"By the millionth century they began to die, one by one. They had been almost, but not quite, immortal. At the turn of the ten millionth century some spark of ancient fire aroused my parents. I was born—the last child of the human race. With ten thousand centuries more they died, aloof, oblivious to my being, as if regretful of that single Earthly act.
"And now I am alone, the solitary survivor of the human race, alone on the shores of a shoreless, frozen sea, alone in a wilderness of ice and snow and fast-congealing atmosphere. I look up into the heavens and see a dim, overlaid ball that was the Sun. On its tenuous surface already life has begun, a life not of our kind. On the distant stars there is life, but not of us.
"I could go there—in all those æons the means have been discovered—but to what purpose? I would be forever alien; no kindred human would seek renewal with me. In a few centuries or millenniums, it does not much matter, I shall die, and the race of Earth, once teeming, will have vanished with me. This you have done."
He ceased, and the hush deepened.
Merrill sprang to his feet, eyes blazing. Hugh, intent against the wall, jerked forward, too late. The scientist was already over the parapet, his voice excited in the utter silence.
"It is a terrible picture you have painted, man of the incredible future; but the die has been cast. The future has already come into being. We must proceed inexorably to our doom."
With a sigh, Hugh relaxed against the cold concrete. He dared not follow Merrill into No Man's Land.
The great figure swirled with color. "You are wrong, my friend," he said. "It is true that the future has already occurred, that the die you have cast in this battle has led to inexorable conclusions. But I have come back through time—through means known only to myself—because you stand at the cross-roads. There is no one future; there are innumerable futures. The time-space entity has many paths: each one leads to the future, and each is different. And each is equally real with the others. But the election remains with you—which to adopt. Once the crucial, adoptive moment is past, your feet must inevitably tread the path before you; the other paths are there, the futures they contain as real a sector of time space, but to you they will be lost. Here and now is the crucial moment I have indicated. Continue in your madness and the path leads to—me! Cease this slaughter, embrace each other as fellow-men, fellow beings on the upward, common road of evolution, and another vista inevitably opens."
Mathieu, ever the practical, even in the face of the incredible, yelled out. "Where does that lead, monsieur?"
The last man dropped his extended hand. "I do not know," he confessed. "It is enough that the other must not grow into existence."
A low buzz murmured among ten million men—a buzz compounded of fear, of dim-groping thoughts, of accustomed ways and fumbling speculations. "He is right!" "He is wrong!" "We cannot change fate!" "It is a chance!" "Our general will be angry!" "Brother!" "But he is my enemy!"
The buzz grew to a hum, like the hive of countless contending bees. They stood on the verge of a shoreless eternity, and they dared not take the plunge.
In remote headquarters, astounded staffs awoke to realization. Their war, the war they had planned so carefully and coldly, was being taken away from them—and by an idiot who spoke of the future, of paths, of utter nonsense. This must not be!
Simultaneously, sono-coils spewed rasping commands, vivid threats, to earth and sky alike. But still the mighty swarm of bewildered men moved indecisively, troubled beyond all obeying. The general cursed his cowering staff, ran himself to a gun emplacement. He centered the monster cannon on its far-off prey, pressed the release. A huge projectile, true in aim, whistled through the night, roared a direct hit on the motionless Shining One.
The bullet crashed to earth miles away in a spouting geyser of mud and mangled bodies, but the man who hovered above was unhurt, whole.
"I am beyond your puny weapons," he said calmly.
The general, with a scream of insane rage, rushed to another set of controls. He jerked and pressed and danced with fury. The huge stratosphere bombers, obedient to robot levers, hurtled toward earth in a crescendo of whistling sound, their pilots clinging helplessly to safety straps.
"They'll blast that triple-starred fool out of existence," roared the general.
The planes, shining metal monsters, converged on the still motionless figure, zoomed past him, sprayed with dread Dongan pellets, dropped tons of aërial explosives on his devoted head, swung away triumphantly. When the smoke had cleared, and the thunderous concussions had ceased, the awed, cowering armies saw the man of the future emerge, calm, still shining, unharmed.
"It is obviously necessary that I show my power before these silly displays of your leaders cease," he declared passionlessly. He extended his hand.
A cry of fear blasted from the watching millions. A long streamer of blue light had emanated from the pointing finger, impinged upon the nearest diving plane. Metal flared in unendurable brightness, cataracted in a molten gush to the war-torn earth beneath. The finger moved. A great bomber jerked convulsively, went crashing and flaming to destruction. Its mates, aghast, catapulted into the night, fleeing from that dreadful figure to the farthermost ends of the stratosphere!
That was the end!
Ten million throats gave vent to a single cry; ten million men threw down their arms and clung to one another in trembling awe. Man was indistinguishable from man; enemy from friend. In one headquarters a bullet-headed general ranted and screamed and called on his staff to follow him. A futile sword waved dangerously in his hand. His officers shot him down, coldly and precisely, and clambered on swift mono-cars to join the swelling fraternization. In opposing headquarters, another general, wiser or more discreet, ripped the epaulets from his shoulders, and mingled indistinguishably with the mob of shouting men.
High above the clamor, high above the sudden frenzy of overwrought emotions, pierced Dr. Paul Merrill's keen apostrophe.
"Wait, O man of the future! Have you not signed your own death warrant? If our human feet are even now on a new path, then your future never came into being, never existed; and you yourself—"
The great Shining One floated high above the multitudes. A weary smile seemed to wreathe his godlike features, but his voice was as passionless, as unhuman as ever. "You have but lifted the veil of truth a little bit, my friend," he said. "You have elected your path. It is not the one from which I stem. Hence to your limited consciousness, to the consciousness of the future human race, I do not exist, I shall never exist.
"But in the wide universe of space time there are many mansions and many parallel paths. To you I am but a possible future that never came into being; in the vast ebb and flow of being that possibility, an infinitude of other possibilities possessed eternal reality. Farewell."
Hugh Wilmot gripped the supporting wall with rigid, tightening fingers. His eyes flamed with curious lights; he seemed exalted above himself, yet strangely weary.
The man of the future shimmered, hazed, melted into the blackness of the night, vanished. He had commenced his tremendous journey back to the illimitable future, back to the frozen, shoreless sea, back to solitude and approaching dissolution, cut off by his own martyrdom from those who should have been his ancestors, an alien without past or present or future.
On Earth, by radio, visor screen and fleet airplane, the joyful news was spread. Man looked on man and saw with excess of gladness that he was brother. The tale of the incredible visitant hastened on lightning wings, was tossed from mouth to mouth and grew in the telling. But ten million men had seen, and ten million men could swear to its essential truth.
The world recoiled from the abyss into which it had almost plunged. A new World State arose; the old politicians were contemptuously discarded; men of vision, men of science, poets and philosophers took over the reins. The legend of the man of the future, lonely by his frozen sea, took root and flourished. He became, down the ages, an inspiring myth, a noble sermon, by means of which
the generations were kept, perforce, to a path of reason.
In Trench X 32, Hugh Wilmot stared an oblivious moment at the hazy afterglow where only a little while before the Shining One had floated on nothingness. Then the breath expelled sharply from his laboring chest. In No Man's Land, ten million men shouted and danced and thumped each other's backs; in Trench X 32, Hugh Wilmot moved cautiously and swiftly down the concrete walk toward the little proto-steel hut in which he had labored mightily for two whole months on that new and mightier weapon which he had promised his general. His lips curled at the thought.
The general was now a discreet anonymity among the rejoicing millions; he had no present thought for Wilmot's broken promise. Hugh stooped down, pressed a hidden control. The shimmer of protective rays ceased; the heavy metal side slid soundlessly open. He entered.
Within there was a complex of machinery, of compact tubes and strange devices. Lovingly, with infinite regret, Hugh surveyed them for the last time. He bent, fondled the shining tubes as if they were flesh-and-blood children of his brain. So absorbed was he in his own emotions that he did not hear the tiptoeing secrecy of the man who entered almost on his heels.
"I thought as much," the voice crashed startlingly in his ears.
Hugh whirled, clutching for his Allison gun. He had been discovered, but the man who had found him out must not live to spread the tale. He would kill, yes, murder in cold blood, to protect his secret.
His fingers dropped nervelessly from the trigger "You?" he breathed dully.
Dr. Paul Merrill, fellow scientist and closest friend, stood before him, staring at him with fathomless eyes, staring with quick appraisal at the maze of machinery.
"Don't worry," Merrill said gently. "I understand! I shall never betray you, Hugh. The secret must die buried in our breasts—that countless generations of human beings may live. It is hard. I would rather shout it from the housetops. My friend, Hugh Wilmot, is the greatest scientist who ever lived, the greatest benefactor that mankind has ever known. But it cannot be. Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have faith; he must bear witness to miracles."
Hugh avoided his friend's eye like a guilty boy caught in the jam closet. "When did you find out?" he muttered.
"I became suspicious when you seemingly turned coward—that was not like you. Then the Shining One, the man of the future, too pat on your little speech about the end of civilization, about our duty to put a stop to the slaughter. Some of his phrases were remarkably like your own. But how, in Heaven's name, did you accomplish such a miracle?"
Hugh took a deep breath. "The idea came two months ago," he answered. "I fooled the general into giving me carte blanche. The Shining One was but a concentration of magnetic light rays built up in the representation of a man. You will find in the back of that projector the three-dimensional simulacrum over which I sweated many a day, exercising my artistic talents. That was why, of course, bombs couldn't hurt, Dongan shells couldn't destroy, the Shining One. He was pure light!"
"But his voice, his speech, his ready answers to all questions?"
Hugh grinned. "A very simple trick. I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred carefully chosen words. Then I ran them over again, a bit off key, at slightly different speeds, to give them that queer, slurred, alien-sounding accent of the future. Sound waves are deceptive; in the stress of the moment no one could trace the voice to my hut, rather than to the figure itself."
"But you were with me all the time," Merrill protested. "Out there in the trench. How could you possibly control the word disks so as to return apt answers?"
"You are most unobservant for a scientist," Hugh retorted severely. "You saw, yet you didn't see, my fingers drum on the wall until they were numb and bruised. I had a keyboard panel built in the side, and covered it with a thin coat of disguising paint."
"And the ray from the fingers?"
"That," Hugh Wilmot said softly, "was my new weapon: lightning!"
Dr. Merrill stared in wordless admiration. It was almost reverence.
Embarrassed, Hugh spoke briskly. "Now, if you'll get out of here fast, I have work to do."
The scientist nodded understanding, went out noiselessly. Ten seconds later Hugh joined him at the very farthest end of the trench. In No Man's Land the fraternization, the rejoicing, was reaching epic proportions. The night was a delirium of sound.
So it was that no one heard the dull boom which emanated from Trench X 32, or worried much about the shapeless, unrecognizable mass of twisted metal and shattered glass which marked the erstwhile hut where Hugh Wilmot had labored fruitlessly for two months on a proposed engine of destruction. An enemy bomb might easily have been responsible for that.
But two men watched with regretful eyes the passage of this noblest monument in all science. Wordlessly, they shook hands and clambered out of the trench, out of the darkness, into the pæan of happiness that had once been No Man's Land.
The End
********************************
NOVA in Messier 33,
by Nat Schachner
Astounding Stories May 1937 {as by "Chan Corbett"}
Short Story - 7118 words
I.
It was with a heavy heart that John Wayne kissed his sweetheart good-by for the very last time. The small field of the mountain airport was alive with activity; the great transcontinental liner was a silver nestling bird in the sun, obviously quivering with impatience to be off. The New York-bound passengers peered out of the observation windows, grumbling at the delay. A pompous official bustled toward the belated couple, watch in hand.
“You’d better hurry, Miss Middleton,” he shouted. “We’re behind time as it is.”
Betty Middleton disengaged herself gently, smiled at the somber, serious face of the man she was going to marry. “Why, John,” she exclaimed, “you look as though we’re never going to meet again. Cheer up!” she said gayly. “In a week I’ll be back from New York, preening myself in a trousseau of silks and satins and fine feathers, trailing glory like a cometary splendor, and ready to become Mrs. Astronomer Wayne.”
But her bantering nonsense did not lift the seated anxiety from his countenance. “Listen, Betty,” he declared earnestly. “Forget about your trousseau. Don’t take this trip to New York. Let’s get married to-morrow, here at the observatory. I have a strange premonition—”
She gazed at him tenderly, yet with impish mockery. “And have all the dowdy, matronly Mrs. Astronomers of Kelton Observatory sniff and gossip behind our backs that young Mrs. John Wayne couldn’t afford to deck out in the proper finery! I should say not.”
The siren hooted; the ground official grew almost apoplectic.
“Besides,” Betty flung over her shoulder as she hastened toward the liner, “a scientist has no business having premonitions. They’re not quite proper.”
At the gangway she turned, waved—a trim, slender figure in white sports costume, her hair a shining splendor against the silvery hull, her blue eyes dancing, yet somehow deep with the pathos of even this short parting. Then she was gone. The compartment shut behind her, the giant propeller took hold with a sudden roar, the gleaming monster lunged, lifted, and soared joyously into the sunlight, higher, higher, clearing the tumbled peaks of the Rockies, drumming along at three hundred miles per hour toward far-off New York.
John Wayne stared until the late-afternoon sky swallowed up both airliner and its precious freight; then he walked slowly over the now deserted field toward the great domed observatory of which he was next in command to Howard Giles. Of course, Betty was right, he berated himself. It was ridiculous for a scientist to yield to unmanly fears, to premonitions. Yet he could not shake off the leaden weight, the conviction that he had seen Betty Middleton for the last time.
His colleagues ribbed him unmercifully. They took time off from their instruments, their calculations, to rally him on his obvious distress; spoke gravely to each other and with malice aforethought of the blighting effects of even a wee
k’s absence on love’s young dream. New York was simply swarming with personable young men, they averred, and how could a dour, ugly old man like John Wayne hope to hold a beautiful young girl like Betty Middleton, full of life and gayety, against such formidable competition?
John tried to smile at the good-natured joshing, but without success. His years, in spite of his scientific accomplishments, were but twenty-five, and any honest mirror would have told him that his lithe, steel-muscled frame, his tanned, athletic features and steady gray eyes had nothing to fear in the way of competition.
Even absent-minded old Giles, his few straggling locks powdered with the snow of years of faithful devotion to the stars, noticed his young assistant’s preoccupation. “What’s the matter, my boy?” he asked kindly.
John Wayne took a deep breath. He could not tell the chief of his silly fears. “I think,” he said, “I would like a week’s vacation. I’ve been rather going to seed. There’s a plane leaving for New York to-morrow at nine—”
A smile of understanding illuminated the wrinkles that seamed the old astronomer’s face. “It might be better,” he agreed. “But we’re a bit shorthanded and—”
“I’ll take the observation telescope to-night,” Wayne interposed eagerly. “I can grab a few winks on the plane.”
It was past midnight. The huge white building was quiet; a thing of semishadows and monstrous shapes. Here and there a carefully shaded light spangled the darkness. Howard Giles was at the fifty-inch refractor, taking meticulous photographs of small segments of the Milky Way. He was preparing a new star map. John Wayne sat at the great one-hundred-inch reflector, his eye trained on the immensely distant spiral nebula known as Messier 33. He was studying its structure, drawing details that photographs would blur into hazy irradiation.
When The Future Dies Page 18