New Frontiers

by Ben Bova

  I took a sip of my warm flat beer, not trusting myself to come up with a properly polite response. There was only one timeline in which Albert lived long enough to make an effect on the world. There were dozens where he languished in obscurity or was gassed in one of the death camps.

  Wells’s expression turned curious. “I didn’t know you had translated my story.”

  “To see if perhaps a German publisher would be interested in it,” I lied.

  “But you gave the manuscript to that Jewish fellow.”

  “I have another copy of the translation.”

  “You do? Why would you—”

  My time was almost up, I knew. I had a powerful urge to end the charade. “That young Jewish fellow might change the world, you know.”

  Wells laughed.

  “I mean it,” I said. “You think that your story is merely a piece of fiction. Let me tell you, it is much more than that.”

  “Really?”

  “Time travel will become possible one day.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” But I could see the sudden astonishment in his eyes. And the memory. It was I who had suggested the idea of time travel to him. We had discussed it for months back when he had been working for the newspapers. I had kept the idea in the forefront of his imagination until he finally sat down and dashed off his novella.

  I hunched closer to him, leaned my elbows wearily on the table. “Suppose Kelvin is wrong? Suppose there is much more to physics than he suspects?”

  “How could that be?” Wells asked.

  “That lad is reading your story. It will open his eyes to new vistas, new possibilities.”

  Wells cast a suspicious glance at me. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  I forced a smile. “Not altogether. You would do well to pay attention to what the scientists discover over the coming years. You could build a career writing about it. You could become known as a prophet if you play your cards properly.”

  His face took on the strangest expression I had ever seen: he did not want to believe me and yet he did; he was suspicious, curious, doubtful and yearning—all at the same time. Above everything else he was ambitious, thirsting for fame. Like every writer, he wanted to have the world acknowledge his genius.

  I told him as much as I dared. As the afternoon drifted on and the shadows lengthened, as the sun sank behind the distant mountains and the warmth of day slowly gave way to an uneasy deepening chill, I gave him carefully veiled hints of the future. A future. The one I wanted him to promote.

  Wells could have no conception of the realities of time travel, of course. There was no frame of reference in his tidy nineteenth-century English mind of the infinite branchings of the future. He was incapable of imagining the horrors that lay in store. How could he imagine them? Time branches endlessly, and only a few, a precious handful of those branches manage to avoid utter disaster.

  Could I show him his beloved London obliterated by fusion bombs? Or the entire northern hemisphere of Earth depopulated by man-made plagues? Or a devastated world turned to a savagery that made his Morlocks seem compassionate?

  Could I explain to him the energies involved in time travel or the damage they did to the human body? The fact that time travelers were volunteers sent on suicide missions, desperately trying to preserve a timeline that saved at least a portion of the human race? The best future I could offer him was a twentieth century tortured by world wars and genocide. That was the best I could do.

  So all I did was hint, as gently and subtly as I could, trying to guide him toward that best of all possible futures, horrible though it would seem to him. I could neither control nor coerce anyone; all I could do was to offer a bit of guidance. Until the radiation dose from my trip through time finally killed me.

  Wells was happily oblivious to my pain. He did not even notice the perspiration that beaded my brow despite the chilling breeze that heralded nightfall.

  “You appear to be telling me,” he said at last, “that my writings will have some sort of positive effect on the world.”

  “They already have,” I replied, with a genuine smile.

  His brows rose.

  “That teenaged lad is reading your story. Your concept of time as a dimension has already started his fertile mind working.”

  “That young student?”

  “Will change the world,” I said. “For the better.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said, trying to sound confident. I knew there were still a thousand pitfalls in young Albert’s path. And I would not live long enough to help him past them. Perhaps others would, but there were no guarantees.

  I knew that if Albert did not reach his full potential, if he was turned away by the university again or murdered in the coming Holocaust, the future I was attempting to preserve would disappear in a global catastrophe that could end the human race forever. My task was to save as much of humanity as I could.

  I had accomplished a feeble first step in saving some of humankind, but only a first step. Albert was reading the time-machine tale and starting to think that Kelvin was blind to the real world. But there was so much more to do. So very much more.

  We sat there in the deepening shadows of the approaching twilight, Wells and I, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts about the future. Despite his best English self-control, Wells was smiling contentedly. He saw a future in which he would be hailed as a prophet. I hoped it would work out that way. It was an immense task that I had undertaken. I felt tired, gloomy, daunted by the immensity of it all. Worst of all, I would never know if I succeeded or not.

  Then the waitress bustled over to our table. “Well, have you finished? Or are you going to stay here all night?”

  Even without a translation Wells understood her tone. “Let’s go,” he said, scraping his chair across the flagstones.

  I pushed myself to my feet and threw a few coins on the table. The waitress scooped them up immediately and called into the café, “Come here and scrub down this table! At once!”

  The six-year-old boy came trudging across the patio, lugging the heavy wooden pail of water. He stumbled and almost dropped it; water sloshed onto his mother’s legs. She grabbed him by the ear and lifted him nearly off his feet. A faint tortured squeak issued from the boy’s gritted teeth.

  “Be quiet and do your work properly,” she told her son, her voice murderously low. “If I let your father know how lazy you are…”

  The six-year-old’s eyes went wide with terror as his mother let her threat dangle in the air between them.

  “Scrub that table good, Adolph,” his mother told him. “Get rid of that damned Jew’s stink.”

  I looked down at the boy. His eyes were burning with shame and rage and hatred. Save as much of the human race as you can, I told myself. But it was already too late to save him.

  “Are you coming?” Wells called to me.

  “Yes,” I said, tears in my eyes. “It’s getting dark, isn’t it?”

  INTRODUCTION TO

  “THE LAST DECISION”

  One of the things that make science fiction such a vital and vivid field is the synergy that manifests itself among the writers. Whereas in most other areas of contemporary letters the writers appear to feel themselves in competition with each other (for headlines, if nothing else), the writers of science fiction have long seen themselves as members of a big family. They share ideas, often work together, and they help each other whenever they can.

  A large part of this synergy stems from the original Milford Writers’ Conference, which used to be held annually in Milford, Pennsylvania. Everlasting thanks are due to Damon Knight, James Blish, and Judith Merril, who first organized the conferences. For eight days out of each June, a small and dedicated group of professional writers—about evenly mixed between old hands and newcomers—ate, slept, breathed and talked about writing. Lifelong friendships began at Milford, together with the synergy that makes two such friends more effective working together than the simple one
-plus-one equation would lead you to think.

  I met Gordon R. Dickson at the first Milford I attended, back in the early 1960s, and we became firm friends right until Gordy’s death. We collaborated on a children’s fantasy, Gremlins, Go Home, some years later, and even though we lived half a continent apart it was rare six months when we didn’t see each other.

  “The Last Decision” is an example of the synergy between writers. Gordy wrote a marvelous story, “Call Him Lord,” which stuck in my mind for years. In particular, I was haunted by the character of the Emperor of the Hundred Worlds. As powerful a characterization as I have found anywhere, even though he was actually a minor player in Gordy’s story. I wanted to see more of the Emperor, and I finally asked Gordy if he would allow me to use the characters in a story of my own. He graciously gave his permission.

  The result is “The Last Decision,” a story about the frontiers of space, time, knowledge, and—above all else—the kind of friendship that outlasts even death.

  THE LAST DECISION

  1

  THE EMPEROR OF the Hundred Worlds stood at the head of the conference chamber, tall, gray, grim-faced. Although there were forty other men and women seated in the chamber, the Emperor knew that he was alone.

  “Then it is certain?” he asked, his voice grave but strong despite the news they had given him. “Earth’s Sun will explode?”

  The scientists had come from all ends of the empire to reveal their findings to the Emperor. They shifted uneasily in their sculptured couches under his steady gaze. A few of them, the oldest and best-trusted, were actually on the Imperial Planet itself, only an ocean away from the palace. Most of the others had been brought to the Imperial Planetary System from their homeworlds and were housed on other planets in the system.

  Although holographic projections made them look as solid and real as the Emperor himself, there was always a slight lag in their responses to him. The delay was an indication of their rank within the scientific order, and they even arranged their seating in the conference chamber the same way: the farther away from the Emperor, the lower in the hierarchy.

  Some things cannot be conquered, the Emperor thought to himself as one of the men in the third rank of couches, a roundish, bald, slightly pompous little man, got to his feet. Time still reigns supreme. Distance we can conquer, but not time. Not death.

  “Properly speaking, sire,” the bald little man was saying, “the Sun will not explode. It will not become a supernova. Its mass is too low for that. But the eruptions it will suffer will be of sufficient severity to heat Earth’s atmosphere to incandescence. It will destroy all life on the surface. And, of course, the oceans will be drastically damaged; the food chain of the oceans will be totally disrupted.”

  Good-bye to Earth, then, thought the Emperor.

  But aloud he asked, “The power satellites and the shielding we have provided the planet—they will not protect it?”

  The scientist stood dumb, waiting for his Emperor’s response to span the light-minutes between them. How drab he looks, the Emperor noted. And how soft. He pulled his own white robe closer around his iron-hard body. He was older than most of them in the conference chamber, but they were accustomed to sitting at desks and lecturing to students. He was accustomed to standing before multitudes and commanding.

  “The shielding,” the man said at last, “will not be sufficient. There is nothing we can do. Sometime over the next three to five hundred years the Sun will erupt and destroy all life on Earth and the inner planets of its system. The data are conclusive.”

  The Emperor inclined his head to the man, curtly, a gesture that meant both “thank you” and “be seated.” The scientist waited mutely for the gesture to reach him.

  The data are conclusive. The integrator woven into the neurons of the Emperor’s cerebral cortex linked his mind with the continent-spanning computer complex that was the Imperial memory.

  Within microseconds he reviewed the equations and found no flaw with them. Even as he did so, the other hemisphere of his brain was picturing Earth’s daystar seething, writhing in a fury of pent-up nuclear agony, then erupting into giant flares. The Sun calmed afterward and smiled benignly once again on a blackened, barren, smoking rock called Earth.

  A younger man was on his feet, back in the last row of couches. The Emperor realized he had already asked for permission to speak. Now they both waited for the photons to complete the journey between them. From his position in the chamber and the distance between them, he was either an upstart or a very junior researcher.

  “Sire,” he said at last, his face suddenly flushed in embarrassed self-consciousness or, perhaps, the heat of conviction, “the data may be conclusive, true enough. But it is not true that we must accept this catastrophe with folded hands.”

  The Emperor began to say, “Explain yourself,” but the intense young man never hesitated to wait for an Imperial response. He was taking no chances of being commanded into silence before he had finished.

  “Earth’s Sun will erupt only if we do nothing to prevent it. A colleague of mine believes that we have the means to prevent the eruptions. I would like to present her ideas on the subject. She herself could not attend this meeting.” The young man’s face grew taut, angry. “Her application to attend was rejected by the Coordinating Committee.”

  The Emperor smiled inwardly as the young man’s words reached the other scientists around him. He could see a shock wave of disbelief and indignation spread through the assembly. The hoary old men in the front row, who had chosen the members of the Coordinating Committee, went stiff with anger.

  Even Prince Javas, the Emperor’s last remaining son, roused from his idle daydreaming where he sat at the Emperor’s side and seemed to take an interest in the meeting for the first time.

  “You may present your colleague’s proposal,” said the Emperor. That is what an Emperor is for, he said silently, looking at his youngest son, seeking some understanding on his handsome untroubled face. To be magnanimous in the face of disaster.

  The young researcher took a fingertip-sized cube from his sleeve pocket and inserted it into the computer slot in the arm of his couch. The scientists in the front ranks of the chamber glowered and muttered to each other.

  The Emperor stood lean and straight, waiting for the information to reach him. When it did, he saw in his mind a young dark-haired woman whose face might have been seductive if she were not so intensely serious about her subject. She was speaking, trying to keep her voice dispassionate, but almost literally quivering with excitement. Equations appeared, charts, graphs, lists of materials and costs; yet her intent, dark-eyed face dominated it all.

  Beyond her, the Emperor saw a vague, star-shimmering image of vast ships ferrying megatons of equipment and thousands upon thousands of technical specialists from all parts of the Hundred Worlds toward Earth and its troubled Sun.

  Then, as the equations faded and the starry picture went dim and even the woman’s face began to pale, the Emperor saw the Earth, green and safe, smelled the grass and heard birds singing, saw the Sun shining gently over a range of soft, rolling, ancient wooded hills.

  He closed his eyes. You go too far, woman. But how was she to know that his eldest son had died in hills exactly like these, killed on Earth, killed by Earth, so many years ago?

  2

  HE SAT NOW. The Emperor of the Hundred Worlds spent little time on his feet anymore. One by one the vanities are surrendered. He sat in a powered chair that held him in a soft yet firm embrace. It was mobile and almost alive: part personal vehicle, part medical monitor, part communications system that could link him with any place in the Empire.

  His son stood. Prince Javas stood by the marble balustrade that girdled the high terrace where his father had received him. He wore the blue-gray uniform of a fleet commander, although he had never bothered to accept command of even one ship. His wife, the princess Rihana, stood at her husband’s side.

  They were a well-matched pair, physica
lly. Gold and fire. The prince had his father’s lean sinewy grace, golden hair, and star-flecked eyes. Rihana was fiery, with the beauty and ruthlessness of a tigress in her face and tawny eyes. Her hair was a cascade of molten copper tumbling past her shoulders, her gown a metallic glitter.

  “It was a wasted trip,” Javas said to his father, with his usual sardonic smile. “Earth is … well,” he shrugged, “nothing but Earth. It hasn’t changed in the slightest.”

  “Ten wasted years,” Rihana said.

  The Emperor looked past them, beyond the terrace to the lovingly landscaped forest that his engineers could never quite make the right shade of terrestrial green.

  “Not entirely wasted, daughter-in-law,” he said at last. “You only aged eighteen months.”

  “We are ten years out of date with the affairs of the court,” she answered. The smoldering expression on her face made it clear that she believed her father-in-law deliberately plotted to keep her as far away from the throne as possible.

  “You can easily catch up,” the Emperor said, ignoring her anger. “In the meantime, you have kept your youthful appearance.”

  “I shall always keep it! You are the one who denies himself rejuvenation treatments, not me.”

  “And so will Javas, when he becomes Emperor.”

  “Will he?” Her eyes were suddenly mocking.

  “He will,” said the Emperor, with the weight of a hundred worlds behind his voice.

  Rihana looked away from him. “Well, even so, I shan’t. I see no reason why I should age and wither when even the foulest shopkeeper can live for centuries.”

  “Your husband will age.”

  She said nothing.

  And as he ages, the Emperor knew, you will find younger lovers. But of course, you have done that already, haven’t you?

  He turned toward his son, who was still standing by the balustrade.

  “Kyle Arman is dead,” Javas blurted.

  For a moment, the Emperor failed to comprehend. “Dead?” he asked, his voice sounding old and weak even to himself.