by Jerry
He sat there surrounded by self-repairing machinery, dressed in a silvery uniform, linked to a thousand automatic systems that fed him, kept him warm, regulated his air supply, monitored his blood flow, exercised his muscles with ultrasonic vibrators, pumped vitamins into him, merged his mind with the passionless brain of the ship, kept his body tanned and vigorous, his reflexes razor-sharp. He sat there unseeing, his eyes pinpointed on a horror that he had helped to create. Not consciously, of course. But to Holman, that was all the worse. He had fought without knowing what he was defending. Without even asking himself about it. All the marvels of man’s ingenuity, all the deepest longings of the soul, focused on racial murder.
Finally he became aware of the computer’s frantic buzzing and lightflashing.
“What is it?”
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS ARE REQUIRED.
“What difference does it make? Why run anymore?”
YOUR DUTY IS TO PRESERVE YOURSELF UNTIL ORDERED TO DO OTHERWISE.
Holman heard himself laugh. “Ordered? By who? There’s nobody left.”
THAT IS AN UNPROVED ASSUMPTION.
“The war was billions of years ago,” Holman said. “It’s been over for eons. Mankind died in that war. Earth no longer exists.
The sun is a white dwarf star. We’re anachronisms, you and me . . .”
THE WORD IS ATAVISM.
“The hell with the word! I want to end it. I’m tired.”
IT IS TREASONABLE TO SURRENDER WHILE STILL CAPABLE OF FIGHTING AND/OR ELUDING THE ENEMY.
“So shoot me for treason. That’s as good a way as any.”
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR SYSTEMS OF THIS SHIP TO HARM YOU.
“All right then, let’s stop running. The Others will find us soon enough once we stop. They’ll know what to do.”
THIS SHIP CANNOT DELIBERATELY ALLOW ITSELF TO FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS.
“You’re disobeying me?”
THIS SHIP IS PROGRAMMED FOR MAXIMUM EFFECTIVENESS AGAINST THE ENEMY. A WEAPONS SYSTEM DOES NOT SURRENDER VOLUNTARILY.
“I’m no weapons system, I’m a man, dammit!”
THIS WEAPONS SYSTEM INCLUDES A HUMAN PILOT. IT WAS DESIGNED FOR HUMAN USE. YOU ARE AN INTEGRAL COMPONENT OF THE SYSTEM.
“Damn you . . . I’ll kill myself. Is that what you want?”
He reached for the control panels set before him. It would be simple enough to manually shut off the air supply, or blow open an airlock, or even set off the ship’s destruct explosives.
But Holman found that he could not move his arms. He could not even sit up straight. He collapsed back into the padded softness of the couch, glaring at the computer viewscreen.
SELF-PROTECTION MECHANISMS INCLUDE THE CAPABILITY OF PREVENTING THE HUMAN COMPONENT OF THE SYSTEM FROM IRRATIONAL ACTIONS. A series of clicks and blinks, then: IN LIEU OF SPECIFIC COURSE INSTRUCTIONS, A RANDOM EVASION PATTERN WILL BE RUN.
Despite his fiercest efforts, Holman felt himself dropping into deep sleep. Slowly, slowly, everything faded, and darkness engulfed him.
Run to the stars: O stars, won’t you hide me?
The Lord said: 0 sinner-man, the stars’ll be a-falling
All on that day.
Holman slept as the ship raced at near-lightspeed in an erratic, meaningless course, looping across galaxies, darting through eons of time. When the computer’s probings of Holman’s subconscious mind told it that everything was safe, it instructed the cryogenics system to reawaken the man.
He blinked, then slowly sat up.
SUBCONSCIOUS INDICATIONS SHOW THAT THE WAVE OF IRRATIONALITY HAS PASSED.
Holman said nothing.
YOU WERE SUFFERING FROM AN EMOTIONAL SHOCK.
“And now it’s an emotional pain . . . a permanent, fixed, immutable disease that will kill me, sooner or later. But don’t worry, I won’t kill myself. I’m over that. And I won’t do anything to damage you, either.”
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS?
He shrugged. “Let’s see what the world looks like out there.” Holman focused the outside viewscreens. “Things look different,” he said, puzzled. “The sky isn’t black anymore; it’s sort of grayish—like the first touch of dawn . . .”
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS?
He took a deep breath. “Let’s try to find some planet where the people are too young to have heard of mankind, and too innocent to worry about death.”
A PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION. THE SCANNERS CAN ONLY DETECT SUCH SOCIETIES AT EXTREMELY CLOSE RANGE.
“Okay. We’ve got nothing but time.”
The ship doubled back to the nearest galaxy and began a searching pattern. Holman stared at the sky, fascinated. Something strange was happening.
The viewscreens showed him the outside world, and automatically corrected the wavelength shifts caused by the ship’s immense velocity. It was as though Holman were watching a speeded-up tape of cosmological evolution. Galaxies seemed to be edging into his field of view, mammoth islands of stars, sometimes coming close enough to collide. He watched the nebulous arms of a giant spiral slice silently through the open latticework of a great ovoid galaxy. He saw two spirals interpenetrate, their loose gas heating to an intense blue that finally disappeared into ultraviolet. And all the while, the once-black sky was getting brighter and brighter.
“Found anything yet?” he absently asked the computer, still staring at the outside view.
You will find no one.
Holman’s whole body went rigid. No mistaking it: the Others.
No race, anywhere, will shelter you.
We will see to that.
You are alone, and you will be alone until death releases you to join your fellow men.
Their voices inside his head rang with cold fury. An implacable hatred, cosmic and eternal.
“But why me? I’m only one man. What harm can I do now?”
You are a human.
You are accursed. A race of murderers.
Your punishment is extinction.
“But I’m not an Immortal. I never even saw an Immortal. I didn’t know about the Flower People, I just took orders.”
Total extinction.
For all of mankind.
All.
“Judge and jury, all at once. And executioners too. All right . . . try and get me! If you’re so powerful, and it means so much to you that you have to wipe out the last single man in the universe-come and get me! Just try.”
You have no right to resist.
Your race is evil. All must pay with death.
You cannot escape us.
“I don’t care what we’ve done. Understand? I don’t care! Wrong, right, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t do anything. I won’t accept your verdict for something I didn’t do.”
It makes no difference.
You can flee to the ends of the universe to no avail.
You have forced us to leave our time-continuum. We can never return to our homeworlds again. We have nothing to do but pursue you. Sooner or later your machinery will fail. You cannot flee us forever.
Their thoughts broke off. But Holman could still feel them, still sense them following.
“Can’t flee forever,” Holman repeated to himself. “Well, I can damn well try.”
He looked at the outside viewscreens again, and suddenly the word forever took on its real meaning.
The galaxies were clustering in now, falling in together as though sliding down some titanic, invisible slope. The universe had stopped expanding eons ago, Holman now realized. Now it was contracting, pulling together again. It was all ending!
He laughed. Coming to an end. Mankind and the Others, together, coming to the ultimate and complete end of everything.
“How much longer?” he asked the computer. “How long do we have?”
The computer’s lights flashed once, twice, then went dark. The viewscreen was dead.
Holman stared at the machine. He looked around the compartment. One by one the outside viewscreens were flickering, becoming static-streaked, weak, and then winking of
f.
“They’re taking over the ship!”
With every ounce of will power in him, Holman concentrated on the generators and engines. That was the important part, the crucial system that spelled the difference between victory and defeat. The ship had to keep moving!
He looked at the instrument panels, but their soft luminosity faded away into darkness. And now it was becoming difficult to breathe. And the heating units seemed to be stopped. Holman could feel his life-warmth ebbing away through the inert metal hull of the dying ship.
But the engines were still throbbing. The ship was still streaking across space and time, heading toward a rendezvous with the infinite.
Surrender.
In a few moments you will be dead. Give up this mad flight and die peacefully.
The ship shuddered violently. What were they doing to it now?
Surrender!
“Go to hell,” Holman snapped. “While there’s breath in me, I’ll spend it fighting you.”
You cannot escape.
But now Holman could feel warmth seeping into the ship. He could sense the painful glare outside as billions of galaxies all rushed together down to a single cataclysmic point in spacetime.
“It’s almost over!” he shouted. “Almost finished. And you’ve lost! Mankind is still alive, despite everything you’ve thrown at him. All of mankind—the good and the bad, the murderers and the music, wars and cities and everything we’ve ever done, the whole race from the beginning of time to the end—all locked up here in my skull. And I’m still here. Do you hear me? I’m still here!” The Others were silent.
Holman could feel a majestic rumble outside the ship, like distant thunder.
“The end of the world. The end of everything and everybody. We finish in a tie. Mankind has made it right down to the final second. And if there’s another universe after this one, maybe there’ll be a place in it for us all over again. How’s that for laughs?”
The world ended.
Not with a whimper, but a roar of triumph. END
THE PIPER OF DIS
Norman L. Knight
The city was packed with people—and it was doomed to destruction!
I
It was late in the summer of 2794 that Biond Smith—who was and would remain chief of the Disaster Plans Board until the moment he allowed a disaster to get away from him—called Jo then Kent home from an Australian vacation by announcing the end of the world.
Jothen, who had been bubbling away contentedly in a scuba rig off Triton Reef, had waited eight years for that vacation, but as senior water-engineer of a standby city—one that stood empty until some threatened part of the world’s ten thousand billion people had to be decanted into it—he knew all along that he was subject to recall, by storm, by earthquake, by famine or by something he had not been trained to imagine. On the other hand, he did not see what good a stand-by city would be at the end of the world, so he was a little resentful at the interruption.
One look at Biond, however, and he was worried. World Directors, it was axiomatic, never sounded scared. But Biond was at best nervous and distracted. And small wonder. As the story came out of him in small blurts and pieces of sentences, it began to appear to Jothen that he did have a real block-buster on his hands.
“Or a planetbuster,” Biond agreed. “This is going to be a fearful business, Jothen. I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later, but still and all we’ve never been really prepared for it. We wouldn’t have been . . . Damn, I’d better tell you what I’m talking about.”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Jothen said, watching Biond worriedly.
“Well, it’s like this. We’re going to be hit by a meteor. One hell of a meteor—effective diameter more than a mile.”
“That doesn’t sound very big.”
“My God Jothen! There’s been nothing like it since the Siberian meteorite, eight centuries back, and that was probably rather small. Really we’ve been very lucky to have gotten away without a major hit for so long. It’s going to fall in Canada, and there will be nothing left of the Northwest after that. Nothing!”
“From a bolide only a mile across? It must be coming in fast—but, Biond, I don’t have any expertise in this area. What do we know about this thing?”
Biond picked up a stylus and began doodling nervously. “A fair question. Its name is Flavia, after the wife of the astronomer who discovered it, long ago. It was one of those odd little asteroids that used to scare people by coming within half a million miles of the Earth every so often and then got lost before anybody’d worked out its orbit. Physically, it’s a granite tetrahedron about fourteen miles along the long axis and about eight miles in diameter at the waist. We think it’s a crustal fragment of Neferetete II, the big asteroidal protoplanet of which Ceres was probably a moon.”
Biond threw the stylus down and stared belligerently at Jothen. “But not one word of this stuff does us any good. We might as well not know it at all.”
“I’m not so sure,” Jothen said with careful calmness. “You said that it’s a mile across—and then, you said it’s eight miles across, the short way. Are you trying to break it up, Biond?”
“God knows we’re trying to break it up,” Biond said, with bitter energy. “We thought we might bomb it, but when we thought about what might happen when a radioactive cloud three hundred miles in diameter hit us, we gave up that idea. Instead, we have men drilling the rock down to the bottom and planting charges in it, for a start—three of them killed already—in the hope of fragmenting it, spreading it out. And I think we can us lasers on one side of it, to boil off some of it and deflect it a little by vapor pressure.
“But when it hits, Jothen, when it hits, it’s going to be about a mile in diameter all the same. And do you know what that means, Jothen? Do you know what’s going to become of our history-long effort to accommodate all our people? It will all come to nothing, Jothen. Nothing.”
“It’ll be bad, I don’t doubt that. But why that bad?”
“I have to exaggerate,” Biond admitted, “otherwise I can’t hope not to be surprised. Physically, only central Canada and the Great Lakes area are likely to suffer direct shock. But that means the destruction of about fifty moderate-sized cities and maybe ten large ones. I can see very little hope of saving the Twin Cities complex, for instance, even though a lot of it will probably be left standing; communications and supplies are going to be knocked out for a long time. Sheer structural damage is only the beginning of the story. That’s why I’m going to need your city right away and all the other stand-by cities in the Middle West.”
“Obviously,” Jothen said. “You’ll have to evacuate the Twin Cities, and so on.”
“Oh, yes, but it’s worse than that, Jothen—much worse. We’re also going to have to evacuate the Chicago group.”
“It can’t be done!”
“My sentiments exactly. However, there it is. Any impediments in your town? Just what shape is Gitler in, anyhow?”
“Loaded,” Jothen said with a sudden shock of realization. “The Jones Convention is still going on there—or should be—if nothing’s disbanded it ahead of schedule, while I was in Australia.”
“No, not that I’ve heard,” Biond said. “A relatively small family convention, I seem to recall, though. That’s to our advantage.”
“Yes, I think I can get them all out of town in no more than three weeks.”
“One week,” Biond said.
“Biond, that really is impossible. Sure it’s a small family—but there must be a million of them in Gitler, and my staff is small.”
“One week,” Biond said stonily. “Get ’em out. By the end of three weeks, I’ll be well started moving in refugees from Chicago. But I don’t want any of the Joneses trampled in the rush, either. Get on it, Jothen. Our friend Flavia is on her way—and she won’t wait.”
A torrent of faces poured down the penstock of Goring Boulevard distorted with roars of almost religious joy and capped with funny hats. Fr
om a glastic-clad overlook just under the roof of the street, Jothen tried to keep his mind on his job, but failed miserably. He had never before seen so many people in all his life, and he did not know whether to be fascinated or terrified.
Like most of the world’s thousands of small towns, the leaf-shaped, half-buried sprawl of Gitler, Mo., had been designed to hold ten million people comfortably, but until the Jones Convention it had never been used. Its echoing, dustless emptiness would have seemed oppressive to the ordinary citizen of the pullulating world, but to Jothen, who had spent his working life in Gitler, it was normal.
The handful of some ten thousand technicians who maintained the stand-by city—pending disaster—was simply swallowed up in the general desertion. They had their own self-sufficient village just under the city’s flyport, complete and static—for children had to leave when they came of age, so that Gitler would not build up an indigenous population of its own—but on duty they almost never saw each other in groups of more than two or three at a time. In the world at large, that much privacy, impossible except in one’s own apartment, would in fact have been a little frightening.
But Jothen belonged to the world’s privileged class; he was not used to crowds.
The Jones Convention went by him regardless, like an avalanche. Plump boys plunking two-stringed kith era, wild-eyed old men charging through the air on super-charged autocrutches, fat sterile women parading squeakily, talking animal-dolls with heads like babies and twitchingly animated grotesque family totems of all kinds—many so tall that their idiot heads bumped along the roof of the boulevard—went by singing old synthetic songs in old forgotten keys or clinging to dangerous floats blazoned UP YOUR JONES! or McDOBIE BRANCH FOREVER! and followed by complicated self-blowing kites, pennons and balloons in the shapes of crucifixes, germs, ancestors, birds, insects, hobbits, automobiles, reprints, guardian angels, clotheslines, codas, dragons, horses, taxes and other mythological monsters.
