by C. L. Moore
"No you won't, Johnny," he said. "No, you won't."
Dyson tried to squeeze the trigger.
He couldn't.
He concentrated on White's silhouetted back and sighted along the revolver, and he forced a command down his arm, into his index finger. But the message never got through. Martine moved faster.
-
MARTINE took the long, quick forward step and slammed the edge of his palm down on Dyson's wrist. The gun exploded in mid-air as it spun away.
The thunders rolled.
"Benjy!" Dyson shouted. It came out a thin whisper. He had to stop Benjy. He had to. Benjy mustn't go into that cave. It was very, very wrong, somehow, for anyone but Johnny Dyson to go into that cave. He took a step forward, but Martine, revolver ready, blocked his path. Martine, the truant officer, ready to collar him and drag him back to Earth. Back to work, discipline, responsibility.
Work. Discipline. Responsibility—
"Oh, no, no!" Johnny Dyson whispered. In his mind's eye he saw his fragile Martian Eden glisten under the moons, all its palaces and shining towers beginning to dissolve around him.
A Geiger began to tick in his brain.
It ticked faster and louder.
It roared.
Then he felt the flash. He felt the top of his head open and the bursting nova explode and the ballooning black cloud spurt upward through the sutures of his skull. The cloud rolled out enormously, its edges curling over and under in the familiar, the terrible shape of doom. He looked up to see it ...
He saw the Earth-star, blue-green against the dark. He saw it change. He saw it change ...
The explosion in his head must have been only a faint and remote echo, he thought, of that other and larger and farther nova-burst. For an instant half the sky was blotted out in the white glare of exploding Earth. He saw it happen.
Then the glare receded and condensed. The Earth-star took shape again, no longer blue for purity and green for peace, but a dreadful, shaking, unstable glow.
This is the way the world ends ...
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
He heard himself laughing.
He stumbled up the slope after White.
"Benjy!" he yelled. "Benjy, wait! It's happened! Didn't you hear? Look up—it's happened!"
White slogged on, not turning. Dyson labored after him, seized his shoulder. White paused and looked uncertainly into his face. Dyson couldn't stay still. He couldn't stop laughing. He danced—the old, old dance of triumph. When Martine reached the spot he danced around Martine too.
"What's happened?" Martine shouted at him.
"The end of the world!" Dyson shrilled. "This is the way, all right. You must have heard it! Earth's gone. We're safe. Safe in Eden. Look up, you dopes, look up!"
Two of the men looked up, while the third danced. Danced and laughed. Johnny couldn't stop laughing, even when Martine and White lowered their gaze and stared at him.
"Dyson," Martine said in a curious, low voice. "Dyson. Listen. Nothing's happened. You must have—imagined it. Look up, see for yourself."
Johnny looked. It was still there, all right. A trembling white glare in the sky. He laughed more shrilly than ever.
"But Dyson—" Martine said. White shook his head at him, reached out and took Johnny by the arm, stopping his dance.
"It's all right, Johnny," he said. "You're safe now. Everything's fine. Now you just take it easy and wait for me. I'll be back in a little while." He whispered something to Martine. Then he started up the slope again, toward the cave.
Johnny stared after him.
"Benjy!"
There was no answer.
"Benjy, what's the matter with you? You don't need to save the fuel now. Earth's gone. We're safe. We don't have to go back. Don't you understand—"
"Easy," Martine said. "It's all right."
White went on slowly up the hill, his shoulders hunched as if against a wind that was now blowing. He was getting smaller and smaller, vanishing into the microcosm. Johnny Dyson blinked into the white eye of the cave. Then the rolling thunders swallowed Benjy.
-
AFTER A WHILE THEY were in the ship again, ready for the take-off. And, after that, Martine and White talked as if they had actually left Mars, headed back toward—well, not Earth, because obviously there was no Earth. Where, then?
Johnny tried to figure it out. When he asked questions the answers he got were so irrational that he had to translate them into his own terms; but presently he found a solution that satisfied him. When they said "Earth" they meant it only as a symbol. They were, logically enough, going to try to locate another habitable planet somewhere, a planet even better than Mars, where they could rebuild Eden.
And that was all right too. Because, after thinking it over, Johnny realized that it would have taken a lot of hard work to build his Martian Eden, even with the robot to help. It would have been quite a responsibility.
It was better to let the older men have the responsibility.
Of course the Blow-Up must have been quite a shock to Martine and White. It was difficult for them to readjust. But it did no harm to let them pretend. The name didn't matter. They thought of the new, undiscovered planet as Earth. When they found it they might even call it Earth—New Earth, in memory of the bad Old Earth that was gone. Gone forever, with all its worthless, evil infestations of humanity. For that Johnny couldn't really feel regret.
He made allowances for his companions, even when they acted a little crazy. It was odd, being the only completely sane man in the ship.
He waited. There was a period of vivid, confusing dreams in which he almost imagined himself back on Earth, but presently the dreams passed and were gone., Then he was able to sleep soundly again.
... Johnny's spaceship kept on going.
Sometimes he wondered when it would reach its destination. He was tired of the artificial days and nights of the ship, and those viziports with their disturbingly vivid images of what no longer existed. It had been pointless, after all, trying to disguise the blackness of space with those visions of Old Earth outside the windows. And it had been rather foolish to disguise the robot so that it looked like a man in white when it came in to bring him food and get its orders from him.
Someday when he felt more like it, he would change the orders and remake the robot, casting it back into its metal reality. But he was tired. He had to rest. He mustn't take on any unnecessary responsibilities now, because the day was coming when the ship would land on a habitable planet and his work would begin.
And he'd do his job. He'd do it well. He hadn't given up. Oh no, not Johnny Dyson.
His own father had lain down on the job, of course, first trying to pass the buck to Johnny, and then, when that failed, simply by going insane. A complete refusal to accept responsibility. Yes, that was the only sin—giving up. For if his father had stayed on the job, he might have found an answer. After all, Dr. Gerald Dyson had been a brilliant man.
But Dr. Gerald Dyson had given up. He had ended his career in an insane asylum, very likely so happy in his ultimate retreat that he'd never even known it when the Blow-Up came.
If I'd had my father's chances, I'd have kept on fighting to the last ditch, Johnny thought. But I've got my own job. It isn't too late. And if the ship ever reaches a habitable world, I'll start right in working at it.
He glanced at the viziport images of a world that had given up and therefore had died, quickly and painlessly.
Johnny smiled.
He was so happy in his spaceship room that he never knew it when the real Blow-Up came.
The End
PARADISE STREET
Astounding Science Fiction - September 1950
(as by Lawrence O'Donnell)
The pioneer who carves some semblance of order, some way of life, from a raw planet naturally feels he owns the place. The settler who follows and tames the planet feels differently. And then there is always the third factor to set off the fireworks ...
-
Loki planet rolled its wild ranges and untrodden valleys up out of darkness toward morning under Morgan's thundering ship. Morgan was in a hurry. His jets roared out ice-plumes in the thin, high air; writing the scroll of his passage enormously in vapor across half Loki's pale sky. There was no other visible trace of man anywhere in the world.
Behind Morgan in the cargo bin there were three kegs with sehft washing about oilily inside them. They made the tiny cabin smell of cinnamon, and Morgan liked the smell. He liked it for itself, and for the pleasant memories it evoked of valley canebrakes and hillside forests where he had gathered his cargo in discomfort, danger and perfect freedom. He also liked it because it was going to be worth fifty thousand credits at Ancibel Key.
Either fifty thousand, or nothing.
That depended on how soon he reached Ancibel Key. He had caught a microwave message back there in the predawn over Great Swamp, and he had been pushing his ship to top speed ever since. He had also been muttering angrily, kicking the ship along her course, cursing her and Loki planet and mankind in general, after the fashion of men who are much alone and talk to themselves for company.
Radar patterns pulsed noiselessly across the screen before him, and ahead under a blanket of morning fog he knew Ancibel Key lay sprawled. Around the edges of the fog he could see the telltale marks of civilization spread out upon the soil of Loki—carbon-blacked fields with neat straight roads between them, racks of orchards checkering the sides of valleys he remembered wild and lonely. He thought of old days not very long ago, when he had hunted the bearded Harvester bulls across these meadows and trapped sehft-rats where the orchards grew.
The sky was a little soiled already, above Ancibel Settlement. Morgan wrinkled his lean, leather face and spat.
"People!" he said with fierce contempt to the pulse of the radar pattern. "Settlers! Scum!"
Behind him in the clear morning the vapor-trail of his journey swept in one enormous plume clear back to the horizon, back over Wild Valley, over Lookout Peak and Nancy Lake and the Harvester Range. He decelerated above the invisible landing field, and the soft gray fog closed over him. The plume of the passage he had scrawled over half a planet dissipated slowly above the peaks and the lakes that had been his alone for a long time now, grew dim and broad, and vanished.
-
Morgan stamped into the assay office with a carboy of sehft swashing on his shoulder. He moved in a haze of cinnamon. The assay office was also general store, now. Morgan scowled around the too-neat shelves, the laden bins and labeled barrels. Toward the back a red-headed youngster with the dark tan of Mars on his freckled face was waiting on—yes, Morgan looked twice to make sure—a parson. A parson on Loki!
The Mars-tanned boy was belted into a slick silver apron. So was the storekeeper himself. Suppressing a snort of contempt, Morgan gazed past the heavy, bent shoulders of a settler in brown knitted orlon and met the keen and faded blue eyes of Warburg, assay agent turned storekeep.
Morgan's eyes flicked the silver apron. He grinned thinly and spat. The settler straightened his heavy shoulders and glanced from the list in his hand up along the shelves. He was a youngster in his twenties, thick-muscled, tall, fair as a Ganymedan, with flat, red-flushed cheeks.
"Need some more of that hormone spray, Warburg," he said. "Same as last time. And what about this new fungus? My potatoes aren't doing so good. Think actidione might do the trick?"
"It did with Laany'i," Warburg said, evading Morgan's gaze. "And his fields are right next to yours. Actiodione's a good antibiotic. O.K., Eddie. Had any trouble with rats lately?"
"Just a little. Not enough to mention."
"Stop it right there," Warburg advised. "I got some compound thirty-two just in—the dicoumarol stuff. It fixes rats better than squill. Those critters breed too fast to take chances."
"Not as fast as settlers," Morgan said.
The young settler looked up sharply. He had mild brown eyes under sunbleached brows that drew together with suspicion as he regarded the lean newcomer. Morgan ignored him. Shouldering forward, he thumped the carboy on the counter.
"Forty gallons, Joe," he said.
"In a minute," Warburg said.
"I haven't got a minute. I'm in a hurry."
"It's too late for that, Jaime," Warburg said, looking at him.
Morgan's hand tightened on the neck of the carboy. His eyes drew up narrowly. He swung his gaze to the young settler and jerked his head doorward.
"Take a walk," he said.
The settler straightened to his full height and looked down on the slighter man. The red deepened in his flat cheeks.
"Who's this, Warburg?" he demanded. "One of the fast-money boys?"
"Easy," Warburg said. "Easy, now." His hand moved toward the gun on the counter. It was a Barker ultrasonic—it barked before it bit, uttering loud threats before its frequency slid up into the killing range. Morgan sneered at it.
"Up till lately, before the rats moved in," he said, "when a man pulled a gun he used it. I guess people scare easy around here these days."
"Who is he?" the settler demanded again. "Gunman?"
"I carry one," Morgan said.
Warburg came to a decision. Smoothing down his silver apron, he said, "I'll send Tim over with your stuff, Eddie. Do me a favor and—" He nodded toward the door. "Here," he added, shoving a cellobag into the settler's big hand. "For the kids. Go on now, git."
But the settler, scowling at Morgan, didn't move.
"You're wrong," he said. "The rats didn't come till the settlers were here already. Your kind isn't wanted in Ancibel, mister. We don't need any more hoodlums or gambling houses or—"
Morgan's whole lean body, moving very slightly, tightened forward in a barely perceptible crouch. Perhaps the settler didn't know what that meant, but Warburg was an old Loki frontiersman himself. He knew. His hand closed on the butt of the Barker gun.
Feet grated on the dusty black floor. From the back of the store the parson came forward, nodding casually at Morgan, moving equally casually between the two men. Behind old-fashioned lenses his mild eyes regarded them. He took the cellobag out of the settler's hand.
"What's this?" he asked. "Candy? Well, we'd better make sure your kids get it, Eddie. Be a pity if a bullet went through the bag. Might mash the candy."
Warburg said quickly, "I've got some news for you, Jaime. The—"
"Shut up," Morgan said. He looked from the parson to the settler, shrugged, spat on the black floor and turned away. He was ready to let the quarrel drop. He knew he'd have to talk to Warburg alone. Behind him he heard retreating footsteps and a door thudded shut.
Warburg bent and lifted a roped carton from under the counter. Lettering on its side in three languages said "Micrografting Kits."
"Tim," Warburg called. "Get this over to Eddie's. And don't hurry back, either."
The boy came forward, unbelting his slick apron. His eyes regarded Morgan with a sort of grave wariness. His freckles scarcely showed under the deep Martian tan. Morgan grinned at him a little and said in hissing Middle-Martian, "What do you hear from the cockeyed giant, young one?"
The boy's sudden smile dazzled in the dark face, showing missing teeth. He was about eighteen, but he made a child's gesture, holding up both hands, making a wide circle in front of one eye and a narrow one in front of the other. It was the old, childhood legend of the watching giant with Deimos and Phobos for eyes.
"All right, Tim," Warburg said. "Get at it."
The boy hoisted the carton to his shoulders and staggered out with it. Morgan's grin faded. The store was silent when the door had closed.
-
Morgan slapped the carboy on the counter.
"Forty gallons of sehft," he said. "Fifty thousand credits. Right?"
Warburg shook his head.
Morgan snarled soundlessly to himself. So he was too late, after all. Well, that just made it harder. Not impossible, he thought, but harder. Surely Warburg couldn't r
efuse him. Not even the Warburg who faced him now, plump and soft in a storekeeper's apron. Warburg had been here almost as long as Morgan himself, from the days when Loki was as wild as the men who trapped and hunted here. And it was wild still, of course. He told himself that fiercely. The most of Loki was still untrodden. Only here at Ancibel Key the spreading disease called civilization fouled the planet. So long as Morgan could find a market for sehft, so long as he could buy the few things he needed from that disease-source, it wouldn't matter how many settlers swarmed like flies around Ancibel.
"How much?" he asked grimly.
Warburg snapped open a transparent sack, set it on the little scale at his side, and began weighing sugar with a rustling noise. He pinched the top of the first sack tight to seal it before he spoke.
"Five hundred for the lot, Jaime," he said, not looking up.
Morgan didn't move a muscle. The store was very still except for the hiss of sugar into the cellobag. Softly Morgan said:
"Sure your authorization on the price-cut came in before I did, Joe?"
"It came in," Warburg said, "a couple of hours ago. Sorry, Jaime."
"Don't be," Morgan said. "I came in four hours ago. Remember? It's four hours ago now. That means you can still pay me fifty thousand."
"Sorry, Jaime. I had to turn in a spot-check inventory."
"All right! You overlooked this—"
"Nobody overlooks forty gallons of sehft," Warburg said, shaking his head regretfully. "I've got a license to worry about, Jaime. I can't do a thing. You should have got here faster."
"Look, Joe—I need the money. I owe Sun-Atomic nearly ten thousand on my last fuel grubstake. I can't get more until I—"
"Jaime, I can't do it. I don't dare. I guess you caught the broadcast about the price-cut, but you didn't go on listening or you'd know who's here to enforce it."
"Who?"
"Old friend of yours. Major Dodd."
"Rufus Dodd?" Morgan asked incredulously. "Here?"
"That's right." Warburg snapped open a fresh sack noisily and shoved it under the sugar spout. The glittering white torrent hissed into the bag, expanding it to plump solidity. The two men regarded it in silence.
