Both sides acknowledged that. Every resource of science, every available engine of warfare, had been rushed into play. Whoever won would be in a position to mop up all remaining opposition, proclaim themselves the masters of the world. Already fifty million had died in fratricidal conflict, already hundreds of great cities, centers of former civilization and culture, had flamed in destruction; but now—
Grim-lipped, Hugh Wilmot looked at his friend and coworker, Dr. Paul Merrill. "We two are responsible for all this," he said harshly, "we two and scientists everywhere like ourselves."
Merrill blinked near-sightedly. "Eh, what's that, Hugh?" he asked, startled.
Hugh repeated it. "You're a chemist," he explained bitterly. "Your chemicals, your revolutionary discoveries, have been used—for what? To create mightier explosives, to make poison gas that no mask, no suit of armor even, could keep out. I am a physicist, dealing with light and electromagnetic effects. What happens? My practical application of light pressure is now being utilized to scythe airplanes out of the stratosphere, to annihilate squadrons of men ten miles away. Every gun, every fiendish weapon we employ, is but the product of scientific brains. Brains that should have been employed to make the world a better and more wonderful place to live in, have devoted all their energies to annihilation.
"Mark my words, Paul. Whoever wins this coming battle will be the vanquished equally with the loser. Civilization will die in a welter of blood and agony. Those few who remain alive will revert to the brute. All that the human race has built for these long, slow centuries will be lost—forever!" He ended in a quiet passion that shook his lean, wiry frame.
Merrill blinked a moment, said thoughtfully. "It is true, yet—even now, Hugh, you are working on a secret invention. Over there!" He pointed to the tiny proto-steel hut at the farther end of the trench. It was blank, windowless, and a faint shimmer of rays played over its smooth surface. "I won't ask you what it is—war being war—but the general has hinted to me you promised him a mightier weapon than any we yet possess. That was why he gave you permission to work secretly and alone."
Hugh shot a swift glance toward the steel chamber. For almost two months he had immured himself in its confines, night and day, working desperately. That faint electric discharge playing over its surface was a vibration screen, which had repelled even the subphoton search ray of the enemy.
There was a queer look on his face as he turned back to Merrill. "We are all caught in a web of circumstance," he admitted, evading the manifest invitation to unbosom himself. "Yet it is our duty, since the guilt is ours, to put a stop to this horror. In five minutes now the signals will be given. In five minutes it will be too late. Look at them!"
The trench had stirred to a dark, secret life of its own. The men hunched forward, eyes glued to the time light on the televisor. The illuminated thread was creeping closer, inexorably closer, to the zero hour.
Five minutes! Four minutes! Only Holbrook's stifled sobbing broke the deathly silence of the trench. The shadow of approaching death lay heavy on every face. There were no illusions. In a bare few minutes earth and sky and underground would become a blazing inferno in which no man of human flesh and blood might live. Yet they merely tightened their Allisons, gripped triggers, and waited for the word of doom!
Merrill said with quiet anguish, "There is nothing we can do to stop it now, Hugh. It is out of mortal power; only God himself—"
Hugh leaned forward, spoke rapidly. His right hand reached out, gripped against the concrete wall. "You are right. Only a godlike being—"
He was interrupted. Arthur Holbrook had jerked suddenly to his feet, stared wildly around for a split second. "Two minutes to go!" he screamed. "Two minutes to hell! I can't stand it, men. Do you hear me; I can't stand it! It's got to stop!" His mind had snapped.
Before the trench knew exactly what had happened, before any one could move to stop him, the boy had vaulted up a poised ladder, was speeding like a seared rabbit over No Man's Land, across great shell holes and electrical barrages.
Hugh groaned, shouted: "Stop, you fool! You'll be killed! You'll spoil everything!"
But the lad was beyond all hearing. His voice rose in the astounded night in an agony of darkened senses. "I call on you all to drop your arms! Brothers! Comrades! Listen to me—"
Ten miles to the rear, one hundred feet deep, the general heard the mad exhortation in his detectors. The veins swelled on his bullet head; his face darkened. He stabbed a button.
A quiescent electric barrage leaped into a shining current of crackling flame. Holbrook was caught in midstride. For one awful second his body was a flaring silhouette; the next a crisp of powdered ashes floated gently to earth.
A bull-throated roar rose from Trench X 32. It came from Gregory Lipsin, the placid, heavy-handed Russian. "Dey killed dot poor leetle poet!"
In a trice he was up the ladder, Allison gun in hand, running—running—blind to all but the overpowering lust to kill, to take revenge.
"Verfluchte teufel!" growled Jorn, and was after him.
"Nom du chien!" screeched Mathieu, and darted up.
"Blast the blighters!" snarled Gleason.
In five seconds Trench X 32 was almost vacant, emptied of a raging, roaring onrush of bloodthirsty men. Within two seconds more the neighboring trenches had disgorged their hordes of screaming, racing devils. Within ten seconds the far-flung line was a hurtling mass of millions of shouting men.
Startled in their remote shelters, the commanders of the opposing forces stared into their visor screens, heard the mighty rush of sound. It was still a minute to zero hour; yet—
Buttons pressed simultaneously. Instantly earth and sky and underground leaped into rocking, roaring fury. Great guns thundered; bombers flung from hidden catapults high into the air; electric barrages seared and crackled; lakes of chemicals sprayed over No Man's Land and trenches alike, and ignited into huge blasts of flame; poison gas billowed forth in hellish miasma; concentrated light stabbed blinding fingers through the murk, blasted men and planes into crumbling dust; great tanks howled at sixty miles an hour over broken ground, gaunt, gray Juggernauts of destruction.
And through it all, blinded, suffocating, ripped to pieces by blasting shells, crisped beyond recognition by flame and racing current, crushed beneath tanks, reared the two vast armies to meet each other, working the triggers of Allison guns as fast as jerking fingers could manage.
Hugh Wilmot's left hand caught the scholarly, near-sighted Dr. Merrill just as he lurched forward to join the others in their mad swarming up the ladders.
"Don't you follow!" he cried sharply. "It's certain death out there. The brave idiots. If only they had waited—one more minute!"
Paul Merrill whirled on his comrade, peered at him in the blazing, crackling, roaring madness of sight and sound with unbelieving eyes. "Hugh!" he screamed in shocked voice, fighting to make himself heard above the hideous din. "Have you gone crazy? We are soldiers; we must—"
Hugh held his slight, struggling form in an iron grip. His right hand stabbed backward against the concrete wall as if to brace himself.
"Coward!" yelled the little scientist, striving in vain to break the hold. "Let me go! Let me join our comrades!"
His hand went up, crashed against his companion's face. In the blinding, blazing light, amid the churn and thundering explosions of millions of shells, against the screams of the dying, Hugh's face went red, then deathly white. But he did not relax his grip; and perforce, weeping, kicking, gouging, the embattled scientist was forced down into the bottom of the trench.
There they crouched, alone in the inferno that was to wipe civilization from the Earth! Already the supporting trenches in the rear were vomiting their myriad of khaki-clad troops.
Merrill had subsided; he was sobbing mingled tears of rage and humiliation for his friend.
Hugh Wilmot stared up and out through the periscope with tight-drawn lips and fierce, impatient jaw, watching—watching—that gigantic battlegro
und from which few would emerge. To Merrill's bitter reproaches he paid no slightest heed.
The stratosphere rained flaming, hurtling craft and blasting destruction. Hugh did not even see; the electric barrages moved back and forth with malignant sweep and crisped thousands of screaming men in their bright-blue curtains—and his lips became only a thin gash of hardness; rays, tanks, Allison guns, bombs, gas, flame, took their frightful toll—and the strain in his eyes deepened.
Once more he sagged against the concrete—as if in weary despair.
Suddenly the wild, fierce shouts, the deadly rat-a-tat of the Allison guns, ceased. A moment longer and the roar of the monster cannon muted. For seconds more, stratosphere bombers locked in furious combat; then they, too, drew off and circled in aimless, erratic flight. The tanks lumbered to a whining halt; rays dipped and scorched earth harmlessly; barrages paled and sputtered, lakes of rushing flame flickered and died as force tubes ceased their constant pressure.
For ten long seconds, staring amazement held millions of men in frozen tableau; battalions breasted each other, yet did not shoot. All eyes were raised aloft, raised to a sudden midnight blackness against which a gigantic figure loomed—a figure of more than earthly proportions; a figure, nevertheless, of a man, clad in strange, shining garments of unknown stuff and hue. He walked the still air swiftly, and did not sink; he trailed behind him clouds of luminescent glory. Midway between the hosts he paused, high in the night, yet below the circling planes. He raised his hand commandingly; his godlike brow was stern upon the cowering, gaping armies underneath.
"Godlike!" muttered Hugh, and fell away from the periscope and against the trench wall. His grip on Merrill relaxed. "That's what you said, Paul!" he cried. His fingers beat a nervous tattoo on the concrete.
For ten long seconds the frozen silence lasted. Then a whispered sigh reared from the earth. Superstitious awe fled through the ranks. Soldiers fell on their knees, raised trembling hands aloft to that motionless, superhuman form.
"The Lord has come!" shrieked a man. "Forgive us our sins!"
"A being from Mars!" rose another cry.
Then the voice of Pierre Mathieu, harsh with recognition. "He has come again! My grandfather saw him—in the War of 1914. He is the Angel of Mons, come once more to aid his children in defeat. Forward, comrades, forward!"
A great voice rolled down and over the far-flung millions. It was sweet with an infinite sweetness, yet strong enough to drown all other sounds; it was rich and vibrating, yet curiously unhuman. It was in English, understood by all the warring armies, yet an English that was slurred and foreign, and like unto no dialect form that was spoken on Earth.
"Hear me, men of the end of the twentieth century! I come to call on you to cease this senseless slaughter; I come to tell you that here, on this very battlefield, on this very day and hour, you had doomed the Earth and all its civilizations, all its evolution and aspirings, to complete and total destruction. After this last great battle of the world, few remained alive; and those few fled to the wastelands for safety and hiding, while you surged back and forth over the smiling Earth, leaving but desolation and thickets and lifeless deserts behind. Hear me before what has occurred shall come to pass! Hear me before it is too late!"
Dr. Paul Merrill rose tremblingly to his feet. His pale eyes glimmered at the mighty, air-borne being; his scholarly features blazed with excitement. No need for Hugh to hold him now.
"Hugh Wilmot!" he cried. "Did you hear that? Did you notice? He spoke of us as men of the past, as men whose appointed courses had already run!"
But Hugh was staring also, muttering over and over, "The godlike being!" while his lean fingers drummed desperately on the wall.
A stricken mortal, more daring than the rest, cried out harshly: "What are you, angel or devil or creature from another world?"
The great figure shifted and shimmered, and his misty eyes seemed to rest calmly on the rash questioner. "I am none of those you mention. I am a man!"
As one, the incredulous whisper went up, pregnant with the latent anger of those who feel they have been tricked. "A man?"
"Yes, even so," the shining creature admitted. "Yet no man of your early day and time. I come from an incredible century in the far future; in your chronology it would be measured in millions on millions of years ahead."
"I thought as much," breathed Merrill, scientific ardor fighting human awe. "His speech is clipped and changed, as though æons have intervened to smooth and distort."
Hugh Wilmot said nothing.
"In fact," the great voice went on, "I am the last of all mankind!"
A vast susurrous rose like incense from the frozen armies. Catholics crossed themselves devoutly; Protestants muttered hasty prayers; Jews called on their ancient prophets; Mohammedans invoked Allah; the Chinese whispered to their hovering ancestors.
Somehow the Shining One seemed infinitely weary. "The last man!" he repeated. "Do you puny mortals of a forgotten time realize what that means, what you have done to me?"
They could hear Karl Jorn's guttural response, greatly daring. He, Mathieu and Lipsin were all that were alive of those who had emerged from Trench X 32 only minutes before. "Lord! Do you blame us?"
"Because here and now you primitive creatures, with primitive weapons in your hands, had decided the future. Let me sketch for you briefly what resulted from your insane quarrel, and you shall understand!"
The night seemed a bottomless void in which only a luminous, floating figure existed, in which only a solitary voice breathed incredible things. The huge armies were motionless shadows, clinging to a blood-soaked Earth with bonds that would not loose; high above, a thousand planes still circled idly, dark and noiseless, while amazed pilots picked up the voice in sono-detectors. Deep underground, in proto-steel chambers, among gun and flame crews, in far-back headquarters, men did not stir, but listened breathlessly.
"This is March 8, 1987," said the Shining One. "In my time it is Flor 6.2.3—æons ahead. But the switch that determined my time, that set immutable causes at work, started here. You call yourselves men of the Left and Right; you believe that it matters who wins this holocaust of carnage. I shall tell you—neither won! Both of you were defeated! By the rise of Sun, barely a handful of tens of millions had remained alive. All over the world, locked in the same madness, other armies met in mutual destruction. Within a month only those wise enough or cowardly enough to flee to the wastelands had survived.
"Civilization, such as you possessed, was extinct. Knowledge, culture, were but dimming memories in the brains of those who crouched in caves, baked by the sun, frozen by the ice, feeding sparsely on grubs and roots and raw fish that they could catch with stiffened fingers.
"For uncounted centuries they lived thus, slowly degenerating into the brute, intent only on the bare satisfactions of hunger, shelter, and sex, forgetting all their ancestors had known, staring with lackluster eyes at the thorn-covered ruins of what had once been cities, fumbling with careless fingers at the rotting pages of the books that lay buried under the débris.
"The Earth became a barrens. The countless tons of searing gas and flaming chemicals you are now loosing and will continue to loose for the next few months over grassy plains and tree-covered hills, over the surging, life-impregnated oceans, through the wind-blown atmosphere, had seen to that. Life, such as it was, became supportable only in a few remote sectors of the world.
"The generations came and went. Shambling, wool-covered, knowing naught of fire, blinking in their dark caves, killing each other with brawny, strangling hands on those few occasions when strange tribe trespassed on tribe; the tide of evolution retrogressed.
"In one colony only, on the edges of what you term Antarctica, was there even a hint of emergence from the slough. In tens of thousands of centuries fire was born; in tens of thousands more, writing was recreated; in a hundred thousand, civilization emerged. For a million æons it progressed. A marvelous culture flowered; thought soared and lifted to supe
rnal heights; man emerged to whom you are but discarded experiments. Yet there was that which was irremediably gone.
"For it was of a different type than yours. Man had lost the initiative, the brutal energy of his youth. He was content to sit in solitude, to contemplate as in a glass the wisdom of himself and of his universe. Action was abhorrent to his fine-blown sensibilities; it was something nonessential.
"Why, he argued, shift from his rooted colony in Antarctica? Why bother to explore the confines of the Earth? Why rear new structures, build space-devouring vessels, visit the remote stars? In the external universe everything was the same, wherever one went—the same protons, electrons, photons. Only in the depths of one's mind was there novelty, was there change. Man's lifetime, increased though it was to many centuries, was hardly sufficient to probe those fascinating depths to the full.
"As a result, each sat solitary and alone, heedless of his fellow colonists, wholly contemptuous of those strange, animallike creatures who rooted and grubbed in the farther confines of the Earth. Sex became a matter of indifference; less and less children were born to sit and contemplate by themselves.
"The Sun cooled slowly; the Earth, long arid, became a frozen ball. The little apelike bands died out one by one. The colony in Antarctica, each man solitary and aloof from his fellows, glanced outward with the physical eye, resumed again their introspective absorption. Heat and cold and food were matters of supreme indifference. Long before, they had learned to impregnate themselves with radiant forces that stoked them ceaselessly. Sex became a lost memory.
When The Future Dies Page 17