When the Future Dies,
by Nat Schachner
Astounding, June 1939
Novelette - 7573 words
The Green Globes came—and man had to go for lack of a weapon, for lack of time!
But—the time machine was a weapon irresistible!
IT was in the spring of 1982 that the strange flotilla thundered down upon an unsuspecting Earth. Where it came from no one knew, nor was the exact truth ever discovered. The best opinion, however, of those who survived the first onslaught was that the invaders were not indigenous to the Solar System; that they came from one of the nearer stars.
In support of this contention it was pointed out that the spaceships were fashioned of a green-glowing metal that had no counterpart on Earth, or any of the planets; or in the fiery bosom of the Sun, for that matter. And, it was further argued, not only did the hulls shine with a green phosphorescence as they flashed across the night skies, but they held within their molecular patterns a blasting, continuous heat of such terrific intensity that would have melted into a showering flux any element, or combination of elements, in the known atomic scale.
The invaders came on a moonless night like a flock of streaking green comets. They landed on an open plain near Bordeaux, right in the heart of world-famous vineyards. There were twenty of their long, tubular spacecraft, pointed at one end, like well-sharpened metal pencils. The canny peasants, aroused by the thunder of their approach, the blast of their green-heated sheaths, fled in terror.
By the time mobilized troops and scientists from the University of Bordeaux and the Sorbonne in Paris had hurried to the scene a thin, translucent bubble, green glowing as the ships dimly wavering within, had surrounded the flotilla. Heat scorched outward from the bubble—so fierce, so incandescent that the country for a mile around was blasted clean of houses, vegetation and every form of life. The parched, brown soil was as bleak as any desert.
More troops were called upon; more scientists mobilized. They tried to signal the ships within the glowing bubble. They sent men clad in asbestos wrappings into the steaming area. They sent planes sealed against heat and cold soaring overhead.
But the unseen visitors did not answer the signals. The men in the asbestos suits were forced back by the furnacelike heat. And three of the planes, diving too close, were shriveled in the frightful bath as though they were midges falling on a red-hot stove.
After that the general in command. Marshal Perraud, a veteran of the Third World War, gave orders to fire. The new thirty-centimeter guns, using explosive shells of semi-atomic power, thundered a salvo. During the War, nothing had withstood their bombardment. Ferroconcrete fortresses, mile-deep Essinot lines, triple-reinforced stratosphere bombers, entire mountains, had been ripped wide open by the famous thirty-centimeters.
Yet now this tenuous bubble, semitransparent, hiding within its shining green distortions the wavering shapes of the pencil-shaped craft, refused to collapse under the terrific impact of the screaming shells.
The astonished observers, watching incredulously through vibro-scanners, saw queer, flowing movements within the protective shell. Movements obscured to a large extent by the greenish bubble, giving not even a hint of the strange creatures who followed those patterns. They were not human, that was obvious, nor any form of life understandable to man. For the paths, dimly seen, magnified, traced in three dimensions a complicated weave and design that had no counterpart on Earth. The shadows danced, died suddenly, reappeared elsewhere, seemed literally to twist themselves inside out. To the very end, no one solved the mystery; no one knew if those curious, flowing lines were mere distortions filtering through the bubble, or, in fact, true representations of the alien creatures who had come from outer space. No one knew; for no one ever saw the invaders face to face and lived to tell what he had seen.
AFTER forty-eight hours of continuous bombardment with every weapon and scientific device devised by man, Perraud was compelled to confess defeat. Once he had tried a bayonet charge and lost five thousand men in consequence. The closer they hurled across the waste lands the more frightful became the heat from the delicate, green phosphorescent bubble. The advance battalion, spurred on by the exhortations of its officers, died in droves with La Belle France on their blackened lips.
Perraud swore and tugged at his gray mustache. It was suicide to send more brave men against a furnace. The invaders had not retaliated; they did not even seem to realize that they were being attacked. The strange patterns gyrated their incredible dance within in ceaseless flight. Not once during all the turmoil and thunder of sound had they stopped or hesitated in their courses.
Perraud called Paris. The cabinet went into session. Martial law was declared. Perraud was displaced by Arcot. He had no greater success. Five thousand more men were lost and fifty great bombers. More cabinet sessions. The upshot was sensible. Since the invaders neither attacked nor could themselves be attacked, it was decided to adopt a policy of watchful waiting and let them alone.
Accordingly a forbidden area was declared around the glowing bubble—a sort of no man’s land. It inclosed the parched and blasted section, and a two-mile radius beyond. Around the circumference of this circle troops were massed. One hundred thousand men, equipped with every known offensive and defensive weapon, installed behind asbestos shields and yards-thick ferroconcrete; while French scientists worked feverishly in laboratories in search of new methods of penetration and communication with the unseen beings within; or, in the alternative, for new weapons whereby they could be completely destroyed.
But neither one result nor the other was obtained. The bubble remained outwardly quiescent, though the military observers could follow with some difficulty the unceasing signs of activity within. Nothing seemed able to penetrate that semitransparent shell—neither messages nor arms.
For two months the mobilized forces held to their position, tensely observant, not knowing just what to expect, but ready to die, if need be, to resist any further aggression on the part of this alien invasion from space.
The tension of the nation gradually relaxed. It was evident that the bulletnosed ships and their masters held no schemes of aggrandizement. A huge collective sigh of relief went up. The troops were gradually demobilized; a single battalion was left as a thin guard in the circumscribing trenches, more to warn off the curiously rash than to defend the country from further invasion.
Tourists came, as was to be expected, to observe the phenomenon. They brought their families and their lunches. The harassed soldiers were hard put to it to keep the unwary out of that zone of fierce, scorching heat. More scientists came, from all over the world. They spoke gravely of intra-atomic patterns, of a possible element of the atomic order of something like 112, whose instability divulged itself in fierce, continuous radiations. They tried to decipher through the most powerful vibro-scanners what curious order of life forms could give rise to those constant, weird gyrations; but without success. They tried communication by radio, by gesticulations, by heliograph, by huge geometric figures outlined in electric lights; yet no response came from within. Finally they, too, gave up in despair. The nine-day wonder was beginning to fade. Other matters distracted the flickle public eye.
Then one day, ten weeks after the sudden appearance of the spaceships, it happened. No one saw it happen, but it must have been about four in the afternoon, just as guard shift was taking place.
THE BUBBLE suddenly expanded. It split into a hundred separate segments, each similar in shape and form to the original bubble, and each swiftly grown to a similar size. The cellular segments lifted lightly into the air. They sped with sentient purposefulness along the radii of a widening circle. They dropped to the ground at spaced intervals, outward from the parent bubble, so as to include within their spheres of influence a territory of over three hundred square miles. The most beautiful, the most fertile section of France was completely obliterated.
For, wherever the bubbles landed, the huge outpourings of heat from the
ir shimmering green shells destroyed towns, villages, trees, houses, all life. Nothing remained but the scorched and smoking soil. Nothing remained of the two thousand troops or the half million inhabitants who were trapped by that sudden irruption. Bordeaux, in whose great public square one of the hemispherical translucencies had come to rest, was a desolate waste. The people died like gnats in the furnace blast. The buildings crumbled and crashed in glowing masses of masonry. Even the steel girders of the larger structures buckled and sagged under the tremendous temperatures.
France was swept by frenzied horror. She had been lulled into a sense of security by the quiescence of the invaders. But now they had acted; half a million people had died, and three hundred square miles of territory were destroyed beyond redemption.
The country was put on a wartime basis. Every able-bodied man was called to the colors. Munition factories worked full speed; munition laboratories at a still greater pace. These aliens were definitely inimical to human civilization and must be wiped out once and for all.
But this was easier said than done. Again vast armies were hurled against the green-glowing bubbles, protected with every weapon at the command of science against the fierce temperatures. In vain! Even those who, clad like strange antediluvian monsters in impervious asbestos, and incased in armored tanks lined with the same material, managed to approach the frail-seeming bubbles, found it impenetrable by shot, shell or old-fashioned ramming. A thousand massed bombers, flying in close formations, unloading their deadly cargoes from above, achieved no better results. Thousands more died in the attempts, and a hundred thousand found themselves erupting with sores and burns dreadfully reminiscent of second-degree radium bums of a former day.
For ten weeks more the bubbles were quiescent outwardly, neither fighting back at the desperate onslaughts of their human foes, nor showing any sign that those within were even aware that such a creature as man existed. Once more France and the expectant world relaxed, thinking that perhaps this time the worst was over.
But at the end of the ten weeks, as though ticked off by a stellar clock, the same phenomenon was repeated. Each of the hundred bubbles expanded and subdivided into a hundred similar offspring. Ten thousand newly hatched shells lifted high and sped swiftly, in spaced patterns, over the surrounding countryside. France was destroyed as far north as the gates of Paris, half of Spain and Portugal succumbed to the holocaust. The loss of life was appalling. Thousands had migrated from the surrounding territories, but millions had remained, stubborn in the belief that the first division of the invaders would be the last. They died now for their stubbornness, caught like insects in this second foray.
It was now no longer a local French problem, outwardly sympathized with, and secretly exulted at, by her neighbors. It was obvious even to the dullest that the invaders had set themselves a methodical course. The original expedition had brought a new form of life, beyond all human knowledge, to colonize the Earth. What had made them migrate in their strange spaceships from their far-distant former home was a mystery. It might have been a stellar cataclysm that swept their world to destruction; it might have been the pressure of superior enemies from whom they fled. The secret of their journey, just as the secret of their habitat and appearance, remained a mystery until the end.
THE SCIENTISTS again talked learnedly: Of life forms who propagated themselves at ten-week intervals, ten offspring at a time, in fission like the amoeba or in spores like the Monocystics. Of reproduction in geometric progression. Of life that fed on mineral soil, free of vegetable or animal contagion. Of earthly elements fashioned by some strange super-science into a new element, hitherto unknown to spectroscopy, with an atomic weight of 112, and glowing with fierce, electronic energy. Of creatures as remote from protoplasmic carbon compounds as it was possible to be.
The scientists talked, but the plain man in the streets knew that the world was doomed. At such a rate of propagation the invasion must accelerate until all Earth was covered with the green-glowing bubbles and their unknown occupants. Within a year at the most—
Enemy nations forgot their nationalistic ambitions in the face of the common peril. The armies and the battle planes of the world converged. General staffs fused and subordinated to a single generalissimo. The laboratories of Earth pooled their resources. Everything else was forgotten except the onsweeping, inexorable expansion of the bubbles.
At the end of the third ten-week period half of Europe was laid waste. This time, though the destruction was infinitely greater, the loss of life was not as great in proportion. Only a million were caught in the fiery bath. The rest had emigrated.
It was the greatest hegira known in the history of the human race. Hundreds of millions partook in terror-stricken flight. They poured into the desert places of Asia; they shrieked and fought desperately for footholds on every possible means of transportation. They clung like black flies to the tops of railroad cars, they clung to the rails of transatlantic steamers, in their madness they even sought precarious perch on the wings of airplanes. A million dollars was offered for an old plane that rested in a museum, and was refused. Thousands were crushed in stampedes; overburdened ships and aircraft went down without a trace. Famine swept away its thousands; typhus and cholera took more.
Then even Asia was no longer safe, and a new rush started to the Americas, to Africa, to far-off Australia. And always, at inexorable ten-week intervals, the existing bubbles split into new swarms that expanded outward in an ever-widening circle, and blasted everything out of their path.
The general staff gave up its futile bombardments. If Earth was to be saved, it must find its salvation in the laboratories. Hundreds of thousands of men and women scientists were working feverishly, desperately on the problem. Find some weapon, some means of offense that will break element 112 and destroy everything within its sheltering walls! That was the order issued.
“Easier said than done!” groaned Godfrey Talcott, ruffling his gray hair with a despairing gesture. “All we know about the element is what has been observed at a safe distance through telespectroscopes. We can’t lay our hands on a sample to analyze or test it. And I’d say only a full, efficient use of subatomic power could touch it.”
“That’s our problem, then,” retorted Raymond Trent, looking up from the cyclotron he was manipulating. “We’ve already made a start along the path. We’ve broken down uranium atoms with neutron bullets, and released almost ten percent of the total energy. We’ve harnessed that power for explosive bullets, for stratosphere planes, and the first rocket lifted last year some five hundred miles out into space before its drive gave out and it fell back.”
“Of course it can be done,” Talcott said impatiently. “But it takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor did any great scientific discovery, immediately practicable, come fully perfected out of the laboratories—all fiction to the contrary. We have only the vaguest idea of the principles involved. Patient experimentation is required, long months and years of mathematical calculations, tentative blueprints, testings, scrappings, new blueprints, new experiments. Good Lord, man! I’d say fifty years is not too much.”
“Fifty years?” Ray Trent echoed. His blue eyes squinted. “Might as well ask for eternity.” He strode to the newscaster, flipped it open. The International Broadcasting Co. announcer swam into view. His hand trembled as he read the latest flash.
“Leningrad,” he was shouting, all suavity forgotten, “has just radioed. Moscow is destroyed and covered by the invaders. The southwestern part of Russia is a smoking ruin. The Soviets announce they are moving the seat of their government to Irkutsk, on Lake Baikal. From Cairo comes a report—”
RAY flicked him off. He was still young, slightly under thirty. His face was twisted into a hard grimace; his eyes burned. He was a good physicist, but from college days his imaginative mind had preferred to play around with the larger philosophic conceptions of his subject—time, space, the nature of eternity, origins, endings. With an independent income at his dispos
al, left to him by a thoughtful father who had made his pile in manufacturing motors, he had immersed himself in a combination library, den and laboratory of his own choosing. There had pondered deeply on abstract matters and contrived curious little models which he never showed to visitors.
Since the coming of the spacemen, however, every available scientist had been impressed into the desperate effort to find some method of combatting their geometrically progressive spread. Ray Trent joined up by choice with Godfrey Talcott, his former teacher at the university. Talcott had a reputation as an authority in electronics. He was about fifty, tall, stooped, gray, and with a long, thin nose. He preferred working by himself, with a single assistant, rather than in a huge laboratory, surrounded by bewildering equipment and an obsequious group of underlings.
“They get underfoot,” he complained, and took Ray off with him to his private little affair near Boston.
Ray said quietly now, without any bitterness: “You asked for fifty years? Within a year at the utmost the whole earth will be taken over, and “not a human being left alive. Europe is gone; Asia and Africa are next in line. Then—” He shrugged eloquently.
Harsh lines etched themselves into the older man’s face. “A miracle may happen, though I don’t believe much in miracles. And only if a sufficient number of scientists work simultaneously on the problem, and without interruptions. But if we are compelled to move from place to place, always fleeing the advance, even a century wouldn’t be enough.”
“Right, and I have an idea. Suppose we shift our best men and the minimum of essential equipment down into Antarctica, where, from the looks of things, mankind will make its last stand.”
“You’re crazy, Ray,” Talcott exploded.
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