in an iron seat, made funny clucking noises to the beasts.

  They saw each other simultaneously—the men of the 97th century, and the farmer man of the 19th century. The farmer yelled in fright, jumped off the mower, and ran as if he were being pursued by devils out of hell. The horses snorted and went clattering after him.

  "What the—" Vic commenced. But he had no time to finish. Fran knew what had happened.

  "Come," he shouted frantically, "to the City of the Machines! We must put a stop to this before it is too late."

  Once more obedient, Vic followed. At the Communications Board everything was chaos. Reports tumbled in from all over the earth. More ominous even, was the lack of reports from vast sections of the world. Everything was topsy-turvy, much more so than even during the First Phase.

  Time had gone haywire!

  HERE AND THERE, incalculably capricious, the 97th century had disappeared. Whole Sectors went into oblivion—the oblivion of nonbeing—and other times, other civilizations, sprang into their places.

  Cities of the 51st century, crowded with people, juxtaposed in amazed contact with steamy jungles from which the dinosaur peered and Neanderthal man hunted with huge stone club.

  Pickett led his gray wave in that last desperate charge at Gettysburg, only to halt in stunned bewilderment at the turreted walls of Carcassonne which had unaccountably veiled the blue line of Meade's army. Athenian orators found themselves addressing primordial slime in waveless seas; a 32nd-century dictator, holding powers of life and death over all the world, was suddenly alone on a featureless plain over which the wild hordes of Ghengis Khan were pelting.

  Centuries, millennia, eons, were mingled in inextricable confusion. Even the future was there. Unimaginable beings, gracious and godlike, impassive even in this sudden wrench to their surroundings, floated next to shoreless seas of frozen ice, over which the sun, a dying shrunken ball, cast its last wan glow. The beginning of time, the end of time, stared at each other in equal incomprehension.

  Only Fran 19 knew, there on that still secure plot of the 97th century, watching the welter of the inpouring reports, the sudden cessation from Sector after Sector.

  His face was grim and lined. Vic asked anxiously: "What does it mean?"

  "What I had forgotten. That time is a dimension even as the three we know of space. The electron, the proton, the rest of them, move in a time dimension as well as in spatial dimensions. Undoubtedly, time is also a wave of probability in which the electron exists. The Orb of Indeterminacy, which I thought was smashed, is somewhere, functioning again. Only this time it is enlarging the probability waves of the Time Dimension instead of space. As a result, matter is jumping from probability to probability in time, mixing all the ages, shifting eras—

  Vic's eyes popped at that. A new and fearful thought had just struck him.

  "Suppose," he said, "this City of Machines shifts to another probability. Suppose we do."

  "In that case we'd either be so far back as not to be alive yet, or so far ahead as to have been dead for centuries!

  "For heavens' sake," Vic clamored, "do something about it!"

  "I am," Fran retorted grimly. There was pain in his eyes, but also a new light that had been gone since the First Phase. "I am destroying the Central Power Cylinder, destroying it so thoroughly it will never be rebuilt."

  Vic shrank back, alarmed. "Why?"

  "Because the Orb of Indeterminacy has no power of its own. Wherever it is, it works only on the waves of energy sent out by our Machines. That was why, after the crash of the City, the First Phase stopped."

  "But—but—we will starve again," Vic protested.

  "No we won't," Fran retorted, queerly exultant. "That field in which we were dropped was a field of wheat from an earlier day. The animals that ran from under our feet were rabbits. Both were used for food long ago; we shall relearn to eat. Think of it, Vic," he cried. "Smash the Machines, stop the Orb, bring back the old spirit of adventure, of struggle with nature that was so satisfying in those two months of the First Phase, now to be forever our heritage."

  "And those other times that exist with ours, the civilizations, the people, the customs of other days and years?"

  "They shall stay. Never in the history of the world has there been such a glorious chance. The map of time is outspread for us to read, to learn the wisdom of all the ages."

  Fran sprang through the trembling Guardians, disappeared into the walls of the Cylinder. Vic held his breath. Any moment, before Fran could act, annihilation might be upon them. Outside, where the great cavity had yawned into the earth, something had happened. In its place stood a roaring, teeming city. Tall buildings of stone and steel soared in jumbled confusion. Subways grumbled underneath; automobiles, street cars, clanged slow progress through narrow streets black with hurrying people.

>   New York City in the 20th century!

  Vic cried out. "Hurry, Fran!"

  There was a grinding, rending smash. The shining Cylinder shook with inner vibrations. The faceted ball on the top went dark and lusterless. The Atom Smasher shuddered, stopped; Tending Machines fell heavily to the ground.

  Vic's Gravity Cell was dead. All power was gone!

  Fran ran down the outer spiral passage. "It's done, Vic," he panted. "The Cylinder is a wreck of twisted parts. It can never be repaired." He sopped short, stared with avid eyes at the 20th-century city that blocked his view.

  "Adventure!" he whispered to Vic. "In there, elsewhere, all over the world." He flung his arms wide, as if to drink in the wonder of it all.

  "How about Sem?" asked Vic practically.

  Fran's face clouded, lighted up again. "We'll find him," he shouted. "That youth of our own age whom we know and who doesn't know us. We'll explain it all to him. He'll understand. He'll be our friend again."

  Together they went running to seek him out. They skirted the city in which traffic had stopped in sudden disorder,-in which frightened people stared out at the silent City of the Machines of the 97th century. A new and unimaginable era had dawned for the world.

  Overhead, five hundred miles out, a tiny crystal sphere rushed through space, round and round and round. Within its transparent depths were silence and blank death. Round and round and round, unknowing what it had done, what strange new world rotated beneath.

  The End

  *******************************

  The Shining One,

  by Nat Schachner

  Astounding Stories May 1937

  Short Story - 6824 words

  "To you I am a possible future—that never came into being—"

  A star shell rose silently into the night, burst soundlessly into a dazzling white illumination. Ten square miles of uneven terrain sprang suddenly into being. One could see every detail of concrete trenches, of hundred-foot-deep proto-steel shelters of miles of intercommunication tunnels that held together the far-flung fortifications, of huge guns whose flaming mouths belched forth tons of destruction and retreated smoothly behind yard-thick caps of stellite forgings.

  Leashed stratosphere bombers showed in their hidden lairs. Subterranean lakes of poison gas and liquid flame seemed to be waiting for the signal to spray their searing contents through high-pressure blowers. A million men were crouched behind barriers, wave on wave of them. Allison guns bandoleered over shoulders, the slightest finger pressure on which sent hundreds of expanding, shattering bullets in a constant stream from revolving barrels.

  The pitiless M rays pierced earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass, illuminated every nook and cranny of the deepest hidden secrets, etched into shadowed outlines men and guns and bomb-proof shelters. Tiny cameras, raised swiftly aloft from the dark quiescence of the enemy lines, clicked panorama views on specially activated plates, lowered as swiftly and silently as they had reared into the blue-black sky.

  For a full minute the penetrating rays flooded the landscape; then, with a little puff, the star shell dissolved into the all-embracing night. As before, the midnight air hung breathless over the tortured Earth, shuddering with premonitions of that which was about to happen.

  A little group of men crouched grimly in Front-line Trench X 32. A cold-light flood lamp sent its pale-white rays down into the concrete depths, its tight-band illumination cut off sharply beneath the parapet as though sliced by a knife. No scattering reflections could betray their presence to the watchful enemy in their parallel trenches not quite five hundred yards away.

  Hugh Wilmot blinked from the blinding star shell, stared at the ingenious cold-light lamp, laughed shakily. There were fine wrinkles gathered in little knots under his eyes that had not been there six months before, that were belied by his still youthful cheeks and lean, hard jaw. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He leaned over to his next companion. "Got a light, Gregory?" he asked.

  The man nodded wordlessly, lifted his glow catalyzer to the unlighted tip. At the point of contact flame spurted. Hugh inhaled deeply, breathed out a cloud of smoke.

  "That's a new stunt," he remarked calmly, as though he were speaking of the weather. "The star shell, I mean."

  Gregory Lipsin shrugged his shoulders. He was a Russian of the inner steppes, big, with blond hair and blue, frosty eyes, yet with high cheek bones and a certain askewness to his features that betrayed an ancient Tartar blood. He hitched his Allison gun a trifle higher on chafed shoulder, spat, grunted. "Bah!" he rumbled. "It means—nudding! In two weeks our good friend, the Dr. Paul Merrill, will haff solved the secret, made one just as good, or bedder." He leaned over, clapped a bearlike paw on the slight shoulder of the man crouching on the other side of Hugh.

  "Hah!" Merrill gasped under the impact, regathered his breath. He was thin and graying, with lean, sensitive features. Behind his spectacles his eyes were troubled.

  "I don't know, Gregory," he said doubtfully. "It's a new principle—the M ray—our intelligence service only got wind of it last week. Far more penetrating than X rays, or cosmic rays, for that matter. Of the order of sub-photons, we think. In two months perhaps—"

  "Two months?" shrilled a youngster with fair hair and round, smooth cheeks which the razor had as yet barely touched. His lips twitched, and there was a feverish sparkle in his eyes. "In two months we'll all be dead. You fools! Don't you see? Don't you understand? In thirty minutes the grand attack starts. Zero hour! Flame throwers, gas, bombers, tanks, M rays, Dongan shells, Conite disruptors, every hideous weapon that the accursed race of man has made to wipe his fellowman from the face of the Earth. In thirty minutes—oh, Lord!" He was crying hysterically now.

  The rest of the huddled company looked around, startled. A thickset Bavarian, black-bearded, lowering, grumbled audibly. "It's dot English poet, Arthur Holbrook, again. He shouldt be home with his nurse, making up leetle poems about violets and cows und der Liebe. He don't belong here."

  "You shut up, Karl Jorn!" snapped Hugh. He shifted position, put his arm soothingly around the shaking lad, who was only nineteen. "Take it easy, Holbrook," he said quietly. "I know it's a tough spot for you—for all of us. Six months ago we were at peace—the arbitration system that had been evolved after the Great War of 1940 seemed to be functioning perfectly. Then, like a thunderbolt, came—this!"

  "Oui!" A small, dapper soldier with glossy, pointed mustache shrugged expressive Gallic shoulders. "It ees verree funny, no? Karl Jorn's country, she attack mine. Everybody jumps in, like strange dogs when dachshund and leetle poodle make private fight. It spread—like what you Americans call—house afire. Spain, Russia, England, Italy, China, Japan, America, South America, Egypt, Congo, Eskimos, Patagonians, every one."

  A Spaniard, olive-cheeked, with burning black eyes, leaped up, laughed harshly. "You think that funny, Señor Pierre Mathieu? You are most mistaken. This"—and his wiry arm swept expressively over the crouching men, dimly illuminated in the narrow cold-light beam—"this is funny. For a month there was war—like always. Then what happened? What you see here. From a war of nations it became a war of—men, of human beings. Brother against brother, father against son. Look at us! We are Spanish; we are Russian; we are American; we are English; we are German; We are French—" He paused for breath.

  A tall Englishman, bronzed with the Indian sun, interrupted quietly. "You, too, are mistaken, Pablo Valverde. We are no longer nationals. For every race you can point out among us, there is the same in the enemy's ranks. The line-up is different now. It is a war of principles, of ideals, not of nations, not even of human beings."

  Mathieu grimaced. "Monsieur Frederic Gleason," he said courteously, "you speak like a—philosopher. Once we fought for la belle France—now it seems I fight for—an ideal. What, Monsieur Gleason, is that ideal I fight for?"

  Karl Jorn exploded. "Ach, listen to dot Frenchman! He knows noddings. Herr Mathieu—it iss very simple. W
e fight for—freiheit!"

  "Libertad!" cried Valverde.

  "Pah! Mere words!" rumbled Lipsin. "We fight, comrades, for the Commune, for the future World State."

  Valverde spat furiously. "We do not," he cried. "I am an anarchist—an individualist! I wish for no State to regiment me, to tell me what to do. Man is godlike; is—"

  "You are both wrong," Gleason interposed with some heat. "We fight for order and sanity and reasonableness and—"

  "Of a brand Anglaise," Mathieu murmured wickedly.

  It became a dog fight. The company of numerous nationalities lifted their voices, argued, gesticulated, shouted to unheeding ears. The noise rose in the frosty night, broke the strained nerves of near-by trenches, impinged on the delicate sound detectors in enemy headquarters.

  A bullet-headed general, resplendent with decorations, nodded with satisfaction, spoke gutturally to his listening associates. "The pigs are fighting among themselves," he chortled. "We shall have an easy time."

  A rasping, angry voice burst among the quarreling men in Front-line Trench X 32 like a Dongan shell. "Stop that racket, men! Another sound and the entire trench will be shot."

  The loud discussion died suddenly; they looked at each other sheepishly. It was the voice of the brigade commander, three miles in the rear, and a hundred feet underground. It came through sono-induction coils, vibrated within the circumscribed area of the trench. Outside that area not a whisper of it could be heard.

  Silence again, broken only by the muted sobbing of young Holbrook. "Fifteen minutes to zero hour," he moaned hysterically, "and they argue about principles, ideals. Fifteen minutes more and they'll be torn and bleeding lumps of flesh. Oh, Lord!"

  Along the vast opposing lines there was no sound. The wind itself died down to a hush, breathless, waiting for fifteen tiny minutes to pass. The stars peered at their sister Earth in puzzled bewilderment. Along a hundred miles the trenches made zigzag gashes in plain and valley and mountain. Ten million men crouched and waited, with hearts pounding, for hell to break loose. A hundred million others, armed, accoutered, scattered along far-flung lines that ran irregularly around the Earth, waited with pallid faces and straining ears for the first concussions in their televisors that bespoke the commencement of the crucial battle.