The blond young man shook his head. “Not in the least. It’s our only possible chance. There are already meteorological stations dotting the ice. They’re pretty well scattered, yet close enough for plane and radio communication. Thirty or forty laboratories, working independently, yet with instant cooperation, freed for almost a year from the sickening disruption of flight from endangered areas, might find something within the limited time to save at least a remnant of the human race from total destruction.”
“I still say you’re crazy,” insisted Talcott. “But it’s the only decent suggestion I’ve heard since this infernal mess started. I’ll get in touch with the general staff at once.”
THREE WEEKS later the vast icecap called Antarctica hummed with unusual activity. Before there had been solitary wastes, broken only by inconspicuous stations and semiannual relief ships. Now cargo planes hurtled through snow and blizzard and furious storm to unload equipment and somewhat befuddled scientists in a last desperate stand against the ever-expanding death.
Trent and Talcott took over the station that perched precariously on the high interior plateau where the south pole made a mathematical point. The older physicist stared out at the wilderness of ice and snow, dim and spectral in the endless gloom of the south-winter night. “I still don’t know why you picked on this most God-forsaken spot of all, Ray,” he complained. “The storms howl down here at their worst; even the stratosphere planes may not be able to get through when we need extra equipment in a hurry. Now down on the coast—”
Trent looked at him queerly. “I wanted isolation; plenty of it,” he said in a strange voice. I didn’t want anyone to know what we are trying to do.”
Talcott said, startled: “What do you mean?”
“You remember back in Boston you said it would take at least fifty years to uncover the secret of destructive weapons with full atomic power?”
The older scientist made a hopeless gesture. “Of course. But we’ve got to keep trying. Besides, what’s that got to do with our being isolated?”
Trent’s answer was another question. “Suppose,” he said slowly, “I could manage to span that fifty years for you—or even a hundred, if necessary—and present you with weapons already made and fashioned that could blast the invaders to pieces—without worrying about the theory involved?”
“And how, my fine young friend,” demanded the other sarcastically, “will you provide me with these weapons?”
“By going into the future—that fifty or a hundred years ahead you were talking about—and bringing them back with me.”
Talcott got up slowly. “I think,” he said with careful intonation, “that perhaps this place has already gotten you. Suppose I send you back to one of the base—”
The younger man grinned. “My craziness is no longer a matter of mere metaphor, eh, Talcott? But I never was more sane in my life.”
“And how, please, will you manage to go into the future?”
“With a time machine!”
Talcott blinked, snorted. “It can’t be the heat, so it must be the cold. Whoever heard of a time-traveling device outside of fiction?”
“That’s no reason to believe the problem can’t be solved,” Trent retorted. “Ever since I quit college I’ve been fooling around with the idea. You may remember that time and space, as abstract qualities, were always my obsession. I’ve gone through the intricate mathematical formulas involved; I was even compelled to create a new method of analysis and re-synthesis to solve my equations. That’s all completed. I was on the verge of commencing the actual construction when the invasion broke.”
Talcott stared incredulously. “And you think you can build a machine to take you into the future?”
“I don’t know,” Trent admitted. “That’s why I wanted this total isolation. I didn’t want the rest of the scientific world to relax their own efforts along the lines of super-atomic power. Human nature is such they might just sit back and wait for us to succeed. Our chances are slim, but theirs partakes, as you said, of the order of a miracle.” He shook his head. “Only a time machine will solve the problem; nothing else.”
In spite of himself, Talcott looked interested. “What’s the theory?”
“An electro-magnetic warping of the space-time continuum,” Trent explained. “The machine, if it works, will slide around the world line of events and reappear at any specified time and place.”
The older man sighed. “I suppose you’re right. It’s our only chance, slim and far-fetched as that may be. How about the equipment?”
Trent grinned. “I’ve already arranged for that. It’s all packed down here as my private baggage.”
“We-e-ll!” sniffed Talcott. “I was wondering how much evening clothes you were bringing along. All right, suppose we get to work.”
FOR NINE MONTHS they labored. It was back-breaking, brain-stupefying, nerve-destroying toil. The long antarctic night turned into perpetual day. Incredible blizzards roared over them and sealed them within mountainous drifts. The temperature rose and fell again. The last cargo plane came and went. Its pilots were frightened. “You’re wasting your time!” they cried. “It’s all over. The human race is wiped out. We’re practically the last—”
But Talcott and Trent did not hear. They did not sleep; they had only snatches to eat. Day and night, the alternation of seasons, were but vague patterns to them. Only one thing mattered—the swift progression of calendar days as they flung desperately into their work.
Their minds bleared with formulas; they set up new apparatus, feverishly ripped it down to start afresh; they built strange cages and dismantled them; they impressed cosmic rays and alpha rays into service; they twisted elements with furious distortions, seeking always the warping, electro-magnetic action called for by Trent’s equations. Time and again they thought they were on the proper track, only to meet with sudden blank walls. The solution showed dimly, tantalizingly ahead; but always success eluded them. And they had only weeks now.
Once a week they forced themselves, bleary-eyed, muscles jerking with supreme weariness, to listen to the radio. There were only a few announcers left, and fewer stations, and their news was increasingly tragic.
Europe was gone, Asia and Africa as well; North America baked with searing fires; Brazil lay panting under the swarming bubbles. The southern part of South America and Australia were black upheavals of refugee humanity. Hundreds of millions had died, but hundreds of millions were compressed into smaller and smaller spaces, fleeing the ever-advancing destruction.
Famine and fierce, internecine warfare took immense tolls. Civilization had reverted to savagery; a crust of bread, a foot of ground on which to stand, meant murder and sudden death. The tortured atmosphere and the more tortured sea, writhing under the insupportable burden of the blasting heat, rose in rebellion. Furnacelike siroccos swept over the still-untouched areas; a boiling sea, augmented by melting glaciers, roared in tidal floods over the hapless swarms.
At the end of the ninth month the last overwhelming news sputtered through. It came from the high continental barrier, not five hundred miles from where they listened. There was no other sending station to be heard. The newscaster spoke in a dull monotone. His capacity for emotion had long since drained away.
“The bubbles have spawned again,” he said drearily. “Of what was once our earth only this desolate bit of ice and mountain is left. Australia and the South Sea Islands are gone; all South America down to the tip of Patagonia. A few people still perch precariously on Tierra del Fuego; some thousands more swarm on the bleak Grahams; fifty thousand all told have managed, by plane and by boat, to get away in time to reach the ice. There is food for perhaps three months.”
Then his nerve broke. He looked out from the screen with an insane giggle. “Three months’ food. More than enough. We can throw part of it away. In ten weeks time the bubbles spawn again. Do you understand?” His voice grew high-pitched. “In ten weeks’ time we all die; we, the heirs of billions of years. We die
, and those damned gyrations from hell take over.” He glared at his unseen audience; his face seemed to be an independent mask, jerked by casual strings. “We die!” he sobbed. “I, the last announcer, tell you so. Damn them! Damn you! Damn us all!”
Still screaming, he picked up an iron bar, threw it at the silver mesh. There was a blinding flash; then dark silence.
Ray Trent lifted his head. “That’s the end, Talcott,” he said quietly. “His nerves couldn’t stand it any more. He smashed the last sending station. We’ll hear no more; we’re cut off from the world.”
The older man’s shoulders sagged. “What does it matter? You heard what he said. In ten weeks more we’re all dead—all our hopes and ambitions; our plans for the future. Wiped out, erased from the memory of the universe as though we had never been.”
Ray stared at the complex of equipment. “Ten weeks more!” He seemed to be speaking to himself. “Ten weeks in which to find the secret and create a weapon to save the poor remnant of humanity.” He turned suddenly on Talcott. “Can we do it?”
THE SCIENTIST shook his head. “I said in the beginning only a miracle could do the trick. For a while I thought you might be able to supply the miracle. Now that seems over.” He clenched his veined fists. “God!” he choked. “If only they hadn’t come for another fifty years. We wouldn’t have to worry about time machines then. We are on the direct path. Subatomic power is there. It’s only a matter of time; of normal, patient experimentation. Fifty years only, a half century; a mere instant in eternity—yet more than eternity to us now.”
Ray Trent had been sitting, his head in his hands. Now he got up excitedly. “Look, Talcott,” he said. “You gave me an idea. Suppose we contact the coast and get a picked group—not over a dozen-men and women. Suppose, in the ten weeks left us, you and they will burrow deep under the ice here, into the rocky, underlying core. We have power enough on tap to fashion a hollow chamber, stock it with supplies, arrange for constant aeration, and set up a laboratory. Down there, sealed in from heat and cold, they can live, marry, rear children, concentrate every energy on a single problem—the completion of my time machine.”
“And suppose it never succeeds?”
Trent shrugged. “Then they’ll have to plug away at the original problem of atomic power. That will take nearer a hundred years under the cramped and restricted surroundings. Perhaps their children’s children will find the answers. With weapons so powered they’ll be able to reconquer the earth.”
Talcott looked doubtful. “It’s a dreary gamble. However, I’ll get them together at once. There’s a base at Little America I can contact on our transmitter. Endersby is down there. He’s a good man. I’ll have him pick the dozen and fly up here with food and equipment.”
Endersby, at the other end, was equally doubtful; but finally agreed to take the chance. There was nothing else for them to do.
The dozen came up in a dozen separate planes, laden to the struts with hurriedly assembled stores, taken secretly from the general supply. Picked men and women, young in years but old as time in spirit. In their eyes lurked the horrors they had seen; on their faces was set an ineradicable stamp.
They went to work at once, efficiently, swiftly, under Talcott’s direction. But there was no drive, no energy to their efforts. In the time machine was their only hope. With that they could tap any age, any vast knowledge! As for the straight problem of atomic power—supposing they succeeded? Fifty to a hundred years of circumscribed living within the bowels of the earth, where they would never see the sun again, or hear the dawn wind through the trees, or watch the mountains light up with supernal glory. A century of molelike drudgery, so that perhaps their children, or their children’s children, might reconquer a blasted, useless earth. And how did they know that the invaders, once firmly established, might not also evolve new and superior weapons to batter down those they expected to invent?
They held a conference by themselves finally. Trent and Talcott were not permitted to attend. Then Endersby, as the spokesman, came to the two scientists.
“We’ve talked it over,” he said. “We don’t intend to go through with it. We’d rather die right here and now than eke out such an existence underground as you’ve outlined.”
Talcott stared incredulously at their grim, set faces. “But you can’t do that,” he cried. “The race of man will die with us.”
“Let it die then,” Endersby said grimly. “There isn’t any hope for us, anyway. Unless”—his eyes turned on Ray—“you can make that time machine of yours work.”
“O.K., then,” Trent agreed. “I’ll make a bargain. You go ahead with the underground shelter and I’ll concentrate exclusively on the machine. If by the time the invaders come, I see that the whole thing is hopeless, I’ll tell you so, and we can all die decently together. If, however, I find a possibility of success within a short period—say five years at the outside—we’ll hole ourselves in and finish the job.”
Endersby conferred with the rebellious ones. “It’s a bargain,” he said. “But we expect you to be honest about it.”
“I’ll be honest,” Trent promised.
FROM that time on Trent took no part in the communal work. The hole deepened hourly; semi-atomic diggers bit through ice and rock; Talcott drove them remorselessly. But the diggers worked only with muscles and main strength, not with their minds.
During their short sleep periods they crowded around Trent instead, watching his progress with a desperate intentness. Every time he swore viciously and tore down what he had just built, despair clamped upon their hearts; every time he grinned as something clicked in the slowly growing mechanism, their faces lightened and similar smiles twisted their lips.
As the days went on and on it was the time machine, not the underground, that absorbed all their thoughts, all their conversation. Talcott swore at them and flogged them on; they continued their work with mechanical efficiency, but the vitalizing force was gone.
One of them spoke for the others. “I tell you flatly I wouldn’t spend even a year underground. Sure, I’ll finish it, but I won’t go down. Unless Trent’s machine comes through, of course.”
From open skepticism they had veered around to enthusiastic, abiding faith. The time machine! The time machine! Once it’s finished, everything will be all right. We won’t have to live like moles. Trent could go a thousand years ahead if necessary—ten thousand, even!
They’d show those damned invaders. A thousand, ten thousand years ahead, the human race would be far advanced; far beyond a bunch of gyrating, geometric abstractions. Trent would bring back with him weapons that would blow them back to the star from which they originally came.
But the days went on, and the weeks, and still Trent worked on desperately, doggedly, seemingly no nearer success than on the first day. The high hopes, the fanatical faith of the others, began to fade. They whispered to each other and looked askance at the thing of bars and wires and tubes.
Raymond Trent paid no attention to them. His face was hollowed out, his eyes were black from lack of sleep. Feverishly he went on—and on, driving himself beyond all human endurance.
Then suddenly, only two days before the alien bubbles were due to spawn again, he straightened his wearied shoulders with a tremendous whoop. Talcott, grim and haggard, had just emerged from the tremendous hole they had dug. The others were deep below, two miles down, their cavern hollowed out of granitic rock, their apparatus almost completely installed. The last desperate touches were being made in a wild race with time. Within forty-eight hours the upper surface would be overwhelmed.
“I’ve got it!” he shouted a little insanely. “I’ve got it—got it! And now, by all the gods of man, we’ll get those damned green globs! I don’t care what they’ve got, or how soon they come; once I’ve put this gadget into that set-up I’ll go forward till I find something so potent, so deadly, a hand weapon will destroy this whole damned horde!”
Talcott stared at him. “You’re sure?”
; “As certain as I can be without actually going,” Trent nodded, more soberly.
“When?” the old scientist snapped.
“Tomorrow. Three hours to rearrange that hookup, a half hour or so to install this, and then about six hours of tuning, and another three hours of careful testing of parts. Twelve to twelve and a half hours.”
Talcott smiled grimly. “It better work the first time. You’ll have one day leeway.”
Trent laughed with sudden release of strain. “Half an hour will be enough. I can’t guess now what I’ll have, but I’ll go on to the farthest future, when man’s power is irresistible, and bring back his deadliest defense!”
IT WAS a simple enough affair. Upright bars ringed in a circular platform on which there was a steel, bolted chair with straps to hold the occupant. Between the bars spread a lacework of fine wires, making an intricate geometric pattern. Small but powerful magnetons radiated from a central spoke. Dynon batteries, supercharged, furnished the power. Surmounting each bar were octahedral crystals of synthetic malachine, flashing with green fires, and sensitive to the lightest magnetic whisper. A huge dial with button inserts was fastened to the arm of the chair.
Endersby, black-haired, tense, growled skeptically. “So you expect to go into the future with that contraption, Trent?”
Now that it was time to go, Ray himself began to have uneasy doubts. “I hope to,” he corrected. “If not—” He shrugged.
Ray glanced quickly at his timepiece. Precious seconds were passing. He spoke rapidly. “It’s almost noon. Tomorrow at noon the bubbles are due to spawn again. When that happens, what little is left of our world will be swept away.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll either be back before then with an effective weapon taken out of the future, or else—”
“You’ll be dead, and your machine a failure,” Endersby broke in harshly.
“Exactly,” Ray agreed. “That means you’ll have to be prepared for every eventuality. Have most of you down in your sealed-in cavern. Let Talcott and someone else remain up here until about eleven thirty tomorrow morning. If I don’t show up by then it shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes for them to lower swiftly to the hide-out, place the sealing cap into position, and explode the prepared charges that will block the tunnel from view.”
When The Future Dies Page 28